TSS--Where to Find Edgy Books

A few weeks ago I was on twitter and over-"heard" a conversation about who is to blame for the homogeneity in current romance fiction: authors, readers, or publishing companies. To sum up part of the argument, authors can now self-publish, and potentially make more money doing so than they would with publishing companies; so if authors WANTED to write different types of stories, one would expect to see them self-published as eBooks, no? Yet the majority of self-published books follow the current trend in traditional publishing; ipso facto, homogeneity cannot be entirely (or even mostly) the publisher's fault. Either people aren't buying other types of romances, or authors aren't writing them.

To me this conversation reflects the age-old push and pull between the market and artistic expression. On the one hand, you want to make money. On the other hand, you have a vision for what you want to do with your work. Is it really reasonable to expect self-published authors to answer holes in the publishing market? Here are some of my thoughts:

• I'm not super-familiar with self-published works out there, but I do know there's a lot of them. Any person browsing for cheap eBooks on Amazon sees maybe 1% of what's been self-published, and most of what appears in the top 100 is by authors who are already established by traditional publishing. So judging how authors are pushing the boundaries of the genre through that lens may not be entirely fair. There are undoubtedly TONS of books that would never traditionally be published on Smashwords, Amazon, and B&N right now; but they're are hard to find because the authors don't show up at the top of the buy lists.
• Any writer worth their salt writes for an audience, but what is the audience for self-published work looking for? This is largely unclear, especially to writers just starting out. Publishing houses have marketing departments that not only find out what's selling, but tell people what to buy. An author by themselves has twitter, facebook, and their words. This reminds me of a post I wrote earlier this year about how publishing resembles the beginnings of modern art (post here). In that post, I mentioned the Salon des Refusés and how the artists who participated and become scions of modern art actually wanted to be part of the establishment. It took a generation after that Salon for artists to begin to identify and paint for an audience looking for independent alternatives to the Academy. I do think this idea of self-publishing being the place for pushing boundaries of a genre or experimenting comes from modern art. But if we look to self-publishing for the creative energy to drive literature, will traditional publishing become dinosaurs in the same way the Academies did?
• One of the things my students often come into class thinking, and which I try to disabuse them of, is that art is about self-expression. That may be true in our current society, but in fact most artists in history created art for other people. The Pope didn't tell Michelangelo he wanted him to express himself, he said, "Paint me a ceiling about the Bible, bitch." (Maybe not in those exact words, of course...) Michelangelo still managed to express himself in spite of what the market--which in this case was the Church--demanded. Innovation and self-expression usually happens in spite of the market, not because of it.

I don't really have a point here, but based on what I know of history, I think publishers DO deserve the majority of the blame for what's in the traditional market. Writers will write for the market, and if a publisher says they want to publish X, they will get submissions for it. Also, there is a market for everything--the internet and self-publishing proves that. It just may not be a large enough market for the Big 6 to put time and energy into it.

Fun With Gender Stereotypes

I'm currently reading Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, where one of the main characters is a girl pretending to be a boy so she can join the Royal Air Whatever (Brigade?). Fortunately she has a brother to show her the ropes. His major tip on not giving her status as a vagina away?

Last night Jasper had demonstrated how a proper boy checked his fingernails--looking at his palm, fingers bent, whereas girls looked at the back of their hands, fingers splayed.

Um, yeah. That's the way to prove your manliness--checking your fingernails! Where do people get this stuff?

The weird thing is, I've come across this before. It was in an MG mystery I read when I was about eight or so. The detective knew the male criminal was disguising himself as a female because he checked his nails palm-in. So women are wired to check their nails a certain way? Give me a fucking break.

First of all, it's totally untrue. Google image search "checking nails" if you don't believe me. In fact, here is a photo of model Vena Cava backstage, with long nails and a manicure, checking her nails the "manly" way:



But whether it's true or not (it isn't, so stop staying it) isn't the real reason why statements like this bother me: it's because people assume they're true, and then those ideas became justifications for notions of gender essentalism. Men behave one way, women behave another--ergo, if you act the latter way, you MUST be a man, or vice versa (see detective story, above).

And yes, this goes for stupid and inconsequential things like checking nails, too. Maybe even more so, because no one bothers to question the implications of nail-checking stereotypes, does one? Yet eventually assumptions like this are repeated as fact by such lovely organizations as Choosing the Best, an abstinence-only sex education program in the US known for its gender bias (Legal Momentum).

Here's an idea: maybe we could not fall back on these archaic notions of what men and women "are" and how they behave and instead just treat people like people? I know, I'm wasting my breath. But hopefully at the very least we can stop repeating this nail checking ridiculousness.

Mock-bookery

Remember #RRTheater? It was a thing Jane Litte from Dear Author used to do every Friday, where she'd read a free eBook and tweet about it, then everyone participating in the hashtag would make fun of it. Naturally someone got offended at some point and she had to stop (I'm surprised it took people as long as it did, honestly), but before that happened, it was really fun and we actually enjoyed a lot of the books!

I've noticed people tend to get huffy when others (me) make fun of books. Huffy like a big man with a walrus moustache. But just because I make fun of a book doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it! I make fun of Twilight all the time and I quite enjoy those novels.

Here's the thing, at least ninety per cent of anything anyone reads is utter crap. But, as Steven Lloyd Wilson says in his epic rant against twisty-panted snobs who hate genre fiction, "Pick Your Poison: Sturgeon's Law and Why We Love Bad Fiction," it's the utter crap you enjoy that really defines your reading tastes. Anyone can like Pride & Prejudice; that doesn't make you a hopeless romantic. Going through hundreds of romances a year in search of the most sigh-worthy story, on other hand... now that's connoisseurship.

But just because you enjoy it doesn't mean you also, objectively, are not aware of its flaws. So yes, if a book asks to be mocked, I will oblige. Am I also making fun of myself a little for enjoying such ridiculous books? Perhaps. But that's my prerogative. I have never and will never claim that the books I like are actually good, just that I had fun reading them, and sometimes that involves making fun OF them.




Have you read a book recently you enjoyed making fun of?