Trouserpress

You may have heard me harping and/or carping on about this topic before. Tune out now.

I have proposed (see previous posts and innumerable pub conversations) that publishers and writers’ agents are perhaps motivated by bottom lines rather than neat lines, by profits not profundity, by talents and shekels rather than just plain literary talent; by monetary value rather than literary value and are anyway often unable to tell a best seller when it bites them on the nuts.

And in my discourse I have been quick to deny that I am personally influenced in my conclusions by the reluctance of the same publishers and agents to handle my novel Weed. Oh no, not a bit of it.

Well, now vindication, because even the Guardian, that bastion of the literary establishment has noticed. The article is called How fiction lost the plot — silly title since it is the market makers that have lost the plot, not the people who make the fiction, but why let accuracy stand in the way of an eye catching headline? The article has a similar thesis to mine, but the writer Mark Lawson has done some actual research to back up his claims. You can read it here, if you are still with me.

In my own posts I have described this bread head trend as a relatively recent phenomenon and I think I said that the success of JK Rowling (all the best to Ms Rowling, by the way) really entrenched the modern publishing culture. Perhaps it has. However, having a good read of Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday while passing through Coincidence City a few days ago, I came across the following observation: “… now accountants and business school graduates dominate book publishing. They feel that money spent on a first novel is good money down a rat hole.” You can find the passage on p2 in my edition. In the chapter called Self-Interview he expands upon this theme in a more satisfying manner and at greater length than I can quote here. The rat hole remark was apparently written in 1980 or thereabouts and Self-Interview was published in 1977, so I don’t know where I got the idea this a new phenomenon. Vonnegut himself claims it was the rise of TV after WWII that killed the market for the printed story. TV has a lot to answer for.

Well, that’s me done on this topic. Honest. No more.

Time to get on with some bloody writing.