The December 2014 issue of Vanity Fair contains an article by Michael Kinsley about the battles between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing – and thus, quite possibly, the future of publishing.  Amid many entertaining anecdotes and some useful insights, Kinsley inserts own prejudices towards that future.

Speaking of “Amazon’s self-published authors’ books…” Kinsely blithely dismisses them as universally “genre” work (his quotes not mine), then goes on to characterize these authors as taking their revenues from those on the print publishers’ side: “biographers, historians, midlist novelists… the authors of books that sometimes took a decade to write…”  In other words, self-published authors are hacks, who are stealing the bread from the mouths of real writers.

This is, to put it in decidedly non-literary terms – bullshit.

First off, the financially-successful self-published authors  who so frighten Kinsley are a teeny, tiny, infinitesimal fraction of self-publishing authors (for convenience, let’s adopt the acronym SPAs), the vast majority of whom will spend considerable time and money creating, self-packaging, self-listing, self-printing and attempting to self-distribute their work, and make very little or no money for their efforts.

Second, while some of those SPAs may indeed crank out work quickly, so do plenty of paper authors – perhaps Mr. Kinsley is aware of one James Patterson, profiled in the very next issue of the same mag.?  For every crank-it-out SPA, there are far more who have spent years or even decades on their works too, many with no support from the “Universities and foundations” to whom Kinsley worries his more-worthy paper-bound scribes must turn for support when advance and royalty checks are not available.  Truth is, most authors, paper or print, will never make a living wage from their work (just like most actors, most musicians, dancers, visual artists and mimes), and whether or not a writer gets an agent or publisher depends on far more than either the quality of their work or the amount of effort which went into writing it.  That Mr. Kinsley seems to think otherwise, suggests that he – being an industry-insider, is ignorant of – or perhaps has just forgotten – the obstacles which most authors must surmount in order to achieve the elevated viewpoint.

A little farther along in the article, Kinsley recounts a visit to his agent’s palatial offices, where “I sat in the waiting room with Picasso’s grand-daughter – it’s that kind of place.”  Apparently Kinsley is so besotted with rubbing those surnamed elbows that he does not realize he’s just admitted one of the reasons the SPA movement is not only not evil but necessary: one’s admittance to the offices of today’s agents and print publishers is far more contingent upon having a famous name than having a great book, whether it took months, years or decades, to write.

This condition exists for a good reason; the limited capacity of the print-publishing marketplace .  Publishers daily face an onslaught of written work, not all of which they can possibly print and sell at a profit.  To deal with this, the industry has spawned exclusionist mechanisms; a complex and effective filtering system (of which agents are the first line of defense) to weed out all works other than those most likely to be commercially successful at the scale required by industrialized print publishing.  Add to that a celebrity-crazed culture, and it is growing more and more difficult for any work, regardless of merits, to be hard-published unless its author has a ‘platform’ – a pre-existing public identity to serve as advertisement without reference to the work’s merits.  Thus it is easier for a reality-TV supporting actor, minor pro-athlete or painter’s granddaughter to get an agent and a print deal than a previously-un-published biographer, historian, novelist or academic.

And yes, I am taking it as a given that print-publishers are less than perfectly-efficient; that they do not actually locate and publish every worthwhile work that has been created.  Trusting that Mr. Kinsley would not argue that point, I will in fact go farther; I believe there are large numbers of worthwhile writings that will never be seen by any but their authors unless those authors take upon themselves the financial burden and risk.  Fortunately, many of them are willing to do that, which is the real reason SPAs abound, not some rapacious desire to steal out of the mouths of their betters’ babes without doing the work of ‘real’ writers.

The true value of electronic- and self-publishing is this: no longer must an author convince first an agent and then a publisher that her work will appeal to a wide-enough segment of the hard-copy market to justify a five- or six-figure investment of someone else’s capital for printing, promoting and distributing hard copies. It is now possible for a work of value with (perhaps) more limited appeal to be brought to light, albeit usually for a much smaller audience.  This, Mr. Kinsley, is not a bad thing; for writers, for readers, for the general culture.  And it does not come about because SPAs are stealing the legitimate paychecks of paper-authors.  It comes about because the times they are a-changin’.

I am reminded of another famous inside-down-looker, Rousseau’s un-named “great princess.”

SPAs are not settling for cake either.

Thanksgiving Day today; so many things for which one can and should be thankful and a new one just hit me:

In the room where I write is a deep bookshelf, and over the years it’s been packed full – valued volumes first in normal line-up, then lain down sideways and piled till they filled the space right up to the shelf above, then when that was still not enough space, a second row stacked in front of those, so you had to pull out one bunch to even see what was behind. Later small stacks inserted on the rest of the shelves wherever a small niche afforded – six books here on top of the board games, ten over there next to the stereo equipment.  Down there, they were packed in between boxes holding the good china we used to bring out for holidays but rarely do any more. Wall to wall books, eventually, and something of a reassurance, a comfort.

Lately though, I’ve been culling.  Pulling out volumes one by one and asking if each of them really deserves to be kept. If I were to pack up and move tomorrow, would I really want to carry this book with me?  Or that?

Three boxes have gone to local libraries so far, for their used-book sales (funding local libraries being an unalloyed good cause, in my book).  Gone the collected copies of every novel by John LeCarre (still revered, but I know I can find them if I ever wish) keeping only the Smiley series and Little Drummer Girl, favorites to which I might want to refer for some hint at character or pacing.  Gone too, Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass series – fun and valued, but I’ll be fortunate if I can ever get around to re-reading Tolkien, I seriously doubt I’ll never make it to Pullman.  Gone are several volumes by Ann Patchett and Michael Chabon – favorite authors but I’ll keep only my favorites of each, and not necessarily the most widely known.

No big surprise that it’s been satisfying to see the space become less full and a bit more ordered, but what struck me just now, looking at the remaining titles, is how my bookshelf has been concentrated and fortified.  Names pop out,; there’s Woof and Winterson, there Krakauer and Gaiman and next to them.  Attwood, Ishiguro, Ondatje and McEwan.  Like grape juice fermented into wine, and wine distilled to brandy, so my library is improved with editing.  Now when I turn away from the computer to ponder an idea, I find myself confronted with a collection of truly-valued works; a chorus of voices worth looking up to, a challenge to emulate.

So this year’s Thanksgiving resolution is to keep culling and selecting, to create a bookshelf that truly inspires, reflecting the literary abundance available to us in this age of free libraries, portable e-books, and self-publishing.   Bookstores are struggling( a real loss) and hard-copy sales declining (I rate myself a lover of the hard-copy experience) but e-books are growing quickly, and self-publishing means voices that would never gain a for-profit publisher can now be heard, if only be a lucky few.

My bookshelf may someday be replaced by an index of file names – but one way or another, story-telling will be with us as long as human beings have imagination and the ability to visualize what is not physically before their eyes. So long as humans are humans, that is, and as long as there are stories being told, even a small collection can be a treasure trove, and an abundance.

Happy Thanksgiving!

When I was taught science, we learned there was a clear divide between physical forms – defined by genes, varied by combination and mutation, passed down through procreation – and knowledge – which could only be passed from one living creature to another through behavior, communication and living memory; not encoded in a genome.

In a recent Nat Geo (11/14) I came across the fact that Monarch butterflies migrate on an interval longer than their life span, so the individuals who make one migration are the great-grandchildren of those who made the last.  So how do those youngsters know to migrate, if none of the individuals present when it’s time to start were alive to experience and remember the previous migration?

It’s not too difficult to imagine genetic traits that would pre-dispose butterflies to travel in groups, to flee cold weather, maybe even to sense that traveling south is generally the way to do so. But to cause them to all fly at virtually the same time every year, on virtually the same routes from year to year, purely through some combination of physical traits?  And even if those pre-dispositions are passed from one generation to the other, wouldn’t we expect the behavior to be eroded by those generations that never get to experience it – “Oh yeah, Grandpa’s always talking about his famous migration. He’s so full of pollen….” (Unless, of course, butterfly adolescents are much wiser than human ones…)

Or do butterflies have the intelligence to understand and recall their own migration, communicate it to their offspring – and those to theirs and those to theirs – and then to act on that knowledge passed down to them; even though they themselves have no experience with the act of migration, or the conditions that make it the most likely path for survival? Not exactly the level of cognition we generally attribute to the brain of an insect.

In the same issue, Neil deGrasse Tyson is quoted as to how the ember of curiosity seems nearly extinguished in some adults he meets, while in others it barely burns, and I wonder – how could anyone not be curious when confronted with these fluttering Magellans.

“Everything you think you know is wrong,” they say, and what fun it is to think about what might be right!