Today’s Papers
5 Dec
I spent a good deal of Wednesday and Thursday reading and digesting bad news about the book business. (For a nice roundup of what Galley Cat called “Black Wednesday” check out this post from New York Magazine.) I want you to know how DCWYTBMA is going to handle the crisis.
After a lot of thought I’ve decided that the answer is not much. This site has always been dedicated to you doing exceptional work, finding a large audience, and doing it in a way that preserves your dignity and celebrates your humanity. The economy may make this mandate more of a challenge, but then again, it may not. What are a few layoffs to an already impossible dream?
The bottom line is that no one knows how this will all turn out. The only thing that’s certain is that in hindsight the guesses that were right will look like the obvious choice. Epic romances written in light verse with a dash of time travel thrown in? [Slaps forehead.] Why didn’t I see that? Order will emerge out of the chaos, but you can’t tame the chaos. That’s why they call it chaos.
Let’s continue to focus on the basics:
- Taking risks
- Maximizing the strengths of a genre or form
- Executing the fundamentals
- Serving your audience
- Building and supporting a community of like-minded artists
I feel like these core concepts are essential enough to be relevant no matter what the state of the book business is. I also feel like they’re flexible enough to be useful should we be forced to stop writing books and start programming literary holograms.
So keep reading and commenting and sending me links and questions. Barring something catastrophic, I will continue to be here for you.
Tags: books, life, publishing
“Barring something catastrophic”– a bit of an ominous note to end on…
Love the core concepts. Just wish you would have said you were trying to preserve my dignity before. Now it may be too late…
Well, if there is a good thing about the economy tanking… even as it takes down publishers, it also proves that if I had majored in something practical, I might well be out of a job.
Take that all you practical business majors!
My favorite thing I’ve read since Black Wednesday is from Mark Terry. He said agents should be, in this economy, taking on more writers than ever before in order to even the odds of hitting it big.
Will they? I don’t know. Probably not. But I think this is an excellent time to take a chance. Sheesh. If it doesn’t work out, you can always blame the economy.
@bets: I would hope that there are agents out there who see the state of the industry as an opportunity to take more risks rather than try to bank on “sure things” which are almost never sure things.
There’s an award for you over at my blog – http://ofbooksandwriting.wordpress.com