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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Publishing’s Shrinking Attention Span

July 1, 2014 by Scott Timberg

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THE Scottish novelist Val McDermid, who has sold 10 million books, says she wouldn’t have a career in today’s relentless marketplace. One of the things the Internet and the superstar economy have done is to shrink our already shrunken attention spans further, and that’s doubly true in the culture industries.

Crime writer McDermid, best known for her Dr. Tony Hills books, tells the Telegraph that these days, publishers want an instant hit, or a big award, or writers get cut loose. It’s part of a larger collapse of the midlist writer or artist and a still larger threat to the middle class of the creative class. Says McDermid:220px-ValMcDermid

Back in the day when I started you were still allowed to make mistakes. You got to make your mistakes in public, in a way. I think the world was a more forgiving place when I started my career, in the sense that we got time and space to develop as a writer… If you don’t make the best-seller list, if you don’t get shortlisted for any prizes, it’s goodbye.

Literary agent Jonny Geller told the paper something similar:

It’s never quite as bleak as that but publishing is a lottery. What they are doing is putting big bets on some unknowns and it’s all or nothing. There’s a whole mid-range of novels that don’t have a hook or spectacular angle that would have been published five years ago, but fewer publishers want to take the risk.

We’ve had famous and celebrity writers for centuries now. But much of publishing seems to be joining Hollywood and the rest of the US and UK economies in a march toward a winner-take-all culture. Part of me wonders, what took them so long?

Filed Under: books, brit culture, creative class, Death of the midlist, Inequality, Internet, middle class, Winner-take-all

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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