WHAT USED TO BE PUBLISHING

Books, paintings, collections, orchestras, theatres -- all used to be human activities in the here and now, quite concrete, specific, local and received through the senses.  When the industrial age, the machinery of standardizing and duplicating, caused all these wonderful things to be accessible to the masses via duplication and repetition (which might be called “publishing”), they prompted the creation of institutions to guide them: museums, galleries, foundries, printing plants, acting companies, movie companies, radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, universities and so on.

This was the state of things when Enzentsberger said “the human mind is reproduced as a social product.”  And then Haacke talked about the system of exchange between museums and corporations and corporate leaders  which I’m constantly grumbling about in terms of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, which controls books, auctions, personal buyers, websites, and the like throughout that genre.

It was a matter of convenient role specialization.  Artists and authors of the “artesian” kind -- that is, the ones who cannot help but create and who do it on their own terms -- are not well-equipped to be publicizers, sales managers, or even likely to have the necessary capital to sustain a building.  So other people, entrepreneurs, come along who saw the potential and agreed to contribute capital to publicize and record, edit and distribute.  Somehow along the line they, who were at first so grateful and took maybe ten per cent of profits, began to take a third and then half and now under some circumstances they let the artist or writer have less than ten per cent.  And no control.  Today fabrication costs much less.  (Lower quality contributes.)  When the artists and authors began to dry up under this regime, the entrepreneurs went to faux products, processed with the added elements of sex, violence, and crime, or maybe cut-and-paste books assembled out of pirated others.

I’ve watched this in a very ground level way.  In 1961, starting out, Bob Scriver had built a museum and studio.  While I was with him, we built a foundry.  Our product was excellent, our profit was a little more than it would have been if we hadn’t done our own fabrication and sales.  What we lacked was big-time contacts in the Western art world, but that hardly existed yet.  Harold McCracken tells about the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (now called the Smithsonian of the West) being nothing but a huge space where his heels echoed on the terrazzo.  He wondered how he would ever fill it.  So Bob’s career grew with that expansion.  He always kept control.  Even tried to keep control after his death. But now there’s a cowboy artist under every mesquite: young, gifted and building on the older artists like Bob.

Bob’s best friend from childhood, Ace Powell, struggled with alcoholism.  It’s not unlike HIV-AIDS, which was unknown at the time, or TB or polio -- any chronic physical burden.  It made Ace vulnerable to capitalists who could keep him dependent on them.  He produced so much work, in so many circumstances, even after his heart, lungs and liver were nearly shot (which was the only way I ever knew him) that he was never really controlled by anyone, not even himself.  There are plenty of authors like that.  The great irony was that Ace produced so much work that it didn’t seem valuable to the people who think rareness is a marker of value.

In our contemporary world it is the capitalist entrepreneur who is admired and listened to.  Everything is for sale, the prevailing art is the art of negotiation.   The Euro-markers of quality have been exploded by experiments and counter-movements.  

But now everything is changing again.  Now we’ve made a new transition that allows all these created things to be resolved into code.  The internet is like the transporter in Star Trek when a crew member stepped into it and said,  “Beam me up, Scottie!”  Then there were a lot of sparkles and, with luck, the same person was reassembled at the other end (without parts of either Jeff Goldblum or a fly somehow incorporated).  We have learned how to make everything into code: send it, share it, store it, interpret it, mess with it.  Indeed, we know the code for our own bodies and many other species, even ones that no longer exist.  But once things are coded, they can be recreated, pirated, passed around, mashed, morphed, and Photoshopped.

What used to be the physical and mechanical reproduction of something -- which we called publishing -- is now code.   It cannot be contained.   It can be cross-media.  It can transmute under your hand, translate into a different language, shift into another key or instrument or timebeat, swap colors, remove backgrounds, change the names of the characters.  So what does being an artist, a creator, really mean if the consumer has total control over the creation?  (Does God ask this question?)

There is another change, which goes by the awkward name of “globalization.”  Suddenly we have broken through to what is politely called “the developing world.”  Illiterate people. thus not print-dominated.  Unexpectedly the newest and most blow-you-away artists of the American West are Chinese, traditionally trained, newly immigrated and gracefully recovering the hidden history of the Chinese American West -- so entwined with gold, railroads and -- well, admit it -- laundry and food.  In a reciprocal trend, artists of the American West begin to visit China and Russia where the vast grasslands are quite like the prairie and the Mongolians still ride horses.

I “travel” vicariously with another group, young men shoved out to the margin.  In the American West they would have been boys pushed out of families, the original cheap labor called “cow” boys.  They died so much that their bones are scattered in as many places as the bison, though there weren’t that many boys. In those days it was trauma and TB that killed them -- different alphabet disease today. 

So add it up:  boys who create on the Internet, an awakening and immense audience newly gaining access, and a cost so low -- the device, the electricity, and internet access -- and the result is so far different from “publishing” that no one even has the terms to talk about it.  Except that “the human mind is reproduced as a social product.”  It bypasses the system of exchange between museums and corporations and corporate leaders.  These dinosaur institutions are fighting back as hard as they can: making deals with Internet providers and social websites, shaking the old danger rattles (they will take your money, they will kidnap your children), collaborating with governments and military bodies (they will steal your secrets, they will reveal your plans).  All our lives are changed.  But now the energy has gone back to the authors and artists and activists.  And that’s what’s happened to publishing.

WHAT'S THAT YOU WRITE??

Working on my assigned chapter of “Landscape and Legacy,” the book that John Vollertson is editing, has me surveying writing and writers along this east slope of the Rockies. Partly I’m wondering whom to include. There are the usual suspects, of course, Guthrie, Walker, Howard -- but there are also a few I’d like to set fire to, like R.L. Lancaster, that reprobate whose book everyone loves in that unreasonable white-man [sic] way because it fulfills the stereotype they cherish. (If I say more, I might be sued for libel even though he’s dead and what I say is all true.) Then I look through my bookshelves and begin to realize how many small homemade local books there are, and I come up against the question of whether I myself should be in this chapter. If I put in Lancaster’s “Piegan,” don’t I need to put in “Bronze Inside and Out: a Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver” who was very much an east slope person all his life?

In the book I tell the stories of Bob and I hunting up Blackleaf Canyon and on Two Moons, Guthrie’s ranch. Guthrie divorced about the time I met Bob and remarried about the time Bob divorced me, so there’s an inverse relationship of some kind. When we were hunting on his land (chaperoned by a lawman) Guthrie was in a very bad patch and might not have cared if he’d known. I once had the task of helping out some videographers who wanted to get Guthrie on tape -- this was in the mid-eighties -- and asked me to be the stooge who asked questions from off-camera. They gave me the questions. But Guthrie and I chatted a bit and when he realized who I was, he had some eye-brow wiggling about how Bob got any sculpture done when he was busy with so many women. I told him the truth: Bob put us all to work on the sculpture. Or sometimes a little writing. The first real lesson about writing, the hardest one I ever had, was composing the captions for the miniature wildlife dioramas in the museum. They had to be vivid, factual, simply said, and memorable. Not quite poetry. I don’t suppose they survive.

I always wanted to be a writer but never understood how a person went about it. Ivan Doig, who was in my class of ’57 at Northwestern, chose journalism and history but somehow that didn’t work for me. I went for theatre. I kept a journal for Alvina Krause, intense and effective acting coach, and wrote in it that I was never bored. She was outraged! She said that when she read that, she was so incensed that she threw my binder against the ceiling! Not being bored meant that I had nothing to DO !! Why didn’t I get BUSY?? I paid no attention to her. I’m not a doer. I watch. (I got a bad grade in acting class, but I really learned a lot.) Part of it is a matter of not revealing myself, but even more is about so much going on in my head that I didn’t want to be distracted.

When I bought this little shanty in Valier and moved here to write, I had very little notion what that meant, except that I’d saved boxes and boxes of material I thought might be useful. Tear-outs, manuscripts, scribbled notes on café napkins, old albums, paper in many forms. What I thought would ensue eventually was “being published,” which I took to be some mysterious process that would leave me rich and honorable.

Forget it. In the next decade the Brit/European/Jewish Manhattan yoke was shattered. Suddenly no one knew what to do except make money. NOW who were the people who called the shots? Scramblers who lunched. The publishers, their attending agents, the newspapers that supported critics, the academics who tucked extra feathers into their nests by saying who was good and who was bad (which had a mysterious relationship to “naughty and nice”), the bookstores (the big chains that had just gotten through destroying all the local indie bookstores) -- and even the readers-- vanished without leaving so much as a pile of rubble.

Now that our eyes are beginning to adjust, we see a whole new world in which authors deal directly with readers -- if they can find each other -- and there are what claim to be publishers everywhere, but we’re all sort of feeling around in the dark with little ebook flashlights, except for those who long ago jumped ship for sophisticated videos with music and links. (There was a momentary period of time when we talked about “vooks,” which were supposed to be books with vids in them, but, whish, they zoomed on by.)

And we’re going crazy over content. What is “true?” What is “obscene?” What is privileged? What is good writing now? Talk to me, baby! You’re audible! Tell me some secrets! I want to be shocked!

There was another moment when people were writing extremely short stories, the equivalent of haiku. I’ve forgotten what we were calling the category. The Asian ones were very emotional. Mine were little juxtapositions of shifted consciousness. On the computer I printed up about a hundred quarter-page, yarn-bound sets of them. One cousin bought a dozen to give as Christmas presents. I made some other home-printed and bound booklets -- one about iniskum (buffalo stones) but they did NOT sell. It was an organic funky-looking little half-page buckskin-colored pamphlet that only an anthropologist could love. Those guys don’t come around anymore. Tourists want bright and slick.

I bought a $350 wire binding machine and made 400 copies of a computer-printed short bio of Bob Scriver with a slick photo cover. They occasionally show up on Amazon and so does the book of prairie sermons called “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke” published conventionally by the Moosemilk Press, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Unitarian Church of Edmonton. Then my binding machine broke and I discovered Lulu.com.

THAT’s when I found out what publishing is about: money. Lulu.com is print-on-demand which solves both the problems of needing manufacturing money up front and the problem of storage. But Lulu.com is NOT a publisher, which is a selling endeavor: locating readers, pitching to them, distributing, building up a clientele and a platform as though selling Popeil universal fishing rods. Lulu.com expects the author to do that. Or contract with someone. Money up front. All my Lulu.com books show up on Amazon and Google, but that is not enough to make money from writing. So am I or am I not a published writer? The public thinks publication is like a college degree: a certificate of achievement of some kind. But they have no idea what publishing is. The writers’ associations always considered having published a book as the dividing line between professional and amateur. Not any more.

And no one can figure out blogging. Especially long-form blogging. You’re lookin’ at it, baby. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s “good” or not. Even what the proper context might be.

APOPTOSIS OF WRITING

http://www.duotrope.com/ is a useful website where the organization, operating on voluntary donations, lists markets for short writing: paying, non-paying, which have died, which have revived with money, which have revived with no payment, interviews, themed deadlines, and whose work has been accepted recently. If you can’t remember to check it, there is a weekly newsletter that comes to you automatically.

It’s hard to imagine a more useful or timely function, especially for beginners trying to find homes for their writing. But I’m always bemused by the info that’s provided. There are always a LOT of listings, but as new ones arrive, the list of dead markets is just as long. Here’s a sample:

Anubis Magazine (fiction, teen-written sf/f/h)
Candlemark & Gleam (fiction)
The Darkleian Times (fiction, sf/f/h)
Fender Stitch (fiction)
Noir Nation: International Crime Fiction (fiction, noir/crime)
Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism (fiction & poetry, fabulism)
Candlemark & Gleam: Substitution Cipher Anthology (fiction, themed antho)
The Zharmae Publishing Press (fiction)

Non-paying market listings added:

Alligator Stew (poetry)
The Applicant (fiction & poetry, Nepalese lit)
The Broken City (fiction & poetry)
Coffee Plus Fiction (fiction)
em: A Review of Text and Image (fiction & poetry)
Bank-Heavy Press: Husbands and Malfeasant Dogs (fiction & poetry)
MaLa: The Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal (fiction & poetry, Chinese lit)
Mind's Eye: U Magazine (fiction & poetry)
new graffiti: Literature on the Streets (fiction & poetry)
Spiracle (poetry)
The Tavern's Vault (fiction)
The Vehicle (fiction & poetry)

I don’t know whether the links will survive the blog transfer, but they are great since they take one to the publisher’s website with little effort. What strikes me is that this is clearly a young person’s activity, which is probably why there are so many deaths of publications. Big ideas, good intentions, life intervenes. Probably because of the youth of the editors, the subject matter is dark indeed. To a kid’s eye (kids being someone not yet thirty) all that ghoulish, death-ridden, obsessed subject matter equates to courage, truth, and social action. Just check the news, eh?

And check this list

Caribbean Writer, The: Deadline extended (fiction & poetry)
Cincinnati Review, The: Now accepts electronic submissions (fiction & poetry)
DemonMinds: Website has not been functioning for over a month; editor has not responded to us; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)
Dog Oil Press: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; editor has not responded to our inquiries; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)
Kugelmass: Now accepts poetry (poetry)
Lonesome Fowl: Website has not been functioning for over a month; editor has not responded to us; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)
Ramble Underground: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; now emails to the editor bounce; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction)
technicolor: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; editor has not responded to our inquiries; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)

Imagine the time and effort it takes to check all these people. You’ll notice that the list is not limited to weird little vampire-fang publications, but also follows big respectable outfits like “The Cincinnati Review.”

Nature’s way is to create a zillion of something and then muster up the equivalent of cell-death. That is, sometimes death by trauma but far more deaths by apoptosis, the quiet falling-apart. Shockingly, this is how a human is formed in the womb: lots of cells, then most of them pared away. If that process goes a little too far, abort. Even the brain: as soon as you are born, unused brain cells “apop.” It appears that this is the way writing and -- more than writing -- publishing is going to unfold -- IS unfolding. Writing: making marks or images that convey consciousness. EVERYBODY’s doin‘ it, doin‘ it. The market is flooded.

Publishing: investing money in making profitable writing available through curation (choosing), editing, promotion, and so on. Publishing is a business model. Writing is only a business if publishers make it that by shaping it towards sales. Sales -- in one way of thinking -- are what define fitness for survival.

It is possible to find a symbiosis or niche where writing can survive without being published: academia, blogs, private subsidy, institutions. Blogs are the only environment where writing is controlled only by the writer. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will have readers. In today’s commercialized atmosphere, I don’t expect free long-form blogging to persist. Use it while you can. On the other hand, it is an artesian spring of ideas, networking, and hot-housing language and image that would impoverish the culture if it were missing. Increasingly people are resenting pay-walls for professionals.

Social media is not writing even though some poets use it that way because their work is normally short or because they use linking to continue elsewhere. Social media, which means very short personal messaging, is proliferating faster than blogs, they say, which means that it becomes ever more ripe for apoptosis that will turn it into something else -- evolve it like a fetus from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal. (Don’t panic. Only a metaphor.) It’s great advantage is its speed and numbers, which are marketable in the same way as votes -- indeed, it is fascinated with votes: thumbs up/thumbs down, like/dislike. traffic quantification. Quickly, a kind of group mentality forms and it is cross-national. In fact, when it jumps to cross-media by including music and video, the language barrier disappears.

But not the capacity for creating illusions. We’re seeing things we never saw before, things that might permanently change the way your brain is organized -- the things you always took for granted. Particularly, both taboos and idealizations get mocked to dust. Apoptosis of the reputation.

I love the word “apoptosis” because it’s onomatopoetic. If you’ve forgotten, those are the words that sound like what they mean (bark, plop, clang). So many concepts are soap bubbles that I like to imagine make a little pop when they burst. Thin rainbow membranes around ideas and categories. In the 19th century there was a huge proliferation of sorting categories that seemed to be permanent. Now we pop them. No more dodos. Pluto is not a planet. What will happen if we pop too many things? Abort the world?

What if we pop ALL the ideas about the world? Won’t new ideas arise, like the publications listed by duotrope? Some with costs associated, some with rewards? We’re trying.

PAPER BOOKS IN PROPER BINDINGS

In our usual binary way, the reading public has actually registered only two things:  paper books which we recognize as objects and pack into our lives on that basis while knowing very little about how they get made; and ebooks which we see only through the glass window of the little tech gizmos.  But the REAL impact of this difference is behind the scenes and the DEEPEST impact is on the developments of “cultures” responding to those changes.

In the popular mind, the “mental image” BEING PUBLISHED has always mostly been one of elite achievement, often after a long period of suffering on the part of the writer -- not the publisher, who takes the parent role, providing the Seal of Approval.  Indeed, nice comfy writers who have private incomes are rather resented, because the other popular conviction of educated persons is that at some point they each could write the “Great American Novel” and vindicate themselves.  Or they could write a revelatory, astounding, and absolutely true memoir. Over and over the books themselves used these concepts as internal plot devices until everyone stopped questioning their reality.  Newspapers had book sections that promoted this assumption.  The idea persists on NPR.

This idea is in fact gone.  The colony of publishers on the island of Manhattan is down to five “legacy” publishers owned by Europeans.  They are simply capital investors who require a healthy return.  These publishers have dispensed with the famous slush piles by outsourcing them to the people who used to be their in-house readers and who are now free-lance agents who only make money if they sell a book.  Each publisher has “imprints” which are sort of sub-sets for which one person takes responsibility.  If they don’t make money, they simply wink out.  Everything is driven by the need to make money.  Editing has become a gypsy occupation.  Advertising is where the money goes.

The people who have the most clout in terms of what is published are the salesmen, considered experts because they go out there in the field and deal with bookstores, esp. volume buyers like Big Box Stores.  Bookstores (endangered themselves) order what they like, return whatever doesn’t sell even if they’ve put dayglo “sale” stickers on the books and let the books be damaged, return books at the end of the year to avoid the taxes they must pay on inventory and then reorder the same books because they do sell.  Bookstores must now compete with online providers, not just the publishers themselves or other new book sources, but also the huge back inventory of used books that used to be available only by going into a used book store or employing a book finder, who did the same.  These are books nurtured in the old system so their quality is much higher. 

Even the salesmen are now replaced by “quants” -- quantifiers who investigate numbers to see what sells the most.  They don’t like “outliers” and “long-tails”.  There is a lively market for “remainders” which are books dumped by the publisher as unsaleable at some mysterious auction.  Possibly these are the result of over-optimism about what will sell, failure to allow enough time for word of mouth to develop, or failure to promote.  They show up in used bookstores or catalogues that include music, movies and calendars.  A person can read wonderful books as low-cost remainders because somewhere someone loved them a little too much.

Amazon weirdly recognizes books as just a product and advertises them alongside bug spray, knee pads, household accessories, clothes.  EBay skims off some of the specialty books or particularly valuable books to sell at auction.  Abebooks.com, Alibris.com and Powells.com sell used books.  Literate people who can navigate Google, etc. declare themselves bookstores and sell through these venues.  I find myself acquiring the books of retired anthros, often books they wrote and used as texts, therefore accumulating a lot of copies of no use without classes.  Sometimes these books come from the Salvation Army and other organizations which accept donations of physical books to sell.  Really valuable old books, unrecognized, show up there.

All of this is the product of the MARKETING changes of physical books made possible by computers.  Nothing to do with eBooks.  Likewise, the disappearance of book reviews from newspapers, which was the primary way many of us knew what to read, is NOT due to the disappearance of physical books.  Quite the contrary.  Newspaper desks are heaped with books begging for review.  It is the shift of news-seeking people to the computer websites as well as television and resurging radio that has impoverished newspapers.  Book sections are cut because the ads from publishers didn’t pay for the space.

Back to the impact of electronics on book manufacturers, which is what the publishers must be if they are making physical books. The only way to cut costs for the physical object has been volume printing -- a lot of copies means less money per copy.  But with electronic printing, it’s possible to “print on demand.”  So if you order my books from Lulu.com, they will print you a copy and mail it to you.  Or you can order enough for a class.  No worries about running out.  There is no such thing as an “edition” or “going out of print” or “first printing” versus “second printing.”  There are no remainders.  There are no returns.  The Espresso printing machine, which is about the size of a player piano, will print you any book that has an electronic file (zillions of them), bind it and kick it out warm as a cookie in the time it takes to drink a nice coffee.  Weirdly (again) the most common use is to create a blank book for journaling, not a manuscript but a binding.

Electronics also affects acquisitions.  Queries go to freelance agents.  Many will not consider any queries from people who have not already had a book published. (The snake bites its tail.)  Agents work in genres -- some do certain age groups, others will only consider certain subject matter.  This is because the value of an agent is in their ability to know the market and predict what the publishers will be willing to acquire.  That’s what all the lunches are about, publisher to agent, agent to agent, agent to writer.  Rarely publisher to writer.  Most publishers do not read books.  And electronic queries are processed in a quick and sketchy way.

The publishers are also imposing editorial duties on agents.  Not just to line-edit for correct English and spelling, but also to advise changes, to push for different outcomes or even contents, to “colorize,” to make everything more commercial, and (OFTEN) to hire a ghost writer or a “book doctor.”  If the writer balks, he or she is told they will lose the offer to publish.  This was once done in-house.  It is more acute now that the cost of making a physical book is higher.  There is constant pressure to be shorter.  

Some publishers require the writer to submit a plan for advertising and estimated sales.  Some, especially academic presses which only exist to serve their community and pay the salaries of the Press employees, will ask the author to secure a grant to pay for all or part of the costs and to pay for all illustrations, which might be costly graphics as well as photos or art work.  Material books must be stored in warehouses, shipped, handled and packed by people with muscles and at some costs, including the vagaries of rising paper costs or health insurance.  It is too expensive to allow authors free or low cost copies of their own books, so they do not have boxes of them at home.   

Authors themselves are dented and remaindered by the increasingly greed-driven, corner-cutting, ghost-written, closed-circle-marketing -- all accompanied by the erasure of advances and the diminution of royalties to 5%.  Some authors understand computers and what they could do as direct marketing websites, what is called a “platform.”  They know it is the same as putting boxes of their books in a car and driving them through the country, hand-selling at readings and events, hoping it will amount to pump-priming.  Others, who had been quietly writing all this time, could not get a grip on what was happening and only knew they were wiped off the game board.

Most wannabe writers have no concept of all this and go on happily scribbling in their fantasy world.  What impact reality will have on writers and their motivations is open to speculation.  But as Abraham Lincoln remarked about the man being run out of town on a rail, if it weren’t for the honor of it all, he’d just as soon stay home.  But as another thinker said,  if all you can see is bars, you need to re-focus on the spaces between them.

Tomorrow I’ll take a swipe at ebooks.