What the publishers aren’t telling you

Interesting article by Russell Smith in today’s Globe & Mail about a new, sooper-seekrit publishing meme: “big”.

I heard it the most, as I am guessing most authors do, in the course of receiving rejections for a book. From publishers in Canada, the United States and Britain, I heard great compliments – it’s clever, it’s funny, you’re, you know, nice and all that – but we’re looking for a somewhat bigger book.

It, of course, first occurred to me that they meant longer, or maybe just heavier. Couldn’t they fix that with a thicker binding? But no, I was dimly aware that it must be code for something. So I asked around. One editor couldn’t really answer, as if it were a trade secret, what big means, and if you don’t know what it is then you don’t got it. Even my agent wasn’t quite clear on it. She hinted that it was just something you knew when you saw it.

It started to feel like a Da Vinci Code sort of thing – a conspiracy. Everyone in publishing is looking for big and everyone knows what big means except the authors.

Smith goes on to attempt decryption of the “big” conspiracy. It’s something for me to keep in mind, though I can’t speak to it as I haven’t pitched yet. But are publishers looking for trendy over lasting?

What counts as a big issue, I am guessing, is a trendy one, an issue of the moment. A black man who wants to become president, sex abuse in the Vatican, environmental disaster, Internet life. Or some kind of unlikely combination: black president and vampires; environment and Vatican; Facebook and global killer disease. Those would be big. (Black pope would be brilliant. You can’t have that one; it’s mine.) And, of course, it goes without saying, the Holocaust is still and always big – indeed, recently writers can be forgiven for wondering if there is any point to writing about anything else. (You can imagine the clever inventions going around our bars about how brilliant it would be to do some kind of “green” Holocaust novel.)

For any of my readers out there who have pitched, is this concept something you’ve heard of? This mysterious “big”? Let me know, or go leave a comment on Smith’s article.