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.