around the internet on a tuesday

 I'll be brief, because I have to catch a plane to New York.

More on Japanese cell phone novels from the New Yorker (a) where do I even start? and b) is my blatant loathing of Japan getting funny yet, or is it just weird?).

Here is an article about a book in which really bad and gross things are done to a priest.

Here is an article about a nun.

And now a very special podcast: An American Bookworm in Paris debuts on KCRW!

I don't know if you've been paying attention, but the publishing industry has been laying people off in massive waves. A huge one happened just yesterday at Macmillan, and Random House is planning a bunch more effective in January.  Bad times, people.  Really bad times.  Please go out and buy a book.  (And maybe make it from Powells.)

Mark Tavani, a senior editor at Random House, traces the crisis back to multimedia corporations buying up smaller houses and imprints in the 90s, and to the changes wrought in reading habits by the Internet. But somehow, he doesn't view what's happening as necessarily a bad thing.

Anyway, maybe we contract. Maybe fewer books get published. Maybe some publishing folks have to look elsewhere for a paycheck. I don’t say those things lightly, because I love those books, and I’m one of those publishing folks, and I have a lot of friends in the industry. But on the bright side, maybe fewer books will mean better books. Maybe, over time, books will regain an elite status that I sense they once had. Maybe, in the end, books won’t qualify precisely as mass entertainment, but entertainment for a sizable if select audience.

That's one way to look at it.  Here's another: Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman, give back 90%  of your advances right now, and maybe a bunch more people can keep their jobs and some other writers can sell their books.  What do you say?

Meanwhile Forbes has chimed in with their usual idiocy, suggesting that maybe publishers are failing "because they dumb everything down." Yeah, right.  My friend who works for FSG just got laid off because FSG publishes books for dumb people. That makes complete sense.  But Laurence Osbourne does make some good points that counter Tavani's argument regarding the internet: "I don't read the Drudge Report instead of Cormac McCarthy. Do you?" and concludes:

Of course, there's always the contrary argument. Namely that publishers make their bucks precisely on things like The Da Vinci Code and The Gargoyle and that they support everyone else. We'll leave to one side the sad fact that The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown didn't come up with a profitable sequel to his first round of execrable twaddle, and we'll ignore The Gargoyle's failure to make anyone rich (and, really, 12th century German nuns? ) It may be true.

Personally, I don't mind this system as long as I don't have to pretend that just because something is crap doesn't mean it's crap. But what if the giant advances, the agent schmoozing and the general hysteria ends up killing my advances altogether? I will not be so pleased.

 

That there illustration is an object by Claude Cahun which Steven Harris brilliantly reads together with Bataille's L'Histoire d'un oeil (the book with the bad stuff and the priest mentioned above) in Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s.

Comments

[Lesley]

"execrable twaddle" - I like that!

[Michelle]

It's certainly a cruddy time to be aspiring to getting the first novel published, or of course, to work in the publishing industry.

I can't help thinking of something I read a while ago in (I think) Margaret Atwood's 'Negotiating with the Dead', where a publisher is reported to have said something along the lines of, we don't sell books, we sell solutions to marketing problems.

Enjoy New York.

[how to write a masters dissertation]

Blogs are good for every one where we get lots of information for any topics nice job keep it up !!!

[how to write a masters dissertation]

Blogs are good for every one where we get lots of information for any topics nice job keep it up !!!