Right now, a post on POD vs. traditional publishing has erupted into a remarkably polite and thoughtful debate with a crank author. You know the type: engaged in the sort of literary experiment that absolutely requires bad punctuation, worse grammar, and the ditching of all narrative interest (or else The Man has won); writing skills that suggest the author is not a native English speaker, but his bio says he was born in New Jersey/Sydney/Edinburgh; Very Special personal philosophies. For some reason, the Very Special personal philosophies usually involve not capitalizing "I." I love crank authors--collect them, actually--but debates with them rarely go anywhere. Thanks to the "unskilled and unaware of it" paradox, the more they suck, the more they're convinced that they're geniuses, and the more the Very Special personal philosophies come to the fore. It's fun to poke them, but they're debate-killers.
This time, people are actually getting into good discussions. Around him, mostly, not with him, but--and this is beautiful to see--he's trying hard. I see sane-writer potential in this one if he can get his ears open. As fun as crank writers are, crank writers converted to good writers are even better.
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issendai- Issendai
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All right. I skimmed that whole argument over there and, despite the fact that I probably should be posting my two cents at The Rejector's blog, I'm not going to expose myself to those wolves and will weigh in here instead.
Believe me, I'm not here to defend Meika (or whatever his name was). Firstly, because I couldn't be bothered to read any of his work and secondly, if those people all agreed it was bad, I'm sure it was. But, I have some comments to make about the publishing industry in general, and mainstream publishing in particular.
The Rejector defends the large publishing houses because she knows what side her bread is buttered on, so to say. But as for me, someone who is more connected with the indie music world than any aspect of the publishing world, I have a different take on it. A viewpoint that I'm surprised more people don't share. In music, it's generally accepted that the product being put out by the big labels (of which there are painfully few these days) is 99% pure crap. The MTV music awards, the Grammys, the CMAs, all that good stuff - honour mediocre, over-produced, formulaic music, primarily based on its saleability. And the only reason this stuff sells is because it has big money advertising behind it and is widely available. Unlike the snobs in publishing, there isn't anyone in the music industry who denigrates or ridicules a DIY musician or band who puts out their own product. In the past, bands like They Might Be Giants circulated homemade cassette tapes that put them on the map and nowadays, anyone can slap up a website or myspace page and get their music out there. Does it matter that the production quality is often poor? Does it matter that the musicianship is sloppy? No. None of that matters if the songwriting is good and the band is unique, charismatic and enthusiastic. Christ almighty, rudimentary musicianship didn't stop the Sex Pistols from changing the face of music, did it?
Conversely, in the publishing business, there is a huge snobbery about people who put out their own product. On NPR, I heard a publishing rep at a national book fair refer to POD books as "book- like objects," with a sneer. And the people on the internet that I've personally encountered tend to get obsessively bogged down over editing and/or grammar mistakes (I wanted to slap that one snide jack-off who said that he wouldn't bother to read Meika's book because Meika couldn't bothered to edit his own posts. In the meantime, The Rejector's comments were riddled with errors. WTF?). Petty. I mean, seriously, if you played a CD of a local band for a friend and the only comments your friend could make were, "The basslines are pretty lame; these guys don't deserve an audience. I prefer the studio musicians that Mariah Carey works with," or "The sound quality is murky compared to Clay Aiken's stuff which is so crisp and clean. That's why he's so popular and that's why they'll never make it," wouldn't you think that person was kind of an asshole?
When a musician has the backing of a label - the production quality will improve and when the writer has a paid copyeditor - the grammar mistakes will magically disappear. Simple. I view criticising that stuff as a failure of the critic's artistic vision and not any indication of his/her proficiency in sound engineering or English grammar.
Continued...
Sometime this past Spring, I read an article in NY Magazine that said if you're an unknown writer trying to get a book published, times have never been worse. for you. Agents and publishers literally NEVER read 98% of the stuff that is sent to them and oftentimes never bother to respond. Instead, they tend to woo Ivy League college seniors from Harvard, Yale and Princeton (who have been introduced to editors at the big publishing houses by their high profile author professors) and pay them enormous sums of money for their debuts works, making them overnight sensations, while journeyman writers who've been submitting their work for years are competely ignored. That woman is mistaken when she says the inabilty to get one's work read by an agent or an editor is because the writing is bad. That's like saying the musicians who can't get recording contracts are all bad. [in music, usually the opposite is true - it's the crappy ones who get signed and the innovators who languish]
Well, as a frustrated POD author, that's my two cents. Now you and your mates can all have a chuckle.
That said... You're right, people's attitude toward writing is different from their attitude toward all the other arts. It's just fine to sell fanart prints or filk tapes, but you're a total loser if you try to sell fanfic. Student sculptors or potters can sell their less-than-perfect works at craft fairs, but no one will touch booklets of student poems or short stories. It's okay to criticize a beginner's story in a fiction forum, whether they want you to or not, but no one heckles a beginner dancer. It's... weird.
I think part of it stems from the fact that everyone is taught how to write. Sure, we all get an hour of music class and art class a week and a unit of square dancing in gym, but we're not expected to develop any competence. We write for hours every school day for years and years of our lives, then graduate into an adult world where we're expected to keep up our skills. Everyone thinks they can write, so they're not as afraid to approach the craft of writing as they are the craft of drawing or making music.
And part of it, I think, stems from the fact that it takes longer to appreciate writing than to appreciate the performing arts. The average song is three to five minutes long. A painting or sculpture takes seconds to see. Dancing and acting can take hours, but it's possible to make a reasonably informed evaluation of their quality in a much shorter time. On the other hand, fully appreciating a piece of writing can take hours, and requires active participation instead of just watching. Since the investment of energy is so much greater, people demand greater return.
The last piece of the puzzle is that successful writers (theoretically) have incredibly high status. Shapers of the way nations think, educators of the heart and soul, cutting edge of the intelligentsia... Sure, everyone learns about Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio in school, but can you name two of their paintings? Mozart's great, but what does he mean? Did your fifth-grade teacher make you write symphony reports? The intellectual life is centered on books, which means writers, and that means that anyone who writes gets measured against their worthiness to join this tradition. The greater the rewards, the harder the climb to the top.
It's not fair, but it's deeply rooted in our culture.
(more)
Sorry if I'm spelling this out too much. I'm not trying to lecture to you, I'm trying to unravel the whole thing myself as I go.
A couple of days ago I read the start of a fascinating ebook by Michael Allen called On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile. It's about the role of luck in publishing, and how the slush-pile method just isn't working. I haven't gotten far in it, but the essence of what I've read is: The goal of publishers is to find the best books, but picking out which books are best is notoriously difficult. Runaway hits like Harry Potter are rejected a dozen times before being bought; established authors whose books routinely become best-sellers submit manuscripts anonymously and are rejected. The slush pile is simply not a good way to find the best manuscripts. So what should we do?
He has some interesting ideas--I like the idea of paid apprenticeships for writers--but even he can't overcome the problem of the slush pile. Who decides which writers are promising enough for apprenticeships? If you train your slush readers to a higher level of competence, what does that mean? Any kind of training will have the effect of standardizing their taste. In the end, his best recommendation is that aspiring authors take up careers in hairdressing.
I shit you not.
The way he lays it out, it makes a terrible degree of sense. I'll leave it to you to see how he does it.
Anyway, the problem is that readers of POD books pick them up with the expectation that they'll be terrible, regular fulfillment of that expectation, few resources for finding the good POD books, and a demanding value scale that starts with a hurdle few POD authors can leap without professional help.
Meanwhile, traditional publishing turns out enough genuinely good books to keep all but the most voracious or niche readers busy, and there are plenty of resources to lead readers to them. From the perspective of supply and demand, most readers don't need new sources of books. Writers need new sources of books.
When I'm wearing my reader's hat, I don't want writing with bad spelling and grammar. Why? Because it's a lot of work to fix in my head. I want something that makes me work to understand what's going on in the plot, not what the sentences mean.
I always say, there's work for the writer to do, and work for the reader to do, and imo the grammar, spelling and punctuation is in the writer's camp. I don't care how they get it decent--learn how to do it themselves, get a friend to do it, pay someone. Whatever. I'll do my bit in understanding what they're writing about. Admittedly, I've grabbed the more interesting part to myself, but there ya go. I love to read, but when I'm reading, I want to read, damnit, not edit.
I also wonder whether part of it has to do with the technology used to create books vs. music. When a band submits a demo tape, no one expects it to be a finished product. If they're signed on, they'll re-record the songs on better equipment with a professional staff to assist them. When a writer submits a piece, it's assumed to be finished apart from a little light editing; if it has to be rewritten, it's a failure by definition and will be rejected. Editors assume that the writer has used the finest instruments available to her, and if she can't produce publishable work, there's nothing they can do to improve her imagination or her writing skills.
Ack! The time. I have to run off to family parties. I have more to say, but it'll have to wait. Happy holidays!
The other thing you hit on is the time investment involved. Someone isn't nearly so bitter against a painter, whose unappealing work one can walk past swiftly in the art gallery or the musician whose boring song is over in four minutes, but anger runs very high against the writer who is perceived as having "wasted one's time." I was actually going to write an entire LJ post on this topic (not to do with my book mind you, as reviewers have been suspiciously kind to it) but about popular books in general. I'm currently reading JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL, a critic's darling of a book that I'm really quite enjoying. The Amazon reviews, while mostly positive, were peppered with the odd bitter, angry tirade against the author, as well as the other Amazon reviwers. What's with that? You didn't like the book. So? Suck it up. [This is why they don't allow "cross talk" in 12 step meetings]
BTW - I changed my mind about posting my opinions about Amazon reviewers on LJ because I thought Stone would be (erroneously) convinced it was a response to her assessment of Annie Proulx.
(But dammit, that doesn't make sense. Why not like both? Why all the posing? Like what you like, don't like what you don't like, and stop being such a damn snob about it.)
The length of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell must have added insult to injury for the people who didn't like it. If you don't like it, it's not just boring, it's incredibly boring. Soul-suckingly boring. Plotlessly meanderingly boring, with no sex scenes to distract you. 800 pages of passionless drivel, and god help you if you're one of the people who's driven to finish every book they start. You spend weeks of your life on it, and come out of it to find thousands of other people squeeing about how engrossing it was. It's enough to make you tear your hair out.
But simmer down before you write your bad review, please. A scathing book review is one of life's small pleasures, but it's always better when it's not shot through with your own issues.
(Me, I loved JS&MN. Tell me when you're done, because I'd like to discuss it with you.)
Anyway, I'm at my folks. It's Christmas day and I'm pressed for time, but I must must must clarify one thing...I am thoroughly ENJOYING JS&MN. I stated that in my original entry, but I guess you misread it. I was actually quite baffled by the few Amazon critics who didn't like it (which is their right) and because of their dislike of it were so angry with the author and the other reviewers. Huh? Whatever. It just makes no sense to me.
But again, I'm loving it. I'm only just past page 100 (since the holidays have been busy and tiring and have prevented me from reading). But I will DEFINITELY enjoy discussing with you when I'm done. Definitely. Happy holidays. Peace out.
Oh, no, no, I got the idea that you were enjoying JS&MN. I wrote about the reviewers who didn't like it because they were the puzzling ones, and my "you" was addressed to them, not to you in particular. Sorry about the confusion.
I hope you'll have time and energy to read more soon. 100 pages barely scratches the surface of the story.
May your fruitcake always be perfectly rummed,
Yours,
Issendai
Music and writing are two radically different forms of communication. Both have a variety of styles, are capable of evolution, use a vast array of instruments. But music usually concerns itself with communicating emotions -- either through evocative lyrics or melodic composition -- writing traditionally is about communicating ideas. Narrative ideas, intellectual ideas, even emotional ideas (aka emotional truths)... you get the picture. Most people play music to change their mood, or connect with the mood the musician is trying to create. But when they pick up a book, they want to hear a story, have an idea explained to them.
Punctuation and grammar aren't technicalities; they are communication. Lynne Truss gives a classic short example in her Eats, Shoots and Leaves on how punctuation alone can change the message of a sentence entirely (besides the title and panda joke, that is):
A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
And that's just which scratches and pinpricks you decorate your sentences which. The impact of how you arrange the words in your sentence is exponentially greater.
An inability to cope with the ins and outs of grammar isn't the musical equivalent of an extra-crunchy bass line or inferior sound quality; it's a lack of understanding about how individual notes come together into melody.
Which is not to say that all POD authors -- or all cover bands -- aren't capable of producing amazing (or original) work. Or that POD authors are all linguistically challenged. (Just a note -- POD isn't even the term we should be using (or the Rejecter, for that matter), since Publish on Demand does not equal vanity press does not equal self-publishing, but what the hey.) But while typos in a blog entry (or a comment on one) are one thing, a good portion of Meika's replies were literally incomprehensible, which is why people remarked they wouldn't touch his original work with a long pole.
Also, it's one thing to write anonymously in a public blog for personal amusement, and it's another to represent yourself as a would-be professional author seeking an audience. Which is what Meika did -- posted a link to his work and asked for feedback. He got it.
You and Slashergirl are head and shoulders above my own understanding of music, so I can't comment, but I'm interested in what the two of you say. Comparisons between the book business and the other entertainment industries are enlightening, especially for someone like me who has nothing to do with the other arts.
I'm screening your comment now because it contains a link to your site. Normally that would be fine, but you already have a history of blog-bombing.
For some reason, the Very Special personal philosophies usually involve not capitalizing "I."
for my sig. Hope you're doing OK. I'll try to call you soon.
Meika, I didn't mind talking to you, but when you tried to borrow my blog to be your own personal forum, that was it. Take it to your own journal.
Why? Call it grassroots or bohemias, whatever, but part of growing into artisthood is doing work that nobody notices but friends and family and gradually builds support from there. Same for musos. How many kegger bands have played one night only? Or buskers sat playing without a dollar landing in their guitar case? It's freedon, to grow and develop and get better, to rise naturally.
And there are stages to rise *through*. I'm a half-decent artist, but not the best. Years of hard work and study got me to a point where I don't have to consider telemarketing or pouring espresso (and less than 5% of arts professionals earn that living wage, so I do feel fortunate). But I'm not at the top of the heap by any means. Meanwhile, all sorts of folks do a spot of painting on the weekends. Point being, there are lots and lots of jobs and levels of achievement between amateur and full-time pro.
Musicians have a similar deal. There are heaps of amateur outlets, and all sorts of pro and semipro jobs (pub bands, for instance) that don't involve record deals with Sony.
It just seems like writers have fewer options. Oral storytelling isn't really an industry (though maybe it should be), so it's post fanfic for free, sell your own PoD, or ask a press large or small to pony up tens of thousands of dollars to see who wants to hear your stories.
I sympathize with both sides of that issue but lack the extra smarts to see a good way around it.
PoD would be a reasonable way around the problem if two things could be fixed:
1) It costs as much to print a PoD book as it does to print, market, ship, and sell a press-produced book. With royalties and shipping on top, a PoD book can cost twice as much as a press-produced book. Ebooks can be sold more cheaply, but many people dislike them.
2) PoD is not considered a way to publish fiction that's fun, but not ready for prime time. It's considered a vanity substitute for being published by a press. That's the only reason I can think of for why so many people are offended by the very existence of self-published books--the authors must be taking shortcuts, lying to the public and themselves, stealing honors they don't deserve. (Some authors buy into it--loudly--which doesn't help.)
If self-published books are made less expensive than press-published books, but as convenient to read, AND self-publishing is considered the literary equivalent of playing bar gigs or selling CDs off your web site, then I can see self-publishing becoming a viable stage in a writing career.
Might be nice. It would be pleasant to have an option other than spending years sending manuscripts to New York. It would also provide more perspective for people outside the publishing industry; right now, few people other than fanfic readers and aspiring writers have gotten to see what the slush pile looks like.