"Let it die"
In the current Harper's, Gideon Lewis-Kraus's essay "The Last Book Party" outlines very briefly the well-known origins of the current crisis in trade publishing:
These assumptions that Lewis-Kraus points out are worth considering; they are the assumptions of a narrative about which I cannot feel particularly sorry. At the just-concluded AWP conference in Chicago, there were, despite the current economy, three hundred conference events, but as most AWP-goers understand, the real action is to be found at the "offsite events," where various presses often showcase their new and recent books through group readings. Each night, after the AWP bookfair closed at 5:30 PM, people scattered to bars, galleries, and bookstores across Chicago for readings that sometimes went as long as three hours. And because these events are often held in bars, there is generally a much more festive feel than the reading intoned into a microphone in a lecture hall before undergraduates who get course credit for attending, or the reading at a bookstore in front of two or three dozen people while uninterested customers wander through the background. Though I'd ascribe it less to alcohol than to enthusiasm, at the poetry reading in which I took part, I heard, between poems, spontaneous applause and whoops from the crowd of nearly two hundred people (for example, when Johannes Göransson read in both Swedish and English from his translation of Aase Berg's With Deer, or when Kevin Holden read his poems involving math and fractals)—the forms of appreciation one would hear were a band onstage instead of a poet. As Göransson notes on his blog, "While the room full of big booths was largely empty and while the dull panels mostly discussed 'american hybrids' and other ultra-canonical, very US-centered stuff, the youngsters were busy reading Swedish grotesqueries from a very small press table run by a former undertaker."
Dean Young began his reading with a brief reference to the many recent media obituaries for publishing. Surveying the crowded room, Young noted quite correctly that poetry (and I'll extend this point to include small-press fiction as well, since both forms are sustained by what Young called "tribes," rather than by what Lewis-Kraus calls "the wishful insistence—for it is a wish, deeply felt, by a lot of people—that [writers are] going to be rich") is not dying; only corporate publishing is dying. "Let it die," he said—and indeed, the reading offered an entirely new business model, one borrowed, perhaps, from the DIY independent music world on which so many writers forty-ish or younger were raised: small presses financed not with inheritances and trust funds, but hard work and credit cards; books sold from a merch table, rather than the rented end-caps of a megastore aisle; writing that perhaps doesn't fit familiar publishing niches but that, as Matt Hart said about Dean Young's work, makes us "feel less insane"—by which, of course, Hart meant less alone in a literary culture where quality is generally equated with sales, and in which mediocrity is routinely celebrated.
Artist Brice Marden, quoted in the current issue of New York, makes much the same point: "[A] recession is always good for art. It's not the art that's suffering, it's the market that's suffering. They don't have anything to do with each other."
The writing that matters to me, and to many of my peer writers, seems to be doing just fine in the marketplace that that writing inhabits: what's "at stake" in such writing is not the profit margin of some minor component of a multinational media corporation, but the pleasure in a repurposed word, an elegant phrase, or a perfect sentence—in language used not as another commodity, but as part of the complicated communication between speaker and listener.
[An addendum, from Conversational Reading.]
Publishing used to be a business of leisured gentlemen happy to make a profit of 3 or 5 percent. They came from money and often didn't need much more of it, especially the sort that might be gained through the sale of things. What they did instead was to turn their parents' financial capital into cultural capital. Then media consolidation arrived, and by the 1990s almost every big publisher was owned by a giant conglomerate.... These giant publicly traded companies were insulted by margins of 5 percent. CEOs pressured editors to buy big bestsellers, which developed into the form of mutual assured destruction that is the book auction, a sales device that leads to insupportable advances and thus to virtually inevitable disappointments, followed by even larger advances and larger disappointments. As publishers are squeezed from one direction by their corporate overseers, they are gouged from the other by Barnes & Noble and Amazon, whose increasing domination of the retail market means they can demand ever deeper wholesale discounts and extort additional concessions for prime bookstore and home-page placement. At the same time, book sales are down, newspaper coverage of books is diminished, people like to waste their time on the Internet, and so on. Thus it augurs total collapse when, in an economic downturn, publishers are forced to shutter whole imprints, as Random House did in December; freeze acquisitions, as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has; or lay people off, or cancel holiday parties, or fetter expense accounts.
But the problem with this standard story is that it refuses to ask what, exactly, is at stake. It assumes that decline and loss are self-evidently defined. It takes for granted that the mid-twentieth-century good fortune of publishing, held aloft by a peculiarly luxuriant middlebrow culture (and "middlebrow" is here employed in the most appreciative way), was natural, or was even somehow a necessary condition for the book's survival.
These assumptions that Lewis-Kraus points out are worth considering; they are the assumptions of a narrative about which I cannot feel particularly sorry. At the just-concluded AWP conference in Chicago, there were, despite the current economy, three hundred conference events, but as most AWP-goers understand, the real action is to be found at the "offsite events," where various presses often showcase their new and recent books through group readings. Each night, after the AWP bookfair closed at 5:30 PM, people scattered to bars, galleries, and bookstores across Chicago for readings that sometimes went as long as three hours. And because these events are often held in bars, there is generally a much more festive feel than the reading intoned into a microphone in a lecture hall before undergraduates who get course credit for attending, or the reading at a bookstore in front of two or three dozen people while uninterested customers wander through the background. Though I'd ascribe it less to alcohol than to enthusiasm, at the poetry reading in which I took part, I heard, between poems, spontaneous applause and whoops from the crowd of nearly two hundred people (for example, when Johannes Göransson read in both Swedish and English from his translation of Aase Berg's With Deer, or when Kevin Holden read his poems involving math and fractals)—the forms of appreciation one would hear were a band onstage instead of a poet. As Göransson notes on his blog, "While the room full of big booths was largely empty and while the dull panels mostly discussed 'american hybrids' and other ultra-canonical, very US-centered stuff, the youngsters were busy reading Swedish grotesqueries from a very small press table run by a former undertaker."
Dean Young began his reading with a brief reference to the many recent media obituaries for publishing. Surveying the crowded room, Young noted quite correctly that poetry (and I'll extend this point to include small-press fiction as well, since both forms are sustained by what Young called "tribes," rather than by what Lewis-Kraus calls "the wishful insistence—for it is a wish, deeply felt, by a lot of people—that [writers are] going to be rich") is not dying; only corporate publishing is dying. "Let it die," he said—and indeed, the reading offered an entirely new business model, one borrowed, perhaps, from the DIY independent music world on which so many writers forty-ish or younger were raised: small presses financed not with inheritances and trust funds, but hard work and credit cards; books sold from a merch table, rather than the rented end-caps of a megastore aisle; writing that perhaps doesn't fit familiar publishing niches but that, as Matt Hart said about Dean Young's work, makes us "feel less insane"—by which, of course, Hart meant less alone in a literary culture where quality is generally equated with sales, and in which mediocrity is routinely celebrated.
Artist Brice Marden, quoted in the current issue of New York, makes much the same point: "[A] recession is always good for art. It's not the art that's suffering, it's the market that's suffering. They don't have anything to do with each other."
The writing that matters to me, and to many of my peer writers, seems to be doing just fine in the marketplace that that writing inhabits: what's "at stake" in such writing is not the profit margin of some minor component of a multinational media corporation, but the pleasure in a repurposed word, an elegant phrase, or a perfect sentence—in language used not as another commodity, but as part of the complicated communication between speaker and listener.
[An addendum, from Conversational Reading.]
Labels: AWP, Black Ocean, Dean Young, Johannes Göransson, Matt Hart, publishing, writing
posted by Josh at 9:50 AM
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