The publishing industry has something more complicated than "a gambling problem"
On chaos theory, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, and the peril of neat explanations
I don’t want to rag on “Publishing Has a Gambling Problem,” Tajja Isen’s latest article in The Walrus, so much as engage with it on its own level—and in gratitude.
After all last year’s abominations—“No One Buys Books,” “The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction”—it’s a profound relief to find a critical publishing take based on something other than jazz hands and projection, even if I have issues with its execution.
Publishers should care less about short-term sales tracks and invest in authors’ long-term potential like they used to. By focusing myopically on profit, they’re contributing to the destruction of an ecosystem that once allowed more of us to flourish. To advance these arguments, Isen gathers some real and compelling data. She interviews many experts and gathers strong testimony from two different authors, one of whom is a Neon client and the other a loyal “Glow” reader. (Love yoooou.)
I’m grateful for this. Really. Although I’m about to spend the rest of this newsletter picking on Isen’s arguments, I’m really picking on all of us: publishers, agents, editors, authors, everyone. If some willful naïveté glues Isen’s reporting together, it’s a willful naïveté of which every single one of us has been guilty.
The issue isn’t that Isen’s take falls apart uniquely; it’s that she, like all of us, strains to come up with neat arguments inside a system whose underlying mechanics refuse to support them.
Publishing—this universe of hits and misses, bestsellers and flops—operates within the field of nonlinear dynamics, where tiny differences in input often lead to enormous (and—alas—unpredictable) differences in output. This is the kind of math you learn how to do after AP BC Calculus if you’re, like, one of the smartest STEM kids in your school. I was not.
Faced with the sheer difficulty of this math—the uncertainty tolerance it requires, to say nothing of the exhausting applied intellect—I have been wont to say “no thanks” and reach for simple explanations instead. I’m guessing you have, too. It’s impossible to engage at all times with the full complexity of reality, and nobody really wants to hear it, anyway.
I repeat: nobody wants to hear it. Shareholders, CEOs, editors, agents, readers, and authors all have one thing in common: they’re people under capitalism. As such, they crave certainty when their wallets, egos, and futures are on the line. They don’t want you to tell them, “This subject is irreducibly complicated and veers into chaos theory! Let me show you some fractals and bifurcation diagrams!!”
No: they want answers. They want money. They want you to tell them what is wrong and how to fix it so they can get more money.
In the face of all that, I not only get the impulse to be reductive; I share it.
Yes, and: the Walrus piece is reductive. Unhelpfully so. Turning nonlinear dynamics into a one-line moral is bad business strategy, and worse: it misleads authors, the people most in need of clarity.
Come, come: let’s take a scalpel to this piece so we can peel it back and see all the complications underneath. Ultimately and IMO, what I have to show you is less depressing for authors than the surface-level takeaways of the piece.
