[Link] Yes, People Do Buy Books

Despite viral claims, Americans buy over a billion books a year

By Lincolm Michel

This week fellow Substacker Elle Griffin published “No one buys books,” which looks at quotes and stats from the DOJ vs. PRH (Penguin Random House) trial where the government successfully blocked PRH’s $2.2 billion purchase of Simon & Schuster. Griffin’s article has gone viral for its near apocalyptic portrait of publishing. Much of the overall thrust of Griffin’s article is right: Most people don’t buy many books, sales for most books are lower than many think, and big publishing works on a blockbuster model where a few couple hits—plus perennial backlist sellers—comprise the bulk of sales. But I hope Griffin wouldn’t mind my offering a rebuttal of a few points here. As I think a few things are off.

I was alerted to the article by people rebutting it by sharing my 2022 article about the hard-to-believe claim that 50% of books only sell 12 copies. This claim, and similar ones, go viral pretty regularly despite making no sense. In the comments of my 2022 post, Kristen McLean from BookScan attempted to recreate the viral statistic and couldn’t come close even by restricting sales to frontlist print sales in a calendar year. It seems unclear what the 12 copies claim is referencing at all.

While I think Griffin does great work collecting these quotes, I would offer a word of caution. PRH’s legal strategy was to present publishing as an imperiled, dying industry beset on all sides by threats like Amazon. PRH allegedly even paid high fees to have agents and other industry professionals testify on their behalf. I’m not saying any of the quotes are lies. I’m saying the quotes and statistics are fitting a specific narrative in the context of a legal battle.

First though, let’s step back and look at the biggest question. Do people buy books?

Read the full article: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/yes-people-do-buy-books

This article is a response to this one from last Saturday: https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

[Link] GOOD WRITERS BORROW, GREAT WRITERS REMIX: WHY IT’S OK TO REUSE, REPURPOSE, AND RECYCLE FICTION

by Lincoln Michel

This morning I took my cup of coffee and laptop to a desk to work on an old short story I’ve been kicking around when I made the greatest mistake any writer can make: I opened Facebook.

Between posts on the current horrors of the Trump administration, my timeline was filled with discussions about Sadia Shepard’s debut short story “Foreign-Returned” in this week’s New Yorker, which the author Francine Prose had been attacking in a series of Facebook posts. Prose was offended by the fact that Shepard’s story used plot elements and even language from a story by the late Mavis Gallant: “the only major difference being that the main characters here are Pakistanis in Connecticut during the Trump era instead of Canadians in post-WW II Geneva,” Prose said, calling the story a “travesty.” Other authors pushed back, with Marlon James, for example, noting that he didn’t notice this “self-righteous venom being dished out […] when Jonathan Safran Foer took as much as he wanted from Jessica Soffer’s “Beginning, End.”

The short story I had opened, and then abandoned as I fell into the social media hole, is titled “A Feeling Artist.” It is an homage to Kafka that takes the plot of “A Hunger Artist,” but sets it in a version of the contemporary world where a “feeling artist” finds his popularity eclipsed by young cellphone app and YouTube artists who do rapid-fire feeling acts instead of his carefully crafted long-form sadness performances. I don’t know if this story will work or not, but I know that taking an element or two (or even three or four) from a work I love and reconfiguring them into something new is one of my most generative practices. So I immediately got sucked into the debate.

In the comments of Prose’s posts, other authors said they were contacting the New Yorker to complain and many suggested they’d never read something that was inspired by another piece or used similar structures or plots because they wanted to read “original” pieces with “imagination.” No matter how one feels about Shepard’s story, the ahistoricity of these comments, though predictable, was still surprising. We know, for example, that William Shakespeare’s plays frequently borrowed plots, characters, and even names from other plays. And we know that countless great works of art have been created by adapting Shakespeare’s plots to different settings (Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood) or reworking his characters in a new way (Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). And yet time and again I see authors act like homage, pastiche, and remixing is some kind of lesser form of creation. That it doesn’t count.

An art form is a conversation between artists. Literature is massive ballroom stretching through time in which authors debate, rebut, woo, and chat with each other. (A genre is perhaps a dialogue in one corner of the party.) They steal ideas to make them better. Or to make them different. Or to expose the problems in them. We know all this, and influences are regularly discussed in English lit classes. And yet, in the world of contemporary creative writing, people get upset when that dialogue is something we overhear.

Read the full article: http://lithub.com/good-writers-borrow-great-writers-remix/