What Is the Business of Literature?

By Richard Nash

As technology disrupts the business model of traditional publishers, the industry must imagine new ways of capturing the value of a book.

One of the remarkable deficits in contemporary accounts of both book publishing and Internet business is sociohistorical awareness. That it should be so with the Internet is unsurprising, prone as so many popular tech commentators are to triumphalist or progressive teleologies—one technology replacing another, one company killing another, IBM’s dominance unquestioned, then Microsoft’s unquestionable, followed in turn by AOL, MySpace, Facebook, etc. The implacability of Moore’s law is extrapolated from processing power to the social order. Similarly, most current discussions of the book economy rarely reach back earlier than the Golden Era of American publishing in the 1950s, the British one dating back perhaps a little farther, to the 1930s.

While many histories of the book incorporate serious empirical research—Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is an epic example—three have arguably done the best job in applying that rigor to contemporary publishing: J. B. Thompson’s The Merchants of Culture; Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print, a series of case studies with particular focus on retail; and Laura Miller’s Reluctant Capitalists, which was almost purely about the retail side. Most other accounts of the contemporary business of literature are autobiographical, hagiographic, or histories of literature, avoiding the business and economics of it all. So why study a business that is sui generis, that isn’t even really a business—that, like America, is exceptional?

It is the Exceptionalists, the ones who claim the mantle of defender of the book, who undermine the book by claiming that it is a world unto itself, in need of special protection, that its fragility in the face of the behemoth or barbarian du jour (Amazon, the Internet, comic books, the novel, the printing press, illiteracy, literacy, to name but a handful of purported sources of cultural decline) requires insulation, like the skinny kid kept away from the schoolyard and its bullies. Who are these Exceptionalists?

Click here to read the rest of this story

Books aren’t dead yet

Self-publishing fans and the tech-obsessed keep getting it wrong: Big authors want to be in print — and bookstores

By Laura Miller

Without a doubt, book publishing is an industry in a state of flux, but even the nature of the flux is up for grabs. Take a recent example of the traditional tech-journalism take on the situation, an article by Evan Hughes for Wired magazine, titled “Book Publishers Scramble to Rewrite Their Future.” The facts in the story are indisputable, but the interpretation? Not so much.

The news peg is the success of a self-published series of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels, “Wool,” by Hugh Howey. Available as e-books and print books from Amazon, the series became a hit, and Howey recently sold print-only rights to a New York publisher, Simon & Schuster. Print-only because Howey and his agent determined that they were making plenty of money selling the e-books on their own.

Wired characterizes this as a “huge concession” on the part of Simon & Schuster, and in one sense it is: The publisher won’t receive any e-book revenue, and it is in e-book format that “Wool” has seen its success so far. On the other hand, “Wool” is not only already very popular among the genre fans who made it an e-book bestseller, it’s also an object of curiosity for the many otherwise-uninterested people captivated by Howey’s rags-to-riches story in the Wall Street Journal. (By far the best-selling e-book by self-publishing exemplar John Locke is not one of his thrillers, but “How I Sold One Million E-Books.”)

Yes, it’s notable that Simon & Schuster shelled out a six-figure advance for this deal, but publishers have been known to offer similar advances for books that they only hope will find a large audience. “Wool” is that rare thing in book publishing, a known quantity, and a series on top of that, so there are multiple titles to sell.There is surely a sizable untapped market for print editions of “Wool” because e-books remain only 25 percent of the book market.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Barbara Pym gets rediscovered — again

From Paula Fox to Richard Yates, literary rediscoveries are in vogue. The latest model is wry satirist Barbara Pym

By Laura Miller

It sometimes seems there are two schools of enjoyable fiction. In one, the fate of the world hangs in the balance: There’s running and shooting on the low-brow end of this spectrum, and scheming and intrigue higher up. In the other school, the stakes are low — in fact, that’s a key to its appeal. Making this latter sort of fiction work is infinitely more difficult, but the author who pulls it off, especially if he or she is funny, can command a fearsomely loyal readership. Barbara Pym is one of those authors.

Born a solicitor’s daughter in the West Midlands of England in 1913, educated at Oxford, serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service during World War II and working for much of the rest of her life at the International African Institute in London, Pym was a quintessential middle-class Englishwoman, much like her idol, Jane Austen. Like Austen, Pym wrote comedies of manners about the members of her own class, modeling the characters on people she knew. Her novels are populated by vicar’s wives, dotty unmarried sisters living in rural villages, holders of mid-level office jobs in sleepy London concerns and assorted anthropologists (based on the ones she met at the institute).

Pym had a modest success with the first six of these novels, publishing during the 1950s, but in the early ’60s, one publisher after another rejected “An Unsuitable Attachment.” She believed this was because her low-key style and unsensational subject matter had gone out of fashion. To a correspondent she conceded that her seventh book “might appear naïve and unsophisticated, though it isn’t really, to an unsympathetic publisher’s reader, hoping for that novel about negro homosexuals, young men in advertising, etc.” She was, probably and typically, right on the nose about that.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Do you truly own your e-books?

Amazon and publisher restrictions control your access, but a bookstore lawsuit could change that

By Laura Miller

To the casual observer, the e-book revolution has produced two bumper crops: smutty trilogies à la “Fifty Shades of Grey” and lawsuits. First there were the authors (as represented by the Authors Guild), who sued Google Books for digitizing their work without permission. Then the Department of Justice sued five publishers and Apple for adopting a policy known as the agency model. Finally, a trio of independent booksellers filed a class-action suit last week against the six largest book publishers and Amazon, accusing them of collaborating to create a monopoly on e-book sales and shutting small retailers out of the market.

The booksellers — Fiction Addiction of Greenville, S.C., Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, N.Y., and Posman Books of New York City — are demanding the right to sell what they term “open-source and DRM-free” e-books, files that can be read on a Kindle or any other e-reading device. The publishers are accused of entering into “confidential agreements” with Amazon making this impossible.

The dispute and the situation that fostered it are confusing, and it can be difficult to suss out how either one affects readers. To put it simply: The Big Six publishers require that all their copyrighted e-books be sold with DRM (digital rights management) protection. DRM is coding designed to prevent the people who buy an e-book from making copies of it. A Kindle will only support DRM-protected books that are in a format that Amazon owns and that only Amazon can sell.

 

Click here to read the rest of this story

Sorry, the short story boom is bogus

Clockwise from top left, Junot Díaz, Amber Dermont, Nathan Englander, George Saunders

The New York Times touts the Internet’s role in reviving interest in short fiction. Too bad it’s not true

By Laura Miller

The short story, like the western, is periodically said to be on the brink of a comeback. The most recent example of this boosterism: an article by the New York Times’ new(ish) publishing reporter, Leslie Kaufman, titled “Good Fit for Today’s Little Screens: Short Stories,” in which “a proliferation of digital options” is said to offer short fiction “not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.”

This would be good news — if there were any reason at all to think it was true. Kaufman’s only evidence for this imaginary renaissance is the success of George Saunders’ story collection, “The Tenth of December,” published earlier this year and currently hovering in the middle ranks of several prominent best-seller lists. Saunders’ longtime fans (I count myself among them) have reason to celebrate this, but it really has nothing to do with “digital options.” Saunders has built a devoted following over the past 17 years, hadn’t published a book in a good while and — most important of all — was heralded in the headline of a long, radiant profile in the New York Times Magazine as producing “the best book you’ll read this year.” All of that could have happened 10, 20 or 30 years ago and produced the same result.

Kaufman goes on to marvel at the “unusually rich crop of short-story collections” published (or about to be published) this year. Some, “tellingly,” are even written by “best-selling novelists”! This is all the more astonishing to her since “publishers and authors tend to be wary of short-story collections because of the risk of being critically overlooked and, worse, lower sales.”

Click here to read the rest of this story

Bring back shushing librarians

Library users plead for quiet places to read, write and study — but is anybody listening?

By Laura Miller

Librarians hate to be depicted as bun- and glasses-wearing shushers, hellbent on silencing any and all noisy activities within their sacred domain. Fair enough: Librarians are highly skilled, well-educated and socially aware as a rule, and should not be reduced to a cultural stereotype ranking only a notch or two above a church lady on the hipness scale.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to be said for that shushing. I’ve long believed that one of the most precious resources libraries offer their patrons is simple quiet. Alas, for too long I’ve been forced to confine this sentiment to bar-stool rants because for all I knew I was being hopelessly retrograde. Libraries are constantly talking up the new — and often clamorous — services and activities they have added or plan to add in order to “better serve a diverse community” (and by extension, justify their continued funding in the eyes of public officials who like to appear forward-thinking). But take heart, seekers of serenity, for now we have data!

Click here to read the rest of this story

A prestige-free zone

J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer and Suzanne Collins

The reason why women writers dominate young-adult literature is the reason why many guys avoid it

By Laura Miller

The prototypical YA (Young Adult, i.e., early teen) novel “The Catcher in the Rye” may have been written by the late, reclusive and definitely male J.D. Salinger, but nowadays, YA — like Elvis on “Happy Days” — is a chick thing. So says Meghan Lewit in a recent post to the Atlantic’s website, and she has the numbers to prove it, sort of: A little over half of the titles in a reader poll of the 100 “best-ever teen novels” are by women. This counts as “dominance” because in almost every other poll of best-ever books (whatever the category), works by men greatly outnumber those by women.

Ask anyone in the book business if Lewit is right, and they’ll probably agree; with a few exceptions, the most successful and prominent contemporary YA writers are women. Furthermore, the cultural infrastructure supporting their books — from agents and editors to librarians, teachers and that formidable new force in the YA world, bloggers — is predominantly female. Some observers blame this state of affairs for the drop-off in boys’ reading habits as they reach their teens; it’s a system ill-suited to producing books that will interest boys, they argue. But if YA has indeed become a gynocracy, few ask why.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Are literary classics obsolete?

(Credit: Salon)

A new study says today’s writers are influenced by authors of the present, not the past

By Laura Miller

You have only to look at the one-star reviews given to classic novels on Amazon.com to recognize that quite a few contemporary readers find these immortal works of literature unreadable. Stories that don’t begin with a Hollywood-style bang or that skimp on action are dismissed as “boring.” Subtleties of character and context are overlooked. But more than anything else, the one-star brigade hates the prose of the past. Any writer whose sentences contain multiple clauses typically gets labeled “wordy” or “flowery” (a term that only seems to be used by people who don’t know what it means).

Surely only ignoramuses and resentful students slogging through their required reading feel this way, right? Not according to a new study led by the chair of the mathematics department at Dartmouth College, Professor Daniel Rockmore. In “Quantitative Patterns of Stylistic Influence in the Evolution of Literature,” an article published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even today’s literary writers have little use for the classics. They are, the study asserts, much more influenced by their peers than they are by the most revered authors of earlier centuries. And these researchers, being mathematicians, have the numbers to prove it.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Stories don’t need morals or messages

(Credit: iStockphoto/Yayayoyo via Shutterstock)

A “stupid” test shows that the Puritan ethic lives on. Why do we insist on learning lessons from the books we read?

By Laura Miller

What is the purpose of reading stories, especially made-up stories? That’s the question lurking behind a recent posting to the New York Times’ education blog, SchoolBook. Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols, the parents of twins, wrote about taking their kids’ third-grade English Language Arts test with some friends as a party game on New Year’s Eve. The group read an inane little story about tiger cubs learning to tear bark off logs, but, to their surprise, couldn’t agree on a single answer to the multiple choice question that followed: “What is this story mostly about?”

Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students “a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.” The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a “banal” story like this tiger-cub number admits “multiple interpretations,” and the prod to “reduce the work to a single idea” does a disservice to both reader and text.

Click here to read the rest of this story

The death of the celebrity memoir

(Credit: sgame via Shutterstock)

We can thank Snooki for something: Finally, this annoying publishing trend looks like it is fizzling out.

By Laura Miller

In a recent essay for the Daily Beast, Michael Korda, the storied former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, warned the public to stay away from celebrity memoirs, decrying the majority of these books as “dull, homogenized, bland and sanitized.” He ought to know, for as he goes on to explain, he spent much of his professional life trying to persuade movie stars to write their autobiographies. (One of the ironies here is that Korda, while a celebrity only in the book world — which means not much of a celebrity at all — is famous for writing divertingly about almost any topic, including himself. This piece is no exception.)

A growing awareness of this truth might explain why sales of celebrity memoirs have fallen off of late. According to the Guardian newspaper in Britain, a whole raft of celebrity-authored books tanked in the U.K. last year. In the U.S., as well, there have been several notable failures, particularly by cast members from the reality TV show “Jersey Shore.” Could the public finally be wising up?

Of course, the cause might just be the low caliber of the celebrities in question. I didn’t recognize any of the names the Guardian held up as fizzling memoirists — except for Alan Partridge, who isn’t even a real person. “I, Partridge” was in fact written by the actor-writer-director Steve Coogan, who created the character of Partridge for a television series parodying B-list chat-show hosts and other effluvia of the media world. His book is a parody of celebrity memoirs, and reportedly the only “significant” title in a genre whose sales have dropped 60 percent in the past year.

However, I suspect it’s mostly just wishful thinking that has some observers pegging the celebrity memoir as a fading trend. It’s hard for me to say for sure, though, because I seem to have a much lower than average interest in the people who write them. To be honest, apart from a couple of episodes of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” back when it first came out, I’ve never watched a reality TV show. (My feeling is that if I’m going to be entertained, I’ll go to professionals.) So I still don’t really know who Snooki is, and when I asked friends and acquaintances to fill me in around the time her book came out, they all said. “You’re lucky. You’re much better off not knowing.”

Click here to read the rest of this story