THE STORY SPOT

On authors, editors, and the state of the Publishing Union, author Declan Burke (Crime Always Pays and The Big O) says it better than most in a recent guest column in Irish Publishing News:

…like-minded writers should get together and set up a co-op, akin to the United Artists studio of early Hollywood lore. In theory, it can be done: e-publishing and print-on-demand are just two elements of contemporary technology that allow writers to circumvent the publishing circus and go straight to readers.

He also quotes author Henry Porter from a related post on the Guardian Book Blog:

What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.

Hey, that’s a great idea.

“So You Say You Want A Revolution?” in Irish Publishing News (with links to the original post on his blog)
“As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing: Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work” by Henry Porter at The Guardian Blog (observer.guardian.co.uk)

So I was at one of those pay-$15-bucks-to-hear-what-
you-already-know literary industry panels tonight. You know the kind where you’re surrounded by people who only leave the house to go to hear how they can find an agent who will adore their really great book–really, it’s great!–and find them a million-dollar advance? (Hey, I had nothin’ to do on a Monday night and I’m looking for an agen–never mind). And the inevitable questions were asked including: “Why has the world so completely switched from fiction-love to non-fiction-love?”

Answers were offered by very qualified people but still, I wanted to chime in here, if I may. It seems to me that the reasons for this can be somewhat easily observed: we, as a culture, have moved from the joys of being lost in the imaginative realm of fiction just as we have moved increasingly towards being a rational, logic and Spock-driven society, though we don’t know it. By that, I mean that we’ve steadily moved away from emotional experience–or at least the open acknowledgment and seeking of it. I don’t even know if we realize it as individuals. But, being human, we still need and crave emotional, imaginative experiences even when it is not fashionable to say so (even when we have lost our abilities to recognize what is missing). Listen, why else have we swarmed en masse to reality television and to books about harrowing emergence from impossible odds? It’s the visceral experience that draws us again and again. Yet we are not free, somehow, to enjoy the departure from rationality if it is not based in fact. Shame, that. The better questions are: what’s happening to reading, to our culture?

This too shall pass.