According to statistics released by R.R. Bowker and published in Publisher’s Weekly, more than 764,000 self-published and micro-niche books were published in 2009, compared to 288,000 traditionally published books. I wonder if those numbers include ebooks?
We already know that a goodly number of the traditionally published books — all of which presumably were professionally edited and produced — aren’t of particularly high quality, so what does that portend for the three-quarters-of-a-million nontraditionally published books? Odds are that many of them aren’t even of the lowest quality traditionally published books.
I readily admit that among the nontraditionally published ebooks are some gems; I’ve bought a few and throughly enjoyed the writing style even if there were a lot of significant annoyances (see for some examples, On Words & eBooks: Give Me a Brake!) — but I wouldn’t name a single one as great literature.
The problem isn’t just in the lack of the finishing touches, the kinds of things that professional editors, designers, and producers can provide (for an understanding of what an editor does, see Editor, Editor, Everywhere an Editor). The problem is that they really aren’t new twists on old stories and the old twists aren’t particularly well executed.
Pick up a novel — doesn’t matter whether it was written by a world-famous author or your next door neighbor — and the story is probably a rehashing of a story that is at the core of thousands of other books. It isn’t a wholly original story. How many times have you said to yourself that the eighth book in a series is really just a repeat of the first book — just different characters and different locale? How many different ways can someone be murdered or armies clash or elves have pointy ears?
It is clear, however, that there is a distinction between run-of-the-mill novels and literature. Would anyone mistake Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories for their neighbor’s mystery novel? I’m not talking about whether I like a particular author or story, I’m talking about whether the story will stand the test of generations: Will future generations be reading the work for anything more than research? (Will researchers even bother reading the work?)
This is the problem I see with nontraditionally published ebooks (and to be honest, even with many traditionally published ebooks). Sure there are some that will sell several thousand copies and be considered a financial success by their authors. But financial success doesn’t equate with good literature. Ponzi schemes bring financial success but no one I know considers investing in such a scheme to be good financial planning.
There are no clear or easy resolutions to the problems that ebooks bring to the reading world. It isn’t possible to equate single-digit sales numbers with poor literary merit any more than 5-digit sales numbers can be equated with it. There is something significantly more elusive about what makes a novel literature as opposed to nonliterature. I admit that I can’t put my finger on that elusive trait and identify it clearly for all the world to see and acknowledge, but readers do know it exists.
Great literature is often the retelling of an older story but in a new way or in a new light. Fantasy adventures, for example, are often a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey or Virgil’s Aeneid. (Unfortunately, too many are retellings of the retelling of the retelling — ad infinitum — of the original retelling.) It is how they are retold that separates the wheat from the chaff. And it is the ease of publishing ebooks that makes the separation process so difficult.
Many people have a story that they want to tell. The question is: Should they tell it? Is there really a place for wooden characters, wooden dialogue, and repetitive plots? Should there be? And with the ease of nontraditional publishing of ebooks, will literature soon disappear? Or will it become unrecognizable? Or will it become more readily recognizable?
Although I can’t identify the precise thing that makes one book great literature and another not even poor literature, I do recognize that there is a certain broad, cultural identification of a work as great literature, even if some of the recognizers would not themselves call it such. Consider Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Both are considered literary masterpieces of the 20th century; I don’t dispute that accolade even though I think Salinger is well overrated and Steinbeck deserves greater praise. I also think Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry should be in that esteemed company although I have yet to read a Philip Roth novel I would recommend to anyone. My point isn’t that I think yea or nay but that there is a developed consensus that says yea or nay.
How do you develop such a consensus with nontraditionally published ebooks? It takes more than a village of 10 people to move an author from the wanna-be to the great category. Two generations from now, what will be the great literary works of the late 20th-early 21st century that are discussed in schools, that everyone can point to as being in the list of top 100 must-read works? I fear that the future of ebooks will be the downfall of literature as ease of publishing sinks everything to the bottom. I fear that we are seeing the birth of mediocrity as the new great literature.
Editor’s Note: Rich Adin is an editor and owner of Freelance Editorial Services, a provider of editorial and production services to publishers and authors. This is reprinted, with permission, from his An American Editor blog. PB
I couldn’t disagree more. This is nothing more than NY Times elitism writ large.
Let’s start with the underlying premise that the only books that are worthy to be published or that should be published are “GREAT LITERATURE”. What utter nonsense.
Reading is BOTH a VERY pleasurable pasttime AND enlightening. Some books weigh on one scale more than another. In other words, a book that is a fun read, even though not a masterpiece of literary fiction is equally worthy (I’d say more worthy) to be published and read that great litrerature. Why? Because it entertains (nothing wrong with that) and it encourages more reading. After you’ve read several “trashy” novels, you may be best prepared to enjoy “great” writing. And, learn something about human nature from it.
The fact that ebooks can be easilty self-published (with authors actually making some money, i.e. Amazon’s coming 70% royalty) is a GOOD thing NOT bad. It means that more voices can be heard. Will they all be great literature? No, but I don’t think that is bad. Will some be terrible and virtually unreadable? Yes.
But, what makes ebooks great is that they are distributed on the internet. Also, on the internet, are blogs, websites, etc (like Amazon itself) which allow comments, reviews etc of these books. If a book is really terrible (no grammar, mis-spellings, confused plot, etc), the reviews, etc will be so negative that the book won’t sell much.
I do NOT agree with your underlying premise that the flood of self-published books means that dreck will rule the book world. NO. For the most part, good books will find their place- and the internet is GREAT for word of mouth (so to speak).
I think you should get off your pedastal and smell the coffee of the real world.
This article sounds suspiciously like a new twist on the same old complaint about ‘popular’ culture in general. Once upon a time it was mass market paperbacks cheapening “great literature”. Traditional publishing has long since become a centralized, corporate, profit-centered production of nothing but lowest-common-denominator bestsellers and in-crowd-community-approved ‘literature’.
The internet was bound to open this up, just as it has done with video input via sites like youtube. 99% of everything may be crap, but the more stuff there is, the more good stuff there is as well. People will find it, or not. It’s not like there’s any shortage! We have so little reason to complain in this world.
The whole mythology of “greatness” in literature is tiresome. Who needs it? Let’s just read and write and not worry about superstars and immortality and other such transient vanities.
…no, I don’t think that’s the underlying premise at all; I saw nothing in there about how ‘only GREAT LITERATURE’ should be published. As I read it:
* There are books that, yes, are in a higher class than your average ‘entertainment’ novel. Call it ‘literature’ or not as you like, but I think it’s indisputable that some books just engage you more than others, at a deeper level, and make you think and enjoy yourself more. There’s argument about any particular book’s place in this category – I love Lord of the Rings, but I know others find it overly long, wordy, and boring – but I don’t think you can argue that the category doesn’t exist.
* There are books that go below the bottom of the barrel, if that’s possible. Poorly-written, poorly-plotted, poorly-characterized, poorly-edited, these are books well below the level of even generic by-the-numbers formula potboilers, and are worthless even as light entertainment. You can’t get past the first chapter even when you’re stuck somewhere and it’s the only thing you have to read.
* Nothing else is said about publishing or not publishing the ‘average’ books in between; they’re assumed to be there, and that’s all.
His argument seems to be that the ‘net and POD open the floodgates to Category 2 – and that loosing the flood will make it a lot harder to find Category 1. Again, nothing said about the books in between. (Though I think you can argue that the flood of Category 2 will make it harder to find average enjoyable books, as well.)
As someone who spent years in the anime fanfic community built around the FFML, and eventually dropped out for exactly this reason – I burned out on wading through the crap to find the good stuff – I think the argument has a lot of merit. Indiscriminately publishing the slush pile may get you the occasional Hunt for Red October that you didn’t have before, but you have to find it first – and those are something like 0.001% of the slush.
The article is written as if someone you trust read and reviewed the 288,000 traditionally published books, but there is no way they could have read the more than 764,000 self-published and micro-niche books were published in 2009. Oh no! We need barriers to keep the riff-raff out.
It’s as if you never realized until this moment that you already trust random exploration and word of mouth to discover new literature. Many people reading many books (but less than 800 each per year) talk and write about what they read–some of it catches on with others. That is how it has worked for along time, and yes, genius has been lost along the way. That will continue, Mr. Adin, just as before, welcome to reality.
Why is this written as if ‘books’ = ‘fiction’? Is it in order to gloss over the fact that people tend to read books about subjects they are interested in, and that well-written ‘quality’ books, though they may have all their infinitives in the right places, often fail simply because they don’t cover topics of interest to a sufficient number of readers?
This is especially true of non-fiction, but even in the realm of novels I would much rather read a bad detective story (and I speak from experience) than the most well-written romance. Let’s have as much writing about as many topics as possible, and let the readers sort it out. If ‘traditional’ publishers go broke in the process, tough.
There is another option.
Self-publishers hire the expertise — editor, designer, marketer (to the extent most book gets done by most publishers) — they don’t have.
Then there’s the Pulitzer Prize winning Tinkers published by tiny Bellevue Press, a 3-yr old non-profit publisher affiliated with New York University’s School of Medicine.
The New York Times (good story) admits it didn’t review it but describes how it got some attention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/books/19harding.html
USA Today mentions that “Tinkers has sold 15,000 copies since its publication in January 2009. That’s a hit for a small press but nothing by commercial standards. Bellevue plans to reprint more copies but hasn’t decided how many.
The last time a small publisher won the fiction Pulitzer was in 1981, for John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, released by Louisiana University Press.”