April 10, 2011

Kindleonlyness

As you might imagine, I have never knowingly read a "romance novel," per se, though I would guess some books I have read could well fall into some genre-straddling peripheral category. I mean, like, actual gothic romances, The Monk, the Brontes, Mary Stewart's Arthurian series -- I'm not that sure how the genre is delimited by fans of it, exactly. But the world of the modern romance novel is quite properly almost entirely dark to me. On the other hand, I know from stray links on the internet that there is a thriving tradition of romance novel readers finding, reading, and ridiculing the more outlandish examples on their blogs, and the links I've clicked on can be pretty funny. They're doing strange, unnatural things with fiction over there, from what I can tell.

To wit, this one, linked by someone I virtually know on twitter, is a doozy. (It's text only, but if you were to stand on your desk at work and read it aloud, I doubt it'd be "safe.")

So, it's funny.

And yet, I must admit, the whole thing was quite a bit funnier and more interesting when I thought it was a "real," as in, actually published, book. But it turns out, from what I can tell, that The Gingerbread Tryst is a Kindle-only production.. I'm told that still counts as published, and my head tells me that's true; but my heart's just not gonna buy it.

There's a cherished category in my world (and it includes everything, not just books) that goes by the name of: "amazing and wondrous that it even exists." I'm sorry to say I'm old fashioned enough that Kindle-only-ness makes a book seem like it exists less. And quite a bit less, actually. Maybe I'll get with the program and learn to stop worrying and love the bomb and all that, and I'll modify my definition of "existence" to include "anything somebody typed out and uploaded to a server and put a cover and price on." But in this apparently inevitable brave new world, it just seems like it will be impossible to tell whether or not it's wondrous and amazing that something even exists, and the net result will be: less wondrousness and amazingness, in that sense. I don't know, maybe I'm totally wrong about that. There are more important things in life, I suppose, than ironic celebration of weird stuff that somehow managed to get published.

This started out fun, but now I'm just kind of bummed out.

Posted by Dr. Frank at April 10, 2011 05:56 PM | TrackBack
Comments

yeah, kindle only seems about as real as a web page. that makes it feel more like fan fiction than a real book.

Posted by: aaron at April 10, 2011 08:08 PM

Yeah, the self-publishing world is something to be wary of. Especially since certain publishing companies have a vested interest in getting novice (or just crappy) writers to pay them money to make their books happen. They've been calling it "indie" publishing to make it seem as glamorous as the indie music/film scene is (was), but a great majority of it is merely vanity publishing; sadly, this Internet Age has many more outlets for distribution of their wankery.

Posted by: Duncan at April 11, 2011 08:26 PM

I agree and I feel the same way about music. There's something special about having a tangible copy of a book or music album. Good or bad, those books and albums on your shelves a window to who you are. I hope I never see the days when I can no longer physically turn the pages of a new book or place a new CD in my stereo and listen to it for the first time while I read through the liner notes. Electronic versions of books and albums are like watching a television show about exotic locations. Yeah, you can see and hear it, but are you really getting the full experience?

Posted by: ben at April 12, 2011 04:54 PM

"The Gingerbread Tryst"

I assume we all just put that one in our hypothetical-band-name vault.

Posted by: josh at April 13, 2011 01:09 PM

That's something I always found interesting (in reference to Duncan's comment), that when a band or filmmakers choose to self-release, it is inherently viewed (by a good many folks, even some in the mainstream) as punk-rock-ish rejection, or through an impressed, sparkly lens of DIY reverence. Yet when a writer does it, the first impression more often than not is that s/he isn't good enough for NY.

I know those are generalizations, but there does seem to be a bit of truth in them.

Posted by: cks at April 14, 2011 06:36 AM

That's something I always found interesting (in reference to Duncan's comment), that when a band or filmmakers choose to self-release, it is inherently viewed (by a good many folks, even some in the mainstream) as punk-rock-ish rejection, or through an impressed, sparkly lens of DIY reverence. Yet when a writer does it, the first impression more often than not is that s/he isn't good enough for NY.

I know those are generalizations, but there does seem to be a bit of truth in them.

Posted by: cks at April 14, 2011 06:36 AM

oh jeez. I hit the button twice; my bad.

Posted by: cks at April 14, 2011 06:37 AM

I know what you mean, cks. I guess part of it may be that while writing is hard, typing and uploading is easy, and if you're going to invest the time and energy to read a four hundred page book it does help to know beforehand that at least someone other than the author himself deemed it worth releasing. On the other hand, listening to a song that is mainly of interest to the band and their friends only takes two minutes and even if you don't particularly care for it when it's over, that two minutes is no big loss.

If you win the lottery and the homemade song turns out to be great great great (which totally can happen) so much the better. Movies are quite different in that even independent ones require lots of resources to get them moving. Maybe some kids in a garage with an iPhone could make a great film for almost free, but it is doubtful and far far far less likely than that they could make a great song. If a movie makes it far enough that you know about it, that means someone has deemed it worth investing in. The equivalent to the dystopian publishing situation I'm complaining about with films might be like: you want to watch a movie on Saturday night, so you go to youtube and click on random videos till you accidentally get one that's worth your time. You'll find good stuff, sure, but you probably won't find an undiscovered Casablanca.

There are lots of people with unpublishable, unedited, and likely unfinished, novels on their hard drives. Just hitting upload to scribd doesn't make it more "publishable" even though technically it has been "published." I know there are exceptions, successful, real novels that began as self-published projects, but sorting through all the self-published content really is a daunting prospect and it's only going to get more daunting.

Posted by: Dr. Frank at April 14, 2011 06:07 PM

What I really rail against is vanity publishers that get naive (and usually bad) writers to pay the publishers money to print and make books. Something similar happened in music with Rebecca Black's "Friday", though in that case she didn't write the song herself.

Posted by: Duncan at April 15, 2011 09:00 PM

Yeah Duncan, you're right. And I think those very vanity publishers may be one of the reasons the (general) we say on auto-pilot:

Alternative Tentacles---Hell yeah! DK won't sell out!
Troma---F@ck that studio system!

...But when someone mentions Joe Knetter, if you know who he is, there's a good chance your (general) first gut reaction is, Yeah, he paid to be published.

And he did. But so did the others.

I wasn't taking a shot or anything, BTW, your 1st comment's wording (Duncan, I mean) just reminded me of something I catch myself doing: Splitting lit from the rest of the indyverse and putting a more powerful magnifier on it.

And maybe on an instinctive level, it is that we're all very aware of these gnarly vanity publishers and their long, long history of shakedowns. And I imagine DF's comment probably holds more than a little truth, how the relationship with a book is a(n) unique entertainment experience in that it takes more of your life to, well, experience it (excluding those Peter Jackson troll movies).

Most people can write at some level; many do; and that's likely yet another reason we're more suspicious of this stuff. But for whatever reason---technical and issues of quality aside; you ain't thinking about that stuff in a gut reaction---there does tend to be (ugh another generality) a more harsh critical eye dropped on DIY writers/publishers, that's a lot less forgiving of artistic intent than on some of the other forms (unless you've just heard another 7 inch from the 557,000 band where all the guys have the same last name). Maybe a guy/girl is an entrepreneur; maybe s/he's a control freak who doesn't trust (gasp!) The System.

Or maybe s/he sucks.

With other art forms, the wide-eyed, bucking rebel in us WANTS to believe the former. With lit we tend to become our dads and say, "well, that isn't exactly real, is it?". For whatever reason.

As for Kindleonlyness, the original point of this all: I guess the warning is built into the subject line. Feel adventuresome, give something a shot. It'll probably suck, but most things do. (Supermarket Twilight Knockoffs?) Worried about the ticking away minutes of your life, you should probably just skip it. And this comment.

And there IS traditional publishing, for the foreseeable future, so you can still revel plenty in WTF! ironic wonder. You know, if whatever you're ironically celebrating happens to include a sexy vampire prom somewhere in it.

ASIDE: I'm starting to unironically kinda love Friday. Fun fun fun fun: Who can stay mad at that?

Posted by: cks at April 16, 2011 11:46 AM

On CNN.com, there is a recent article about E-book sales topping paperback sales for the first time. However, a related poll on the site shows that 80% of 244,000 voters prefer paperbacks. Granted, that is an unscientific poll, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, it's an interesting contradiction.

Posted by: ben at April 18, 2011 02:21 PM
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