I got my first magazine gig in the summer of 2008, just before the economy imploded. While I was experiencing the first-blush thrill of seeing my articles in print,
Rolling Stone shrank, newspapers all over the United States were declaring bankruptcy, the legendary "long lunch" of magazine publishers evaporated, the death knell for journalism began to sound, so on and so on. The magazine I'd just started working for stopped being able to pay its contributors for several months, and we produced the thinnest issue in the history of the publication that November. Now, here I am sitting on my unfledged novel manuscript, and the same scene unfolds (according to some sources) for traditional publishing. It's sometimes hard not to feel that I was born too late--or, at least, at the wrong time.
Garrison Keillor's death-of-publishing op-ed piece speaks directly to that anxiety. Lots of
smart,
well-spoken people have
said and
written quite
a bit in response to this, so I won't belabor it, but the fact of the matter is that I'm impressionable. I will believe anything for approximately 5-7 minutes, at least. And so when I read Keillor's closing sentences ("It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it."), I kinda pulled a muscle in my chest. I'm old enough to have known what the publishing industry was like when I was developing my what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up narratives. For Garrison Keillor to steamroll my childhood fantasies and slam the door on future generations is a damn shame. His piece seems to me less the nostalgic musing of a curmudgeonly humorist than it is the sour grousing of a nasty, alienated old man.
In the
Baltimore Sun, Keillor's editorial ran under the title "
When Everyone's a Writer, No One Is," which purports to shift the emphasis a smidge, though the content is of course the same. About a month after Keillor's screed landed, author/editor
Laura Miller wrote an
article for Salon likewise examining the consequences of the digital self-publishing trend. Her perspective is much more judicious. Where Keillor says, "
editors will vanish," Miller offers the finer-tuned argument that "
if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job [as agent or editor]
will soon be yours." (Or, to paraphrase, "when no one's an editor, everyone is.") How you, as a reader, might feel about this scenario has a lot to do with how much time you've spent with unpublishable writing.
When I think about
slush piles, I think about Freud. In his 1908 essay, "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," Freud had this to say about the distinction between the daydreamer and the writer:
You will remember how I have said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures. Such phantasies, when we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence of many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others.
I've always enjoyed his matter-of-fact attitude about how the phantasies of the nonwriter "give us no pleasure....repel us or at least leave us cold." It makes me picture Dr. Freud sitting in his armchair, on the receiving end of something interminable and grotesque, wishing things were different. So it is with the slush pile. Talented writers and, well, let's call them "daydreamers" both contribute manuscripts to slush piles. You never know whether the next thing you pull out of there is going to (as Freud has it) seethe
ars poetica and bring you the kind of pleasure that deepens when it resonates with your own experience or, alternatively, sap your faith in humanity and populate your nightmares for months. There's an overwhelmingly large proportion of the latter, and for it to "repel us or at least leave us cold" would be putting it mildly. I've spent a little bit of time with fiction slush, and between thinly veiled rape fantasies, passionately anti-Semitic recastings of the Holocaust, druggy and near-unintelligible ravings about who only knows, and the par-for-the-course awful grammar and general pointlessness, it was dark business indeed. Contrary to Freud's evocation of the shameful turd-burying habit of the daydreamer--and this is just my own
Dunning-Kruger-effect-inspired generalization--it seems pretty typical of the slush pile (and sometimes, by extension, of self-published work intended for a general readership) that the skill of the writer is often in inverse proportion to their lust for publication, which is to say, to their perception of the value of their own work. (
Here's a fine example.
Here's another one.)
It's certainly true that self-publishing eliminates the so-called gatekeepers, the "old guard" of editors and agents whose job it is, more often than not, to protect the public from (forgive my bias) the unbridled textual excrescences of the unwashed masses. It's also true that the new era of digital self-publishing makes it that much easier for would-be authors to circumvent the middlemen and sidestep the steady diet of rejection accorded by the writing life while quality control goes out with the bathwater. Make no mistake: The slush pile is coming to an online distributor of print media near you. Nothing can stop it. I assume that this is what concerns Keillor when he opines that book publishing is "about to slide into the sea." The tide is flowing, for sure, but his conclusion is overly grim. As John Williams of
The Second Pass puts it, "
Publishers are not frightened by the latent powers of the slush pile, believe me." (And for what it's worth, he has a much more diplomatic view of slush piles than I do, and far more experience with them.)
So, say the pile goes public and the marketplace swells to bursting with the literary endeavors of the self-published. Say, even, that the act of publishing becomes entirely meaningless. What then? What we read (or don't read) becomes a study in the psychology of choice, and the result is effectively a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" scenario. In Miller's words,
[A]s observers like Chris Anderson (in "The Long Tail") and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book "The Art of Choosing") have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren't utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision [read: being your own gatekeeper] is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions. This has been going on in the book world for at least a couple of decades now, since long before the rise of e-books: Bestselling authors continue to sell better and better, while everyone else does worse and worse.
[Even if publishing becomes meaningless and people find new ways to discover things worth reading], we'll still wind up with a literary marketplace in which a handful of blockbuster names capture most of the sales and attention, personal connections are milked for professional success, and relatively few authoritative voices have the power to lift some artists into the spotlight while others languish in obscurity. Writers who are charming in person and happy to promote themselves and interact with fans will prosper, while antisocial geniuses may fail. (It's unsettling to wonder how the Salingers, Pynchons, Naipauls and David Foster Wallaces of tomorrow will fare in a world where social networking and glad-handing are de rigueur. Why should extroversion be required of a great novelist?) The result: not a whole lot better than the system we already have, but also (hopefully) not much worse.
This is the most informed, practical, and realistic prediction for the industry I've seen yet (sadly). It's difficult to disagree with Miller's argument, and anyone who would dance on the grave of traditional publishing and bang pots and pans for the DIY revolution would do well to consider it. (It is, after all, a chief complaint of authors who resort to self-publishing that no one else would pay them any attention.) In a literary age where so many options exist as to induce
analysis paralysis, it seems to me that agents and editors, those "relatively few authoritative voices" are more important than ever. Far from being relics of a decaying institution, their skills and judgment should be in greater demand than ever before. If anything, there should be more of them. But I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.
Several months ago, I was considering applying for a renowned, fancypants fiction-writing fellowship. In a discussion with a friend of mine, I said it was longer than a long shot, that the judges would want the sort of author they could easily fill up a press release about. I'm not that person, I said. I haven't published anything. I'm a nobody. "How is being published still a thing?" he asked me. "I mean [and here he directed me to an Amazon page featuring an absurd, vanity-press-produced book], even
that lady is published." I explained that what I meant by "being published" was "being published by a reputable press," and that (to me at least) it was even
more of a thing now, owing to the glutting of the market. But to people who don't love books and know them well, a book is a book, no matter where it came from. Small independent presses have stronger identities than big conglomerates or their imprints--it's a part of what makes the titles they publish appealing to readers in the know. If a writer is shopping a manuscript, it's part of her job (or at least it used to be), to get acquainted with those presses (and ultimately to get rejected by many of them). DIY publishing shows a lazy disregard for this entire process, and the product is poison to the marketplace. If a writer's work is really fit to print, I'm inclined to think (perhaps naively) that a proper press
somewhere would eventually pick up and follow through. If writers are really, truly struggling to find good publishers for good work and failing, then there must be too few independent presses publishing good books right now. (Sound crazy?
I'm not the only one to suggest it.) However, if writers resort to the instant gratification of self-publishing instead, there will probably be even fewer small-press opportunities available in the future.
In short, the advent of Web 2.0, the burgeoning popularity and affordability of ereaders, the limitless online marketplace, and the DIY spirit make it an essentially forgone point that publishing is not, now, what I thought it would be like when I was younger. I say I was born too late, because I imagine it now essentially the way it used to be; and I say I was born at the wrong time, because I expect that the industry will come out of its current birth pangs well enough to thrive and sustain good writers and their work by the time I'm done trying to accomplish anything. But what I see in my immediate future is this: a monstrous slush pile, a dwindling and overworked contingent of agents/editors/professional book critics, a decreasing number of small presses, and an awfully inopportune time to be an awkward, self-loathing introvert. I'd rather be a fetus with a Facebook page already. Give me a do-over.
...
No, I'm not going to go out like that. It's too sad.
As a writer, maybe I don't need to concern myself overmuch with the ins and outs of the publishing industry. It's fine to do, if I feel I need to pull my hair out every now and then--especially since the pace of life today would have you believe that you need to keep as many plates spinning as possible--but even though much has changed (and will continue to change), most of what made the world of words wild and wonderful to me as a kid has stayed pretty much the same. Take, for example, the story of the last great book I read,
Tinkers.
Six years ago, Paul Harding submitted his novel manuscript to a number of agents and editors in New York City. All of them rejected it. He was told that no one wanted the kind of book he'd written, that it was too meditative, too slow, too quiet. Over the course of the next three years, "Tinkers" (the manuscript) sat in a drawer. And then, finally, Paul Harding found a publisher: the Bellevue Literary Press, a small, nonprofit "project" affiliated with NYU's School of Medicine. Bellevue's editorial director helped push the book (Harding's debut novel) to independent bookstores, whose staff read it, loved it, and raved about it everywhere they could. (I was turned on to the book by
Michele Filgate, events coordinator at the
RiverRun Bookstore in New Hampshire.) But while
Tinkers was making rounds in the indie circles and on litblogs, major media outlets weren't reviewing it, and the book was more or less ignored by the public at large. By the end of the year, though,
Tinkers had made "Best of" lists at NPR and
The New Yorker. And then, in April, Paul Harding won a Pulitzer Prize. The
New York Times called his success with
Tinkers "
perhaps the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory." It's proof that the old channels aren't broken. It's a credit to the agents, editors, reviewers, and readers who do their extremely valuable and underappreciated work the way it's supposed to be done. It's everything Keillor avowed was only happening "back in the day." It's a measure of hope.
Marilynne Robinson, Harding's friend and former teacher, told the
Times that she sometimes has difficulty making her students believe that they "
can write something that satisfies their definition of good, and they don't have to calculate the market." (She added, "
Now that I have the Paul anecdote, they will believe me more.") Her advice is heartening to me. Maybe I don't need to fret about all-consuming slush piles, or the crest of the self-publishing wave, or what either means for the publishing industry. Maybe I don't need to worry about the number of people reading the stuff I like to read (or write), or about the market appeal of either of those things. Maybe all I need to do is develop and trust my definition of good, and strive to achieve it.