When I heard that Southwest Airlines will soon be eliminating its esoteric-but-efficient boarding system, likely in favor of more premium offerings, I notched it as a big loss: It’s one of the last communal experiences in American society that hadn’t yet been ruthlessly stratified by class.
Now, sure, you have to be rich enough to buy a plane ticket in the first place, and Southwest has sneakily introduced some premium features through the years, but Southwest’s boarding process was about as egalitarian as it gets these days. Rich or poor, you got your boarding number based on the time you checked in, you lined up elbow-to-elbow with everyone else, and when you boarded, you didn’t walk past the rows of the comfie richie-riches followed by rows of the sorta-riches before you crowded into your now-quite-obviously inferior seat.
On Southwest, everyone got essentially the same seat and the same snacks. Soon, even that appears to be going by the wayside.
I’m worried we’re headed for a similar future in the world of books.
Society, stratified
Over the course of my lifetime, it feels as if our capitalist overlords have ruthlessly stratified everything. If Karl Marx said “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” our modern capitalistic world says, “To each according to his means.”
Of course we have always had rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods, expensive restaurants and greasy spoons. But there were still some experiences that crossed against class lines. When I was a kid, rich or poor, everyone waited in the same lines at Disneyland. Maybe Fess Parker got to skip the line, but that’s about it.
Now? If you want to skip some lines, you can buy a Lightning Lane pass for $32 per person per day that lets you schedule a few cut-the-line experiences, with optional upgrades for certain rides. Or you can pay $400 per person per day to cut to the front of every Lightning Lane ride once per day. Or you can hire a VIP tour for $500-700 per hour, which gives you a personalized tour and priority access.
And that’s once you’ve even gotten into the park. In 1985, a ticket to Disneyland cost $16.50, or about $50.02 in inflation-adjusted dollars. Now they start at $103 and increase from there.
It’s not just Disneyland.
In the second half of the 20th century, many mom and pop restaurants gave way to mid-tier chains like Olive Garden and Applebees, which, according to a recent study, were the most common places Americans would encounter someone from outside of their social class. Now those chains are facing hard times too.
Church attendance has long been in decline. Even pursuing hobbies and meeting fellow enthusiasts of all stripes is in danger due to hobby inflation. We keep losing places where we might have spontaneous encounters from people outside our socioeconomic strata.
As we move through our days and weeks, we are relentlessly reminded where we stand in the economic pecking order, and the truly rich are increasingly walled off from the rest of us. Virtually everything we do, everything we buy, and everywhere we go is getting sliced into basic, premium, and ultra-premium.
Rising democratization of books
I don’t want to overrate the extent to which the book world was ever a truly democratized or meritocratic space. Books were historically luxury items only available to the rich, and the industry has long been populated by (and catered to) elites.
But the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first really did see books become more readily available to more people than ever. Andrew Carnegie spent some of his vast fortune to build over 2,500 libraries. The invention of the mass market paperback lowered the cost barrier and facilitated, among other things, the United States War Department’s distribution of an astonishing 120 million paperbacks in the years around World War II, which contributed to the lasting cultural impact of The Great Gatsby (150,000 free copies distributed), among others.
For authors, access to the publishing world was once limited to the well-connected, and rich people like Marcel Proust had the means to self-publish, but with the rise of literary agents, you could have more out-of-the-blue success stories like Jack Kerouac walking into Sterling Lord’s office with On the Road or teenaged Oklahoman S.E. Hinton sending a successful query letter for The Outsiders to Marilyn Marlow at Curtis Brown Ltd. In the 2000s, the rise of industry blogs like Miss Snark’s lowered the barrier of access to insider information, making it easier to approach the publishing industry than ever.
While more work has always needed to be done to diversify the industry so that it better reflects the country and its readership, there have been halting waves of progress through the years that have been headed, if imperfectly and inadequately, in the correct direction.
I’ve said throughout my career that this is a golden age for writers, and in many respects it’s true. With the rise of self-publishing, no manuscript must remain in the drawer if the traditional industry passes on it. Every writer now has a shot at finding their readers, and with the right word of mouth, explode out of nowhere into a huge success story.
I worry that all of this progress feels extremely fragile as we head into the second quarter of the 21st century.
Is the golden age getting tarnished?
Nearly everywhere I look, the halting progress of the last hundred years of publishing feels ever more precarious.
Waves of book banning are having a chilling effect over schools and libraries, and the Trump Administration is trying to gut a crucial organization supporting America’s library ecosystem. Diversification efforts at publishers seem to be faltering. The mass market paperback is going by the wayside in favor of more expensive formats. Chain stores aren’t stocking books like they used to.
And just as we’re losing democratized spaces and experiences in the country, I worry the publishing ecosystem is increasingly at risk of becoming “pay to play” and stratified by class.
If you look at the top level, things still look okay. It’s still free to query literary agents, and traditional publishers still pay advances. It’s still free to self-publish on KDP, IngramSpark, and e-book distributors like Draft2Digital. Theoretically at least, anyone with a laptop and some time on their hands can become a bestselling author (provided, of course, you receive a crucial tweet from Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood).
But with fewer and fewer quality slots available at traditional publishers, and competition becoming so thoroughly intense, an entire ecosystem of experienced editors and service providers (like me!) has now developed around the industry to help authors with pre-submission editing and query letter critiques to give them the best leg up possible. The most experienced freelance editors can command eye-watering sums, even given the uncertain ROI of pursuing publication. Since you broadly get what you pay for when it comes to editing, already the richest authors tend to be getting the best advice.
On top of that, as A.I. slop books clog up online booksellers like Amazon, it’s only that much harder to rise above the noise, putting a premium on additional marketing, P.R., and distribution. Accordingly, hybrid publishers have sprung up that perform some of these services…. and they can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars in up front fees.
Pay-to-submit discovery services like The Black List are moving into the book world (it costs $30 per month), providing a further potential economic barrier to authors hoping to land a literary agent or publishing deal. While these haven’t yet caught on in a big way to my knowledge, I’m worried about the precedent they set for adding a for-profit filtering layer between authors and agents.
Is the publishing industry headed for the same kind of economic stratification we’re seeing everywhere else? It feels almost inevitable, doesn’t it?
Back to building a meritocracy
I firmly believe that an industry that is open to all and is as meritocratic as possible will result in the best books and the best society. Everyone should have the chance to tell their story and have their voices heard. The more barriers to entry there are, particularly economically and via pernicious biases, the more we are all shortchanged as a reading society.
The industry had progressed as close to the ideal as we’ve ever gotten, but the forces arrayed against democratization have mounted one heck of a counteroffensive.
Unfortunately, it’s not within my power to dismantle capitalistic structures that incentivize profit-seeking over a cultural meritocracy, but I can support individuals and organizations that serve as democratizing forces in the business.
The answer, as always, is community, and it also means putting your wallet where your heart lies.
That means supporting organizations like We Need Diverse Books that are pushing for a more equitable industry and providing a leg up to authors who wouldn’t have otherwise had one. It means ditching your Amazon Prime and doing your shopping at community-oriented bookstores. It means being mindful of your reading habits as well as your social media habits. It means sharing quality creative work with your network (and paying for it or borrowing it from your local library) instead of wasting your brain on Instagram slop that only benefits Mark Zuckerberg and whatever propagandist fed it to you.
I hope, in the coming years, that the publishing industry does not become fully pay-to-play, that the racists among us will once again feel fearful of showing their true faces, and that we will regain more meaningful ways of interacting with people from all walks of life in our day to day existence.
In the meantime, 24 hours after setting my alarm to check in for my Southwest flight, promptly getting distracted, and remembering with an “oh shit oh shit” 15 minutes later… I’ll enjoy standing up to board with my fellow B 1-50s while I still can.
Have you noticed any signs of increasing stratification in the world of books? Is this just how it’s always been? And what should we do about it?
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Art: The Miser by Jan Massys
You are absolutely correct about stratification of, not only the publishing industry, but everything else.
I’m fed up with the way money has become the most important thing in life, to the detriment of everything else.
I’m just an ignorant author, as far as economics goes, but the insistence of profit, and, as we are constantly told, the importance of economic growth, all seem to me to be decreasing, not increasing the quality of life and the difference between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’
My personal view is that we shouldn’t be stratifying society, but equalising it. And finding ways of creating a sustainable economy, not a growth one. After all, there must come a point where more growth isn’t possible. What then?
Absolutely! As world population perhaps peaks and we confront climate change, we’re overdue for a new paradigm that doesn’t organize everything around consumption and “growth.”
Intersting, Nathan. But only 100% inflation in 40 years? A quick Google suggests 400% is more like it, though that still makes the tickets more relatively expensive today.
Good catch, I had a typo there, though it’s more like 300% according to the BLS calculator: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Hi, Mr. Agent Man.
I hear/feel what you’re saying.
But I kinda feel it’s always been a bit this way.
Yes, publishers/agents have through the years been more open to diverse voices/talents.
But the bottom line has always been: saleability. Which, sad as it may be, is not true ‘meritocracy,’ it is the true meaning of ‘successful’ publishing – not talent, not ‘art,’ not anything other than: “who that’s sold well is this book most like?”
Take for instance, ‘comp’ titles.
Reminds me of an old friend/mentor of mine, Barry Holstun Lopez, who gave me the best advice in writing I have ever received.
When complaining to him (as often I did, to whoever would listen) as a 20-something ‘enfant terrible’ (as my first agent referred to me) that I was still not getting the publishing contract from Scribners I knew I deserved, while he was off fishing for grayling in Alaska (and working on, at the time, what became ‘Arctic Dreams,’ a Book-of-the-Month Club selection almost before publication), in a very sparsely typed post card he wrote:
‘Now’s the time to write with impugnity.’
At the time, of course, I didn’t know what ‘impugnity’ meant, nor why he told me that.
Not long after, another mentor/friend of mine, Loren D. Estleman, who had the same agent (as did Gary Paulson, but that’s another story), told me as he was writing both Westerns and Mysteries, that he was having a bit of a problem with his various publishers, because they wanted him to not be Loren D. Estleman, artist and talented writer, but write books ‘like’ Elmor Leonard. Or Larry McMurtry.
My point is: if publishing were (ever) a true meritocracy, art and talent would be valued over ‘saleability.’
But these days, with 5 major media conglomerates responsible for not only revenue-generating publishing of books, but all sorts of other ‘media,’ and the livelihoods of far more than a few hundred people, it is even that much harder for an ‘original voice’ to be given a chance.
In my youth, it was always “why don’t you write like…” Now, it’s even more than that. It’s why aren’t you already packaged as a saleable commodity? Can you make a series/franchise out of this one idea? Can we conceivably generate movie or streaming series or other rights out of this one idea?
How many followers do you have on social media?
What category/genre/pigeon hole can we put your book in?
(When I started, YA was just becoming a ‘thing,’ as it’s what my agent was trying to sell my first novel as to Thomas Crowell. When I was in high school, we were reading ‘classics,’ including Gatsby, and The Sun Also Rises, both of which, today, would likely be considered ‘YA,’ as they deal with ‘young adults,’ though probably NOT assigned to high school readers, as both have fair amounts of sex/language/violence that in the 1970s we weren’t protected from).
I just finished reading ‘Yellowface.’ I recommend it to anyone interested in today’s publishing world, and the stratification and selection of saleable commodities: writers, who happen to have ‘highly readable’ books that publishers already know they can package and sell.
I wish it were true, that publishing actually was heading toward democratic ‘meritocracy,’ and not stratification.
In the 1920s, there was a similar situation, though publishing houses were smaller operations. With the French advent of paperback books, the ‘out-of-running’ ‘experimental’ writers (Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, etc) often first published each other.
It took a ‘friend’ to (in the case of Joyce) smuggle or otherwise transport a manuscript/book into the US to find a publisher willing to take a risk with an unheard-of, or at least not known ‘saleable’ commodity.
Which Boni & Liverite specialized in.
My understanding is Boni & Liverite still exists, owned by someone and in some form.
But I doubt anyone there – like the venerated (for cause) Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s – has enough clout to actually take a ‘risk’ on an unknown author, unless there is a marketable angle as to why them – not why their book, but why them.
Even then, Joyce knew the quickest, best way to create ‘buzz’ about your book was to have it banned…
I appreciate the thoughtful comment! Perhaps indeed it has always been thus, though when the pendulum swings backward it is never pleasant.