On the Future of Book Publishing
Literary Agent Colleen Lindsay noted that editor Mark Tavani, senior editor at Ballantine Books, had sage words of advice about the current economic crisis and how the publishing industry’s problems started long before the September 13th* economic collapse. In Books, Going Forward, he said this:
Anyway, maybe we contract. Maybe fewer books get published. Maybe some publishing folks have to look elsewhere for a paycheck. I don’t say those things lightly, because I love those books, and I’m one of those publishing folks, and I have a lot of friends in the industry. But on the bright side, maybe fewer books will mean better books. Maybe, over time, books will regain an elite status that I sense they once had. Maybe, in the end, books won’t qualify precisely as mass entertainment, but entertainment for a sizable if select audience.
Travani has a lot of salient points, and I agree with him in part here: consumers are having to drag the publishing industry kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, and it shouldn’t be that way. If fewer imprints means that editors will stop giving multi-million dollar advances to anyone, let alone illiterate celebrities, if publishers will look at newer technology like Print-On-Demand with interest instead of scorn, if corporate lawyers will give up on the idea of DRM because it alienates consumers and actually increases piracy, then yes, I will be the first out there to champion reorganization. The Millenial Generation is coming of age, and we do not look at traditional institutions he way our parents did.
For instance, I don’t look at the internet model of instant gratification and see it as a temporal phase that will wax and wane as blogs overpopulate the digital enivironment. The first (and last) problem with that way of thinking is that environments, unlike the Internet, have limits.
There is one sector of book reading that has not declined over the past few years, and that is ebooks. Granted, many of these books are in two genres, erotica and romance, but the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres are making headway with publishers like Baen and one-stop shps like Fictionwise. Meanwhile, Amazon wants to dominate and overtake the publishing industry as the seller of all proprietary creativity, just as Google wants to be the organizer of all proprietary creativity. Someone needs to move in front of the train before there is no more room left on the tracks for anyone else to ride.
I also look at traditional models of mass media as just what they are: models of what has worked in the past, what holds up in the present, and what may or may not survive into the future. Lest someone interpret this point of view as a writ of doom on the current vetting system, however, literary agents are the part of the publishing industry most likely to survive and thrive. Our society is built to delude unskilled, mediocre creators into thinking that they are unique, special snowflakes and to reward incompetence as long as the person embodying it sells it efficiently and with enough self-confidence. As long as there are abject failures lacking in artistic merit who believe they deserve to be published, there will always be a need for the gatekeepers. This does not preclude other authors who simply choose to work outside the model from being good authors – although the vast majority of them will be terrible authors — because there are some who want complete editorial control, some who aren’t in it for the money at all, and some who have built-in platforms that do not require the services that a literary agent can provide in order to succeed financially. None of these trends above are new, only the modus operandi has changed.
There’s nothing wrong with publishing fewer books — if the books we’re cutting are coffee table books, celebrity biographies, compendiums of useless facts and self-help ripoffs like The Secret. If we’re talking about publishing fwere vampire stories, then maybe we should talk about publishing fewer BAD vampire stories. There are different taste levels, and then there’s just straight-up bad writing. Bad writing should not find an agency, much less a publisher. Trends should not preclude sales of sub-genres.
I know that the average non-writer does not see a difference in quality betwen Tom Clancy and Stephen King, only genre and taste. Writers should see a difference. One of those two men can write damn good prose; the other just makes a lot of money. But I still think that both of them have a place on our bookshelves.
Why? Because as a whole, the literacy rate should be increasing, not decreasing. If airport novels are what it takes to keep the average consumer literate, then so be it. It’s bad enough that national news anchors have forgotten what adverbs are. There is no need to send the populace into a grammatical tailspin by serving up only The Kite Runner or the lastest book by Thomas Pynchon.
For the record, I feel no personal animosity towards authors or readers of literary fiction. I read it, I’ve written it (or at least tried to, in my not-so-humble opinion, under a different name), and I’ve enjoyed it. The deciding factor for me is usually the plot, and genre fiction tends to have plots that are more appealing to me on the whole. As someone who dreams of supporting herself one day by her words alone, I can look at the bestellers lists right now and tell you that the road I want to travel will be a hell of a lot easier if I write genre fiction. History has given us many, many decades of literary elitism and maybe three decades of commercial elitism. Why would the pendulum swinging too far in either direction appeal to any of us? Can’t we strive for artistic merit without falling prey to the pseudo-intellectual hype about Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduates and New Yorker pieces? Can’t we read beautiful prose that appeals to a broad audience?
* (JYFI, I say September 13th and not the first actual date of the stock market plunge because that was the day that at noon EST, everyone was pretty sure Bank of America or Barclays would buy Lehman Brothers. By 6 p.m. EST, Those potential deals had fallen through, it was pretty clear Lehman Brothers would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the credit options for buying cars had frozen. I know this because my family bought a new car at appoximately 3 p.m. EST, and we received a great finance rate on our loan. We were probably one of the last families in the country to purchase a vehicle before dealers received panicked calls and the banks stop issuing loans. Then, on Monday, the stock market crashed.)
I said this back when NY began to melt down and even though I’m a writer, I don’t find culling the ranks and editors growing more selective to be a bad thing. I find the situation rather akin to being an Olympic sprinter who enters a high school race knowing they’ll easily win: how does the win mean anything if you’re not competing against the best? I feel more challenged and alert to write when I’ve read a really great book rather than when I read a tepid one and say “I can write better than that”–if I can, there’s no motivation to get up and write because I already know I can write a better book. But when I see a book who has knocked my socks off, I want to rise to their level and challenge their talent with my own.
But I’m competitive that way. *g*
What I’d hope is that with a smaller roster of authors, publishers will be more open to diversifying their selection: no more flooding the market with Type A because one book was successful. Call me naive, but the smaller number of books produced, but with a variety of choices for readers to choose from, will be a more accurate litmus test of what readers want rather than throwing a bunch of books at consumers in the hopes that one or two will stick. And maybe Publishers will be more willing to ‘grow’ their authors.