| I don't know why I bothered with that question | | | | gatekeepers of that caliber is, I would vigorously |
| mark. Of course the internet is the future of the | | | | contend, worse than having no gatekeepers at all. An |
| novel. It's the future of almost everything. We have | | | | idiot like that is very likely to reject good books |
| to remind ourselves that the web is not much more | | | | under the impression that they're bad, and -- even |
| than ten years old, and that the revolution has only | | | | worse -- to publish bad books under the impression |
| just begun. Think of where the automobile was after | | | | that they're good. And if you publish shit and tell |
| just ten years of existence, or the aeroplane, or | | | | people it's good, you'll rapidly devalue the currency. |
| moving pictures. And think of how far they've come | | | | The asinine rise of the marketers -- i.e. those |
| since. We have seen, so far, only a tiny fraction of | | | | geniuses who slap fancy covers on dud books and |
| what the internet can and will do. But I've already | | | | hype them obscenely beyond their actual worth -- |
| seen more than enough to conclude that in my own | | | | might well deliver short-term profits, but only at the |
| field of interest, literature, the writing is on the wall | | | | cost of ensuring long-term catastrophe. The public will |
| for the traditional paper book.I don't say this in a | | | | buy one unreadable "masterpiece", or maybe two, |
| spirit of glee or provocation. In fact I would be much | | | | but after sustaining a few serious burns they'll stop |
| happier if it were not the case. I love books. I love | | | | buying books altogether. And then the culture starts |
| the way you can read them anywhere -- on the bus, | | | | to rot. Publishers make less money, and the less |
| the plane, over dinner, in bed, racked out on the | | | | money they make, the less willing they'll be to publish |
| couch. I love the way you can flick ahead through | | | | anything remotely risky. Pretty soon they'll be |
| them if you get bored, or flick back to check on | | | | publishing nothing but cookbooks by one-legged |
| stuff you missed. I love the way new ones smell | | | | ex-Rugby stars, with the odd new novel by some |
| different from old ones. Yet it isn't hard to see how | | | | established dinosaur tossed on as a bit of artistic |
| most of these things -- with the exception of the | | | | garnish. A literary culture run by people without brains |
| odor thing -- could be replicated electronically, with | | | | might just conceivably survive. But one run by people |
| some kind of I-Pod-like device for downloaded text. | | | | without balls is doomed.Something like this has |
| Perhaps such a device exists already and I don't yet | | | | already happened in Australia. That notional class of |
| know about it. In any case, those of us brought up | | | | literati which is supposed to police our book culture, |
| on paper books, those of us with a sentimental | | | | weeding out the bad books and publishing only the |
| attachment to them, will not be around forever. | | | | good ones -- having first rid these of any and all |
| Pretty soon we'll have to yield the floor to a | | | | grammatical howlers -- has died out, if indeed it ever |
| generation of people for whom it's at least as natural | | | | existed at all. No doubt this has something to do with |
| to read things off a screen as off a page. To them, | | | | the thinness of the country's population base, |
| the whole print thing, the whole concept of the hard | | | | combined with our long tradition of settling for |
| copy, is likely to seem superfluous. One day our | | | | second-best in intellectual affairs. In any case, the |
| grandchildren will look back on the daily newspaper -- | | | | result is that the novel in this country is effectively |
| that great wasteful slab of pulped flora that turns | | | | dead as a form. Yes, novels still get published here. |
| obsolete a mere day after its creation -- the way we | | | | But they're like Wile E. Coyote running on a |
| look back on such quaint historical objects as the | | | | subtracted piece of ground, treading air and not yet |
| penny-farthing, or the sheep-gut condom.If the | | | | knowing it. If anything remotely original and exciting |
| internet is not the future of the printed word, and | | | | ever gets published here again, it will be entirely by |
| therefore of the novel, then my name's not Kirk | | | | accident. Again I have to point to the relative merits |
| Kinbote. In fact, I'll go one step further: the novelist | | | | of cyberspace. It's not enough to say that the web, |
| should want the internet to be the future of the | | | | in such a climate, is just as good as the traditional |
| novel. After all, what the novelist craves above | | | | publishers. It's better, because there's no material of |
| anything else is control. And publishing your own stuff | | | | which it's afraid. It excludes nothing. Which is, I |
| on your own site gives you unqualified control over it. | | | | repeat, better than excluding just about everything |
| There is, first of all, an absolute guarantee of | | | | on grounds that have nothing to do with quality.For a |
| publication. There will be no intermediaries. Nobody will | | | | culture to actually be a culture, for it to live, |
| alter a word of what you have written. No grinning | | | | publishers need to invest in more than just the |
| editor will propose "working with you" on the text. | | | | established brand names. They need to seek out |
| Debates regarding punctuation need not be entered | | | | new and different and risky stuff as well. They need |
| into. Nobody will insert any redundant comma, or | | | | to publish books that might fail. They need to publish, |
| remove any necessary one. Apostrophes will not be | | | | to say it plainly, a lot of books, so that we get the |
| relocated from where they belong to where they | | | | kind of critical mass from which, if we're lucky, one |
| don't. You can control line-length, font, point-size. Any | | | | or two excellent and lasting things will emerge. |
| genuine writer is bound to be tantalized by these | | | | American culture takes a lot of shit, but what other |
| possibilities. Of course, there's the burning question of | | | | culture could sustain a young novelist as prodigiously |
| how you're going to make money out of the thing. | | | | talented but downright perverse as David Foster |
| This is a serious question, and I'll get back to it | | | | Wallace? Certainly the thousand-page Infinite Jest |
| eventually. But apart from that gargantuan caveat, | | | | would have got short shrift from any publisher here. |
| web publication looks in many ways like a novelist's | | | | Wallace would have got it straight back by return |
| paradise.But hang on. Isn't there an important sense | | | | post, in a crate, at his own considerable expense. |
| in which the rise of web publication would spell | | | | Only in a culture as broad-shouldered, as robust, as |
| disaster for the novel? Because a published novel, in | | | | America's could a writer like Wallace thrive. There's |
| the traditional sense, isn't just a novel that's been | | | | only one other culture from which he might |
| printed on paper, is it? It's a novel that's been | | | | conceivably have emerged: the culture of the web, in |
| vetted, that's passed muster. The publisher, the | | | | which true talent, no matter how weird it is, always |
| gatekeeper, has lovingly hand-selected it from a | | | | seems to find some kind of audience.Remember |
| chaotic bale of far lesser manuscripts. Quality control | | | | when The Beatles, not long before splitting up, |
| has been exerted. And without quality control, all | | | | founded Apple Corp., the idealistic publishing/recording |
| we'd have would be an undifferentiated sludge of | | | | filmmaking company that would -- so the argument |
| material, about 99% of which is bound to be | | | | went -- forever eliminate the artist's degrading |
| worthless, right? Isn't that all the web is? An unsifted | | | | obligation to go down on his knees in some suit's |
| mass of largely valueless information, with nobody in | | | | office (probably yours, sneered Lennon at some |
| authority to guide us through it?It's a sound | | | | unlucky journalist) in order to get his stuff out to the |
| argument, in principle. But it only works in practice if | | | | public? Apple of course failed to deliver on that |
| the quality controllers know what they're doing. And | | | | dream, because its employees were promptly buried |
| in my own country, Australia, there is ample evidence | | | | under an avalanche of submissions. But think of the |
| to suggest that they don't. There is ample evidence, | | | | web as one giant and unswampable Apple Corp., |
| in fact, to suggest that they're either asleep at the | | | | capable of publishing an infinite supply of creative |
| wheel or brain dead. Publishing in this country is | | | | work, without the mediation of those parasitic and |
| growing more fatuous by the day. A good half of | | | | vaguely contemptible middlemen who have until now |
| the books published here are autobiographies of | | | | stood between the artist and the public. If the idea |
| cricket players, or celebrity memoirs that would be | | | | of infinity scares you, I can only repeat that it is far |
| uninteresting even if their authors could write, or | | | | preferable to entrusting our cultural future to the |
| reflections by former newsreaders on the difference | | | | personal tastes of some bureaucrat who doesn't |
| between Generation X and Generation Y, or | | | | know his arse from his elbow, but thinks that he |
| barbecue cookbooks by half-assed TV personalities. | | | | does. The question of which books will survive, and |
| (If they actually are half-assed, having lost an | | | | which ones won't, is far too important to left to a |
| appendage or two in the course of some | | | | handful of marketers and semi-lettered literati. The |
| unnecessary but "inspiring" journey to the top of | | | | public has to be in on it to some extent.It's probably |
| some indomitable mountain, then so much the better, | | | | time for a confession. Don't get me wrong: this |
| as long as they've got an arm left to write the | | | | confession does not alter the truth-value of the |
| memoir.)What matters about books these days is | | | | foregoing arguments. Everything I have said remains |
| whose face is on the front cover, not what is | | | | watertight, objectively ship-shape. But here is the |
| written inside. In this sense at least, the web -- that | | | | confession. I am a novelist myself, and for a |
| supposedly anarchic no-go zone of unfiltered | | | | depressing year or so I have attempted, without |
| information -- is in fact a rather more rigorous | | | | raising a single spark of interest, to sell my |
| enforcer of quality control than our traditional | | | | masterwork to this country's moribund publishers. |
| publishers are. Your web page can look as fancy as | | | | And I tell you, there is no experience more surreal |
| you like, but if it doesn't deliver on content, people | | | | than submitting one's stuff, again and again, to the |
| will hit the back button. By some strange law of | | | | burnt-out remnants of an industry which, although |
| publishing physics, people will, under certain | | | | nominally concerned with the business of publishing |
| circumstances, pay for unreadable tripe; but under no | | | | books, has essentially given up on the whole notion. |
| circumstances will they read it for free.As for the | | | | It's like shouting into a void.And so I have indignantly |
| highbrow stuff, one of the most celebrated | | | | published my book online, where it is freely available |
| Australian novels of recent times had a glaring error | | | | to anyone who wants to read it. Which is to enter |
| of grammar in its second sentence. I repeat: in its | | | | another kind of void -- a bigger but more democratic |
| second sentence. Is it trivial to mention this? Or does | | | | one, which has no prima facie aversion to new |
| the fact that no editor picked up this howler | | | | material. On the contrary: it wants you. Or at any |
| reinforce the point that the editor as gatekeeper, as | | | | rate, it doesn't not want you. It wants stuff. People |
| fastidious guarantor of quality control, is these days a | | | | want the stuff that's on it. Some of them will come |
| purely mythical figure. If a publishing house can't even | | | | to your page. If it delivers what they want, they will |
| guarantee adherence to simple rules of grammar, its | | | | stay. If it doesn't, they will go. Most of them will go. |
| imprimatur is worthless. For all the help his editors | | | | Some of them will stay. If enough of them stay, |
| gave him, this guy's novel might just as well have | | | | then maybe your site will amount to something.And |
| been self-published on the web.Here's a pertinent | | | | that's about all I have to offer on the topic. I think I |
| anecdote for you. At a recent and excruciating social | | | | said, back at the start of this article, that I would |
| function, I happened to find myself seated next to a | | | | come back to the subject of money. I lied, sort of. I |
| fellow who was, and as far as I know still is, | | | | really haven't worked that bit out yet. All I can do is |
| employed by a globally reputable publishing house as | | | | propose, without a great deal of conviction, that |
| a senior editor of fiction. Finding him generally | | | | anything that's any good will eventually draw some |
| unimpressive, I generously raised the subject of | | | | kind of audience, and that anything that draws an |
| fiction, so as to let him riff freely on a topic he | | | | audience will also, eventually, make some kind of |
| presumably knew something about. I mentioned | | | | money. That's my working hypothesis. We'll see how |
| Catch-22. It swiftly emerged that he'd never heard | | | | it goes.Kirk Kinbote, operating from behind at least a |
| of it. He thought I meant The Catcher in the Rye. | | | | brace of pseudonyms, was the key creative and |
| When I subsequently referred to Thomas Wolfe he | | | | design force behind home of the online novel "A |
| thought I was talking about Tom Wolfe.Having | | | | Dancing Bear. |