Hi Ro, thanks for the comment. I disagree with almost everything you've said here! I do agree that commerce and art are different domains - sometimes they overlap, but their inner logic is just very different. I absolutely do not, however, think it follows from there that the market is always right or that it's just sour grapes to bemoan…
Hi Ro, thanks for the comment. I disagree with almost everything you've said here! I do agree that commerce and art are different domains - sometimes they overlap, but their inner logic is just very different. I absolutely do not, however, think it follows from there that the market is always right or that it's just sour grapes to bemoan how things play out in the market. You have to think about what you stand for and advocate for.
For one thing, it's not really a free market. There are players in the market who have immense in-built advantages. In the case of publishing, it's houses that have been around for hundreds of years, can do whatever they want, and have a whole apparatus of reviewers, trade publications, etc, to bolster their choices.
But, on the other hand, I'm not speaking here as some kind of economist. What I'm interested in is seeing good work get the credit that it deserves. And that's something that people - critics, curators, ordinary readers - put a tremendous amount of effort into doing. It took a tremendous amount of work for, say, Hermann Melville or Emily Dickinson to get the credit they deserved - and long after they were dead. Things like that don't just happen. It takes work by archivists, critics, etc, to sift through old, neglected writing and then to find work of a high quality that the market had either passed over or didn't know existed. It's better of course for that kind of work to happen, though, while writers are alive - and much of that has to do with readers exercising a healthy skepticism about the choices made by the publishing industry and who gets left out of those decisions.
I very much disagree also that it's a lottery. Publishing is certainly not a lottery. It's very intentional decisions made by people who think that they have a product to sell. And those decisions always have winners and losers in them. If a publishing house puts out one book and in so doing chooses against a hundred others submitted to it, it's not like those hundred books are 'on the menu' - for the purposes of prestige, those books just don't exist.
And I also don't agree that it was "ever thus" - and Sinykin wouldn't agree with you either btw. The conglomerate era of publishing has very different dynamics from the 'house' era that preceded it. In the 'house' era, publishers might have been elitist and closed but they also exercised a great deal of taste. In conglomeration, per Sinykin, the publishers don't even try to set the tone aesthetically. They are just listening to what they think the market wants and trying to sell widgets accordingly - and they are in such an entrenched position and have such overproduction of writers that they have nothing whatsoever to gain from aesthetically challenging or offbeat works. They are just pumping out middlebrow content. For people who want to find genuine individualism, or unorthodox thinking, in what they read, there is almost no point in picking up anything put out by a mainstream publisher.
Oh, I don’t think the market is always right. Certainly there is very little that would make the market correct about which books are genuinely good, and quite a lot that would make it a terrible mechanism to select the best manuscripts and publish them. My point was only that these selection mechanisms based on what people prefer are neither fair nor unfair. It might be lamentable that derivative and schlocky books are popular but the problem of people failing to want interesting or challenging work is a problem of fairness.
By ‘lottery’ I merely mean a process of selection that tends to depend on many random and arbitrary factors. This has always been an aspect of the arts. A small number of people keep the gates, various trends arise, or the culture is ready for one work and not another. Many aspects of chance shine good fortune on some artists, and pass others by of similar skill and insight. One hopes that the truly spectacular work will always be recognized but people aren’t always spectacular when they get their start, and they often become more spectacular when they are given opportunity and security on the basis of something that wasn’t massively better than the other things on offer.
Of course I agree that sorting for quality some of the time is better than never sorting for quality. It’s really terrible that this is happening less and less. (Marketability was still a factor in the past.)
Critics still look for quality work. Some quality work is still published. I agree that not enough is published now. I cannot say for sure if this is due to my own taste, but I do think—like movies—we see fewer and fewer genuinely great books hit the shelves.
But I still don’t see why we should have any worries about a sorting mechanism more likely to include work from people who aren’t straight white men. It’s equally likely that the work of other people would be high quality. If the market selects it because people prefer it—that’s also not unfair. There are more books of quality than will be caught in whatever tiny basket that is reserved for this—so why would it matter if the books that end up there aren’t by white men? It simply seems irrelevant, given the overall arbitrariness and the fact white people are still heard from and not overall disadvantaged (so there isn’t anything like an injustice, but rather something more akin to arbitrariness—like the arbitrariness of many people regarding books about war as more literary than books about something else).
Of course, it’s not the case that books by white men aren’t selected. They always are. 89% of books published are by white people. 76% of the publishing industry is white. 81% of the publishing industry is straight. There seems to be many more women in the publishing industry but women writers aren’t published more often than male authors, especially not among the books considered literary books.
But anyway if the ‘quality’ basket is just getting smaller and smaller the arbitrariness will simply increase to the point of complete randomness. The number of excellent but challenging literary manuscripts will simply begin to dwarf the number that ever get published. We won’t have any reason to think these people are anything but lucky given the array of similarly excellent books which might have made it. (This doesn’t make the books that are selected non-excellent, it only shows that being selected does not indicate you were more excellent than another book that could have ended up in there.) So this seems to be the more salient issue.
Hi Ro, thanks for the comment. I disagree with almost everything you've said here! I do agree that commerce and art are different domains - sometimes they overlap, but their inner logic is just very different. I absolutely do not, however, think it follows from there that the market is always right or that it's just sour grapes to bemoan how things play out in the market. You have to think about what you stand for and advocate for.
For one thing, it's not really a free market. There are players in the market who have immense in-built advantages. In the case of publishing, it's houses that have been around for hundreds of years, can do whatever they want, and have a whole apparatus of reviewers, trade publications, etc, to bolster their choices.
But, on the other hand, I'm not speaking here as some kind of economist. What I'm interested in is seeing good work get the credit that it deserves. And that's something that people - critics, curators, ordinary readers - put a tremendous amount of effort into doing. It took a tremendous amount of work for, say, Hermann Melville or Emily Dickinson to get the credit they deserved - and long after they were dead. Things like that don't just happen. It takes work by archivists, critics, etc, to sift through old, neglected writing and then to find work of a high quality that the market had either passed over or didn't know existed. It's better of course for that kind of work to happen, though, while writers are alive - and much of that has to do with readers exercising a healthy skepticism about the choices made by the publishing industry and who gets left out of those decisions.
I very much disagree also that it's a lottery. Publishing is certainly not a lottery. It's very intentional decisions made by people who think that they have a product to sell. And those decisions always have winners and losers in them. If a publishing house puts out one book and in so doing chooses against a hundred others submitted to it, it's not like those hundred books are 'on the menu' - for the purposes of prestige, those books just don't exist.
And I also don't agree that it was "ever thus" - and Sinykin wouldn't agree with you either btw. The conglomerate era of publishing has very different dynamics from the 'house' era that preceded it. In the 'house' era, publishers might have been elitist and closed but they also exercised a great deal of taste. In conglomeration, per Sinykin, the publishers don't even try to set the tone aesthetically. They are just listening to what they think the market wants and trying to sell widgets accordingly - and they are in such an entrenched position and have such overproduction of writers that they have nothing whatsoever to gain from aesthetically challenging or offbeat works. They are just pumping out middlebrow content. For people who want to find genuine individualism, or unorthodox thinking, in what they read, there is almost no point in picking up anything put out by a mainstream publisher.
- Sam
Oh, I don’t think the market is always right. Certainly there is very little that would make the market correct about which books are genuinely good, and quite a lot that would make it a terrible mechanism to select the best manuscripts and publish them. My point was only that these selection mechanisms based on what people prefer are neither fair nor unfair. It might be lamentable that derivative and schlocky books are popular but the problem of people failing to want interesting or challenging work is a problem of fairness.
By ‘lottery’ I merely mean a process of selection that tends to depend on many random and arbitrary factors. This has always been an aspect of the arts. A small number of people keep the gates, various trends arise, or the culture is ready for one work and not another. Many aspects of chance shine good fortune on some artists, and pass others by of similar skill and insight. One hopes that the truly spectacular work will always be recognized but people aren’t always spectacular when they get their start, and they often become more spectacular when they are given opportunity and security on the basis of something that wasn’t massively better than the other things on offer.
Of course I agree that sorting for quality some of the time is better than never sorting for quality. It’s really terrible that this is happening less and less. (Marketability was still a factor in the past.)
Critics still look for quality work. Some quality work is still published. I agree that not enough is published now. I cannot say for sure if this is due to my own taste, but I do think—like movies—we see fewer and fewer genuinely great books hit the shelves.
But I still don’t see why we should have any worries about a sorting mechanism more likely to include work from people who aren’t straight white men. It’s equally likely that the work of other people would be high quality. If the market selects it because people prefer it—that’s also not unfair. There are more books of quality than will be caught in whatever tiny basket that is reserved for this—so why would it matter if the books that end up there aren’t by white men? It simply seems irrelevant, given the overall arbitrariness and the fact white people are still heard from and not overall disadvantaged (so there isn’t anything like an injustice, but rather something more akin to arbitrariness—like the arbitrariness of many people regarding books about war as more literary than books about something else).
Of course, it’s not the case that books by white men aren’t selected. They always are. 89% of books published are by white people. 76% of the publishing industry is white. 81% of the publishing industry is straight. There seems to be many more women in the publishing industry but women writers aren’t published more often than male authors, especially not among the books considered literary books.
But anyway if the ‘quality’ basket is just getting smaller and smaller the arbitrariness will simply increase to the point of complete randomness. The number of excellent but challenging literary manuscripts will simply begin to dwarf the number that ever get published. We won’t have any reason to think these people are anything but lucky given the array of similarly excellent books which might have made it. (This doesn’t make the books that are selected non-excellent, it only shows that being selected does not indicate you were more excellent than another book that could have ended up in there.) So this seems to be the more salient issue.