Skip to content

Tag: mike doherty

Published November 11, 2014

The War of Words

Keith Gessen, writer and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, has a long article in the December issue of Vanity Fair on the ongoing hostilities between Amazon and Hachette. Essentially it’s a timely primer on how the retailer’s relationship with publishers sank to its current low, but it is worth reading for literary agent Andrew Wylie’s thoughts on the matter alone:

The issues at the heart of the conflict are both margin and price, according to Wylie. Publishers have been slow to recognize the danger of percentage creep, he told me. “There was a European publisher in here recently who proudly sat on that sofa and said, ‘I’ve worked everything out with Amazon. I’ve given them 45 percent.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘But they wanted 50 percent.’ ” The European publisher thought he had won. Wylie stared incredulously at the memory of this encounter. “He’s a moron!”

Losing the fight over margins would be an immediate blow to the publishers’ profits, but losing control over pricing could be fatal. “If Amazon succeeds,” said Wylie, “they will lower the retail price—$9.99, $6.99, $3.99, $1.99. And instead of making $4 on your hardcover, you’ll be making 10 cents a copy on all editions. And, Keith, you will not be able to afford to write a book.… No one, unless they have inherited $50 million, will be able to afford to write a serious work of history, of poetry, of biography, a novel—anything. The stakes are Western culture.”

Western culture I could take or leave, but the part about me sent a chill down my spine. This is not what you want to hear from your literary agent. Surely we’ll think of something, I said to Wylie, if Amazon does win?

“You think?”

Wylie was not in the mood for a pep talk.

If you don’t have the strength to wade through the whole thing (and who can blame you?), Gessen discussed the piece with Leonard Lopate on WNYC today:

 WNYC Leonard Lopate: Why the Amazon-Hachette Fight Matters and What it Means for Publishing mp3

But for more Wylisms, the man himself was in Toronto recently and Mike Doherty interviewed him for the National Post:

Wylie readily admits, in his Massachusetts drawl, that he was once a big supporter of [Amazon], going so far as to call up CEO and founder Jeff Bezos and offer to help him expand into Europe. He praised the idea that, unlike in a bookstore, backlist and literary titles could be on equal footing with bestsellers — the industry dependence on which he calls a “coked-up, crazy, wild weekend-in-Vegas approach to publishing.” Amazon’s dedication to the long tail, he thought, was key, but then with the introduction of the Kindle, he says, “the dark side of their intention began to be visible.”

Wylie was in town to deliver the keynote address at the International Festival of Authors.

Comments closed
Published January 10, 2014

Child’s Play: Blockbuster Movies, Comics and Superheroes

At RogerEbert.com, Alexander Hul has an interesting piece on self-indulgent movie directors and the degeneration of blockbusters:

Artists certainly are allowed to make films that only satisfy their own creative pursuits. But blockbusters—more than any other kind of film—are conceived of as a way to entertain and satisfy audiences (so they can make money). Modern spectacles feel like they’re built to entertain and satisfy their filmmakers instead. They’re not considering who their destruction is actually for anymore. They’re just doing it. Or, as Vulture wrote, when it comes to destruction porn, “No one necessarily asks for it; it just kind of happens.” Bless his honesty, but [Damon] Lindelof’s assessment of the climactic destruction he penned for “Star Trek Into Darkness” only reinforces how embedded and unconscious this has all become for the moviemakers: “Did ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ need to have a gigantic starship crashing into San Francisco? I’ll never know. But it sure felt like it did.” All of this makes me recall “Jurassic Park”‘s Ian Malcolm sentiment when he lectures Hammond for blindly realizing his dinosaur fantasies with the technology he has access to. Filmmakers are now so preoccupied with how much they can (and are encouraged to) destroy digitally, they don’t stop to think if they really should. They don’t stop to ask “Who is this really for?”

On a related note, Toronto-based writer Mike Doherty asks comic-store owners have blockbuster movies been good for comics?:

“I hate to say it… but after waiting so long for really good superhero movies—all my life, almost—and now they’re here, I’m almost getting bored of them. There are so many now. And they’re always basically the same story, which is not much story: bad guy versus good guy, good guy wins in the end.”

Almost getting bored of them? I think I’m already well passed that point. And much as it pains me, I’m beginning to think Alan Moore may have a point:

[Superheroes] don’t mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it’s nothing to do with them. It’s an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal. This is a significant rump of the superhero-addicted, mainstream-addicted audience. I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good. I think it’s a rather alarming sign if we’ve got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s.”

Sigh.

Comments closed