miscellaneous potpourri and other interpipe blockages

A few more links:

I still haven’t read Freedom (it’s next up, I swear), but that doesn’t mean I can’t read about it! This article rehashes all the major themes from last years media explosion (sexism, ambition, and potty humor), and, while it fails to say anything that hasn’t already been said, who really reads these sorts of articles to hear something new anyways?

The only thing better than reading books or writing books or even talking about books is talking about talking about books.

Remember in the old days, before writing was a business and making art actually meant something? Nope, neither do I, but I’m pretty sure it existed. Otherwise, why would people keep writing articles about it? Boozy lunches, smoke filled parties, and nostalgia was so thick you could cut it with a black and white knife….

This one is about book sex.

Thank goodness Jonathan Lethem is surviving in California, and thank goodness for New York City.

Sometimes reading about famous writers talking about writing can seem more fun than writing.

diy publishing in books and music

Eric R. Danton over at The Hartford Courant recently published an opinion piece about the rise of DIY publishing in the literary world that’s worth a scan if not a full on “read.” As proof of the viability of self publishing he spends a lot of time making parallels with the music industry, which makes sense when you google “Eric Danton” and realize he’s the on-staff “rock critic” for The Courant. Mr. Athitakis’s response on his blog was much more interesting. A snatch:

This is where Danton’s story starts to fail me. His equation of DIY music with DIY publishing fails to acknowledge the culture of discussion, argument, documentation—and, yes, gatekeeping and tastemaking—that’s still installed in DIY music, and doesn’t provide a convincing parallel for DIY publishing. Who’s replaced POD-dy Mouth? Where’s the culture of readers engaged with POD novels in the same way as Pitchfork? Or even the collaborative group of, say, young fantasy writers who’ve built a small cult around themselves by branding the novels they self-publish? Instead, the story’s chief example is Joel Fried, who’s sold a thousand or so copies of his book of essays, Bursts, through BookSurge. How this proves that self-publishing has obliterated its amateur-hour stigma escapes me. If anything, Stewart O’Nan comes off as the most convincing voice in the article, arguing for the old-fashioned publisher: He tells the Courant, “I want to get my book between covers and onto the shelves of as many good bookstores and good libraries as I can, hoping that in time maybe that will translate into it being on the shelves of lots of good readers, and I find the big houses give you the best shot at that.”

He goes on, and if you’re interested you should hop on over and read the whole article. I was going to copy and paste more, but Mark started talking about other things and when I was done editing, I was left with a messy string of ellipses and unconnected phrases, and then this conclusion: “If indie rock is any sort of a model for DIY publishing, it’s not merely in self-publishing—it’s in smart self-publishing strategies that think of the audience before the book.” Yes.

I’ve thought and wrote about this topic for awhile now and though there isn’t really anything new in either of these articles, it’s always egotistically gratifying to find your ideas in the mouth of someone else, especially when that someone else is Mark Athitakis. What literary culture needs is MORE tastemakers and MORE gatekeepers — and therefore more opportunities for readers and writers alike. Get two it, Internet.

Speaking of, in case anyone is interested I’m still developing my concept for a Pitchfork-esque book review website/community hub for literary fiction (plus the occasional/ironic one-off genre review). If you are interested in donating ideas or (more importantly) investment capital, please get in contact with me.

amazon will crush you

There’s a big article up on the Boston Review about Amazon and the future of book publishing. Definitely worth a read. A quote:

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors? Amazon is indisputably the king of books, but the issue remains, as Charlie Winton, CEO of the independent publisher Counterpoint Press puts it, “what kind of king they’re going to be.” A vital publishing industry must be able take chances with new authors and with books that don’t have obvious mass-market appeal. When mega-retailers have all the power in the industry, consumers benefit from low prices, but the effect on the future of literature—on what books can be published successfully—is far more in doubt.

mfa programs versus the new york city

Slate has put up a six page article by Chad Harbach (the editor-in-chief of n+1, which makes a lot of sense now that I think about it) detailing the literary cultures of New York City publishers versus MFA programs. It’s influenced by Mark McGurl’s book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, something I’ve been meaning to read since its release.  The most interesting bits are about how the differing culture means of book production affect the form of what’s being written, though I don’t know if those ideas presented belong to Chad or Mark. It’s a good read, though it doesn’t really take you anywhere you weren’t already. A bit for perusal:

There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 854! This explosion has created a huge source of financial support for working writers, not just in the form of lecture fees, adjunctships, and temporary appointments—though these abound—but honest-to-goodness jobs: decently paid, relatively secure compared to other industries, and often even tenured. It would be fascinating to know the numbers—what percentage of the total income of American fiction writers comes from the university, and what percentage from publishing contracts—but it’s safe to say that the university now rivals, if it hasn’t surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world. This situation—of two complementary economic systems of roughly matched strength—is a new one for American fiction. As the mass readership of literary fiction has peaked and subsided, and the march of technology sends the New York publishing world into spasms of perpetual anxiety, if not its much-advertised death throes, the MFA program has picked up the financial slack and then some, offering steady payment to more fiction writers than, perhaps, have ever been paid before.

Everyone knows this. But what’s remarked rarely if at all is the way that this balance has created, in effect, two literary cultures (or, more precisely, two literary fiction cultures) in the United States: one condensed in New York, the other spread across the diffuse network of provincial college towns that spans from Irvine, Calif., to Austin, Texas, to Ann Arbor, Mich., to Tallahassee, Fla. (with a kind of wormhole at the center, in Iowa City, into which one can step and reappear at the New Yorker offices on 42^nd Street). The superficial differences between these two cultures can be summed up charticle-style: short stories vs. novels; Amy Hempel vs. Jonathan Franzen; library copies vs. galley copies; Poets & Writers vs. the New York Observer; Wonder Boys vs. The Devil Wears Prada; the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference vs. the Frankfurt Book Fair; departmental parties vs. publishing parties; literary readings vs. publishing parties; staying home vs. publishing parties. But the differences also run deep. Each culture has its own canonical works and heroic figures; each has its own logic of social and professional advancement. Each affords its members certain aesthetic and personal freedoms while restricting others; each exerts its own subtle but powerful pressures on the work being produced.

interesting (anxious) stuff

My posting to this site has slowed down considerably, but that’s a good thing as I’m currently working on the book. Right now the working title is “He Do The Police In Different Voices” (and no, I don’t give a shit). Writing books is stressful, especially when you’ve never written one before and have to figure out how it’s done. Regardless, things are coming along very well, even though my word output isn’t as high as I would like. Lately I’ve spent most my time on the characters, something I’ve (perhaps out of dread) put off until “late” in the game — and by “late” I don’t mean to imply that I’m close to being done with anything, but rather that it’s one of the remaining aspects of the novel for me to work through/figure out. It’s actually the last aspect, but I’m going to say “one of” just in case farther along I come across something else that requires studying and lots of time spent thinking and staring into space. My whole approach to writing this book  has been to move slowly and work through problems as they arise, like trying to undo a tangle of knotted string, and so far so good. I can see progress, and that’s enough of a fix to keep me going.

I’ve been surprised at how a few things in my writing have turned out very differently from the way I initially conceived them. The plot, especially the genre elements, continues to recede further into the narrative background while the characters have come to the forefront (see above paragraph). It’s definitely made writing the story more exciting, since I’ve always intended the characters to be the main event — I want my plot boring in comparison. The other big change is how much darker things have become, specifically with Dick, my protagonist. I always wanted HDTPIDV to be dark, but initially it was more a gritty, noir-esque darkness apparent in the the setting and plot details. Now most of that darkness is in Dick, who’s morphed into one messed up dude. This is good.

The other day I read a couple of articles, this one about how (contrary to everything I’ve been talking about here) big books are now in style, and this one is about how impossible it is to be a writer, and how pathetic my life will be if I attempt it (it’s actually about the effects of THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION on publishers, readers, writers and the novel, but the subtext is far from implicit).

e-book armageddon

Discussing e-book pricing and its affect on the world of publishing seems to be the hot topic in the world of literary journalism nowadays, that is if the amount of articles on the topic that keep popping up in my Google news feed means anything. Most of them can be summed up succinctly: e-books are easy to make and should be cheap and people want them to be cheap but then the publishers won’t get any money and neither will the authors (here and here and here).  The publishers need to hold onto their industry bottleneck in order to survive, and to say that cheap, infinitely available and infinitely reproducible products threaten that hold is an understatement.

I hope we’ll always have publishers because I hope we’ll always have books (the old-fashioned paper kind), but really, what else apart from physical production do you need publishers for? Not promotion — not anymore. Tastemakers? I suppose some people would think so, though I’d prefer a more varied array of groups working with and against each other to promote what they think is the best – maybe, say, a large amount of independent publishers that cater to a variety of different tastes. And then we’d have all sorts of book reviewers that also catered to various groups of types of readers, with the big, national/international reviewers picking the best and most interesting from those sources, and ideally/theoretically, the cream of the crop would rise to the top!

Ok. Now I only need to gather around me a group of reader-followers and we’ll sit and wait for the publishing world to end, and when it does we’ll be ready to set out and build our perfect book world. Hurrah!

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.

indie and a jonesing for respect

Here’s a publishing contest you can send your stories/manuscript to. The interesting part? Their goal is to increase credibility for independent book publishing:

“In this new era of digital publishing with eBooks, POD books and more, there are now many paths to publication…We are offering the indie alternative – working to establish the credibility for indie book publishing that the indie film and music industries enjoy today.” Laurie McLean said, the SFWC Contest Director

I like this and hope to see more stuff like it in the future. For more information you can check out their website here.

for morning perusal

An interesting article went up on slate today by Meghan O’Rourke about women and unconscious bias in the literary world. Worth a read. Here’s a quote:

The literary debate of the fall is the tempest everyone is now calling, illogically, “Franzenfreude.” The storm, summarized hereby Ruth Franklin in TNR online, has encompassed a debate about the place of commercial fiction and whether Jonathan Franzen’s work is overrated. But I’m interested less in arguments about the relative merits of Franzen’s latest novel, Freedom—I’m halfway through and find it artful and engaging—and more in the deeper question raised by the debate: Namely, why women are so infrequently heralded as great novelists.

A thought exercise, perhaps specious: If this book had been written by a woman (say, Jennifer Franzen), would it have been called “a masterpiece of American fiction” in the first line of its front-page New York Times review; would its author, perhaps with longer hair and make-up, have been featured in Time as a GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST; would the Guardian have called it the “Book of the Century”? Without detracting from Franzen, I think we can say it would not have received this trifecta of plaudits, largely because we don’t ascribe literary authority as freely to women as men, and our models of literary greatness remain primarily male (and white).

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.