Breaking: Book Publishers Believe People Need Book Publishers

In a USA Today Op–Ed this week, the authors Harold McGraw III and Phillip Ruppel present five myths about the future of book publishing the digital age. Their top two are:

Myth No. 1. Publishers are merely printers. That would be news to companies like ours, which don't even operate their own printing presses. Publishers today are in the content business. We develop it; we design it; and we deliver it however our readers want it. And while a large part of our business remains in paper and print, we are seeing an unmistakable and irreversible shift toward bits and bytes with e-books and digital delivery platforms accounting for a growing share of the total market.

Myth No. 2. Authors don't need publishers in the digital age. Anyone who has ever written a book knows this to be false. Many great authors would never have found their audience without a great publisher willing to take a risk on their talents and market their works. At every stage of the editorial process, publishers partner with their authors as creative consultants, editors and designers. Ernest Hemingway had Maxwell Perkins from Charles Scribner's Sons, and Norman Mailer had E.L. Doctorow from Dial Press.

This week I attended a seminar designed to orient out of work print journalists on opportunities for web writers and web editors (as a job distinct from that of web designer). The moderator insisted there were plenty of good-paying jobs based on the same-value added argument. Firms will hire journalists to produce web content because they have skills and training that readers value, such as fact-checking and interviewing. As encouraged as I was at the thought, I found myself wondering at the same time if this were true. My sense is that people don’t miss what they don’t notice.

For example, I am more likely to read a film review by Anthony Lane of a film that I am not going to see than I am to read a review by David Denby of a film that I am because I prefer Lane’s writing (and I rarely go to see, or avoid, films based on reviews anyway). In other words, I tend to read reviews for the writing and the quality of argument, but I suspect that I am a small minority. Anyone seeking movie reviews on the Web can go to Rotten Tomatoes and not only get reviews but rankings of box office tallies (something that I doubt either Lane or Denby much cares about), links to buy tickets, watch clips, read celebrity gossip, and countless other features and adornments—all of which I’m guessing were proposed in design meetings in which the idea of improving the quality of writing of the reviews was never raised.

The key questions become for how much longer will publishers, regardless of the format in which they are publishing, feel it is worth the expense and effort to play Perkins to Fitzgerald (or, for that matter, Lish to Carver) and how much longer will readers continue to expect such a marriage of literary and editorial skill?

Who could have predicted?

There’s an old joke about two writers talking publishing:

Writer 1: Any luck with your novel?

Writer 2: Naw, the publishing market sucks. I can’t believe how much it sucks.

Writer 1: It’s always sucked.

Writer 2: Yeah, but now it’s really bad.

For as long as I can remember people have been saying that conditions for getting a first novel published by a New York house were bad and getting worse by the second. These expressions of doom pre-dated the Kindle. Just the same, this story should surprise no one. Facing declining sales and under pressure from parent companies and shareholders, publishing houses seem to be taking fewer risks on new talent than ever before. And e-reader consumers thus far overwhelmingly favor non-fiction, genre fiction, bestsellers in general. In other words, they are inclined to buy that which is the opposite of the first literary novel of a recent graduate of a MFA program.

The trend in literary publishing, regardless of format, from at least as far back as Oprah’s first book club, has been away from the blue-chip competence of MFA grads toward writer-personalities who can tell a story of their lives on Oprah’s couch that tracks directly with the material in the book. The message being: you, too, can commodify your sucky life. With the result being an unexpected, disproportionate fame and, now, with the logical conclusion being—this.

Updated: Links fixed.

Where do they find these people?

I have always wondered where lifestyle reporters find interview subjects who conveniently suffer from the exact angst du jour highlighted the article. In this case the story is that there are couples in America in which one prefers to read paper books and the other prefers to read e-books. (See the couple above captured spontaneously in their living room reading on differing devices.) She loves the way books smell; he thinks books are so Middle Ages and hates the whole “smell” thing.

The writer concedes that it’s not clear how widespread this quiet agony of marriages strained to the breaking point by divergent preferences of reading platforms is but insists that “the publishing industry is paying close attention, trying to figure out how to market books to households that read in different ways.”

Apparently, there is also some concern among digital evangelists about the resiliency of paper:

“There is much more emotional attachment to the paper book than there is to the CD or the DVD,” said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “It is not logical — it’s visceral.”

Right? Because there’s no logic to people preferring the device that you can pick up and read after you’ve dropped it off the Empire State Building.

What almost every article that sets out to reveal the tension between e-readers and paper readers is the notion that there necessarily must be a philosophical motivation behind the choice, deeply rooted in each individuals world view and sense of self, but my sense is that such motivations are often more prosaic. I’m not an early adopter of e-reading technology for several reasons. One is that I can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on technology that will cost half as much a year from now and be obsolete in two. Another is that I know if I bought one, I’d never use it and then feel guilty. I reason I don’t use the iCal app on my computer isn’t that I like the smell of the half dozen to-do lists strewn about by desk. I don’t use it because I know that if I did, one item on my hand-scrawled to-do lists would be “Transfer to-do lists to iCal.”

The Souffle Also Rises

With Gourmet first coming back digital and now in a newsstand print format, Conde Nast appears to be the first of the big magazine publishers to be following the trend I pointed out in Creative Nonfiction of online literary magazines who establish a print presence by publishing greatest hits collections semi-regularly. Jason Fell, the author of the article, suggests that this move is not an indication that Nast is bringing back Gourmet as a periodical but uses the opportunity scratch his head, as many have, over the closing Gourmet in the first place, a panic move ostensibly aimed at bottom line realities that caused disproportionate damage to the company’s public image.

I hope to be back on a more regular posting schedule after Labor Day. The languid steamy days of August have coincided with a period of intensified job hunting, which these days goes mostly Choose File/Attach Resume and “I believe my education and experience make me uniquely qualified for this position,” which means “I can’t tell from the language in your posting what your company actually publishes, but if it doesn’t advocate the killing of puppies, I’d be willing to consider it.”

Shivani on the Future of Literary Magazines

Last week, Anis Shivani posted a list on the Huffington Post of “17 Literary Journals That Might Survive the Internet.” I found the list intriguingly random. While most literary magazines these days make their case for survivability on the grounds of how well they have adapted to the new technology (as Jeanne Leiby of the Southern Review does here effectively), the magazines Shivani has chosen fall in a broad range along the spectrum of new-media adoption—which of course may be the point he is implicitly making: that editors, not circumstances, determine a magazine’s future.

Shivani asked the editors of these publications “Can this venerable American literary institution survive—or even thrive—despite new technologies?” What struck me about the replies was that many of editors make the case for their futures by referencing the nature and position of little magazine in the past. Dan Latimer of the Southern Humanities Review says, “It is astonishing to learn that the journals that spread Modernism over the globe rarely had a circulation over 1,000. The Dial was an exception.” (The Dial was an exception, though the larger it grew, the more money it lost.) Which indicates that the reach and influence of literary magazines always extended beyond their circulation numbers. How many people have read “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the near century since Ezra Pound urged Harriet Monroe to accept the work of an unpublished T. S. Eliot?

Robert Boyers of Salamagundi points out that literary magazines “thrive because we are committed to publishing work that cannot appear in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, work that will often seem far too eccentric and rigorous for online publications.” Which, of course, has been the mission—as advanced in different ways— of little magazines over the last century. Poets and fiction writers from Robert Frost and Marianne Moore to Joyce Oates and Ernest Hemingway were published first in small-circulation literary magazines before their work was accepted as part of the canon of the twentieth century.

Though academic quarterlies followed close on their heels, the pioneering magazines of the nineteen-teens and twenties were characterized, for the most part, by the fact that they were independently financed and that their editors rarely spent much time thinking about what they could do to bring in more subscribers. However, gone—sadly—are the days when an editor can move her operation to Europe to take advantage of a low cost of living, liquor, and printing. And most institutionally-affiliated magazines must show some growth in circulation or risk being shut down or forced online.

Carolyn Kuebler of the New England Review speculates that “eventually print will be reserved only for things that are best suited to its particular charms—literary magazines among them—rather than the assumed medium of choice.” And perhaps that will be the salvation of the literary magazine in the end: not only that it attracts a certain type of audience, but that it repels that which seeks the commercial or the profitable.

Update: I chose the Raritan image from the post because it's a great magazine that more people should know about.

The Profit Equation

The final lecture of So You Want to Start a Magazine was devoted to the steps necessary to determine a magazine’s potential for profitability. As I have suggested, the utility of the class for me was diminished by the fact that my neo-socialist literary magazine—despite all its certain dash and drive—is unlikely to be supported by Lexus, Tag Heuer, and Ketel One ads. And when I told “Steve” the instructor (who had graciously agreed to take phone calls) that my four-year subscription goals were 2000 copies, I could tell from the descending lilt in his voice that he agreed. Though I should say that Steve is not only very successful in the field but also a truly supportive instructor. Ultimately, the class was valuable for the insight it provided into the practical realities and processes that must attend the impulse to start a magazine (profitable or otherwise) and for the business plan template that was essentially the superstructure of the lesson plan. And, on the upside, I have spared myself a fortune in market-testing and branding consulting fees.

The only downside to the experience was that it revivified my long-dormant school-related anxiety and its attendant dreams. I had one the second week of class that I had returned to my alma mater the University of Wisconsin to attend a reunion of the cast of the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School that was filmed in Madison while I was going there. The dream-event was held in a crowded lecture hall and had been going on for less than a minute before I remembered not only that I had hated the movie and been annoyed at having to walk around all the cameras and crowds as I went about my self-important way, but also that I was missing a math class I had registered for but hadn’t gone to since the first week. A school anxiety dream within a school anxiety dream, and all this while I was actually doing the online work for the class as it was assigned—unlike some virtual students I could name.

Colorado Review in the HuffPo

Anis Shivani has a great interview with Stephanie G'Schwind on Huffington Post. The Colorado Review, along with other stateonymic literary magazines, like the Missouri Review and the Alaska Quarterly Review, are excellent examples of journals with regional-sounding names that are actually the equal of any of the top geographically-ambiguously-titled counterparts.