Travel writer and journalist Lawrence Osborne tallies up everything that’s gone wrong in the publishing industry for Forbes readers:
“Industry insiders provide a depressing catalog: a failure to acquire the kind of franchise authors now topping the bestseller lists, a lack of editorial insight and supervision (resulting in longer, sloppier books that bore readers stupid), extravagant author advances, agents all too happy to sacrifice the long-term interest of authors for short-term profit, incompetent management at the top and a lack of books that have commercial impact. These sins have been compounded by external factors—the decline of book reviews and the halving of the number of independent booksellers from 4,000 to 2,000.”
As Osborne points out, while the current economic climate may be taking the blame for the layoffs, pay freezes, and corporate restructurings taking place throughout the publishing industry, the underlying problems have a much longer pedigree. “But what if the giant advances, the agent schmoozing and the general hysteria ends up killing my advances altogether?” he asks. “I will not be so pleased.” Then he basically accuses publishers of being fixated on a “paper-thin celebrity culture” that, where books are concerned, values “crap” over serious writing, and demands: “Why are you not venturing out to connect with the vast market of recent college graduates who are thirsting for serious writing and who have been grappling with difficult and often sterile texts for years and want something different?”
Osborne’s evidence is largely confined to his twentysomething son and his friends, who “read Houllebecq and Bolaño and Sebald and Coetzee without any problem at all,” but is he on to something? Or is his article just a slightly less bitter and more erudite variant on Timothy Egan‘s NY Times attack on Joe the Plumber?
(Note to grammarians: We want books that are less stupid, not fewer stupid books.)