Is it too hard to imagine that some of these missing mid-list books are turning up in the catalogs of smaller, non-establishment publishing companies, like the one Colin Robinson himself works for. Robinson himself complains about the fact that a record 300,000 new titles were published in 2012. They also need to moderate the cash which used to flow out in advances. Because of all the well-known stresses on the business, trade houses have to be ever more focussed on big sellers, and so have less space on their lists for smaller books. Plenty of non-blockbusters are (of course) still being published. But what is at most being abandoned is surely the smaller end of mid-list publishing from companies who focus on blockbusters. His fear is that “the mid-list, publishing’s experimental laboratory, is being abandoned”. In so far as these mid-list books are apprentice work for the few who go on to write blockbusters, we can assume that alternative routes to publication will be found (and indeed Robinson himself identifies many). Now, we can all see how no longer being able to get an advance for that mid-list book is bad for the people who write them, but to extend that to dire forecasts about the state of literature is putting way to much weight on the facts. What really typifies the mid-list book he’s thinking of is that it attracts an advance - usually fairly modest, and quite likely to be one of those which fails to earn out. It got me thinking, but I fear my thinking didn’t take me much further than the surface. “The ‘mid-list’ in trade publishing parlance is a bit like the middle class in American politics” Robinson tells us in an odd simile. Different is just different, not axiomatically worse. We need to be constantly vigilant that we avoid the pitfall of claiming that because things are now different from what they were when we were young, they are therefore worse. (Probably the title’s not his fault.) The message boils down to a claim that the mid-list book is no longer being published which is seen as a bad thing. Colin Robinson has a piece in last Sunday’s New York Times strangely entitled “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reader”.
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