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.

Are Corporations, Society or Writers Killing Literature?

This post is about three writers offering differing views as to why literature appears to be dying.

"The Big Five publishing houses are located within a few subway stops of each other in Manhattan; that rich island which represents 0.000887 percent of our country’s surface. This is not benign. Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?"

So says Matthew Neill Null, a prize-winning author and native of West Virginia.

The lengthy quote comes from an article published by "Literary Hub" wherein Null complains that publishers aren't interested in stories based on the lives of real people, especially if they are situated in rural communities.

If they were alive today, writers such as William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe might as well forget it.

Fiction and Non-fiction Indistinct in Some Cultures

Think about a two lane road. In the U.S., if there is a dotted line down the middle, cars coming in either direction can cross over the line to pass a slower vehicle, assuming the coast is clear.

Now think about the same road on more difficult terrain.  There are two lines in the middle, one solid and the other dotted. If the solid lane is on your side, you can't cross it. But if you are driving on the side with the dotted line, you can.