On Authors and Publishers

Many authors regard publishers as pompous, totally unfair creatures with little, if any, consideration for the feelings of another human being.

If an author’s work is rejected, you can be certain the publisher, editor, or agent responsible for this dastardly act will be blacklisted for eternity. Authors have even resorted to voodoo and witchcraft to bring about revenge, I am told.

As for publishers, many appear to regard authors with the same amount of enthusiasm as a shot of penicillin. That is, they realize they need them to fill up pages of a book which they in turn can sell for a profit, but somehow they can’t shake the feeling they are being fed nothing more than fungus on moldy cheese.

There are authors who are very prolific, like Charles Hamilton, alias Frank Richard “Billy Bunter.” He was known to produce 80,000 words a week of finished copy. His lifetime output was said to be more than 72 million words. The fact that Charlie never married may have something to do with his many hours of productive labor.

Erle Stanley Gardner of Perry Mason fame worked on as many as seven novels at one time. Before he died in 1970, he dictated up to 10,000 words a day.

Then there was John Creaset, the British novelist, who pounded out two complete books in a single week. (Talk about touch-typing!)

If it’s money that turns you on, then consider Hemingway being paid $30,000 for a 2,000-word article on bullfighting for Sports Illustrated in 1960. That’s $15 a word for writing about some guy throwing the bull.
Publishers and their supposedly wise staff do make mistakes. All you have to do is consider the people who turned down Gone With The Wind because they felt it was too long. Numerous publishers also rejected the novel Peyton Place before it was accepted and eventually sold 12 million copies.

And, what publisher, or anyone else for that matter, would ever dream that six million people would go out and purchase a simple boy/girl postcard created by Donald McGill in the early 1900s with this caption:

He: “How do you like Kipling?”

She: “I don’t know, you naughty boy. I’ve never Kippled.”

This goes to show that an author must (for a better choice of words) stay the course. If an author has talent and persistence, that author will eventually find a publisher equally gifted and farsighted who will be quick to recognize these attributes.

However if an author is lacking in either quality, he’d do better using his hands to dig ditches.

(E. P. Ned Burke is president of E. P. Burke Publishing and editor of The Perspiring Writer Magazine and Yesterday’s Magazette and is also the owner of My Personal Copywriter, Ebooks On Writing. Ebooks For Marketeers and The eBay Book Nook Depot.