Publishing is an Industry Bedeviled by Pessimism

As the number of original titles published in Britain in 1927 numbered 13,810, compared to 119,000 in 2001 (of which about 75,000 were general trade books), it is still harder to sustain the charge that good writers are being passed over. And there is evidence that volumes are actually rising. In the first half of 2002, the number of books bought in the US rose by 1.6 per cent to 557m copies.

Quantity is not everything, but the doomsayers' view that the consumer is being denied a wide choice of books (and thus points of view) is hard to sustain. One could argue that non-mainstream thinking is not published by big houses and therefore not widely available, but to do so would be oxymoronic: what is mainstream if not that which is widely available?

With its over-educated, overworked, underpaid legions, publishing is an industry bedeviled by pessimism. This pessimism blinds people to the fact that we are living in a golden age of book publishing in which quantity and quality rival anything in the past, in which books have never been so well published and in which they occupy a more boisterously visible place in the general culture than ever before.

The future, it seems, belongs to writers, readers and entrepreneurs. There will be as many or as few masterpieces published as ever, but they will enter the world through proliferating channels. More publishers will exist and some of them will also be famous authors. For less well-known writers, making a living from the written word is likely to be hard, but no harder than it is now. From the industry point of view, as it sits on the tail-end of the longest economic boom in postwar history, all this seems somehow unimaginable. From the consumer's point of view, the golden age is set to continue. But for publishers, ordinary writers and booksellers, the next few years could be the last great days of publishing as we have known it since the 16th century.

From "Good Books"
Toby Mundy
Prospect Magazine, October 2002

The Writer's Best Friend

The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend. ISAAC B. SINGER

The Appearance of Reading

"Many [new readers] are making a fashion statement of sorts, carrying around tattered copies of 'in' books-"not necessarily to read, but to be part of a scene," says Jeremy Ellis, a manager at Austin's Book People. Garrett kemps, for example, has everyone from William Shakespeare to William Faulkner on his shelves, but rarely reads more than 40 pages of any one volume. "In this day and age, it's much important to appear like you know something than it is to actually know something," says the 23-year-old Web designer in Los Angeles."

From "Look Who's Reading" by Pooja Bhatia
Wall Street Journal 11/9/01

Experience Becomes Literature. . .

"Experience becomes literature when the reader ceases to care whether or not the story is true." Garrison Keillor

Stories are Better than Truth

Lawyers are storytellers "who take the raw and disjointed observations of witnesses and transform them into coherent and persuasive narratives." The reason that storytelling works is because the linear narrative has been proved to be the best way to persuade a judge or a jury. Also, the disjointed statements of witnesses mean little until they are connected into a single meaningful story.

from "Author argues stories are more important for lawyers than truth", by
Malcolm Abel in the ASHEVILLE CITIZEN TIMES

The Essential Gift for a Good Writer

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof sh*t-detector. ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Power of Suggestion

The following is a letter to the editor published in the Nov./Dec. issue of Poets&Writers

David Long's "Stuff: The Power of the Tangible" (Sept./Oct. 2002) while invaluable and penetrating, does not address an interesting concomitant question: Why are there so many great works of prose fiction that do not "write about stuff"?

Jane Austen, Stendhal, Henry James, and Marcel Proust have all created palpable fictional universes without cultivating the kind of physical detail and concreteness found in Long's examples. Reread PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and you will notice that Austen's. . . description of Darcy's estate is quite general. Stendhal renders the Battle of Waterloo in THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA with very few particulars. Likewise, neither James nor Proust are much interested in naming objects or listing things for the sake of it.

A work of literature is given life by the reader's memory and imagination. Flat and mundane details of the sort cited by Long can stifle the quickening act of the mind we call reading. Lady Murasaki, and other masters allow us to "see" entire physical worlds for ourselves by the power of their suggestion.

Edmund de Chasca
Senior Editor, Boulevard