Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. — A. J. Liebling
Press critic A. J. Liebling
I was once talking to a publisher of very fancy books and he was complaining how his edition of Gary Snyder’s latest, I think it was, had sold only 12,000 copies.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
Virginia Woolf, to whom I keep referring because she is the one thing I know almost everything about, having realized, when I set out to be a reporter, 43 years ago, that it would be a state of being one mile wide and one inch deep, and if I wanted any self-respect at all, I needed to know everything about one thing, and it was she, was her own publisher.
Famously, she said it gave her the freedom to write some of 20th century modernity’s earliest works. This includes experimental novels like The Waves, which goes up blow-for-blow against Ulysses. In fact the Hogarth Press which she founded with her husband, for which she was both typesetter and reader, turned down the opportunity to publish Ulysses in 1919.
Much has been made of what Virginia, who may be the finest literary critic of the 20th century, did not like and what she stole from Ulysses.
But as a matter of fact her husband, Leonard, who did the heavy lifting as publisher, writes that they decided to print it if they could find a printer willing to risk it. He showed Ulysses to two printers, and they “said no respectable printer would have anything to do with it, for the publisher and the printer of it would certainly be prosecuted.” [Beginning Again, 247]
Virginia’s ownership of her own means of production, her sales, her “platform” as the daughter of England’s foremost literary journalist, who herself made a living writing book reviews, have always been a part of my thinking about book sales and newspaper circulation. Her masterpiece, well-reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, had two print runs, the first of 7,000 and the second, in the same year, of 5,000.[The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, 48, Note 3.]
The Waves will be read as long as people have eyes. Gary Snyder won’t be. To sell 12,000 copies of a truly arcane novel, in 1931, or late 20th century beatnik poetry, in 1996, is an fn miracle of literacy and good fortune.
To think that there are 12,000 people who can read arcana, and have the money to buy the book — last I checked fancy editions of Snyder are selling for $41 — is unprecedented in history. Snyder’s publisher was certainly thinking about the Dan Brown ball park, or maybe Tupac’s, and I made him pay for lunch because a.) he made fun of the waitress’ pronunciation and b.) he was so clearly delusional.
The paradigm is this: nobody goes into the quality writing business to make money. If you want to be Dan Brown, be Dan Brown. If you’re a poet, or a journalist, or the 20th century’s best writer of fiction, repeat after me. You’re not in this for the money, and you’re not going to make any, and 12,000 in sales is a miracle in the history of mankind.
If you’re a newspaper publisher, you’re not in it for the money. If you’re a rich Silicon Valley start up entrepeneur, and like nouveaux riches throughout the history of money, you find yourself mesmerized by the prospect of being a “newspaper” “publisher”, for lack of a better term, because of the supposed political entree, clout and social cachet that entails — oh! what fun we’ll have eating with Gwen Ifill and Ram Emmanuel in our kewel Watergate offices overlooking the Potomac! — you need to do four things.
Prepare to lose all your money, to have a separate income stream, to reinvent online journalism so as to monetize itself, or if you’re to produce real online journalism, suffer the circulation/advertising/monetizing consequences. Or else.
Finance is not my bailiwick. I don’t need to know the multiplication tables to see which way the wind and the invention of fiduciary instruments like sending college kids credit cards or bundling mortgages, blows. Craigslist has gutted newspaper revenues. Newspaper advertising sales people are the slowest on the digital uptake. Next?
Harvard’s Nieman people and the Columbia Journalism Review and the Project for Excellence in Journalism are among the serious players on the case. PEJ to be most trusted because they actually talk to working journalists about revenues and circulation.
Here we have Nieman, who are fanboyz, interviewing Ben Huh, the progenitor of I Can Haz Cheezburger. Huh, like every plutocrat since the beginning of time, is being sucked into the glamourous world, as he sees it, of “newspaper” “publication”. He is going to take his Cheez revenues and reinvent the news.
Ben Huh reinvents the news with his I Can Haz Cheezburger pelf.
Let me say, first of all, I dote on I Can Haz Cheezburger. Because I am and always have been, despite certain bluestocking tastes, a Downtown Girl, and what I think of as the Digital Watercooler Journalism — we all hang around cyberspace looking at LOL cats and reading aggregated Gawker riffs about John Travolta’s private parts as we trudge through our digi day — is a true benison of socially redeeming importance to all us cyberdrones.
As for Ben Huh’s ideas about journalism, keep your knees together and your hands on your wallet.
Next up:
huh
monetize with conferences or salons or kaplan
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_washington_post_cos_self-d.php
PEJ — it’s reconforming truth: kickstart journalism, pro publica
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2010-01-25#folio=038 http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/
Writing 
I think this goes beyond journalism, to the role of amateur (as in, done for love and not for money) creativity and practice in our lives. While techology has undoubtedly reduced some livelihood opportunities for local providers of – what? Music, portrait painting, photography, typesetting, typing, mom-and-pop retail, and – yes – writing, I doubt it has reduced the absolute incidence of high-quality art (though perhaps drowning it out in a cacophony of prole preferences). As you observe, the 12,000-copy sales that had so disappointed the publisher (good for you, making him pick up the tab) equaled the two press runs of Woolf’s masterpiece.
And you yourself can publish yourself, and you do! And I read it, obsessively I might add, without needing some intermediary editor to decide that jeannettesmyth.com is worth setting to type.
I often reflect that here I am watching a DVD of the Metropolitan Opera’s recent Don Pasquale, while my great-grandparents – music-lovers as well — eked out a subsistence living on a German farm. I am not deprived of singing, even if no-one will pay me to do it – and why should they? They can listen to Anna Natrebko, who looks better too. Whereas 100 years ago, I wouldn’t even have the score available, never mid the opportunity to hear it. Back then, more than 90% of the population worked from first to last light just on food production (now it’s something like 9%, maybe less).
No-marginal-cost reproduction of content may be the death of print, and pose wrenching challenges for the typesetters of yore, but high-quality content is still there – more of it (the family blowhard isn’t the only source of opinions any more), and people are still willing to pay for curated content (we, for instance, pay for the digital Grey Lady, which we flip through in bed on iPads.)
With technology automating so much shitwork – and with it, paid employment – we are now challenged to distribute fairly the new wealth. Not keep jerking away the chairs as more and more workers circle fewer and fewer workbenches, desperate for a paycheck. Or producing more crap just to provide full employment. Spread the available, remaining work around more evenly and all of us enjoy more leisure. To do as amateurs what we love , what we feel called to do – mud-wrestling. Netsuke. Poetry.