David Wheeler is the author of Contingency Plans and a fair number of essays around the internet. He’s been selling books for the last few years, currently at the Elliott Bay Book Co in Seattle. He works on the events team to introduce authors and sells books during any number of the 500 readings we put on throughout the year, in addition to his work on the floor in customer service. Mediation writer Thomas Turner chatted with David to discuss his perspective on the current changes in publishing as a both a bookseller and author.
In the past couple years, I’d say digital publishing has altered people’s expectations about how literature is made available to them. We’re only just realizing the accessibility e-Readers give us, and they’ve made some pretty big waves with publishers who have found that e-books’ low cost to customers might be undermining the hardback, even the paperback. Still, booksellers and publishers have done our best to hop on board with this new medium. You’ll find QR codes all over my bookstore for popular titles, as well as downloadable e-books on our website from Google books.
It’s hard to say it’s one reason over another. Money is certainly an issue. Look at someone like Steve Almond, a writer whose practice and presence I deeply respect. He’s a full force in the self-publishing and e-book world now, after what he refers to as a “checkered” history in traditional publishing, which isn’t to say he doesn’t have ties to big houses—Random House, specifically. He self-publishes and self-promotes and works himself to the bone as the sole breadwinner for his family of four. The bygone days of the ’90s are over, when a stellar but underpaid poet like Roberto Bolaño could just switch to writing fiction and support his kids. No, the system’s due for an overhaul, and maybe the e-book is just the thing. Whole albums on iTunes for $9.99, Amazon’s price gouging, and the disparity in e-book prices make it hard to convince people a traditional hardback is worth the $25-$30. Lots of us don’t have that kind of money; Steve Almond filled out 39 1099 forms for 2010 to make ends meet. But I think these low-low prices we’re getting used to with digital publishing undermines the quality of the work. Almond’s writing is worth way more than the $10 he’s selling it for. Maybe an inexperienced writer publishing because he doesn’t want to spend the time and energy it takes to run the traditional route–maybe that book’s only worth $10, probably less. Keep in mind that Bolaño and Almond both had notable names and works under their belts before they shifted gears for what they’ve been able to work into a semblance of financial stability.
I think we also need to remember that a book (digital or not) might be peanuts to actually print and distribute, but it’s often years of labor for the author. You get maybe a few days to a few weeks of enjoyment from a book—maybe a lifetime—break that down to an hourly wage, and for the sake of argument imagine it all goes to the author, and at $30 it’s still slave’s wages.
I guess I got sidetracked before with self-publishing, but the fact remains that many self-published often choose digital media because it’s the least upfront cost for them. That said, much work that’s available digitally is also available in print. Most notable, probably, is Amanda Hocking, but she’s worked hard to self-promote. You can’t write a book, upload it to e-book, and just expect the crowds to flock. Social networking is one good route—Facebook and Twitter—but I think all authors will agree that contributing to web magazines, literary journals, newspapers, even the church newsletter (for crying out loud!) is going to be better than a bunch of SPAM to people who don’t give a whit about who you are or what you have to say. I don’t have an e-Reader, so I can’t speak to who’s better than who.
I think it provides readers and writers a wealth of opportunities if there ever comes a hard shift toward digital. So far, it’s been pretty tepid when you consider how few people are actually exclusively e-readers. In my undergrad, I spent some time exploring the idea of hypertext—like what you get with Wikipedia and other sites that allow you to click on actual portions of the text to take you somewhere else—hyperfiction specifically, as some examples were cropping up on the Internet. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is already a text-based form of hyperfiction, but I think more work like his would translate even better to e-Readers. Already, we’re using YouTube to view book trailers (1Q84 anyone?). Books have soundtracks now, too. I think if we can wrestle the medium into an off-shoot instead of a substitute for the book, the good literature, and quality, will follow.
It’s hard to say; I haven’t ever read anything on a tablet. But I can pretty well say that graphic novels won’t be anything I’d be interested in reading digitally. The art is arguably more important than the text. A lot of it is hand-drawn still, too, so it seems counter-intuitive to me to enjoy that form from a computer screen at all.
If the line breaks are correct, it’s fine. It’s sort of like how things translated to the pages of my book as opposed to the pages of my word processor. My poem “Slaughter Season” has these long couplets that stretched all across the page on my computer, so when it came time to print for my book, the lines break in a way that the couplet sense is lost, but I knew that going into it, too. Poetry is about the only text-based literature I’ve heard that doesn’t translate well to e-Readers.
Kind of like what I was saying before about hyperfiction. I think people are going to realize the tremendous expanse of opportunity they’re given when the computer is their medium for telling a story, as opposed to the page. I suspect in the long run we’ll start seeing more multimedia experiences with literature; in the next year or two, I hope to hear of more people testing those boundaries, or at least a tablet being capable of supporting that type of literature.