Going Rogue

Palin’s Profit (or Loss)

November 10, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

At the beginning of October, in a post gnawing at the subject of ghostwriting, I wrote:

Will Palin’s book include shared credit with her collaborator? I don’t know, but I hope so.

The answer, apparently, is no:

Lynn Vincent, a senior writer for Christian World, is widely reported to have done the gruntwork on Going Rogue — proving so efficient that Palin’s manuscript was delivered early and allowed HarperCollins to move the publication date from spring 2010.

Vincent is not getting a byline on Going Rogue, and she’s not disclosing her fee.

My concern about ghostwriting, as previously noted, is that it is lying. In some cases these lies are killing people. I also don’t think it helps our political process to allow people to be credited with things they did not do, and I would say that about any candidate.

Regarding HarperCollins’ deal for Palin’s book, it looks like all the high-flying cynicism displayed in the production and marketing of her book may be for naught:

For Going Rogue, no publication has publicly stepped up to claim first serial rights — running the juiciest excerpts before the book comes out, which either kindles or extinguishes public anticipation for it. Such an excerpt deal may have been struck for The Oprah Winfrey Show, which features Palin in an interview the day before the book’s release; the public will find out on Monday.

…

Of course, the stars could still align in Palin’s favor. She could produce the hit she and her publisher are looking for. But the math suggests that it may be the readers who go rogue on Palin — and on HarperCollins’s plans to right the wrongs of its dismal book sales.

If the book stalls, I would like to think that the brute-force mockery of the authorial process had something to do with it, but I know that’s naive. It’s the recession.

— Mark Barrett

Giving Up the Ghost

October 1, 2009 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 ]