Here's another succinct summary of the Crisis in Publishing, this one from the London Review of Books, by Colin Robinson, a Brit who lost his job at New York publisher in last December's Black Wednesday. Some of it is particular to the publishing world in Britain, but there's a lot about American publishing, including a very lucid explanation of the medieval system of returns, by which publishers have agreed since the 1930s to take back unsold copies from booksellers at full price. Also some prescriptions about What Should Be Done, about which I will have more to say later, when I have the time.
Here's a very interesting article in Time by Lev Grossman, about the future of publishing and of literature. Reading it, I felt alternately grumpy, scared, and exhilerated. Grumpy, because I'm a middleaged guy who doesn't handle change well; there's a reason there are so many cats in my books, mainly because I'm so much like a cat myself. I like my comforts and my routine and my little patch of sunlight, and I get snarly and petulant about any changes.
And I'm scared, because I'm a midlist author with a new book coming out in a publishing environment that's changing daily. It's not quite as big a change, say, as the comet that killed the dinosaurs—though maybe it is, and if I follow that metaphor through, I have to wonder if I'm a dinosaur myself (albeit a small one), or one of the early mammals, a scurrying, furry little critter (see above about cats) engineered to survive and even thrive in the new world after the comet.
And I'm exhilarated, because the wild, wide-open new world of writing that Grossman predicts sounds kinda thrilling. Not particularly lucrative, though, but when was it ever?
In which I mostly write about books, movies, and TV. An all-purpose spoiler alert: Sometimes I will talk about these works on the assumption that the reader's already read or seen them, so if you haven't, be forewarned.
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