. . . And By the Way, Will You Follow Me On Twitter?

Ellis Weiner posted something in the Shout & Murmurs section of the The New Yorker this morning that made me snicker like a child. It’s a nifty satirical piece on the decline of book marketing at major publishing houses — a theme I discussed the other day in a post about a new vampire novel being buzzed about online. What makes this funny is that it’s essentially true. More and more, authors are forced to do the job of marketing their own books. Don’t get me wrong, it was always a good idea for writers to help promote their own books, but nowadays with most of the marketing budgets going to writers like Dan Brown, authors are having to do more than making appearances and signing autographs — they now have to wear the hat of a marketing expert and do a lot of what marketing and publicity departments used to do. I’m not saying that there’s necessarily anything wrong with this. I think the rightness or wrongness of it is beside the point.

Point one is that many writers are ill-equipped to do this work. Point two is that technology, no matter how useful, cannot replace the support and confidence of having a real flesh and blood team of people out there working on a writer’s behalf — I don’t care how many people follow you on Twitter, if they are not buying your book, it doesn’t help you. Point three is that I’m wondering, as writers are forced to serve themselves more and more without the clear support of the publishing houses who contract with them, when does all publishing start to become some form of self-publishing? Now, I realize that by posing such a question, I risk fueling that old argument between self-publishers and those writers who have book deals (although that argument always sounds like an argument between a house slave and a field slave if you ask me). Because, let’s face it, traditional publishing houses still have status. Even if you’re a failed writer who’s one book was published by a major publisher and quickly consigned to the dust bin, you still have a credibility that self-publishers don’t and simple pride would preclude the former from admitting to the latter that traditional publishing houses aren’t the shiny cities on the hill they once were and that self-publishing may not be as bad a thing as it once was, that the lines between them are blurring, that traditional publishers may, in effect, be phasing themselves out of existence.