Is This Any Way to Run a Culture?

From my weekly column for The Desert Advocate (the whole thing can be found at www.thedesertadvocate.com):

The director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England, reprinted thinly disguised versions of Austen’s novels, including the perennial Pride and Prejudice, and submitted them to 18 different UK book publishers. The result: 18 rejections. Writing in London newspaper The Independent, publisher Andrew Franklin frankly stated the reason. Was it the changing taste of the reading public? Nope. “Publishers turn down masterpieces every day,” Franklin admitted. Why? Because there are just too many submissions for readers at the various publishing houses to deal with. Some 200,000 books are published every year, Franklin stated, and for every one of those, “20 to 30 others” are rejected.

“It’s a numbers game,” he concluded.

“No one can be surprised to learn that not every manuscript gets the careful attention it deserves. It should not come as a shock that many manuscripts are returned unread to the sender. We need to clear our desks in order to look after the authors whom we do sign up, and the unsolicited manuscripts are often a chore to be dealt with at the end of the day by an overworked intern.”

In other words, getting published is largely a matter of luck.

I can attest that, in the much smaller world of symphonic composition, a very similar phenomenon holds sway. If you were to list the most performed living composers, you would be shocked – as I was, when a friend in this dubious “business” informed me – that more than half of them are supported by seven‑figure trust funds. To be a composer takes such an enormous amount of time for such little financial reward, that to be successful at it heavily favors the wealthy. After all, they can spend all their time soliciting publishers and performers, and if they fail, what’s the difference? They don’t have to go back to their day jobs. They don’t have any!

In other words, the new books and the new classical compositions that reach your eyes and ears have at least as much to do with the sheer good fortune of being born to wealth and/or the dumb luck of having your manuscript one of the few that actually gets read.

I ask you: Is this any way to run a culture? If practicing medicine was a profession available only to those born rich or those whose applications just happened to be picked up from among the thousands otherwise discarded unread, wouldn’t medicine suffer? How can we care so little for culture as to leave it to anyone but the most talented, whatever their bank account or luck quotient?

- Kenneth LaFave