Consider the writer, sitting alone and creating a book that mediates between herself and the larger world. When she finishes her work, she possesses only an insensate pile of pulpwood and ink that doesn’t naturally call attention to itself, not like a bright canvas on a wall, or a dancer leaping across a stage, or the sounds of a guitar floating note by note through the doors of a club. Still, that lump of paper needs to attract attention, it needs its readers, it needs to make its point. Yes, yes, art for art’s sake, but the art of writing, like all other arts, involves its eventual consumption. Yet the written thing is not itself a spectacle to attract those who would consume it. It doesn’t announce itself. It cannot announce itself without help.

It is upon that slippery rock that we have built a maddening business called publishing, a business of drummers and barkers and exhibitionists. What would we do without them?

Without them we’d have less to complain about, that’s certain. We’d have no need of André Schiffrin’s The Business of Books, or Jason Epstein’s Book Business, or any one of a hundred different indictments of the commercialization of American publishing that have come down to us since the middle of the last century. There would be no commercialization. There would be no Peter Olson, Bertelsmann’s man in New York City, who strides through booksellers’ conventions like a viceroy, lops off the heads of offending editors, and demands his 12 percent tribute. There would be no more complaints about the Olsons of the world, no more gauzy invocations of the way it used to be, no more hand-wringing. We could all write our books unencumbered by the barbarians tending the gates; we could make our art and afterward stare at our finished manuscripts with great satisfaction. We could stare and stare and stare forever!

Ridiculous. Let’s acknowledge that the drummers and barkers and exhibitionists and Olsons are necessary, even if they’re not like us. Let’s also acknowledge that the Schiffrins and the Epsteins of our world have only described a small part of American publishing, that the recurring story of publishing’s commercialization is a story of limited utility to the writer, and that the whole mess is only important if you’ve already accepted someone else’s definition of what it means to be a successful writer. The fulminating and wailing about the state of the publishing industry has given rise to the notion, ever growing, that there are no more good editors or publishers, and that’s just not the case. Such outrage has bred a cynicism that I’ve seen taken to extremes by writers who, succumbing to their suspicions about publishing, give up on writing entirely. “What’s the point?” they say.

Why do you care what happens at Random House or Simon & Schuster? What does it matter? That sounds coy, of course. There are plenty of reasons why a writer would care. The big five publishers (Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Time Warner, HarperCollins) comprise most of the oldest names in American publishing. Among the many thousands of books they publish every year, you can find the works of our finest writers. These companies are very picky about what they publish, at least when it comes to publishing books that aren’t obvious best-sellers, and so having their imprimatur on the spine of your book is a relatively rare honor. Being published by one of those houses confers a certain prestige, or at least a ratification of your identity as a writer, an identity you probably question in your dark moments. Being published by one of the big five publishers confers more prestige, certainly, than being published by your uncle with the old linotype out in the barn. This prestige has currency among other writers and it also has a little currency in the wider world; you know that when you meet someone at a cocktail party and tell them that your book is being published by one of the big five, they’ll recognize the name and have the vague sense they should be impressed. The big five also have a lot of money.

This is the way we think. We are a status-oriented people living in a country fast transforming itself into an omni-entertainment state, in which brand identity sometimes seems our last, best hope for stability. We may say we wouldn’t mind being published by Steerforth Press or Akashic Books, but secretly we crave a few moments of fame under the auspices of Rupert Murdoch. It’s not a dirty thing to admit; it’s just a fact.

But if the point of all this is to take your manuscript, composed alone in your room for an audience of strangers, and to find those strangers who would appreciate it, does it really matter who does the finding? Is there really any difference between Graywolf’s selling 5,000 copies of your book and Random House’s selling 5,000 copies? You might say, “Random House would never sell so few copies of a book!” But you’d be wrong. Here’s the real difference: Graywolf would be more likely to judge that a success, while Random House might be more likely to judge it a failure—or, if not exactly a failure, certainly not anything that would cause the company to get excited about publishing your second novel. At Graywolf, a 5,000-copy sale might be cause for celebration, a good start for a new author on its list. Which experience would you prefer?

I don’t mean to say that being published by one of the big five publishers is an endeavor doomed to fail. Sometimes the experience vastly exceeds an author's expectations, and when that happens it's a wonderful thing to watch—the publicity and marketing machine gets cranked up in support of your book, the morning news shows scramble to get you into their greenrooms, the publisher orders staggeringly large printings and instructs sales reps to push your book, you see your face on the cover of magazines, and you make enough money to support your family and continue writing. What could be better than that?

This is not the outcome you can expect, though, and therefore it can’t (or shouldn’t) be the standard by which you judge yourself a success or a failure. What should that standard be? Is it André Schiffrin’s standard or Jason Epstein’s? No, in each case. The books that snipe at the business of publishing (that bloated, massive, slow-moving target) claim to have the best interests of our literature in mind, but they’re still books about publishing, love letters to dearly departed publishers; they’re only indirectly about literature, about writing. The bill of particulars they post against the industry is about business principles—principles that are not relevant to your task as a writer. Let Schiffrin and Epstein fight that fight. Your expectations as a writer are not necessarily congruent with theirs as publishers.

I want to argue for lowered expectations. This is not the American way, and it would be a more awkward proposal if not for the fact that I’ve been close to too many writers undone by the gulf between what they expected would happen once they finally were published, and what did happen. I’m not talking about the little disappointments: The book tour wasn’t extensive enough, they didn’t push hard enough to get it on Terry Gross's show, they didn’t buy full-page ads in the New Yorker, the L.A. Times reviewer could not possibly have read the book, no one nominated the book for the National Book Award, and so on. I’m talking about the big, soul-shattering disappointment that comes from expecting that being published will change life radically. I’m talking about the hopes for a free life, for a life that will be remembered even after death; about pouring into the leaky vessel of a publishing contract dreams of transcendence and happiness. Those are the dreams that are dashed with alarming regularity. One of the horrors of being a book editor is witnessing this, and having to become inured to it in order to do the job properly. Publishing your book will not change your life, and it's not a good idea to hand over so much of yourself to a publishing house, each and every one of which is a menagerie of the insecure, the grandiose, the brilliant, and the dull.

A few years ago, British novelist and essayist Julian Barnes was asked during an interview with Robert Birnbaum about the novelist Stephen Dixon, author of Frog and Interstate, revered books among a small cadre of readers but mainly missed by the rest of the world. This is what he said:

I think there are similar cases in all literary cultures. On the whole, in the novel, it’s a sort of slow curve. In poetry there are only three places on the podium in Britain and those three poets make a living. All the others are just scrabbling around. In the theater, the curve goes up very sharply, because you make vast amounts of money if you have anything running for a few months anywhere. But, if you are on the fringe, you don’t make anything. But the curve in the novel, on the whole, goes up more slowly. On the whole you make a bit more as you go on, and on the whole the gradations of fame are not so violent. There are always cases of honorable writers who have to do another job to make a living. That’s always been the norm. I think we’re slightly spoiled. And I think American writers [on the whole] are the most spoiled of all. The difference between an American writer and a British writer—I can’t remember who said this—is that when an American writer publishes a novel and wins a prize or something like that, has a success, he or she buys a Volvo—an English writer buys a typewriter.

When Carol Shields died this past summer, a number of radio programs and magazines reran interviews they’d conducted with her after The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer Prize. I revisited those interviews and thought that she seemed wise in every sense of that word.

She often told the story of looking up the other authors who had won the Pulitzer Prize over the years and noticing that she didn’t recognize the names of half of them, and how this helped her to understand how unlikely it was that she would be remembered for her books after her death. It was a humbling realization, she said. (I can think of only one more humbling thing, and that is the fact that most of us won’t be recognized for our work while we’re still alive.)

Carol Shields may have been an exception, but it appears that she didn’t write with the idea that her books would somehow exempt her from the anonymity that is our birthright, yet she seemed to enjoy her writing life anyway. Her publishing success came late in life, and perhaps that’s why she seemed to have it all balanced.

Having it all balanced, though, doesn’t mean working without ambition, even ambition to publish. The completion of the art is in the publishing, with or without the Volvo.

If you write something that only you could write, and you write it well, I believe your work will be found. I came out of my experience in publishing believing in that even more than I believed in it when I began. I witnessed or experienced many of the awful, crass aspects of publishing, and yet I also remember those sweet moments when everything came together for someone deserving, one of those people who had worked for an unfathomable amount of time by themselves on a book they would not compromise, that they would rather have destroyed in the burn barrel than turn into a pack of marketable lies. They were those rare people who, somewhere along the way, found a reason to write that didn’t depend on the goodwill of editors and publishers and critics, who were not much stirred by rejection. Under those conditions—when a mind, an intelligence, a will, is let loose to do what it wants—the most impressive things emerge, fantastic creations of people dreaming worlds to sustain them in their isolation. It’s the originality, maybe even more than the craft, that makes those books stand out. Working on your craft is important, but working on your mind—teasing out that thing you have to say, which was previously unutterable—is even more important. Most people can’t do that when their minds are clouded by concerns about the publishing world, about the latest theories of the Bertelsmann/Viacom/NewsCorp apparatchiks, about the marketplace, about who their agent should be.

I no longer have any interest in the rise and fall of agents, nor in the migration of editors up and down Broadway. Both subjects bore me, although agents and editors themselves are often remarkably smart and interesting people, the kind of people you wish would smile more often, or take up a hobby, or move to the country for a while.

It’s marketing that really bores me, particularly the marketing of books, and especially talking about marketing books. Conversations about why books succeed or fail invariably stray to the ontological, and are as useful and concrete as debates about God’s creation of the termite and why he made it crave wood. If publishers knew why people bought certain books and not others, there would be no warehouses filled with millions of unsold books. In the publishing world, “marketing” is another name for “gambling.” “That horse looks fast and has a pretty name—let’s put our money on him!” Publishers are in the business of selling things that, by and large, people don't know that they want. People don't need your first novel like they need a new set of tires on their car, or a telephone that works. The book offers no certainty about who might buy it, and how many of those people are out there.

This does not stop publishers from trying to achieve a sort of certainty, so they look at books that have done well and they try to spot trends. They don’t look down their noses at a book that’s imitative of a best-seller already published—they embrace it, thinking they can make the sales history of the first book stand in for the (nonexistent) sales history of the second. This is why publishers inundated booksellers with disaster-at-sea narratives after The Perfect Storm came out, culminating in the rather distasteful circling of the vultures that attended the fatal ending of the 1998 Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race, the subject of at least three forgettable books and only one good one. Publishers are constantly going on about their latest book "in the tradition of" something else, "tradition" being a malleable word denoting anything that hasn’t been forgotten after a few months. Chasing trends is a loser’s game, as each subsequent book falls somewhere on the downside of a curve whose apex was marked by the appearance of the first book, which created the so-called market by being original and surprising and popular, and whose nadir is marked by books like the Sydney-to-Hobart accounts, after which the "market" is proclaimed saturated and dead. Rarely does anyone pause to wonder if that "market" ever really existed, if the original book was not sui generis, and if it belonged only to that larger group of books which are simply good.

I write this knowing that the publishing industry is full of people who love books, love reading, love writing. Many are writers in disguise, and are at their happiest when they’re among the kinds of strange, mysterious people they idolized as bookish children—the novelists, the poets, the essayists. Yes, they’re prone to chase trends and to throw a lot of money at obvious and unnecessary books, but that’s how they keep their jobs. Many of those same people, toiling away in one of a succession of windowless rooms, are dying to discover something great, the book that will save them, the book that will make them feel they’re doing something useful. This does not mean that, once they find that book, they’ll be able to make a success out of it. Often publishing such a book means pleading and crying with the money people, and later suffering the sarcastic comments about their precious little literary book while the balance sheets are waved in their faces. Nevertheless, it's worth it every once in a while.

I am buoyed by knowing that there are people throughout the industry looking for that one great book. They may be harassed for and bloodied by the effort, but they’re still there, hiding out in unexpected corners with their piles of manuscripts, just as they’ve always done. And anyway, when exactly was that golden age in which publishing the great books was easy and instantly profitable? I’m not aware of it. The good editors have always been harassed and bloodied.

If you put the writing first, and you have something new to say, your work will be found. I’ve seen it happen everywhere, at all levels of publishing. I believe this so completely that I gave up being an editor in order to write again. I am amused by the industry, and often I get ticked off when I see the kinds of books that are piled up at the front of bookstores, until I remember that those piles don’t mean anything of importance to me. I believe in the publishing industry still, enough to take my crack at it from the other side.

Getting published won’t change my life. Maybe I’ll publish a book, maybe I won’t. Maybe you’ll publish your book, and maybe you won’t. Let’s hope you do, and when you do, I’ll wager this: Somewhere between Little Rock and Newtonville you’ll get tired of your book tour, and eventually the money will run out, and after a few years you'll forget all the readings and all the interviews and all the reviews. But you will remember the day you finally figured out how to open that chapter you wrestled with for half a year, that time when the words just came, and you’ll remember what time it was and how high the sun was in the window and how the floor was cold on your bare feet. You'll one day realize that you miss writing that book, and that you'll never get to write it again.

Those will be your memories of writing and publishing your book, or at least the best ones.

Duncan Murrell was an editor at Algonquin Books for five years. He lives in North Carolina, where he works as a freelance editor and journalist.