We write for the love of the game. Although I wouldn’t mind impressing my ex-girlfriends.

Enterprising editors could decenter literary publishing away from New York and into intellectual, creative, and regional communities through non-profit publishing ventures. This could have several advantages:
(1) lower overhead; rent is cheaper in Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha . . .
(2) diversification of the dominant aesthetic, which has become distorted by unsustainable business models and meaningless measures of “success” (i.e., bookscan)
(3) creation of sustainable creative communities of readers and writers while also pushing forward creative and intellectual debates (a market-driven model, by definition, is impotent on this count)

There are some excellent examples of presses already doing this, and while it isn’t easy, those beacons are rich sources of new and surprising literature. Perhaps through developing these new communities (there’s no such thing as a “general” audience anymore, anyway), we can also find new ways to pay authors more directly. If the costs of production can go down through smaller scale production and new distribution channels, then perhaps we can afford to pay our authors a suitable price for their work.

It’s senseless anymore to depend on out-of-touch behemoths to support literary work. Large publishers no longer dominate the channels of distribution or marketing. Their once-strong advantage in production and inventory has also diminished. So why should they dominate literary taste?

We sell our books direct to our readers. We freelance articles on mundane topics. We freelance copy for local businesses. We scrape by. We make as much as we would if we worked at the dreaded “real job”. But we’re doing what we love.

This model works especially well for regional literature about places people love. I see authors self-publishing books about Sanibel Island with success…some people love Sanibel Island, they want to read about it when they’re on vacation here, they want to read about it between their vacations here. Local authors are writing fiction, setting it on Sanibel, and selling books as a result. Even you, I love your writing, but I almost surely never would have heard your name if you hadn’t written a book about Cape Cod — that’s what I was looking for when I bought Wild Rank Place. I assume it would also work well for books on narrowly defined topics…topics with built in audiences. Even when we do it ourselves, it’s still about marketability and sales…we become the beancounters. We rule.

The publishing industry is an industry, a multicultural agglomerate of business and cultural practices determined to make a profit. The Big Six Sisters do surprisingly well at what they do best, provide a mass appeal product at as low a cost as fractions of percentage points profits allow. That’s the big box commercial paradigm. Large volume, low cost, low per unit profit, economy of scale. High-concept content has wider commercial appeal than low-concept content. High-concept is more widely audience accessible from being superficial.

Aristotle bemoaned the rise of high-concept spectacle’s appeal to the masses, wondered about the future of dramatic poetry in a mob-driven entertainment marketplace. Oral poetry replaced orational debate arts–the Attic Orators–in cultural preeminence before Aristotle’s time. In his time dramatic poetry was ascendent, supplanting epic and lyric poetry. Stage play narratives based on planned, written scripts soon ascended into preeminence and dominated for a millenia before moveable type placed written narratives within reach of everyday masses. The novel became ascendent, not really achieving preeminence over stage plays until the introduction of trade and mass market paperbacks in the early Twentieth century, right before being superceded by screenplays. All to brief a time by any standard. Meanwhile, folklore traditions have been holding their own on every front since the dawn of language.

Poetry all but vanished except in insular cultural circles. Technology is reinvigorating poetry as a commercially viable culture. More and more poetry Web sites are popping up, publishing poetry, discussing poetry, promoting poetry. Sad but true, poetry reading is an acquired skill, one that’s all but forgotten, but on the rebound due to the Internet. If the way of literary literature is the way of poetry, so be it. It’s not as dark as all that. There’s emerging outlets that will preserve and reinvigorate the ways of the poet.

Also sad but true, reading in general is an acquired skill that requires self-commitment to move beyond simple literacy. Most readers won’t acquire advanced reading abilities until late in college, if ever. The sort of reading skills needed to reasonablly appreciate literary literature are not commonly developed in a population, maybe about a couple hundred thousand readers out of three hundred million people, maybe at least one percent. The norm is seventh grade reading ability. Government laws for medicine packaging, roadway signs, and general safety content require fourth grade reading level ability.

It’s all part of a greater machine known as culture, as much a technological progress trap as humanity’s mastering fire. Fire users enjoyed a higher standard of living than cold campers, but cold campers got burned less often and didn’t suffer from smoke-blackened lungs. Compromise and trade off. Publishers make compromises and trade offs, like favoring commercial viability over artistic appeal.

I’ve been surveying arts and crafts shows, galleries, and municipal events like state fairs and regional festivals for years. There’s been a steady state of participation and attendance since a major boom in the mid ’80s. Recently, attributable to the poor economic climate, there’s been a resurgence of participation and attendance. One art show I participated in enjoyed a five hundred percent participant increase and a two hundred percent attendance increase this last year. (I won my first ever art award, and sold the winner, too, in a more competitive environment than I expected and was tickled that I won under such fierce competition. It wasn’t a best in show winner category, but second best.)

Duotrope.com has virtually replaced the Writer’s Digest guide to digest publications. They track three thousand digests. There’s at least another fifteen hundred that don’t meet Duotrope’s criteria, like having a digest Web site and no reading fees charged for general submissions. Ecotone is indexed at Duotrope, for example. One machine is replaced by another machine.

To my humanist way of thinking, the publishing marketplace is like life, an ever-shifting chiasoscuro lagoon of treacherous shadow and light dappled reefs and shallows and deeps and shorelines and beachheads. The future I see for publishing is the big sisters do their thing, the big brothers do their thing. We who sit on the porch with the big dogs sit watching, waiting, contributing to the dialogue as best we can, and get off the porch and run with the wolves and sheep and feral dogs and rabbits when we can, when we want to, and have our own kind of whatever fun wherever it may take us. The publishing marketplace is a many splendored miasma. The machine is now so many more tentacled arms and wisps of potentiality than it’s ever been. And it’s as alive as humanity makes it, sentience and sentiment-wise.