More on This Electronics Business
Gregor Dallas
Richard Lewis has already made some important comments on the influence of the new technology on the ‘publishing industry’. Effectively, publishing today is disappointing an increasing number of authors. Should we just let these corporations die, since they seem to resemble increasing huge ‘printing machines’, serving no one? Gregor Dallas argues ‘No’: seems is not what is. We would all be the poorer for it. Publishers still have a role to play in the world of books, but they will have to respond better to the needs of authors if they are to survive.
I should like to make a few comments on Richard Lewis's three interesting contributions of January and February: 'This Electronic Business: Are Authors Being Sidelined?', 13 February 2009; 'Plumbers of the Human Condition', 28 January 2009; and 'Desperate Publishers', 16 January 2009. 'Plumbers' is at the heart of the matter, so I shall focus on that. It is all about this current mess in the book world that nobody seems to want to do anything about.
It should concern all authors. But authors appear to be part of the general public paralysis, evident to anybody who bothers to look at the state of the world of books today. That's the essence of the problem: paralysis — general paralysis of thought stretching right through the industry, from the authors, through the agents, the publishers and the distributors — in the face of technological change.
THE CONSTANT: HUMAN CREATIVITY
Now, I am what one may call a 'techno-sceptic'. I shock my friends by telling them that nothing has basically changed on the face of the globe since I was born shortly after the Second World War. I can recall Harold Macmillan (he was once our Prime Minister, you may have forgotten) expressing awe at the change his world had undergone since the days when his parents used to drive him through town in a horse and buggy. Perhaps, I thought, that would happen in my world, too; one day it would come to resemble that of Dan Dare (British space hero, you may remember, of the comic, The Eagle) where we drive around town in helicopters and jet-propelled hovercraft. But that is not what happened. So I now say to my querulous friends: 'Look, we still take the train to the airport, the airport at Heathrow looks exactly the same, the people are somewhat more sloppily dressed; but the South Downs are still there, the street scenes through the Weald villages haven't changed one bit, the tower on Leith Hill is still there, so is the pub at the foot of the hill, and the nice bouncy girl still serves her pints of bitter there: the world hasn't changed one bit!'
'Computers! computers! computers!' cry my querulous friends. 'What about computers?'
'What about these damned computers?' I respond. 'I am a researcher, a historian and an author,' I assure them; 'nothing whatsoever in my trade has changed in the last forty years.' They look at me aghast.
However, I am right. The research hasn't changed. 'But you can get everything on Google, today!' If you haven't read your books properly, double-checked your sources and learnt those sources by heart — something one doesn't emphasize too much these days — you will make serious errors. If all you do is just Google your sources you are in trouble. That is exactly what some journalists in fact do. A serious historian must not. That is why I am worried about standards in journalism today. Google helps you locate sources — some wonderful advances have been made in medieval history, where sourcing is difficult, because of this. Google is also very useful right at the end of the publication process, at the copy-editing stage. My own copy editor, who I really do believe is the best in the world, uses his marvellous command of the English language, his powerful memory and a library of reference works. He types his comments on a manual typewriter with coloured ribbons and has never been near a computer. I use Google to check him, after he has double-checked me.
Rely on Google and you will be landed in a ditch: Google must be limited to the fast reference at the beginning of your research and a fast check at the end of the production of the book. In between, you are still faced with the task Thomas Carlyle had to contend with in the 1830s and 40s: reading, learning and inwardly digesting. So no change in the research.
As for the composition of a good book, it hasn't changed much since the days of Dickens. 'What about the word processor?' Well, what about it? When I started writing professionally I wrote by hand on legal sheets of yellow paper. Very early on I moved on to the typewriter. Then an electric typewriter. Then my first Mac. Over the last two decades I have been changing and upgrading my computer equipment every five years or so. It helps with the editing and has immensely improved the physical appearance of my manuscripts. But the actual work of composition — the climactic pleasure of writing a history book after all those other tasks have been completed — has not changed one iota since I began writing on yellow legal paper when I was still a teenager. So the composition hasn't really changed either.
I suppose there is a danger of overwriting, of correcting and correcting and correcting your writing — because it is so easy to do with a word processor. Lawyers tell me how much they have saved, through their word processors, on secretarial services when preparing their briefs and their conclusions. I myself no longer employ a typist. But there is the downside, too. In my emails I make errors of grammar and spelling that I never made before; and I have made diplomatic blunders when communicating at speed with friends and professionals — the time for reflection has gone. I have since learnt to hold on to an important email for twenty-four hours — as with an old-fashioned letter. None of this, of course, is reflected in my manuscripts, which get the same treatment as they did when I began publishing in the 1970s.
In sum, there seem to be more dangers connected with the new technology — superficial research, and shoddy, unreflective writing — than the advantages — the ease in editing and the prettier final presentation of the manuscript. There is no doubt about it: the quality of writing books has declined rapidly since the introduction of the new technology. I think, however, that this is largely due to the disappearance of editing in the publishing process. And this brings me to an organizational theme which is really at the heart of what Richard Lewis is writing about.
YESTERDAY’S VISION OF THE FUTURE
Since the development of contemporary electronics we have seen the volume of books being published increase rapidly. A new book is published every three-quarters of an hour in the UK. These 'titles', as they say in the trade, are depressingly similar, with publishers, marketers, distributors and literary agents demanding more and more of the same: autobiographical novels, thrillers and, in non-fiction, thriller histories. The number of new books peaked in Britain in 2003, when 131,271 'titles' were published. Since that date total annual output has gradually declined.
What is galling in my own particular field of publishing is the decline in quality history, especially quality European history. A year ago Orion paid out several hundreds of thousands of pounds to cancel its existing contracts for many major works of history. You only have to look at the trade publishers' lists to see that good history is not their priority. (See my articles, 'The World Publishing Blight', and 'History, Publishers and Vandals', in 'Diary', www.gd-frontiers.net.)
So does this spell the beginning of the end? That is, does traditional publishing end here? Preliminary figures suggest that, with the financial crisis, there could be an even sharper decline in the number of books published, accompanied by an increase in the share of the book market by Amazon and other on-line booksellers, and perhaps even an increase in the sale of e-books — pushed by the electronics people since the 1990s. Maybe, in a few years, we will be living in a Dan Dare world of publishing after all, with all our precious thoughts being communicated by electronics. The critical question will be: how the devil do we get paid?
Richard suggests that we authors 'just let the publishing industry die.' After all they seem to be fighting 'for a lost cause, not our interests.' Why don't we perform a modern form of strike by simply bypassing the industry? Richard cites the case of the music industry, where musicians record, market and sell their music themselves. 'I sell my music online and people actually buy it,' reports Richard. 'Generation Y' — which I suppose is the electronic generation — spends 20 per cent of its time on the net and they 'want stuff, 24 hours a day, at a price that's fair.' As a matter of fact, I don't think they want to pay anything at all. So the question remains: how do we make a living?
Richard certainly describes pretty accurately the pastimes of a large part of youth today and, when he transfers this music model to the book world, he is halfway along to describing what is happening. 'Publishers sell books,' he says. 'It's a twentieth century model that is now past its sell-by date. Writers, on the other hand, sell writing.' He is partially right. It is the Bill Gates vision of The Road Ahead (Penguin, 1995).
I have yet to be convinced that such a utopia is possible. And I do not think it is desirable.
And, speaking for the Generation Z (techno-sceptics who can remember Dan Dare), it has all the fragrance of something very old fashioned. We oldies, as the poem goes, invented sex in 1964. Generation Y opened the treasure box with the millennium. Class analysis is quite similar to sex: every generation invents it. Like sex, it actually goes back a few generations. Class analysis is not even of the twentieth century; it belongs to the turn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth. Publishers, according to Richard, are still able to maintain their hold on writers because they are capitalists who 'own the means of production'. In the music industry, so goes the same argument,musicians have challenged doomed music corporations as workers 'able to control the means of production'. Come off it, Richard! You can't make class — or generational — analyses of either the music or the publishing industries! Recent developments, galvanized by technology, may indeed bring new freedoms to creative people; but they may also be the cause of something more dangerous which we have not yet fully fathomed out.
For we do not know where we are going. All we have to go by, right now, is what we see about us. What I see are a lot of authors living very badly; and, among the very talented musicians I know, especially the younger ones, their situation seems even worse. Let not class analysis stand in our way — historically, class analysis collapsed when that wall came down in 1989.
THE ORGANIZATIONAL REVOLUTION: EDITING
We do not even know if technology is the root cause. In the 1990s — before the dot.com bubble bust — economists, on the basis of a superficial reading of the Austrian economist, Josef Schumpeter, were arguing that the new hi-tech industries were performing the same dynamic role in Western economies as railways had performed in the nineteenth century. They had clearly not studied their history. In one of the most remarkable examples of counterfactual statistical analysis Robert Fogel — he went on to win the Nobel Prize — demonstrated, in Railroads and American Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1964) that American economic growth would have been just as dynamic without railways, in an economy that relied solely on water canals, built across the American continent. The analogy is clear: economic growth in the last forty years might have been achieved without computers. Fogel 's substantial work — he and Douglass North (another Nobel laureate) did the same analysis on American slavery — serves as a mighty caveat to the techno-enthusiasts.
Have another look at what is going on in publishing. The development is essentially, I think, organizational rather than technological. You may want to call it 'capitalist', but I believe it has got more to do with our cultural demands and our own creative egos: everybody wants to publish a book these days, but they are not terribly interested in reading the books of others.
In the old days (fifteen years ago), the publishers were inundated with 'slush piles', including many wonderful manuscripts, which unfortunately they just could not sell — because people were not reading. Now, the statistics suggest that readership has actually remained stable since the 1980s. But I have a hunch that readership is in precipitous decline, for what are people reading? Publishers' lists and bestseller lists reveal the lie: short autobiographical novels, celebrity tales, travel guides and thrillers.
Then the real change took place: in the mid-1980s (before the technological revolution), slush piles were first farmed out to readers (young graduates from Oxford and Cambridge). By the 1990s slush piles were going to the literary agents — who constitute what has essentially become a new industry over the last two decades. The editing process thus shifted from the publishers to the agents.
That was the revolution. Most of these agents were not professional readers: many of them had a background in marketing, in book distribution or other diverse trades which, if they were useful skills for placing a manuscript with a publisher, did not have much to do with editing — that is, discerning the good from the bad and going over manuscripts fastidiously with a pencil. (For the process of the drafting and editing of books in the 1950s see ‘Paris Review Interviews’, on this blog, 23 February 2007.) That shift in the editing process from the publisher to the agent is, I think, at the centre of the problem in the book industry today.
THREE OBSTRUCTIONS TO THE PUBLISHING PROCESS
The system has become obstructed, like a pigsty’s swill drain. To overcome their declining unit margins — in other words, their decline in sales of individual books — publishers have sold out to larger and larger organizations. These are huge corporations, many of which were set up with venture capital. They were managed by people who had little interest in books per se. And that is the situation today: my current boss is a Frenchman who earns most of his income from the aircraft industry. People like this bought into the book trade because publishing books still commands enormous social prestige; I do not agree with Richard that this is 'capitalist' — it is an integral part of our culture.
The editor disappeared. His job went to the agents. His office was replaced by the 'acquisitions editor', who answers to the marketing department. Marketing today has absolute right of veto over all publishing projects and gets some of the highest stipends in the company; again, this is not the ugliness of 'capitalism' — it is the product of declining sales per book. As for publicity, it is run by another of those young Oxford or Cambridge graduates, who works on each book for about a month and then goes on to the next 'title'. Bookshelf life in the stores is limited to a few weeks, even if the book is a bestseller — there are just too many books around to afford more bookshelf life to a 'title'. Within about two years of publication the book is 'out of print', though remaindering no longer exists today: the book is sold off at discount to the many distributing services that hover around the industry, often operating offshore: within the next year the book will be selling for one penny on the internet.
So there is one blockage: today's publishers are more concerned with cornering a 'share of the market' with vast numbers of rapidly changing 'titles'; the editor has gone; they pay little attention to individual books, which have become short-lived commodities within a highly volatile market.
Working one's way up the drain one encounters a second point of blockage: the editing, which has now shifted to the agents' channel. Agents receive on average something like 300 manuscripts every week, they accept around thirty a year, they place perhaps a dozen a year with publishers. Obviously most of these manuscripts are not read; they are sent through a team of young readers who tick boxes on forms and send out ready-made letters to prospective authors. This is not in any sense a creative form of editing, nor does it guarantee the selection of the best books.
The drain-cleaner's drill brush works its way further and further up until it encounters the biggest sludge blockage of them all: the author. He, or she, is absolutely paralysed with fear.
It is at this critical juncture in the pipe — the very point of creativity — that we discover how slight is the influence of the Great Electronic Revolution; how little the Bill Gates vision of the world actually affects the imagination, the process of inventive thought, the source of cultural attitudes, the heart of historical change; how much Robert Fogel's economic model governs growth and technological innovation.
Men could have learnt to fly in the Renaissance, but they didn't. Men could have used gunpowder to blow each other up in the first millennium, but they didn't.
The power to inspire, to evoke awe, to excite our passions, to imitate God (the essence, surely, of the 'charismatic' personality) and to produce beauty has nothing to do with technology; it has everything to do with the composition of books, even history books, even biology texts — on, for example, the life of snails by the shores of Greenland. It has everything to do with historical evolution because it is born out of this same human creativity. The problem is that our very creativity has become a source of blockage in the publishing process today.
We are adaptable creatures. We work our way out of economic recessions and depressions, we survive wars, we rebuild our homes after ecological disasters. Since the beginning of historical time men have been forecasting the end of the world, but it hasn't come yet. There will always be books.
MODISH PUBLISHERS VS. CONSTANT AUTHORS — AND THEIR FEARS
I insisted earlier in this article how little the creative process of research and writing has changed over the last half century. What has changed, as I hope I have demonstrated in the second part of the article, is the organization of creative work: the way we communicate our ideas, how we get them published. A tension has developed between the process and the organization and this, I believe, is the source of a great fear that has developed among authors.
In our hearts, we know that the process of creation has not changed in us, but we think that it ought to have changed. We are bombarded with messages about how fast the world is changing and we think that if, as Aristotle would have done, we write down a creative thought on a scrap of old parchment, we are doing something a bit old fashioned. Especially if we then simply think about it for the next six months. We have a fear of being exposed.
Have you come across agents who tell you that most of their clients produce a book every year, or every other year? Don't believe them. I was so convinced this was not true that I conducted a little research on authors listed by a few famous agents. Sure enough, I found what I was looking for: most authors take four, five or six years to complete a book. They probably feel ashamed of the fact, though they shouldn't. I am sure that most of them overrun their contracts — publishers want War and Peace written within two years, and limited to 100,000 words. I stick to Tolstoy, but my querulous friends tell me that this, in the 'current state of affairs', is being totally unrealistic. I reply with what I have just said: the creative process hasn't changed since the days of Tolstoy, it is only in the way it is all organized that has altered.
Here we come to the crux of the matter. Don't imagine that all these changes are due to 'capitalism'. But I do agree with Richard Lewis that many in the publishing industry are facing annihilation — because they refuse to recognize the truth: that their creative authors do not change with the market, the technology or the wind of fashion. The danger is that if publishers do disappear life will become materially very difficult for us. That 20 per cent which wants our books and music free will grow to 30 or 40 per cent, or more.
Gradually, authors will come to the conclusion that publishers who have no editors, whose publicity programme is limited to a couple of months, who offer a shelf-life of six months and put books out of print — without remaindering — within two years, serve no purpose to authors who spend four, five or six years researching and writing their books. Such publishers are, as the expression goes, simply printing machines. And slowly authors will come to the conclusion that agents who farm out manuscripts to young graduates and reply by form letter, are not people respectable authors want to deal with. These agents and publishers will disappear.
But where will the authors go? Self-published on the net? Or by print, at one's own expense? That's suicide. True, there are the exceptions, like the mega-seller, William P. Young's The Shack, which was sold out of the author's garage with a publicity budget of $300. But the mega-sellers will remain what they always have been, the chance in a million and nothing to count on.
Publishers need authors. Authors, I am afraid, also need — and will always need — publishers. If the system is to last, publishers will be obliged, for their own survival, to provide the two services absolutely essential for an author's success: editorial expertise and competent publicity. There will have to be a return, in some way or another, to the old system, the proven system, the system that is compatible with the old creative process. Trade publishers have been distancing themselves from that creative process; but they cannot, in the long run, survive without it — if they try to, their days, as Richard Lewis points out, are numbered and nobody will regret their passing. Somebody, somewhere, will pick up the tab because those two services, editorial expertise and competent publicity, from a well-financed centre that recruits only the best are essential: the best discerning editors with the best publicity for the best authors. That is the way it has always been. Perhaps this will begin with a 'self-publishing' firm. Perhaps somewhere else.
Marketers will have to learn to bend to editorial authority once more. They have had their turn in the public eye and they have manifestly failed. All they have been able to do is flood the market with 'titles', unreadable thin volumes that have displaced everything worth looking at and made bookstores some of the most depressing places on earth. No wonder readers are turning to Amazon. The game is monopoly, the search by the big corporations for their 'share of the market': 'how many of our ‘titles’ can we force into the big bookstores and supermarkets?' Monopolies, in history, have never lasted. Worse, they are playing a game of censorship. I have mentioned the case of Orion's cancelling of history. I know of cases of the most brilliant, necessary works not being published because some fool in the marketing department does not think this book is 'marketable'. But the marketers can't market. The average sale for each 'title' has now dropped to around a thousand. At the same time, the level of censorship is reaching levels that would have made members of the Soviet Politburo blush. History has never been kind with the censors.
The current fear among authors is perfectly understandable: not only is their fundamental, age-old talent as creators being denied them; many of them are facing censorship by men and women who have shown little interest in books, just the 'titles' and the 'share of the market'. Nothing is more terrifying than dictatorship by the mediocre. But do not worry, this situation will not last; it cannot last.
PARALYSIS
Richard, at the conclusion of his last article (‘This Electronic Business’, 13 February 2009), after noting how important it is to hold on to our 'digital rights' and deploring the effects of 'discounted sales through the physical book trade', asked, 'Does anybody have any thoughts about this except me?' He waited a fortnight and then sent in his own unhappy comment: 'Clearly not.' There was actually one other comment, from an American organization calling itself 'Boing Boing'. The comment referred to a recent conference on ‘Tools for Change for Publishing' and if you snap on its website you get a graph of 'Hard data on ebook piracy versus sales', which should be interesting, given Richard's comments. But it is utterly incomprehensible: the axes have no labels, the colour keys are not explained, and there is no demonstrable correlation between the variables, whatever they are. This is exactly the kind of shoddy presentation one has come to expect from e-publications, outside editorial control and centralized, publishers' publicity. Quod erat demonstrandum!
So is the silence that Richard has encountered. Readers generally do not comment on blogs, websites, articles that flit across the cyber-space or on books that appear in our rooms with the flick of a finger or are gone with the snap of another. Why expend any energy on such ephemeral objects as these? Again, the gap separating the utopian electronic dream of inter-active democratic literature and the empty silence of the reality is enormous — and has been ever since these technologies were set up. It is doubtful that the gap will ever be filled because they do not inspire that ancient source of creativity in us. University professors find electronic exchanges useful — which is why the net was initially set up. Pornographers ply their trade without penalty. E-mails have replaced letters, though the composition of a sincere letter remains much the same as it ever was. But is the book on the way out? I doubt it; and it is hardly what we want.
The silence extends right across the trade: none of the main participants want to commit themselves to a model of the future — not the booksellers, not the publishers, not the agents, not the main bodies that represent authors, and certainly not the authors themselves. But it is clear that if authors continue to remain mum they will find themselves further marginalized; their intermediaries will do the organizing for them, and that will not be done in their interests. This is already happening.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
In a circular that I emailed to SOAF members last December I noted the points that authors need to address themselves to if they want to improve the imbalances now evident in the publishing industry:
the pricing and discounting of books,
the remaindering of books (without going through the formal procedures of remaindering),
the sale of new and second-hand books on the internet (for as low as one penny),
the rapid emptying of stock by publishers,
and a scandalous indifference by some of the major publishers to the maintenance of their backlists. Backlists are what most authors employ to build up their careers.
No, we don't want publishers to disappear. But we do want them to take account of authors' needs and stop talking about the 'best deal': the 'best deal' is for them and not for us. Publishers are not delivering on the two services vital to us: editing and publicity.
In the end I think this is going to involve the action of the law. Publishers will not act on this voluntarily: they did away with the Net Book Agreement in the 1990s and eventually were hoisted with their own petard. When Harold Macmillan, a publisher, abolished Retail Price Maintenance in the early 60s it was said that 'books are different'. Books are different; they are not mere commodities. Each one has to be treated individually, marketed individually, regarded on its merits and only its merits; I am tempted to say that 'books are human beings,' because in many cases, a whole life has gone in to creating it. That life must be respected.
One may start with a reconsideration of copyright. Copyright respects the life behind the book. But the last copyright law in Britain dates from 1988, before the new technologies really got going. The author's copyright should take into account these new technologies.
Yes, we will always be writing books. But we want to live well, too. That is up to each one of us and no one else.
Gregor Dallas
HYPERLINK http://www.gd-frontiers.net
Richard Lewis has already made some important comments on the influence of the new technology on the ‘publishing industry’. Effectively, publishing today is disappointing an increasing number of authors. Should we just let these corporations die, since they seem to resemble increasing huge ‘printing machines’, serving no one? Gregor Dallas argues ‘No’: seems is not what is. We would all be the poorer for it. Publishers still have a role to play in the world of books, but they will have to respond better to the needs of authors if they are to survive.
I should like to make a few comments on Richard Lewis's three interesting contributions of January and February: 'This Electronic Business: Are Authors Being Sidelined?', 13 February 2009; 'Plumbers of the Human Condition', 28 January 2009; and 'Desperate Publishers', 16 January 2009. 'Plumbers' is at the heart of the matter, so I shall focus on that. It is all about this current mess in the book world that nobody seems to want to do anything about.
It should concern all authors. But authors appear to be part of the general public paralysis, evident to anybody who bothers to look at the state of the world of books today. That's the essence of the problem: paralysis — general paralysis of thought stretching right through the industry, from the authors, through the agents, the publishers and the distributors — in the face of technological change.
THE CONSTANT: HUMAN CREATIVITY
Now, I am what one may call a 'techno-sceptic'. I shock my friends by telling them that nothing has basically changed on the face of the globe since I was born shortly after the Second World War. I can recall Harold Macmillan (he was once our Prime Minister, you may have forgotten) expressing awe at the change his world had undergone since the days when his parents used to drive him through town in a horse and buggy. Perhaps, I thought, that would happen in my world, too; one day it would come to resemble that of Dan Dare (British space hero, you may remember, of the comic, The Eagle) where we drive around town in helicopters and jet-propelled hovercraft. But that is not what happened. So I now say to my querulous friends: 'Look, we still take the train to the airport, the airport at Heathrow looks exactly the same, the people are somewhat more sloppily dressed; but the South Downs are still there, the street scenes through the Weald villages haven't changed one bit, the tower on Leith Hill is still there, so is the pub at the foot of the hill, and the nice bouncy girl still serves her pints of bitter there: the world hasn't changed one bit!'
'Computers! computers! computers!' cry my querulous friends. 'What about computers?'
'What about these damned computers?' I respond. 'I am a researcher, a historian and an author,' I assure them; 'nothing whatsoever in my trade has changed in the last forty years.' They look at me aghast.
However, I am right. The research hasn't changed. 'But you can get everything on Google, today!' If you haven't read your books properly, double-checked your sources and learnt those sources by heart — something one doesn't emphasize too much these days — you will make serious errors. If all you do is just Google your sources you are in trouble. That is exactly what some journalists in fact do. A serious historian must not. That is why I am worried about standards in journalism today. Google helps you locate sources — some wonderful advances have been made in medieval history, where sourcing is difficult, because of this. Google is also very useful right at the end of the publication process, at the copy-editing stage. My own copy editor, who I really do believe is the best in the world, uses his marvellous command of the English language, his powerful memory and a library of reference works. He types his comments on a manual typewriter with coloured ribbons and has never been near a computer. I use Google to check him, after he has double-checked me.
Rely on Google and you will be landed in a ditch: Google must be limited to the fast reference at the beginning of your research and a fast check at the end of the production of the book. In between, you are still faced with the task Thomas Carlyle had to contend with in the 1830s and 40s: reading, learning and inwardly digesting. So no change in the research.
As for the composition of a good book, it hasn't changed much since the days of Dickens. 'What about the word processor?' Well, what about it? When I started writing professionally I wrote by hand on legal sheets of yellow paper. Very early on I moved on to the typewriter. Then an electric typewriter. Then my first Mac. Over the last two decades I have been changing and upgrading my computer equipment every five years or so. It helps with the editing and has immensely improved the physical appearance of my manuscripts. But the actual work of composition — the climactic pleasure of writing a history book after all those other tasks have been completed — has not changed one iota since I began writing on yellow legal paper when I was still a teenager. So the composition hasn't really changed either.
I suppose there is a danger of overwriting, of correcting and correcting and correcting your writing — because it is so easy to do with a word processor. Lawyers tell me how much they have saved, through their word processors, on secretarial services when preparing their briefs and their conclusions. I myself no longer employ a typist. But there is the downside, too. In my emails I make errors of grammar and spelling that I never made before; and I have made diplomatic blunders when communicating at speed with friends and professionals — the time for reflection has gone. I have since learnt to hold on to an important email for twenty-four hours — as with an old-fashioned letter. None of this, of course, is reflected in my manuscripts, which get the same treatment as they did when I began publishing in the 1970s.
In sum, there seem to be more dangers connected with the new technology — superficial research, and shoddy, unreflective writing — than the advantages — the ease in editing and the prettier final presentation of the manuscript. There is no doubt about it: the quality of writing books has declined rapidly since the introduction of the new technology. I think, however, that this is largely due to the disappearance of editing in the publishing process. And this brings me to an organizational theme which is really at the heart of what Richard Lewis is writing about.
YESTERDAY’S VISION OF THE FUTURE
Since the development of contemporary electronics we have seen the volume of books being published increase rapidly. A new book is published every three-quarters of an hour in the UK. These 'titles', as they say in the trade, are depressingly similar, with publishers, marketers, distributors and literary agents demanding more and more of the same: autobiographical novels, thrillers and, in non-fiction, thriller histories. The number of new books peaked in Britain in 2003, when 131,271 'titles' were published. Since that date total annual output has gradually declined.
What is galling in my own particular field of publishing is the decline in quality history, especially quality European history. A year ago Orion paid out several hundreds of thousands of pounds to cancel its existing contracts for many major works of history. You only have to look at the trade publishers' lists to see that good history is not their priority. (See my articles, 'The World Publishing Blight', and 'History, Publishers and Vandals', in 'Diary', www.gd-frontiers.net.)
So does this spell the beginning of the end? That is, does traditional publishing end here? Preliminary figures suggest that, with the financial crisis, there could be an even sharper decline in the number of books published, accompanied by an increase in the share of the book market by Amazon and other on-line booksellers, and perhaps even an increase in the sale of e-books — pushed by the electronics people since the 1990s. Maybe, in a few years, we will be living in a Dan Dare world of publishing after all, with all our precious thoughts being communicated by electronics. The critical question will be: how the devil do we get paid?
Richard suggests that we authors 'just let the publishing industry die.' After all they seem to be fighting 'for a lost cause, not our interests.' Why don't we perform a modern form of strike by simply bypassing the industry? Richard cites the case of the music industry, where musicians record, market and sell their music themselves. 'I sell my music online and people actually buy it,' reports Richard. 'Generation Y' — which I suppose is the electronic generation — spends 20 per cent of its time on the net and they 'want stuff, 24 hours a day, at a price that's fair.' As a matter of fact, I don't think they want to pay anything at all. So the question remains: how do we make a living?
Richard certainly describes pretty accurately the pastimes of a large part of youth today and, when he transfers this music model to the book world, he is halfway along to describing what is happening. 'Publishers sell books,' he says. 'It's a twentieth century model that is now past its sell-by date. Writers, on the other hand, sell writing.' He is partially right. It is the Bill Gates vision of The Road Ahead (Penguin, 1995).
I have yet to be convinced that such a utopia is possible. And I do not think it is desirable.
And, speaking for the Generation Z (techno-sceptics who can remember Dan Dare), it has all the fragrance of something very old fashioned. We oldies, as the poem goes, invented sex in 1964. Generation Y opened the treasure box with the millennium. Class analysis is quite similar to sex: every generation invents it. Like sex, it actually goes back a few generations. Class analysis is not even of the twentieth century; it belongs to the turn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth. Publishers, according to Richard, are still able to maintain their hold on writers because they are capitalists who 'own the means of production'. In the music industry, so goes the same argument,musicians have challenged doomed music corporations as workers 'able to control the means of production'. Come off it, Richard! You can't make class — or generational — analyses of either the music or the publishing industries! Recent developments, galvanized by technology, may indeed bring new freedoms to creative people; but they may also be the cause of something more dangerous which we have not yet fully fathomed out.
For we do not know where we are going. All we have to go by, right now, is what we see about us. What I see are a lot of authors living very badly; and, among the very talented musicians I know, especially the younger ones, their situation seems even worse. Let not class analysis stand in our way — historically, class analysis collapsed when that wall came down in 1989.
THE ORGANIZATIONAL REVOLUTION: EDITING
We do not even know if technology is the root cause. In the 1990s — before the dot.com bubble bust — economists, on the basis of a superficial reading of the Austrian economist, Josef Schumpeter, were arguing that the new hi-tech industries were performing the same dynamic role in Western economies as railways had performed in the nineteenth century. They had clearly not studied their history. In one of the most remarkable examples of counterfactual statistical analysis Robert Fogel — he went on to win the Nobel Prize — demonstrated, in Railroads and American Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1964) that American economic growth would have been just as dynamic without railways, in an economy that relied solely on water canals, built across the American continent. The analogy is clear: economic growth in the last forty years might have been achieved without computers. Fogel 's substantial work — he and Douglass North (another Nobel laureate) did the same analysis on American slavery — serves as a mighty caveat to the techno-enthusiasts.
Have another look at what is going on in publishing. The development is essentially, I think, organizational rather than technological. You may want to call it 'capitalist', but I believe it has got more to do with our cultural demands and our own creative egos: everybody wants to publish a book these days, but they are not terribly interested in reading the books of others.
In the old days (fifteen years ago), the publishers were inundated with 'slush piles', including many wonderful manuscripts, which unfortunately they just could not sell — because people were not reading. Now, the statistics suggest that readership has actually remained stable since the 1980s. But I have a hunch that readership is in precipitous decline, for what are people reading? Publishers' lists and bestseller lists reveal the lie: short autobiographical novels, celebrity tales, travel guides and thrillers.
Then the real change took place: in the mid-1980s (before the technological revolution), slush piles were first farmed out to readers (young graduates from Oxford and Cambridge). By the 1990s slush piles were going to the literary agents — who constitute what has essentially become a new industry over the last two decades. The editing process thus shifted from the publishers to the agents.
That was the revolution. Most of these agents were not professional readers: many of them had a background in marketing, in book distribution or other diverse trades which, if they were useful skills for placing a manuscript with a publisher, did not have much to do with editing — that is, discerning the good from the bad and going over manuscripts fastidiously with a pencil. (For the process of the drafting and editing of books in the 1950s see ‘Paris Review Interviews’, on this blog, 23 February 2007.) That shift in the editing process from the publisher to the agent is, I think, at the centre of the problem in the book industry today.
THREE OBSTRUCTIONS TO THE PUBLISHING PROCESS
The system has become obstructed, like a pigsty’s swill drain. To overcome their declining unit margins — in other words, their decline in sales of individual books — publishers have sold out to larger and larger organizations. These are huge corporations, many of which were set up with venture capital. They were managed by people who had little interest in books per se. And that is the situation today: my current boss is a Frenchman who earns most of his income from the aircraft industry. People like this bought into the book trade because publishing books still commands enormous social prestige; I do not agree with Richard that this is 'capitalist' — it is an integral part of our culture.
The editor disappeared. His job went to the agents. His office was replaced by the 'acquisitions editor', who answers to the marketing department. Marketing today has absolute right of veto over all publishing projects and gets some of the highest stipends in the company; again, this is not the ugliness of 'capitalism' — it is the product of declining sales per book. As for publicity, it is run by another of those young Oxford or Cambridge graduates, who works on each book for about a month and then goes on to the next 'title'. Bookshelf life in the stores is limited to a few weeks, even if the book is a bestseller — there are just too many books around to afford more bookshelf life to a 'title'. Within about two years of publication the book is 'out of print', though remaindering no longer exists today: the book is sold off at discount to the many distributing services that hover around the industry, often operating offshore: within the next year the book will be selling for one penny on the internet.
So there is one blockage: today's publishers are more concerned with cornering a 'share of the market' with vast numbers of rapidly changing 'titles'; the editor has gone; they pay little attention to individual books, which have become short-lived commodities within a highly volatile market.
Working one's way up the drain one encounters a second point of blockage: the editing, which has now shifted to the agents' channel. Agents receive on average something like 300 manuscripts every week, they accept around thirty a year, they place perhaps a dozen a year with publishers. Obviously most of these manuscripts are not read; they are sent through a team of young readers who tick boxes on forms and send out ready-made letters to prospective authors. This is not in any sense a creative form of editing, nor does it guarantee the selection of the best books.
The drain-cleaner's drill brush works its way further and further up until it encounters the biggest sludge blockage of them all: the author. He, or she, is absolutely paralysed with fear.
It is at this critical juncture in the pipe — the very point of creativity — that we discover how slight is the influence of the Great Electronic Revolution; how little the Bill Gates vision of the world actually affects the imagination, the process of inventive thought, the source of cultural attitudes, the heart of historical change; how much Robert Fogel's economic model governs growth and technological innovation.
Men could have learnt to fly in the Renaissance, but they didn't. Men could have used gunpowder to blow each other up in the first millennium, but they didn't.
The power to inspire, to evoke awe, to excite our passions, to imitate God (the essence, surely, of the 'charismatic' personality) and to produce beauty has nothing to do with technology; it has everything to do with the composition of books, even history books, even biology texts — on, for example, the life of snails by the shores of Greenland. It has everything to do with historical evolution because it is born out of this same human creativity. The problem is that our very creativity has become a source of blockage in the publishing process today.
We are adaptable creatures. We work our way out of economic recessions and depressions, we survive wars, we rebuild our homes after ecological disasters. Since the beginning of historical time men have been forecasting the end of the world, but it hasn't come yet. There will always be books.
MODISH PUBLISHERS VS. CONSTANT AUTHORS — AND THEIR FEARS
I insisted earlier in this article how little the creative process of research and writing has changed over the last half century. What has changed, as I hope I have demonstrated in the second part of the article, is the organization of creative work: the way we communicate our ideas, how we get them published. A tension has developed between the process and the organization and this, I believe, is the source of a great fear that has developed among authors.
In our hearts, we know that the process of creation has not changed in us, but we think that it ought to have changed. We are bombarded with messages about how fast the world is changing and we think that if, as Aristotle would have done, we write down a creative thought on a scrap of old parchment, we are doing something a bit old fashioned. Especially if we then simply think about it for the next six months. We have a fear of being exposed.
Have you come across agents who tell you that most of their clients produce a book every year, or every other year? Don't believe them. I was so convinced this was not true that I conducted a little research on authors listed by a few famous agents. Sure enough, I found what I was looking for: most authors take four, five or six years to complete a book. They probably feel ashamed of the fact, though they shouldn't. I am sure that most of them overrun their contracts — publishers want War and Peace written within two years, and limited to 100,000 words. I stick to Tolstoy, but my querulous friends tell me that this, in the 'current state of affairs', is being totally unrealistic. I reply with what I have just said: the creative process hasn't changed since the days of Tolstoy, it is only in the way it is all organized that has altered.
Here we come to the crux of the matter. Don't imagine that all these changes are due to 'capitalism'. But I do agree with Richard Lewis that many in the publishing industry are facing annihilation — because they refuse to recognize the truth: that their creative authors do not change with the market, the technology or the wind of fashion. The danger is that if publishers do disappear life will become materially very difficult for us. That 20 per cent which wants our books and music free will grow to 30 or 40 per cent, or more.
Gradually, authors will come to the conclusion that publishers who have no editors, whose publicity programme is limited to a couple of months, who offer a shelf-life of six months and put books out of print — without remaindering — within two years, serve no purpose to authors who spend four, five or six years researching and writing their books. Such publishers are, as the expression goes, simply printing machines. And slowly authors will come to the conclusion that agents who farm out manuscripts to young graduates and reply by form letter, are not people respectable authors want to deal with. These agents and publishers will disappear.
But where will the authors go? Self-published on the net? Or by print, at one's own expense? That's suicide. True, there are the exceptions, like the mega-seller, William P. Young's The Shack, which was sold out of the author's garage with a publicity budget of $300. But the mega-sellers will remain what they always have been, the chance in a million and nothing to count on.
Publishers need authors. Authors, I am afraid, also need — and will always need — publishers. If the system is to last, publishers will be obliged, for their own survival, to provide the two services absolutely essential for an author's success: editorial expertise and competent publicity. There will have to be a return, in some way or another, to the old system, the proven system, the system that is compatible with the old creative process. Trade publishers have been distancing themselves from that creative process; but they cannot, in the long run, survive without it — if they try to, their days, as Richard Lewis points out, are numbered and nobody will regret their passing. Somebody, somewhere, will pick up the tab because those two services, editorial expertise and competent publicity, from a well-financed centre that recruits only the best are essential: the best discerning editors with the best publicity for the best authors. That is the way it has always been. Perhaps this will begin with a 'self-publishing' firm. Perhaps somewhere else.
Marketers will have to learn to bend to editorial authority once more. They have had their turn in the public eye and they have manifestly failed. All they have been able to do is flood the market with 'titles', unreadable thin volumes that have displaced everything worth looking at and made bookstores some of the most depressing places on earth. No wonder readers are turning to Amazon. The game is monopoly, the search by the big corporations for their 'share of the market': 'how many of our ‘titles’ can we force into the big bookstores and supermarkets?' Monopolies, in history, have never lasted. Worse, they are playing a game of censorship. I have mentioned the case of Orion's cancelling of history. I know of cases of the most brilliant, necessary works not being published because some fool in the marketing department does not think this book is 'marketable'. But the marketers can't market. The average sale for each 'title' has now dropped to around a thousand. At the same time, the level of censorship is reaching levels that would have made members of the Soviet Politburo blush. History has never been kind with the censors.
The current fear among authors is perfectly understandable: not only is their fundamental, age-old talent as creators being denied them; many of them are facing censorship by men and women who have shown little interest in books, just the 'titles' and the 'share of the market'. Nothing is more terrifying than dictatorship by the mediocre. But do not worry, this situation will not last; it cannot last.
PARALYSIS
Richard, at the conclusion of his last article (‘This Electronic Business’, 13 February 2009), after noting how important it is to hold on to our 'digital rights' and deploring the effects of 'discounted sales through the physical book trade', asked, 'Does anybody have any thoughts about this except me?' He waited a fortnight and then sent in his own unhappy comment: 'Clearly not.' There was actually one other comment, from an American organization calling itself 'Boing Boing'. The comment referred to a recent conference on ‘Tools for Change for Publishing' and if you snap on its website you get a graph of 'Hard data on ebook piracy versus sales', which should be interesting, given Richard's comments. But it is utterly incomprehensible: the axes have no labels, the colour keys are not explained, and there is no demonstrable correlation between the variables, whatever they are. This is exactly the kind of shoddy presentation one has come to expect from e-publications, outside editorial control and centralized, publishers' publicity. Quod erat demonstrandum!
So is the silence that Richard has encountered. Readers generally do not comment on blogs, websites, articles that flit across the cyber-space or on books that appear in our rooms with the flick of a finger or are gone with the snap of another. Why expend any energy on such ephemeral objects as these? Again, the gap separating the utopian electronic dream of inter-active democratic literature and the empty silence of the reality is enormous — and has been ever since these technologies were set up. It is doubtful that the gap will ever be filled because they do not inspire that ancient source of creativity in us. University professors find electronic exchanges useful — which is why the net was initially set up. Pornographers ply their trade without penalty. E-mails have replaced letters, though the composition of a sincere letter remains much the same as it ever was. But is the book on the way out? I doubt it; and it is hardly what we want.
The silence extends right across the trade: none of the main participants want to commit themselves to a model of the future — not the booksellers, not the publishers, not the agents, not the main bodies that represent authors, and certainly not the authors themselves. But it is clear that if authors continue to remain mum they will find themselves further marginalized; their intermediaries will do the organizing for them, and that will not be done in their interests. This is already happening.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
In a circular that I emailed to SOAF members last December I noted the points that authors need to address themselves to if they want to improve the imbalances now evident in the publishing industry:
the pricing and discounting of books,
the remaindering of books (without going through the formal procedures of remaindering),
the sale of new and second-hand books on the internet (for as low as one penny),
the rapid emptying of stock by publishers,
and a scandalous indifference by some of the major publishers to the maintenance of their backlists. Backlists are what most authors employ to build up their careers.
No, we don't want publishers to disappear. But we do want them to take account of authors' needs and stop talking about the 'best deal': the 'best deal' is for them and not for us. Publishers are not delivering on the two services vital to us: editing and publicity.
In the end I think this is going to involve the action of the law. Publishers will not act on this voluntarily: they did away with the Net Book Agreement in the 1990s and eventually were hoisted with their own petard. When Harold Macmillan, a publisher, abolished Retail Price Maintenance in the early 60s it was said that 'books are different'. Books are different; they are not mere commodities. Each one has to be treated individually, marketed individually, regarded on its merits and only its merits; I am tempted to say that 'books are human beings,' because in many cases, a whole life has gone in to creating it. That life must be respected.
One may start with a reconsideration of copyright. Copyright respects the life behind the book. But the last copyright law in Britain dates from 1988, before the new technologies really got going. The author's copyright should take into account these new technologies.
Yes, we will always be writing books. But we want to live well, too. That is up to each one of us and no one else.
Gregor Dallas
HYPERLINK http://www.gd-frontiers.net
posted by SOAF Chairman at 11:51 PM
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