“What’s next?” asked the novelist Tom Robbins. “Kiddie architects, juvenile dentists, 11-year-old rocket scientists? Any parent who thinks that the crafting of engrossing, meaningful, publishable fiction requires less talent and experience than designing a house, extracting a wisdom tooth, or supervising a lunar probe is, frankly, delusional.”

I’m not saying he is wrong on all accounts, but I’m posting this to reiterate the following point I made in a blog post a while back: it’s probably better for the business of literature and the value of literature in society to treat amateur authors with respect and not contempt.

I also goofed around making some with the entire program. In the one below I have stripped all of the meta-conference terms (convention, level, speakers), common names (Mike, Elizabeth, Amy), state names (MI, NY, CA), and ultra-commons terms (writing, students, composition, class, composing) that I could in the ten minutes or so I played around with it:

Let’s do a thought experiment. Picture professional tennis players encouraging people not to play tennis, professional singers encouraging people not to sing, and professional chefs encouraging people not to cook. It’s ludicrous. In every case amateurism probably leads to more money circulating through the professional ranks. I never had the desire to drop $xxx on fine dining until I became a good cook and realized exactly what a wicked-good professional chef can do that I can’t.

However, professional authors have always taken the stance that amateur writers drain professional profits. The result is a constant message to amateur writers: shut up and read. Don’t write.

Now’s probably a good time to rethink this attitude. For one, POD and ereaders have opened the floodgates. No matter how often professionals urge amateur writers to shut up, amateurs are going to self-publish by the millions in the next decade. More importantly, however, is that professional authors need to entertain the possibility that amateur book writers are good for business.

I’ve been finding that writers who try their hands at writing books probably read more books as a result. They want to scope out previous work and they want inspiration. Second, it’s also possible that amateurs will learn a hell of a lot about prose from the activity of book writing, which might actually increase their respect for good books.

Based on the research I have done, I would say both are as equally plausible as the good old boy party line, where amateurs are urged to shut up because they are killing book culture. That’s not a particularly pleasant position, and it probably isn’t doing anyone much good at the moment anyway.

I would guess that contrary to elite opinion, most amateur authors don’t believe they are headed for fame and fortune. Sure some have delusions of grandeur, but most write for fun. And that is probably a good thing for books.

Writing and Reading Technologies

Remington Typewriter Commercial (1958)

Secretary’s Day (1947, interesting gender dynamics about typewriters etc.)

Twenty-Six Characters (1947 documentary about the history of the alphabet)

Basic Typewriting Methods and History from US Navy (1944)

A Video About Civilization and the Alphabet (1968)

Print Culture & Books

Opportunities for Work in Printing(1947)

Film about Student Journalism Censorship (1963) 

Sending Pictures by Wire (1937)

Making Books (1947)

Journalism (1940)

Schools and Literacy

The Children Must Learn (1940)

Build your Vocabulary (1948)

Writing Better Social Letters (1950)

Computing and information technologies

Word Processing Discussion (1984)

Sharp Calculator Advert (1970s)

Computers and Illiteracy (1980s)

Commodore 64 Profile 

The Information Machine (IBM Video, 1958)

Is contemporary self-publishing really self-publishing? 

Not really. First, I think the discussion would take a giant leap forward if everyone began referring to self-publishing as *commons-based publishing* or even social publishing. There’s simply nothing self or individual about self-publishing. Most successful self-publishing authors rely on extensive networks of peer production. They rely on peers (often internet friends) to help them edit their work, to help them with various stages of book production, and to help them with reviewing, marketing, and spreading word-of-mouth.

I’m deriving the term “commons-based publishing” from the work of Yochai Benkler and his theory of nonmarket social production. Commons-based production refers to the systems of sharing on the internet. When an author gets a blogger to review her book, the author is essentially leveraging value from social sharing to help create word-of-mouth publicity. Benkler’s work helps explain why “commons-based publishing” is now a viable option for certain kinds of authorship. CBP doesn’t mean authors give their work away for free because in CBP, the market can interface with the nonmarket in valuable ways. If you want a full explanation, Benkler’s Wealth of Networks is a dense book but worth the read. You need some imagination to relate it to contemporary publishing, but it can be done productively. He’s got a TED talk here and I hope to provide a primer to his work and its relationship to publishing in my next post.

Second, we need to remember that there’s no such thing as publishing. Publishing is contextual. There’s textbook publishing, academic publishing, big six trade publishing, religious publishing, independent publishing, small press publishing, etc. There’s also social authorship/publishing, which as a Margaret Ezell has shown, has been around for hundreds of years.

Publishing varies according to the nature of the book’s information and the targeted audience. The flexibility of digital publishing will highlight these differences in the long run, with different sectors of publishing settling on different business models, with some probably folding altogether (see below).

Just as there is no good way to talk about “publishing” as a monolith, there’s no good way to talk about commons-based authors as a monolith. There are recreational authors, niche content authors, hobbyists, academics, first-book authors, published authors who have decided to go the DIY route, etc…

Are we in a commons-based publishing bubble?  

We’ve seen lots of utopian language about the coming of self-publishing and how it will liberate us from publishers. There’s an explosion of self-publishing yada yada yada. Most of this language just rehashes utopian ideas from debates about the internet in the 1990s. Much of this language creates over-excitement about self-publishing, and much of this language is actually produced by companies who sell services to self-publishers. Surprise. For the record, I found similar language in advertisements about “commission publishing” in England from as early as 1845.

If we are in a bubble, then so what? The dotcom bubble burst, but the internet stuck around. Commons-based publishing is not going anywhere, and neither are the millions of people who write books for fun and want to share them. Those writers have been around for well more than 100+ years. What’s different now is that authors have widespread access to distribution technologies and the potential of the commons. That doesn’t mean most will find more than 100 readers. What it means is that they have access to distribution technologies and the potential of the commons. The poor economy is probably also inflating the number of books written at the moment. People have time to write when they are unemployed.

Does the internet with its $.99 self-published ebooks make it impossible for professionals to earn a living as an author? 

Could be yes. Could be no. But in either case let’s remember there was no magical time when authors were flush. The point: it has always been almost freaking impossible to earn a living solely as a book author. That is why so many writers are also academics, editors, journalists, etc. We have really limited data about these questions, but what I have seen suggests that when we talk about the “representative” author of the 20^thcentury, we are talking about someone who published a single book, made just over minimum wage doing it, then disappeared into the ether. By nature authorship is mostly ephemeral, and that’s why it has been mostly an avocation or hobby. This is the standard we need to use to measure the success of authors who publish work through the internet.

Does the flood of amateur writers hurt the wages of professional writers? 

I don’t think we know yet. But this question has been asked before, and it has an interesting history, especially because the internet has been a huge boon to amateur writers looking to have some fun. As Ann Fabian has pointed out, when authorship in America became more professional in the 19th century, professionals often systematically dismissed or devalued the work of amateurs. There’s been a thin blurry line between amateur authorship and professional authorship. And that blurry line has pissed professional authors off something fierce. As a consequence, the longstanding beef professional authors have with amateurs is almost as robust as the longstanding beef they have with publishers.

Will the flood of user-generated books overwhelm readers? 

Meh. Readers have been finding ways to deal with the flood for a long time. There’s nothing more overwhelming than walking through a research library. You get a huge sense of panic once you realize you could scarcely read a single floor’s worth of information in your life, and yet we still rightly venerate those institutions.

Writers began overwhelming publishers with manuscripts as early as the 19^th century as paper became cheaper. According to Michael Winship, the slush pile of the legendary American publishing house Ticknor and Fields grew so big in the 19^th century that they began offering to publish books at the author’s expense to earn income from it. In short, this flood of writing seems to have has its origins in the 19^th century with cheap paper, although complaints about it go back much further. The internet lets us see and quantify a phenomenon that used to hide in desk drawers.

Will this flood tick off readers? First, the twentieth century was pretty damn saturated with books to begin with. Second, from what I can tell, most readers understand user-generated content as user-generated content, and adapt accordingly. In a wonderful bit of irony sure to please those panicked by the flood, many authors I have interviewed have been inspired to write after coming across a bad book and deciding they could do better. Writing begets writing, a wonderful thing for those of us fascinated by the writing lives of ordinary people.

Will commons-based authors become disillusioned when they don’t acquire fame and fortune? 

Answer: Only if they are deeply misinformed about the probability of success to begin with. Morrison’s article says self-publishers will become disillusioned when they only sell 100 books. Actually of the 75 or so self-publishers I interviewed for a research project I am working on, many just enjoyed the writing process and wanted to share their work. They had other jobs and other hobbies. Some had tens of thousands of readers, and others were excited about having 100 readers. I suspect these recreational authors still comprise the bulk of self-publishers. Some authors I interviewed had dreams of fame and fortune, but they were in the minority.

Wasn’t Amanda Hocking’s success an anomaly? 

Duh. Well-paid authors are mostly anomalies. The significance of the Hocking story is that she created a self-publishing dream that authors can chase. Because commons-based publishing is now mostly free using POD and ereaders, she will spawn thousands of would-be imitators trying to replicate her success. This seems more like a banal point than something to get excited about.

Will commons-based publishing and the internet kill the publishing industry? 

Answer: 42. I think what we mean to ask is this: how will the internet and commons-based publishing reconfigure the publishing industry over time?  The work of publishing has not gone away. It’s important. It still needs to be done. It’s just not likely to be done using 20^th century divisons of labor. When a book is successful it creates far more work than the author can handle, and that work needs to be distributed somewhere. At the end of the day, publishers provide enormous value to the production of high quality books by doing this work. At the end of the day, though, durable & high quality books comprise only a tiny fraction of all books ever produced. And that has been the case since well before the interwebz.

“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.”

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…

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

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?