A few weeks ago, I attended the Catholic Writers Guild Conference. As usual, it was held in conjunction with the Catholic Marketing Network. Publishers, booksellers, etc., were connected by a catwalk to the hotel where writers were holding their conference. There were also entrepreneurs—people whose business is simply promotion, sales, marketing. Lots of business cards passed around, people making contacts, becoming contacts, and overlapping both quite a lot—for example, writers who self-promote. One guy, for example, told me that Catholic writers who don’t create a website, run a blog, “build a platform,” can never hope to get their books sold. There was a lot of that kind of talk. This is a new age, we’re told, the age of the internet, and “networking” isn’t just necessary—it’s everything.
A feeble attempt or two at conversation with certain writers bore this out. They don’t want to talk with you, to discuss anything—they want to hand you a promo business card and meet you on Facebook, not in person. Publishers set up display tables and went about hawking their wares, or they’d come over loudspeakers, announcing that somebody was signing books somewhere, or that free books were being given away for the next hour at their booth—booths conveniently numbered so that customers could locate them quickly and easily. Occasionally, some Catholic TV or radio station would hold interviews—a drawing card, something desirable to writers, publishers, and customers all alike.
This, one thinks to oneself, is a business. This is the Catholic marketplace, as loud and busy, as wheeling-and-dealing, as any morning market in some Arab city. I tried to learn, mostly via osmosis, by listening to people who do this sort of thing as a way of life, but I was aware from the beginning that I was very much out of place, personally, and yet bothered by the idea that I shouldn’t be, if I’m really a writer. (Maybe I’m not?) If I were, I should find this exciting, exhilarating, and I should be making plans to build a platform, to network. One young man apparently very much in the know about these things told me bluntly that if my book was going to sell, I’d have to study the social media and learn to manipulate it, figure out when the time was right to hold give-aways, and flood review sites at the right time in order to boost sales-rankings, etc.
Wait a minute. What is all this? It’s not what I had in mind when I decided to write a novel (What did I have in mind?) I met one other old fogey who felt the same. “Good grief,” I said to him, “is this what’s necessary in order to be read?” He understood. No, he responded, it’s what’s necessary if you want to Be a Success. Marketing, market manipulation—all that jazz—used to be only what publishers did, and for a very good reason: they’re in business. But now many writers are also in business—especially those who habitually earn seven-figure incomes. Some of them don’t even claim to be writers anymore. I don’t know if it’s true, but someone told me that James Patterson publicly acknowledged that he hasn’t actually written a book in decades. Such people have staff. They are an industry.
I don’t want to be misunderstood: There is nothing wrong with making an honest profit. There’s nobility in making a good product, including a book, and selling it for a fair price. And competition is indeed healthy. I have NO criticism of business. Some people are more ethical than others, but that’s always true of everything. There’s nothing wrong with athletics—but that doesn’t make an athlete out of me.
I learned that “Catholic fiction” isn’t selling. One publisher held up a novel he’d had on the market for over a year and said, “This hasn’t even paid for itself yet.” Then he held up yet another of the countless spiritual self-help books that are churned out every month by the dozens. “This,” he said, “paid for itself in two weeks.” The publisher is a businessman—guided indeed by his Catholic beliefs, but still a businessman. It doesn’t finally matter whether a novel is any “good”; the point is that it’s not selling.
Back over at the writers’ conference, there were two basic avenues of interest: how to write better, or how to sell better. For the business-minded writer (who wants to Be a Success, maybe?), the latter interest is much more compelling. Meanwhile, however, another publisher commented to me: “The reason Catholic fiction isn’t selling is that Catholic fiction-writers can’t write.” Really? So, while some fiction-writers are blaming publishers (or becoming publishers themselves), publishers are blaming writers, and the writers are dutifully trying to write better “Catholic fiction.”
Away from the conference and back online, Bright Young Literary Catholics are saying that Catholic fiction must be more byte-conscious, must learn to think in “iconic” terms (like an MTV video, maybe? Or a YouTube flick?). I think this might be true for people who want to “have read” something instead of actually reading it. People, they say, read quick synopses of fiction—no more. But I’d like to say to the BYLCs, “Look. This may well be true ofyou, and of your peers now. It’s tough to have to read Tristram Shandy in a weekend. I know—I remember grad school, too. You’ve lost the pleasure of reading. Live long enough, and it will return, but don’t project your resentment of its time-consumption on others.” Anyone who’s ever lingered over one of George Eliot’s narrative asides, relishing the pure music of her prose, knows whereof I speak: It’s possible to mourn the end of an 800-page novel, believe it or not—and even more shocking—to want to read it again.
Why aren’t Catholics reading fiction? Personally, I think they are. They’re just not reading so-called “Catholic fiction.” They want their Catholicism in non-fiction. They’re willing to buy the “young adult” genre and therefore what fiction is accepted by Catholic publishers generally falls in or near that category. But literary fiction from Catholic publishers is conspicuously absent. True, decent literary fiction comes from Catholic publishers once in a while, but for the most part, no. To begin with, such submissions are so few, and then, they’re rendered so trite, or so editorially tortured by publishers who fear alienating their Catholic readers, that they lose all literary quality. If Walker Percy submitted The Moviegoer to a Catholic publisher today, it would be rejected because it has pre-marital sex in it. But you can’t blame the publishers; they’re just trying to survive, unwittingly killing the very thing they say they’re dedicated to saving.
But what is there to save? True, there was something that has come to be called a “Catholic literary revival” in the 20th century, but does it necessarily follow that there is such a thing—or ever was—as “Catholic fiction?” This may sound blasphemous, but I’ll risk it. What is there to save? Publishers may be trying to please a market that doesn’t exist. Some noble-minded sorts know—or suspect—that, and so, being noble-minded, they set about trying to create that market, but what they’re trying to do is re-create a past, one which can be what it is only retrospectively—like the Renaissance, or the Middle Ages.
Catholic Publishers complain that people aren’t reading fiction. Yes they are (and they’re reading it in larger sizes than “iconic bytes,” too, even though it’s often electronically delivered). They’re reading non-fiction from Catholic publishers; what they’re not reading much of is called “Catholic fiction.” I think publishers, writers, critics (especially!), and readers need to re-think the reasons for this. Several years ago, a certain critic posed the question, What is Catholic fiction? People have discussed it to death ever since. Perhaps it would help if it were understood that any definition has to be retrospective, not prescriptive.
I had an opportunity to re-write Treason to suit the prescriptive formula of an editor at a major Catholic publishing house. I’m so glad I chose to withdraw it instead. I didn’t even think about submitting The Lion’s Heart (a homosexual “love story”) to a Catholic publisher. I don’t blame the publishers. They were looking for something they called “Catholic fiction.”
Dear Michael,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I think “paperless” is one of the biggest scams of our age; worse, it will cause the destruction (i.e., “development”) of millions of acres of timberland which would otherwise have been harvested and replanted.
There is one important part of writing that just can’t be dismissed: the *need* to be read. I don’t mean by millions, thousands, or even hundreds–but by somebody somewhere sometime. Whatever else we may say about writing, that process is not complete without readers; the story remains unfinished until it’s read.
I’m almost 71. I don’t know how many more stories I have left to tell, but I’ll tell them as truthfully and as well as I can (whether they’re “Catholic fiction” or not.) As for publishing–I don’t worry about it. It’s not what I do. I just write the story. If God wants anyone to read it, he’ll have to take care of getting it published. As I mentioned in the post, I knew I didn’t belong where I was.
I can’t honestly believe the age of fiction is over, for good. People need truth, not just facts. That’s why Christ spoke in parables. These are dark times, yes, but eventually, someone will say, “Once upon a time….” and people will gather to listen and to hear.
What you describe is folly and a waste of time, but thanks much for going there and your good reporting on this. This “networking” via internet/social media is just the latest version of the hula hoop. The convulsion in American life is ongoing and ramping up daily, and all that jazz will disappear in the crest of the next berserk political/economic wave of destruction. Really, these marketers are just the pseudo-literary variety of “the book is dead/paperless society” people.
The fact is, the American book industry is blown out, along with American culture generally. There is not serious fiction of any sort being published in this country, now, Catholic or otherwise. Whatever you may think of them, the last generation of serious makers of American literary fiction are gone, the generation of Cheever, Updike, Evan Connell. Doubtless there are serious makers of literary fiction in the country but they are not going to see print with so called major publishers. Dittos in spades for serious poetry. This of course is a negative basis for Catholic writers to take heart, for sure, but there it is.
The opportunity and opening is print on demand, chaotic and tumultuous as it presently is. This has emerged since the blow out of publishing which more or less coincided with the meltdown of the economy which began in September 2008, which also coincided with e-books. It is a technological development that allows genuine reader/writer contact over the heads of these pathetic “gurus” & their ludicrous phony wisdom (of the sort which bad writer wannabes have always grasped at, because they are so desperate for attention). Well, Emily Dickinson & the later Melville did not have this pathetic need, and neither should serious writers in this country who happen to be Catholics. For that matter Dante as far as we know had virtually no readership in his day. And how many book signings did Richard Crashaw attend?
No, print on demand is not going to get serious Catholic writers more than say, several hundred readers. But several hundred loyal, serious, committed readers is not something to take lightly in the present climate. It is indeed something important, and objectively so, and worth being sought. And serious readers and human contact with an audience, however small, is the necessary germ of authors having genuine readership, not a “platform” or “network.” There is an element of natural law at work in all things, you must hold: good, true writing is what the writer must do. The rest is secondary. If you do that, you will have some sort of audience under this natural law. And what is more, you should be happy with it. But your genuine happiness must be because you are at work writing your best with the precious but accidental goods God handed you at birth, for reasons of His own unrelated to any merit you can imagine. Fame and notoriety are hardly even worthy goals at any time in history, and certainly not in the present degradation of both taste and truth.
Oh yeah, the vast majority of American Catholics don’t know/care about literature even enough to support minor writers of fiction. Even the cleverest are still more interested in Notre Dame football. We all in our gut know the reason for this. But that reality certainly is not going to change in the present general dumbing down of everything & the specific and rather breath-taking disintegration of the Catholic ethos in this country. There is no point in naming names . . . it remains the case that the best Catholic novel ever published in America (Death Comes for the Archbishop) was written by an Episcopalian. But what Catholic schools at any level even teach it?
My own fiction (Catholic subject matter; others will certainly vociferously decree whether it is “truly Catholic”) is going to start going into print on demand next year. I am 61 and have had a full time career for 36 years. I have been writing even longer & have a considerable backlog I have never seriously tried to publish. At my age, and given recent developments in our history, I now pray with genuine thanksgiving for all the circumstances that have heretofore held me back from becoming published, from being an “author,” and particularly from being known as a “Catholic writer.”
Eloquently stated, Dena! I’m certain that Flannery O’Connor would have steered clear of this gathering– and am also sure that her books would never have been accepted by a Catholic publisher. Sex, sin, violence, suicide, maiming, rape, prostitution: All these would have made the Catholic publishers run screaming from the room.
Yes, Lorraine, but it’s not the publishers’ fault. O’Connor didn’t write “Catholic fiction,” nor did her publishers market it as such.
Book-writing and publishing generally are both in deep trouble–though I think electronics has little to do with it, despite what the market experts and/or culture vultures say. Catholics make their lot very much more difficult by their self-applied labels, and tight almost-juvenile parameters, while all the Catholic literary folk are like dogs worrying a bone they’ve created, endlessly gnawing on “What IS ‘Catholic fiction’?”
I suggest that there’s no such thing. And if there were, nobody would want to read it. Publishers aren’t to blame–look at their outlets: Would Flannery O’Connor have been sold in a Catholic bookstore? Their intentions to “help” Catholic fiction are honorable but impossible. Or, put this another way: Ron Hansen is not, and never has been, published by a Catholic publisher. Neither was O’Connor.
Since the Northern European nations went Protestant — which is already several hundred years ago — specifically Catholic art and culture was also generally pushed off the public sphere, and aggressively so, by the new regimes. Right afterwards, you see the phenomenon of Catholic artists whose specifically Catholic content was essentially underground, such as Vermeer and Shakespeare, “coded” as their public works may have been. But few would have got the point.
Literary fiction, as we know it, is essentially a post-Reformation development, though hardly a “Protestant art form” as the Remnant newspaper insists on calling it. In Catholic countries there have been major novelists and who were Catholic (including the pioneer in the new art, Cervantes), but we don’t ordinarily consider them “Catholic writers” nor would they have so considered themselves. The term is usually applied in a secularist or Protestant society like the United States, as a sort of sub-genre ala “the Jewish novel,” “the black novel,” etc. Here, some Catholics who wrote fiction played along for a time, most note-worthily J .F. Powers and Phyllis McGinley; others didn’t really, like Flannery, or at best half-heartedly, like Walker Percy.
The term is moot now anyway, because no major American publisher will now publish anything even open to an orthodox Catholic point of view, even if the writer has no specifically didactic point. And certainly not about Catholic issues unless (1) determinedly & didactically hostile thereto, to the point of constituting closed-minded propaganda ; (2) lightweight (Ralph McInerny’s Father Dowling mysteries); (3) kiss & tell (Father Greeley); (4) horror (Exorcist clones for the self-styled millennial generation) — all 4 of which approaches are disqualifiers for serious literary fiction.
Now you could certainly ramp all the network you need with a thriller starring a devout, rosary-toting transgender bounty hunter working out of the NYC chancery office (disguised by day as the very femme side of a lesbian relationship, a sort of updated Lois Lane), who goes out at night (after getting the goods from all those awful “secret” diocesan files) to count coup on “the undead.” You could do it Hillerman style, with a different Catholic belief/devotional practice as the arcane secret at the bottom of each new book.
The other side: Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel, the major Christian work of fiction for a few centuries, is not going to be any further published in English translation. That is the situation.
On the Catholic side, you have a people who we all know well — under invisible siege from the dominant, aggressive mass culture all their lives to the point they ape popular music at Mass and the “homilies” they get there are often about TV shows or “events” as defined by dominant media — and they especially like it that way. (And they call the 40s “ghetto Catholicism” . . .)
Americans generally, also, are no longer much interested in any Christian, much less religious content in their arts, popular or otherwise. The shift has been markedly decided in the last decade, as the real effect of virtual reality in tandem with mass market atheist screeds ala Dawkins. Oh, there is one old “religion” hanging on — Darwinism — pervasive in certain well known “novelists” currently selling very well & well reviewed. But I think its day is also shortening.
Whether or not you can blame the general publishers (and other culture purveyors) there is no point in doing so. But the fact is Catholic life has never thrived, much less existed, in such a situation unless you count the earliest days in ancient Rome (exaggerated in the popular mind by the old bible epics churned out by Hollywood). Probably in any event genuine persecution will elicit a counter-response.
Story tellers, as suggested above in this thread, are however needed (in words and in paint) in any genuine culture, and genuine culture is needed by any people. Catholic artists here, being the canaries in the coal mine, now sense what is happening — expulsion from the culture (contra the appallingly failed prediction of Guadium et spes 55).
Catholic publishers are not a place to place hope, for reasons well recorded by Dena, whose note on the reaction to her book Treason is dead on. The fact is, American Catholics never developed culture. Nor have they made any appreciable impact on the general culture, except in politics post JFK, wherein the passionate & at least arguably Catholic activism of an RFK is only remembered by aging bishops who the very next day paved the way for the CHD, the Cuomo family, Pelosi et al. And, yes, abortion on demand and the closing of Catholic adoption agencies, hospitals, and — soon — schools. In such a context, some might ask if we even have the right to work out a place for “Catholic culture” in this nation. I think so, but I stake my view on a God at least trenchantly witty enough– and patient enough also — to hand us off Jonas as an inspired book. You have to wonder about how much sand is left in the patience hourglass, though.
Where does that leave writers who happen to be Catholic in this country? Absolutely free. At this moment. The field has been cleared, and writers still practicing their faith have nothing to do but write well — and stake out the parameters of a new culture which has never yet been achieved. A development such as print-on-demand (there will be others) leaves total artistic control unknown in American letters since the 19th century, before the dinosaur book industry complete with editors, agents, marketers etc took books over. The people Dena met at the conference are their illegitimate grandchildren — they remind one of Charles Bon at the end of Absalom, in a house about to burn down. It would certainly take a Faulkner to get them right — a “writer” who doesn’t want to talk, just hand you a card and go to Facebook! This is cosmic, and a truer “sign of the times” than you could get (or purchase, more likely) at certain current apparition sites.
Michael, I think this is the most intelligent assessment of the situation I’ve read.
Thank you.
This part especially applies, I think, to me, and others like me, whose number is greater than any of us think:
“Where does that leave writers who happen to be Catholic in this country? Absolutely free. At this moment. The field has been cleared, and writers still practicing their faith have nothing to do but write well–”
The latter part of that (“– and stake out the parameters of a new culture which has never yet been achieved. “) I leave to those younger and smarter than I. If I were younger, I might involve myself in these debates (e.g., What IS Catholic fiction?) but I know it’s not my business. My business is to tell true stories, aka, fiction. Nothing more.
I look forward to reading your books.
Thanks, Michael.
Treason
The Lion’s Heart
Both, 2013, available on Amazon.
Forthcoming in 2014 (I hope):
A collection of stories, and a novel/novella about the death of Richard III/end of Plantagenet dynasty.