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| Hearsay: |
We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius. Passing over a few classical and Far Eastern entries, the novel in its modern form really got rolling only in the early 18th century. This wasn’t an accident, and it didn’t happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of them.
Fast-forward to the early 21st century: the publishing industry is in distress. Publishing houses–among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt–are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company’s history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be “the worst year for publishing in decades.”
A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn’t dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 5:58 pm
“(Unpaid amateur editors have already hit the world of fan fiction, where they’re called beta readers.) The wide bottom of the pyramid will consist of a vast loamy layer of free, unedited, Web-only fiction, rated and ranked YouTube-style by the anonymous reading masses.”
Oh, happy new day, oh brave new world. The greatest writers (I’m sure this article writer means only fiction writers, not non-fiction writers like him or herself; he or she will continue to take home a check) will throw themselves into the web, serfs of the net, writing their little hearts out… for nothing! Yes, for to not do so will mean they will have no voice, no audience. And they will have no money. That’s for sure.
When I got to the end of this piece I had an image of a huge hall full of naked, haunted-looking people. Someone, well fed and well dressed, comes out onto the stage and holds up a golden ring, a fortune to those who eye it hungrily. “How much do you want it?” he goads them. Then he tosses it high and the people lunge, bones snapping, fists flying, teeth biting, as they fight over this ring, this ticket out of anonymity and worthlessness.
This is what they are happily proposing. And, sadly, it is already happening. It’s a great business model for the Publishing corporations. They can just sit on the sidelines and wait for the victor to crawl out from under the bodies. To be fair, yes, some good books will be published. But how many will never be noticed in this glut of “vulgar and immoral” less modernist-style, more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative…” that “… will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life — absolute crap! Oh, ain’t it grand! — Paul Clayton, author of Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam