I’ve mentioned in several posts that I’m interested in the idea of character blogs. It’s also clear from the fossil record that character blogs have been investigated by a number of writers and marketing departments over the past five or six years, yet there are no consensus successes to point to despite the effort and hype.
The attempts (so far) seem to fall into several categories. [ Read more ]
Here’s a quote from a piece on e-publishing, titled (provocatively) Why Ebooks Must Fail:
And therein lies the dilemma… how does the publishing industry fund the creation, editing, design, production, marketing, e-warehousing, and sales of ebooks, if the income isn’t there? How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, cover the advances that an entire industry has come to require? The answer is that ebooks, alone, cannot.
Given the assumptions, I can’t really disagree. But the assumptions aren’t a given. [ Read more ]
I’ve stumbled across a few posts recently about e-readers and how they compare to books. The overwhelming consensus is that e-readers aren’t there yet, but this rather obvious observation seems to be leading people to two completely wrong conclusions.
One group of people are concluding from the current technological shortfall that books will always be better than technology, therefore there will always be a need for books. Well, no…and yes. [ Read more ]
As a reader reminded me yesterday in a comment to my post on ghostwriting, ghostwriters were widely used by the drug company Wyeth to promote hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women. While the resulting fraud succeeded in creating a market into which Wyeth and other companies were able to market their drugs, the long-term consequences were not benign:
But the seeming consensus fell apart in 2002 when a huge federal study on hormone therapy was stopped after researchers found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. A later study found that hormones increased the risk of dementia in older patients.
The drug companies wanted a scientific image for their products, so they created one by paying ghostwriters to create the appearance of broad-based research support for their drugs. As a result, they ended up killing human beings who would not otherwise have died.
Because ghostwritten celebrity bios don’t usually lead to death, and because the effect of such authorial fraud is difficult to detect, there’s a tendency to believe that the hiring of a ghostwriter is benign and that an example like the Wyeth case is an outlier. But lying about authorship in order to create a brand image for a drug and lying about authorship to create an image for a performer or politician involves exactly the same intent and execution. While there is clearly a range of possible negative outcomes in these examples, the frauds themselves are identical.
Looking at the outcome of a particular fraud also fails to reveal another kind of damage done by ghostwriting. Less apparent, but more widespread, is the erosion of confidence that ghostwriting creates:
“It’s almost like steroids and baseball,” said Dr. Joseph S. Ross, an assistant professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who has conducted research on ghostwriting. “You don’t know who was using and who wasn’t; you don’t know which articles are tainted and which aren’t.”
And that really goes to the heart of the post I put up yesterday. I understand that everybody does it. I understand that politicians on both sides of the aisle are liars. I get it. Believe me.
If celebrity ghostwriting doesn’t cause physical cancer it’s still a social cancer which erodes our confidence in the things we read and the things that experts and culturally-prominent people tell us. My specific concern on this blog is that it erodes confidence in the idea of authorship, which means it erodes your confidence in me.
— Mark Barrett
Having only recently joined the publishing conversation, I’ve been trying to go back in time and do my homework using the trusty WABAC Machine we all call the internet. While I already (perhaps erroneously) feel as if I have my mind around the major issues, I was not prepared to run across something like this:
At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”
Whatever passions the elitism of the Kindle might have aroused in Mr. Alexie, it’s fair to say that confessing a desire to hit a woman aroused a fair bit of passion in others as well. Given that there has been a general social prohibition (far too weakly enforced) against hitting women for a much greater slice of history than the Kindle has been infuriating writers of noble purpose, I have to say that I think Mr. Alexie probably got his fair due.
(You can read a clarification of Mr. Alexie’s position on the Kindle here.)
What caught my attention, however, was not so much Mr. Alexie’s theatrics (and here I assume he is not a misogynist), but the fact that the quote in question came from a New York Times article that was published only six months ago. Because unless I’m badly misreading the tea leaves today, nobody is talking about the Kindle dominating any market any time soon. In fact, I seem to be reading articles today which speculate that the Kindle’s e-content price of $9.99 is too high. And in a world that rapidly seems to be embracing a floor price of FREE it’s hard to argue against such claims.
Six months!
Whether driven by hype or substance — which only time will tell — the evolution in the publishing industry is clearly a firestorm. I had no idea things were moving this fast.
— Mark Barrett
By Mark 3 Comments
Publishing is a time-honored profession lovingly cared for and protected by people who believe in culture, books, and ideas.
Or…not. From Andrew Sullivan:
We are asked to believe that [Palin] wrote a 400-page autobiography in two months. Although no one ever believed Harper Collins’ Jonathan Burnham was actually interested in the content of books, this new contract and its absurd delivery date closes the case.
…
(Full disclosure: Burnham published my last book, The Conservative Soul. I know whereof I speak.)
Ouch.
Update: more on Burnham, and why amateurs are not qualified to decide who gets published.
(Hint: professionals are rigorously trained to put money ahead of everything else, including their own self-respect.)
— Mark Barrett
By Mark 27 Comments
Ten days ago, in a post titled Why I’m Opting Out, I wrote this:
Today when I hear a publisher complaining about how books are sacred and how we need to protect the publishing industry, I’m reminded of the same talk from news executives about how critical hard news and investigative journalism are to the health of our democracy. Yet in both instances these are often the same people who are putting crap on the front page or front shelf, making crap physical products, and marketing the most sensationalistic crap they can get their hands on in the desperate hope that it can compete favorably with the crap on TV and the crap on the internet.
In the middle of writing that rant, however, I had a nagging feeling there was something else I didn’t respect about publishing. Yesterday, after running across this story, I remembered what it was:
Less than three months after resigning as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, the onetime vice presidential candidate, has completed her memoir.
HarperCollins Publishers, which signed a multi-million dollar deal with Ms. Palin in May, said in a statement on Tuesday that it had moved up the publication date from the spring of 2010 to Nov. 17 of this year.
The book will be titled “Going Rogue: An American Life”; the publisher has announced a first-print run of 1.5 million copies. Ms. Palin worked with a collaborator, Lynn Vincent, the editor of World, an evangelical magazine.
To the publishing industry’s determined self-abuses please add: lying about authorship, devaluing authorship and generally treating authorship like a rented mule. Because I can think of no other industry where the practice of lying about authorship is so completely codified and accepted as it is in the publishing world — which, you might think, would be the last place that would tolerate such a thing. [ Read more ]
