Letter to Freely Associating Writers Collective
Dear Freely Associating,
I’m writing first off to tell you that I am inspired by what you’re doing. To put this in context, I am a writer living in Portland, Oregon who is seeking a way out. In fact, in your essay What is a Life? you asked the question:
Can you imagine self-help guides that really did aim to transform your life? A reader writes in complaining of dissatisfaction with her relationships, the agony aunt replies: “If you want a real insight into love you should participate in a riot.
Well, I’ve written this self-help guide, it’s called Pick Your Battle: Your Guide to Urban Foraging, Hollywood Movies, Late Capitalism, and the Communist Alternative (a memoir) and if you’d like to get a PDF of the book I’d be very glad to send you one.
I am not writing about my own work, however, but yours. Or maybe I’m writing about both of these things.
Let me put my query to you in context. Borders books is bankrupt, when my editor at Tor Books last spoke to me he informed me that a big part of what they’d be doing for me was pushing the ebook version of my upcoming novel (a book about May ’68, by the way), and recently Harper Collins announced that they would be closing down their warehouses and moving to a POD model. This last detail is interesting because what it means is that Harper Collins no longer has to invest much in the way of initial capital in order to publish a book, which sort of sucks. Professional writers like myself have taken on what is objectively a petty bourgeois position. That is, we are in business for ourselves. However, we are also workers in so much as we have relied on capitalist publishers to exploit our labor. We’re pretty much the same as any temporary worker in a way, only we are less alienated from the product of our labor and our labor is usually not collective labor but more individualistic.
Again, Harper Collins’ move to a POD model makes it clear that they are not necessary. The only reason a writer might still seek a big New York publisher after this move is for Spectacular reasons. That is, the image of Harper Collins rather than any concrete capital is what a writer might seek. A young (or even middle aged writer like myself) might seek a big NY deal in order to gain the prestige of a New York deal, but he or she won’t be getting much more than that. She wouldn’t, for instance, get much in the way of promotion because a POD model liberates the publisher from the need to invest in promotion, especially in new authors. The POD model will probably push publishers to focus more on their big name sure fire winners while spending as little as possible on what’s called the mid-list (or in more current speak, the long tail) because there will be less financial motivation to invest in promotion. Promotion in publishing is often just a way to make sure that you can recoup at least enough to pay for your initial investment. Now, with the POD model, publishing a book is a way of doing some market testing. The motto will be, throw the books onto the market and let the market decide.
Some professional writers are beginning to cotton on to what’s happening. The overall crisis in publishing is already pushing more and more writers from quasi-bestseller status to the mid-list, and this move to the POD model will push even more writers in that direction. More importantly, the POD model gives the game away. We petty bourgeois writers can publish POD and ebooks on our own. The upfront investment is cheap, and since we’ve been trained to do our own promotion for over a decade, well we can do that too…
Okay, so that’s the background or context. And here’s the thing. I’d prefer not to. That is, I don’t really want to run my whole life like a business, which is what starts to happen when you work from home writing, designing, and promoting books. That is, I like the work. I enjoy writing, but spending all that time in front of the computer doing my own work can drive me a bit crazy. Also, the world is turning to shit around me and I think the Capitalist system is the culprit.
So, I’m wondering. If the big Capitalists have shown themselves to be unnecessary. If the big Capitalist publishers have been innovated out of existence, is it possible that co-opts or collective of mutually supporting writers could help each other out creating books that would still be sold on the market without the co-opt slowly being morphed into a corporation or business? Is the other option the formulation of a cult? How can I, from within this system, turn my daily practice of writing into both my daily bread and into a process of liberation?
Perhaps you can help me with this question.
Solidarity,
Douglas Lain
New Collection: Fall into Time (available on Amazon)
From the back cover:
In these four stories, Douglas Lain explores the painful and mysterious chasms in the hearts and minds of people who want to break out from their lives, but find themselves becoming stagnant and self-destructive. Unable to escape or move forward, they lose themselves in the past and present, hoping for some insight that will lead them to a brighter future. Readers of Philip K. Dick, Donald Barthelme, and Kelly Link will rejoice in the work of Douglas Lain. Featuring: THE LAST APOLLO MISSION 09/11 was an inside job. What nobody knows, except for writer Paula Austin, is that Stanley Kubrick was one of the men behind it all. With help of Nicholas Cage, of course. RESURFACING BILLY In a near-future city where radioactive trash is seeping up through the soil, one man creates a chewing gum that just might solve the planet’s trash problem, while trying to prove to a Big Brother-like school that his son’s behavioral problems are completely normal before they mandate a lobotomy. ALIEN INVASION/COFFEE CUP STORY Aliens have finally invaded, but apathy has overtaken the planet and nobody seems to care about the flying saucers in the sky. The tensions in a young couple’s relationship rise to the surface as they discuss what the alien invasion means, or more to the point, what it doesn’t mean, in this satirical mash-up of alien invasion and realist “cup of coffee” stories. CHOMSKY AND THE TIME BOX A tech blogger travels back in time and becomes obsessed with a twenty-two minute period in the Chicago O’Hara Airport on November 16th, 1971, when Noam Chomsky and Terence McKenna nearly met. But nothing goes according to plan in his repeated attempts to change the course of history, which entail kidnapping Chomsky and subjecting hostages from the Chicago O’Hara to footage of Ronald Reagan.
