Globe and Mail: are publishers blockbustering themselves into oblivion?

[fjtorres]

Blockbuster mania hits Canada, too:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/...ticle21834263/

One anonymous publishing insider is quoted as saying, “The whole pool of talent is shrinking.” He or she even claims that there are “fewer submissions” nowadays.

Come again? A shrinking talent pool? In the middle of the greatest explosion of writing in human history? At a moment when online literary magazines can be created almost for free? When every third university has a Master of Fine Arts creative writing program that churns out carefully edited and workshopped novels wholesale every term? When phone apps are being developed to access and distribute the millions of pages of new fiction, essays and memoirs being published by previously disenfranchised amateurs? Whatever they mean, they certainly cannot mean a shrinking talent pool.

So they must mean that they are not, in fact, interested in the real talent pool, or in a wide variety of literature. What they are looking for are bestsellers, which tend to be particularly narrow kinds of books. Most of the gargantuan advances that have made headlines in the U.S. recently are for science-fiction and fantasy books. Every publisher is looking for exactly the same book – basically, they are looking for The Hunger Games again and again. When they say “quality,” they mean “mass appeal.”

To be honest, they're also looking for the next DIVERGENT, too.

But in concentrating on bestsellers to the detriment of other literature, the publishers are simply following the model of all the entertainment industries. Providing an eclectic variety of entertainments to please a diverse audience, as the free Internet can do, just hasn’t been lucrative for the conglomerates that own film studios and recording labels. They are in constant search of blockbusters.

As they grow larger and concentrate their efforts and investments on massive, sure-fire hits – the next Marvel movie, the next Taylor Swift album – the cultural landscape seems paradoxically smaller. It becomes even more difficult to get an indie film made – the huge projects suck the oxygen (financing, distribution, media coverage) out of the biosphere.

In following this larger trend, book publishers are shortsighted. By reducing their involvement in original and challenging art, they relinquish literary fiction to the tiny presses and online magazines, and so become artistically irrelevant and, in the long run, uninteresting even as suppliers of entertainment. Pursuing mainstream popularity with ever-larger sums of money is ultimately self-destructive.

More at the source.

Alas, he had a good thing going until he made it all about litfic. And only litfic.
Which is not only the least popular genre (and thus most likely to be trampled by bestseller stampedes) but also the smallest part of any commercial publisher's catalog.

His point is valid but only if applied to the broad *genre* mid-list which is what successful trad publishers have traditionally lived off in between blockbuster lottery winners.

It's something to keep an eye on, along with the ongoing mergers and subsequent downsizing. Bestseller thinking (alone) is not causing consolidation but it sure helps it along.