Why Am I So Negative About Traditional Book Publishing? by Dean Wesley Smith

"Traditional book publishing with thousands of publishers worked pretty well from 1960 to 1995 and then it just fell apart. Those good years are where the myths built up. Now in the last 30 years, traditional publishing and its four publishers has become a sad little echo of the thousands of publishers that came before."

Full article here. 

One of the commentators to the above post (Steve Perry) wrote: "Trad-pub peaked, I think, just before the Great Recession of 2007-2009, that took with it the traditional publishing midlist and the careers of a shitload of writers." 

I have to join in and say this entirely mirrors my own experience. The midlist (the place for quirky interesting books, often nonfiction) started dying around 1995, when all the mainstream publishing went fishing for potential bestsellers, leaving everything else behind.  University presses tried to pick up the slack, but what they pay is risible, so most authors sensibly didn't go that route. 

With the 2007-2009 crash, all publishers tightened their purse strings, and pushed a lot of good writers, who didn't sell according to bestseller standards, out of the marketplace. Within a few years, a writer had to be a heavy self-promoter (on all the social medias) to get a publisher in New York to listen to their proposals, and publishing decisions increasingly were ruled by the marketing departments, who nixed everyone without large a social media presence. It really has become depressing: why do all the work so that a publisher can take all the rights and the money (throwing pennies toward the author), dumbing something down in order to appeal to idiots?  I speak of course of the non-fiction market. If publishers treated writers fairly, I'd have a lot more entries in my bibliography.  As it stands, it's just not worth all the effort. 

 

 

 

Seen at a bookstore in New Orleans

 courtesy of a friend:

 

 

Fractured Fairy Tales: A Twisted Look at George MacDonald's Princess books

As a child I loved the series of "Fractured Fairy Tales," animated shorts narrated by Edward Everett Horton, which appeared as part of The Bullwinkle and Rocky Show in the 1960s. Generally they were twists on known classic fairy tales, but I recently happened upon one that takes on George MacDonald's  two children's books, The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883). It's delightful, and surprising in the particular aspects of MacDonald's books that it keeps! Enjoy. 

 

The most astonishingly productive historian in recent times is someone you’ll never meet

"No living American historian is as prolific as Blake Whiting. In one week alone last fall, he published 13 books on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects . . ."

 More AI theft.  The full story is here:  "Who Is Blake Whiting?"  

"AI projects designed to pose as real researchers, set in motion by unethical humans, with the cooperation of a powerful corporation, are now capable of fooling even careful bibliophiles." 

Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania, by Ed Simon

 A few snippets:

Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. 

Those who agree with [Alberto] Manguel that “Unpacking books is a revelatory activity” are lonely without this crowd of paper bodies; they understand how the cover is a flesh, the binding a nervous system, the chapters as organs, sentences veins, and the words the very blood that circulates meaning.

Enjoy your e-reader all you want, but a soul without a body is just a ghost, apt to suddenly flicker out of existence.

 Read the full article at Literary Hub.  

 

There Are Too Many Overweight Biographies, by Joseph Epstein

I have been reading Joseph Epstein's essays (collected in many books) for over thirty years--not always with agreement, but always with interest and illumination. His new essay "There Are Too Many Overweight Biographies", in the September 2020 issue of Commentary, is a good example.  Read it here.  One small observation:

 [There is] a new trend in publishing: accounts of the writing and publication of other books.

Strangely, I find myself currently engaged in just this sort of thing, in preparing my talk for Oxonmoot on "Humphrey Carpenter on Tolkien: Then and Now (Fifty Years Later)"  

Read in Order to Live

I found the below by accident, bouncing around the web, but the sentiment is perfectly good. 

It reminds me of a book I read about 45 years ago: The Illusionless Man: Fantasies and Meditations on Disillusionment (1966) by Allen Wheelis. Wheelis (1915-2007) was a noted San Francisco psychotherapist who also wrote stories, essays and novels. Most are of a pessimistic cast, and have frequent epigrammatic delights ("One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles" p. 132). 

The Illusionless Man is a collection of six items, four fantasies and two meditations. The one story that stayed with me the most is "The Signal" which concerns a man at a fortune cookie factory who starts writing original fortunes and becomes a notable success (while the recipe for the cookies remains unaltered). It seems like a good time for a re-read.

An Interview with Douglas A. Anderson by G. Connor Salter

A new interview with me, on "Excavating the Inklings and Little-Known Authors," is online at the Fellowship & Fairydust site, here.  

Dunsany Castle and the current Lord Dunsany

There is a new two-hour documentary titled Quintessentially Irish (2024) in which the current Lord Dunsany appears about a dozen times, discussing several things from his great grandfather to his own experience of watching a marriage scene in Braveheart being filmed by Mel Gibson at Dunsany Castle. He also discusses his re-wilding of part of the Dunsany land, and there are a number of interesting scenes showing both the inside and outside of Dunsany Castle. The documentary as a whole is much less interesting, framed by the self-aggrandizing reminiscences of a doddering Pierce Brosnan. It seems at most times to be a superficial advertisement for anything Irish.

The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction

I would substitute "literature" for "literary fiction" in the title of this short article by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings from Persuasion, but a lot of what it says about the state of publishing in the 21st century is spot on. Witness:

Mirroring many other American industries, publishing has followed the path of consolidation, starting when Random House bought Knopf in 1960. What followed was a fifty-year feeding frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, when Random House and Penguin merged, we were left with today’s “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. 

And I'm not sure I see much hope in the current situation--certainly not for the writers who expect to be paid for their work. Small presses may be good for getting publication, but the terms are unpropitious. 

The full article can be found here.

The Expensive Business of Quoting Poetry

Sam Leith ruminates on the unsettled "rules" and sometimes ridiculous costs to quoting poetry in a work of nonfiction. The article is here at The Spectator.  Below are a few snippets. 

It was both a courtesy and the right thing to do to seek permission to quote their work. . . . But the A.A. Milne estate was asking what seemed to me a crazy amount of money to quote a single couplet from that poem about Christopher Robin saying his prayers – and my publishers advised me, if I didn’t want to pay, to snip it out. Which I did. The rights holders for another author of verse, who shall remain nameless here, not only asserted that ‘fair dealing’ legislation – the provision that allows you to quote without permission – didn’t apply to their author but claimed an absolute right of veto on any quotation for ebooks or audio.

Poetry, I was told, is very dangerous. Not as dangerous as pop lyrics (everyone agrees that they are ‘a nightmare’. . .) – but much riskier than prose.

The problem here is not exactly the law. The problem is that nobody wants to test the law. As media lawyer David Hooper put it when I asked him: ‘Copyright law is distinctly unpredictable and expensive to litigate, which puts the copyright holders in quite a strong position.’

Centenary Folio Society Edition of Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter

I recently learned that the Folio Society has published an illustrated centenary edition of The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. Illustrated by Julie Dillon, and with an Introduction by Erin Morgenstern, and a reprinted introduction (from the 1999 Ballantine trade paperback edition) by Neil Gaiman. 

The Folio Society webpage for the book includes a 50 second video highlighting the production. It can be seen here. 

While the artist is clearly very talented, I confess her visions for the novel do not particularly appeal to me. 

A Reviewer's Life

A few extracts from an interesting article by Christine Smallwood, on "A Reviewer's Life: The Material Constraints of Writing Criticism Today":

Newspaper book reviews have been contracting for decades, and while magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic cover books, the hourly rate on a piece, once you do the calculation, is dismal. “Little” magazines and online reviews are wonderful for the culture, but no one could pay the rent writ­ing for those outlets alone. If you have a secure academic job and write reviews on the side, it’s nice work. For the freelancer—I am one—it’s a foolish undertaking. As Russell Jacoby noted nearly forty years ago, one reason there are not more full-time freelance writers is that most take staff writer positions or university jobs or quit writing altogether.

Writing a review is the best, maybe the only, way I can discover what I think. I don’t come to reviewing with my ideas already formed; I have to build them, sentence by sentence. For me, writing a review is a way of getting closer to an object, taking it apart to understand how it works.

Criticism is a conversation—with oneself but also with one’s editors, with readers, and with other reviewers. There is something hopeful about writing a review. It’s like putting a message in a bottle or sending up a flare. . . . Who knows where the person who will read the piece is sitting?

Read the full article in the Summer 2024 issue of The Yale Review, accessible here.

The Adaptation Tango

 George R.R. Martin has written:

Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.”   It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone.   No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it.   “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound.   Then they make the story their own.

They never make it better, though.   Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.

Amen to that.  The full blog post is here.

Literary Blogs from the Golden Age to the (Diminished) Present

"If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging. Even with the current unsettled circumstances in both internet publishing and social media (publishers keep going out of business, social media keeps fragmenting), I do not expect that litblogging as we knew it at the beginning will make any kind of significant comeback. Which is not to say that blogging will not survive, just that it won't again have the same king of salience to the direction literary culture takes as it briefly did in the nascent days of the blogosphere. Bloggers will have to be satisfied with a medium that offers limited reach but allows them maximum freedom and infinite space to say what they have to say at whatever length, and perhaps find an audience who wants to hear it. This may be the most invaluable promise the blog made to writers in the first place."

 Read the full essay "What Hath the Blog Wrought?" by Daniel Green here. 

Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature

Jonah Winter's article, "Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature," published on 5 February 2024 in The Wall Street Journal, is a sad story of the state of publishing today.

"Children's publishers now live in fear of these activists, terrified of showing up on their radar with a book or author that could be deemed “problematic”—meaning out of alignment with the activists' puritanical code. According to that code, an author's identity must match a book's subject matter. Further, certain books can harm children, the activists believe, and books they deem harmful must be removed. If that sounds similar to the right-wing activists' mission, it's because it is. The only difference is that while right-wing activists merely want certain books removed from particular schools, left-wing activists want the books they target annihilated."

The full article is here, but probably behind a paywall. Jonah Winter has also done a picture book for children (with artist Gary Kelley) on a related topic. It's called Banned Book. Worth a look, and worth supporting.

Lord Dunsany's The Curse of the Wise Woman

The Dublin Review of Books has an interesting article by Robin Wilkinson on Lord Dunsany, particularly covering The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). It is titled "Dunsany's Careless Abundance" and is available here. 

A snippet:

In his autobiographical Patches of Sunlight (1938), Dunsany recalls the day he discovered the tales of Edgar Allan Poe in the school library, and straightway read them all, enthralled by ‘the haunted desolation and weird gloom of the misty mid-region of Weir’. He salutes his American cousin once again in The Curse of the Wise Woman, which includes Poe’s description of ‘soulless dissipation’ at Eton, the English boarding school that Poe himself did not attend, although as it happens both Charles [a character in The Curse of the Wise Woman] and Dunsany did. The passage he quotes is taken from William Wilson, Poe’s doppelgänger tale of a young man of noble ancestry haunted by his unrelated twin, a second self who follows him everywhere, much as Charles follows in the footsteps of his creator.

How Authorship Has Changed

There is a new article up at The New Yorker, on "How Has Big Publishing Changed American Fiction" by Kevin Lozano. It's a kind of slanted take on a new book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, by Dan Sinykin.  I haven't seen Sinykin's book yet (though I've read excerpts and reviews), but I look forward to reading it, as it gives a pretty good analysis of how authorship has been changed by the totality of corporate bean-counters, much to its detriment. This aspect is little understood by readers in general, and by anyone outside the industry.

The article notes the following:

Before conglomeration, Sinykin asserts, writing a book “was a completely different experience.” Once, a would-be novelist’s chances of being published depended on “how easily you could get your book in the right editor’s hands.” As the number of those involved in publication expanded, authors had to meet new criteria. “Could marketers see a market? What would the chain bookbuyers think? Could publicists picture your face on TV, your voice on the radio? Could agents sniff subsidiary rights? Would foreign rights sell at the Frankfurt Book Fair? Might your story be remediated? Would it work in audio? On the big screen?”

Sinykin calls authors who successfully navigated the maze of agents, marketers, and booksellers “industrial writers.” This group includes chart-topping genre writers, such as Danielle Steel, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King, and also literary novelists who managed to work within the new system. 

The full article is here (though it might be blocked by a paywall). 

A.I. and the Writer

 A long and very interesting essay by Adam L.G. Nevill about the future for writers and the threats of A.I. 

Let's say that future AI software becomes sophisticated enough to write a new novel by Tolkien. Then, surely, there will be attempts to upload and sell the myriad results of new stories "in-the-style-of" [add any popular author's name], produced by the technology and its so called "authors" and "publishers". And immediately. 

 Read the full version here.

Don't Try This At Home!

Here's a publisher's advertisement from 1933.  Why anyone would think this a good way to advertise books is beyond me.