T. S. Eliot spends six months not getting the manuscript of The Waste Land typed, even though publishers are literally begging for it (even though none of them have read it yet! Because it's still in manuscript! WHAT IF IT WAS TERRIBLE, YOU GUYS?)
LOL. It's like fandom and WIPs. Sort of.
I know why history theses need to have an angle or a hook, but often they cause so much trouble, because really, no, everything didn't change with this one thing, and it can be so annoying when the book is otherwise interesting, but the author is pushing this unconvincing thesis argument, because otherwise it's just, like, biography. (I see nothing wrong in biography; this was a lot of my problem in why I remained a fairly middle of the road history student at uni. Why was I required to have a provocative opinion and prove it? I had no such opinions, except once, and it was the wrong one.)
Actually I get this feeling about a lot of publishers of yesteryear: they're often heroically patient with their authors,
I think there were a lot of smaller printers/publishers; therefore your author was someone you had a close relationship with (you might even sometimes be their editor, and they wouldn't have had an agent). Although, even today, especially once an author is v famous and has been with a publishing house for a while, you still get that, with editors (who, of course, are not the top executives, who are the ones who are less likely to be patient).
Barry Cunningham of Bloomsbury famously took Harry Potter, after it had been rejected by just about everyone else - and Bloomsbury was not a big publishing house - and J. K. Rowling met him and said, actually it's a seven book series, and he was Somewhat Perturbed, as one might be. But then she told him the ending. (He told my library conference this, so this is actually not something I read somewhere! It's true! Unless he was lying. And, actually, he told us this somewhere around Book 4 or 5, so he was lucky he didn't get dragged off somewhere to get the secret out of him.)
And GRR Martin's publishers, and Jean Auel's, and Susanna Clarke's. (Are the publishers of brick like fantasy works more saintly than others?)
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Date: 2017-05-28 07:50 am (UTC)LOL. It's like fandom and WIPs. Sort of.
I know why history theses need to have an angle or a hook, but often they cause so much trouble, because really, no, everything didn't change with this one thing, and it can be so annoying when the book is otherwise interesting, but the author is pushing this unconvincing thesis argument, because otherwise it's just, like, biography. (I see nothing wrong in biography; this was a lot of my problem in why I remained a fairly middle of the road history student at uni. Why was I required to have a provocative opinion and prove it? I had no such opinions, except once, and it was the wrong one.)
Actually I get this feeling about a lot of publishers of yesteryear: they're often heroically patient with their authors,
I think there were a lot of smaller printers/publishers; therefore your author was someone you had a close relationship with (you might even sometimes be their editor, and they wouldn't have had an agent). Although, even today, especially once an author is v famous and has been with a publishing house for a while, you still get that, with editors (who, of course, are not the top executives, who are the ones who are less likely to be patient).
Barry Cunningham of Bloomsbury famously took Harry Potter, after it had been rejected by just about everyone else - and Bloomsbury was not a big publishing house - and J. K. Rowling met him and said, actually it's a seven book series, and he was Somewhat Perturbed, as one might be. But then she told him the ending. (He told my library conference this, so this is actually not something I read somewhere! It's true! Unless he was lying. And, actually, he told us this somewhere around Book 4 or 5, so he was lucky he didn't get dragged off somewhere to get the secret out of him.)
And GRR Martin's publishers, and Jean Auel's, and Susanna Clarke's. (Are the publishers of brick like fantasy works more saintly than others?)
(Sorry. /waffle.)