Literature is an aesthetic form of knowledge and experience writ large or small by the imagination, an art, not some set of capitalist algorithms. Of course cultural and social, political and private contexts can have huge affects on both writers and producers, as any halfway competent institutional or social, political or personal analysis will reveal. Some writers can write comfortably within dominant forces, while other writers dig in and write against them. Much writing is mixed. What one sees in literature depends very much on what one knows, wants to know, and where one happens to look. Some literature changes the world, some literature perpetuates it, some literature changes people, some literature prevents people from changing. Capitalist algorithms, like other constrictive ideologies and circumstances, can get in the way of the creation, production, and distribution of literature, can deform and kill it. Not exactly shocking news to many artists.
Nor to, say, critic Edmund Wilson in “The Historical Interpretation of Literature”:
"I want to talk about the historical interpretation of literature—that is, about the interpretation of literature in its social, economic and political aspects.... In the year 1725, the Neapolitan philosopher Vico published La Scienz Nuova, a revolutionary work on the philosophy of history, in which he asserted for the first time that the social world was certainly the work of man, and attempted what is, so far as I know, the first social interpretation of a work of literature…. In the field of literary criticism, this historical point of view came to its first complete flower in the work of the French critic Taine, in the middle of the nineteenth century.... To Taine’s set of elements was added, dating from the middle of the century, a new element, the economic, which was introduced into the discussion of historical phenomena mainly by Marx and Engels....
"In my view, all our intellectual activity, in whatever field it takes place, is an attempt to give a meaning to our experience—that is, to make life more practicable; for by understanding things we make it easier to survive and get around among them…. And this brings us back to the historical point of view. The experience of mankind on the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered…."
Thank you Tony. I find it difficult to argue with capitalist influence on literature - that seems to me unavoidable in a capitalist system. What I find unendurable is people like Sinykin arguing that that is somehow a positive or even historically inevitable. I think something very peculiar has happened in Sinykin's little corner of academia, where marxist analysis - materialism, historical determinism, etc - is completely intact but applied instead to a narrative of capitalist ascension. Sinykin really is rooting for conglomerations and against the romance of the individual. It's hard for me to see why anybody would believe in a position like this - unless they were getting sufficient stock options - but that's where academia seems to be have routed itself to.
You go inside a lot of family households and they function in an essentially socialist manner, not capitalist. So it seems to me that socialist influence is unavoidable even within any greater capitalist system - and manifests itself in culture and art and ideas. And right-wingers feel this "threat" immensely, as do any establishment types, liberal, conservative, you name it. They construct whole ideologies, or religions, and tyrannical micro and macro systems to quash it. So capitalism, socialism, they clash in art as elsewhere in many societies.
As far as those who lobby for the rule of money over the rule of the people, for capitalism over democracy, this is a manifestation of a type of problem that is as old as philosophy itself, wherein philosophers, like rulers, and other establishment intellectuals say, "This is what is, therefore it ought to be." Logical fallacies don't stop intellectuals who are willingly or blindly subservient to power any more than they stop the rulers themselves. In fact, entire careers and empires are built upon both logical fallacies and outright lies. Lots of professional liars out there. We live in an Empire of Lies. The resistance intellectuals - sometimes called prophets - sometimes called socialists - sometimes called liberatory artists, for varying reasons they go another way. In a capitalist society especially, it's typically a very challenging way.
As a form of macro economic architecture, there’s no clash whatsoever. It’s not a coincidence that well over 30 of the 40 highest quality of life countries on earth or social democracies.
Completely understanding what to socialize and what not to socialize.
Incarceration
Healthcare insurance
Quality public education, through post Doctoral, if earned
They DO NOT socialize federal projects, such as nationwide highways. The Eisenhower interstate system, for example. I’m sick of carrying Walmart, Amazon, and the rest of the Fortune 500.
They don’t offer Socialism to the largest revenue and income entities of the sovereign. Again the Fortune 500.
They DO, implement, thoughtful and strictly enforced, consumer protection, and let the market be free and unfettered, unless there is an unfair advantage built-in. Then, they attempt to even the playing field.
We don’t do any of that. In America, the reference.
Very interesting Sam. I found myself scoffing at the suggestions of this Sinykin person, who rightly does not escape your ire...i mean REALLY? But the passages about the lack of young male authors (my ship has sailed i fear) resonates. Overall, i realise that i spend too much time doing my job and not reading widely enough to tenderise the meat of my unconscious biases or broaden my knowledge of the human condition. The latter is also changing a lot more rapidly these days, hard to keep up.
Thank you Nick. This Sinykin person is bad news. I think I wouldn't have come across this book if not for Lorentzen, but it seems to be representative of a certain field of like materialist cultural studies.
This shows the aspect of diversity efforts that needs to improve: they cannot pull one group up by pulling other down. This way, they simply perpetuate the same problem.
Did Sunykin actually write that essay? Or was it the product of a well spring of contemporary thought that each of us has contributed to, and he was simply the name attached to it's final form? The former, obviously. I will not accept any of the blame for that nonsense.
Excellent cutting through the whirls and confusion. I appreciate this new articulation: "The publishing industry, as we’ve demonstrated above, isn’t acting in the interests of writers, and the industry may well have done men an inadvertent favor by, in effect, excluding them from it. The action is going to be elsewhere."
Just in case you were wondering if posting on Notes was worth it, that's how I found my way here.
Anyway, your work is very intellectually stimulating and informative. I'm aware of some problems in the publishing industry but wasn't at all aware of the ideas of Sinykin, for example. In many ways, this post was like stumbling into a new world I didn't even realize was there. Eye-opening! I share your hope for the evolution of a better model.
Thank you Bill! Very happy to have you here! Sinykin seems like a symptom of a problem that I suspected was there - but I didn't realize the full extent of it. It's old-style cultural materialism but in the service of celebrating capital. What is useful about a book like his is that he seems to dig under the hood of the publishing companies and show what their thought process is - and it's the kind of thing that should make every writer run (especially when paired with the sort of glibly triumphalist narrative that Sinykin espouses).
Thank you Anne! That was a bit meanspirited of me, but it just seemed so fitting. Snyder was worth $40 million at one point. I almost can't even imagine the number of advances he squeezed or the overhaul he carried out at the expense of quality writing in order to get to that kind of haul for himself - all of which ended up going to his grifter wife. Just seems like a perfect metaphor.
I always learn something from your thoughtful essays, Sam. This one was brilliant and stirred up a considerable amount of ire in me for this Sinykin tool I’d never heard of before. He can take his views on the author’s place in literature and shove them in his colophon’s portal.
I am sure that Walt Whitman had a similar reckoning, why he learned how to operate printing presses. He trusted few, if any, to "edit" his work. Not a jot or tittle. Ironically, he probably would have been a kid in a candy store with modern digital self publishing technology. I am grateful to "publish" unsullied, but frustrated I must through the refiners fire of PR, promotion, and the publishing industry to amplify my voice. My fantasy is to create an image so powerful that heads would explode. Then, and only then, could I bypass the bullshit.
Thank you Jeff. I've been thinking a lot about what Whitman did and how perfectly comparable it really is to what's happening now on Substack. There have basically been two exciting moments in the history of literature in the past two centuries - and both had to do with a sudden democratization of publishing. One was the rise of the penny presses, around the 1840s and 1850s, which allowed Whitman to edit his own newspaper and then to self-publish Leaves of Grass. The other was an ease in printing books that allowed the modernists to have their own presses and to publish work that no conventional trade publisher would even have thought of putting out.
Exactly. Thank you for filling in the blanks. In my more optimistic moments, I like to think of myself as a sort of "mini-Whitman." He has inspired so many with his rebelliousnes, both as a writer and as a publisher. The latter allowed the former.
There is always going to be arbitrainess--an enormous amount if it--in whose work is disseminated and celebrated.
Publishing is a business. Creating art is not a business. Art that clashes with business goals may not be perceived.
Previously, people whose social standing was marginal did not regularly create marketable work, or weren't seen to. Now they are sometimes seen to. I doubt that the reality is that white straight men can't get their books published. But suppose it's true. So what?
It's still just as arbitrary. If we set aside effects of socioeconomics and historical oppression that give some less leisure time and education and status, then publishing is ultimately a kind of lottery, that some win and others don't --so why worry about the unfairness to thoae who do not win?
By it's nature, the business element of literature--the market for books --will exclude some and promote others. So it's unclear why it's unfair or harmful to anyone if it is less favorable to white men. If it wasn't, it would simply exclude somebody else.
It's not even clear a market in terms of 'what people prefer to read' can BE unfair. If people prefer jambalaya to lentil soup is this unfair? To whom? Not even to those who love lentil soup--there is still plenty of lentil soup to eat there's just more jambalaya. It's maybe harder to sell lentil soup but if it weren't--then it would be harder to sell jambalaya. Lentil soup will still be made, and available. Just not the main item on the menu.
I understand lamenting the effects of the market on the production and availability of art--but it was ever thus.
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.
Very nice. "The action is going to be elsewhere. It has to be. And that’s going to be wherever writers and readers feel most free to be themselves." Where is that? Where will it be? Writers handing out copies of their books on the street corner? Currently the only place where writers like myself can find even meager numbers of readers is Amazon KDP.
Well, for starters, I would point to this lovely platform. This really represents a revolution in the mode of writing and reading - even if we're somehow a little shy to notice this (and mainstream publications show absolutely no interest). As time goes on, I would like to see the energy here develop into more long-form writing, etc. But something really important is going on, which is writers reaching readers directly, without business intermediaries (i.e. publishers) without overhead (they don't need to pay for the materials to self-publish). We shouldn't underestimate what a big deal that is.
Great piece. It's interesting to watch mainstream publishing try to remain relevant without including some normal male perspectives. They're trying. But it's not working.
Extremely interesting. I've long experience that almost anything bold, interesting, exciting, curious, weird, or challenging comes from the indie scene or from outside the imperial presses — glad I'm not alone in that.
When I was querying a mg book for boys a few years ago I would have agents request, tell me it was good, but pass because they didn't think there was enough of a market. Specifically, despite being written at a 3-5 grade level, they thought the concepts would be too challenging. I don't know—I was extrapolating from my own reading at that age—but I had this terrible image of the feedback cycle you describe. Adults think boys are too dumb to read a book that will challenge them, and so boys are only ever given dumb books that make them dumb.
Yeah, the industry is really a joke. I imagine that industries always had this tendency - that's what industries do. The problem is when they become large enough as to convince everybody that the industry is the only thing - in the case of this Sinykin character, he clearly seems to actually feel that the industry is the creative agent.
“Gossip about literary types. (By the way, did anybody here manage to get to the point of the New York Magazine’s four-friends-having-affairs piece….I even know one of them and I couldn’t get through it).”
Gotta love this👆🏻👆🏻—loved the whole essay, actually, though being myself a writer (poetry, primarily) I didn’t have/take time to read every single word. (Sorry. I DID save it though, does that count?)
Re men-on-men…funny, as a het, partnered female, I don’t hear my bookworm guy complaining at ALL about the scarcity of books written by other men—could be cos he favors old dusty histories & lit crit, bios of men (Napoleon, Hamilton) etc which I’ll guess have historically been the province of male authors? And maybe he doesn’t get enough guy fiction(and doesn’t tell me)…idk…but we def watch more guy-written-directed-and-themed TV/movies, with glancing few female characters I might add, than woman driven ones (those I watch alone). Of course, as a woman poet, I read mostly poetry, but probably 50-50 males/females by volume.
Anyway thanks for a good post! I’d “also share as a note” but utterly no idea what that means haha.
Literature is an aesthetic form of knowledge and experience writ large or small by the imagination, an art, not some set of capitalist algorithms. Of course cultural and social, political and private contexts can have huge affects on both writers and producers, as any halfway competent institutional or social, political or personal analysis will reveal. Some writers can write comfortably within dominant forces, while other writers dig in and write against them. Much writing is mixed. What one sees in literature depends very much on what one knows, wants to know, and where one happens to look. Some literature changes the world, some literature perpetuates it, some literature changes people, some literature prevents people from changing. Capitalist algorithms, like other constrictive ideologies and circumstances, can get in the way of the creation, production, and distribution of literature, can deform and kill it. Not exactly shocking news to many artists.
Nor to, say, critic Edmund Wilson in “The Historical Interpretation of Literature”:
"I want to talk about the historical interpretation of literature—that is, about the interpretation of literature in its social, economic and political aspects.... In the year 1725, the Neapolitan philosopher Vico published La Scienz Nuova, a revolutionary work on the philosophy of history, in which he asserted for the first time that the social world was certainly the work of man, and attempted what is, so far as I know, the first social interpretation of a work of literature…. In the field of literary criticism, this historical point of view came to its first complete flower in the work of the French critic Taine, in the middle of the nineteenth century.... To Taine’s set of elements was added, dating from the middle of the century, a new element, the economic, which was introduced into the discussion of historical phenomena mainly by Marx and Engels....
"In my view, all our intellectual activity, in whatever field it takes place, is an attempt to give a meaning to our experience—that is, to make life more practicable; for by understanding things we make it easier to survive and get around among them…. And this brings us back to the historical point of view. The experience of mankind on the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered…."
Thank you Tony. I find it difficult to argue with capitalist influence on literature - that seems to me unavoidable in a capitalist system. What I find unendurable is people like Sinykin arguing that that is somehow a positive or even historically inevitable. I think something very peculiar has happened in Sinykin's little corner of academia, where marxist analysis - materialism, historical determinism, etc - is completely intact but applied instead to a narrative of capitalist ascension. Sinykin really is rooting for conglomerations and against the romance of the individual. It's hard for me to see why anybody would believe in a position like this - unless they were getting sufficient stock options - but that's where academia seems to be have routed itself to.
You go inside a lot of family households and they function in an essentially socialist manner, not capitalist. So it seems to me that socialist influence is unavoidable even within any greater capitalist system - and manifests itself in culture and art and ideas. And right-wingers feel this "threat" immensely, as do any establishment types, liberal, conservative, you name it. They construct whole ideologies, or religions, and tyrannical micro and macro systems to quash it. So capitalism, socialism, they clash in art as elsewhere in many societies.
As far as those who lobby for the rule of money over the rule of the people, for capitalism over democracy, this is a manifestation of a type of problem that is as old as philosophy itself, wherein philosophers, like rulers, and other establishment intellectuals say, "This is what is, therefore it ought to be." Logical fallacies don't stop intellectuals who are willingly or blindly subservient to power any more than they stop the rulers themselves. In fact, entire careers and empires are built upon both logical fallacies and outright lies. Lots of professional liars out there. We live in an Empire of Lies. The resistance intellectuals - sometimes called prophets - sometimes called socialists - sometimes called liberatory artists, for varying reasons they go another way. In a capitalist society especially, it's typically a very challenging way.
As a form of macro economic architecture, there’s no clash whatsoever. It’s not a coincidence that well over 30 of the 40 highest quality of life countries on earth or social democracies.
Completely understanding what to socialize and what not to socialize.
Incarceration
Healthcare insurance
Quality public education, through post Doctoral, if earned
They DO NOT socialize federal projects, such as nationwide highways. The Eisenhower interstate system, for example. I’m sick of carrying Walmart, Amazon, and the rest of the Fortune 500.
They don’t offer Socialism to the largest revenue and income entities of the sovereign. Again the Fortune 500.
They DO, implement, thoughtful and strictly enforced, consumer protection, and let the market be free and unfettered, unless there is an unfair advantage built-in. Then, they attempt to even the playing field.
We don’t do any of that. In America, the reference.
Where are you that you have this “capitalist system”?
Good job, on both fronts!
Thank you GD!
It’s a depressing environment. Thank God writers will continue to invent and help us to discover ourselves.
More and more depressing, the more I think about it!
Hey are you coming to the socialism conf in chicago this fall?? Im so excited! Capitalism has failed to kill poetry entirely, but it’s doing its best.
Very interesting Sam. I found myself scoffing at the suggestions of this Sinykin person, who rightly does not escape your ire...i mean REALLY? But the passages about the lack of young male authors (my ship has sailed i fear) resonates. Overall, i realise that i spend too much time doing my job and not reading widely enough to tenderise the meat of my unconscious biases or broaden my knowledge of the human condition. The latter is also changing a lot more rapidly these days, hard to keep up.
Thank you Nick. This Sinykin person is bad news. I think I wouldn't have come across this book if not for Lorentzen, but it seems to be representative of a certain field of like materialist cultural studies.
This shows the aspect of diversity efforts that needs to improve: they cannot pull one group up by pulling other down. This way, they simply perpetuate the same problem.
Thanks Europe
Did Sunykin actually write that essay? Or was it the product of a well spring of contemporary thought that each of us has contributed to, and he was simply the name attached to it's final form? The former, obviously. I will not accept any of the blame for that nonsense.
There is no Sinykin. He is just a functionary of Emory's legal department, a placeholder of a name to stick before the the university press' colophon.
Wait really?? How nineteenth century!
Excellent cutting through the whirls and confusion. I appreciate this new articulation: "The publishing industry, as we’ve demonstrated above, isn’t acting in the interests of writers, and the industry may well have done men an inadvertent favor by, in effect, excluding them from it. The action is going to be elsewhere."
Thank you Mosby!
Just in case you were wondering if posting on Notes was worth it, that's how I found my way here.
Anyway, your work is very intellectually stimulating and informative. I'm aware of some problems in the publishing industry but wasn't at all aware of the ideas of Sinykin, for example. In many ways, this post was like stumbling into a new world I didn't even realize was there. Eye-opening! I share your hope for the evolution of a better model.
Thank you Bill! Very happy to have you here! Sinykin seems like a symptom of a problem that I suspected was there - but I didn't realize the full extent of it. It's old-style cultural materialism but in the service of celebrating capital. What is useful about a book like his is that he seems to dig under the hood of the publishing companies and show what their thought process is - and it's the kind of thing that should make every writer run (especially when paired with the sort of glibly triumphalist narrative that Sinykin espouses).
Haha the caption on the Snyder photo made me laugh and laugh!
Thank you Anne! That was a bit meanspirited of me, but it just seemed so fitting. Snyder was worth $40 million at one point. I almost can't even imagine the number of advances he squeezed or the overhaul he carried out at the expense of quality writing in order to get to that kind of haul for himself - all of which ended up going to his grifter wife. Just seems like a perfect metaphor.
I always learn something from your thoughtful essays, Sam. This one was brilliant and stirred up a considerable amount of ire in me for this Sinykin tool I’d never heard of before. He can take his views on the author’s place in literature and shove them in his colophon’s portal.
Thank you Ben! Cheers!
I am sure that Walt Whitman had a similar reckoning, why he learned how to operate printing presses. He trusted few, if any, to "edit" his work. Not a jot or tittle. Ironically, he probably would have been a kid in a candy store with modern digital self publishing technology. I am grateful to "publish" unsullied, but frustrated I must through the refiners fire of PR, promotion, and the publishing industry to amplify my voice. My fantasy is to create an image so powerful that heads would explode. Then, and only then, could I bypass the bullshit.
Thank you Jeff. I've been thinking a lot about what Whitman did and how perfectly comparable it really is to what's happening now on Substack. There have basically been two exciting moments in the history of literature in the past two centuries - and both had to do with a sudden democratization of publishing. One was the rise of the penny presses, around the 1840s and 1850s, which allowed Whitman to edit his own newspaper and then to self-publish Leaves of Grass. The other was an ease in printing books that allowed the modernists to have their own presses and to publish work that no conventional trade publisher would even have thought of putting out.
Exactly. Thank you for filling in the blanks. In my more optimistic moments, I like to think of myself as a sort of "mini-Whitman." He has inspired so many with his rebelliousnes, both as a writer and as a publisher. The latter allowed the former.
Thanks again Jeff
There is always going to be arbitrainess--an enormous amount if it--in whose work is disseminated and celebrated.
Publishing is a business. Creating art is not a business. Art that clashes with business goals may not be perceived.
Previously, people whose social standing was marginal did not regularly create marketable work, or weren't seen to. Now they are sometimes seen to. I doubt that the reality is that white straight men can't get their books published. But suppose it's true. So what?
It's still just as arbitrary. If we set aside effects of socioeconomics and historical oppression that give some less leisure time and education and status, then publishing is ultimately a kind of lottery, that some win and others don't --so why worry about the unfairness to thoae who do not win?
By it's nature, the business element of literature--the market for books --will exclude some and promote others. So it's unclear why it's unfair or harmful to anyone if it is less favorable to white men. If it wasn't, it would simply exclude somebody else.
It's not even clear a market in terms of 'what people prefer to read' can BE unfair. If people prefer jambalaya to lentil soup is this unfair? To whom? Not even to those who love lentil soup--there is still plenty of lentil soup to eat there's just more jambalaya. It's maybe harder to sell lentil soup but if it weren't--then it would be harder to sell jambalaya. Lentil soup will still be made, and available. Just not the main item on the menu.
I understand lamenting the effects of the market on the production and availability of art--but it was ever thus.
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.
Very nice. "The action is going to be elsewhere. It has to be. And that’s going to be wherever writers and readers feel most free to be themselves." Where is that? Where will it be? Writers handing out copies of their books on the street corner? Currently the only place where writers like myself can find even meager numbers of readers is Amazon KDP.
Hi Paul,
Well, for starters, I would point to this lovely platform. This really represents a revolution in the mode of writing and reading - even if we're somehow a little shy to notice this (and mainstream publications show absolutely no interest). As time goes on, I would like to see the energy here develop into more long-form writing, etc. But something really important is going on, which is writers reaching readers directly, without business intermediaries (i.e. publishers) without overhead (they don't need to pay for the materials to self-publish). We shouldn't underestimate what a big deal that is.
- Sam
Great piece. It's interesting to watch mainstream publishing try to remain relevant without including some normal male perspectives. They're trying. But it's not working.
Thanks Blake!
Extremely interesting. I've long experience that almost anything bold, interesting, exciting, curious, weird, or challenging comes from the indie scene or from outside the imperial presses — glad I'm not alone in that.
When I was querying a mg book for boys a few years ago I would have agents request, tell me it was good, but pass because they didn't think there was enough of a market. Specifically, despite being written at a 3-5 grade level, they thought the concepts would be too challenging. I don't know—I was extrapolating from my own reading at that age—but I had this terrible image of the feedback cycle you describe. Adults think boys are too dumb to read a book that will challenge them, and so boys are only ever given dumb books that make them dumb.
Yeah, the industry is really a joke. I imagine that industries always had this tendency - that's what industries do. The problem is when they become large enough as to convince everybody that the industry is the only thing - in the case of this Sinykin character, he clearly seems to actually feel that the industry is the creative agent.
“Gossip about literary types. (By the way, did anybody here manage to get to the point of the New York Magazine’s four-friends-having-affairs piece….I even know one of them and I couldn’t get through it).”
Gotta love this👆🏻👆🏻—loved the whole essay, actually, though being myself a writer (poetry, primarily) I didn’t have/take time to read every single word. (Sorry. I DID save it though, does that count?)
Re men-on-men…funny, as a het, partnered female, I don’t hear my bookworm guy complaining at ALL about the scarcity of books written by other men—could be cos he favors old dusty histories & lit crit, bios of men (Napoleon, Hamilton) etc which I’ll guess have historically been the province of male authors? And maybe he doesn’t get enough guy fiction(and doesn’t tell me)…idk…but we def watch more guy-written-directed-and-themed TV/movies, with glancing few female characters I might add, than woman driven ones (those I watch alone). Of course, as a woman poet, I read mostly poetry, but probably 50-50 males/females by volume.
Anyway thanks for a good post! I’d “also share as a note” but utterly no idea what that means haha.
Thanks Patricia! And the literary gossip is always fun tbh if a guilty pleasure.