Why Writers Hesitate to Criticize Publishers

The publishing industry is obsessed with money and celebrity yet writers hesitate to criticize it because in the current environment, their prospects of earning a living are so poor.

That's the view of Jessa Crispin, who I also wrote about in my previous post.  Crispin has been in the news during the past year because she shut down her pioneering literary blog "Bookslut" after 14 years.



"Everything is so precarious, and none of us can get the work or attention or the time that we need, and so we all have to be in job-interview mode all the time, just in case someone wants to hire us," Crispin told The Guardian in an interview. "So we are not allowed to say, 'the Paris Review is boring as fuck!' Because what if the Paris Review is just about to call us?"

In a similar vein, Crispin said The New Yorker has become the sort of magazine one expects to find in a dentist's office, an assessment with which I agree. After taking the magazine for years, and reading a lot of its fiction, I canceled my subscription last year and was rewarded with a letter claiming my account was "delinquent" and that I needed to resolve my "debt." This even though the magazine quite properly ceased sending me any new issues when my subscription ran out.

"Crispin’s general assessment of the current literary situation is fairly widely shared in, of all places, New York. It is simply rarely voiced online. Writers, in an age where an errant tweet can set off an avalanche of op-eds more widely read than the writers’ actual books, are cautious folk," The Guardian article said.

“As things get kind of more chaotic for publications,” Crispin said, “they get narrower and narrower and more elite and nepotistic.”