The Backlist

I'm not sure I'd agreewith a whole lot that is in Ursula K. Le Guin's Harper's essay "Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading," but she does have this correct:

Over the years, books kept in print may earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for their publisher and author. A few steady earners, even though the annual earnings are in what is now dismissively called “the midlist,” can keep publishers in business for years, and even allow them to take a risk or two on new authors. If I were a publisher, I’d rather own J.R.R. Tolkien than J. K. Rowling.

But capitalists count weeks, not years. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance on a hot author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These millions—often a dead loss—come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to reliable midlist authors and the royalties on older books that kept selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch. Is that any way to run a business?

Comments

[Bob Garlitz]

Glad to see you're finally onto Marías. I
tried to interest you two years ago (or more) and you ignored the alert.

[Asp]

Ursuala le Guin would rather have Tolkien on the list than Rowling? Good thing she's *not* running a business.

I very much enjoyed Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which imagines a high-functioning anarchist society, but that book's perspective on human motivation and political organization is naive in the extreme. Though there's some counter-point-of-view hedging, the book seems sympathetically to portray the conceptualization of wealth accumulation as 'excrement.' The ideologically indoctrinated Odoists in that book manage to treat each other decently, but in real life they'd be at each other's throats w/ one group swiftly emerging as a ruling coterie.

[Asp]

Ursuala le Guin would rather have Tolkien on the list than Rowling? Good thing she's *not* running a business.

I very much enjoyed Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which imagines a high-functioning anarchist society, but that book's perspective on human motivation and political organization is naive in the extreme. Though there's some counter-point-of-view hedging, the book seems sympathetically to portray the conceptualization of wealth accumulation as 'excrement.' The ideologically indoctrinated Odoists in that book manage to treat each other decently, but in real life they'd be at each other's throats w/ one group swiftly emerging as a ruling coterie.