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 ne…
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.
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.