The publishing industry is in some distress these days. Consider the following.
Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien’s own publisher, froze acquisitions and laid off a bunch of people. This means they’re not buying any new manuscripts. It’s chilling, all right.
Borders Booksellers, the second-largest chain in the country, is undergoing a ‘restructuring’. Meaning, most likely, closed stores, lost jobs, and less selection at remaining stores.
Just last week, yet another phony ‘memoir’ was exposed-after a ringing endorsement from Oprah Winfrey and a movie deal. Herman Rosenblat’s touching story of two children helping each other survive to Holocaust, only to meet on a blind date years later, turned out to be a total fabrication. I think that’s three (or is it four?) fake memoirs in the past year. No industry needs that kind of black eye.
So, what’s to blame for all of this? The industry itself, of course.
Some time ago, I’m guessing the late seventies or early eighties, publishing decided to adopt the Hollywood model; acquire product that will move fast, build franchises/series/brand names (I’m always suspicious of a book whose author gets a bigger font size than the title). Work for the quick turnaround. Occasionally publish a smaller, ‘prestige’ book to let people know you still care about good writing.
I suppose this worked for a while, but in the end it was doomed to crash and burn. The reason is simple: Books are not movies.
True, both (or good ones, at least) can take you to other worlds, engage your heart and mind, make you think, make you cry. But the experience is different. Put five hundred people in front of a screen and run the flick, they’ll get everything at the same time, the dialog, that fiery explosion, that thrilling sunset. Give the same people a book, and very likely none of them will be on the same paragraph at the same instant. Some people read more slowly, some like to go back and reread little passages just because the writing stirred them, or maybe they missed some little bit and need to refresh.
But publishers got greedy. They wanted the quick turnaround and they began super-hyping star authors at the expense of lesser-knowns. When Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince was published in 2005, Scholastic spent eight million dollars on promotion. Never mind that the book promoted itself, never mind that Scholastic must have had dozens of new authors whose work needed the boost. But these days most of the big houses leave new authors on their own when it comes to marketing, which makes one wonder why they picked up the book in the first place.
Now they’re in trouble, and we’ll all lose because of it. We lose because new books that don’t ‘fit the profile’ won’t get published, (Twelve years ago, twenty publishers rejected Cold Mountain. Would anyone pick it up under today’s conditions?) . We lose because more books will go out of print, and because the houses that survive will publish more hum-drum retreads in the hope that they'll sell.
This probably isn't as dire is it looks. This is a shaking-out rather than the apocalypse. The world is still full of people who love to read, and they will demand good books. But shakings-out can be uncomfortable, even traumatic. A lot of people will lose their jobs and a lot of imprints will disappear. It will be interesting to see who survives.
I think the best outcome would be the death of the huge publishing conglomerates and the return of smaller houses that are truly independent. Even now, the few smaller publishers that remain are putting out better work than the biggies (on the whole at least). On-line publishing and self-publishing will also fill the gap. I think that in five years, the industry will look very different.
Let's see if we can all hang on.
Check out this article from The Nation, where Mr. Engelhardt draws comparisons to what's happening in publishing to the mess in other industries.
Yesterday I spent four miserable hours trying to upload The Bretton Katt Alliance to the Kindle format. First it just plain wouldn't take, then it was full of bobbles that called for correction. Oy. Well, it finally told me it was done, and that the book should be available to readers 'in 12 to 72' hours. That's a long window. Amazon never did explain why it might take up to three days.
Hopefully, it's done, and people will be able to download it to their little gadgets. If not, it's back to the drawing board.
I still have mixed feelings about this. How well will it sell? Will Amazon pull anything with that less-than-above-board contract? Does this really mean anything for the future of books and publishing, or is it just another momentary fad?
Yesterday’s newspaper (8/10) reprinted a story about Alloy Entertainment, a New York based ‘publisher’ catering to the teen market, mostly with tales of romance and gossip among wealthy New York or Southern California teenagers. They have deals with tv and movie studios. The thinking is, the books introduce the ‘brand and build a following, by the name the television show or feature film comes along, there’s already huge ‘brand loyalty’ for the new product. Ca- ching!
Ugh.
Now I’m not going to go on about the purity of art. History is full of hacks. Shakespeare, Dickens, Alcott. Even Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings after considerable pestering by his publisher. But this is something different, and perverse. The point of this company isn’t to tell good stories they think that young people will like. The point of the company is to make money. Lots of money. And their own ‘product brand’ isn’t the only one they’re pushing.
These books, and their attendant movies/tv shows are full of expensive consumer goods, all of them brand names, of course, frequently mentioned by name. The book The Clique, lists six expensive status brands in the first four pages, including perfume,. (the character is in the seventh grade. What seventh-grader wears perfume?) Goods that most of the kids reading and/or watching couldn’t afford in a million years. Like kids in the fifties and even later who wondered why their own lives weren’t ‘Father Knows Best’ perfect, today’s kids no doubt wonder why they don’t have all this stuff, just like ‘all the other kids’.
They shouldn’t wonder. None of this, not fifties sitcoms, or today’s shows, have anything to do with reality. They're all about fantasy.
Consider the ‘family’ shows from the fifties and sixties. Prosperous, white-collar (even if Father never seemed to really do anything) well-ordered, no family tension. I remember classmates of mine in the seventies, like me the children of divorced parents, talking longingly about ‘how families used to be’. They took these old shows to be sociological documents ala Galaxy Quest. And of course, they weren’t.
When these types of programs started, the country was coming off of two decades of upheaval. First the Great Depression, than World War II. Families frequently separated, while one parent looked for work. Marriages failed (including my grandfather’s). Then the war pulled thousands of men into the military and thousand of women into the factories. No wonder that, a decade later, TV producers created shows with these ‘perfect’ families. But it wasn’t the norm even then. Neither of my parents grew up in neighborhoods like that. In fact, only about a third of families fit that ‘Leave it to Beaver’ mold. A third! Yet a generation later, children watched these shows and assumed it was ‘the norm’.
This distorted picture of the world is very bad for kids. They probably read and watch this junk and wonder what's wrong with their own lives. Meanwhile, writers and TV producers who want to do real stories about real kids are finding it harder and harder to get a toe-hold in the industry. And people who care nothing about either kids or good storytelling keep right on shoving shallow consumerism in everyone's faces.
