UPDATE June 4: We’ve just come across an astonishing essay by Benjamin Hoff — author of The Tao of Pooh — in which he decries “publishers who seemed dedicated to opposing at every step the new ideas and forms of writing I was trying to bring to the literary world.” His conclusion is as disheartening as it is extraordinary:
The variety is constantly diminishing as corporate committees of book-ignorant, conservative-minded decision makers reject ideas and rework manuscripts they consider too new and untried, not in harmony with a particular point of view or political ideology, or lacking the potential to quickly and sensationally bring them large amounts of risk-free money. Literary quality and intelligence are being lost as well in the relentless corporate dumbing down of literature and numbing down of readers. And authors.
How many wise, inspiring, entertaining, or even basically well-written books can possibly be produced by an industry that treats authors like dirt on the corporate floor? Literary creativity and professional integrity cannot survive in such a deadly atmosphere.
Please read the entire essay — “Farewell to Authorship: And Why We’re Losing Literature” — for one author’s story about how corporate publishing has failed us. And Hoff is a highly successful, bestselling author who has made his publishers lots of money. Imagine how much worse the situation must be for writers without his track record.
Google is
preparing to sell ebooks, cutting Amazon and its Kindle out of the loop.Celebrity
nonreaders proudly publish “books”… at corporate publishers who are proud to sell them.
In 2008, for the first time ever, the number of print-on-demand titles published in the U.S. has exceeded the number of traditional books produced…
…which makes the self-publishing powerhouse AuthorSolutions — which encompasses such companies as AuthorHouse and iUniverse — the biggest publisher of books today.
A thoughtful, provocative piece in The Nation considers the state of the book and the publishing industry in light of the current cultural and economic situation. A few choice excerpts:
Do books still have their power? Over the past twenty years, as we’ve thrown ourselves eagerly into a joy ride on the Information Superhighway, we’ve been learning to read, and been reading, differently; and books aren’t necessarily where we start or end our education. The unprofitable chaos of the book business today indicates, among other things, that slow, almost invisible transformations as well as rapid helter-skelter ones have wrecked old reading habits (bad and good) and created new ones (ditto). In the cacophony of modern American commerce, we hear incoherent squeals of dying life-forms along with the triumphant braying and twittering of new human expression.
A key element in the dissemination of books, independent of publishers and booksellers but essential to both, is the press. The simultaneous collapse of the business model for newspapers and magazines is a gruesome fact of life, and we book people keenly feel the pain of a sister print-on-paper industry, to put it mildly. All citizens should be alarmed by the loss of such a vital necessity to a democracy. But the hard numbers and socioeconomic exigencies of journalism’s huge crisis differ greatly from those of book publishing’s smaller one (though they are often conflated). Here I want only to stress that the loss of so many book-review pages nationwide is crippling all aspects of our literary life. And I mean all. Book news and criticism were fundamental to the old model of book publishing and to the education of writers; Internet coverage of books, much of it witty and interesting, does not begin to compensate for their loss.
As the megapublishers tightened their grip in the 1980s, I was dismayed to see a number of once good firms of markedly different publishing style or literary taste make foolish, overpriced mistakes; they seemed to be losing their bearings as they paid ever more money for ever more questionable properties, entrusting the sewing up of these sow’s ears to not very experienced practitioners. I asked Jeremiah Kaplan, founder of the Free Press, a once autonomous and brilliant publisher of serious social science, how things could go so wrong. Besides the obvious motive of greed, he thought it simple. “Businessmen never learn from their mistakes because they always find someone else to blame for them,” he said. “Businessmen only learn from their successes. Except publishers can’t do that.” He smiled. We both knew well that you couldn’t foreordain a bestseller, no matter how wisely you handled every detail. And the necessary skills were disappearing. “Since our successes can’t be replicated, publishers learn nothing! Nothing!” Roger Straus, too, a skillful practitioner if ever there was one, understood the chanciness: “Aw, a blind pig can find a truffle,” he’d say, deflecting praise for publishing a good book well. Yes, a lot of it was blind luck.
The stifling excess of lucrative junk is, naturally, galling for literary artists unknown or only slightly known to the mass market, whose talents are perhaps not suited to it; they want or need the filthy lucre too. Their ever more powerful agents have successfully decoupled the size of the royalty advances they receive from any estimate of the books’ eventual earnings, and routinely assure them that if Knopf or Norton or Morrow fails to earn back the upfront money, it’s because their masterpieces were badly published, not because the advances were implausibly high. This is cheering, of course; writers’ egos are always shaky, and they tend to forget the sage warning that you should disregard compliments extended by someone whose income derives from your own. Also, they won’t acknowledge that literary quality may decline as advances increase; only rarely is a writer liberated into confidence-inspiring freedom by following advice from greedy publishers about Pleasing the Crowd. Willa Cather wasn’t the only fine writer who refused advances for being, in her view, unethical, nor was D.H. Lawrence the only one who found them demeaning. The agents have much to answer for.
There’s much, much more, and it’s all worth a read. The gist of it, though, is that the woes of traditional publishing have been long in the making, and are yet another symptom of the same disease that ails our global economy on the whole: thoughtless arrogance, greed, shortsightedness, and a valuing of quantity over quality.
Dystopic futures aside — does anyone with a brain really doubt that the nightmare of Idiocracy something truly in the realm of fantasy only? — what can literary people, readers and authors and publishers alike, hope for? AuthorSolutions may be the largest publisher by quantity today, but it does not vet its books at all: it exists merely as a conduit for anyone who wants to write a book, regardless of quality or even coherence, to get that book out there. Flexibility and freedom is a good thing, but won’t be merely drown in even more junk than is already throttling us?
Are we going to have to redefine the book to encompass much more than “a finite number of pages bound into a relative portable package”? Or will the sense of what we know as a book today cease to exist, and soon?
We at Cosimo find ourselves right in the middle of these conundrums. We publish print-on-demand books and sell them online, and we love the freedom and the flexibility that gives us to introduce readers to books that have been overlooked by traditional publishers, because they don’t fit into the very narrow, corporate-minded paradigms those publishers have constricted themselves into over recent decades. But Cosimo isn’t an AuthorSolutions-style vanity press, either: we don’t publish everything that crosses our desks.
But if Cosimo isn’t actually alone in this new category of publisher, we’re in a very tiny minority in trying to cope with the new reality of publishing by finding a middle ground between the two wild extremes we’re seeing today.
What is the future of books and bookstores? Or readers and reading? If you’re an author, what do you expect from publishers and the publishing process these days? And where is nontraditional publishing and bookselling going to take us, as readers and as a culture?
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and from other online booksellers.
