the wall street journal and the decline of fiction/$

There’s an interesting article up on the Wall Street Journal about the rise in popularity of e-books and the effect it’s had on the size of authorial advances. According to the article, not only is it becoming even more difficult to break into the literary fiction market, but also once you’re published it’s nigh impossible to live on what you make. A quote:

Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America’s top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.  ”Advances are down, and there aren’t as many debuts as before,” says Ira Silverberg, a well-known literary agent. “We’re all trying to figure out what the business is as it goes through this digital disruption. “

The biggest mistake the author of this article makes is to equate the current publishing business model with the publishing business. Digital reproduction, distribution and consumption of books is going to have the same affect on the industry as it did in music and film, and the industry’s failure to transform is going to result in the same thing: a long, protracted contraction of the market until new ways of doing business are created and implemented. Authors would do well to learn from the independent film and music communities. Things are going to change, and even Mr. Doctorow thinks that’s a good thing:

Not everyone believes that the shift to digital publishing is necessarily bad for writers. Novelist E.L. Doctorow, who has taught creative writing for 23 years at the NYU Creative Writing Program, says the industry may be transforming away from big corporate-owned publishers back to a cottage industry like it was many years ago. The shakeout could help prune an overcrowded market.

I can’t wait.

look i wrote my own bloated essay about novels

Writers love big essays about novels by novelists. Or at least I do, and the more theoretically bloated and complex and ego driven they are, the better. Lee Siegel published a piece in the New York Observer a few months ago, and though it was pretty straightforward — major themes: things aren’t like they used to be in the world of letters, and this is bad; we need more authors like we used to have; non-fiction is where all the talented kids are nowadays; the novel is dead (for now) — the brouhaha it caused was much more exciting.

In my mind Siegel’s “Mailer” article should take it’s place in the long string of essays written about the state of the novel (Some of my favorites include: Tom Wolfe, Lev Grossman, Johnathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, B.R. Meyers, and James Wood.), even though I find it a little lacking in the substance department. Most essays of this type strive to become part of an ongoing conversation between creators about what they’re creating, about what the novel as an artistic form should be and do. And I know I’m not the only one to say it, but Siegal comes off a little like an old man complaining on his front porch. “Kids today,” he thinks. “Harrumph.”

Perhaps the problem for me about Siegel is that he’s too focussed on the past. He’s looking at American Letters as it has been and then insisting that’s how it should be, and he’s far from the only one. Authors, editors, agents, publishers — the majority of the American literati seems to be in denial about the fact that currently our culture is undergoing a great and rapid change at a very deep structural level — and it’s all technology’s fault. The depth and breadth of this denial reminds me very much of the music and film industries from the late 90s and early 2000s, and when it’s all said and done, it’s going to be just as catastrophic.

The reason? With the advent of internet technologies we no longer need big publishing houses to take on the risk of finding and developing new talent and covering the cost of printing books. I hate to admit, but for the majority of people on this planet electronic books will become the means by which they consume literature. It’s inevitable when the cost of reproduction becomes zero, ad infinitum. I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, and I don’t think physical books will ever go away, but the book as a technology is now outdated. In a few generations it will seem just as antiquated and nostalgic as vinyl records or classic cars.

So what does this mean for the author? I think the time of Super Writers and Great American Novels is over. Our culture is simply too fractured and heterogeneous for one product or voice to appeal to us enmasse, and we have our parents and technology to thank for it. Individuality is the name of the game, and for the consumer in our society, individuality is defined through choice. Down with monobeer and hooray for craft breweries! “Boo!” on formulaic, big budget summer blockbusters and “yay!” for independent films with story and character! Kill radio and long live Indie music! Sure people still drink Coors and watch MTV, but not like they used to. This is a big country we live in, and to get something to appeal to all those people and disparate interests  it usually ends up watered down or generic or formulaic. Art becomes an industry, a business, and innovation and risk or anything new stops making sense because it’s bad business.

This is ultimately what I think is wrong with American Literature. Books aren’t losing popularity, it’s that the wrong kinds of books are no longer popular — but “wrong” only according to the various tastemakers. The audience for literary fiction has continued to shrink, and in an attempt to appeal to more a larger audience authors have become generic and formulaic, the flavor equivalent of taking out all the hops.

I hear and read so many authors and critics bemoaning an end to the Golden Age of letters, and that’s wrong. If anything I think we’re on the cusp of a Golden Age, only it’s going to be different than anything people could have imagined. Again, look at the music industry. Thanks to the internet artists can write, record and distribute all their music on their own — they don’t need the giant publishing houses. New business models are being invented, and musicians are making a living doing what they want to do: play music. On the flip side, people can now find and listen to music that specifically caters to their own personal taste. Bands don’t need hundreds of thousands of fans to support them (and  in turn the giant publishing machine that controlled the bottleneck of distribution) and people aren’t limited to listening to music that caters to the least common denominator.

So what does this mean for the novelist? Writers should take a page about of the musicians playbook: get online, connect with people, give some stuff away for free and sell the rest. You may not have as many readers as you would have had, but you don’t need them — there’s a lot more room at the table, now. Self-publishing is no longer anathematic, and in time I see it becoming prerequisite to any sort of publishing deal. It’s important to remember that publishers aren’t going to go away, they’re just going to get smaller and there will be a lot more of them catering to all different kinds of tastes and interests.

In the end authors will still be writing, publishers will still be distributing, and people will still be reading, and that’s what’s important.