Perverse fascination, or it didn't used to be this way

I just spent the last several hours going through 24 book marketing sites to see if any of them might be useful to me, guided by the Author Marketing Club that ran the webinar on Saturday. I can't believe how much the literary world has changed in the last half century, since I was a budding writer and grad student at the Univ of Oregon. At that time: I had never met anyone who had written about vampires or zombies; I had never met a screenwriter or knew anyone who wanted to be a screenwriter, though I knew some filmmakers; never had a conversation with anyone, fellow MFA student or faculty, that mentioned the word "marketing" with respect to sales. All the talk was of getting an agent and getting a short story in the New Yorker or the New American Review.

I began publishing while still a student, in Prism International, The Literary Review and other places (one of my teachers admitted he'd been trying to get in there for years!). Never was there talk of MAKING MONEY. It was assumed our writing would NOT make money, as a matter of fact, because we were realists and knew the market for literature was small ... and we didn't want to become hacks, which is how we literary elitists thought of pop novel writers, TV writers, even screenwriters. The writers who sold out.

Now here's the thing: this attitude was not only respectable, it was mainstream in the universities! It was assumed we would all end up writing good and maybe even great literary novels and teach to make a living. Marketing? Give me a break. Might as well sell encyclopedias door to door. Writers were like priests: we had a calling. To discover small truths about the human condition and communicate them in stories. A noble calling! Publishers made their reputations, if not their rent, on this kind of writer.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, how times change. It would appear that literature today, if it can be called that, is really about marketing. Readers, who used to be searchers, partners with serious writers in the quest to learn who we were, now have been reduced to consumers.

And here's the great irony today. What serious writing is going on -- and it's always going on and even is very visible in foreign countries still, if less so here -- it's no doubt being put online in obscure places by serious writers with infinitesimal readerships. The "self publishing" that the major publishers are crying about now, being indie ebooks now make up 20% of the market, and with some justification given all the crap out there, it's unbelievable how much bad writing is available to, ahem, consumers, this same self publishing is what may rescue literature if anything does because now writers can easily "do it" themselves, "do it" meaning making their work accessible.

I've said this many times before but what the literary world needs as much as anything today is a bright, serious, ambitious critic with a solid education in literary history, who would go find all the great stuff hiding in cyberspace and collect in some kind of online journal, a champion of literature who will show that great writing still exists, it's just not as easy to find as it once was. Because not every student in America, certainly not every one of them, wants to write about zombies and vampires and get rich doing it.

Or maybe I'm more delusional than ever.