FAREWELL TO AUTHORSHIP
And Why We’re Losing Literature
By Benjamin Hoff
And Why We’re Losing Literature
By Benjamin Hoff
...Books probably meant more to me than to most children, because reading was my way out of a childhood of illness that kept me in bed, and in pain, a good deal of the time. My heroes were people who could write -- Mark Twain, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott -- rather than actors or athletes.
If someone had told me then that one day I would write books myself, and that they would be translated into over twenty languages, communicating to people around the world, I would have been awestruck at the promise of a dream come true.
... I've been having increasingly severe professional difficulties because of the multinational corporations that have bought out the book-publishing industry, ... I’ve decided to leave the book-writing profession ...the following is my explanation.
(An aside on the traditional publisher’s advance: Generally speaking, the larger the figure advanced to the author, the harder the publisher will work to quickly recover the money -- in other words, the greater the publicity department’s promotional effort will be. The amount of the advance depends on how strongly the publisher believes in the proposal. And that’s where the catch lies. It would seem that to today’s imagination-challenged corporate decision makers, the book ideas most deserving of substantial advances are those that are as old as the hills yet have a contemporary twist. To put it another way, they combine Historic Precedent with What People Are Talking About Now. The problem with that somewhat schizophrenic combination of attributes is that, first, what’s old-as-the-hills in books is by now quite old indeed; and, second, what people are talking about when the idea is accepted is not necessarily what they will be talking about two or three years after that, when the book is released. So corporate publishers, who demonstrably know no more about the characteristics of great writing than most of us know about the intricacies of rocket science, end up with too many big-advance disappointments and here-today-gone-tomorrow flash books that sell impressively the year they’re released but do not sell a single copy five or ten years later. All of which further narrows publishers’ sights and makes them less and less likely to do what the big, wealthy, pre-corporate publishers did so successfully: back a new voice, an unusual idea, a great piece of creative writing. Pity the author today who wants to start a new trend rather than follow existing ones. From the corporate publisher’s point of view, the trouble with you, the author Benjamin Hoff, is that your book-proposal ideas have no historic precedent, and they are not what people are talking about now. So you will never be given a large advance.
The Te of Piglet stays on the New York Times bestseller list in hardcover for 40 weeks. Observing its performance, book people you know predict confidently that when the paperback is released, it will be on the bestseller lists for two-to-three times that length, the usual pattern for the paperback edition of a solid hardcover bestseller.
Fed up with the publisher’s arrogance, dishonesty, and arbitrary actions, sick over the mutilation of your intended book, and seeing nothing ahead for it but disaster, you request that the publication rights be returned to you before the manuscript goes to the printer and binder.
Knowing what’s wrong with the book better than anyone else does, you watch with bitter amusement as the critics miss every one of its glaring faults while criticizing contents that don’t exist.
Nearly four years have now passed since the book’s publication. The book has long since been remaindered, as quietly as it had been released.
Sick of spending your time, energy, and money fighting publishers, you haven’t bothered to ask your attorney to retrieve the rights. What good would it do? It had been difficult enough before to find a publisher that liked the manuscript. Who would publish it now?
The message behind the denial of these requests, as well as the other demeaning treatment you’ve received from publishers, is: You’re not worth much. The trouble with being given this message repeatedly for such a long time is that you’ve come to believe it.
Over the years, you’ve pushed every bit of professional criticism and rejection deep down inside and kept writing, to fulfill a dream that cannot be fulfilled because others have made it impossible. And you’ve paid the price.
If you were to dedicate your time and energy to writing, wouldn’t you prefer to write something you could feel goodabout? That’s what I’m going to allow myself to do from now on -- to get completely away from book publishers and write for magazines and movies. If neither of those two areas wants my efforts, I’m going to forget about putting words on paper and possibly turn to the music career I once decided against. It’s much healthier, I’ve concluded, to let a dream die than to allow it to destroy yourself.
A couple of years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report indicating that between 1992 and 2002, the number of non-bookreading American adults increased by 17 million. The report speculated that the most likely reason for this great turning away from books was competition from television, movies, and the internet.
Because of what I’ve seen, heard, and experienced in a quarter-century of authorship and more than half a century of readership, I believe that the growing disinterest in books is instead largely due to the relentless shrinking of literary variety and degradation of literary quality brought about by the destruction of the independent book-publishing industry.
If you were to dedicate your time and energy to writing, wouldn’t you prefer to write something you could feel goodabout? That’s what I’m going to allow myself to do from now on -- to get completely away from book publishers and write for magazines and movies. If neither of those two areas wants my efforts, I’m going to forget about putting words on paper and possibly turn to the music career I once decided against. It’s much healthier, I’ve concluded, to let a dream die than to allow it to destroy yourself.
A couple of years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report indicating that between 1992 and 2002, the number of non-bookreading American adults increased by 17 million. The report speculated that the most likely reason for this great turning away from books was competition from television, movies, and the internet.
Because of what I’ve seen, heard, and experienced in a quarter-century of authorship and more than half a century of readership, I believe that the growing disinterest in books is instead largely due to the relentless shrinking of literary variety and degradation of literary quality brought about by the destruction of the independent book-publishing industry.
For years, I dealt as well as I knew how with publishers who seemed dedicated to opposing at every step the new ideas and forms of writing I was trying to bring to the literary world. ... I participated in what seemed the writing-profession equivalent of a martial arts movie.
Before the corporate era, I’ve been told by veteran authors, the business of writing books wasn’t like that. But over the past forty years, authors have become increasingly caught in the crossfire as the once-gentlemanly American book-publishing arena has been transformed into an international war zone. Victims of corporate conquest, our once-great publishers have been reduced to mere false-front divisions of the now six surviving major publishing houses, which themselves survive not as autonomous companies but only as divisions of their parent mega-corporations, only two of which are American.
Not even the book-writing magazines or workshops ... want to tell anyone what’s going on out there. When I read or listen to their “You Can Be A Published Author” hyperbole, I think they must be living in a time prior to May, 1966, when RCA bought Random House, starting the corporate race to buy the wealthiest, most successful publishers and gut them.
The truth is: All the great publishers are gone; only their names remain. Don’t be fooled by the presence of those names on today’s books and corporate bragging lists -- they are names of the dead. The spirit of independent enterprise that once animated those names -- the spirit that joined creativity, communication, and commerce to form the great publishing houses -- is no more. And America is much the worse for its loss.
From the beginning of our nation, which started with the Revolution-inspiring pamphlets of Tom Paine and the Constitution-shaping words of Thomas Jefferson, our society has been guided by writers who could articulate new principles and better ways of life. Over time, books have proven to be the most influential “packages” of that writing. We have developed our personal and national ideals, better understood our past, and shaped and reshaped our present largely because of the influence of a great variety of thought-provoking books. But now…
The variety is constantly diminishing as corporate committees of book-ignorant, conservative-minded decision makers reject ideas and rework manuscripts they consider too new and untried, not in harmony with a particular point of view or political ideology, or lacking the potential to quickly and sensationally bring them large amounts of risk-free money. Literary quality and intelligence are being lost as well in the relentless corporate dumbing down of literature and numbing down of readers. And authors.
How many wise, inspiring, entertaining, or even basically well-written books can possibly be produced by an industry that treats authors like dirt on the corporate floor? Literary creativity and professional integrity cannot survive in such a deadly atmosphere.
Before the corporate era, I’ve been told by veteran authors, the business of writing books wasn’t like that. But over the past forty years, authors have become increasingly caught in the crossfire as the once-gentlemanly American book-publishing arena has been transformed into an international war zone. Victims of corporate conquest, our once-great publishers have been reduced to mere false-front divisions of the now six surviving major publishing houses, which themselves survive not as autonomous companies but only as divisions of their parent mega-corporations, only two of which are American.
Not even the book-writing magazines or workshops ... want to tell anyone what’s going on out there. When I read or listen to their “You Can Be A Published Author” hyperbole, I think they must be living in a time prior to May, 1966, when RCA bought Random House, starting the corporate race to buy the wealthiest, most successful publishers and gut them.
The truth is: All the great publishers are gone; only their names remain. Don’t be fooled by the presence of those names on today’s books and corporate bragging lists -- they are names of the dead. The spirit of independent enterprise that once animated those names -- the spirit that joined creativity, communication, and commerce to form the great publishing houses -- is no more. And America is much the worse for its loss.
From the beginning of our nation, which started with the Revolution-inspiring pamphlets of Tom Paine and the Constitution-shaping words of Thomas Jefferson, our society has been guided by writers who could articulate new principles and better ways of life. Over time, books have proven to be the most influential “packages” of that writing. We have developed our personal and national ideals, better understood our past, and shaped and reshaped our present largely because of the influence of a great variety of thought-provoking books. But now…
The variety is constantly diminishing as corporate committees of book-ignorant, conservative-minded decision makers reject ideas and rework manuscripts they consider too new and untried, not in harmony with a particular point of view or political ideology, or lacking the potential to quickly and sensationally bring them large amounts of risk-free money. Literary quality and intelligence are being lost as well in the relentless corporate dumbing down of literature and numbing down of readers. And authors.
How many wise, inspiring, entertaining, or even basically well-written books can possibly be produced by an industry that treats authors like dirt on the corporate floor? Literary creativity and professional integrity cannot survive in such a deadly atmosphere.
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