Tell me all of the small presses that I neglected to put on my (far from complete) list! For my list I stuck to American presses because I am criticizing American (Conglomerate) Publishing- from what I can tell the publishing ecosystems outside the US are much healthier (a good mix of big and small and far less conglomeration)
I discovered a lot of great indie presses by browsing the list of publishers distributed by Asterism! As for the Canadian market, it’s dominated by the Big 5 but I’d say CanLit as an active nation-building project provides a little buffer (no coincidence that so many small Canadian presses were established in the late 60s-70s thanks to funding trends/cultural interest in Canadian identity). So small presses today are not only responding to conglomerate publishing as Sinykin describes, but CanLit as well. I also see little integration between the English and French language ecosystems and suspect the French scene is healthier, in part because of Québécois independence. This list is not comprehensive and is English-focused but it’s a good starting place: https://festivalofauthors.ca/small-press-interactive-map/. (SO to Véhicule as an interesting QC press that kind of straddles the language barrier.)
I've been thinking and talking with others about the supposed necessity of publishers (grounded in my experience as a former publisher of a small, risk-oriented press). Increasingly it seems to me artists will be better served by trusting their instincts and publishing their own work going forward. Rather than ask for permission, the internet and the advancement of production processes allows artists to ask for support. Crowdfunding, handmade titles, Patreon, or hell, putting a project on credit... All allow the artist to control as much of the status, quality, and presentation of the art object as possible.
The small publishers doing good work are wonderful, but the notion of "house style", or the belief that a label can accurately indicate the quality of its offerings, seems to have been pretty cooked by the serialized and a la carte nature of algorithms. In other words, it's harder to get folks to trust that a group has done and will keep doing good work—a skepticism that is both heartening (because it promotes assessing things individually and resisting groupthink) and scary (because it distrusts the socially-essential fact that groups of people are capable of good work as such, thereby further atomizing us).
I think artists should more often take and use the means of production and communication. The importance of the publisher will ideally lessen with time. Hopefully more syndicalist, union-esque artists' collectives will pop up—pledging and practicing mutual support and aesthetic diversity. We'll see.
One of the best essays I've read on this site: Kudos. The Big Five conglomerate and all that Bertelsmann owns fit your overview here that, to be trite, hits the nail on the head.
A couple thoughts to add: Edmund Jabès: "If there is no risk, there is no writing."
On David Shields _Reality Hunger_: When I read it (later taught it in a creative writing class), I was driven to write this, as a review I posted:
"This book is breakthrough prose of the highest order. If you write (or if you read!) and haven't bought Reality Hunger, do! It's brilliant—the best work I've read on the writing process, on the nature of invention, on art and on the torturous permissions process that any writer who simply chooses to acknowledge and quote her influences—the writers who have been part and parcel of her thinking—that I have read in a lifetime of reading."
And here is his generous reply:
"Thank you for your post, which captures the book for me better than a hundred reviews. Yours, David"
What do we do when creativity is somehow downsized to the kind of blurb you outline here with such skill?
Good grief, what a penetrating article. Kudos on the ambition here, there were at least five passages where I wanted to stop reading, repost the paragraph, and riff. What's staying with me most is the applicability of the "popstar" term to the literary landscape--you're right, that's absolutely what's being cultivated.
There's something so cultishly secretive about the industry (your couple references to BookScan are giving me flashbacks to writing articles and trying to get those numbers from people: they seem mortified if you even ask); the deeper I got into this piece, the more I started to think that the reason they don't want anyone looking behind the curtain is because they themselves aren't proud of what's back there.
This piece alone made me excited for TMR's print edition. If this had been in The New Yorker I'd have been underlining something in every paragraph.
57 Channels (And Nothin' On) became 1,000s of channels and still nothin' on. And so it is with movies, and now also literature. It's TikTok all over... How do we recover spaces where we can actually tell each other something genuine and worthwhile. Sick of shows about nothing!
BTW: Thanks for an excellent essay! Maybe not uplifting, but at least clarifying. Meanwhile, there is always Cervantes, Shelley, Stendhal, Tolstoy and the other classics...
Having known Bello: I can say her major crime was simply being too early to the AI workflow. The simple extension of what I call “thesaurus brain”, whereby each word is mistaken for interchangeable with an alternative and another writer’s syntax can be copied and rearranged, is perfected in LLM’s “plausible tranches of human speech”. These are simulacra eventually, for no original exists in the cut up process. What was such a huge scandal with Bello has become completely banal today.
I think the book world needs a new, non-internet distribution mechanism run by some people with a different sensibility
People-who-run bookstores are very much of a type. Something else is needed to reach a different group of end users. When the end users are not all white collar coasters with email jobs, retirees and the university crowd, there will be different sources of demand again
the end of the funnel is much too narrow and it’s in too few places and even in the places where it is, most people don’t want to go there
While I generally agree with the criticisms of algorithms and Big 5 Publishing in this piece, I have to disagree a bit with the ideas around serialization being distinct from literature. Henry James and Charles Dickens both serialized many of their novels, and they're certainly in the category of "literature." Balzac, too. Interestingly, James didn't like serialization for many of the reasons mentioned here, but perhaps it was to his benefit. His revised editions that he created near the end of his life are usually considered worse versions of already published novels.
Interesting—maybe I misread (it is late in the day) but I took the idea of serialization here to mean the sort of “episodic” nature of the books being published, as each time a book comes from a big 5, it’s just the next chapter in their highly homogenized paths to profit and not to do with actual “serialized” works of literature that exist (that you’ve referenced). Either way, really a lot of stuff to unpack here. Difficult, too, to confront the idea of dealing with a future subset of readers who might think they are experiencing literature when in fact it might not be, re: algorithmically created ghost books—such a grey area of course, probably more philosophical than anything, makes my brain hurt even thinking about it.
Yes, you’re right, but I’m pointing out that the concept of “serialization” is not necessarily an indicator of a lack of depth or quality. My larger point is that there is no time in the past where “literature” was free from the demands of business or profit. It’s always tangled up, and artists have to work within that to create art. Even the idea of “ghost books” is more complicated than it appears—what about The Odyssey and The Iliad, which had no true authors, but were reinterpreted by each singer who performed them? The idea of the single, genius author, which is being hinted at here, is a historical idea with a beginning and it will have an end, too. Again, I agree with the general tenor of this piece, but I think we can be more precise about what the issues are, and if we want to argue for artistic quality now, in the present, we have to be careful about imagining the past as some pure time where artists were free to create unimpeded by the demands of the market.
Makes sense! So maybe this period of hyper serialization is the end of an era? There’s no need to be worried that we stand to lose down deep literary fiction, whatever one wants to call it, as the list of publishing houses at the end of the article suggests, but I guess what might be at risk of being lost is a wider, historical understanding of literature. I wonder if the examples you’ve cited were far less algorithmic by nature—probably more humans and probably less data involved—compared to the examples in this piece, like the case of romance novels or Netflix/Spotify, where the market fixates on certain traits, creating a race to capitalize on them. The sheer number of books published today alone, compared to any other time in history, must widen the gap between what sells and what meets the muster of artistic quality. All to say, I agree that this problem of the market has always existed, and it’s up to writers and readers to exist in and around it, there’s no romanticizing that in my mind. I guess whether or not it’s a bigger problem now or the same as it’s always been is what remains to be seen.
Thanks so much for engaging with "The New Seriality"! Reading it together with Dan Sinykin's book is really fruitful, I think. Your further analysis helps illuminate what's going on not only in literature but in cultural spheres more generally. Thanks!
The best illustrations here on Substack are Magritte paintings. They are sort of surreal but not like melting clocks. More conceptual. Any Magritte can illustrate almost anything. Anyway, I’m definitely not bored by anything on Substack so I don’t know what The Metropolitan in on about.
Tell me all of the small presses that I neglected to put on my (far from complete) list! For my list I stuck to American presses because I am criticizing American (Conglomerate) Publishing- from what I can tell the publishing ecosystems outside the US are much healthier (a good mix of big and small and far less conglomeration)
Apocalypse Party
Feral Dove
Amphetamine Sulphate
Kiddiepunk
Cowboy Jamboree
Expat Press
Rebel Satori
Infinity Land Press
:)
I discovered a lot of great indie presses by browsing the list of publishers distributed by Asterism! As for the Canadian market, it’s dominated by the Big 5 but I’d say CanLit as an active nation-building project provides a little buffer (no coincidence that so many small Canadian presses were established in the late 60s-70s thanks to funding trends/cultural interest in Canadian identity). So small presses today are not only responding to conglomerate publishing as Sinykin describes, but CanLit as well. I also see little integration between the English and French language ecosystems and suspect the French scene is healthier, in part because of Québécois independence. This list is not comprehensive and is English-focused but it’s a good starting place: https://festivalofauthors.ca/small-press-interactive-map/. (SO to Véhicule as an interesting QC press that kind of straddles the language barrier.)
Fantastic analysis. Thank you.
I've been thinking and talking with others about the supposed necessity of publishers (grounded in my experience as a former publisher of a small, risk-oriented press). Increasingly it seems to me artists will be better served by trusting their instincts and publishing their own work going forward. Rather than ask for permission, the internet and the advancement of production processes allows artists to ask for support. Crowdfunding, handmade titles, Patreon, or hell, putting a project on credit... All allow the artist to control as much of the status, quality, and presentation of the art object as possible.
The small publishers doing good work are wonderful, but the notion of "house style", or the belief that a label can accurately indicate the quality of its offerings, seems to have been pretty cooked by the serialized and a la carte nature of algorithms. In other words, it's harder to get folks to trust that a group has done and will keep doing good work—a skepticism that is both heartening (because it promotes assessing things individually and resisting groupthink) and scary (because it distrusts the socially-essential fact that groups of people are capable of good work as such, thereby further atomizing us).
I think artists should more often take and use the means of production and communication. The importance of the publisher will ideally lessen with time. Hopefully more syndicalist, union-esque artists' collectives will pop up—pledging and practicing mutual support and aesthetic diversity. We'll see.
One of the best essays I've read on this site: Kudos. The Big Five conglomerate and all that Bertelsmann owns fit your overview here that, to be trite, hits the nail on the head.
A couple thoughts to add: Edmund Jabès: "If there is no risk, there is no writing."
On David Shields _Reality Hunger_: When I read it (later taught it in a creative writing class), I was driven to write this, as a review I posted:
"This book is breakthrough prose of the highest order. If you write (or if you read!) and haven't bought Reality Hunger, do! It's brilliant—the best work I've read on the writing process, on the nature of invention, on art and on the torturous permissions process that any writer who simply chooses to acknowledge and quote her influences—the writers who have been part and parcel of her thinking—that I have read in a lifetime of reading."
And here is his generous reply:
"Thank you for your post, which captures the book for me better than a hundred reviews. Yours, David"
What do we do when creativity is somehow downsized to the kind of blurb you outline here with such skill?
xx
I am now a Mesha Maren quoting person.
Good grief, what a penetrating article. Kudos on the ambition here, there were at least five passages where I wanted to stop reading, repost the paragraph, and riff. What's staying with me most is the applicability of the "popstar" term to the literary landscape--you're right, that's absolutely what's being cultivated.
There's something so cultishly secretive about the industry (your couple references to BookScan are giving me flashbacks to writing articles and trying to get those numbers from people: they seem mortified if you even ask); the deeper I got into this piece, the more I started to think that the reason they don't want anyone looking behind the curtain is because they themselves aren't proud of what's back there.
This piece alone made me excited for TMR's print edition. If this had been in The New Yorker I'd have been underlining something in every paragraph.
Thank you!
57 Channels (And Nothin' On) became 1,000s of channels and still nothin' on. And so it is with movies, and now also literature. It's TikTok all over... How do we recover spaces where we can actually tell each other something genuine and worthwhile. Sick of shows about nothing!
BTW: Thanks for an excellent essay! Maybe not uplifting, but at least clarifying. Meanwhile, there is always Cervantes, Shelley, Stendhal, Tolstoy and the other classics...
Thank you for listing alternatives to the Big Five.
Yowza! Thank you for this, so good. Standing ovation. Love.
This is really great, Mesha, and affecting.
Thank you!
Having known Bello: I can say her major crime was simply being too early to the AI workflow. The simple extension of what I call “thesaurus brain”, whereby each word is mistaken for interchangeable with an alternative and another writer’s syntax can be copied and rearranged, is perfected in LLM’s “plausible tranches of human speech”. These are simulacra eventually, for no original exists in the cut up process. What was such a huge scandal with Bello has become completely banal today.
I think the book world needs a new, non-internet distribution mechanism run by some people with a different sensibility
People-who-run bookstores are very much of a type. Something else is needed to reach a different group of end users. When the end users are not all white collar coasters with email jobs, retirees and the university crowd, there will be different sources of demand again
the end of the funnel is much too narrow and it’s in too few places and even in the places where it is, most people don’t want to go there
While I generally agree with the criticisms of algorithms and Big 5 Publishing in this piece, I have to disagree a bit with the ideas around serialization being distinct from literature. Henry James and Charles Dickens both serialized many of their novels, and they're certainly in the category of "literature." Balzac, too. Interestingly, James didn't like serialization for many of the reasons mentioned here, but perhaps it was to his benefit. His revised editions that he created near the end of his life are usually considered worse versions of already published novels.
Interesting—maybe I misread (it is late in the day) but I took the idea of serialization here to mean the sort of “episodic” nature of the books being published, as each time a book comes from a big 5, it’s just the next chapter in their highly homogenized paths to profit and not to do with actual “serialized” works of literature that exist (that you’ve referenced). Either way, really a lot of stuff to unpack here. Difficult, too, to confront the idea of dealing with a future subset of readers who might think they are experiencing literature when in fact it might not be, re: algorithmically created ghost books—such a grey area of course, probably more philosophical than anything, makes my brain hurt even thinking about it.
Yes, you’re right, but I’m pointing out that the concept of “serialization” is not necessarily an indicator of a lack of depth or quality. My larger point is that there is no time in the past where “literature” was free from the demands of business or profit. It’s always tangled up, and artists have to work within that to create art. Even the idea of “ghost books” is more complicated than it appears—what about The Odyssey and The Iliad, which had no true authors, but were reinterpreted by each singer who performed them? The idea of the single, genius author, which is being hinted at here, is a historical idea with a beginning and it will have an end, too. Again, I agree with the general tenor of this piece, but I think we can be more precise about what the issues are, and if we want to argue for artistic quality now, in the present, we have to be careful about imagining the past as some pure time where artists were free to create unimpeded by the demands of the market.
Makes sense! So maybe this period of hyper serialization is the end of an era? There’s no need to be worried that we stand to lose down deep literary fiction, whatever one wants to call it, as the list of publishing houses at the end of the article suggests, but I guess what might be at risk of being lost is a wider, historical understanding of literature. I wonder if the examples you’ve cited were far less algorithmic by nature—probably more humans and probably less data involved—compared to the examples in this piece, like the case of romance novels or Netflix/Spotify, where the market fixates on certain traits, creating a race to capitalize on them. The sheer number of books published today alone, compared to any other time in history, must widen the gap between what sells and what meets the muster of artistic quality. All to say, I agree that this problem of the market has always existed, and it’s up to writers and readers to exist in and around it, there’s no romanticizing that in my mind. I guess whether or not it’s a bigger problem now or the same as it’s always been is what remains to be seen.
Thanks so much for engaging with "The New Seriality"! Reading it together with Dan Sinykin's book is really fruitful, I think. Your further analysis helps illuminate what's going on not only in literature but in cultural spheres more generally. Thanks!
The best illustrations here on Substack are Magritte paintings. They are sort of surreal but not like melting clocks. More conceptual. Any Magritte can illustrate almost anything. Anyway, I’m definitely not bored by anything on Substack so I don’t know what The Metropolitan in on about.