Eric Rosenfield's Master Feed RSS

Writer Eric Rosenfield's master feed of Wet Asphalt, his writer's blog and his twitter updates.

Eric's homepage is http://www.ericrosenfield.com

Jan
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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.

— More from the same Richard Nash interview

(Source: bostonreview.net)

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It has been a fascinating phenomenon in the discussion around publishing how adversarial people get around other people’s choices. So if someone says “I like an ebook,” a person will respond “Ohhh, I can’t believe—how can you do that?” It’s like that obnoxious person who you don’t want to go out to dinner with anymore because they can’t just order what they want, they have to comment on what you’re eating as well. What’s been epidemic in this discussion is that when both camps talk about their own preferences, they have to malign other people’s preferences too, and make grandiose extrapolations about the consequences of other people’s preferences for their own. If they like printed books, they should be buying the damn things instead of whining about other people’s preferred mode of reading. So I’m tremendously optimistic about the future of the book as an object. I think the worst years of the book as an object have been the last 50 years.

f you’ve got a manufacturing supply chain, then the dictates of manufacturing are going to be the ones that drive the business. And there’s certainly going to be some ad hoc occasional efforts not to do that: certain independent publishers will try to focus on quality, and certain individual books from other publishers might be tarted up for one reason or another, for marketing purposes. But those are the exceptions. Basically, when you’ve got an industry that is pushing out $25 billion worth of physical products into a supply chain, the vast majority of businesses are going to try to cut costs and increase revenues. And the simplest way to cut costs is going to be on the production side. So if the core of the business is no longer a supply chain, but rather the orchestration of writing and reading communities, the book is freed of its obligation to be the sole means for the broad mass dissemination of the word, and instead become a thing where the intrinsic qualities of the book itself can be explored.
— Richard Nash always interesting when talking about publishing

(Source: bostonreview.net)

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