We had a brief moment of panic reading Lev Grossman‘s look at the publishing industry for Time, when he said “publishing houses—among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—are laying off staff left and right.” HarperCollins?!? we thought: OMG, how did we miss that? (We called to make sure, and a representative for the company assured us it wasn’t so.)
But that’s just a cosmetic detail; the real meat of Grossman’s article is his thesis that the novel, which was born out of economic circumstance, will become “cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever” in response to today’s market conditions. Mostly, he’s focused on the digital world—e-books, podcasts, Japan’s cellphone-based keitai shosetsu and emerging American counterparts, and fanfiction repositories. And, first and foremost, the power of self-publishing, which has evolved from “the last resort of the desperate and talentless” to an environment where DIY storytellers can take their work directly to readers. As we wrote a little over a year ago, responding to another self-publishing success story:
“If this is a ‘cautionary’ tale, it isn’t about staying away from self-publishing because you don’t understand the big, complicated publishing industry and it will break you like a twig; it’s about not starting up a publishing company if you don’t have the entrepreneurial spirit to get through what Seth Godin calls ‘The Dip‘ while you learn from your mistakes.”
Grossman’s takeaway sounds builds on the hope we offered you when various Manhattan-based media outlets were predicting death or disfigurement for the publishing industry last fall: “more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City’s entrenched publishing culture.” We don’t know about the specifics of his predictions for the literary transformations that will transpire as a result, but we figure there’s going to be plenty of good reading no matter how things turn out.