The 21st-Century Writer’s Life

I mentioned in the previous post that, to my shame, I read very few new books this year. And I feel guilty about that, like I’m a traitor to my profession. 

I’m not the only one feeling guilt. Check out this confession by David Streitfeld from last weekend’s New York Times, in which he admits to buying used books from resellers rather than purchasing them new:

Here’s one example of how I casually wreak destruction. I was reading “Sylvia,” an account by the late short-story master Leonard Michaels of his unstable first wife. Looking for material about Mr. Michaels, I saw his friend Wendy Lesser had written a long essay about him in a book published last year by Pantheon. I could buy a new paperback edition of that book, “Room for Doubt,” for $13.95 plus tax in a bookstore. But there were dozens of copies from resellers available online for as little as one cent, plus shipping.

A penny felt a little chintzy, even for me, so I bought a hardcover copy for 25 cents from someone who called herself Heather Blue, plus a few bucks for shipping. Neither my local bookstore nor Pantheon — whose parent, Random House, announced this month it would cut costs by reducing five divisions to three — nor the author got a share. The book looked good as new.

Streitfeld then contacted the author, Wendy Lesser, to tell her what he’d done:

Ms. Lesser herself was philosophical. “I am a pragmatist, not a thin-skinned, delicate little writer who thinks everything needs to be what it is in heaven,” she said. Still, she sounded a little taken aback at the going rate for her books. “Twenty-five cents? That’s all it was?”

Which calls to mind the great line from Ruthless People, delivered by recently kidnapped Bette Midler when she discovers her husband refused to pay the ransom:

Do I understand this correctly? I’m being marked down? I’ve been kidnapped by K-Mart!

But another crucial element of book publishing had changed, and I think it’s nicely articulated in this essay in the Village Voice by novelist Kevin Baker:

“The state of publishing is such that you can get all these great things, but people don’t talk about the work. They talk about you,” says [novelist Darin] Strauss. “There used to be serious critics and an audience. . . . Now, the audience is also in the critic business.” The model becomes Amazon, “where any cranks complaining about books can have the same weight as The New York Times.”

This should provide an example of Web democracy in action. But consider the fact that every writer I know nudges his friends and relatives to offset the mob rule by sending their own glowing reviews to Amazon and similar sites. The result is a culture where everything is a five-star book, and everything is fraudulent. It’s not so much democracy but a corruption of the public square, one that doesn’t so much improve writing as it forces each writer to become his own corporate PR department.

For Strauss, the result is a sort of vast, cultural “rot,” extending across art, music, and cinema, as well as writing. “We have created sort of a post-talent age,” where what began as the heroic overthrow of cultural elites has now devolved to the craven capitulation to the mob: “It’s commercial elitism as opposed to intellectual elitism.”

I’ll admit this works in my favor, since I write books to be used, rather than reviewed. Most of the people who buy and use my books will end up getting good results from the programs, and the ones that review the books will say nice things and give them five stars.

I get nasty online reviews from time to time, and I won’t pretend I’m tough enough to ignore them. They sting. (Kimberly tells me I have a unique ability to give one negative review more weight than 10 positive reviews.) But most of them are nice.

The reviews that mean the most to me are the ones that are clearly well thought out by people who’ve read the books carefully and done the workouts. Even if there were such a thing as serious book critics who reviewed fitness books, I wouldn’t expect any of them to wait until they’d tried the programs before they reviewed one of my books. That’s why feedback from readers who’ve made that investment is more important to me than anything else.

Inevitably, those reviews are mixed. No program that’s intended for a mass audience is going to be exactly perfect for any individual. And although my writing style sits well with most of my intended readers, it annoys the shit out of some of them. So a truly honest, thoughtful review is going to include legitimate criticisms along with whatever praise it offers.

Those in-depth reviews are so rare that, when I see one online, I’ll often try to find the reviewer’s email address and write to thank him or her for the time spent composing it. I’ll even make it clear that I agree with some of the criticisms, and if there’s confusion about some aspect of the book, I’ll try to clear that up, or at least explain how it came to be so confusing.

But that’s just me. If I were writing books that were meant to be works of literary art, I’d have a different point of view. 

Either way, though, this is the way it works. I can’t change it, so I may as well celebrate the parts of it that work better than the old system. 

Tags: Tags: books, personal, writing