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December 11, 2007

The Beat of a Funky Drummer

I know I’ve let these entries flag since Frankfurt, but over the course of a year of Tuesdays with Freddie, I think I’ve had my say. And so, for now, I finish here.

I’ve labored rather clumsily in this sometime-weekly blog to reveal some of my literary convictions (and, shamelessly, to acknowledge my genuine admiration for the authors we publish).

More practically, I’ve tried to argue that what comes next in the digitized publishing world will not be determined by any technological breakthrough but by behaviors—not only those of readers, but those of writers.

Correlative to this, I have wanted to posit an aspect of reading life that I think has been under-considered in e-book discussions: The Text Entire.

And I’ve done so because the following seems to me true:

Irrespective of the “sampling” that is expected in the universal digitized library—that hyperleaping from a passage in one work away to other words and other lines by other writers—there will remain within the mind of the author the compulsion to ensure that his or her work exists complete and whole. Somewhere. Somehow inviolable.

For generations, when a novel has been eviscerated on the movie screen (or by a reviewer), an author has been able to swivel the desk chair, reach up, and pluck the solid book from the shelf. There it is still, just as it was created and made. Its physical reality a reassurance.

When and if that artifact becomes lost to the writer (which is much more important, I think, than its loss to the reader), more will have changed than the textual delivery system. Imagine yourself to be that author awakening in a pixilated narrative world. And then imagine that what you write today will eventually be sampled like the riffs of Clyde Stubblefield.

In that world, I wonder what would be the compulsion to write.

I’d love to engage Toni Morrison in a colloquy about whether she thought herself to be speaking as a writer in that Kindle video. If she was speaking only as a reader, I’d like to know how she accomplished that. And I’d like to know what she thinks the effect of doing so might be on literary writers who are not so well established as she.

Assuming that the stranglehold BookScan has on the careers of writers will loosen with the awakening of the fully digital and therefore suddenly intractable reader, the economics of novel publishing—and novel writing—will change in ways that are difficult to see at the moment. But given the behavioral proscriptions that are still in play, that change is, I imagine, more distant than we may have thought in recent days. If Kindle was going to start the fire, wouldn’t there already be flames? And, no, I don’t think this is simply a function of that $400 ignition fee.

The book endures for more primal reasons, and writing thrives. Regardless of the loss of review inches and endless assertions about the death of reading, publishing proceeds at a rate of 200,000 titles a year. And it seems that hardback fiction sales creep upward while paperback sales drift—If this is so, could it be precisely for fear of soon losing the Book altogether?

We at Unbridled will continue to address new media. Of course we will. We’ll ponder each season whether a novel should be released in cloth or as a paperback original. We’ll be present on Web 2.0 as well as in the print review media. But far more important, we’ll be making all of our promotional and delivery decisions in support of whom we believe to be among the finest writers of the day.

Myself, I’m inclined this season more than ever to wave those books from the tops of the walls and to shout their titles joyfully from there, inclined for now to step away from the more quiet reflections I might make here.

If an open letter to Ms. Morrison (or to the NBCC) does congeal in my head, or if I really feel compelled to reflect in public on B. R. Myers’ astounding comments about establishment literati in his Atlantic review of Tree of Smoke, I’ll be back. (But I bet you already know what I think.)

Otherwise, thanks to you for reading my periodic ramblings this year.

And as Speer always says, Onward.

Fred
Posted 11 December 2007

Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog

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