Double Shot of the Times

There are two articles in the august New York Times this weekend that I wanted to comment on, so I'll just shove them together into one post:

First, Rachel Donadio had the back-page essay in the Book Review this week, writing about why books take so long to be published. It's reasonable as far as it goes, but it's also utterly blindered by its own preconceptions. To be blunt, it's not an essay about books being published, but about major "literary" fiction from big New York houses. (Some of the points also apply to similar non-fiction, but not to genre publishing in fiction or non-fiction. It's about "big books" aimed at bestseller lists.) It doesn't take a year to publish a book; not at all. If you want everyone up to the executive suite to be behind this particular book, and to pour huge sums of money into it, and to be aiming at Oprah and The Daily Show and major literary prizes, then, yes, it does take that long. But 95% of books published aren't like that; a majority of the books published by the houses whose representatives are quoted in this essay aren't published like that. Assuming my employer is typical, right now books from September are being presented to sales reps all across publishing. (In some categories, like the one I mostly work in, it's a shorter lead-time, so we're talking about June books.) My house's fall list just closed this past week, and a few stragglers will probably drop into that season -- August through November -- in the next few weeks.

Donadio's general point would seem to be that it takes longer to publish a book than it does to print it -- which is absolutely true, and is what a lot of people outside the publishing industry don't understand -- but she's taking the extreme case to be the norm. It takes a while to publish a book, but six to nine months is reasonable in a lot of cases. (Faster than that is generally a "crash," for which there needs to be a compelling reason.) Over a year's delay, though, and my cynical heart expects that means we're talking about a "wonderful" book -- one that people at the house love, but have no idea how to sell.

And then there's Charles McGrath in today's paper, commenting on the Joan Brady case (in which a British writer received a 150,000 pound out-of-court settlement for, essentially, an environmental condition that she claimed made her too dumb to write her previous literary novels and reduced her to thrillers). I haven't seen much about that case yet online, though it's a very striking claim -- that writing genre fiction is inherently less difficult and taxing on the brain than literature is. McGrath examines the history of the literary/genre divide and has a very even-handed end -- though he quotes Updike to the effect that genre works are "formulaic." (Updike has written a number of genre works, not always well, and I find his thinking on the subject equally mixed.)

(Parenthetically, the Times's online search engine stinks -- I wasn't able to find either of these by author's name, and had to go into the specific section and poke around until I could find it. Typical of the Times to be so old-school.)