Letter from the Editors:
Writing > Publishing: The Agony and the Ecstasy
Christopher Bernard
Congratulations are due Caveat Lector’s co-editor Ho Lin, whose award-winning short-story collection China Girl was published last fall as a Caveat Lector Book by Regent Press. The reviews have been excellent, the reception more than encouraging (the book won the 2017/2018 Reader Views Second Prize for Graphic Novels/Short Stories and 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards’ Silver Award for Multicultural Fiction).
More importantly, the stories themselves (many of which first appeared in C.L.) are stimulating, original, often genuinely inspired, the work of a first-rate literary craftsman. I state that even though I am, naturally, biased in favor of a colleague—though that bias is likely to make me more critical rather than less. Notwithstanding, I can’t encourage our readers too much to grab a first edition, and curl up with these literary gems. A link to Regent Press’s web page dedicated to the beautifully designed and produced volume can be found at the bottom of this Letter.
In related news, my dear old writer friend Ernest Bigwich told me he had recently received a royalty check from his own publisher, for sales of his books last year.
“Of course I knew immediately what it was,” he said. “The envelope was as thin as tissue and weighed less than a dried rose petal. What else could it be but a check?
“Unless it was a summons to appear in court.
“But after all, I hadn’t broken that many terms of our contract—and so I opened the envelope impatiently. ‘Ripped it open like a gutted fish’ would not be overstating it!
“Most people have difficulty understanding the mixture of hope and dread, intoxicating optimism and suicidal despair, that accompanies a writer’s communications with his publisher, especially when the delicate issue of royalties is involved.
“No doubt most people think that, once you’ve written, marketed, and published your masterpiece for the world to dote on, your worries are over forever.
“Laudatory reviews will descend like hosannas from heaven. The books will fly off the shelves, orders flock like angels of mercy between Amazon and Ingram and your local bookstore and your publisher. Fans will hound you, groupies will seduce you. Your every whim will be realized quicker than an Amazon drone or an Uber pickup. Publishers will worshipfully kneel by your door awaiting the next manuscript that will make all of you richer than God or Jeff Bezos. And you will be nestled in the comfortable down of royalties for the rest of your awesome life.
“Alas.”
He sighed.
“The royalty check I now held in my hand was, I have to admit, a good deal more encouraging than the one that I had received before it.
“There was a dramatic rise of 262% compared to my last check. That check I had received three years, eight months and two days earlier (a writer keeps close track of these things).
“That year saw the sale of one book.
“Last year”—his look brightened—“saw sales of three paperback copies and one e-book (and all different titles)!
“At this rate,” he continued gaily, “I will have achieved the minimum sales figure for a Best Seller by the year 47,218 CE!” His face fell. “Assuming a linear progression, which, of course, is never to be depended upon, trends being notoriously fickle.
“For example,”—again his look brightened—“sales could explode, rising exponentially, because of some burp in the zeitgeist, creating a Best Seller in a mere century, making my urn of ashes in the local columbarium a natural object of pilgrimage for pimply adolescents, starry-eyed wannabe poets and suburban book clubs.
“Or”—here his face fell again—“sales may have peaked, and the years ahead see only a steady but inexorable decline, and finally a collapse of the market for my scribbles until, in a decade or eight, that market could be said to have entirely ceased to exist.
“Or”—he shrugged philosophically—“there might be cycles of boom and bust in the market for Ernest Bigwich, such as in the stock and bond markets, that go on more or less indefinitely or for as long as there is a market for literary products of any kind.
“So”—he brightened again—“there is no need for pessimism, however dire the current picture may be. In the immortal words of Scarlett O’Hara: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ One’s luck must change—one’s luck will change! Though whether from bad to good, or from good to bad, or from bad to horrendous, and for how long, no one can ever know.
“One’s luck in future might be so terrible that the bad luck one has bemoaned all one’s life may look, in retrospect, like paradise, the way my childhood does (I had a very happy childhood) as I look back on it from the perspective of decades of a more or less unsatisfactory adulthood, certainly not the one I fantasized about as a boy before I learned to eat the daily bread of disappointment and disillusion.
“After all (I tell myself), you always claimed that you wrote for just one person, even though you had no idea who that person was.
“And here is proof you were right!”
He stared off into the distance, having left me far behind.
“The single person you spent your whole life writing for, the reader who has needed your words as a person needs food, air, water, friendship, love, the sun, the stars, and an escape, however temporary, from this palace and prison of a universe and the parade of delusions—romance, wealth, power, fame, beauty—that sometimes seems to make up all of human reality, was you, Ernest Bigwich.
“That was the person you were writing for, as you scratched and scrawled and scribbled away, and dreamed. That was the person whose soul you were trying, with all your cunning, skill and power, to save.
“And who knows?” He looked at me slyly, and then whispered: “Maybe I have.
“All the rest may as well burn: all those papers all those flames . . .
“I can see it now. A big bonfire of the scribblings of Bigwich, climbing the sky, like Jack climbing his beanstalk—higher and higher and higher, into the impenetrable night.”
His face glowed with a crazy grin.
“Ah yes, what a lovely fire it will be!
Its light will fill the darkness cunningly.
Its roar.in wind and night and doubt
will rub indifferent silence out.
Oh, what a lovely fire it will be!”
For the rest of us, there is a rather more encouraging example in China Girl: http://www.regentpress.net/china-girl.html.
PS: Our Wunderkabinett this season includes the New York Times obituary for my colleague, literary supporter, and mentor, in that he was a profoundly important influence on my own writing: the Spanish novelist and essayist Juan Goytisolo, who died last year at the age of 86. Almost exactly a year ago, I sent him a copy of the manuscript of my latest novel, with my dedication to him in thanks for his example of uncompromising intellectual and literary integrity, to say nothing of his enthusiastic and generous personal support, especially for my first novel, A Spy in the Ruins. He received the manuscript not belong before suffering the stroke from which he later died. I have therefore dedicated the novel to his memory. The novel is titled Spectres and will be published later this year by Regent Press.
Christopher Bernard is the co-editor of Caveat Lector. His novel Voyage to a Phantom City appeared last year. His newest book—the poetry collection Chien Lunatique—is available on Amazon.
Image: Sean Miner, from cover of "China Girl"