That's twisting it more than a bit, Dave. I said at its core, it's no
different. The root intent of a business is to make money. Businesses
follow trends. They follow the market. At a fundamental level, that has to
be true of any business, or you stop being in business. It would be much
easier to make a list of the businesses that haven't changed in the past 50
years, if you can think of any, if you want to look at simple execution.
Much shorter. But the fundamentals are what they've always been.
Publishers are trying to make money. They aren't going to publish stuff,
no matter how many people think it's amazing technically, if they don't
think they can sell it.
You can't say someone's publishing more or less of anything, unless you do a
complete inventory of everything published in the given years, categorize
things by strict definitions - if you want to retreat behind a true noir
definition instead of dark then you have to stick to it when you make your
own arguments - and then compare percentages. Maybe we can go back X years
and list a solid handful of classics, amazing books that have endured
somehow and we think there was a boom for noir fiction, but what if those
books amounted to only .01% of the total books published in the given year?
My problem with these discussions is that it's easy for all of us to make
generalizations, but if you want me to believe there's been some massive
shift in NYC with regards to noir, then I want numbers. And I don't mean,
"Jim Thompson sold 750,000 copies of some book in 1951 and Author X only
sold 9000 copies of some book they wrote in 2009." I mean prove that in
1950 3% of what NYC publishers published could be classified as noir under
your definition, and that today only 1% fits that definition. That's
proving a shift. Truth is, a lot of these old, classic writers that get
talked about here all the time had a huge resurgence because of works being
reissued.
We also don't even begin to talk about how readily available books were 50
years ago, how you could buy these cheap paperbacks for nickels. They were
like magazines. Those authors weren't getting the payouts that the
successful authors are getting now.
As for talking dark... yeah, it's a whole other discussion, isn't it? But
I'm okay standing by my opinion that at the core, not much is different from
one business to another. It's how people do business that changes.
Publishers are interested in producing books they can sell. Period.
They'll fall in love with whatever genre or subgenre is popular at the
moment in order to do that - hence all the DaVinci Code knock-offs and Harry
Potter spin-offs and current vampire love we see. It is the independents
that seem to commit themselves to the product first, and bring a quality to
what they do that's worthy of note. I absolutely think John McFetridge
would be better served by Tyrus than a big NYC publisher. It was different
before his editor left, but without the editor to argue for the art, there
doesn't seem to be anyone left in the equation that knows how to sell it.
St. Martin's has been abysmal in how they've managed promoting Dennis
Tafoya.
On a really simplistic level, it's like the difference between big budget
films and independent films. You don't go to the indie films for their
special effects, but what they know how to do, some of them do extremely
well, much better than the big guys ever could.
Just my 2 cents,
Sandra
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 3:10 PM, davezeltserman
<Dave.Zeltserman@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
> About your observations that publishing is no different than it was 50
> years ago, well that's clearly not true. 50 years ago you had large
> publishing houses, now these same houses are part of gigantic
> conglomerations, with headquarters for at least one of them housed in
> Europe. And then you have the large retailers like Walmart, Costco, Target
> and the changes they've brought. And now the changes ebooks are bringing.
> IT's definitely a different world for them and the dynamics have changed
> dramatically. What would be interesting, and I'd love for many reasons to
> see a study on this, is how have readers' taste changed over the last 50
> years? Are we all anomalies here on rara avis still digging noir crime
> fiction, while the rest of the world has moved on??
>
-- LULLABY FOR THE NAMELESS Dec 09 Dorchester http://www.sandraruttan.com/[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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