A Few Thoughts
A few thoughts knocking around inside my head:
* No matter how much being a full-time writer sometimes sucks, I really, really like that I don’t have to work retail right now unless I choose to. I do volunteer at a bookstore (Cover to Cover Books in beautiful Uptown Vancouver, come and see us!) but I don’t have to deal with the General Public every day. As someone who has worked a lot of retail, this pleases me a great deal. Which is why I find this so amusing. Anyone who works retail or food service need a huge sense of humor and more endurance than Job.
* There’s a special place in hell for those who steal books. That being said, the Tome Raider is a huge plot bunny. My steampunky forensic sorceress and her two sidekicks (one of them a Sherlock-Holmesian master of observation and deduction) could SO use this story.
* Some thoughts on the “democratization of slush” that digital and self-publishing is opening up.
You’ve either experienced slush or you haven’t, and the difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the vast majority of it is. Civilians who kvetch about the bad writing of Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer or any other hugely popular but critically disdained novelist can talk as much trash as they want about the supposedly low standards of traditional publishing. They haven’t seen the vast majority of what didn’t get published — and believe me, if you have, it’s enough to make your blood run cold, thinking about that stuff being introduced into the general population.
Everybody acknowledges that there have to be a few gems out in the slush pile — one manuscript in 10,000, say — buried under all the dreck. The problem lies in finding it. A diamond encased in a mountain of solid granite may be truly valuable, but at a certain point the cost of extracting it exceeds the value of the jewel. With slush, the cost is not only financial (many publishers can no longer afford to assign junior editors to read unsolicited manuscripts) but also — as is less often admitted — emotional and even moral.
It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters — not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés — for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that’s almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn’t been there themselves: Call it slush fatigue. You walk in the door pledging your soul to literature, and you walk out with a crazed glint in your eyes, thinking that the Hitler Youth guy who said, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver” might have had a point after all. Recovery is possible, but it’ll take a while (apply liberal doses of F. Scott Fitzgerald). In the meantime, instead of picking up every new manuscript with an open mind and a tiny nibbling hope, you learn to expect the worst. Because almost every time, the worst is exactly what you’ll get. Laura Miller, Salon
Oh, God. SO TRUE.
* This brings me to another train of thought: people are once again yelling wildly that digital and self-publishing are nails in the coffin of trad publishing. Um, no. One of the things very few people who sound off about this realize is that digital publishing, (most of) self-publishing, and e-readers largely presuppose a number of things:
-an infrastructure to deliver Internet service
-disposable income/sweat equity to pay for some aspects of self-publishing, and definitely to pay for marketing
-access to or disposable income to buy Internet service
-access to a computer or the disposable income to buy a computer
-access to or the disposable income to buy an e-reader
-that the quality control a trad publisher delivers (editing, copyediting, art departments, proofing, production values) Doesn’t Count
I’m not saying that digital or self-publishing is bad. Far from. I just don’t think a lot of the underpinning assumptions beneath grand sweeping statements about the Death of Trad Publishing or about how Trad Publishers Are Keeping Quality From The Masses are founded on any kind of reality. Plenty of people who are very vocal in this discussion don’t realize that the Internet and e-readers aren’t ubiquitous, it just feels like they are if you have access and income enough to take advantage of them. Self-published successes, or so-called “digital” successes, are still the exception rather than the rule, and trad publishing has better resources and a better track record at this point in time. Trad publishing also makes books available to a vast mass of people who aren’t privileged enough to be plugged in. Sherman Alexie made this point not too long ago:
Having grown up poor, I’m also highly aware that there’s always a massive technology gap between rich and poor kids. I haven’t yet heard what Amazon plans to do about this potential technology gap. And that’s a vital question considering that Bezos wants to change the way we read books. How does he plan to change the way that poor kids read books? How does he plan to make sure that poor kids have access to the technology? Poor kids all over the country don’t have access to current textbooks, so will they have access to Kindle? Sherman Alexie, Edrants
I have very mixed feelings about ebooks. Part of this is because I’m very in love with the sensuous experience of reading a physical book–the smell of the paper, the feel of the pages. Partly because used bookstores and libraries were my salvation before the Internet existed, they were my salvation when I was too poor for a high-speed connection or indeed any connection at all, and they still continue to be the places I patronize when looking for books, because I don’t want to spend the money on an e-reader and deal with the hassle of platform changes, technology burps, and the distributor deciding to take things off my private electronic device even after I’ve paid for them–I could go on and on.
A greater part of my mixed feelings about ebooks comes from the fact that I can look at torrenting sites and see people stealing my work. (Mike Briggs addresses this eloquently in his Copyright And Free piece.) Maybe my books are shoplifted from brick-and-mortars, I don’t know. But I can look and see them being stolen online, and that irritates me.
Now I’ve got some more fiction to commit. Like I said, these are just some thoughts knocking around inside my head today. Make of them what you will, and play nice in comments.
See you around.
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Tags: about me, books, linkspam!, shooting from the hip, slight pause for station identification
June 24th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
It pisses me off to when people pirate ebooks because yall work so hard to give us great products and the least we could do is pay a little .
June 24th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
Agreed!
And if you want to read a book, and don’t have the money to buy, or something. There is this wonderful thing called LIBRARY. And they are awesome! So don’t take from the people who work hard for these things. Just saying.
And I laughed so hard at the book retail thing.
June 24th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Maybe I’m missing something here, but while I’m an avid fan of ebooks and plan to both self-pub and do my best to get trad pubbed…I just don’t see why it has to be one or the other. There are strengths and weaknesses to both self and traditional publishing…but I think a lot of people who self-publish will decide it’s too much work for not enough profit in the end (especially if they aren’t willing to do the marketing, and be patient…two things many writers already complain about). If self-pubbed books aren’t well written & edited, they won’t sell…and I doubt those authors will keep trying if it’s not profitable for them. I could be wrong though.
I’m under no illusions that I’ll be able to make a living self-publishing books, which is why I’m also pursuing traditional publication. Self-pub will allow me to publish books that might not quite fit in a specific genre, traditional publishing will give me credibility within the writing community and much wider distribution. Between the two, I might be able to quit the day job eventually. Win win, IMO. It doesn’t have to be either/or.
June 24th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Yes! – especially the part about the gap between poor & rich in tech. I don’t have money for a Kindle (or any of the equivalents). Frankly I’m not sure it would be worth the investment anyway with tech changing so much but even so, I don’t want to support the idea of exclusive access – it’s like (yet another) a club for the rich. My priority is keeping my computer being able to receive the internet – not just in service but upgrades! I often can’t see sites without upgrading now and it’s only a matter of time before my little computer can’t handle it – even though it’s only 5 years old (2nd hand). I can’t see myself affording a new computer in a year or even 2. What do I do then? Nothing replaces the holdable written bound word for me. It’s a multi sensory experience and it stays put! No upgrades required to re-read what I bought etc
While I agree yay for self-publishing options & other ways to creatively attain ones writerly goals, there will always be people who advertise they offer ‘quality’ over the masses – something I want when I’m going to spend my hard-earned and precious few $. Right now that’s Publishers, in the future it will be another form of the same thing.
I should note that even though I’m very $ challenged I simply don’t understand people pirating ebooks. If they love the stories, why don’t they support the authors to ensure they get MORE stories? They’re shooting themselves in the foot but forward thinking doesn’t seem to be a popular pursuit these days. Just complaints about ‘now’ and ‘my rights’. In order to have my rights I have to allow others their rights or it doesn’t work.
It seems people – usually people who can afford it – want more for free, like it’s a right. As a result authors are having to spend more and more time in para-activities to make sure their real work isn’t lost. This seems like a set-up for burn-out to me.
I’ll keep writing (thank goodness paper still works! So too, my computer when it’s not connected to the net! LOL) and I’ll keep reading however I can. If I sell more, great. If not I’ll still write. I don’t have an answer to the questions except to keep writing and reading. The ‘playing field’ was never level – never will be.
June 24th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
special place in hell for those who steal books
the real crime aside from the thefts, is that he was selling the books he stole, not keeping the Precious! for himself.
June 25th, 2010 at 4:47 am
Why I believe digital publishing in the death of traditional publishing:
The internet is about getting content out efficiently, which means it is its not unexpected for a high noise to signal ratio with content. But as the blogosphere has shown, just because everyone has a blog does not mean everyone is read. As publishing house can seem pretentious with the tone of their writer guidelines, it is also easy for the amateur blogger to feel isolated and frustrated with the number of their handful readers when others have 1000s. Sort of like having ones novel relegated to sale at dollar store retail. Only difference being the amount of paper that is not wasted on slush.
Regardless of the mechanism of delivery is– a multimillion dollar operation or a PDF fed over the ether to some gray screen device. Content will still be refined, marketed, and published. What won’t make sense is delivering it on paper. Economy of scale can be achieved without having a huge machination controlling each individual pawn in the publishing value chain. The issue with publishing houses is the centralization of perceived talent both in authors and operations staff like copy editors, marketers, etc. Freelance publishing consisting of multiple non-institutionalized players is coming and the internet will form the backbone of their business model.