Too many books? Come on
What is all this blogblatt about too many writers? What
silliness. Did the Victorians worry about teaching everyone
to draw? Do we worry about too many baseball players, too many pretty girls, too many movies?
Who are these self-appointed gatekeepers who spout this nonsense? If you write a good poem and it makes your day or somebody else’s day, what’s wrong with that? Who says W.W. Norton has to publish you and you have to win the Nobel Prize? That’s just our crazy horse-race mentality talking.
I’ve seen blogheads fret about print-on-demand encouraging unwarranted literary ambitions. So what? Are we worried about a proliferation of ice cream vendors? Are we worried about the millions who buy lottery tickets when the odds are stupendously against them?
Will a proliferation of writers change the literary scene? Probably. How I don’t know. Nor do you. But the Victorians weren’t worried about crowding the art field and I think it loony of us to worry about crowding the literary field. Who knows, all that writing might encourage some reading?
Are the people who fret about such things worried about the poor
conglomerates who run the publishing industry? How can they possibly deal with so many literary ambitions? Oh sure, we’re all worried about the poor dears, about as much as they worry about us.
The fact is there has always been a modest profit margin in publishing, but if the big guys still want to keep on trying to squeeze blood out of a nickel, who cares?
I’m worried about my neighbor getting sick and not being able to pay for health care. I’m worried about his children not being able to go to good schools. But I’m not going to worry about too many writers and I’m not going to indulge any bloggers who do. Fatheads and big money groupies, the lot of them.
—DM
You, I love. I love you.
You’re quite right, but I wish writers of poorly edited (or unedited) work would learn a bit of shame.
I started reviewing novels online and have to say that 80% of what’s sent to me needed polishing with another draft or two before being released.
Chris.
Dear Chris, I think you’re doing a valuable thing, and I share your concern. Too many quasi-literate web sites, too many poorly edited books with low production values, and a very real deterioration of editing among the major newspapers and book publishers. Sometimes I wince at the
illiteracy of those CNN crawlers.
One of the problems is undoubtedly greed: the big money media companies have savaged their news operations and their editing capabilities instead of thinking creatively about how to develop new money streams. It’s the same old same old: take it out of labor’s hide.
Nonetheless, you and I will fight the good fight and always hope for that good book that might otherwise have been lost.
Thanks for writing.
DM
Please give me a bit of a break since my very first story is being published tomorrow in our local paper. And, I’m not even a writer. As Steve Martin famously said way back in the seventies, “Some people have a way with words, and other people (pause) no have way.”
Oh, and I love you too!
-Patti
Congratulations, Patti. This is the age of the citizen journalist, and I welcome it. Big Media are abdicating their responsibility by cutting back their news-gathering operations instead of creatively seeking new revenue streams. Their greed has created a vacuum into which citizen journalists are stepping. They say they’re doing this to ehance their competitiveness, but competition is not what results. What results is short-term gain for shareholders and executives and a tragic loss of a competitive press for the republic.
DM
You are SO right, dear. I’ve lived long enough to get all that useless worrying organized by setting aside a special day for it—it’s the second Tuesday in each week.
Love ya, too,
Jackie
Maybe if all those folks are writing, they will also read. We need more readers. With 50% of the public functionally illiterate, the more people writing the better. (Since the test of whether you are functionally literate is “can you read the IRS tax instructions?” I fall among the illiterates–and with a degree in English!)
I’m with you, Harley, clearly illiterate. One of my most odious chores as a young reporter was trying to read all the bafflegab produced by lawyers. Unfortunately, all the
really important stories are buried in that bafflegab, and the press hardly takes a stab at penetrating it these days—woe to the republic!
DM
I love this. I simply love this! Who would have thought to look at it like that?