My friend John e-mailed me this link about ‘misery lit,’ a.k.a. ‘grief porn.’ While I’ve certainly been aware of it, mainly via supermarket and Target book sections that inevitably include copies of A Child Called ‘It’ and it’s sequels, this is the first I’ve seen about a specific genre or special bookstore section. Does Borders or Barnes & Noble have special sections for this stuff?
I recently tore through Jason Epstein’s Book Business like it was this summer’s hottest thriller. Of course, for me, this stuff is pretty thrilling.
The book is full of anecdotes from his years as an editor at Doubleday and then Random House. Like the one about the time he met Edmund Wilson for drinks and Wilson ordered a half-dozen martinis; Epstein naturally assumed at least one of them was meant to be for him, but then Wilson asked him if he’d like a half-dozen of his own. Epstein declined.
The book’s larger point is that American culture’s move into suburbia mortally wounded the book business. Book stores had to pay high rents in shopping malls and therefore needed a constant flow of bestsellers in order to keep revenue up. The accompanying shift of focus away from literary merit and toward celebrity and sensationalism (enter Misery Lit) impoverished publishers’ backlists. Now, the Internet is threatening to finish the job (i.e., take away the function of the publisher by enabling instantaneous digital distribution), and authors stand ready to become their own publishers.
I highly recommend Book Business to anyone interested in books, writing, or publishing. For an additional taste of the sort of content you’ll find in the book, read Epstein’s Reading: The Digital Future from the New York Review of Books.
All of this has got me thinking a good deal about my future as a writer. It seems inevitable to me that one day we’ll all be reading books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs off of ultrathin flexible displays that will download content off the Net.
Will I be selling eBooks directly from my own website? Some writers already do this. Stephen King sold a short novella via his website. And look at the direction the music business is going in.
How long will it be before publishing devolves completely into marketing, a billion or so self-styled writers/artists clamoring to be heard? I say ‘devolves’ because one typically thinks of marketing as a subset of the publishing process. Such a change would be a simplification, or scaling-back, of the current practice. If there’s no vetting process, how will we know what’s worth spending our money on? Our time?
It may be a moot point when you look at today’s book market. According to the New York Times there were 175,000 books published in 2004, 10,000 of them novels. So, if we were going to have a hard time figuring out what to read, we’d already be there. Some might say we are, in fact, already there.
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