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Eric Flint vs. Lev Grossman on the future of the publishing industry
February 3, 2009 | 10:23 am
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By Chris Meadows
In Eric Flint’s latest "Salvos Against Big Brother" column in the current issue of Jim Baen’s Universe, Flint rebuts the Lev Grossman column I covered in this TeleRead post. Flint finds a great deal to criticize in the Grossman column, which starts with a tale of an author finding success after self-publishing and goes on to make assertions about the future of the publishing industry. Flint feels that the success story is not supported by the facts, and that most of Grossman’s subsequent assertions are also faulty.
There are a couple of things I find puzzling about Flint’s column, however. One of them is that Flint uses the wrong title for the column he’s rebutting (he calls it "Books Unbound," but on the web it is called "Books Gone Wild"). Perhaps it was re-titled after print publication? The other is that, though this column was ostensibly supposed to be about DRM, Flint barely mentions it, apart from calling Grossman an example of a "pro-DRM advocate."
Basically, his article repeats all the fallacies of pro-DRM advocates, but from the opposite standpoint. Grossman agrees with the most extreme pro-DRM advocates that the digital era poses a mortal threat to copyright. The difference is simply that it’s implied that he thinks that’s to the best, and he states explicitly that it is inevitable and that the publishing industry might as well get used to it.
However, Grossman’s article does not actually mention DRM at all—the comparison seems like a stretch to me. (Perhaps it was largely because the notice in the last issue said Flint’s next column would be "about DRM," but then this article came out and Flint couldn’t resist the chance to fire a "salvo" back.)
Flint makes some good points in the article, calling attention to some of the flaws in Grossman’s reasoning. I can’t predict the future, but I suspect it will lie a little closer to Flint’s vision than Grossman’s.
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Comments:
This is a provocative piece and genuinely entertaining. Yes, it’s true, some aspects to publishing remain the same despite the usual death-of-publishing and rebirth-of-publishing-through-selfpublishing meme.
After reading, I realized that everything depended on Flint’s definition of success. If success is defined as producing a significant monetary return within 6 months, then yes, then Flint’s advice against self-publishing makes sense.
But many writers don’t define success that way. And younger writers don’t have time to wait for that “lucky break.”
The hidden assumption behind Flint’s point is that the time spent waiting on publication and a literary agent is a worthwhile investment. If a writer has to wait for a year or two, then yes, perhaps that investment will bring dividends. But I certainly don’t have confidence that the current publishing market would respond so quickly. I remember in the 1990s it sometimes took literary magazines 6 months to reject a short story!
So then the writer is faced with a choice: do you self-publish (and hope that smaller dividends will lead to larger dividends eventually) or withdraw from publishing altogether until a publisher is sagacious enough to want to publish your work?
The problem is that self-publishing doesn’t receive enough critical attention, but I expect that will change.
With regard to fan fiction and the Lev Grossman piece, I wrote about that elsewhere.
I think Flint’s dismantlement of Grossman’s fluff piece is spot-on. Rhetoric like Grossman’s is owed due analysis; otherwise Time magazine pieces like this will continue to perpetuate misinformation and misconceptions. Flint’s “point,” more than anything, is just: please don’t take this kind of article at face value, and don’t take its “truths” as self-evident. His point is that Grossman’s argument does nothing from a factual or logical standpoint to counter the realities he writes about: the advance system DOES support a lot of writers who otherwise would not make much on royalties; self-publishing and vanity publishing DO condemn both a writer and her work in the eyes of most agents, editors and publishers; and the Web, hypertextuality, and open content have NOT threatened the spirit of copyright but instead have refined it and empowered many other ways of recognizing it. Companies like AOL-Time Warner (which subsidizes Grossman) and Disney HAVE harmed copyright. Copyright was designed to protect an author’s right to profit from a work, and largely thanks to Disney, now it is designed, and perpetually re-architected (with 70- and 100-year extensions) to define a media conglomerate’s right to sue any individual who makes personal copies, backups, shares excerpts or creates derivative works.
Generally I am a fan of Eric Flint and his thoughts on electronic publishing. That being said, I think he has missed the boat on this argument. I think several of his points are just as flawed as Mr. Grossman’s article.
1. That the current model of publishing hasn’t killed the publishing industry yet, so there must not be anything wrong with it. While Eric Flint is good at recognizing a lot of the potential of computers and the web for the publishing industry, he is completely missing the boat here. In fact, his argument sounds very much like what the Detroit Auto Companies were arguing back in the 1960s… He even lays out the problems with the current model. We essentially have to pay the cost of printing two books for every book we buy because publishers over print books; the book stores often ignore the majority of their stock for the current best sellers (The most annoying thing in books is going into a book store and finding a book in a series where the earlier books are not on the shelf). Its 2009, any other industry that had such waste built into the system and such poor inventory control would have gone bankrupt years ago. Now it is killing many book stores… why go to Borders where I might find the book I want when I can go to Amazon where I know it will be.
2. Electronic Reading is growing slowly. I think it is easy to see that it is in fact growing quite rapidly. The numbers are currently still small, but if they continue growing at this pace for a decade I wouldn’t be surprised if by then most people who actually read didn’t read at least some of their books in electronic format.
3. Flint attacks the notion of the pyramid where only a select few will be published on paper by the big publishing houses and that few will read the unwashed, unedited mass of of material that is available from self/web published authors. To a certain extent, this I think might be true, but is it so different than the current model? Lets face it, 90% of what gets published stinks. The current publishing houses are not terribly good at guaging the tastes of the reading public (if they were better, most books would earn back their royalties). At most we are extending the pyramid further down than it already is. In some respects it could save the publishing industry a bundle; they can wait until an author starts to build buzz on the internet and then sweep in and give him or her a contract.