Writing (a novel, this post, anything) is “a bit like love.” Few are in it for the money or self-esteem; you pursue it because you can’t not and because at some point, it feels good and right and like one of the few things that actually makes sense (and other times because it takes out your insides, plays them like an instrument, and stuffs them back in mangled and irrevocably changed). The object of that love, your audience, appreciates your effort (most of the time, if you do it right).
It’d be cliché of me to transition with: “There’s love lost between Jonathan Baumbach and the commercial publishing scene”; but cliché is exactly what’s sustained the market-driven world of big publishers.
In this article from Maud Newton’s blog, Baumbach offers a concise manifesto for a(nother) publishing revolution. He is the originator of the Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two), which he (and a group of other writers) started in 1974 “out of desperation.” No one would publish his third novel, and he needed a literary space that would publish what was traditionally unpublishable. The Fiction Collective became “an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction.” The problem, Baumbach says, was and is: “Fiction that redefined the rules, innovative and experimental work, was having the most trouble finding a home in what was clearly (though defensively unacknowledged) a publishing establishment increasingly attuned to the bottom line.” Baumbach establishes the conflict between what’s good and what sells: “surprise is one of the touchstones of art,” and yet, “it is probably fair to say that art sells only when it becomes an identifiable commodity.”
The writers who created Fiction Collective aspired to “jostle the publishing establishment into taking more chances with work that was out on the edge. [Yet he] couldn’t imagine Fiction Collective going on indefinitely. [Their] business, [their] busyness, was the writing of books. [They] were, [he] wanted to believe, a stopgap action in a period of emergency.” His 1974 laments read more like dramatic irony today. Despite the prevalence of small presses, the need to make publishing less commercial remains. “Commercial” roughly translates into “disposable“, which is just something writing can’t be. “We want immediate payoffs for our commitments of time and concentration. Fiction, suggests the evidence, tends to be used more and more as a licit form of drug abuse.”
-Elissa Bassist
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Quick, uncalled for, editorial by EB: At some point I stop caring about why the publishing industry undersells our intellect and wastes its money on shit that makes us dumber, or shit that implies we’re already dumb. Like Baumbach, I prefer to focus on how to remake all of publishing in the image of the small press. If books are tied to money, they will go with the whim of the economy; if books are tied to strong content, they will endure. Some of us know how small presses work. It’s not about the bottom line. It’s not about pandering to the masses. It’s not about Urban Outfitters or Dan Brown or foreign markets. It’s about innovation, aesthetic in tandem with content, capturing the world and emotion in a way that is infinite and representative and original. As Baumbach says, “if one reads books at all, shouldn’t one go for an experience one can’t get from TV or movies or anywhere else. Taking the trouble to read, perhaps we ought to go for something that throws our whole way of seeing into question. Art permits the dangerous in the comfort zone of the imagination.”
