An Insidious Trend

(Above: my daughter at, um, Yale.)

Want to write a bestseller? Write a good book. That used to be the advice given to ambitious new authors, and there was a time it was more or less true. But today? Want to write a bestseller? Go to Harvard or Yale (or Hollywood), lose any extra pounds, get a nose job or cheek implants if required, and then dash off a mediocre manuscript and send it in with your spiffy resume and a photo. Quickly. Before you turn thirty-five.

Something insidious is going on in the publishing industry. It started with marketing departments and the idea that novels are easier to sell if the author has a “platform” and can be “branded.” With this discovery came a shift in the power to decide which manuscripts are bought and which are rejected, with marketing departments trumping editors on the basis of a manuscript’s “salability” or lack thereof.

So what constitutes a platform? Well, being a former Secretary of Defense makes a good one. William Cohen’s new thriller, DRAGON FIRE, is described by Booklist as “leaden” and “clunky.” If anyone other than Cohen had written it, he’d probably have received a form rejection letter. Instead, this leaden clunker is being given a mammoth advertising budget and huge print run.

Cohen’s book at least has one redeeming feature: those willing to wade through that clumsy prose filled with stock characters will be given an accurately rendered peek into the behind-the-scenes workings of our government (at least, I assume so; I haven't read it). But Secretaries of Defense writing lumbering thrillers are (thankfully) rare. So what is a publisher to do? Why, cash in on the nation’s obsession with wealth, youth, beauty, and the elite, of course.

Thus in the last few years we have been subjected to an avalanche of ho-hum books written by young graduates of Ivy League schools (or youngish professors at Ivy League schools). Failing an Ivy League background, an author might still be in the running for bestsellerdom as long as he’s young, relatively attractive, and preferably a doctor or a lawyer (again, the allure of the elite).

Publishers aren’t the only ones responsible for this trend. A popular women’s magazine recently ran an article on six female writers; all were young, attractive, and from elite backgrounds. A coincidence? I don’t think so. Authors are routinely selected for appearances on television talk shows (Oprah being the exception) not because they’ve written a good book but because they look good on television. And then there’s the magazine LUCKY, that actually recently asked NY book publicists to recommend an attractive female author between the ages of 25 and 35 for an upcoming feature. Content or quality of books not important.

I suppose in a sense it was inevitable. In the music industry, the rise of MTV shifted the emphasis away from musical ability, toward appearance and sex appeal. Recording executives realized that untold millions would rather listen to the computer-enhanced breathy twang of a blond bimbo than to a gifted, well-trained singer with a beautiful voice and a plain face. So why should we be surprised that something similar is happening to books?

In the early years of the twentieth century, writers were seen as intellectuals or adventurers or both (think Ernest Hemmingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald). Or they weren’t seen at all, trusting to the strength of their voice and storytelling ability to gain them readers. Today, of course, the number of dedicated readers has plummeted. Only a book that appeals to traditional non-readers can hope to rack up the sales record of something like The Da Vinci Code, and traditional non-readers obviously have much in common with the music-buying public. They might require a “high-concept” to entice them into buying a book, but there is no need for it to be well executed. All that’s needed, evidently, is a photo of a young, relatively photogenic author on the back and a bio testifying to his or her elite status.

The problem with all of this is that while these kinds of tactics can sell a lot of a certain book in the short run, the longterm effects on the publishing industry will be disastrous. Wonderful books are being rejected largely because their writers don’t fit the required image, while the weak, the graceless, the mediocre are being enthusiastically snapped up and rushed into print on the strength of their authors’ platforms.

All too many of these authors are one-book wonders. Either their second book is too hopelessly awful to be saved even by the massive editing that made the first book publishable (as is rumored to have been the case with the second book penned by the authors of The Nanny Diaries), or the book makes it into print only to be shunned by you-won’t-fool-me-again readers.

I remember a former editor telling me about her trials and tribulations with a certain young rockstar’s “novel.” The project went through two ghostwriters, then hit a snag when the rockstar refused to sit still long enough to listen to the book being read to him (he couldn’t read it himself because he was functionally illiterate). The publishers reasoned that the rockstar had to at least have heard the book in order to be able to promote it, so the whole deal fell apart. But the rockstar kept his huge advance.

It occurs to me that if celebrities can hire ghostwriters to write their books, then an overweight, over-the-hill writer from an ordinary background ought to be able to hire a celebrity—or a young, attractive graduate of an elite school—to be his or her public face. At least then we’d all be getting better books.