Why is everything so bad? publishing edition
have you ever wondered why the publishing world sucks so bad? I have some Thots
*This post was originally published on Patreon on March 24, 2022. Thanks to Adrian Rennix for editing! You can check out Adrian's terrific (and free) newsletter about immigration policy here.
One of my friends—an accomplished short story writer—pays very little attention to literary scandals. You know it’s a juicy drama when he hears enough about it to message me for details. I pay attention to pretty much all these scandals. I don’t know why. They’re not fun or cool or interesting. The latest flap over Sandra Newman’s “gendercide” novel The Men is case in point. I’m not sure it’s not really worth going into details, because one of these scandals is much the same as any other, but, in brief: Newman, a nonbinary author, has written a book where people with Y chromosomes disappear. It’s a premise that’s been done before, and obviously has troubling implications for trans people. A few trans and nonbinary writers have read advance review copies and criticized Newman’s execution of the premise, although some other readers say the critics have mistaken representation for endorsement. Newman has stayed quiet but her friend, Lauren Hough, fiercely went after the critics, insulting them rather than responding in a meaningful way. As a result, Hough’s memoir (about living as a lesbian in adverse environments) has been removed from contention for the Lambda prize, an award for queer writers. All of this has happened on and because of Twitter, or in the pages of magazines that now exist mostly to comment on things that happen on or because of Twitter. It will probably not affect Newman or Hough’s book sales very much, or the book sales of their critics; all buzz is good buzz but not many people buy books these days anyway. The books themselves seem increasingly unimportant. Nobody makes much money writing them; nobody seems to be having an especially good time. Marginalized writers provoke and tear each other apart for a publishing industry that eats their identities and barely supports their work. I handle the horror of this reality by looking; my friend handles it by looking away.
“Why is publishing so horrible” is a much bigger question than I can answer, because there are a lot of factors and I’m situated on the relative outside of the publishing world. And any question of “why is X so bad” needs to be contextualized: has X always been bad? How bad is X now, in relation to how bad it was before? In a few senses, publishing is a little better than it’s been: efforts to publish work by marginalized voices have resulted in a small increase in novels by marginalized people, even if we haven’t yet approached anything like true parity. Once-taboo subjects, especially in the realm of gender and sexuality, are not only publishable these days but awardable (though bannable in certain states, which is a much more significant issue than any online controversy). And yet at the same time—and not coincidentally!—author pay has plummeted, publishing houses have merged and squeezed existing staff until they quit en masse, and one of the only semi-reliable paths to publication is by slamming other writers’ work, whether through artful takedowns in high-end publications or dramatic Twitter call-outs. It doesn’t matter so much whether you’re calling out or you’re the one who is called out; either way, attention can be marketable (although again, never that marketable.)
Lots of good books are still being written and read of course…but even when it comes to books that I like, I keep noticing a certain laxness. A novel with an exciting premise might have a terrific opening sentence, a solid first chapter…but the narrative dwindles as it goes on, as if nobody had time or energy to edit all the way through. Now, writing is difficult, and successfully rounding the corner on a story has always been a challenge, and certain genres—SFF in particular—have often struggled with “ok great concept but how do you tell the story?” What there seems less of now, across the board, is investment in any given work, because the work itself is now only an investment. A novel is a risk, a financial instrument, and all that matters to its financiers (publishers) is whether it’s worth the risk or not.
It usually isn’t worth the risk. Something like seventy percent of novels these days don’t pay out their advances. Is this because the public has less appetite for novels? I doubt it. It’s true that people are reading less, and some of this is likely due to competition from movies, TV, and video games (and, given the fluidity and frequency of adaptations these days, it’s kind of reasonable for people to wait for the inevitable TV adaptation of any semi-popular novel.) But mostly I think people aren’t reading as much because they don’t think reading is fun or interesting, and they don’t think it’s fun or interesting because publishers aren’t marketing books to them as fun or interesting. Novels might be fun or interesting (or both!) but they are generally sold as some variation on Important (read this book to better yourself) or Popular (read this book or you’ll have FOMO). However, that doesn’t mean that better marketing alone would encourage people to read more, because the marketing is only the end product of a much larger material and aesthetic breakdown. These Twitter literary feuds too are not the beginning but the end of a process, a sad fight over scraps at the end of the world. Again, this is a very big topic, and in many ways I’m just a rubbernecking outsider, but here’s a brief overview of some of the reasons why I think all of this is happening.
Corporate Greed
This is, of course, the biggest and most obvious point. As I said above, a novel acts as a kind of financial instrument for publishing houses, and not a very good one. Novels are high-risk assets, which is why publishing houses offset their risk by paying authors as little as possible. But publishing houses are extraordinarily bad at guessing what people will like and allocating resources accordingly. (You would think greedy motherfuckers would be better at greed, but that’s capitalism for you: it’s stupid and inefficient.) The tendency across the board is to chase trends, or try to anticipate new ones—books are held to be part of a trend, rather than viewed individually. This produces mini-gluts of very similar books, or books that contain one or two similar elements being lumped together by both publishers and public in a kind of ah-ha, TV Tropes-style cataloging, as if reading were merely an exercise in basic pattern recognition. The effort to chase trends or invent trends, or not be left behind by trends, leads to publishers jumping on books that are then quickly irrelevant, or to squash books into niches that don’t really fit them, or to reject books that don’t fit exactly into a micro-trend, or fit too exactly into a micro-trend that, according to the incredibly incompetent trend-spotters at publishing houses, has already passed its prime.
Now, it would be much simpler to just publish “books that are good,” irrespective of trends. But that would require having faith in the public to choose books thoughtfully, rather than just assuming they react to the double stimuli of marketing and popular trends like rat brains in a jar. However, publishers don’t have faith in the public, because of…
A Persistent Anti-Democratic Ethos
In the 1995 Aaron Sorkin film The American President, the handsome brown-haired president (Michael Douglas) is having an argument with his equally handsome brown-haired aide (Michael J. Fox). “People want leadership,” cries Michael J. Fox, “and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership; they're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.” But President Michael Douglas is not convinced. “We've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference.”
This exchange is a rather neat encapsulation of Sorkin’s worldview, and of a common and pessimistic liberal perspective on the impossibility of democracy. Ordinary Americans may crave leadership, as they crave water, as they crave food, as they crave art, as they crave storytelling—but they’re stupid. They don’t know what they want. They have to be guided through the desert by wiser men, but because water and sand are all the same to them, they’ll drink whatever they find. It may not be possible to lead them to higher things, and past a certain point, why bother? Just feed them a gritty slurry.
As such, there’s no need to market “literary fiction” to the broader public—they won’t get it. There’s also no need to make halfway decent movies or TV shows based on popular IP—people will watch whatever’s on anyway. Good art, like good democracy, is impossible in this country, given this anti-intellectual, junk food-addicted, instant gratification-desiring, fat and stupid body politic. Often enough, the imagined “bad” American audience has been conceptualized as a white-collar, childish bourgeoisie obsessed with treats and being entertained (see how people talk about adult YA readers and Marvel movie-watchers). But, while it’s certainly true that a portion of the pop culture fanbase is upper middle-class, most people of all classes love pop culture. Working-class people enjoy entertainment too: their lives are rarely 100% nonstop work and misery. Working-class and middle-class Americans are just as likely to go see whatever the big tentpole movie is, or stream a popular TV show, or read a big-name YA novel. Now, do ordinary Americans like what they like because they’re too stupid to understand higher things? What kind of person (with what kind of politics) would think that?
I’m stepping a bit away from publishing and starting to tread into the territory of a much larger topic: when popular art is enjoyed by all classes of people, and auteurs like Denis Villeneuve are directing big-budget adaptations of a beloved sci fi novel, there’s really much more overlap between “pop culture” and “serious art” than many would like to imagine. But still a lot of critics argue from the basic premise, conscious or unconscious, that the broader public remains too dumb to know what art is good for them; and therefore when bad art is popular, it means people are drinking the sand because they don’t know the difference. Giant multinational entertainment complexes operate from the same premise: people are dumb, they will happily drink the slop, so keep churning out the same thing over and over again. That’s how we get endless gluts of IP reworkings and cookie-cutter YA novels. It’s also—paradoxically—how we get the category of literary fiction, defined in opposition to the slop, marketed toward a would-be intelligentsia that believes it can always tell the obvious difference between water and sand.
I’m not for a moment making some kind of poptimistic suggestion that all art is somehow the same, just that most art, whether popular or serious, is made and marketed by people who have unconsciously accepted Sorkin’s basic premise that people are stupid (obviously other people are stupid, never the person making the claim.) Americans are definitely very annoying, and often shitty and bigoted, but I’m not convinced they’re stupid, or rather, I don’t know if liking art is a question of intelligence as much as feelings. If the broader public shows up for particular movies and books, then they probably find something fun or interesting there. The particular work in question might not be especially good, but people are enjoying it, or enjoying it enough. Contra to many defenders of “serious” art, I don’t think “enjoyment” is a quality to be scorned; plus there are many different kinds of literary and artistic “enjoyment.” It might be good to make better and braver works that will more meaningfully satisfy people’s emotional needs, rather than holding viewers accountable for a corporate greed and laziness they do not control. Yes, readers and viewers should probably make “smarter” aesthetic choices, but the world is exhausting and people are tired, and what else are you (writers, critics, publishing houses) offering them? Are you making difficult art feel accessible, or are you making it sound like tedious homework? When people have no water, except maybe the stuff marked “REALLY GOOD WATER BUT YOU’RE TOO DUMB/SENSITIVE TO APPRECIATE IT” it’s possible that people might deliberately, spitefully, opt for sand. Yes, that’s stupid, but then feelings are often stupid.
3. Gatekeeping and Gatecrashing
Along with the lingering belief in the stupidity of the public, many people also hold on to the myth of artistic meritocracy. When it comes to publishing, this is highly paradoxical, because as I’ve already said, writers are not compensated well. Almost no artists of any kind are compensated well. The lower ranks of every art form are, without exception, filled with underpaid strivers. And yet almost everybody, even smart leftist artists who know perfectly well that meritocracy is bunk, believe that they will or ought to make it in their chosen field. Why shouldn’t they? After all, there are writers who get published; there are even a tiny handful who earn enough to write full-time. One or two are wildly successful—why couldn’t it be you, if you work hard enough? The institutional barriers of race, class, gender, and sexuality remain, but they’re not quite as strong as they once were; surely you can break them down? Surely you don’t have any excuse?
It’s fascinating to see how these expectations—and much of writing advice in general—are basically just a hustle-and-grind meme. Just write every day, just write more, just write with every free minute. You have time; you would do it if you cared enough. And if you care enough and you get an agent and you sell your book, that means you earned this success; however, if your work isn’t published or it doesn’t sell very many copies, then obviously you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. People actually believe these things, even people who should know better, people who do know better! And then they take out these frustrations on other writers, in ways that are frequently disproportionate to the crimes that the writers have committed (crimes that are ultimately more blame-able on the publishing houses anyway, who sanctioned and were therefore supposed to edit the work). It’s not enough to write a book, if attention and therefore dollars and therefore more books cannot be guaranteed. You must rip down all other books, tear them out by the roots, until only your book can be seen. That’s what makes a good book: being the only book. The only bloom in the garden.
Where this gets messy, of course, is when books are genuinely offensive and hurtful. Many takedowns, on Twitter or otherwise, center on whether a particular story is harmful to marginalized communities. These takedown events are often called “cancellations” but they usually aren’t in any material sense—most books that are widely criticized online are still published, unless the author temporarily withdraws and revises the book herself. (It’s almost always herself, or sometimes themself; women and nonbinary authors are usually the subjects of this sort of scrutiny, and on the few occasions when it’s men instead—say, Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace—the counter-accusations are nearly always of unfairness, bad reading, YA-ness, bourgeois lady-ness). But plenty of the accusations of bigotry in fiction writing, however confined they are by gender, are perfectly valid; and just because they garner attention for the critic doesn’t mean they were solely motivated by a desire for attention (and sometimes the critic, in turn, will be subject to a vicious backlash complete with death threats, which itself can result in more sympathy and book sales.) How do we tell the difference between a good callout and a bad one, between criticism motivated by genuine outrage or by an eye toward brand-building? What is offensive and what isn't, and who decides? Well—
4. You Can’t Turn Art Into an Objective Science So Stop Trying
I’m really not very good with philosophy or abstract thinking, but I do have to carefully define my terms here, so I’ll do my best. When I say “objective” I don’t mean “true,” and when I say “subjective” I don’t mean “false.” I mean two different ways of thinking about reality. The sky is objectively (to my human eyes) blue; my cats are objectively (to any eyes, god or mortal) perfect. If I read a book, and I think it’s good, then it is indeed good—in subjective terms. If you read it and think it’s bad, then it is bad—once again, in subjective terms. Which of us is right? Both of us, and neither of us. Such is the nature of subjectivity.
The aboutness of a book, however, is a bit different. It’s still subjective, but where liking or disliking may be pure opinion (you vibed with the work or you didn’t), the events in a story are not a free-for-all. Certain things happen in a text, and other things don’t happen; when you and I discuss a book, we are discussing the same book, even if we interpret it differently. Let’s say, for example, that we’ve both read a particular novel. I found this book anti-Semitic, but you, a non-Jewish person, didn’t interpret it that way. My view—provided I am making well-sourced arguments based on the actual text—is subjectively valid; you may find my arguments more or less compelling, but you should probably give some credence to my judgment on the subject, because I’m Jewish and therefore operating from a point of expertise that you lack. But what happens if another Jewish critic, let’s call her Wari Beiss*, shows up and disagrees with my reading? What if she doesn’t think the novel in question is anti-Semitic? Whom do you trust? Neither of us, automatically: you would look at our text-based arguments and weigh them, keeping in mind all the while that, as a non-Jewish person, you are operating from a less informed perspective than we are. But just because me and Wari both possess a more informed perspective doesn’t mean that our arguments are automatically flawless; after all, we disagree with each other! We may both have subjectively valid opinions; or one of us is a less skillful reader than the other, and has missed details or unfairly over-emphasized others. Which of us is right? It’s impossible to determine in advance. It’s going to depend on the situation and the context, every time.
What none of the three of us can do is determine whether a given story is objectively offensive. This is perfectly fine: literary criticism is not about objectivity. Through my critical reading of this novel as anti-Semitic, I am not trying to prove objective offensiveness, only subjective offensiveness. Once again, “subjective” does not mean “false” or “merely an opinion;” it just means I am not a flawless arbiter of universal truth. My belief that the novel is anti-Semitic remains true; my subjectivity—again, provided I have made a reasonable argument based on the actual text—is perfectly valid. It just isn’t objective: it isn’t the same category of thing as a provable, scientific fact. A novel is not an objective object, and interpretation is not an objective act.
This is fine. Nothing about fiction is objective. I am not completely sure why this weird lurch toward objectivity is happening, and I suspect it has a lot to do with the increasingly stringent material conditions in the broader writing world that I’ve already discussed. The author may be broke as shit, but she’s alive as hell. If you didn’t know any better, you would think from the tenor of criticism these days that every novel has a single meaning, perfectly intended by the author, which it’s the reader/critic’s job to discern. A novel then is a kind of fancy essay, dressed up in characters and pretty language. It has one interpretation, one theme, one politics. It is also objectively good or bad, objectively offensive or critical of offensiveness, objectively representing evil acts or objectively endorsing them, and if you disagree with a critic’s opinion—whether it’s positive or negative—you are objectively a bad reader. Ironically enough, this is the literal definition of bad reading: declaring a work of art to have only one meaning, your meaning, which is objectively correct. Of course, not all readings are justified: some readings are more or less bad, taking in some details, ignoring others. But a novel that only has one reading, one universal correct interpretation, is not a novel. It probably isn’t even an essay. It’s too boring to exist.
There’s no objectivity in fiction, only more reliable subjectivities, none of which are perfectly authoritative subjectivities, only more authoritative subjectivities. I reiterate yet again that just because something is subjective doesn’t mean it’s false or invalid: a highly-informed opinion remains an opinion, and it remains a highly informed one. Subjectivity deserves respect. Perspectives different from your own should be listened to, because we live in a bigoted society and people who have experienced things that you haven’t will usually know things that you don’t. Everyone is entitled to their opinions about literature, and yet not all opinions are as developed or informed or meaningful as others. Holding those last two thoughts in one’s head simultaneously would end 99% of literary fights right out of the gate. That’s exactly why it doesn’t happen.
*I’m not subtweeting any particular incident regarding Bari Weiss and literature, I just don’t like her.