One of the more gross and annoying aspects of modern liberal
intellectuals is how vital and proper they think it is to piss on
every new technique that allows more people to accomplish more
things, because, well, near as I can tell the dominant “thought”
behind this is that it limits the cultural power of gatekeepers,
which for some reason are dearly loved by people who a) see
themselves as culturally “on the side” of the gatekeepers or at the
very least not on the side of those making and using the
techniques.
Or b), they just really get off on penning people in behind
gates.
I’ve written on this phenomenon before as it applied to the
New Republic‘s
sneering at the terrible offense of Kickstarter (which allows
people to easily and cheaply raise funds for their particular
version of cool stuff) and the New Yorker being
alarmed and annoyed by the “maker movement” (which
encourages the use and spread of techniques and ideas that allow
more people to, again, make more cool stuff). Anything that allows
more choices and abundance outside a context that’s political or
that fails to enforce “social consciousness” just gripes some
writers’ guts a whole bunch. I genuinely don’t get it—and neither
do they get what they are complaining about.
The latest annoying example of this trend is from the U.K.
Guardian, by Alan Skinner, titled “Self-Publishing
is not Revolutionary–It’s Reactionary” and sneers at the rise
of the “authorpreneur.”
Some excerpts w/arguments:
self-publishing is neither radical nor liberating. And, as
revolutions go, it is rather short on revolutionaries. It is
actually reactionary, a contracted version of the traditional
publishing model in which companies, who produce for a wide range
of tastes and preferences, are replaced by individual producers
each catering to very narrow range.
No, in fact they are replaced by a wide range of individual
producers producing whatever they want to for everyone in the
world.
But while traditional publishing, in Skinner’s read, is nicely
and sweetly centralized by experts (and don’t worry he
writes—anyone can submit a book to a trad publisher! Well,
not really), the ability for every writer to reach every reader is
something much, much worse: individualistic.
By definition, self-publishing is an individualistic pursuit in
which each writer is both publisher and market adventurer, with
every other writer a potential competitor and the reader reduced to
the status of consumer. Publishing then becomes timid, fearing to
be adventurous and revolutionary lest it betray the expectations of
its market. This is a natural tendency in traditional publishing
but it is one restrained by the voices of its authors who are free
to put their work first and entrepreneurship a distant second. With
authorship and entrepreneurship now equal partners,
the new
authorpreneurs have thrown off the dictatorship of the
editor to replace it with the tyranny of the market.
What makes an author able to but work first and entrepreneurship
a distant second? Well, I guess mistakes made by editor and
publishers, at times. A point that Skinner might find too vulgar to
mention is that an author through trad publishing gets at best
around 10-15 percent of the income from his work, as opposed to
easily 4-5 times that through e-book platforms, so the amount any
writer needs to sell to be recompensed for her work is actually far
lower with self-publishing.
Cross-subsidies from commercial titles support poets, academics
and writers of new and daring literary fiction who will never
appear on bestseller lists. Such concerted action is impossible in
a fragmented world where each writer pursues individual
success.
One hears this a lot. He provides no evidence of it,
specifically. The whole notion of “cross-subsidies” may happen on
occasion, though generally when publishers print books that don’t
make a lot of money it’s because they made a mistake, and generally
a pretty cheap one, given size of most advances and lack of any
expense on promotion, not because they are nobly supporting
literature. The “support” that reaches writers in a self-published
e-book market is enormously higher per reader/customer reached than
in a traditional model.
But how do you know self-publishing is
really wrong, when the weakness of assuming that
traditional publishing will somehow find or distribute
more great literature (presuming we are in a world
where anyone is writing great literature) with more support to the
author (as opposed to themselves) becomes obvious with about 10
seconds of thought? Because, Ayn Rand!
he individualism of the self-publishing authorpreneurs, is
disturbingly close toAyn Rand’s
Objectivism, in which the greatest goal is individual
fulfilment. No wider context needs to be considered because these
wider goals will take care of themselves if every individual
pursues a personal objective without regard to anyone else. It is
the philosophy of pure laissez-faire capitalism that rejects
community and mutual responsibility.
No, self-publishing is the philosophy of “I write whatever I
want, and I have the means to find out if anyone out there in the
community wants it” rather than the philosophy of “God I hope I can
fool an editor and a marketing board into paying me an advance far,
far more than the book will ever earn back.” The “wider context” he
worries doesn’t exist is one where authors are unfettered, get more
for their work, and are recompensed based on how much the literary
community writ large chooses to support them.
Better, thinks Skinner (and I hope there is no mass audience
that was on his side), that authors be tended and managed by huge
international conglomerates who will, as most authors who pay any
attention know, take 85 percent or more of the income on your work
for no consideration other than a loan (which they, kindly enough,
generally will not try to dragoon out of you at any cost if it
doesn’t technically recoup) and are every step of the way more
interested in maximising their income over gaining you either
income or readers (note their general unwillingness to do or spend
anything at all on promoting your work once they’ve paid
the bills to print it and ship it to Amazon, and their desire to
keep
e-book prices as high as they think they can, and that’s not to
help the author.)
There is so little substance to his argument I can’t imagine
what would inspire him to write and publish this unless it’s having
big ownership stakes in French or
German
megaconglomerates. Because this guy nattering about community and
attacking individualism and laissez-faire is doing so in service of
arguments that don’t help readers and don’t help writers. They only
help publishers.
I made fun of a similar gatekeeper attack
on self-publishing for Suck.com back in the go-go 00s. As I
wrote then and as most professional authors not at the
tippy-toppermost of the poppermost know:
Indeed it is true that, as Bissell and Younce write, “without an
editor, marketing or publicity, [a] book will enter the world with
a silence that makes a tree falling in the woods sound like Chinese
New Year in comparison.” What they don’t mention is that the great
majority of books published by even Manhattan-based publishers with
lovingly crafted colophons and well-situated offices face the same
deafening disinterest. While these books don’t qualify as “vanity
publishing,” the great majority of professional published authors
will find their efforts to have been in vain…..As a service sought out, gatekeeping is noble enough. As an
impermeable barrier, it’s a cultural crime. Only those afraid of
what’s out there, or convinced they can’t defend themselves, crave
impregnable gatekeepers.
That said, the cultural and technological changes of the past
decade have made it easier, though of course never actually easy,
for any writer anywhere to reach any reader, and for communities of
affinity and communication to arise and thrive that will provide
each of us with self-crafted means of “gatekeeping” about what we
might like or want to read.
These new systems don’t involve paying high salaries and giving
midtown Manhattan offices to a bunch of people who could not
possibly care less about author or reader, and that’s, um, a shame,
I guess.
Bonus “disgusting examples of the intellectual twists people
will go through to justify state action to restrict our
possibilities” in this
huge Nation think piece on how marketplace choice is
objectively bad for us and needs to be stopped.
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