Eric Rosenfield's Master Feed

RN: As soon as you say, “In the world there are writers and there are readers,” what else is there? There’s a whole bunch of things that start becoming clear, one of which is that the writer and reader is in fact the same fucking person. When we start to think that through, we realize, “Ah, look at the slush pile.” I look at the names and subjects of the cover letters, and I realize these people are the best customers.

We hear all the complaining that goes on in the world of poetry: “The only people who buy poetry are the poets.” Well no one complains about the fact that the only people who buy wool are knitters and the only people who buy oil paints are oil painters. And you know effectively because the Industrial Revolution method of reproducing media required volume and scale, there was a certain real critical aspect to it which is that you have as few writers as possible and as many readers as possible. The most profitable publisher is one who can print one book and have everybody read it. And so you kind of want to get as close to that as possible—of course recognizing that you can’t in fact get there, because you can actually lead horses to water but you can’t make them drink. Now the reality was that horses like to drink. So if you kept the number of pools relatively small, horses are going to have to go to the pools and drink, so people are going to read your books—as long as there aren’t too many of them.