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. 

Collecting Books

"Our literary past is under assault. Trigger warnings are being slapped on reissued classics. Long-dead writers are being called out for offending contemporary sensibilities. And sensitivity readers are relentlessly filleting books of anything that upsets their identitarian worldview."

So begins Philip Kiszely's essay "Collecting Old Books Is Now a Radical Act." It pinpoints a real problem, but Kiszely's solution is too passive and even silly--we must react, he says,  by collecting such books. Well, not only that, but there needs to be a vocal resistance. 

The Books That Made Me, by Penelope Lively

I enjoyed this essay, "The Books That Made me" by Penelope Lively. It has some nice insights.  It appeared at Unherd--the link is here.  I post a few quotations from it below.  

Books beget books. Intertextuality, the critics like to call it. I am at the end of a writing life; I just read now. So, the process whereby reading so often became writing is over, for me. It has been an almost unconscious process, from childhood on: I have read for enjoyment, for instruction, for education — but most of all in the serendipitous way that has supplied the essential prompts for 50 years of writing fiction.

About 3,000 books line the walls of my house. Most of them I shall never read again, but they must stay there. They define me; they remind me that I thought this, was interested in that; they reassure me, as I hurtle towards 90. Occasionally I shed a few books, but to get rid of many of them would be like discarding part of my mind.

Lord Dunsany's Re-Wilding: An Update

A year and a half ago, I noted the current Lord Dunsany, Randal Plunkett (the 21st Baron Dunsany), and his efforts at rewilding a portion of the Dunsany Estate. (The link is here.)  I found a few video updates recently about the continuing process. A short, six-minute one, "Lord of the Wild: Rewilding Dunsany Estate", can be found here.  A longer (22+ minutes) and more in-depth video, "Does Rewilding Work: Measuring Carbon and Biodiversity Gains at Dunsany Castle", can be found here. As an additional enticement to the rewilding study, I can recommend the many views of Dunsany Castle and the surrounding Estate.  Here the 18th Baron Dunsany wrote many masterpieces of fantasy literature.

Horribly low pay is pushing out my fellow authors – and yes, that really does matter

 This article by Joanne Harris is all too true.  The full article is here.  A few choice excerpts follow:

People are being paid less than half a living wage for their creative labour. The ALCS points to this as evidence of a global trend of the “devaluing of creative labour”. I agree – we see it everywhere: in the calls to work for nothing, in the initiatives to offer unfettered free access to creative work, in mass subscription models designed to serve corporations at the expense of creators.

Writing as a profession is becoming inaccessible and unsustainable for too many.