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February 16, 2009
Nothing more than a naive question
I used to think it strange that the most anti-establishment writers—those, say, that had their own radio shows on Air America—were selling their books to the large conglomerated, corporate publishers instead of to politically active independent presses. But we were part of Putnam during those months, and I sure didn’t want to mess up that deal.
Excuse me.
These days, though, I’m wondering something slightly bigger. Conglomerated corporate publishers are collapsing their imprints and asserting their extended faith in “the sure thing”—which I’ve said before seems like whistling past the graveyard. By sure thing, they mean Brand Authors.
Newspapers have so fully cut their book coverage that there remains precious little room in which to cover small press books. Now they seem increasingly to focus their pages on the lead titles from the corporate publishers—as though such reviews, good or bad, could do something other than announce to the most loyal readers that the next Brand book is now on the shelves.
The economic pressures on the one person in each chain who buys fiction for all of the superstores are now so strong that “small press” looks to them like “low income,” and the buys from independent publishers are therefore cut back dramatically.
National sales figures—most notably via BookScan—are used throughout the industry to eliminate from publishing lists and from chain store shelves authors whose previous books sold fewer than, say, 20,000 copies.
And all of this seems at the moment to be boiling down traditional book delivery to a very few NY imprints.
What would happen to literature, I wonder? What would happen to the breadth of literary readership? What would happen to the focus of attention? What would happen to the streams that deliver books, were the most established literary authors (you know who they are—the Jonathans) (by which I mean to include the Jhumpas)? What would happen, I say, were the most established and respected, most gifted fiction writers of the age all to sell their next novels to independent presses across the country?
Option clauses—and money—notwithstanding,
would this sort of diversification help the literary world?
I’m just saying.
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
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