(6) Why didn't the publishing industry want The Birdcatcher?
Well, the answer to that depends on who you ask. Publishers would
probably tell you that it was an inferior book, not worthy of their
attention. After all, it's not the kind of book they're used to.
Still, you might have expected some interest. After all, following the
advice of fiction gurus, I placed my protagonist Christopher Stone in
the milieu I knew best, the strange and misunderstood world of
personal injury claims. There are about 100,000 insurance adjusters in
North America, plus at least a million insurance claimants with long
term injuries who have been involved in a long term legal slugging
match with an insurance company. Add the people like Christopher
Stone in The Birdcatcher who are solitary by nature (approximately
75,000,000 North Americans are introverts) and you can see why the
book might have a market.
But the publishing industry knew better. They seem to believe that the
lives of shy people and the world of personal injury claims are vastly
uninteresting subjects. No publisher wanted to see the book, and no
agent was interested in representing its author.
I wasn't surprised by their rejection. I'd already experienced thirty years
of rejection by the magazine industry. About 20 short stories written
between 1970 and 1995 - each submitted 20-30 times – were rejected
by science fiction, literary and mainstream magazines. Even the 'little
magazines', supposedly easy to sell to since they offer no significant
payment beyond the reward of being published, wanted none of those
stories.
But there is a shorter answer to this question.
The ducks refused to publish the ugly duckling. That's all that
happened. The ugly duckling found out that he was a swan and wrote
a book about it. Why would the ducks want to publish that? So he
published it himself.
Alan Conrad