Eat Me, Jonathan Safran Foer: Ostensibly a Post About Books
The conventional wisdom is that we're living in the era of the death of the book. This is, of course, ridiculous. We live at a time of unprecedented literacy. People love to read. They read all the time. You are, right now, in the middle of reading this.
But I have to say, after seeing the following "book trailer," I'm starting to feel like the death of the publishing industry is long overdue:
If, for some reason, you can't watch this, it goes like this: A novelist establishes that he lives in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, and that he is a douche who French-kisses his dog. He has a grandma and thus decided to write a book about meat, which is not really about meat; it's about family. The video literally starts out, "Oh, hello," like we've all for some reason decided to go to Jonathan Safran Foer's house and startle him in his study. It is a trailer that will make you want to immediately go to the bookstore and punch his book, on principle.
The million-dollar question is, will innovative marketing like Mr. Safran Foer's video help save Big Publishing?
Thanks to the Internet, anyone can write AND publish a book (through mechanisms such as lulu.com or other self-publishing ventures). You only need someone who will give you an ISBN and some CIP data, and your book looks as legitimate as a John Grisham novel to customers at Amazon.com. And with the rise of print-on-demand technology, you don't even have to have inventory.
So the question facing authors starts to be the same as the question facing musicians--do you really need the corporation, or can you do it yourself?
The trick seems to be that you can do it yourself if you have the ability to market yourself. Look at Andrew Sullivan. For a couple of years, his readers have been sending him pictures of what they see when they look out their windows. He's collected some of them into a book, which he's then turning around and selling to them.
The cost of the book? Well, that depends on when you buy it. The initial group pays less than people who buy subsequent printings because the costs of having a large print-run are less. But Sullivan can swing this because he is his own marketing machine. He writes for The Atlantic, regularly appears on Bill Maher, and (most importantly) has one of the most widely read blogs on the Internet.
It'll be interesting to see if he publishes his more conventional books this way in the future. Who knows if Sullivan is just the tip of the avalanche? Will we read on paper, on our phones, on our computers? Will we buy from HarperCollins, or directly from Stephen King? Who knows? We'll try it all! We'll just sit here watching the innovation bear down upon us.
But as cool as this kind of stuff is for readers, it's terrifying for publishers. Andrew Sullivan's books, after all, do well enough that they help subsidize smaller books. If he can do it himself, what happens to the smaller authors who can't?
Hard saying, but it clearly means that publishing as we know it is changing rapidly. And the way we buy books in the future, and from whom, is bound to be very different than it is now.
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