The end of publishing, again...

...or, rather, the "publishing industry," which, broadly understood, is to publishing as Diebold is to democracy. This article in the latest issue of New York lays it all out for us once again, describing the way that commercial publishers have succumbed to the blockbuster model, wherein the whole farm is bet on some piece of crap or another which has to sell a million copies to have been worth it. The article is rather long, and contains lots of keening and hand-wringing from people who could have started taking a stand on principle ten years ago but didn't bother.

I dunno. This is an entertaining read, but it's sort of like attending the memorial service for a dead fashion-model girlfriend you stopped mourning years before, after which you went and happily married a normal woman. 99% of us fiction writers are resigned, at this point, to never getting to make a living off our work again, if we ever did before. The issue now is not the dying cries of the few who chose to remain on the Titanic, it's the beard-scratching all of us in the lifeboats have been doing. But New York is never going to run a piece on obscure publishers and their short-run literary releases.

I threw in the towel two years ago, when I started begging my then-agent to send my stuff to small publishers. It took a split with said agent to actually make this happen, and this time around I didn't even bother with the commercial houses. Why put oneself through the agony? I can't count the number of times an editor at some big house has reacted to my work with enthusiasm and optimism, only to be shot down by her betters. At those publishers, that's what it means to be an editor of literary fiction. From the New York piece:

Morale among many editorial staffers is dipping to all-time lows. Forget literary taste; everything is cost-benefit analysis. “What I’ve heard from editors is, ‘My judgment doesn’t count any longer,’ ” says Kent Carroll, who left his company, Carroll & Graf, after it was sold to a mini-conglomerate, and who now runs the boutique Europa Editions. “There used to be a reason to get into publishing,” says Carroll. “Whether they know it or not, they all want to be Maxwell Perkins. It’s a kind of secondary immortality. They didn’t flock to publishing because they want to publish Danielle Steel.”

My next novel will be published by a small, independent, non-New-York-based house next spring. And while they would like to generate bestsellers as much as the next guy, they have given me none of the withering pre-guilt I've gotten from almost every commercial house I've ever worked with. You novelists know what I'm talking about. The tone changes a few months before your book comes out--their confidence decays into hope, and then nervous ticcing, as they realize you're going to be another flop. In the weeks leading up to publication everybody seems to be on vacation, and a month afterward you can't even get the assistants on the phone.

It's hard to imagine that anything I will ever do in my life could support anyone's Manhattan apartment rent. Honestly, it was ridiculous to have ever thought this. But that was the roaring aughts for you. As for New York, can we please have a piece on happy, well-adjusted literary editors with reasonable expectations, and their plans for making a modest living doing what they love? Personally, I am tired of being asked to feel bad because Binky Urban is anxious.

The Writer As Chattel

Oh, my. This one is making the rounds of the blogs today, and I can't resist throwing it onto ours as well. I saw it on Boing Boing. It would seem that, according to Sian Pattenden's blog in The Guardian, Random House has decided to insert the following clause into its boilerplate contract for children's authors:

If you act or behave in a way which damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, and consequently the market for or value of the work is seriously diminished, and we may (at our option) take any of the following actions: Delay publication / Renegotiate advance / Terminate the agreement.

Pattenden doesn't seem to think this particular offense will take hold: "Random House," she writes, "will suddenly realise that it's not very good PR and cease this rot immediately."

But you know how this kind of thing works--somebody floats it, it gets shot down, and then at some point in the future it gets floated again, by somebody else, in a slightly diluted form, and it seems kind of familiar, and not such a big deal anymore. And in a few years we're all eating it for breakfast.

Personally, I see this is more evidence that the major publishers have gone the way of the record giants, falling over themselves to be the first to become completely irrelevant; and before long all the decent books will be published by smarter, weirder, smaller, and more interesting presses who regard actual talent as their strongest asset. But what do I know--I'm just a guy on the internet.

Making Publishing Predictable

This piece in Sunday's Times was, like all newspaper articles about the publishing industry, deeply depressing. Here's a sample:

The hunt for the key has been much more extensive in other industries, which have made a point of using new technology to gain a better understanding of their customers. Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions. Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines and hotels have developed increasingly sophisticated databases of customers.

Publishers, by contrast, put up Web sites where, in some cases, readers can sign up for announcements of new titles. But information rarely flows the other way — from readers back to the editors.

“We need much more of a direct relationship with our readers,” said Susan Rabiner, an agent and a former editorial director. Bloggers have a much more interactive relationship with their readers than publishers do, she said. “Before Amazon, we didn’t even know what people thought of the books,” she said.

I'm not so sure about this. Does anyone really want the publishing industry to give readers what they want? I know that I don't want what I want--I want what I don't yet know I want. Sure, I'm always happy to sink my teeth into a nice crime novel when I know it's going to satisfy me in a particular way. But the whole point of literary fiction, and really the only thing that separates it from commercial fiction, is that it provides a new way of seeing. You're not supposed to know you want to read it. You're supposed to be surprised.

Increasingly, the publishing industry can't stand surprise. It is bad for the bottom line. And the idea that the Times would suggest that the industry's unpredictability is a problem really makes me want to give up, and just scawl my novels on bar napkins and staple them to phone poles.

What the publishing industry really needs to do is to give up the idea, cooked up at some point during the buyouts of the 1990's, that putting out books can be as profitable as any other business. Perhaps it can, but dammit, it shouldn't. Books should be a labor of love, and a decent way to make a decent living, at best.