Chekhov’s Mistess

Think Small: On Blogging and Publishing

What I Learned on Vacation to BookExpoWorld

I mentioned having met the San Francisco Chronicle’s David Kipen at BookExpo (BEA) last week. In his own follow up to the convention (“What are you reading? Big guns of book world will decide for you.” 9-June-05), David says…

Will the book business remain as successful as the film business in putting off a reckoning that seems long overdue? For all we know, yes. Publishers, and especially booksellers, will put up with a lot to keep working in their beloved chosen field. But lately, literary publishing is in much the same fix that movies were in a few years ago, before DVDs came along to save the studios’ bacon for a while. If some new savior technology is just around the corner for publishing, I didn’t see it on the convention floor last weekend.

An apt question, but sad to think that the book business needs technology to bail it out. However, If I learned anything from BEA, it was to separate the idea of a book as an emotional construct and a book as a “product.” At the Reviewer’s Embargo panel I attended, Jane Fonda’s new book was brought up and Liz Taylor from the Chicago Tribune made that distinction quite clear; Fonda’s book is clearly seen in her eyes as a product. Her distinction though, was one of literary merit. I would take it further and say that everything is at some stage just a product (don’t worry, I’ve always been cynical, I didn’t learn that in three days) and if it’s not profitable to make and sell it will not ever have an opportunity to become a beloved object of intellectual affection.

Small is Big

On the convention floor at BEA I saw a presence of print-on-demand and self-publishing companies and a number of publishers who sell books to a very well defined audience. None of that is new or shiny, but the DVD had been around for a while before hollywood really began to reap its potential. A side effect of the DVD medium – along with digital cameras – is that it gave small producers the ability to effectively distribute their products without being wholly dependent upon big companies or big money, and some of that has filtered into the mainstream.

Thinking of books as products, cheap methods of production, marketing and distribution are the key. Forget about astonishing new e-books or some zippy new technology for the time being. They will have their place, but not as savior to the book industry. While killing millions of trees every year is probably not too efficient, technologically speaking, the answer to cheaper production may lie in some form of synthetic paper rather than L.E.D.s and achieving efficiencies of scale for small producers may be far more significant than any of that. Remember that DVDs merely represent a value-added proposition to the consumer and an efficient form of distribution as opposed to a technological innovation.

The Web is Finally seeing the Fruit of its Loom

Clearly the internet is on the verge of providing one of these three elements through the micro-marketing ability of blogs – a better phrase would be word-of-mouth or the already cliched word-of-blog, but it really is the old ‘you tell ten friends and they tell ten friends’ and so on, except that on the internet those friends may number in the hundreds or thousands. Word-of-blog power lies not just in the handful of popular blogs – and not necessarily just litblogs either, but in the sites that emerge daily as a hub of discussion between friends, whether pre-existing or like-minded electronically “found” friends. As the author and blogger M.J. Rose said in the Book Industry Bloggers Panel at BEA, if you want to sell a cookbook, don’t go to a book blog, go to a cooking blog.

In his BEA piece in the L.A. Times (Text Messages 12-June-05), James Marcus (House of Mirth) writes…

Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House suggested that vest-pocket operators like himself may actually be entering a golden age as mainstream publishers increasingly shy away from riskier projects: “They’re selling product; we’re selling ideas. It’s a very exciting time to be an independent publisher.

The Web is becoming more of a place of ideas than ever before because of the comparatively low-tech Weblog. A side-effect of the blogging phenomenon, as the arts critic and blogger Terry Teachout points out in his Commentary magazine article, ”Culture in the Age of Blogging,“ is that a new form of journalism is emerging:

As has often been remarked, blogging is an amateur culture in the exact sense of the word. Even those bloggers who are artistic or intellectual professionals of one kind or another are motivated chiefly by love of the things they write about. And whereas journalism in America has come to be regarded as a ”profession“ open only to trained, credentialed specialists, life in the blogosphere more closely resembles the European notion of journalism as a skill that can be practiced by anyone who knows how to write and has something to say.


It is noteworthy, therefore, that the mainstream media in America are now starting to reach out to artbloggers, despite their lack of journalistic credentials. This is not a simple matter of bet-hedging. Maud Newton’s popular literary blog may be less widely read than her print-media book reviews, but its readers, many of whom are themselves professional authors and editors, constitute a self-selected audience of people passionately interested in literary fiction and the publishing business. If enough of them choose to read her blog every day—as they do—then she becomes de facto an important figure in the literary world, no matter who she is or where she went to school.

This is particularly important for the world of books. In the April/May edition of Bookforum, several literary notables were asked in regard to the passing of Susan Sontag ”where can interested readers turn to find insightful literary criticism with an eye toward other countries?“

As usual – for the The Bookforum Question column – the answers were varied and interesting. But most important was this statement by the writer Almmiel Alcala: ”Translations arrive [in America] without context – no collections of letters, no biographies, no social, political, or literary histories; no gossip, no controversy.“

While some of that falls into the realm of scholars, the idea of putting an author’s work in context – no matter where they are from – is something particularly suited to the Web and even more so to the world of the blog. When I went to the L.A. Times Website to find James’s article on BEA, I could not even find the book section. I had to do a search to find it and had I not been looking for something specific I would have given up. James’s article there only amounted to 580 words, whereas he wrote multiples of that on his blog, House of Mirth. That’s not just context, that’s depth and that depth rarely exists in the blockbuster world of mainstream media.

Think Amateur Act Professional

In the not distant future, the distinction between Weblogs and Websites will blur substantially. Static sites already include blogs and some blogs will grow into full-fledged mini-journals with a distinct flavor and audience. Liz Taylor of the Chicago Tribune said that well-reported profiles on authors are rare, and I would add my own impression that many author interviews feel like little more than those promotional ”behind the scenes“ interviews that come packaged with movies. I doubt any of this stems from writers or even editors but from the ability to sell such things to a mass audience. Remove the necessity of huge revenues and you remove the obstacle to more thoughtful writing.

With the acceptance of the Web and Weblogs by professional writers and the opportunity given to amateur writers, the Web is ripe to fill that void. Bloggers like Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading and many others are jumping into the world of journalism (whether or not they recognize it as such) by reviewing books and interviewing authors. The choice of who or what to write about and at what length remains in the hands of the writer.

While journalistic standards may arguably be loose without an editorial mechanism, technological means exist to measure readership and that, in the long-run, may be similarly even if not wholly effective. Write poorly and lose your readers because the next site is only a click away (see there, you’ve already done it and you’re not reading this).

Additionally, I believe that in the same way that blogs have built a community of writers, it may too build a community of editors. When I posted a book review (which Scott commissioned) at Conversational Reading, Scott and I spent a fair amount of time on editing; a process I found surprisingly helpful. I have also found that fact checking is paramount on the Web. If you write about something or someone, an expert on that thing or that someone may easily find you and challenge your assertions immediately and publicly. There’s no escaping that sort of accountability when search engines cache content and the self-conscious can ”Google“ themselves on a whim.

The Fridge Used to be a New Technology Too

The blurring of lines between Weblogs and Websites can only work to everyone’s advantage because both work together. A reader can go to the aptly named Complete Review (a site with a blog) to find reviews and information on over 1400 books or that site’s links page to find hundreds of other book-related blogs and sites; they can visit Words Without Borders to find articles on authors from around the world, or the Emerging Writers Forum to find interviews and reviews of newer authors. But the path to these sites are few. For example, a reader would have to already know of William T. Vollman* or Adam Zagajewski to search for either of them on Google, yet that same reader may have run across one of their names on the 124 recent blog posts mentioning Vollman or 106 mentioning Zagajewski. Those may not seem like large numbers, but through the linkages** on the Web thousands of people may have read about these guys and some at least may be prompted to follow a link to more information or to an on-line bookstore.

It was clear to me from my conversations and observations at BEA that the publishing industry sees blogging as having potential. The reception of Litbloggers in general and the Litblog Co-op party in particular was positive. Websites like M.J. Rose’s, BackStory, which a) does not really resemble a blog in the ”traditional“ sense and b) gives writers a chance to tell the story behind their books to a potentially limitless universe of readers, are particularly innovative and will probably spawn new efforts. Another positive sign that publishers are beginning to understand blogs was the Reading The World Project, which embraced blogs as part of its promotional efforts. There was arguably as much or more blog-coverage of the project than mainstream media.

While blogs may not be the technology that saves publisher’s ”bacon,“ I think they can make a difference in far more profound ways than just book sales. However, my internal editor is telling me that I’m way way over my word limit, so I will leave it at that for now.

* Ed Champion of the litblog Return of the Reluctant conducted a small informal poll of people in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center on their familiarity with several novelists. Not one recognized Vollman’s name.

**

If each of those 124 posts are read by 250 unique individuals (a stab at an average) over the course of a week or month, that’s 31,000 views. Additionally, if I write about Adam Zagajewski and ten other sites link to my post but don’t mention his name (perhaps they only mention his book or just my name), those links won’t show up in a search of the author’s name, thus leaving open the possibility that there are even more than the stated number of links.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: June 14, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:0
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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