April 27, 2008
Essay
You’re an Author? Me Too!
By RACHEL DONADIO
New York Times
It’s well established that Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year — a state of affairs that has prompted much soul-searching by anyone with an affection for (or business interest in) turning pages. But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there’s a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.
In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”
In short, everyone has a story — and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it.
“As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self,” said Gabriel Zaid, a Mexican critic and the author of “So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,” a meditation on literary life in an over-booked world. Today, he added, “Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.”
At the Book Review, dozens of self-published books arrive each week — poetry collections, children’s books, memoirs, self-help manuals, sci-fi novels, religious titles. “The Chronicles of a Hip Hop Legend: Paths of Grand Wizardry” recently crossed the transom, as did a technical monograph on the death of Napoleon, complete with charts on possible arsenic poisoning; an illustrated religious guide, “Hell: For Those Dying to Get There”; and “Disney Your Way,” with suggested itineraries for navigating Walt Disney World. There are memoirs by Holocaust survivors and people fighting eating disorders, and novels like “September Sun,” in which, “enticed by the powerful aphrodisiac of sex, Michael learns to his chagrin that Murphy’s Law is always in play.”
And the numbers suggest the books will keep on coming. IUniverse, a self-publishing company founded in 1999, has grown 30 percent a year in recent years; it now produces 500 titles a month and has 36,000 titles in print, said Susan Driscoll, a vice president of its parent company, Author Solutions. While some are “calling card” books that specialists sell at conferences and workshops, most are by ordinary people who want to get their work in print. The writers tend to be on both ends of the age spectrum. “As people get older, they have more time and more money and something to say,” Driscoll said, while their grandchildren are often driven by “that need for fame,” she said. “They may not be avid readers, but they certainly are writers.” Not that anyone is necessarily paying attention. Driscoll said that most writers using iUniverse sell fewer than 200 books.
Other self-publishing outfits report similar growth. Xlibris, a print-on-demand operation, has 20,000 titles in print, by more than 18,000 authors, said Noel Flowers, a company spokesman. It is “nonselective” in choosing manuscripts, he said, though it does screen “for any offensive or inappropriate content.” Xlibris’s top sellers include “Demonstrating to Win!,” a computer manual (15,600 sold, not including copies bought by the author), and “The Morning Comes and Also the Night,” which the company lists in the “religion/Bible/prophecies” category (10,500 sold).
For the most part, big booksellers shy away from carrying self-published books. But they’re still looking to jump into the game. IUniverse has a “strategic alliance” with Barnes & Noble, which sometimes considers stocking self-published titles for some local branches, Driscoll said. Amazon.com owns BookSurge, a print-on-demand operation that produces and distributes books for as little as $3.50 per copy. Borders recently started a self-publishing program with the print-on-demand company Lulu. Would-be authors can pay $299 for formatting, printing and an ISBN code, or for the $499 “premium package,” an editor will address structure, plot and documentation, along with basics like grammar, punctuation and spelling.
The Borders site says self-published authors can even arrange readings in local Borders stores, but the kinks still need to be worked out. “It is not possible to purchase a place on shelves or an author event today,” a spokeswoman for Borders said.
Borders lists its self-publishing program under the rubric “Borders Lifestyles,” as if writing were a hobby, like golf, rather than a calling or a craft. But for those seeking formal training, there are hundreds of creative writing programs offering M.F.A.’s and other credentialing. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs represented 13 programs when it was founded in 1967. Now it includes 465 full-fledged courses of study, and creative writing classes are offered at most of the 2,400 college English departments in North America.
Since the ’60s, creative writing programs have helped “democratize” the talent pool, providing “the encouragement to women and a lot of different people of different classes and ethnicities to tell their stories and write their poems,” said David Fenza, the organization’s executive director. He disagrees with those who think an oversupply of books is pushing readers away. “Some have argued that all this new literary activity is displacing the Great Works and therefore estranging the great audience for literature,” Fenza said. “Writing programs have their faults, but they still work as advocates for the mind that reads.”
Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of a forthcoming book on the impact of creative writing programs on postwar American literature, agrees that writing programs have helped expand the literary universe. “American literature has never been deeper and stronger and more various than it is now,” McGurl said in an e-mail message. Still, he added, “one could put that more pessimistically: given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.”
Self-publishing companies may produce books for less than $5, but how much does all this production cost readers? In “So Many Books,” Zaid playfully writes that “if a mass-market paperback costs $10 and takes two hours to read, for a minimum-wage earner the time spent is worth as much as the book.” But for someone earning around $50 to $500 an hour, “the cost of buying and reading the book is $100 to $1,000” — not including the time it takes to find out about the book and track it down.
On the whole, Zaid is unworried about the proliferation of books, though he doesn’t think everyone should set pen to paper. “About would-be writers, André Gide used to say: ‘Découragez! Découragez!’”(discourage!), Zaid said in an e-mail message. “The implication was that real writers would not be discouraged, and the rest would save a lot of time. Of course, some mediocrities are never discouraged, and some potential real writers would be lost. But there is so much talent around that we can afford it.”
Indeed. There’s a lot of noise out there, and some of it is music.
Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.
