Diary of a Mad Editor

Macmillan chief, John Sargent has already demonstrated that he has no love of eBooks. But, according to statements made during a Q & A session at the Publishing Point in NYC in response to a query by blogger, Eric Hellman, Sargent is no fan of eBooks in libraries either:

"That is a very thorny problem", said Sargent. In the past, getting a book from libraries has had a tremendous amount of friction. You have to go to the library, maybe the book has been checked out and you have to come back another time. If it’s a popular book, maybe it gets lent ten times, there’s a lot of wear and tear, and the library will then put in a reorder. With ebooks, you sit on your couch in your living room and go to the library website, see if the library has it, maybe you check libraries in three other states. You get the book, read it, return it and get another, all without paying a thing. "It’s like Netflix, but you don’t pay for it. How is that a good model for us?"

"If there’s a model where the publisher gets a piece of the action every time the book is borrowed, that’s an interesting model."

Sargent’s comments are not surprising given his previous views on the subject of eBooks. (His hair looks a little thin in that picture, though. Can’t decide if its the haircut or maybe he needs to start taking vitamins for hair or something) Seriously, does Sargent even understand how libraries work? In order to borrow anything from a library, including eBooks, you must be a member of that library. You cannot access a library website 3 states away and borrow an eBook. I know at my local library, you not only need a library card, but a PIN number to access eBooks. I would imagine it’s like that at all libraries. Hellman, himself, points this out. I do think it’s quite clear at this point the Sargent is not really interested in new business models for publishing. His own words betray him.

As someone who’s often lamented that mainstream publishers seem more interested in investing their time and money in producing low-rent crap rather than quality literature, my curiosity was piqued earlier, reading Robert McCrum’s piece in The Guardian book section, "The best and worst times for publishing.

McCrumb refers to individuals such as myself as a "New Elitist" and points out, quite correctly, that lowbrow and highbrow culture has always coexisted. I don’t think anyone, including us new elitists, are really arguing that there was ever a time when this wasn’t so. What I (and those like me) are saying is that it’s become a factory-industry in which low-grade product such as the big multi-book celebrity book deals which seem to be announced daily by some industry hack are getting all of the juice while quality literature gets almost no play at all unless a previously unnoticed book catches on despite its handicaps.

What does it say about our culture when a talent like John Edgar Wideman publishes his latest short story collection through Lulu because he feels he’s being dissed by traditional publishers? We’re talking about a noted award-winning literary author. Yet, Hillary Can’t-Sing-Can’t-Act-Can’t-Write Duff can get a multi-book deal based on nothing but her manufactured celebrity.

Does it really make me an elitist to suggest that there’s a difference in how lowbrow and highbrow literature "coexisted" in the 1500s and how it coexists today? Now, I’m not going to say that what’s happening today is necessarily a bad thing for literature in the long run — I honestly don’t know what the long-term implications of current realities are, but I think it is a bad thing for traditional publishers —I’m fairly certain. If big publishing continues to pursue these kinds of book deals, how much longer can they sustain their sinking ship? How much longer before most of the Widemans are using companies like Lulu and Booksurge and Author Solutions to bring their works to market instead of dealing with corporate media types who continue to insult readers and real writers alike?

You think I’m kidding? Well, here’s one final thought: McCrumb argued in an earlier posting that the gatekeepers of traditional publishing are still necessary. The function of so-called gatekeepers is to maintain a certain level of quality in what is published. Okay, fair enough, but if they are publishing high-priced, low-quality garbage while driving away higher-quality, lower-priced writers one has to ask: Who’s watching the gate? Who are they really keeping out? What’s the value of what they are letting in? And, if they are not consistently nurturing, producing and publishing quality than what’s the value in having gatekeepers? Because you can’t have it both ways. You cannot argue that gatekeepers serve a necessary function then have it be okay for those gatekeepers to produce garbage. Because the assumption that traditional publishers are producing quality while “unmediated” sources are producing nothing but junk is not entirely accurate.

Call me crazy. Call me wrong. Call me an elitist. Just stick it in your flash drive for future reference and check that file five or ten years from now and see what’s what.

There’s this dude who keeps submitting poems to me. Every day, he emails one poem to me. Imagine finding a really bad new poem in your inbox every single day by the same bad poet. Imagine this is in addition to dozens of other submissions by other writers that also arrive every single day.

Wouldn’t you get really annoyed if you had to send the same person a fresh rejection notice every day if you were an editor of a literary magazine and you had thousands of submissions flowing to you every day, but part of your day was being wasted by a godsmack awful writer who doesn’t follow submission guidelines — a fellow whose submission practices border on harassment. My guidelines firmly state that I don’t want to see multiple submissions (in other words, I don’t want to see new material from the same writer until I’ve read and responded to old material). And I certainly don’t want to see a person whose written 365 new poems send them to me one at a time day-in, day-out.

They have submission services for writers — companies that will submit to magazines on a writer’s behalf so said writer doesn’t have to deal with the submission guidelines or have any direct contact with editors, etc. I wish there was a service like iDump4U.com that actually rejected writers on an editors behalf.

It’s not that I’m a pussy or anything. It’s just that I’m at a point in my life where dealing with certain kinds of writers . . . um . . . well . . . I’m just past it. It’s not like me and this poet are going to be picking outwedding napkins together anytime soon. No, what this guy is doing is akin to being water-boarded or some shit. It’s a tactic, you know. He thinks if he keeps sending me a poem every day, I’ll get so tired of rejecting him, I’ll just accept one of his shit poems to get rid of him.

No, I’ve already warned him. What does usually happen in cases like this is I’ll just reach a point where I’ll just stop reading his emails and block the fucker altogether. I don’t want to do that, but what has become so tiresome for me over the years is having to explain to dumb-ass, no-talent writers why I’ve rejected them and have them a) respond to me with a dear-in-the-headlights, "huh?" and continue to ignore my attempts to educate them, doing the same thing that annoyed me in the first place or b) respond with vitriolic, self-deluding comments because I dared to reject their work. It would be so much easier if I had a Bradley to contact these kinds of writers on my behalf and have him be the bad guy instead of being pushed into being that bad guy myself.