Slow Business

With information available at lightning speed all around the world, publishing remains a very slow business.  One of the few jobs unavailable to computers or robots, the editor is a reading machine.  The editor is also a bottleneck.

In many presses, once an editor accepts a book for publication, it will still need to go through the production process.  Even in this age of high technology, errors are waiting to creep in at every stage of transference, making proofreading necessary and slowing the process down.

It is a lot less expensive to catch an error at the stage of a proof than it is after hundreds, or thousands of copies have been printed.  Even after the long wait for approval, it is an even longer wait until a book appears.

Waiting is on my mind as I have my once accepted, frequently rejected novel under consideration with about six independent presses at the moment.  I used to be a believer in single submission only.  Life is too short for that, I’ve come to realize.

I began writing early in life, but only started trying to publish late in the process.  I sometimes wonder if I will survive long enough even to see this one published.  I once had a non-fiction book with a publisher for two years before a decision was made not to publish it.  It only appeared a decade later.

And it is not only book publishers who take their time.  Even electronic journals can take a year before getting back to you. If you’re like me, that means that the response was a sometimes barely polite “no thank you.”

Perhaps in these circumstances it is best not to write early novels about issues of contemporary interest.  By the time you get a publisher your novel could be decidedly out of date.