By Benjamin Hoff
One of the strongest memories of my childhood is that of the county Bookmobile that would periodically visit the grammar school I attended in Sylvan, Oregon, then a small, semi-rural community off a two-lane road leading from Portland to the coast. When I stepped up into the Bookmobile, I would encounter first the intriguing smell and then the fascinating sight of shelf after shelf of books -- colored packages of adventure that could take me to places I’d never seen, with people I’d never met. Books probably meant more to me than to most children, because reading was my way out of a childhood of illness that kept me in bed, and in pain, a good deal of the time. My heroes were people who could write -- Mark Twain, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott -- rather than actors or athletes.
If someone had told me then that one day I would write books myself, and that they would be translated into over twenty languages, communicating to people around the world, I would have been awestruck at the promise of a dream come true. I would not have known then what I know now -- that I had been born too late.
When I tell people that I’ve been having increasingly severe professional difficulties because of the multinational corporations that have bought out the book-publishing industry, they typically respond by advising me to “hang in there” and “roll with the punches.” They remind me that I’m an award-wining, internationally bestselling author (as if I had the luxury of being able to forget the fact). I have an obligation to the public, they say, to keep writing (ignoring the reality that it’s one thing to keep writing, but can be another thing entirely to keep being published). Now that I’ve decided to leave the book-writing profession and to try writing stories for magazines and movies, nobody I’ve told of my decision seems to understand. So the following is my explanation.
Imagine, whoever reads this, that you are me. Let’s start a little over twenty-five years ago. You have completed approximately one-third of the manuscript for a proposed book you have titled The Tao of Pooh -- a book that is to humorously explain the generally misunderstood principles of the generally ignored Chinese philosophy or spiritual teaching known as Taoism, using the A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh characters. You have submitted the manuscript-so-far and chapter outlines to Elsevier-Dutton, formerly the independent publisher E.P. Dutton -- the only American publisher, the editor who reads your proposal immediately assures you, authorized by the English corporation The Trustees of the Pooh Properties to publish any book featuring the Milne characters.
The editor stalls on a decision for months as you write and mail in chapter after chapter, until the manuscript is practically complete -- at which point you send a letter stating that you’re not going to continue until you receive an acceptance, a contract, and an advance. The publisher then officially accepts the proposed book and sends you a contract to sign, which grants you a hardcover royalty of 12 ½% (the standard is 15%, but you don’t know that). You are to be “given” (loaned) an advance of $6,000.
The trustees of the Pooh Properties had at first in their communications with the publisher demanded one-half of your royalty in exchange for the right to use quotations and drawings from the Milne Pooh books. But on being told that you have responded to this demand by refusing to proceed further, they have reduced their exorbitant permission fee to a still-enormous 33 1/3% on the hardcover edition and (after the customary author/publisher splits) 40% on paperback and foreign editions, if there are any.
After a period of great hesitation, you decide that you’d rather finish the book than not, despite the considerably diminished royalty. So you sign the contract.
Months pass. The Tao of Pooh is about to be printed and released. For what seems a long time, you have been dealing with a very prickly editor and a very cold-blooded publishing house. But the book-to-be reads well, and you have some hope for its success. The editor tells you that he will be visiting the Dutton West Coast sales representative at his home in Olympia, Washington -- a two-hour drive from where you’re now living -- and that he would like to buy you a dinner to celebrate the upcoming release of your book. He suggests a certain restaurant in Seattle, a forty-five-minute drive north of Olympia.
You show up at the restaurant carrying a stuffed bear made by your mother, very closely based on Ernest H. Shepard’s Pooh drawings. You meet the editor and the sales rep, and the latter's girlfriend. The editor orders a tray of cheese blintzes for the table. He tells you that the new foreign corporate owners are authorizing only $1,275 to advertise the book, and that Dutton is planning to spend the money on little ads in The Village Voice. As if to demonstrate that you the author are not the only one to suffer from the publisher’s austerity program, he shows you his broken glasses, which he has taped together as a cheap fix. By now, you are convinced that the man is not only prickly, he’s crazy.
The sales rep’s girlfriend, who says she is studying art in college, tells you that she believes it’s good for artists to starve, because poverty (which she seems to have no first-hand knowledge of) strengthens character. Having grown up with professional-artist parents, your viewpoint is somewhat different; but as the conversation indicates that your viewpoint is not of interest, you decide not to pursue the subject.
In the meantime, you have noticed a buzzing sound -- people at nearby tables are discussing the bear, which you’ve seated on the chair next to yours. You hear the likes of: “Have you noticed that bear?” “Yes, he looks just like Winnie-the-Pooh!” “Boy, I really loved those books when I was a kid.” Your table company ignores the buzzing -- and the two diners who come over to you and strike up conversations about the bear.
The editor leans toward you and, as consolation for the small ad budget, says, “Don’t expect much from this book. It’s too esoteric to appeal to the general public.”
The editor and his companions excuse themselves, saying they need to return to Olympia. They pay the check for the cheese blintzes -- of which you’ve eaten three -- and leave. You sit there, ravenously hungry, wondering what happened to the offer of dinner. You think over the money you’ve lost from your paying work while writing the book, and consider that, according to the editor’s anti-pep talk, its sales will probably not pay back your investment. So you decide that you can’t afford to eat dinner at the restaurant. Bear under arm, you go to your car and eat the sandwich that you fortunately brought from home, thinking gloomy thoughts of wasted effort and upcoming failure.
When The Tao of Pooh is released, it is assassinated in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and several other publications, including even a teddy-bear-lover’s gazette, The Teddy Tribune. Unless you’ve somehow missed something, there are no positive reviews. Sales figures for the book start low and stay low, ominously so. When you go to your local library to see if they have ordered a copy, to be told they haven’t, you catch sight of a photocopy of the Kirkus Reviews throat-slitter. It has the most venomous assertions underlined, which you assume is the doing of the book-buyer. You donate two copies of the allegedly worthless book.
A “mixed” review -- part positive, part negative -- appears in The Washington Post. Six years later, you will learn that it was what saved The Tao of Pooh from almost certain death. At an American Booksellers Association convention, a Penguin Books executive will tell you that he came across the Washington Post review on the Sunday morning it appeared, while reading the newspaper over breakfast. Impressed enough by its positive statements to believe that the unusual book had the potential to reach a large readership, he directed his staff the next day to make an offer for the paperback rights. “Dutton didn’t even send the book out for paperback bids,” he will tell you, still incredulous after six years. “That shows how much they cared for it. We made an opening offer -- not much -- and they grabbed it with both hands.”
Just after its release, the paperback edition is described for about sixty seconds on National Public Radio. Shortly after that, it appears on the Washington Post trade paperback bestseller list and then on the New York Times trade paperback list -- the first time in publishing history that a book on Taoism had done any such thing. You learn two valuable lessons: one, every review counts; two, in the face of bad reviews, even brief national exposure can make a big difference to the survival of a book.
Although your next two book proposals are rejected by publishers, your third one, The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow -- a biography clearing the reputation of long-maligned 1920s bestselling author Opal Whiteley -- is accepted and published in hardcover by independent-minded, author-friendly Ticknor & Fields. Like its two unsuccessful predecessors, the proposal had been turned down by a long list of publishers in large part -- according to statements made in the rejection letters -- because it was not a sequel to The Tao of Pooh, by then a proven commodity. For it, you receive a $7,500 advance. The Singing Creek is not a commercial success, but it manages to win an American Book Award.
By then, Warner Books has bought the paperback rights -- shortly after which purchase, the two enthusiastic Warner’s editors responsible for the acquisition quit in disgust over the new corporate owner’s treatment of staff. No one from Warner’s shows up at the awards ceremony. But Patti Breitman, the first of The Singing Creek’s two editors to leave the house, appears and makes an inspiring speech about the book.
With no one at Warner Books to champion The Singing Creek, despite increasing sales apparently stimulated by two National Public Radio programs featuring it, Warner’s soon decides to drop it. Ticknor & Fields is closed down by parent company Houghton Mifflin, ending the life of the hardcover. (A few years later, Penguin Books will buy The Singing Creek for a $10,000 advance and release it cheaply and quietly in paperback.)
Ten years after starting The Tao of Pooh, you work up a partial manuscript plus outline for a companion book, The Te of Piglet. You submit it to your former editor’s successor at Dutton -- by then “an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.” -- still the only American publisher authorized to publish books featuring the Pooh characters. You’ve worked up the nerve to write the proposal because your belief in the project outweighs your dread of Dirty Dutton. At least, it does at first. Then the proposal is rejected. As the editor’s negative letter sums up:
What I think is wrong here is that we really do want a sequel to the Tao of Pooh (sic), and we basically want more of the same. Okay, fine to add in Piglet, fine to show change from shy and quiet to quiet and strong, but the book is not going to work if it’s all a showcase for Piglet. Pooh is still the basic Taoist.
Incensed by the letter -- “They didn’t believe in The Tao of Pooh, and now they don’t believe in anything else,” you remark to family and friends -- you decide to burn the manuscript. You are stopped by your fiancée and a friend who manages a bookstore. The latter, who’s as contemptuous of Dutton’s no-Pooh-no-deal attitude as you are, urges you to “go over that jerk’s head to someone who can see the potential.”
After a long cooling-off period, and after hiring and firing an agent who without consulting you offers Dutton world rights to The Te of Piglet for a $50,000 advance -- which Dutton accepts -- you turn negotiations over to your attorney. The latter, no stranger to tough bargaining, has by that time obtained for you a $6,000 out-of-court settlement with Dutton after threatening them with a plagiarism suit over a Dutton book, edited by The Tao of Pooh’s editor, that included in its text several word-for-word passages from The Tao of Pooh without acknowledgement or permission.
As your lawyer describes the Te of Piglet negotiation process: “At each step of the way, I call up their attorney, and he yells the terms at me, ‘Take ‘em or leave ‘em.’ I tell him they’re unacceptable, and the only reason he makes them is because no other American publisher can do the book. He denies the allegation. He then proceeds to prove it’s true.”
When your attorney asks for a $300,000 advance -- a more-than-reasonable figure, considering what The Tao of Pooh has earned for Penguin -- he encounters a rage so extreme that it turns comical: “He shouts, ‘Three hundred thousand dollars! Who does your client think he is -- Garrison Keillor?’”
You settle for a $150,000 advance and sign the contract. “Thank God that’s over,” your lawyer declares. “That attorney was the most obnoxious son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever encountered.”
(An aside on the traditional publisher’s advance: Generally speaking, the larger the figure advanced to the author, the harder the publisher will work to quickly recover the money -- in other words, the greater the publicity department’s promotional effort will be. The amount of the advance depends on how strongly the publisher believes in the proposal. And that’s where the catch lies. It would seem that to today’s imagination-challenged corporate decision makers, the book ideas most deserving of substantial advances are those that are as old as the hills yet have a contemporary twist. To put it another way, they combine Historic Precedent with What People Are Talking About Now. The problem with that somewhat schizophrenic combination of attributes is that, first, what’s old-as-the-hills in books is by now quite old indeed; and, second, what people are talking about when the idea is accepted is not necessarily what they will be talking about two or three years after that, when the book is released. So corporate publishers, who demonstrably know no more about the characteristics of great writing than most of us know about the intricacies of rocket science, end up with too many big-advance disappointments and here-today-gone-tomorrow flash books that sell impressively the year they’re released but do not sell a single copy five or ten years later. All of which further narrows publishers’ sights and makes them less and less likely to do what the big, wealthy, pre-corporate publishers did so successfully: back a new voice, an unusual idea, a great piece of creative writing. Pity the author today who wants to start a new trend rather than follow existing ones. From the corporate publisher’s point of view, the trouble with you, the author Benjamin Hoff, is that your book-proposal ideas have no historic precedent, and they are not what people are talking about now. So you will never be given a large advance. But $150,000 will guarantee you more promotion than will $6,000.)
With The Te of Piglet, you don’t have to worry about Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews assassinating the book before it’s had a chance to build sales momentum. Thanks to the promotional efforts of Dutton’s Head of Publicity, Lisa Johnson, The Te of Piglet is on every major bestseller list in the nation before its official publication date -- the date before which, by professional agreement, no reviews are to appear. Then the reviews come out, asserting why the public shouldn’t, and won’t, buy the book. This time, fortunately and surprisingly, there are some positive, thoughtful reviews as well.
The Te of Piglet stays on the New York Times bestseller list in hardcover for 40 weeks. Observing its performance, book people you know predict confidently that when the paperback is released, it will be on the bestseller lists for two-to-three times that length, the usual pattern for the paperback edition of a solid hardcover bestseller. But then, instead of assigning paperback promotion to the head of the paperback publicity department -- standard procedure in cases of substantial hardcover success -- the publisher for some ungiven reason assigns it to a young man who seems to be at or near the bottom of the paperback publicity department hierarchy. The paperback publicity campaign that follows consists of you phoning in every week to inform the young man of the book’s position on New York Times. The Te of Piglet is on that newspaper’s trade paperback list for 19 weeks -- less than half the length of the hardcover’s stay. You probably will never learn why Penguin, in effect, pulled the plug on the paperback publicity campaign.
Four years and a couple of rejected non-Pooh book proposals later -- after finally realizing that every time you submit a completely original creation to publishers, it is turned down -- you begin part-time work on the manuscript for an all-ages, four-section book you title The House on the Point: A Tribute to Franklin W. Dixon and the Hardy Boys. It includes your own Hardy Boys mystery, which you loosely base on some of the plot of the 1927 factory book The House on the Cliff, which had been written in three weeks by the fictitious “Franklin W. Dixon.”
In its introduction touching on your experiences as an investigative photojournalist and in its concluding essay proposing the inclusion of observation-and-deduction principles in education, you make connections between crime detection and larger social issues. In it, as in The Tao of Pooh, you attempt to show the potential everyday usefulness of something long considered specialized knowledge, utilizing children’s-book characters and a genre long considered mere entertainment, and making use of a new approach to book writing. The Tao of Pooh had been a surreal blend of fact and fiction, of classical Chinese quotations and imaginary conversational interludes; your Hardy Boys story in The House on the Point is unusually descriptive -- a fleshed-out, literary version of a screenplay, a movie on paper.
For the first submission, you send the partial manuscript to Simon & Schuster, the corporate publisher that by then had bought the rights to the Hardy Boys characters from the factory-book syndicate. They reject it, but agree to let you make use of the characters in exchange for 20% of your royalty.
Four years after starting to write it, you receive a positive response to the by-then nearly completed manuscript: St. Martin’s Press, a large corporate publisher, offers a $10,000 advance, which they agree to raise to $15,000. The advance figure, as always, is a disappointment; but the acceptance is a great relief after years of seeing your manuscripts rejected because they aren’t about Winnie-the-Pooh.
After you sign the contract, the enthusiastic senior editor who had convinced the publisher’s proposal committee that the book had commercial potential is fired, and you find yourself dealing with the publisher of your nightmares, The Publisher From Hell.
Scrapping their previous verbal agreement to package The House on the Point as a new work by Benjamin Hoff rather than as an old work by Franklin W. Dixon, St. Martin’s declares that they are going to give it a “classic” (imitative) look. The very idea of the book, they insist, is too unusual to be commercially successful otherwise.
Despite a contract clause stating that Simon and Schuster and you are to be consulted regarding the jacket and frontispiece illustrations, they without any consultation print the cover illustration from the still-in-print Grossett & Dunlap 1959 revised edition of The House on the Cliff in their catalog as the jacket illustration for your book. You point out that it would be illegal and unethical to release The House on the Point with a stolen illustration on its jacket. So they switch to an imitation of the plagiarized one, then -- after you complain -- alter it somewhat. Like the “final” frontispiece illustration -- clearly a rough sketch, in no way a finished drawing -- the jacket illustration is faithful to details of the Franklin W. Dixon story, not yours.
To add to the copycat packaging, The Publisher From Hell plagiarizes the 1927 Grossett & Dunlap Hardy Boys cover emblem and the 1959 House on the Cliff’s title page, typography, and interior layout. You remind them that stealing is illegal. They grudgingly make some modifications.
St. Martin’s decides to give The House on the Point an imitation factory-book full cloth cover which, they admit, is going to raise the purchase price, and imitation factory-book narrow pages, which are going to increase the page count, raising the price some more. To show off the cover, they decide that instead of a jacket they will wrap the book in a garish red “belly band,” which will need to be folded and end-glued, and which will necessitate gluing an ISBN sticker to the back cover -- all of which is going to further raise the price. Then, to make the book more affordable, they decide to shorten it by shrinking the type to the next-to-smallest size available -- thereby jettisoning your idea of an all-ages book -- and decreasing the margins. But in the meantime…
As the printing deadline looms, the replacement editor hasn’t edited one word of the manuscript. So you edit it yourself, after which a copy (technical) editor St. Martin’s has hired from outside the company -- the staff copy editors were busy -- goes over it to prepare it for typesetting, then sends it to you, as is customary, for your approval. After you return it, the publisher comes to editorial life at last and, without consulting you, makes changes to the text. (You only become aware of these changes later, by reading the printed book.)
Fed up with the publisher’s arrogance, dishonesty, and arbitrary actions, sick over the mutilation of your intended book, and seeing nothing ahead for it but disaster, you request that the publication rights be returned to you before the manuscript goes to the printer and binder. St. Martin’s refuses, saying that they have invested a good deal of money in the book. They tell you that, according to their attorney, no contract terms have been violated, so there is no legal basis for your request.
Taking a cue from the “no legal basis” argument in a last-minute effort to stop publication, you inform St. Martin’s Press and Simon & Schuster that you are not going to pay the permissions fees to copyright holders for the material you have quoted in the book -- which will make The House on the Point illegal as soon as the first copy is sold. You haven’t yet paid the fees. The book is released anyway.
By then, you hope for your reputation’s sake that the deformed creature will die before many people find out that it exists. Its absurd packaging feeds that hope, as does the apparent total lack of promotion. And you are encouraged by the thought that the reviewers haven’t yet seemed to approve of anything you’ve written...
The reviewers perform their usual dishonest tricks. Publishers Weekly, for one example, decries your “fulmination on the present state of American society” and your “diatribe against consumerism [and] uncontrollable contemporary youth,” the mention of which will presumably turn potential buyers away, even though these alleged rantings aren’t anywhere in the book. The Washington Post, for another example, runs a sarcasm piece, “Say, That’s Swell! A Hardy Boys Update,” the author of which had admitted while interviewing you by telephone shortly before the article’s appearance that he hadn’t actually read your Hardy Boys story.
Knowing what’s wrong with the book better than anyone else does, you watch with bitter amusement as the critics miss every one of its glaring faults while criticizing contents that don’t exist.
By the time The House on the Point has died a fast, merciful death, its publisher has stopped communicating with you. Neither St. Martin’s Press nor Simon & Schuster responds to your telephone calls and letters.
Nearly four years have now passed since the book’s publication. The House on the Point has long since been remaindered, as quietly as it had been released. Yet St. Martin’s, in every detail of their behavior The Publisher From Hell, hasn’t even performed the customary basic courtesy of returning your edited manuscript. And they silently refuse to relinquish the rights to the book. Sick of spending your time, energy, and money fighting publishers, you haven’t bothered to ask your attorney to retrieve the rights. What good would it do? It had been difficult enough before to find a publisher that liked the manuscript. Who would publish it now?
On several occasions over the years, you’ve asked the Dutton / Penguin editorial staff if you could be given a list of publications that have quoted from The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet. Each time, you’ve been told that the permissions department says that to compile such a list would be too much trouble. Finally, last year, after you make your list-of-publications request to the president of the company -- who was kind enough not long before to grant your request to raise the hardcover Tao of Pooh royalty to the standard percentage -- you receive a thirteen-page Permissions Report for The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet for the period of March 21, 1991 -- December 14, 2004, listing cryptic entries such as:
Contract: 2223 03/21/1991 Kinko’s / Ref. E4061072 Paid:
09/03/1991
Title: THE TAO OF POOH by Benjamin Hoff
$168.00 for pp. 115-156
Total contract: $168.00
Contract: 5292 10/17/1991 Advanced Systems Paid: 11/14/1991
Used in: MAINE EDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENT TEST, GRADE 8
Title: THE TAO OF POOH by Benjamin Hoff
$200.00 for pp. 91-94 EDITION: test
Total Contract: $200.00
Contract: 8232 03/11/1995 Champlain Regional College Paid:
05/15/1992
Title: THE TAO OF POOH by Benjamin Hoff
$30.00 for 15-page excerpt
Total Contract: $30.00
As you know from your own experience, anyone applying for permission to quote is required to provide a good deal more information to the publisher of the work to be quoted than is stated in the above entries. So you know that the information you’d like to have is somewhere in Dutton’s records. And you know that you’re not going to be given it.
You continue to see listed on nearly every hardcover royalty statement for The Tao of Pooh or The Te of Piglet the tantalizing, mysterious names of individuals and organizations granted permission to quote from those books -- the names and the amounts of payment. You will probably never know what any of the quoting publications are, and so will probably never be able to find and read them -- and will therefore probably never see any of that apparently substantial body of evidence verifying that what you wrote had an effect on this world.
Another request you’ve made several times over the years with no noticeable result is for Dutton and Penguin to forward reader letters to you in a timely manner. You have received letters months or even years after they were mailed to the publisher. Some of these letters contained invitations to speak at banquets, grand openings, and other events. Most arrived in your mail after the events had taken place.
The message behind the denial of these requests, as well as the other demeaning treatment you’ve received from publishers, is: You’re not worth much. The trouble with being given this message repeatedly for such a long time is that you’ve come to believe it. Like most authors you know -- the good ones, anyway -- you’re your own harshest critic, on the constant lookout for the slightest flaw in your writing. That’s why you’re a good self-editor, if nothing else. But it’s also why you’re inclined to believe negative professional assessments of your work, your abilities, and yourself. Over the years, you’ve pushed every bit of professional criticism and rejection deep down inside and kept writing, to fulfill a dream that cannot be fulfilled because others have made it impossible. And you’ve paid the price.
You have been treated by two psychotherapists for clinical depression and grief caused by publishers’ mean-spirited, belittling treatment of yourself and your work. You have been given dental care for problems resulting from jaw clenching at night, which began as you watched your last book being butchered -- you cracked two back teeth and displaced two very visible front ones.
So, reader of this essay, are you tired of being me, the author? If so, maybe you can imagine how tired I am. If you were to dedicate your time and energy to writing, wouldn’t you prefer to write something you could feel good about? That’s what I’m going to allow myself to do from now on -- to get completely away from book publishers and write for magazines and movies. If neither of those two areas wants my efforts, I’m going to forget about putting words on paper and possibly turn to the music career I once decided against. It’s much healthier, I’ve concluded, to let a dream die than to allow it to destroy yourself.
A couple of years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report indicating that between 1992 and 2002, the number of non-bookreading American adults increased by 17 million. The report speculated that the most likely reason for this great turning away from books was competition from television, movies, and the internet.
Because of what I’ve seen, heard, and experienced in a quarter-century of authorship and more than half a century of readership, I believe that the growing disinterest in books is instead largely due to the relentless shrinking of literary variety and degradation of literary quality brought about by the destruction of the independent book-publishing industry. Although I’ve been an avid reader for most of my life and own over 4,000 books, I too find less and less to interest me in bookstores as time goes by. And I don’t watch television shows or today’s movies (because of their mediocre ideas and writing, their rotten taste, and their unprofessional lack of respect for the audience), and I don’t own a computer.
For years, I dealt as well as I knew how with publishers who seemed dedicated to opposing at every step the new ideas and forms of writing I was trying to bring to the literary world. From successfully fighting a regressive, racist jacket illustration for The Tao of Pooh to unsuccessfully fighting the wrecking of The House on the Point, I participated in what seemed the writing-profession equivalent of a martial arts movie.
Before the corporate era, I’ve been told by veteran authors, the business of writing books wasn’t like that. But over the past forty years, authors have become increasingly caught in the crossfire as the once-gentlemanly American book-publishing arena has been transformed into an international war zone. Victims of corporate conquest, our once-great publishers have been reduced to mere false-front divisions of the now six surviving major publishing houses, which themselves survive not as autonomous companies but only as divisions of their parent mega-corporations (see the list following the essay), only two of which are American.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the public has little a
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