Put Your Nook Back in Its Crannie

July 30, 2010 8:19 AM

Noted literary agent Andrew Wylie has made a deal with several of his authors - including Saul Bellow, John Updike and Phillip Roth - to release their e-books exclusively on Amazon. Macmillan's John Sargent and Tyler Cowen react.
posted by l33tpolicywonk (46 comments total)

has made a deal with several of his authors - including Saul Bellow, John Updike

Considering Bellow's been dead 5 years, and Updike's been dead a year, I'm impressed.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 8:22 AM on July 30, 2010 [18 favorites]

One always hopes that NOW after this latest OBVIOUSLY EVIL move people will protest.
posted by DU at 8:22 AM on July 30, 2010

Chad Post, publisher at Open Letter Books and blogger at Three Percent has had the most sensible take I've read so far. He goes through the implications for publishers, authors and bookstores.
posted by Kattullus at 8:27 AM on July 30, 2010 [6 favorites]

Considering Bellow's been dead 5 years, and Updike's been dead a year, I'm impressed.

To clarify - the estates of said authors.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 8:36 AM on July 30, 2010

To clarify - the estates of said authors.

And yet would you really put it past them to learn the dark arts of necromancy to secure a deal like this? Then again, it would require a soul to sell...
posted by griphus at 8:39 AM on July 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

the exclusive Amazon deal only lasts 2 years..
posted by stbalbach at 8:41 AM on July 30, 2010

So is Baen one of the few publishers that figured it out? Still?
posted by linux at 8:42 AM on July 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

How does editing work in cases where the publisher only has the rights to certain forms or markets? If I write a book and sell the hardcover rights to Macmillan but the e-book rights to Amazon, can I incorporate into the e-book edition changes made or suggested by Macmillan's editors?
posted by enn at 8:42 AM on July 30, 2010

Chad Post...had the most sensible take

Post's post could have used an editor: it's rife with typos, run-ons, mixed metaphors, and generally mangled prose. From the first sentence alone: intimidated should be intimidating; has launched should be followed by so they can, not so they could; the word authors seems to have been left-off best-selling; no mention is made of amazon at all; etc.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 8:52 AM on July 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

The Pirate Bay has a few things to say about your exclusive deal.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:59 AM on July 30, 2010 [8 favorites]

e-books exclusively on Amazon. Macmillan's John Sargent and Tyler Cowen react.

Clearly, Messrs Sargent and Cowen feel they've been sold down the river... (I think that warrants a mild "heh", perhaps not)
posted by MajorDundee at 9:00 AM on July 30, 2010

And that's why writers need editors, HP. I certainly can't count myself as any sort of prose-mechanic, but I know I needs 'em too.
posted by LD Feral at 9:01 AM on July 30, 2010

I wrote about this on our company's blog the other day. I think the title says it all ("Andrew Wylie, I love you"), and in that post, I refer back to something else I wrote recently that more or less lays out why authors like me might be a little tiny bit angry with RH et al these days.

"Culture of lunches," my ass. I can barely afford lunch and yet RH is still making money off my books. Is it any wonder that after 12 books with the slavery sharecropper usual system I went off and started my own company? It's time someone with a much higher profile did something like this, and I'm glad it was someone high profile like Wylie.

As for Macmillan's response -- "And what of Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, and others? As they promote the frontlist books for which Andrew is the agent, they are not going to be able to sell his publishing backlist in digital form . . . while their competitor can?"

Hmmmm, lemme think about that one for a second. Ok, here goes. FUCK BARNES & NOBLE, and this is why: there wasn't any information available on how to publish to the Nook, and so, on the recommendation of some other book business people, we sent a copy of our most recent release with a letter asking about getting its ebook edition into the Nook store. They were already stocking the print copy, and people were buying .epub format books for their own Nooks directly from us -- why not? No skin off their teeth, eh?

Well, what we got back was the most ridiculous form letter you've ever read with absolutely nothing relevant to what we'd asked. It was the form letter you'd send Aunt Edna when she wants to put her self-published Things To Cook With Spam And Lard cookbook on the shelves at physical B&N stores nationwide. It was absurd, it was insulting, and it was stupid business on their part. I'll happily keep taking 100% of the revenue from the Nook sellers who buy from me.

Contrast with publishing the Kindle edition: click, upload, click, ok, click again, load a photo, click and 24 hrs later, there it was. It only took that long because we missed an email asking us to confirm a rights issue.

From an independent publisher's perspective, if Amazon is going to make it easy for us to make money with them, then we're going to support them. If B&N is going to make it like pulling teeth, and insult us in the process, they can get stuffed. Apple's iBookstore process was equally simple and professional, so we'll be doing business with them, too.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 9:07 AM on July 30, 2010 [22 favorites]

As an author, what makes me uncomfortable about this is the fact that Andrew Wylie is now a publisher. It's a total conflict of interest between agenting and publishing. Is he really going to tell his clients X Other E Publisher would give them a better deal than he would?

Your representation should never be your producer/publisher, IMHO, and that's what makes me squeegy about this whole thing. If he'd negotiated with an e-publisher for these orphaned rights, I'd say more power to him. But the fact that he stands to profit twice on the same deal- I have a real problem with that.
posted by headspace at 9:18 AM on July 30, 2010 [5 favorites]

Yes, but headspace -- here's the problem. Many of the large publishing companies are not doing ebook editions of works they have published in print. In addition, they're being awfully lackadaisical about ever pulling them together and putting them out, period. (Quick, ask me how I know about this...)

So really, what Wylie's doing here is bringing them a new revenue stream altogether that they wouldn't have had at all otherwise. There aren't 5 different publishers fighting over the ebook rights, there's no "tell[ing] his clients X Other E Publisher would give them a better deal than he would". No one else stepped up, so he did.

As an author who hired an agent far later than she should have done, I'll tell you here and now that after dealing with some particular publishers, I would happily hand over my books to my agent's firm tomorrow if they wanted to publish ebook editions of them. They're a fantastic and reputable firm, they handle some other literary gems of the same stature as the ones Wylie's dealing with, and they've been around longer than at least one of my parents have been alive. I trust them more than any publisher I've ever worked with, truth be told.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 9:27 AM on July 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

My take: author writes blockbuster. Publisher keeps it in hard cover. As sales lag, brings out in paper...later (or at same time) in e-book format. Customer can buy new, hard copy or wait and get used or paper or e-book. But from what this post suggests, the books and authors referred to I have already read or can get from library. Scrambling going on, for sure, and should continue for a time. The Dream: books available in e-form can be downloaded on any e-reader. But that seems not likely to happen.
posted by Postroad at 9:36 AM on July 30, 2010

I'm not saying that the rights shouldn't be used. I'm just saying Wylie shouldn't be the publisher. As you pointed out, you're doing your own e-editions and it's not hard or complicated to do. Why isn't Wylie telling his clients, "Hay, you could make 100% of the profit on e-books if you convert these backlist titles!"?

Because that right there- he's already exhibited a self-interested choice to make a percentage of those backlist titles, instead of simply informing his clients that they can make 100% of the profit if they take this step on their own.

This is not to say that I think Random House is entitled to e-rights backwards forever, simply because no one had a time machine to write them into the contracts. I don't think they are, and I think a court would agree with me.

I just I firmly and entirely believe that no agent should also be a publisher or packager. At the very least, it's the appearance of conflict, and really, it's a straight-up conflict.
posted by headspace at 9:38 AM on July 30, 2010

Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

Probably impossible to calculate the offset or lack thereof of freeloading readers. Wonder if anyone has ever tried. At least in civilized countries, authors get a nominal kickback for books taken out of libraries, which suggests recognition of obligation.

What fascinates me is the adversarial take authors/agents seem to have with publishers. Sort of like the way people feel about congress. They're awful, though my particular congressman/editor might be wonderful (or awful).

Anyway. If the publisher is your business partner and you do manage to get the work out to the world, then why should your business partner be shut out of sharing in rare books that make a substantial profit? They did, after all, put in their share of the work. Claiming that the "medium" is so wildly new and utterly different seems to me laughably disingenuous, and pretty shabby.

On preview - the point that the ebooks are not coming out quickly is well taken. On the other hand, the choice of scheduling secondary editions is pretty much in the hands of the publisher, no? So why should ebook be any different? It may not please the author or agent, but I don't see that their dissatisfaction gives them the unilateral right to usurp a competing form for their own benefit. I mean to say, they can't run off a different paperback edition with a different publisher in competition with the original publisher.

Business is tough and crazymaking all over. But some things are over the line
posted by IndigoJones at 9:53 AM on July 30, 2010

authors get a nominal kickback for books taken out of libraries

Not sure where you're getting that idea from, b/c it's not true at all.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 9:57 AM on July 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

Or maybe I'm just note what was meant by "nominal kickback," which I read as money?
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 9:58 AM on July 30, 2010

What fascinates me is the adversarial take authors/agents seem to have with publishers. Sort of like the way people feel about congress. They're awful, though my particular congressman/editor might be wonderful (or awful).

I got lucky in that the one publishing project I've worked on was with a super-supportive, super-engaged publisher that did right by its authors. I've heard horror stories from lots of other authors who've worked on similar projects with other publishers: waiting years for royalty checks that were supposed to start six months after publishing, things like that.

The reason there is a general sense of antagonism is because it is a rare publisher that actually does right by its non-blockbuster authors.

Anyway. If the publisher is your business partner and you do manage to get the work out to the world, then why should your business partner be shut out of sharing in rare books that make a substantial profit? They did, after all, put in their share of the work. Claiming that the "medium" is so wildly new and utterly different seems to me laughably disingenuous, and pretty shabby.

It depends - a lot of publishing houses friends have worked with don't even do rudimentary editing, especially on technical books. They tell authors to go out and recruit their own technical reviewers and editors. In those kinds of situations, the publishing house is literally acting as a printer and distributor.
posted by verb at 10:08 AM on July 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

authors get a nominal kickback for books taken out of libraries

Not sure where you're getting that idea from, b/c it's not true at all.

it depends where you are.

in Canada, there is the Public Lending Right Commission, which puts money in the pockets of authors whose books are in public library collections. according to wikipedia, 27 other countries have similar programs.
posted by spindle at 10:10 AM on July 30, 2010

On preview - the point that the ebooks are not coming out quickly is well taken. On the other hand, the choice of scheduling secondary editions is pretty much in the hands of the publisher, no?

And yet they don't schedule them ever, at all, thus cutting off one more source of revenue for the author. My agent wrote all my publishers 2+ years ago now, asking them to either a. publish ebook editions or b. permit me to do it if they didn't want to. Quick, now ask me how many of them did? (game show theme music plays...........)

One.

Well, almost. I was about to get the rights back on one book that had been remaindered...

(there is a long and sorry tale there and part of it involves the idiotic marketing department causing my book to be picked up after initially saying it was "too weird," but then B&N asked for a book just like it and suddenly it was ok...oh, except that once it was out for sale, the publisher didn't bother to go back to B&N and say "here's the book you wanted," so they never picked it up. Explain to me again, why these people make more money than I do per copy?)

...when, after ignoring my pleas for ebooks for 2 years (even eye-rolling at me in person at a conference while discussing it), they suddenly were Very Interested In Doing An Ebook, to prevent me from getting the rights back myself.

And you wonder why authors/agents can have an adversarial take on publishers?

It depends - a lot of publishing houses friends have worked with don't even do rudimentary editing, especially on technical books. They tell authors to go out and recruit their own technical reviewers and editors. In those kinds of situations, the publishing house is literally acting as a printer and distributor.

Yes to this, too. Happens all the time in my particular corner of the market. With the majority of my 12 major published books, I hired the tech editor, I paid any contributors (this makes tax time super fun, as you can imagine), I gave them the list of book reviewers for the genre's magazines, as well as bloggers and other influential people, I did just about everything except write out in book in longhand and do the shipping.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 10:20 AM on July 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

Q. what do you call a cross between a ground and an author ?

A. a soil bellow .

Oh wait, this is not the Joking Computer thread is it?
posted by edgeways at 10:21 AM on July 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

Stephen R. Donaldson (author of the Thomas Covenant books, amongst others) has been having a back and forth with his publishers about the e-book releases of many of his novels. You can kind of piece together the story here. Apparently it's not really all that easy to get it done right all the time.
posted by hippybear at 10:31 AM on July 30, 2010

thus cutting off one more source of revenue for the author.

And themselves as well. Possibly incompetence, possibly just not worth their expense.

But are you finding your self published books getting significant downloads? Genuinely curious. From the look of your older books - and they do look well produced, at least on Amazon - I'd have thought that the current ebook technolgy would not set them off to best effect. (Which is why I would stall the issue myself, if I were a publisher, waiting for technology to catch up.)

And you wonder why authors/agents can have an adversarial take on publishers?.

What can I say? I've known other authors who have had significantly different experiences than your. Not that they don't gripe as well, but their issues are not yours. Then again, they're not tech writers

(This is disquieting. THree years old, perhaps the writers pushed back? What is current status?)
posted by IndigoJones at 11:36 AM on July 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Post's post could have used an editor

I think Chad Post is an editor for Open Letter Books. Anyway, he seems to put on a good literary prize for translation but his blog posts at 3% are not my favorite.
posted by stbalbach at 11:49 AM on July 30, 2010

IndigoJones, I've made more money on one self-published book this year than I have in royalties on all my previous 12 books over the past 5 years, combined. Financially, it's a no-brainer. I agree that some of the previous books would not have been ultra-ideal for, say, the monochrome Kindle, but that hasn't stopped publishers (mine included) from putting their other full-color books on Kindle. Going forward, the iPad has pretty much solved the color part of the equation if that's super-important to you as a reader.

The book I just published is on a hyper-specialized topic (the business of knitwear design), and yet it's selling briskly. Taking a look at copies sold just through me (not counting Amazon sales, etc):

* print-only and ebook format (.mobi/.azw or .epub) sales are roughly the same
* PDF-only sales are roughly 3 times print/ebook
* PDF+print package sales are roughly 4 times print only sales

I have a large blog/social media/fanbase from teaching all over the country. I realize, of course, that this is part of why I have been able to be successful publishing independently. But I am by no means the most successful -- there's another designer 10 years my junior who never went the big-publisher route and she outsells me by about four whole tax brackets, so there goes the "yeah, but your publishers made you who you are" argument. Her take on it is that the publishers aren't willing to move as quickly or be as innovative as she would prefer and so why deal with them? I wish I'd known what I know now five years ago!
posted by bitter-girl.com at 11:59 AM on July 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

Interesting! Appreciate your taking the time, and may your future hold more onerous tax brackets.
posted by IndigoJones at 12:09 PM on July 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

* print-only and ebook format (.mobi/.azw or .epub) sales are roughly the same
* PDF-only sales are roughly 3 times print/ebook
* PDF+print package sales are roughly 4 times print only sales

This matches with my company's experiences in non-book publishing as well. We do training videos, and digital downloads outsell DVDs by a wide margin -- an order of magnitude, easily.

I wonder how interesting it would be to get some of the mefi folks who do various kinds of creative works together for a roundtable discussion about the changing media landscape. Hmm.
posted by verb at 12:10 PM on July 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

(More recent stuff on Wylie and the deal)
posted by IndigoJones at 12:13 PM on July 30, 2010

This matches with my company's experiences in non-book publishing as well. We do training videos, and digital downloads outsell DVDs by a wide margin -- an order of magnitude, easily.

Interesting, and makes sense -- people want instant gratification, and those who are positioned to provide it to them are going to make money and succeed. I've gotten a ton of emails from people ordering the print+PDF package saying thank you for offering it, I really really wanted to start reading it IMMEDIATELY and I can while I wait for the print copy to show up...
posted by bitter-girl.com at 12:43 PM on July 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Many of the large publishing companies are not doing ebook editions of works they have published in print. In addition, they're being awfully lackadaisical about ever pulling them together and putting them out, period.

On the consumer side of things, about every three months I look into getting an eBook reader only to find that a large chunk of my reading list is not legally available at any price. Between the volumes I can't get, and restrictions on sharing and exerpting the volumes I can, the platforms are just not attractive to me.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:25 PM on July 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

I think Chad Post is an editor for Open Letter Books.

Editors need other editors when they write. Trust me.

On the other hand, I suppose everyone needs an editor.
posted by mrgrimm at 2:54 PM on July 30, 2010

On the consumer side of things, about every three months I look into getting an eBook reader...

I'm waiting for the SanDisk version: a flash drive with a screen that only reads TXT files.
posted by mrgrimm at 2:55 PM on July 30, 2010

People are allowed to choose with whom they will do business with. If these dudes want to publish exclusively with amazon, why is it not their right to do so? Seems the whole "the internet means I should never have to pay for anything" crowd have this all wrong.
posted by Ironmouth at 4:37 PM on July 30, 2010

I was seventeen when I self-published a novel. (Please don't look for it. I was seventeen.) Senior year in high school, committed to a mediocre college because I didn't do work and hadn't yet discovered art school. Dead-end classes largely. So I wrote a book. Why not see what it takes, I reasoned. What all is the process to committing my books to paper?

One other thing to keep in mind: I'm somewhat lazy, and somewhat shallow. I felt that when I said "writing a book" I meant writing and just that. I didn't give a fuck about hunting for agents. I didn't want to research publishing companies. All those "how to publish books" manuals, they were bullshit. I had an MS Word document and I wanted to make it into a book.

That I published that very year is thanks to a little-known service Amazon provides called CreateSpace. It's about as easy as the Kindle's publishing system is, but it's for printed books. Upload a PDF, a week later Amazon.com has a Jew paperback. Then I told people about it and they bought copies. I ended up making I think $200 off it. The first money I ever made off creative work.

In my mind that's how it ought to work. I can't stand editors. I love editing — I want to try working as an editor for at least some part of my life, because I think I'd be brilliant at it — but I can't stand it for my own writing. I like friends' feedback and I like my own, but I'd never think to pay somebody for the job. I feel it's my responsibility. Ditto book design and self-promotion. Typesetting that novel and designing its cover led me to a fascination with graphic design and typography. Seeing people I'd never met save via blog purchasing my book, that made me want to learn how to sell things. Which led me to where I am now, writing and designing and promoting, all pretty much relying on myself and my judgment, shittily at first but slowly improving. For me that's the fun. No point publishing if you're not trying to do every bit of it yourself. How else do you know it's done the way you want it?

So in a way you could say Amazon is responsible for the person I've become. It told me that I was allowed to do things on my own, without paying anybody else a cent. The only reason I'm studying the arts is that I know I can do things without outside supervision. If I fail it's my failing and nobody else's. But I'm vain and a bit arrogant and stupid enough to play the game with those odds.

If it weren't for self-publishing I wouldn't want to be a writer. And Amazon's doing a smash-up job of making self-publishing cheap and easy and high quality.

Fuck publishers. They existed to grease a rusty, complicated system. We're outgrowing them. Technology lets us produce on a quality level for a fraction of the price. We're capable of doing more on our own than ever before. So publishers are slowly becoming irrelevant.

Worse because they're not particularly good at their jobs. They're inflexible. They pursue big hits at the expense of everything else. They're an ignoble and shallow lot. In many instances they actively hold ther authors back.

If their agent is clever enough to strike up a deal that'll give his clients a new revenue stream behind the publishers' backs, let him. Cheers to him for backing Amazon. Not only are they a great company, but they've strived to make the Kindle Store available on as many devices as possible. I have my Kindle books on the iPhone I'm typing this on. (Sorry, by the way, for any phone-related semiliteracy.) I have it on my Mac. I wish they'd use an ePub format, but theirs isn't awful, and I'm comfortable knowing if they DO turn evil there's a bunch of friendly pirates willing to make me happy again.

I also like that "signing" to Amazon gives me full rights over my work. When I published, I could release a free PDF download simultaneously. I didn't have to consult anybody, I just put it online. "Let's see what this does." It did ten thousand downloads and a few extra purchases. And honestly I'd rather ten thousand people read a book of mine than a thousand buy it. Easy distribution isn't a bug.

Better the agent have say over an author's revenue stream than a publishing company. Better still to have the author controlling, but the layer of abstraction means the writers who only care about the writing can focus on what they want to focus on. Better that than two inflexible layers of abstraction, especially when now that DIY option is readily available and can be switched to by anybody essentially on impulse.
posted by Rory Marinich at 8:08 PM on July 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ironmouth: People are allowed to choose with whom they will do business with.

Yes, and everyone else in the market is allowed to complain about those kinds of decisions.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 8:37 PM on July 30, 2010

Rory Marinich: I can't stand editors

[...]

Fuck publishers. They existed to grease a rusty, complicated system. We're outgrowing them. Technology lets us produce on a quality level for a fraction of the price. We're capable of doing more on our own than ever before. So publishers are slowly becoming irrelevant.

Worse because they're not particularly good at their jobs. They're inflexible. They pursue big hits at the expense of everything else. They're an ignoble and shallow lot. In many instances they actively hold ther authors back.

You don't know what you're talking about. And I don't mean that as an insult, you just don't have any experience working with professional editors or publishers.

Now, I'm not saying that great literature can't be produced without professional editors or publishers, millennia of literary history tell us otherwise, but as a rule editors and publishers are very good at what they do.

I published a novel with an Icelandic publisher earlier this year and I have nothing but good things to say about the experience. My publisher took a chance on me, a first time novelist with an odd novel, and went above and beyond my expectations in terms of marketing and support. My editor was wonderful. Sure, we debated fiercely over what, in retrospect, seem like minor points, but that meant that I never had to doubt her commitment to the book (she said that sometimes dealing with me was like trying to get a horse that didn't want to move to get going, and she meant it as a compliment). She argued her points well and so by example forced me to do the same, which helped me more fully form my conception of the book. Without her editing my book would have been worse.

Don't knock a group of people who you don't know. Sure, there are bad editors out there and bad publishers, but most are in it because they love literature. Jebus knows they're not in it for the money.
posted by Kattullus at 12:16 AM on July 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

I was seventeen when I self-published a novel. (Please don't look for it. I was seventeen.)[...]Fuck publishers. They existed to grease a rusty, complicated system. We're outgrowing them. Technology lets us produce on a quality level for a fraction of the price. We're capable of doing more on our own than ever before. So publishers are slowly becoming irrelevant.

Uhh. It sounds to me like the publishers did exactly what they're supposed to do. They didn't publish something that even the author admits was not something people would want to read. They do publish things that a lot of people would like to read. Imperfectly, sure, but everything humans do is imperfect.

Publishers don't exist to help authors. They exist to help publishers... by helping readers.
posted by Justinian at 1:07 AM on July 31, 2010

a week later Amazon.com has a Jew paperback

Oy gevalt I hope this is a typo and not some kind of pejorative nickname for print-on-demand books.
posted by nicwolff at 8:39 AM on July 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

That I published that very year is thanks to a little-known service Amazon provides called CreateSpace. It's about as easy as the Kindle's publishing system is, but it's for printed books. Upload a PDF, a week later Amazon.com has a Jew paperback.


In case anyone is wondering what a "Jew paperback" is, here is a link.
posted by Modus Pwnens at 8:45 AM on July 31, 2010

I don't know, Rory. I had plenty of young students who, like you, insisted they didn't need, say, the editing "services" of their peers in workshop. Their work was often fairly terrible, but that's not really here nor there. What upset me most is that some of them were young writers bursting with potential that would largely go unfulfilled because they refused to put themselves in a position that was receptive to criticism. When you write for an audience (and why sell your work otherwise?) you need to learn to accept feedback so that the work can grow. Editors and publishers know their readership; more, they know what it takes to make a book marketable to a larger audience. They're invested in selling your words--to many more people than you'd be able to reach on your own. Why wouldn't you want to be receptive to advice like that?
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:45 AM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Eek. NEW paperback. NEW.

Kattullus: I've no doubt there are good editors. I want to be one, and it's not because I think I'd suck at it. But the whole agent-editor-publisher dynamic is what I'm opposed to. There's no transparent, simple process there by which a prospective writer can end up with a published novel. And that's what's needed.

In every other industry there's a culture of enthusiastic amateurism. It's gotten to the point where the indie music/film culture completely dominates a certain part of the market. And in the literary world you have that for short stories and poetry, but not so much for novels. And I think that the relative impenetrability of the literary industry has a lot to do with that. It has a way of killing enthusiasm.

Why don't we see support from publishing companies for things like cybertext? Why don't we see then creating new formats for literature? Movies and music are constantly attempting new things with the support of their industries. Book publishers are doing nothing.

So my beef is less with editors (who I respect the shot out of; just because I don't want to use one doesn't mean I think they're in any way untalented) than it is with publishers. I don't think they're stupid, but nothing I've seen from any of them suggests anything more than casual incompetence. I expect publishers to be savvier and more ambitious than their writers. None of them are.

Justinian, I didn't give a fuck about readers. I wanted to publish a fucking book. A smart industry would give me resources to publish and sell nothing. Like Amazon did. The lost no money, but still I published, learned a lot in the process, and can continue to were in whatever idiosyncratic manner I choose. Then if I defy odds and become good, Amazon makes money and the entire art form moves ahead a little bit.

The best part about modern music is how much of it is impossible to categorize. They've had fifty years now to develop freedom for its practitioners. Films are slowly reaching that point too. But literature isn't heading so quickly to that chaotic pinnacle.

Phoebe: I love peer editing. Everything I write is reviewed by a good dozen close friends. I suffer no illusions about my writing. I like to think perhaps at forty I might bee as good as Joyce was at that age; but I realize that means I have an entire lifetime's worth of hard work and humility ahead of me to reach that.

A professional editor can show me how I'm shit. One did for me when I was thirteen; I'm forever in her debt. But I refuse one anyway. I'd rather learn to edit for myself. Same reason I produce my own music and handle post-production for my films. I care about the entire process, start to finish.

When I published my novel, I shared it to Reddit and SomethingAwful. Hundreds of people jumped on it and ripped it to shreds. In January, when I wrote an article that was seeing ten thousand hits a day, I got similarly beaten up. I've seen my writing criticized and discussed by an exhilarating number of bright, passionate people. That's the process I love.

I submit that I am different from your students. Not because I was born with any particular gift (and I can assure you I was not), but because I've received nearly a decade now of vicious, uncaring criticism from half a hundred different communities. When I was thirteen I was a talented mediocrity. At sixteen I could wreak out the occasional impressive moment. At nineteen I'm occasionally satisfied with things I write. And the better I get, the wider audience I find myself. All without converting to any particular taste or desire beyond my own stubborn taste. And despite that stubbornness I can publish whenever I feel the impulse.

I think that's a medium that better suits the individual who wants to create but also cares about being good at creation. If he's not allowed to fuck up, he suffers for it. And he suffers when the game obeys any arbitrary rules other than his own.

I'd rather be shit than be not in charge of my work.
posted by Rory Marinich at 3:41 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

There's no transparent, simple process there by which a prospective writer can end up with a published novel. And that's what's needed.

In every other industry there's a culture of enthusiastic amateurism. It's gotten to the point where the indie music/film culture completely dominates a certain part of the market. And in the literary world you have that for short stories and poetry, but not so much for novels. And I think that the relative impenetrability of the literary industry has a lot to do with that. It has a way of killing enthusiasm.

I started to type out a whole long response, but really I just want to say this: though publishing in the US is still a walled garden, the process for entering that garden isn't exactly kept a huge industry secret, particularly in the modern age of agent and editor blogs. You write a novel, edit it, and query the hell out of it until you get an agent. Then your agent goes on submission to editors. If it doesn't sell, you write another book. There are plenty of published writers on metafilter (not me, incidentally) who have done just that, and plenty of people scattered around the internet who are absolutely enthusiastic about it. And there are people doing avant garde shit in mainstream publishing, too (Danielewski and Padgett Powell come immediately to mind. And, hey, metafilter's own Johnny Dale, who both has an agent and is doing an internet serial novel.). Anyway, if your complaint is that not everyone can break through those barriers, well, then, I guess I understand even if I don't particularly agree. I've been chatted up by a few too many absolutely crazypants (and bad) self-published authors to feel like it's a particular tragedy that they haven't been embraced by mainstream publishing.

Not that all self-published authors are crazypants or bad. The ones I've met have been, though.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 4:37 PM on July 31, 2010

Justinian, I didn't give a fuck about readers. I wanted to publish a fucking book. A smart industry would give me resources to publish and sell nothing.

Ahh. I see.

I think you're way off-base, then. There always have been plenty of people perfectly happy to print books for you. Publishers are not about helping people to publish, they're about helping readers to find books they want to read. Your position is apparently that nobody should help people find books they want to read.

Why do you have a problem with both people willing to publish anything at all (which have always existed) and traditional publishers both existing? Most people would argue that the latter are far more useful than the former, and they'd be right.
posted by Justinian at 5:01 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]