{"id":1904,"date":"2014-07-01T10:33:05","date_gmt":"2014-07-01T17:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=1904"},"modified":"2014-07-01T10:34:24","modified_gmt":"2014-07-01T17:34:24","slug":"publishings-shrinking-attention-span","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2014\/07\/publishings-shrinking-attention-span.html","title":{"rendered":"Publishing&#8217;s Shrinking Attention Span"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar id=&#8221;CAxR2RewOYpbx08DLip9Jb3pvG0eQ2Sw&#8221;]<\/p>\n<p>THE Scottish novelist Val McDermid, who has sold 10 million books, says she wouldn&#8217;t have a career in today&#8217;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&#8217;s doubly true in the culture industries.<\/p>\n<p>Crime writer McDermid, best known for her Dr. Tony Hills books, tells the <a title=\"Val McDermid on publishing\" href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/culture\/books\/10934043\/Val-McDermid-I-would-be-a-failed-novelist-if-I-started-out-today.html\" target=\"_blank\">Telegraph<\/a> that these days, publishers want an instant hit, or a big award, or writers get cut loose. It&#8217;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:<a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/220px-ValMcDermid.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1906\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/220px-ValMcDermid.jpg\" alt=\"220px-ValMcDermid\" width=\"220\" height=\"175\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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&#8230; If you don&#8217;t make the best-seller list, if you don&#8217;t get shortlisted for any prizes, it&#8217;s goodbye.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Literary agent Jonny Geller told the paper something similar:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It&#8217;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&#8217;s all or nothing. There&#8217;s a whole mid-range of novels that don&#8217;t have a hook or spectacular angle that would have been published five years ago, but fewer publishers want to take the risk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We&#8217;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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar id=&#8221;CAxR2RewOYpbx08DLip9Jb3pvG0eQ2Sw&#8221;] THE Scottish novelist Val McDermid, who has sold 10 million books, says she wouldn&#8217;t have a career in today&#8217;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&#8217;s doubly true in the culture industries. Crime writer McDermid, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35,88,39,626,587,32,574,627],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1904","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books","7":"category-brit-culture","8":"category-creative-class","9":"category-death-of-the-midlist","10":"category-inequality-2","11":"category-internet","12":"category-middle-class","13":"category-winner-take-all","14":"entry","15":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}