No humor essays by guys: what are other Publishing industry rules?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Another threadmentioned that

I’m not trying to publish a book (yet), but it worries me that every person who seems to try gets some kind of response like that. What are the other rules that the publishing industry has? I would guess things like prenatal care books should be written only by medical professionals (or maybe a mother who has been through it), since it would be weird if just some single person wrote about it, but other than stuff like that, what about other rules that you wouldn’t know about?

For one thing, I have no idea why there is no market for male written humor essays. (I remember buying one by Jerry Seinfeld, though he was already famous). I also don’t get the implication that you can’t get published unless you’re famous, but you can’t get famous unless you . . .

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Davis Sedaris is a very well-regarded (and very funny) male essayist.

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Selling the first screenplay is the hardest, according to a friend of mine who’s been trying to get in the biz for a while. She also has had a couple greeting-card companies which never really cleared the trees at the end of the runway, and once told me about an idea she had for a series of children’s books which a publisher told her were brilliant, but would never sell, so nobody would ever publish them.

Regarding humor, very few people will buy a humor book by somebody they’ve never heard of, because they don’t know whether or not he’s funny, and that’s critical. Detective novels or science fiction/fantasy or political commentary can be written by relative unknowns, but comedy is hard, any way you look at it.

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He is, however, famous.

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If you are querying a non-fiction book, it really, really really helps if you have a well-read blog or some other significant online presence.

If you’re not already a famous person, your agent/publisher will be comforted by the notion that you have an existing platform with which to market your book, since they make money every time you sell it.

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My guess would be too much competition from all the free humour online.

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Honestly, if online reading isn’t going to kill the printed book industry, at least it’s going to drag it off into the bushes and tear its legs off.

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One thing I’ve noticed with memoirs/autobiographies is if the title references a female relative (mother, sister) the author, also, is always a woman. Don’t know why that is.

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Women who want to write for a market that isn’t exclusively female have to hide their gender. Witness JK Rowling.

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Ummm. Lois McMaster Bujold is not exactly a name reeking of masculinity; she certainly has plenty of male fans.

The whole hiding-your-gender thing for female writers was long dead I thought.

EDIT: Ah, it seems to be a fiction-aimed-at-young-boys thing with Rowling.

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Has no one here heard of Dave Barry, or does the column format not qualify as an essay?

Or is he just not considered funny? I haven’t thought so since I was about 13, but enough people seem to like him to keep the guy working.

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OK, first off, there are no ‘rules’ in publishing, except that you need to enclose an SASE with any print submission. Saying there’s currently no market for something doesn’t mean that’s a rule. ‘Rule’ implies that it’s dictated by the publishing industry. The ‘no humour by unknowns’ thing is the exact opposite: it’s dictated by the market.

Most things in publishing are. Their whole raison d’etre is to sell books, not to come up with byzantine rules to keep poor aspiring authors unpublished so that agents and publishers can point and laugh.

There’s no market for books of humour essays by unknowns because when was the last time you went into a bookshop and picked up a book of humour essays by someone you’d never heard of? Humour is so personal and subjective that people tend to rely on known quantities.

The idea that you can’t get published unless you’re famous is absolute bollix peddled by vanity presses. If any supposed publisher or agent ever tells you that, put your hand on your wallet and back away.

However. In non-fiction, it’s easier to get published if you’ve got platform. This isn’t the same as fame. It could be fame, sure: if you’re a movie star, your autobiography will be an easier sell than Joe Nobody’s. Or it could be qualifications: if you just built a Formula One racecar out of tin cans and won a huge race, your Build Your Own Car book has a better shot. Or it could be an audience, offline (you’re the expert who gets asked to speak at every single Star Trek convention on some specific aspect of the Star Trek universe) or online (your blog on cooking without dairy has four bazillion hits daily).

In fiction, platform makes basically no difference at all. If your book is good enough, and it’s in a genre that’s currently marketable (serial killer crime, for example, went through a huge boom in the 90s with Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman and people like that, but it’s fallen off an awful lot since then, so a new serial-killer writer would have to be really, really good), then it’ll find a home.

The main reason why books don’t get published isn’t that the publishing industry hates unknowns. Agents and publishers love unknowns: it’s a lot easier to turn a first-timer into a huge bestseller than to do it for a mid-lister whose last four books sold maybe 20,000 copies each. The main reason books don’t get published is, overwhelmingly, because they’re not good enough.

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Barry is also famous, though.

Sedaris, however, was not very well known before his books were published. He was popular with a certain crowd, but the books cemented his career. A.J. Jacobs is another humorist who was (more or less) nobody until his book was a hit.

14

There’s a similar rule in most industries. It’s called we don’t make things that nobody will buy.

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There’s several I can think of, but I believe most started out as journalists, moved into columnists and then jumped to books from there - Barry (my all time favorite) and Lewis Grizzard are two I can think of.

Does Robert Fulghum count as a humorist?

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I was just coming in to say pretty much everything eclectic wench just said. Spot on.

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Another male humorist I was going to mention is Patrick MacManus. However, he, like a number of these suggestions, is someone whose books are basically collections of material originally published in magazines. Magazines, for the young ones, were things like books that people used to buy.

18

I had a guide to literary agents a few years ago, and almost every agent or agency had clause that said something like “No sci-fi, romance, or Westerns.” Those books get represented and published somehow, but apparently nobody wants to do it.

David Rakoff was another. There might be particular types of comedic essays that are mostly written by women - I can only imagine how many Nora Ephron wrote and how many were written in her style - but this can’t be true as a general rule.

Yes, that’s a different thing. A column is going to be much shorter, which means you would probably see fewer digressions and things, and it might be tied more closely to something in the news. For that matter you might see more complex topics addressed in an essay instead of a column.

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Maybe the rule is “if you’re a guy, change your name to David”.

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Why not Sci-Fi & Romance? I thought those were the big sellers.