Ahem. Should have been writing today. Did a bit of surfing.
So anyway. Here are some of the things I’ve been reading today (a lot of them courtesy of Poets & Writers).
First off, I somehow missed the Booker shortlist announcement. I’m glad to see Bring Up the Bodies there. If anything I enjoyed it more than Wolf Hall. I invented a drinking game for it. Every time you see the phrase He, Cromwell you knock back another shot. I was drunk for three weeks straight. Partly because I kept losing my place and reading the same sentence over and over again.
Fantasy novelist Sylvia Hartmann is writing ‘live’ on Google Docs. She says she’s intending to go a little Fifty Shades at some point. I’ve tried writing porn in the past. I always got terribly into it for a brief but intense while. Then I found myself taking a little nap before wandering off to make a sandwich.
I have just finished reading The Human Stain, so I was interested to come across Philip Roth’s open letter to Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia asserted that the novel was partly inspired by the life of Anatole Broyard. This, says Roth, is untrue. But being the author of a work, apparently, doesn’t make you enough of an expert to sway the Wikipedia editors.
Last week, author John Green launched an attack on Jeff Bezos and his online store. Amazon, he claims, is threatening publishing with its ebook platform. Publishers and editors improve books, Green claimed. And their role as gatekeepers balances quality and diversity. Without traditional publishing, how will quality stand out?
My fear is that if there are only two or three voices in the publishing retail landscape—say, Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon—that diversity will dramatically decrease. Only a few dozen books a year will be available at large retailers like Wal-Mart; the rest of literature will exist only in the kindle store. Those books will have difficulty being discovered, because there are so few readers and so many titles. (You are starting to see a similar phenomenon on YouTube right now, actually, but in publishing it will be far worse, because it usually only takes a few minutes to watch a YouTube video.)
This is an interesting point. I’m still keen to understand how quality will be signposted in the brave new self-published world. If we do away with the traditional gatekeepers, we’re going to have to hire in some more at some point, aren’t we? Or are we going to pin our hopes on the wisdom of crowds? My guess is we’ll see a proliferation of indie publishing houses springing up online, and readers will turn to their catalogues.
I also returned to an excellent interview with Lawrence Norfolk today. When I learned that he’d abandoned a book after seven years of painting himself into a corner I finally closed my browser and got back to work.
