writing works

This is a quotation from William Jackson Lord’s 1962 book How Authors Make a Living. The book is incredibly difficult to find. I am sharing these paragraphs because 1) they tickled me; 2) the exact same arguments are constantly recycled in today’s debate over self-publishing and ebooks.

“Once he [the writer] enjoyed the small prestige accruing from the possession of talents not generally possessed. Today, though the real writer is still numerically rare, he does not seem to be. Universal literacy has made him appear as pervasive as light and air”

“Universal literacy is an American passion with serious–almost religious–overtones. This passion has been so fervently cultivated that now everybody can ‘read’ and ‘write.’ What were formerly activities whose essential connection was with thinking have now become universally practiced small-muscle movements of the eyes and fingers, movements into which thought may or may not enter”

“We have all become ‘readers’ and ‘writers’ in that we are all proficient in these small-muscle gestures. Hence the writer and the ‘writer’ are confused in the public mind. [...] Amid this flurry of wholesale small-muscle activity, the voice of the old-fashioned writer, who works with real emotions and real ideas and struggles with exacting techniques, may be lost. His value depreciates because he seems to be doing only what everybody else is doing. His value is further depreciated by the inevitable consequence of mass literacy–easy printability. Everything gets into print.”

I’m doing some research at the moment on publishing and the history of publishing scams. Today I was reading an 1887 text from England called The Grievances between Authors and Publishers, a Report of the Conferences of the Incorporated Society of Authors. I got 12 pages in and I read this gem, which I had to share: “I recollect once seeing an advertisement in a newspaper from a person who wanted to borrow one thousand pounds, and who offered as security an epic poem, written by himself, which he valued at ten thousand pounds. Whether he got anyone to lend him the money was unknown, but it might be assumed that he did not.”

EDIT: After a few days to think I am pretty sure I have seen this recur as a joke across the history of the 20th century. I wonder how far back it goes…

I wrote a review of a seminar I attended on composition research methods at Dartmouth this summer. It is posted at the Scholar Electric, the blog of the Computers and Composition Digital Press.

Cliff Notes of the post: It is an amazing seminar.

As Alex Reid points out, Computers and Writing provided a reminder that scholarly presses continue to cope with declining monograph sales. In the scholarly press roundtable, the editor of the University of Michigan Press gave the often noted statistic that academic presses can count on about 150 monograph sales to libraries whereas that number used to be over 1100. Expensive article databases have pushed purchases of monographs to the fringe.

What I hear Reid saying, though, is that even if presses find sustainable ways to continue producing monographs, there is still no guarantee of a readership for a published book. Much humanities research goes unread and uncited. One of Reid’s solutions is fewer books and more co-authorship, something I would love to see. Other solutions exist too, including R1 departments dropping the monograph as a requirement for tenure so books can incubate in the minds of scholars for decades before they are published if need be, or more importantly finding ways to value the wonderful kinds of digital scholarship derived from the potential of new information technologies.

I want to linger on the book rather than take up digital scholarship, though, because I want to extend Reid’s thoughts on books beyond the academy to draw some parallels to contemporary book culture. The phenomena he identified—the book read by only a few hundred people—is experiencing explosive growth. Contemporary statistics of books and reading are notoriously unreliable, but in 2004 Nielson Bookscan suggested 93% of ISBNs sell less than 1000 copies, and that number is dated and it doesn’t account for the self-publishing authors that I discussed in my #CWCON presentation, whose numbers have soared over the last six years. Writing books is an unacknowledged American pastime, and now that POD and e-reader distribution means publication can happen quite easily without the capital investment of a third party, writing books is the new reading books. We’re talking millions of amateur and quasi-professional book writers here looking for readers.

These conditions have prompted my current project that asks how such abundance is going to affect how we understand authorship. And there are some provocative questions to be asked, many of which translate well into our current monograph problems in academics: When the means of producing books become radically distributed, is readership an appropriate metric of a book’s value? And what is it about the legacy of the book that induces us to register one that reaches 300 people as a failure? I think, perhaps, the book that reaches 300 people might be the representative book, although we still think this problematic because we conceptualize the book as a public good, with assumptions about the public tied to the nation-state and the cultural authority of the author.

What is clear is that notion of book and author from the age of print do not provide appropriate conceptual categories to talk about contemporary authorship and book culture. Seen from traditional print publishing, books that only reach 300 people register as failures. But I have a slew of evidence that books that reach 300-1500 people are doing profound, localized cultural work. How do we recalibrate our expectations of books in the midst of such abundance? Authorship is no longer scarce, and most books won’t find a widespread readership, so how can we understand them for the work they are doing rather than the work they aren’t?

Commons-based peer production is third-wave web utopia. It follows the first-wave, where race, gender, and class were going to yield to an ideal public sphere where preexisting power relations didn’t matter, and second-wave, where the interwebz were going to lead to democracy in oppressive states.