American Dirt and the 3 Dirty D’s of Publishing - PART II

If you’ve been in a coma the last few weeks of January 2020, then you may have missed the release of American Dirt (Jeanine Cummins, Flatiron Books/ MacMillan, 2020, New York), its synchronous pick for “Oprah’s Book Club,” and the immediate backlash against the author and publisher, as well as Oprah Winfrey, and basically against the entire publishing industry. Two issues were illuminated:

• First, the claim from certain spokespeople for the Latino community that the Latino voice was grossly misrepresented in the book, written by a “white woman” who they say had no right to speak for them, who stole their identity, and whose publisher made inexcusable errors in both the edit and marketing of the book. I read the book and wrote about this issue, and my take on it, here in an article titled, "STOP hating on American Dirt - PART I [Spoiler alert: I don’t entirely disagree, but I still devoured and liked the book.]
• Second, the assertion that the publishing industry as a whole is patently discriminatory against the Latino voice, an issue I discuss in this blog, PART II of this 2-part article.

Here’s my prediction: Over the next few weeks, the big players in the publishing industry will cuss and discuss the American Dirt “Fiasco” as Slate.com’s Laura Miller phrased it in an insightful, insider article published 1/31/2020. They will post-mortem the publisher’s missteps to death. And, readers will continue not to care.

We are in a national conversation now about diversity in publishing, and I’m here to shout that the issue is far more complicated than the limited range of cultural influences believed to be making decisions about what gets published. It’s about the 3 Dirty D’s of the publishing industry.  

[“Dirty D” is an urban euphemism that originally referred to Detroit in its worst days, but has come to mean dangerous, base, from the rough side of town, deliberately offensive, odious, and mean.]

To carry the “wall” analogy through, barrier walls to big publishing contracts exist in every corridor and the territory is rife with bad actors or unproven servicers who exploit people trying to get there. Entry costs for those with no access to the Big 5 publishers (Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins), or who have been rejected by the same, is extremely high, many $1,000’s, and once an author manages to get published, to “cross the wall,” they realize the next big hurdle that will keep them from getting their message to the masses is the 3 Dirty D’s:  Discoverability, Distribution, and, yes, Discrimination.

Listen, I have to start by saying this. There is a huge mass of great people out there with legitimate stories, important messages, fascinating histories, who just don't have writing skills, by their own admission. This skill gap is their real barrier to entry. Members of this group can still cross the border into “Big 5 Land” with some help, if they happen to be celebrities, or the subject is in the news for some reason and they are experts or eye witnesses. Otherwise, Katie, bar the door. More about this group another day. (Hint: call me, I can help.)

But what if you are one of those amazingly talented writers who have written world-changing stories that deserve to reach their audience, who can’t get past that wall of rejection letters because of all these issues American Dirt has illuminated, issues which boil down to the first of the 3 D’s: Discrimination. 

This is not a false claim. The book selection formula looks at one thing: “will we make money on this book?” The annual goals of the Big 5 are not to be "fair" to everyone. Their mission is to make money, and the formula and marketing methods they use are skewed toward the lowest hanging fruit, the easiest audience, which ultimately means discriminatory practices are baked in.  The audience, and what they read, become self-perpetuating, and other voices, other viewpoints, no matter how relevant or excellent, are quashed.

How do writers overcome Discrimination? There are two ways to do this:

1. You can pound your fists in the air, scream and shout and shame the powerful, and do your best to illuminate the problem. This is happening now, and it’s great, and important, but incomplete. Soon, the public grows weary of a message they don’t believe affects them; cameras stop rolling and the protestors return home, and nothing changes. Today, because of American Dirt, Latinx voices being excluded from the Big 5 have been illuminated, and certain Latinx works are now enjoying an organic surge in readers and followers. You may try again to submit your works to the Big 5, hoping the new climate shakes loose some gatekeepers looking to be on the right side of the issue. You may squeeze through, but look behind you. The issue remains. The system chugs ahead. The money still funnels down the same path. And, there are so many other groups also being excluded. 
2. So, now, in 2020, you as a writer look for another way to publish.  Maybe you start your own publishing house to balance the field (a significant investment), or you find an existing hybrid or self-publishing house to publish your work, at your expense, or as a shared investment, or, you do it yourself. You may find a different format or medium. You get creative. Then, you run in to the other two Dirty D’s.

Discoverability is the measure in which booksellers and readers are able to find your book, learn about its message, and order it, and this area of publishing is very, very dirty. The Big 5 Publishers have a corner on the market of discoverability. Not only do they have the budget, they have a low risk,  because booksellers already trust them. I mean, the Big 5 would only publish amazing books, right? Their manuscripts are carefully vetted and fact-checked, right? American Dirt is proof that isn't always the case. 

For the rest of us, an entirely new set of gatekeepers and coyotes are here, waiting, hands out, and a few legit co-ops and businesses as well. You can buy your way into catalogs. You can buy your way into prominent reviews. You can buy entry into award programs, most of which exist to get you to buy their promotional products. You can buy advertisement. You can hire book publicists and an agent, who may set up gigs so you can traverse the country at your own expense doing book signings. None of them – NONE of them – will be able to give you any figures on ROI (Return on Investment – how many book sales will result), because they can’t, or won’t, measure their own success. Truly, this is hard to measure. I am hopeful that new technologies will make this problem disappear, but for now, you'll hear about collateral benefits, "soft" benefits of general exposure. Unless you wrote your book for collateral benefits, or to support your resume or CV, you probably only care about whether or not your book sales at minimum cover the advertising, and maybe a little bit more. So, without any data, and having no one to give you solid truth on the matter, you, the author, are cashing in your IRAs and CDs, mortgaging your home, hitting up your relatives, opening a fund-raising site, with high hopes, because you didn’t know. So, let’s say you manage to get some bookseller attention. They try to order your book, and hit the 3^rd Dirty D: Distribution.

Distribution is how your book gets from Point A, which is either your dining room table or your hybrid publisher’s shelves, to Point B, which is either a reseller or the reader’s hands. Here, also, there are lots of walls. The distribution companies will charge your publisher a lot to make your book available to booksellers, and they’ll pass that cost on to you. Don’t have a publisher? Distributors won’t touch you. Booksellers, including big box, chain, warehouse, and many indy bookstores, are tied in to a software system and service that is too expensive for individual authors or small publishers to buy into. Small publishers who do have a distributor trade away some of your profits and a chunk of their own monthly money in order to pay to play, and distributors won’t accept books without proof of sales, which are hard to get without distribution and discoverability. Again, because it’s baked in, discrimination plays a role here, too. 

Take note: just because your book is included in a distributor’s list does not mean orders will roll in. Most booksellers cannot afford to take a lot of risks on unproven titles, so they tend to stick to the Big 5 Publishers’ lists, because these titles feel less risky. They assume, sometimes erroneously, that the Big 5 publisher has done their due diligence. These stores may order 1 or 2, but not without a generous return clause.

What about Amazon? Amazon is essentially a distributor. Books sold there are 'on consignment,’ shipped at your expense to their warehouses, not paid for until sold, and are returned to you if they sit too long on the shelf. Of course, Amazon is happy to sell you advertising to make your book more discoverable among the 1000s of books in your categories, but be careful—you would have to sell a lot of books to justify the expense. Still, this presence is important because your readers go there to check reviews (and prices). Oh, and Amazon has a publishing service, also, for those writers who don’t want anyone monkeying around with their text. If we were able to measure and compare Amazon sales to the Big 5, we may have to accept that there are not 5 “Big” publishers, but 6, including Amazon.

Meanwhile, your book’s profits have long ago disappeared in the desert, their bones picked clean, a casualty of the 3 Dirty D's. You’ve paid to get your book in marketable shape. You’ve paid for printing and registration. You’ve paid for marketing to have your book become discoverable. If you’re lucky, you’ve traded another large percentage of profits so your book can be distributed to bookstores willing to take a chance on you. You are deep in the hole and making pennies per copy. Pennies. (But, congratulations, you’re a published author!) Ah, but I am a publisher! Why would I paint such a negative picture? So hear me. There are other creative ways to make this work.

The 3 Dirty D’s cannot be separated from each other in working to solve this issue, and we have to do better. I know there are solutions out there, waiting to be created. I’m wracking my brain, as are my colleagues in the Indy Publishing industry, but we need the readers and writers to help as well.  NBC reported this morning that Latinx writers and their supporters are banding together to promote each other’s work within their circles, but that won’t help me, a pasty White American woman, discover their books. It’s only one piece to the solution, a start. No one yet has the complete answer, but Indy publishers are definitely out there in the trenches fighting for it, looking for all the pieces.

The Indy Publishing industry operates under a completely different set of rules than the “Big 5.” We take more risks because we have to, and want to. We charge for at least some of our services, because we have to share this risk with our authors. We have specialties, and niches, and passions, and the liberty to publish books the mainstream will likely never see, and we do this often to our own detriment, because it’s the right thing to do, and because we love what we do. Check out this article from two years ago from the Independent Book Publishers Association, the largest such publishing group, which confirms the strengths within the indy publishing industry. We are far more generous with royalties, but authors have to work, really work, to sell the books we publish for them. Most will hopefully break even at some point, but likely never enjoy a comfortable existence from their royalty checks. But, their message will be out there, and maybe, maybe, they’ll change some lives. But, oh, the cost, for everyone involved.

Yesterday was the last day for Destinations Booksellers, a  bookstore in our town that had been in business for 15 years, a casualty of the system. Independent bookstores work right alongside indy publishers, different from chain stores in critical ways. They are more willing to take a risk on an unknown author, a controversial subject, or a tiny sliver of the population. The indy bookstore also struggles to stay on the field, to survive.  Our challenge is finding each other, finding the good matches between our unique niches and the bookstores catering to those same niche readers.  And, those bookstores don’t have the resources to find those niche readers willing to pay a little more to support their local or online niche store.  All of us on this side of the wall have to find a creative way to bring all costs down and still turn out a quality product, so we can keep retail costs in market range and still make a profit high enough to support the industry, so that stories can be read by the people who need to read them. It’s not about the writers, or the voices, or the publishers, or the booksellers, or the cursed money. It’s about the readers. But, folks, we can't do it without money.

So, we are working on it, the indy publishers and bookstores. I personally am working on it, this gap, this gigantic obstacle I call the 3 Dirty D’s.  I’d love to hear your ideas, opinions, and pain points. If you are a writer in need of a publisher, check out my website and if you think we are a good fit, contact me.  One final thought, for those of you writing for the Christian market. These 3 Dirty D's exist in the Christian publishing segment as well. This segment has its own top echelon, its own walls, coyotes, gatekeepers, and exclusionary tactics, "baked in," and in need of examination. Another topic for another day.