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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 12: Art, Money, Books October 12th, 2010 
The more expensive an art form, the more conservative it is. Of all live art forms, the most expensive is opera, the beached whale of the performing arts. Taking a creative risk in opera means Wagner on roller skates or “La Boheme” set in the Tokyo underworld — in other words, hanging ornamental parsley on the same old cuts of meat. Does that mean that artists — composers and librettists — aren’t trying right now to turn opera upside down? Of course, they are. It’s just highly unlikely they’ll ever get produced. Film, the most expensive of all art forms, is more conservative than opera. Once every 4-5 years, an accident occurs and a really different film (a) gets made, and (b) is a hit. And does the film industry say, “Aha, we need more really different films”? No, they say, “We need to imitate the film that made the money,” and they do until the imitations flop. In art, the equation is simple. Money equals stodge. The more bucks at risk, the fewer chances taken. One of the reasons the pop music industry has so often been creatively ahead of other popular art forms is that it’s comparatively cheap to make a recording. And now that the major labels (big-money institutions) are losing their stranglehold in favor of digital distribution, there’s a new universe for independent artists such as Arcade Fire or The Libertines (when Pete Doherty was with them) or James McMurtry or Bird and the Bee or Rilo Kiley or Mary Gautier or Tegan and Sara or, or, or. Historically, the artists whose work provides the earliest signals of changing perspectives and attitudes are painters. Pigments and canvas are relatively cheap, and a painting also costs little in terms of time; a painter can turn out dozens of canvases in the period required to write a novel. Which leads at last to the point I’m moving toward with such agonizing slowness. Up till now, it’s been expensive to produce and sell books. There are dozens of reasons for this: design, printing, and paper aren’t cheap; books are heavy and expensive to distribute; booksellers are allowed to return unsold books; and 95% of all books published lose money. Some of the money-losers turn out, years later, to have been more important than the big hits. So a high-priced best-seller subsidizes the publication of a lot of other books, some of which may be prove to be much better than the best-seller. But still, publishing is an expensive and therefore a relatively conservative enterprise. Publishers want books with undeniable sales potential. They want certain genres. They don’t, by and large, want experimental or revolutionary books. The costs of publishing make risk-taking potentially disastrous. Now, though, all that has been turned on its head. The skyrocketing expansion of the e-book market makes it possible for literally anyone to write and publish a book. Good, bad, awful, brilliant, hackneyed, inspired, pornographic, prudish, right-wing, radical, subliterate, or pushing the envelope of structure and language — anyone’s book can come into being and be offered to a global marketplace in exchange for an investment of time and a very few dollars. Is most of what’s put out there going to be great? No. Is most of it going to be junk? Sure, and I’ll probably write some of it. To me, right now, it means I can write the book I want to write, PULPED, even though my agent, in exquisitely polite euphemisms, has said that no publisher will buy it. The success of the Simeon Grist books in e-book form got me thinking about Simeon again, and also about discontinued series. What happens to series characters when the last unsold copy of the last book in the series is pulped and the contract is not renewed? It’s the publishing equivalent of death — no more new adventures, no more love affairs, no more getting injected with vodka by a Chinese gangster in a custard-yellow suit. Nothing, nada. But is it really? I mean, fictional characters have their own energy (ask any writer who’s been possessed by one). What actually becomes of them after they’re pulped? Is there some kind of fictional afterlife? Is there a literary heaven for good characters and a somewhat warmer destination for bad ones, or would that be unfair, since even the worst characters can claim that they’re not really bad — it’s just (to paraphrase Jessica Rabbit) that they were written that way. So do bad and good mingle there — wherever it is — the same way we do here? Are the afterlives segregated by genre? Is the thriller afterlife cheaper and seedier than the Literary Fiction afterlife? If there’s an afterworld for mystery and thriller characters, do tough, hard-drinking male private eyes hang out with the heroines of quilting cozies? Is there any way, up there, they can interact with what we so amusingly insist on calling “real life”? Are they aware in any way when someone “down here” opens one of the increasingly rare copies of their books? What happens when someone who’s reading, say, a Simeon Grist book, gets murdered? Really murdered, not stabbed with a noun or verbed through a 9th-story window. All this struck me as interesting and possibly even funny in places, but, I’m told, not enough people would want to read it for any major publisher to be interested. But I know of several thousand people who would want to read it, because they’re paying good money right now (although not much of it — such a deal) to buy the Simeons as e-books. HarperCollins or Minotaur might not be interested in “several thousand” readers, but I am. So, from a purely selfish viewpoint, this global revolution in publishing — something I think could change the world — means to me that I can write the book I want. It means that anybody can write the book they want. Write it, put it out there, hope people like it. If they do, great. If they don’t — well, the whole project hardly cost a thing. One global creative explosion, coming up.
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