Mario wrote:
> Kevin, sometimes you use such enormous straw men... The crisis in
> publishing is
> real and is not the product of a bunch of whiners who can't achieve
> "success"
> and therefore are jealous of those who sell a lot.
Talk about straw. I never once said any "crisis" was the fault of
anyone.
What I did say was that both Al and Charles offered a refreshingly
clear-eyed view of the role best-sellers play in the industry.
Without the income and fan base and demand generated by best-sellers
(and even good-sellers) in a genre, a lot of these writers would have
even less chance of being published.
In fact, I'm not even sure what the crisis is, exactly, or whose
crisis it is. I'm not sure some writer being turned down by every New
York publisher in the book -- and his subsequent and constant bitching
about it on every list on the internet -- constitutes a crisis.
> The market as a whole is bad,
> meaning smaller number of titles published, smaller advances (or
> none), and so
> on. Who people blame is really beside the point. This is an economic
> issue, a
> trade issue.
But for who?
Book sales have been far more robust and resilient than the naysayers
predicted a few months ago. Yeah, they've definitely dropped, but not
as quickly or as deeply as people feared.
Perhaps the drop in the glorification of ignorance has something to do
with it.
So, what exactly is the crisis? There are still plenty of new books
around and plenty of interest in them (the ongoing, if occasionally
fractious, vitality of this list is proof of that). There are still
plenty of choices. There are new authors coming out every day. There
are more ways than ever to hear about new and re-issued books. And
there are more alternate roads to publication than ever for those
writers who don't have the skill, talent, patience, persistence or
just plain luck to get published by those big bad New York publishers.
So whose crisis is it? And by the way...
If you look at all of publishing (including self-published, POD and e-
books) there is a GREATER number of titles being published than ever.
At least according to PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY. There's a reason why ISBNs
are now 13 digits, not 10 -- and it's not because hardly any books are
being published.
Remember, even THE DISASSEMBLED MAN found a publisher. And even
managed to be discussed on a big-shot crime fiction discussion list.
Thirty, forty, fifty years ago, if it even got published, it might
have sunk without a trace. Like Jim Thompson's did.
(Remember, Jim Thompson was once considered the most unfairly
UNDERRATED crime writer of the last century. It took until the
eighties for most of his books to get back into print, thanks to Black
Lizard. So the "good old days" weren't so good for him. Nobody would
suggest Thompson is underrated now...)
What has changed is that the amount of books being actually purchased
hasn't increased proportionally to the number of titles published. But
the big problem isn't that the money pie isn't getting bigger -- it's
that more and more writers (or people who think they're writers) want
a slice of that same pie, and because of the increased demand for
slices some people aren't getting the size they think they deserve.
Certainly the publishing system as we know it is going through massive
upheavals. I'm not denying that -- working in a bookstore, I see it
every day.
The local bookstore, be it a big chain store or some small indie hole
in the wall, is in danger. The neighbourhood used bookstore is
disappearing quickly -- or already gone in many communities. And
larger traditional publishers may be more picky than ever about who
they'll take a risk on.
But the average reader doesn't necessarily see any of these
developments as a crisis. At least not yet. There'll still be plenty
of books to read, one way or another, whether it's through Costco or
B&N or Amazon or via Kindle. So where's the crisis for them?
It may be the end of the world as we know it, but it's not necessarily
the end of the world. And the "good old days" as fondly remembered by
twenty, thirty and forty year old would-be fictioneers is wishful
thinking, for the most part.
There's no real evidence to suggest they would have been published
then either. Although I'm sure they'll all trot out anecdotal, self-
serving evidence to the contrary.
> I think there is something else going on besides the economic
> collapse of the
> US. There is anecdotal evidence that people are reading less and
> less (books,
> not blog posts and gossip on the Internet). That sounds like an old
> warhorse but
> apparently it is happening. One of my teenage kids was telling me
> that from his
> classmates, only a couple read anything besides the mandatory books
> (and those
> they often avoid reading by using notes). These guys will soon reach
> adulthood
> and they don't know anything (book knowledge isn't the epitome of
> knowing, but
> there is important stuff between covers...).
There's anecdotal evidence to suggest about anything you want.
Especially if you don't think too hard.
How about this one?
The younger generation just now coming up, the TWILIGHT/HARRY POTTER
kids, are far more likely to read actual books than their older
siblings and even their parents. I see it several times a week at the
bookstore where I work. The parents head to the video section or just
stand around waiting impatiently while Junior heads off to the books.
> A telltale sign is that the blockbusters are lesser busters, they
> don't achieve
> the sales numbers of decades ago.
Like television and music, it's the glut of titles and choices that
are more likely to blame. AMERICAN IDOL probably wouldn't even crack
the top ten back in the seventies. Is there a crisis in overall
television viewership as well?
Markets are fragmented. From 3 TV networks we went to 30, then 300,
from 5 Oscar nominees to 10, and the overall number of choices in
film, books, TV, music, etc. continues to multiply even as the over-
all demand remains relatively flat. It's the method of delivery in
most cases that is changing -- not the message.
Something has to give and it's the sales per individual title. The
same pie being sliced ever thinner. The culture itself is no longer
the inclusive, shared culture it once was. almost everything is niche
and cult and sub-sub-genre. We have narrow-casting instead of
broadcasting. The mainstream is disappearing, bombarded by special
interest groups. If the Beatles came out now, they'd probably be a
cult band half of you would never hear of.
And if they did somehow make it big (by appearing on AMERICAN IDOL,
maybe?), the whiners would complain about the Fab Four's success,
because they're too popular, and have contributed to a "blockbuster
mentality" that has destroyed what it was like in the "good old days"...
> So in a way, a perfectly predictable and
> predicted downslide of a society that has access to lots of books
> but actually
> reads little.
Oh, right, the downslide of society. There are so many crises to keep
track of, I keep forgetting about that one.
Kevin Burton Smith
www.thrillingdetective.com
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