More thoughts on Ken Auletta, literary mixtapes, and selling books by the chapter
I cross-posted my Saturday post on HuffPost. (Look, kids! Three variants of “post” in an eight-word sentence! Ick. But less ick than my HuffPost headshot photo, which I will replace if my vanity ever manages to trump my inertia.)
Anyway, my post from here was up on the HuffPost Books page the last time I checked. A HuffPost reader commented that my idea amounts to “butchering books and selling them off piece by piece like so many tenderloins and flank steaks …” As the ellipses indicate, I’ve butchered the commenter’s comment. The entire comment is worthwhile and can be seen here.
Here’s the response I posted:
This comes down to truth in labeling. You can sell a tenderloin if you call it a tenderloin. If you put the same cut of tenderloin up for sale at a livestock auction, you’re going to have a problem when the buyer realizes he didn’t buy a living, breathing steer.
Similarly, if my wish came true and people could buy chapters 10, 11, and 12 of Caro’s LBJ book, it would be crucial to label those chapters as part of a larger work.
Serious authors write coherent chapters. Compared to a short excerpt or a single sentence, a chapter should be pretty good at defending itself.
Furthermore, I would hope that buyers of these kinds of instant anthologies would be skeptical. Let’s take me. I’m pretty interested in Afghanistan. If publishers gave me the means, I could put together something like an iTunes playlist of the best chapters I’ve read about Afghanistan. You could buy those chapters. The publisher would get paid. The writer would get paid. But why would you trust ME to assemble that book?
Conversely, let’s take Steve Coll, who won a Pulitzer for his Afghanistan book called “Ghost Wars.” If something happens five hours from now that makes the Andar District of Afghanistan’s Ghazni Province the most newsworthy place on Earth, I would love for Steve Coll to be able to point, click, and publish an instant briefing book that assembles the best existing journalism and scholarship.
If HuffPost’s comment system allowed me a few more words, I would have added some notions I like even more:
While nonfiction should make us cautious, allowing random people to assemble their own version of the yearly “Best American Short Stories” seems benign. And fun. I also get a big smile from the idea of smitten people being able to make the literary equivalent of a mixtape, filling it with lovingly selected poems, stories, memoir chapters, etc.
Meanwhile, Ken Auletta himself will go on NPR’s Fresh Air today to discuss his New Yorker piece. It’s about much more than I focused on: Kindles, iPads, the future of books. As Meaghan O’Connell wrote, it’s “a fascinating, overwhelming story.” I’m eager to hear the Fresh Air interview — even if the show doesn’t humor my request for Auletta to flesh out his claim that “no one, with the possible exception of students, will want to buy a single chapter of most books.” That, after all, is what set me off.
Finally, agent Jason Allen Ashlock of Movable Type Literary Group gave some useful feedback on my sell-books-by-the-chapter idea here and here and here.
