Conversations in the Book Trade

Tuesday, February 09, 2016

토론토/ 多伦多/ トロント/Торонто /Τορόντο/ Toronto

Thad McIroy - publishing consultant, analyst

From 2012

CBT: V. S. Naipaul has declared there are not any important writers anymore, Philip Roth has predicted the novel will become a cult activity, Peter Stothard has asked if fiction writing simply used to be better, Cullen Murphy, David Shields, Lee Seigel, and Geoff Dyer have all stated that non-fiction is superior to fiction. The list of people of letters who apparently have lost faith in literary fiction goes on and on; it is clear that an elementary questioning of the novel is not a passing cultural phase.

What is your opinion? Does the novel have a future? If so, what kind? And will e-technology alter the very form of the novel? If so, how?

TM: I have to agree with you that an elementary questioning of the novel is not a passing cultural phase – I’ve been seeing the question since I was in my teens. The big writers loomed large in front of me, geniuses, while papers I respected, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Village Voice and so on, would run these articles asking if the novel was dead. Could it be? I wondered. Had the novel died before I could fully discover it?

I bought into the crisis back then, but forty years later the novel seems to be doing just fine thank you. It’s fashionable to wring one’s hands that the boom in technology adoption will finally bring the great experiment to a halt. I don’t buy it.

People are experimenting with applying technology to narrative fiction. I’m all for the experiments, whether anything comes of them or not. The novel seems to function well – the form succeeds as constituted today. If you embed a 90 minute video in an ebook (which can be done with the new EPUB 3 standard) have you created a movie with an accompanying program, or a book with a movie to illustrate it? Does it matter?

CBT: Are the very significant structural changes taking place in the publishing industry having an effect on novel writing? If so, how?

TM: The structural changes in the publishing industry don’t necessarily impact how novels are written, with the exception of commercial fiction. Perhaps even the most classically literary of authors still keep one eye on the bestsellers lists and so may make some sort of adjustment to the explosion in teen fantasy and adult S&M fiction. But most of these impacts are short-term trends of interest mainly to commercial writers.

CBT. Is the cutting back of mid-lists and a general cautiousness about taking risks on new or relatively unknown writers affecting the caliber of writing that does manage to get into print?

TM: This question cuts to the heart of what I see as a major challenge in the analysis of the future of publishing: acknowledging that the New York and London school of publishing is not the only possible model for the conduct of a successful publishing business.

The “cutting back of mid-lists and a general cautiousness about taking risks on new or relatively unknown writers” refers mostly the “big six” publishers. Small publishers have been chugging along taking risks with mid-list and below authors for years.

I say to my writer friends that the only significant impact thus far on book publishing has been striking fear into the hearts of publishers wed to what has become a significantly more shaky publishing model. If you had your heart set on Knopf publishing the follow-up to your unsuccessful first novel, you may be disappointed. If you stop thinking that Knopf publishing your next book is the only way to validate your talent, you’ve got a whole new world of opportunity.

CBT: Do you have an author's website? Does it help you sell books?

TM: I have an author’s website for my books on publishing technology, www.thefutureofpublishing.com. It does help me sell some books, although that is far from its main purpose. Mostly I use it to publish ideas about project in progress, as a way of connecting my ideas to others in the publishing community.

My books wouldn’t be bestsellers even if I ran ads during the Super Bowl. There’s a limit to what any promotion can do for books with small targeted audiences.

CBT: How do you feel about running an author's website? Do you feel it’s a labour of love – or an annoying imposition? Or something else altogether?

TM: I believe that authors have two choices when it comes to web sites: jump in feet first, or skip it all together. Readers can spot a half-hearted effort a mile away, and it’s more of a turn-off than no site at all. Running a site doesn’t have to be as big a chore as it’s sometimes made out to be. Nor is it effortless.

Ideally authors find ways to blend their online world with their world of writing. It is a natural, but not all writers are naturals. For those writers I say: no blame. Get back to writing.

CBT: Is the selection system for novel and short story manuscripts fair? Should it be made blind?

TM: I don’t really understand this question. What alternative is there than the judgment of professionals within a publishing company? If they don’t select your work, take it elsewhere or self publish.

CBT: According to media reports, e-book sales now represent a significant percentage of overall sales. But small bookstores see them as more a threat to their survival than anything else, and a lot of book people remain print people. Are you enthusiastic about e-books? Do they hold the potential for a renaissance in literary publishing? Or are they over-rated and too susceptible to piracy?

TM: After several years of hype ebooks are settling down for most titles as but one format of several. As publishers we used to fret about the transition from hardcover to paperback. The ebook is the third format in this equation.

For many authors the ease of self publishing of ebooks has made this a viable alternative to a world of painful rejection from brand-name publishers. In some cases books are being published that had slipped through the cracks and deserve to be read. In other cases self-published ebooks are about as durable and engaging as a 3-minute YouTube video. But at $1.99 that’s not a bad thing.

Ebooks are an exciting new format, offering lots of opportunity and very few drawbacks as far as I can see. The big thing is choice, and with millions of books now published every year, added to the many more millions in print, choice is not an issue.

CBT: What do you think of literary prizes? As Jason Cowley has commented, they reduce our culture's ability to think in a critically complex fashion? Do they suggest, “this book is worth reading and all these others aren't?”

TM: I understand the argument regarding the distortion that the prize system introduces into making the public aware of worthwhile books. But it’s not like the alternatives are a smoothly-functioning critical engine.

As far as I’m concerned anything that celebrates books in a lively manner is good news all around.

CBT: What are you working on now that you’re excited about?

TM: After nearly 40 years in publishing I’ve decided to move on. I’m exciting about taking my knowledge of the digitization of information and applying that to the challenges of health care.

I’ve greatly enjoyed working in publishing. It’s a marvelous industry, both challenging and rewarding. But I’ve decided that “the problem of publishing” has in fact been successfully addressed. We’re fretting about very small issues and painting them large just because that’s what people do. They take their small problems and use them to fill the available space.

There is no crisis in publishing. Book sales are holding up well in the West, and growing by leaps and bounds in the Third World and other less-developed nations. Sure there’s disruption to some of the existing players, but overall literacy continues to improve worldwide, and the access to the written word has never been better.

Health care, on the other hand, is a mess. Information standards in health care are probably three decades behind where they are in most industries. Most medical records are still on paper, invisible to the physician currently treating you. I’d love to see more people from publishing take their talents to health care. They could make a far greater difference to the quality of life than publishing the revised edition of Feng Shui for Cats.

Bio: Thad McIlroy is an electronic publishing analyst and author, and president of The Future of Publishing, based in San Francisco and Vancouver, BC.In 2006 he launched www.thefutureofpublishing.com, a Web site nearly a decade in the making, and the most comprehensive source of information on the present and predicted outcomes of all sectors of the publishing industry.

Also in early 2007 he affiliated with The Gilbane Group, and in 1988 he founded Arcadia House, a consulting firm specializing in implementing electronic publishing technology in the graphic arts and publishing industries. In 1990 he co-founded (with Miles Southworth) The Color Resource, a publishing and distribution company devoted to books and training materials on color design, imaging and prepress.

McIlroy’s latest market reports are a 2012 study of the future of Barnes & Noble as well as Adobe’s Designs on Web Analytics: The Omniture Acquisition (2009). He contributed the Composition, Design, and Graphics chapter (with contributions from Frank Romano) for The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing (Columbia University Press, 2003). He is the co-author of Using Color Management Systems for Push-Button Color (1993: Smart Color and The Color Resource), Inside Photo CD: Market Opportunities in a Leading Edge Technology (1993: The Color Resource), The Color Resource Color Desktop Publishing Product Annual (1992/93: The Color Resource), The Complete Color Glossary (1992: The Color Resource), and eight other books.

Marché St. Lawrence Sud/ St. Lawrence Market South

Monday, February 08, 2016

Ciel Canadien/ Canadian Sky - II

Rarement possible de voir cet coloration en Corée de sud.

Rarely possible to see this sort of colouration in South Korea.

Noteworthy

Les 24 de la B.D. par Zviane

Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, reviewed by Alex Good

Brian Fawcett - novelist, poet, critic, magazine publisher

[Interview conducted in October, 2012]

1 V. S. Naipaul has declared there are not any important writers anymore, Philip Roth has predicted the novel will become a cult activity, Peter Stothard has asked if fiction writing simply used to be better, Cullen Murphy, David Shields, Lee Seigel, and Geoff Dyer have all stated that non-fiction is superior to fiction. The list of people of letters who apparently have lost faith in literary fiction goes on an on; it is clear that an elementary questioning of the novel is not a passing cultural phase. Furthermore, the short story seems to be under siege as well: many agents and multinational publishers do not handle/publish story collections, small magazines seem perpetually underfunded, and a YouTube-ification of text and image seems to be taking short narrative in new directions.

What is your opinion? Do the novel and shortstory have a future?

There’s two affective things going on here. One is the imposition of the marketplace over all cultural and educational activities, which has transformed most fiction writing into arid exercises in conventional behavior—trying to please novel-reading little old ladies who want to escape their lives with Robert McKee-grade mechanical nonsense. The other is a “natural” degradation of the importance of written literature in the face of more technology-driven forms of narrative—television series drama (which is approaching a golden age), motion pictures, the Internet, and really, the nightly news, which has writers making up arbitrary narratives about how human reality is unfolding, and at a minute-by-minute speed that authenticates it as fact to the unwary.

All the evidence suggests that what we thought of as literature—the novel and the short story—will end up as a minor heritage activity with little or no cultural impact. I’m probably closest to the position David Shields has, which is that both fiction AND non-fiction are epistemological absurdities, and that the boundary between them was always a cultural illusion.

I think there IS a way of writing that does have cultural relevance: it’s that tiny edge of postmodernism that never got far beyond the experimental and the precious, but which I still think holds allpostmodernism’s valuable mineral core, where writers seek a paratactic depth and transparency at the same time that allows readers to move as quickly as the human mind now naturally moves while being completely candid about where the materials are coming from and how they’re being deployed. I’ve probably written about 15-20 passages across my various books that succeed at this. It’s really hard work, but its also a huge amount of fun. The Spanish writer, Javier Cercas, is probably the most successful writer who regularly achieves this, most recently with Anatomy of a Moment.

If so, what kind? And will e-technology alter the very forms of them? If so, how?

I think I answered the first question. The second question really isn’t very interesting. E-technology is here. It works, sort of, and will get better, maybe, and will end up with 50-70 percent of the book trade. The danger lies in Google and the text mash-up crowd, who are going to, if they get what they want, undermine the evidential/referential systems upon which Western civilization is based. So what’s at risk here is the rule of law and the judicial systems. What happens to individual authorship is a crucial element in this, even if literature isn’t. How e-books will change conventional novels is relatively speaking, not very important. Literature might be, because it remains the most effective device for long-form thinking that exists outside research collectives. And long-form thinking is what got human beings most of the good things civilization has created.

2 Are the very significant structural changes taking place in the publishing industry having an effect on novel or short story writing? If so, how?

Of course changes are occurring. It’s winnowing out everyone who isn’t terminally conventional or independently wealthy. And it’s contributing to the general dumbing down of readers.

3. Is the cutting back of mid-lists and a general cautiousness about taking risks on new or relatively unknown writers affecting the caliber of writing that does manage to get into print?

Probably. But there are lots of nuances here. It’s been a big boon to young writers coming out of the creative writing factories, because they’ve been taught how to market themselves, and how to be acceptably conventional. Publishers are looking for “new, fresh writers” because that’s a prime marketing category. And really, if, as a writer, you’re just trying to get laid by the market, why not go do real estate, where there’s real money to be made?

4 Do you have an author's website? Does it help you sell books?

No, and no. It’s sort of like having a Visa card. If you don’t have one, you lose elements of full citizenship. The test of this is simple: can you find an author’s website that isn’t so crudded with bullshit and self-congratulation that you feel like barfing after 20 seconds?

5 How do you feel about running an author's website? Do you feel its a labour of love or an annoying imposition? Or something else altogether?

I don’t have one, so I can’t say. But I’d think it would be an ongoing humiliation for any writer who isn’t completely stupid or fixated on the market (which is more or less the same thing.

6 Is the selection system for novel and short story manuscripts fair? Should it be made blind?

No, and No. On the first question, no, because it can’t ever be fair, because human beings are social, and thus gossip and sleep with one another and talk and think and do elementary detective work. No to the second question because the last thing we should do with literature is put it in the hands of bureaucrats and their systems. I’ve been on a jury in a blind manuscript selection procedure. The reality was that all the jurors knew who 2/3rds of the writers were, because good writers write distinct sentences. I went out of my way to point that out, along with who most of the writers in the competition were. That got me permanently blacklisted from literary jury duty, but it did get the best manuscripts on the table.

Rick Salutin once remarked that there are only about 900 people in Canada, and they all know one another—or should. He was talking about Canada as a cultural entity. You can froth at the mouth about how shocking and appalling this is, but it won’t change it, and if you erect a bureaucracy aimed at preventing it, you’ll end up in Stalin’s lap with a bunch of tight-assed dickheads telling you what to do.

7 According to media reports, e-book sales now represent a significant percentage of overall sales.

They’re lying about this, but it’s coming.

But small bookstores see them as more a threat to their survival than anything else, and a lot of book people remain printpeople.

The independents are going to be wiped out by it. And print people are going to get old. There’s no pleasant future to any of this.

8. Are you enthusiastic about e-books?

No. But not for the reasons you might guess.What worries me about the e-book industry is that it will put an end to the editing of books. And that would be an intellectual catastrophe, because most e-books right now are really just blogs, which is to say, they’re mostly unedited. You can see the effect of this already in the U.S. where publishers—even the major ones—are demanding that books arrive already edited.

9. Do they hold the potential for a renaissance in literary publishing?

Only if you believe in the old Kerouac “Firstthoughtbestthought universe, which I think may have been the greatest disaster to have befallen intellectual life in the 20th century. I happen to love being edited, for the simple reason that two minds are always better than one.

10. Or are they over-rated and too susceptible to piracy?

I don’t care about rating or piracy. I care about the demise of editing. That’s a cultural catastrophe.

11. What do you think of literary prizes? As Jason Cowley has commented, they reduce our culture's ability to think in a critically complex fashion? Do they suggest, “this book is worth reading and all these others aren't?”

That isn’t the problem with prize culture. The problem with it is that prizes always reward conventional behavior. And that has led to a situation where books being published are run through the prize mill, and if they don’t get nominations or wins, the publishers abandon them, and the morons who run the chain bookstores, people who have expertise in marketing, don’t order them. Meanwhile, the books that win prizes nearly all disappear within a few years, because they’re mediocre. This is, by the way, more true in Canada than in any country in the English-speaking world, and it’s utterly toxic. We need to worry less about prizes and more about the stupidization of the public realm that this is part of.

12. Philip Marchand once stated, “Not even the most fervent partisans ofCanadian literature will say that Canadians have done fundamentally new things with the novel form, or changed the way we read in the manner, say, of a Joyce, a Kafka, a Nabokov, or a Garcia Marquez. Marchand is correct as far as *perceptions* go; Canadian writing is not considered formally or stylistically groundbreaking. However, is this in fact the case when one regards our de facto production? What examples can you think of (including your own work) which would suggest otherwise?

I’m guessing you never saw Gender Wars: A Novel & Some Conversation about Sex and Gender: 1994, Somerville House. If you want radical with the novel form, that has it, in both content and graphic representation. It may not succeed as prize “fiction”, but it’s as crazy as it gets and travels at 4 times the speed. I also thought that Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter, George Bowering’s Burning Water, and Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look on Love were ground-breaking by any International standards. Phil’s beef is with the Jane Urquhart/later Ondaatje universe, along with every nominee/winner of the Giller since it began, of which his description is accurate. What he doesn’t say (even though he knows the truth) is that conventionality is what literary prize culture begets.

12. What are you working on now that you're excited about?

The Epic of Gilgamesh According to Enkidu, where the issue is whether or not I’ll ever know enough to finish it. The truth is that I do know how to finish it, but I'm just not a temple priest, and they’re the ones who wrote all the other versions.