Look at This Freaking Book Deal

Today, the internet is all about what the publishing companies aren’t doing.  Or what they are doing, but doing the wrong way.  Or why what they’re doing is wrong.  I can’t quite tell.  First came the news that the Justin Halpern, author of the hilarious Twitter feed “Shit My Dad Says,” is negotiating with publishers for a book deal.  This comes on the heels of deals (heels of deals!) for books of single-subject Tumblr blogs This is Why You’re Fat and Look at this Fucking Hipster (Apologies for all the profanity on the blog today.  The internet is full of cussing, apparently).  It’s easy to see why publishers think these deals make sense:  people like the blog, they’ll love the book! Except that it often happens that this isn’t the case.  Why?  For one thing, I don’t think blogs are inherently worse than books, which seems to be the implication here.  Sometimes, something is just so much better as a blog.  I know that this kills many people to hear, but there are times in the day when I’d rather read blogs than books.  Yes, let that sink in.

The very thoughtful Tumblr blog Nerdshares puts it quite well in this post on the blog/twitter to book phenomenon:

So there’s a massive industry-wide flail,  of which the blog/tweet books are a part, that’s annoying the hell out of me. But it’s also exacerbated by my suspicion that these books won’t sell. Because if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that people who aren’t buying print material [books or magazines] anyway but like reading things online probably won’t buy a book of something they read/can continue to read online.

Then there’s the issue of whether people will buy something they can already get for free.  I never bought the Stuff White People Like book because, well, it just seemed like more of the same.  (I’d like to draw a distinction here between books like these and something along the lines of Julie & Julia, in which Julie Powell recounts the entire story of writing her blog, not just reproducing the posts or writing more of the same type of post.) I’m sure some people are excited about these blog books (most of all the people who sold them!), but to me, they seem like shoehorning something into a format that doesn’t always fit.

On a similar note, HTML Giant’s Blake Butler bemoans the cowardice of publishing with regards to difficult works, works whose language is so challenging that it can dissuade the casual reader.  He’s talking about the works of Joyce, Beckett, Pynchon and others of this ilk.  Here he discusses the issue of whether any of these books would be published today:

So, then, it becomes confusing to me, in this reckoning, when I think of how most any of these books, if approached today, would not exist. I can’t think of most any publisher, even the major and innovative independents, that would release Ulysses again right now, if instead of an accepted masterpiece, it were a third book by some Irish guy who had published a collection of short fiction and a weird novella. I can’t see Dalkey doing it, or FC2 (EDIT: actually, FC2 recently published Vanessa Place’s La Medusa, which is the closest thing I’ve seen to doing what I’m talking about, which means they might have, maybe), or any of the other countless innovative-based upcroppings. Even the more “languagey” presses often don’t do books that are super-languagey, despite the seeming overwhelming admission that those monsters are the ones that defy time, and sell, perhaps gradually, forever.

Click through and be sure to read the comments thread as well.  It’s attracted some 170 plus, when last I checked, and many of them focus the blame for this phenomenon on that popular bogeyman of literary sameness the MFA program in creative writing.

This is difficult, as I really believe that people don’t want to be challenged.  Some people do, I think, and I believe there’s a way to make money publishing books and selling them to those people.  But the idea that the masses want this kind of adventurous literature or that they would want it if they were more used to reading it, seems wrong to me.  Most people don’t even read.  When they do read, they want plot, they want characters, they want an immersion experience.

I think Butler is wrong about Ulysses, too.  It absolutely would be published today, just as 2666 and Europe Central were published, not by small houses on the fringes but by FSG and Viking, respectively, both owned by massive conglomerates.  Would there be more adventurous fiction published if there were more small houses?  Undoubtedly.  I hope we see a bunch of really innovative niche houses spring up to publish all kinds of daring stuff.  Yes, please, let’s have that.  But let’s not also pretend that most work isn’t being published because it’s too difficult or too innovative.

In my position I have the obligation pleasure of dealing with quite a few self-published authors.  While some of these authors chose this route because they felt they could do a better job than the big houses in marketing their books, most of them have a story about how they couldn’t get an agent to read them, couldn’t get a publishing house to accept them, etc.  I can tell you from experience that these books are not being rejected because they are too ambitious, too outre.  They aren’t getting published because they are either about conspiracies involving the Freemasons and 9/11 or how cats can cure cancer, or they are poorly written (or both…usually both).  This is not to tar all self-published authors with the mark of conspiracy theorists; maybe it’s just the ones who want to talk to me.

What’s the point of this rambling post?  It’s a surprise to no one that the publishing landscape is changing right now.  Publishers are willing to try anything to stay afloat, and for many of them, that increasingly means taking stuff from the internet and printing it.  Ironically, I think it’s the web — or some weblike creature — that might provide exactly what Butler is looking for.  The true experimentation in literature at the moment is happening on the web, where sites like Gimcrack’d are showing new directions for literature, changing the form as well as the content.  So maybe we can have more of that and less of, well, this.  (And for the love of all that is holy, publishers, no book deal for that vile People of Walmart site, to which I refuse to link.)