After reading Dan Sinykin’s article on close reading the other day, I checked out his 2002 book, “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.” It was fascinating, and now I want to track down the books on the topic that he refers to in the footnotes.

I’ve read and enjoyed some books by John Sutherland on the history of literature and publishing in the twentieth century, as well as lots of biographies of authors and books about magazines and newspapers that touch on various aspects of book publishing, and I’ll have to say that Sinykin takes it to the next level. Not that “Big Fiction” is better than those earlier books, exactly, just that he has what seems to me to be a more comprehensive perspective, covering both the business and literary angles. He also had lots of good stories about the authors, editors, and agents involved in the literary-fiction publishing business, and these stories had just the right level of detail; even the bits that might seem kind of gossipy gave insight. For example on page 83 there’s a letter from publisher Bennett Cerf that Sinykin accurately describes as “bizarre” and “outlandish” in its sexism, which reminded me that as a kid we had this book, Bennett Cerf’s Book of Riddles–it had a drawing of a big red rock eater on the cover (the answer to the riddle, “What’s big, red and eats rocks?”), and now I kinda want to have washed my hands after touching it (Cerf’s book, that is, not Sinykin’s). The point is that this is not just a goofy and slightly disturbing story about a now-forgotten mid-twentieth-century middlebrow celebrity, it also gives some sense of the sorts of Asimov-like behavior that were routinely tolerated back then.

Unrelatedly, one thing I like about Sinykin’s book is that it’s “literary” as well as “sociological.” That is, he talks a lot about the business of books, but he also discusses the literary quality of the books. For example, he discusses the novels of Danielle Steel with respect but without avoiding a consideration of their flaws. The book is mostly sociology–but Sinykin’s book has enough of the literary perspective that it seemed clear that he has some interest in these novels for their own sake.

One thing that surprised me about this book is that it nowhere refers to Gordon Hutner’s book, “What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960” (briefly mentioned in this post from earlier this year, Revolutionary Road and That Darned Chatbot). The two books have a lot of overlap, not in time frame–Sinykin’s story begins when Hutner’s ends–but in the way that they place the literary fiction that’s remembered today within a larger framework including genre and non-genre fiction that was published during the same era.

It’s not that Sinykin is unaware of Hutner–in the preface, he remarks that he collaborated with the older author–; I guess he just decided that his book had enough references as it is, without getting into research on the pre-1960 period. Still, I’d like to hear Sinykin’s take on how the two books fit together.

George V. Higgins

One of the themes of Big Fiction is the shift of how novels are published. Up until 1980, new books would be published either in hardcover or pocket-sized paperback forms. Genre fiction–mysteries, science fiction, westerns, etc.–would be published only in paperback, while other fiction–literary work by John Updike or Saul Bellow or whatever but also popular fiction by James Michener, John Le Carré, etc.–would first be published in hardback and then go to paperback a year later. That was just how they did it. But in the 80s various publishers started going with large-format paperbacks (called “trade” paperbacks, a terminology that has always confused me but has something to do with differentiation within the business of book distribution), and then around twenty years later they began to pretty much retire the pocket-sized paperback format, which bums me out because I like to have a book in my pocket. The good news is that there’s about 50 years worth of paperbacks out there, so as long as I don’t want to read something that’s been written in the present century, I can often find it in pocket format. The funny thing is, they still print these pocket-sized paperbacks in France. Just not here, for some reason. Even in France, though, there does seem to be some move to the larger format.

Anyway, George V. Higgins–see here for background. Higgins had a bit of a hard-luck story in publishing. He had the fortune or misfortune that his first published book, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which came out in 1970, was his most commercially successful and also, arguably, his best work. He wrote roughly a book a year for the next thirty years until his untimely death (real old-school stuff: he was a heavy eater and drinker and died of a heart attack). The general feeling is that if he could’ve just stepped off the treadmill and spent two or three years writing each book, he could’ve published 10 or 15 excellent books instead of 30 books which were often wonderful but which had serious flaws. Part of this surely was just his temperament, but another factor was the disintegration of the mass-market publishing world, a slow and complicated process that coincided with his career. He was always jumping from publisher to publisher. Sure, his books after the first did not sell so well, but this had to do with the fragmentation of the market. In his book, Sinykin talks a bit about literary authors such as Joan Didion and Colson Whitehead who wrote literary novels with genre elements, and a bit about best-selling genre authors such as Steven King, but not so much about Higgins’s category of genre novels with literary aspirations. A good analogy might be Ross Macdonald–his subject, styles, and themes are much different from those of Higgins, but the category seems to fit.

Anyway, it seems that what Higgins needed, and never really had, was a supportive editor, someone who could’ve supplied the tough love to explain wha wasn’t working in the books, while fronting Higgins the money so he could’ve spent more time getting each book right. That’s how at least some of the publishing industry used to work, but it didn’t work for Higgins, who never was in that stable situation. Again, this must’ve been partly just the way that Higgins liked to live and work, but I feel that if he’d had a good relationship with an editor and publisher, he could’ve done better.

Nobody buys books, so nobody edits books

This came up a few years ago in my discussion of a book I enjoyed, Suburban Dicks:

The book is well written, but every once in awhile there’s a passage that’s just off, to the extent that I wonder if the book had an editor. Here’s an example:

“Listen, I know what it sounds like, but, I don’t know, think of it this way,” Andrea said. “You were a child-psych major at Rutgers, right? And you got a job at Robert Wood Johnson as a family caseworker for kids in the pediatric care facility, right?”

“Yeah.”

Who talks that way? This is a classic blunder, to have character A tell character B something she already knows, just to inform the reader. I understand how this can happen—in an early draft. But it’s the job of an editor to fix this, no?

But then it struck me . . . nobody buys books! More books are published than ever before, but it’s cheap to publish a book. Sell a few thousand and you break even, I guess. (Maybe someone in comments can correct me here.) There’s not so much reading for entertainment any more, not compared to the pre-internet days. I’m guessing the economics in book publishing is that the money’s in the movie rights. So, from the publisher’s point of view, the reason for this book is not so much that it might sell 50,000 copies and make some money, but that they get part of the rights for the eventual filmed version (again, experts on publishing, feel free to correct me on this one). So, from that point of view, who cares if there are a few paragraphs that never got cleaned up? And, to be honest, those occasional slip-ups didn’t do much to diminish my reading experience. Seeing some uncorrected raw prose breaks the fourth wall a bit, but the book as a whole is pretty transparent; indeed, there’s a kind of charm to seeing the author as a regular guy who occasionally drops a turd of a paragraph.

It makes me sad that there was no editor to carefully read the book and point out the occasional lapses in continuity, but I can understand the economics of why the publisher didn’t bother. I’m sure the eventual movie script will be looked over more carefully.

It’s been four years since that post came up, so let’s do some googling . . . There doesn’t seem to be any movie, but there is a sequel, “The Self-Made Widow.” So that’s something.

My own experiences in publishing

All my books have been published with academic publishers. In retrospect I probably should’ve gone with the same publisher for all of them, but for various reasons I’m spread all over, having published books with CRC Press, Oxford University Press, Wiley, Cambridge University Press, and Princeton University Press. Each time there was a reason. We wanted to publish Red State Blue State with a trade press and get real publicity, and we even found a literary agent, but no trade press was interested which is why we went with Princeton. Then a few years later I was working on Crimes Against Data and I found an agent who’d been recommended to me . . . the agent was enthusiastic about the idea and said they were ready to shop it to some leading publishers . . . but then a couple days before I was going to sign the contract, this story came out–this was Jeffrey Epstein’s literary agency! See here for more background. I really dodged a bullet with that one. On the minus side, without that push from the agents I never got around to writing that book, indeed I have no idea if it will ever happen. So, yeah, intermediaries such as editors and literary agents can really make a difference.

Dan Sinykin

The other thing that Sinykin’s book made me wonder about was . . . What’s the story of the publication of books such as his? 75 or 100 years ago, books such as Big Fiction would’ve been published by “trade,” not academic presses. Indeed, 75 or 100 years ago, “Dan Sinykin,” if he were doing this sort of thing, would likely have been a journalist in the Edmund Wilson mode, not a college professor. Back then–but no longer!–there were lots more jobs in journalism than in academia. A similar example is Leah Garrett’s book about war novels, which again was published by a university press but 75 years ago might have appeared in the form of magazine journalism and a possible trade book.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing–as a successful college professor, I reach much smaller audiences than I would as a comparably successful journalist, but I have a lot more flexibility in what to write about and in how much time to put into each thing I write–but it’s a change.

Sinykin’s published and edited a few academic books, and he occasionally writes or general-interest publications (that’s what brought his work to my attention in the first place), so I wouldn’t be surprised if he has some ideas for a popular or “trade” book to come next. Nobody buys books, and he’s unlikely to make real money on a trade book, but I guess it could give him the news-media credentials to publish more magazine articles, op-eds, etc., maybe even go on the lecture circuit, who knows?