April 26, 2005

• Well, to be honest, the majority of published writers are shite, so a culling of the herd is a good thing. Reading was a popular passtime when there weren't so many other things you could do for entertainment on your own. Now we have lots. So there will be less reading. So now only the best will be published. In any case, writers have many more options to self publish and self-promote.
• nice article, but i wish it had more to say about the state of the fiction industry and how bad authors with poor sales have it, instead of a short article about this one guy and how great his book is.
• >the majority of published writers are shite, so a culling of the herd is a good thing. I think the point is that the ones that are 'shite' and the ones that are going to be culled are probably not the same ones.
• Maybe this could be that group project we were looking for. Start publishing our own books. We can start with my unpublished manuscript "The Subtle Art and Science of Dryhumping"
• So now only the best will be published Ah, but that's the problem isn't it? Large sales of literary fiction are rarely governed by objective quality. More often in modern times literary sales seem to be governed by meme, preferably given a boost from a pop culture figure such as 'Oprah'. In such an environment, how is one to ensure that the 'best' books truly get published, and the canon of modern literature enlarged with the truly worthy contenders? Does anyone doubt that James Joyce would likely have sunk without a trace in today's environment? What is being lost, and how can we possibly change the system to deal with that?
• well, now you've made me fucking depressed.
• Well, to be honest, the majority of published writers are shite, so a culling of the herd is a good thing. Reading was a popular passtime when there weren't so many other things you could do for entertainment on your own. Now we have lots. So there will be less reading. So now only the best will be published. I don't know that this follows, though I agree that most writers are crap in the same way that most TV shows are crap or most CDs are crap or most movies are crap. But I think it means that only the most popular and sellable fiction will be published, not necessarily the best. It means promoting what they know can take off like a rocket (i.e., what fits the formula, what covers the Hot Topic of the Month, what's the most lurid page-turner), and axing or burying everything else. In other words, we're looking at the Clear Channel publishing model -- Britney Spears every hour, on the hour.
• I think it's bullshit to be quite honest, and until I see real figures that fiction sales are bad, I will continue to place my head in the illogic sandbox.
• What I'm curious about is what people are reading... I consider myself an average reader; since January of 2004, I have purchased 49 books from Amazon; all are listed below, separated by informal type: Business/Work Related (13, 26.5%) Sun Tzu Was a Sissy : Conquer Your Enemies, Promote Your Friends, and Wage the Real Art of War Call of the Mall : on the Geography of Shopping Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized How to Get Into the Top MBA Programs Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life The Big Bing : Black Holes of Time Management, Gaseous Executive Bodies, Exploding Careers, and Other Theories on the Origins of the Business Universe Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity Throwing the Elephant : Zen and the Art of Managing Up The Spy's Guide: Office Espionage The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management: Quick Tips, Speedy Solutions, and Cutting-Edge Ideas The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing Designing and Conducting Survey Research : A Comprehensive Guide Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy History/Culture/Theory (12, 24.5%) Life in Renaissance France The Beggar and the Professor : A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases The Company of Strangers : A Natural History of Economic Life Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country Why Things Bite Back : Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences Blood, Class and Empire : The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship Daily Living in the Twelfth Century: Based on the Observations of Alexander Neckam in London and Paris A Manual for Living The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Historical Fiction (6, 12.2%) A Spectacle of Corruption : A Novel A Conspiracy of Paper : A Novel The Dream of Scipio Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1) The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) The Count of Monte Cristo (Penguin Classics) Other Fiction (6, 12.2%) After You with the Pistol Don't Point That Thing at Me Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel The Zenith Angle Jennifer Government Pattern Recognition Memoir/Travelogue (10, 20.4%) Sun After Dark : Flights into the Foreign Mollie and Other War Pieces The Sweet Science : A Ringside View of Boxing Am Unorthodox Soldier Chicago: The Second City Here Is New York Between Meals : An Appetite for Paris Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Madam Secretary: A Memoir Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker Other (2, 4.1%) Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany 2003 AMC US Road Atlas [more]
• Fiction versus nonfiction: 12 to 37 (24.5%). So, a quarter of the books I've read over the last year have been fiction, by nine authors. Is this representative? I don't know - people's reading choices are so subjective. Mine, obviously, skews toward business and history, followed by memoir/travelogue, so one might infer that I am interested in my work, in the past, and in the world. However, fully half of the fiction I bought could be termed historical fiction, so if one added that to the history section, my interest in the past grows beyond my interest in business. The parsing could easily continue. In any event, I think that one can see the success of Amazon's book division as a commentary on the market itself - it's big, and what's more it's diverse. The beauty of Amazon and large retail websites like it is that the variety of books available far outstrips even the largest stores. What happens then is that any readers tastes, however baroque, are met. I think it's wrong to this that "only the best will be published" (Dan Brown and John Grisham's continued success is a testament against that theory), but one thing I think has happened is that the publishing marketplace cannot rely as it used to on the "big book" to make their bottom line - when a reader can choose anything (rather than "the best of what happens to be on the shelf"), the comparative sales numbers between books will flatten out a bit. Perhaps right now, the publishing industry, in seeking the diminishing returns of the Big Book, is culling lesser selling authors in favor of what they believe are sure things. But as the warehouse website better meets individual needs, publishing houses will realize that their catalogs will not generate revenue forever, and I think we see a renewed interest in lesser selling quality authors as the publishing houses, tamed by the egalitarian internet and the wild diversity of taste, realize they have to concentrate more effort in niche markets to maintain profitability.
• The reduction of the book biz to a few huge publishers is not to the benefit of the reader - for everyone ends up selling the same type of product, in this case books. Leads to built-in standardization -- and therefore less variety/greater boredom for readers. What's wanted is far greater variety -- meaning more risk-talking, as the conglomerate/corporate publishers probably see it on new authors or work that is different coming a tried-and-true author. There has to be room for failure in the arts as well as success, room for exprimentation and innovation. Business is very poor about risk as a rile. Places for poeple willing to see merit in new or unusual things tend to disappear in larege businesses where it's safer not to stick your neck out. Bah! Stagnation, in short. Ho-hum. And this problem, from the standpoint of a reader, is further complicated by there being a few huge book chains and fewer independent bookstores in which some of the small press offerings are to be found. Luckily in this bleak wasteland, there is the internets! Support small presses.
• For what it's worth, I picked this article because I just bought the book about a week ago. I've not finished it yet, but really enjoyed it so far. Stern's work has come out on a number of presses, many of them small. Literary fiction used to be the vast majority of what I read, but a couple of lit degrees later burned me out. I used to follow the contemporary lit scene, go to readings, read the reviews and all that. I figured there was also a good chance the editor was bluffing, or at least exaggerating.
• Suddenly I get the feeling that I've shared too much :)
• since January of 2004, I have purchased 49 books from Amazon I've read about that many, for free, using this thing called a Library Card. Figuring (perhaps conservatively) $10 a book x 49 books. OY. I coulda got a used motorcycle (like a small Honda) to learn on for that. Or, more practically, got my right hearing aid fixed. Maybe I am from outer space. Oh by the way, the novel I'm reading now is The Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma. I'll warn you though, it's not for the faint of stomach.
• i'm currently reading monkeyfilter by a bunch of losers suck it
• I think what's happening is the big publishers are sticking more and more to what they see as their best bets, and new and niche authors are getting published by smaller, sometimes new houses, like McSweeney's. I think there's still plenty of room for new, niche and "literary" writers -- just that the big houses ain't gonna be who brings them to us. Also, Bruise Brubaker makes a cogent point. Suck it.
• *shameless plug warning* My friend Wendy just got her book published and she's just a lowly blogger.
• Suck it!!!
• Books, for one reason or another, have suffered far more than most other forms of content from blockbuster syndrome. While you might not think so to look at the surface (after all, you've probably seen more blockbuster movies than you've read blockbuster novels), it's very much the case that while the music and movie industries allow for differing levels of success, the publishing industry is generally not so forgiving. A lot of people know about low-profile or indie films, even if they'll never see a Sideways or an Oldboy in their lifetime. And the continued existence of fairly popular indie bands like, say, Sleater-Kinney or Built To Spill, show that it's possible to make money by selling a fraction of the numbers a bestseller might shift through Wal-Mart (last I heard, S-K was able to routinely sell about 100,000 copies of each of their later albums). The book industry, on the other hand, generally deals with much smaller numbers, and so there are really only three levels of success: massive (a "Harry Potter" or a "My Life"), niche (tons of books you've heard little about but nevertheless sell in decent numbers to specific groups), and dismal (the overwhelming majority of books published today). And while it's nice to think that 99% of the books out there are crap, that's actually about as true as it is to say that 99% of music is crap, or 99% of movies are crap. But smaller artists and movies get exposure in today's climate; even big books have trouble gaining that same exposure, and small books may as well not exist to the vast majority of readers, which by the way is a demographic that is shrinking every day. I don't know the exact numbers in the U.S., but in Canada a bestseller novel usually sells about 5000 copies; multiply that by 10 or so to get a ballpark for the States (that's the difference in market size). That's not an average; that's a bestseller. Do some quick math (again, using Canadian stats): at $35 per hardcover copy, that's about $175,000 in gross revenue. But most bookstores take about 40-45% of that (and the percentage seems to creep up every year), so make that about $78,000. Minus the 10% royalty to the author (and let's assume that's on the publisher's revenue, NOT the gross revenue, just to make the numbers nicer) and you've got closer to $70,000. Those hardcovers probably cost about $5 to print (though I might be lowballing that figure; I have to look at my notes to find out), so that's $25,000 in printing costs. Except it's probably more like $38,500, because the dirty secret of the publishing industry is that bookstores can return unsold product for a full refund, and routinely do so after a couple of months. These return rates often reach about 35%, though they can be as high as 50%. So to sell those 5000 books, you had to have printed and shipped out to stores about 7700 books. That cuts your margin down to $31,500. And then there's shipping, inventory, marketing, operations (you had to pay somone to design the book cover, right? and edit the damned thing?) and you're looking at a tiny margin. The picture in the U.S. looks better simply because there are more people to sell books to. But smaller Canadian publishers, even with government subsidies, hover at a profit margin of about 1-5%. It's not hard to do better than 1-5%; try putting your money in a mutual fund. Work a telemarketing job. Sell lemonade at a roadside stand. Just don't go into publishing if you expect to make lots of money.
• One of my American friends, a successful and award-winning author of both fiction and poetry, says he's been unable to write as much as he'd like due to the repeated book tours, book signings, public readings, interviews by the media and so on at which he's been scheduled to appear. And I hear these complaints from other authors, too, his is not an isolated case. What this means is that readers are being deprived of books by the more able writers who are finding the time they'd otherwise use for writing to be lessened by requirements to participate in self-promoting activities. Very much the reader's -- and posterity's -- loss when this happens. The majority of what's been written during literate periods has always been relatively unremarkable or mediocre. When literary success is measured only by the number of book sales, then more copy-catting, formulaic writing, and sensationalism prevails in what is published. Many of my favorite authors would find it very difficult now to get published at all in this stultifying set-up..
• Harold Bloom is a bag of hot air. What is "literary fiction" and how does it differ from the other stuff? He can't tell us (he'd waffle on about Shakespeare and other, on this matter, irrelevancies), and neither can anyone else. I'd happily ignore the geezer if it weren't for his appearing in the US press at least once a year.
• "The Angel of Forgetfulness" is Mr. Stern's most ambitious book to date. It ranges from heaven to the Lower East Side of 1912 to a druggie commune in Arkansas in the 60's as characters struggle to determine how life is best lived: as found or as transformed by the imagination." ... Yawn. I think people are sick to death of this formula: fiction set, oh, about a hundred or a hundred fifty years ago in a generally depressing period of history; a story that involves a struggle to "come to terms" with life or something haunting in one's past; and New York City. The writing might be fresh, but it's the same old cliches that a big chunk of authors have been writing about for the past two decades. It's barely more engaging than the old "girl growing up in harsh conditions in pre-WWII Poland or Morocco or Mongolia or Israel or wherever" formula.
• Well, I take literary fiction to refer to contemporary fiction that some or other (purported) authoroty thinks is 'literature' as opposed to the (allegedly) crasser stuff that gets ignored by (purported) authorities. Heh.
• I've read about that many, for free, using this thing called a Library Card Well, in my defense, the library neither delivers to my house nor lets me keep the books forever. Amazon's selection is just the teensiest bit wider, too. I coulda got a used motorcycle (like a small Honda) to learn on for that. Or, more practically, got my right hearing aid fixed. Thankfully don't need the latter, and the former is banned by spousal fiat, along with marijuana, convertibles, tattoos, and cocktail waitresses. Maybe I am from outer space. Nah. Different strokes, etc. Another thing that might make mention is the difficulty with which it is to get literary fiction published generally, from the author's standpoint, which has nothing to do with the publisher: a glut of content. Publishers are inundated with unsolicited manuscripts, but can only publish X number of books per year. So, they don't even bother to read stuff that doesn't come from a literary agent. Most writers write their first novel out the gate and expect the publishing industry to scoop them up. Never happen. Stephen King (of all people) outlines the best way for a writer to become an author in his book On Writing - basically, you start out writing short fiction, and selling it to whoever will buy it, typically small lit magazines; as your skills and resume builds, you sell longer pieces to larger, more prestigious litmags. If the quality is good, a literary agent or book publisher will seek you out. It's a very sensible progression, not unlike a career in any other field of endeavor (start small, get experienced, expert and subsequently successsful over time).
• Automated Storyteller: The curse of the prolific author. "The dream of most publishers is to have at least one 'house author,' a writer with a robust fan base who can dependably churn out one title a year — giving the publisher the financial solidity to take the occasional flyer on more challenging (read: less gainful) authors."
• But their formula is good and everyone else's formulas are evil, see. mmhm. I've read Literary Fiction on occasion, but currently I'm reading dreck. (George R.R. Martin's Storm of Swords. Yes, it's precisely what it sounds like.) I vastly enjoy it. The article reads like "I'm a genius and I should be famous! Wahh!" Eh... I don't know. I think to say "this should get more money and more publishing attention because it's good" misses the point. They're trying to mix two metrics - sales figures and quality. I'm not entirely sure one should be yoked to the other - I don't quite grasp the concept there. If you like literary fiction, you'll read it. If you don't, you won't. I don't see what producing vast quantities of the stuff is supposed to accomplish, apart from letting books sit unsold in warehouses. Do you want more people to read it? Then publishing more isn't necessarily going to accomplish that. (And do you really want more people to read it, if part of your self-worth is based on being above the common rabble? Really.) I just don't understand the mindset, I guess.
• *cries, goes back to writing novel*
• I recall hearing a lecture by J.M. Coetzee in which he criticized the state sponsorship of literature in places like Sweden. His point was that comfort breeds mediocrity in writing, and that there had to be a desire to write with no reward. He went on to say that the reading of inferior work (including the reading of student fiction) had a detrimental effect on one's ability to write well. At the time I was quite offended (being a generator of crappy student writing). Now I'm not so sure he's far off the mark. I don't think it's a desire for fame or needed to be told you're a genius. You're doing what you want/need to do--write--and being told you're doing it well (by editors, reviewers, even great windbags like Harold Bloom). The people who do read your work like it, but that's not enough for the publisher. What does it mean to be very good at what you do and still not get any recognition. It's not aiming for a blockbuster or a spot on Oprah or even enough money to support oneself without having to read those horrible student papers, it's just to make enough through sales to continue with the publisher. The article mentions being at a festival with Safran Foer, a wunderkind with a passionate following who, in this case, is working some of the same material. Why him and not Stern? The whole discussion of formula is crap, as there aren't that many variations to begin with. There's little implicit value in a formula, just in how well it's executed.
• Great read, JoeChip, thanks.
• Patita: The obverse of the state-sponsorship coin is that artists are free to create art that won't sell, though it makes important artistic statements. These days, publishers are (generalising here) into money, money, money. Their idea of great literary art is that which funds a number of the flops on their lists. They're not in the business to benefit mankind without making their buck. Take a look at Michael Allen's "On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile" (.pdf file) for an interesting angle on the world of publishing vs the world of art.
• yes, JoeChip--i'd missed the link before but just read the article. The difference between commentary on comsumption and nitrate posioning indeed :) Skrik--I'll check that out. You make a good point... and it used to work that way as well, with publishing houses funding exactly the sorts of authors beeswacky mentioned with other works. I guess with the additional costs entailed in publishing now, that's less feasable.
• His point was that comfort breeds mediocrity in writing. Since this enlarges the topic from literary fiction to writing, I disagree. At least a measure of comfort is a necessity for writers -- the poor quill-toting fools have to eat at intervals, have to be kept reasonably warm and dry in cold weather, and stay half-assedly healthy much like non-writing folk. A crumb of bread now and then, a morsel of cheese, a handful of nuts or an apple, and an occaisional slug of rye whiskey keep the tissues moistened, in Mr Wodehouse's deathless phrase. And it is Good to be able to pay the electrical bills so one can keep scribbling after sundown. To hell with mortification of the flesh, no more starving in a garret! Writers, arise -- throw off your chains!
• I had come around to his point about reading bad writing, but Coetzee's criticism of comfort did seem extreme (especially seeing as he's not wanting for much). beeswacky, your comment put me in mind of the old Monty Python sketch that had a poet in every house... reminding me to put out an apple and some nuts for the resident writer :)
• Thank 'ee. Most kind. ... a poet in each house -- thanks to the internest!
• = internets
• the whiskey comes in the evening--don't want you too moist for the day's work!
• Literary fiction? I'm sorry. I only read slash fiction. One of the biggest problems with getting me to read new authors? I have about, I dunno, 100 great books sitting on my shelf that I still haven't gotten through. I read a good six to eight books a semester for class, and when I'm not reading those, the ones that I read for pleasure are things like Hopscotch and John Barth books. Which don't make any publishers any money. It takes half an hour to watch a TV show. It takes me half an hour to get through between 50 and 100 pages, depending on the density of the book. If most good books are 300 pages, and the better the book the slower I read it, then we're looking at at least six hours to have one story told to me. Aside from the fact that few writers or musicians can afford to do this, I've often thought that everyone should take a year off and let the public just digest as much of the old work as possible before starting anew. And with books, there's a giant fucking backlog, more than any other recreational medium.
• I'm kinda optimistic that good literary fiction will find its way and survive in the big bad world. The world of fiction is a lot bigger than just books. Like Fes' quote from Stephen King, you get your start in those literary mags. If i'm not mistaken that was how James Joyce did it too. Quality bowls people over and it always will.
• Perhaps wise people are taking books out of the library instead of purchasing them in (inflated prices) hardcover.
• Actually I have the sinking feeling that fewer and fewer people are reading literary mags, and the number of big mags that publish fiction at all has dwindled. King, I believe, published a lot in Playboy during its heyday, which is long gone. (I think PB even fired its longtime fiction editor in favor of choosing fiction by committee, likely a move to save $$. Can't remember where I read this.) A lot of the classic SF authors got their start in pulps, which are definitely long gone. And James Joyce? His publishing milieu disappeared while the pulps were in their infancy. Times have changed and litmags just ain't what they used to be. It seems to be much like poetry. Those who read litmags are probably trying to write for them.
• Is "a good six to eight books per semester" a regular sort of humanities course load? Seems awfully light.
• Wolof, my humanities course was a good six to eight books per semster per module. So that amounted to about 20 to 40 books (depending on number of modules taken) for primary reading. Then there's a secondary reading list of books about the books for primary reading. So I covered easily sixty to a hundred books per semester, about half of them cover-to-cover. YMMV.
• Eh. I'm in journalism and polisci. I read six fiction books, mostly because I had Politics in Fiction. I read four non-fiction books (I dunno if the Iliad really counts as fiction) for Will to Power (History), two books for Contemporary Issues in Journalism and zip for Understanding Technology (a required course). I suppose my estimate was off, though I'll cop to only really reading six to eight books, generally, and skimming the rest. Most of my reading is in articles (journal or magazine), and polisci classes tend to skew toward deep readings of few sources (with lots of journal stuff on the side). And a great many classes that I've taken, mostly in philosophy or polisci, don't have you read the full work, but only an excerpt. For some reason, I can plow right through someone like Heidegger, but trying to coax out a thesis from fiction tends to annoy me. I think it may be a peculiarity of my studies that I end up writing more than I read for most of my classes.
• I obviously took the wrong subjects. I was thinking about this last night, and I figure in fourth year I read somewhere north of 180 scholarly books. The three years before that I would have averaged about a hundred a year. This was pretty much what I felt was necessary to nail my studies.
• I would read fiction all day and all night if I could, but maybe most of it would not count as "literary" fiction. I, too, found the plot summary to sound like all those other profound, literary and (to me) stultifyingly dull books that have come out lately. I do like literary fiction - I love Jane Austen, E.M. Forster - what is it I don't like about the contemporary stuff? Sometimes it's just that the plot/situation doesn't speak to me. I can sum up my favorite books in a sentance: eg. a lonely spinster finds out she has one year to live and has to decide what to do with it (The Blue Castle - LM Montgomery). Sometimes I am hooked by the situation, sometimes by the character - and sometimes by the first line (as with Pride and Prejudice, as everyone knows that a man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.) Recently, I just read Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynn Jones - it's terrific (more like the movie than I imagined, but not the same). Eldest daughter of three is cursed to be an old woman before her time, and becomes the cleaning lady for a vain and slitherouter magician. Martin's Storm of Swords series is dizzingly complicated and intricate and you can't put it down at all - which is exactly why I refuse to read any more volumes until he finishes the damn thing. Okay, that one I can't summarise, but I was hooked by the idea of following the fates of the seven different children.