On the “Death” of Publishing and What it “Means” to be a Writer

Garrison Keillor, author and host of famed radio show A Prairie Home Companion, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times last week declaring the end of publishing: in ‘The End of an Era in Publishing’, he prophesizes that “book publishing is about to slide into the sea”. Anchored by concerns similar to the ones that kept me from starting a blog, I felt initially inclined to agree with him. However, I am not an expert—nor, according to most of the publishers and editors I’m about to quote, is Keillor—and I felt much relieved to read Judy Berman’s collection of the publishing industry’s response, “Publishing’s Not Dead: The Industry Responds to Garrison Keillor” on Flavorpill.


One of my favorite responses, coincidentally one of the most cutting, came from Maud Newton and was the first in Berman’s compilation:

“Keillor’s jeremiad is wrong on so many levels, and proceeds from a place of such monumental self-regard and fundamental misinformation, that a proper rebuttal would require an entire afternoon and a minimum of ten double-spaced pages. That, or one satirical essay by Mark Twain or Colson Whitehead.

“But let’s start with some basic fact-checking. Books published through Exlibris and Lulu.com, et. al., are not ebooks. Aspiring writers’ sense of martyrdom is alive and well online, where entire blogs are devoted to the reproduction and decoding of rejection letters. The myriad kinds of informal communication possible on the Internet do not preclude more formal kinds. Nor is everything that appears online created equal. Nor is all of it unedited. Nor is all of it free. Many magazines that have published the “book people” whose demise Keillor is so busy lamenting have spent the last few years beefing up their sites, putting their archives online for subscribers to search and to read. It is not only possible, but increasingly common, for people to read the New York Times on the smartphones Keillor disdains. Nicholson Baker, who fought so hard against the destruction of libraries’ print collections, reads books on his iPhone. Toni Morrison has a Kindle. Reading novels, she has said, is like entering another world; once they’re lost in the story, many readers don’t care whether the delivery mechanism is a piece of paper or a screen.

“Writers of books will always need good editors. Self-publishing is not a new phenomenon. Cf. Benjamin Franklin. Yes, publishing will change, but it will also continue to exist. And so, unfortunately, will ill-informed kids-these-days rants like this one.”

I like that Newton addresses the most disturbing [for me] points Keillor makes about the internet’s effect on the craft of writing:

“if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75…”

Both Keillor and Berman’s articles are worth taking a look at. Berman’s experts certainly quelled the fears that rose in my throat while reading Keillor’s op-ed. The discussion prompted me to do a self [and Google] search about what exactly it means to be a writer in such trying (according to Keillor) times.


I watched a luke-warm Alex Baldwin movie recently called Shortcut to Happiness. The plot is relatively unimportant for my purposes, but if you’ve ever seen Bedazzled and can’t stand Jennifer Love Hewitt, you can skip Shortcut: based on Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story The Devil and Daniel Webster Baldwin plays a writer who sells his soul to the devil (Love Hewitt) for ten years of fame and fortune. As these things go, he realizes it wasn’t worth it and enlists a famous orator (played by Anthony Hopkins) to defend his soul in court. Despite the movie as a whole being somewhat disappointing, there was a moment of dialogue between Baldwin and Hopkins about what “makes” a writer:

HOPKINS: [your novel is] all about a man who wants to be a writer.
BALDWIN: A man who is a writer.
HOPKINS: Has he ever been published?
BALDWIN: …No.
HOPKINS: Then he should know better than to call himself a writer anywhere but in the privacy of his own home.

This movie was shot in 2001 (though not released until 2007) and it made me wonder if writing (and it’s relation to publishing) had changed that much in the past nine years: although online writers are often qualified by the term “bloggers”, many are still considered writers and respected as such. Regarding my own blogging, I related to a quote I stumbled upon whilst trying to pin down the parameters that define what, exactly a writer is:

"Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction."
- Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938

Perhaps it’s the gray weather or dodgy sun but I feel my entry today doesn’t fair as well against the others so far. Hopefully its conviction in mediocrity is enough to ground the post, and myself, for today.