The academy as nursing home for terminally ill arts: better that the novel die with honor in the gutter than enter those gates, where candy-striped theorists will offer it the illusion of warmth as they lead it in slow dances, play bingo with it and wink at each other when it roars from its geri-chair about the power it once had. The philistine quotient is probably no greater within the ivory tower than outside it. But it’s hard to resist nostalgia for a general audience that expected some entertainment for the money it spent on books; hard not to prefer a system in which wage-earners subsidized good authors for dubious reasons to a system in which tenured professors subsidize dubious authors for good reasons.

Sounds interesting, right? The problem is, the essay—”I’ll Be Doing More of the Same”—ran some time ago (1996) in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and I don’t happen to have a copy lying around.

A search of the Intarnets led me to Questia.com, which wanted me to subscribe to read the full version. Fat frakking chance. Then I saw a link to Amazon.com, which offered to allow me to download the article electronically…

FOR FIVE DOLLARS AND NINETY-FIVE CENTS!

It’s a 2,000-word essay. Who’s gonna pay six bucks for it? Maybe a desperate college student the night before his term paper is due, but no one else. However, if it cost 50 cents, or even 99 cents, I’d be all over it. No problem. I’d tap that “Buy now with 1-click” button in a heartbeat.

Print publishers need to figure this out. They are going to die a miserable death unless they make this easier for us.

You, Publishing Person, go read Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail. Go. Do it now.

The publishing biz is in major trouble. I think the days of ‘big publishing’ by corporate media behemoths are coming to an end.

Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it’s hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.

Publishers mulch/recycle an absurd number of books every year that the retail chains can’t sell (in the book business, if you order a product and can’t sell it, you can return it to the publisher for a full refund). It’s extraordinarily wasteful, especially when you consider how many books are published every year in this country.

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.

But the trials and travails of print journalism – specifically newspapers – are quite real. This New Yorker article examines the issue in depth. Eric Alterman has written a broad review of print journalism’s difficulties throughout history, beginning in the 1920s, and projecting into the future.

Marshall’s [Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo] undeniable achievement notwithstanding, traditional newspaper men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism practiced at the political Web sites. Operating on the basis of a Lippmann-like reverence for inside knowledge and contempt for those who lack it, many view these sites the way serious fiction authors might view the “novels” tapped out by Japanese commuters on their cell phones. Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

And it is true: no Web site spends anything remotely like what the best newspapers do on reporting. Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times’ Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain.

This, of course, is true. Doesn’t it seem likely that what will happen, in the end, will be a kind of merging of the print newspaper into the Web format, like what is already happening with the New York Times?

People love to talk about the end of print, but won’t it simply be replaced by something like the tablet PC, the Sony Reader, or the Amazon Kindle?

The complaint, then, is that the reader loses the opportunity to see news he may not have been looking for. I subscribed the Times for a while, and I can attest to the fact that I often found interesting stories I wasn’t looking for. But I also found a lot of crap that was of no interest to me. Ultimately, the ratio of crap to serendipity was weighted too heavily to the crap side. I canceled the subscription.

What’s interesting, though, and is ignored by the article and the commentary I’ve heard about it, is that serendipity on the Web abounds. The possibilities of stumbling onto unlooked-for and interesting news on the Web are ever-present. They’re called “links.” If you use the Web the way it was designed to be used, you can quickly move from whatever start page you use to a news site to a blog that might have you searching on Google for more information on some topic that will often lead you to a Wikipedia entry that might reference a website you’d never have heard of, otherwise.

It is only when you try to take the Webness out of websites (sites that only link within their own pages, users who streamline their Web reading with news readers) that you lose serendipity.

Be optimistic. Humanity adapts.

I’ve thought periodically about the value of writing workshops, and I keep coming to the conclusion that the workshops try to simplify what should be a difficult process. Writing good books should be hard. Getting published should be hard. Workshops, to me, seem like a way for talented young writers to network with established old(er) writers and, thereby, find an agent and/or publisher. It’s like getting into publishing through a side door.

[T]he key point in the business is that the investment is made in the wrong areas in the business, and I think that quality—which is more valuable over time—has been undervalued, and quantity—which is less valuable over time—has been overvalued. And I think this is a reaction to the dominance of the influence of the chains. In England right now, this is a catastrophe. The retail side is leading the business by the nose, and publishers have not reacted with sufficient strength, and they should have. And so the business in England is just in the tank basically.

In this excellent interview with literary agent Andrew Wylie, we’re treated to an inside look at the publishing biz. Wylie represents some of the biggest literary figures out there: Rushdie, Amis, Roth, and others. He’s smart, and he’s funny. Read the whole thing. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

The hard pill for publishing to swallow may have its origins in a parenthetical statistic from the article:

Roughly 200,000 titles were published this year.

Is the publishing industry’s attempt to not miss the next potential big book causing it to, um, miss the next potential big book? Have the big houses fallen into the ‘quantity, not quality’ tarpit?

The story is remarkable because Prince gave away actual copies of the compact disc identical to those available in record stores. Other artists who have given their music away have done so by allowing fans to download mp3s, which, they hope, will inspire those fans to later go out and purchase the cd.

What is the goal of Prince’s mass giveaway? Is it to win new fans? Is it to gain publicity/word-of-mouth?

I’ve heard that there’s no such thing as a good record deal. Artists complain that they don’t make enough from album sales’ royalties, and many artists earn the majority of their income from concert performances. It follows that the more people who hear and enjoy an artists music will be interested in seeing that artist perform. Ergo: Prince will be fine.

So who gets hurt? Record companies certainly get hurt because suddenly their raison d’etre (marketing and distributing music) ceases to exist. More cynically, mediocre artists also get hurt. They’ll still make music; they just won’t get paid for it.

The modern record industry has only existed in its present form since about the end of WWI, and it’s probably heading for a major shift, perhaps a collapse. The internet will at least partially take care of both marketing and distribution for artists. But will it make them any money?

So I got to thinking: would people be interested in what I have to say as a military husband? If Sarah Smiley can have a column, why not me?

Now I have to learn about a totally different submissions process.