Thanks for the extra thoughts to chew on, and thanks for listening to the podcast! ~Scribe

The rise of ebooks has indeed killed the “traditional midlist author” and brought a new “midlist” that is close to impossible to break out of, simply because there are more people getting involved than ever before. There’s no quality control with the end of traditional publishing, and there are too many heads in the group from which to distinguish oneself. Plus, no longer does a “bestseller” incorporate writing ability as the primary reason it becomes one — promotional ability, this thing called “platform,” or “presence,” or “networking,” which is really equal part sugarcoating to make nice and bull$*** to make headway. Just look at the “democratic” model of Harper Collins’ Authonomy, a nice idea on paper but a failure in practice. All too often the “up votes” went to people who’d been generous in giving others kudos and gold stars and reciprocating in return; it did nothing to offer valid critique or editing, because that would bruise the writer/user’s ego too much and wind up with down-votes turned to playground anarchy. The “democratic” publishing model is really the diplomatic equivalent of Jersey Shore.

Moreover, there’s no soul involved in the mechanical digitzation of words on a page. Call me old fashioned, but there’s just something, I don’t know, romantic about curling up with a paperback (or even a hardcover) in a quiet room without the buzzing and flashing of wi-fi routers and Twitter updates. Seeing as the democratic model has become a proven failure, the next step will be formulas and analytics to determine what people like to read and what sells. Nielsen BookScan + Google PageRank + how many likes on Facebook + Tweets and followers + readability statistics will wind us all in an idiocratic mess. This is the C:\Spot.run model, the cold, dystopian future that Bradbury and Orwell warned us about. (Two authors who’d be in the slush pile today because their heroes didn’t “sparkle.”)

But it’s also about advertising, just like how baseball is no longer America’s pastime but “passive income” for the stadiums that re-christen ballparks with their company brand. The next thing for publishing, if it hasn’t come to this point already, will be advertisements inserted within the Kindle “book” itself (sorry, but ebooks are not books, at least not to me), and someday even the content diluted with pointless SEO keywords and “trending topics” — the Google-ization of literature is what it will be. You’ll have marketing “gurus” commissioning aspiring authors to write “novels” with thinly disguised versions of the CEOs themselves as the “heroes” and their rivals as the bad guys. Captain Coke vs. the Mad Dr. Pepper.

Electronic publishing is maybe the best thing that could happen for the BUSINESS of the Internet, but the worst that could happen for writers (who are too prolific and intelligent to call themselves “bloggers”), for publishing industry employees, such as agents and editors, who will maybe have an edge in re-branding themselves as “coaches” or “marketing experts” or some such puffed-up title, and yes, in the end, for the readers, whose chance to experience the next War & Peace will be diluted yet again, thwarted by the One Percent Powers That Be who’ve managed to make something corporate and soulless out of the one thing sacred to our very human existence: the creative spark that ignites a powerful human narrative. Mechanized, monetized, and in the end, pulverized.

I sincerely hope I’m not around to see it. I certainly won’t be there to write it, because if a dead tree falls and no one at Amazon is there to digitize it, then no one will know and no one will care.