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January 06, 2009
Life is Elsewhere
The recent Wall Street Journal article by Harvard professor Anita Elberse has caused a great deal of consternation in the online book world. This piece at Three Percent will indicate to you part of the reason.
Quite simply, Elberse is advocating that in the face of severe economic reversals and market changes mainstream publishers continue to function in the same way they have since the rise of celebrity publishing. “The blockbuster strategy,” she says, “remains the most sensible approach to lasting success.” That is, to her way of thinking, the practice of overpaying for a manuscript to raise its profile and then of expending huge marketing sums in support of that overpayment, is the only means available to conglomerated publishing to address the bottom line.
She’s right—even though it seems clear that one day soon that just won’t work any longer. Professor Elberse’s recommendation presupposes that the old reading customer behaviors are still in play. And perhaps they are, right now. In any case, the old strategy she champions is the only strategy that will serve the old model. But, as I’ve asked before, what happens to that model if the day comes when readers are no longer willing to dive into the stream en masse? What if the publishers who have for so long floated their boats among the swimmers there are already only whistling, only hoping that the stream they’re in is still main?
Certainly the Big Houses are continuing to overbid celebrity properties and will continue to do so until the money leaves the media conglomerates for some other, less intractable business. But with Borders receding and B&N’s front table becoming less a destination point, with the msm reviewers who supported the mainstream vanishing, with the return of actual browsing via Amazon, with the rise of social media that generate idiosyncratic waves of personal recommendations, it must be more difficult these days to marshal readers toward those precious few blockbusters. (One wonders how long we will refer to blockbusters if there’s no longer a unified block to bust.)
I’ve said all this before. Or most of it.
What I really want to ask here is this: How long must we chat and blog and write about big-ticket novels that may or may not fail, that have or have not failed? I do feel the human cost of these changes. I worry for those who have suffered in the realignments and personnel cuts. I wonder what will become of many friends in these hard times.
But separately, outside that world the vitality in the text, the affective life of narrative and of written creativity, and the real future in reading reside in all those small-ticket books we’re ignoring. Life is Elsewhere. As we worry whether the big houses will survive, season by season, I fear that we might lose sight of those more rewarding books, the longer-lasting books that already wait near the stream banks in the thin hope that readers will (for some currently unforeseeable reason) turn around toward them.
And I trouble this even within the discussion of novels on iPhones . . .
As Chad at Three Percent points out, Professor Elberse is worried with maintaining the collective faith in the old business model while that model is apparently losing its stranglehold on culture. Watching that loss of grip is, perhaps, morbidly fascinating. But what books, what authors pass behind us while we look that way?
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
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