HarperCollins Sells Its Soul, Uses Benjamins to Dry Tears
Michael Wolff goes to town on the book publishing industry, namely HarperCollins, for pushing “vanity books” instead of “real books.” Front and center is Sarah Palin’s Inuit romance novel, Pantsuits with Wolves:
Publishers publish fake books because, if you have an “author” who has some larger cause to promote, the publisher gets free promotion. What the publisher has traded for such an abundance of promotion is its own brand. HarperCollins does not really believe Sarah Palin has written a valuable book—or even that it is really a book, not in the way that HarperCollins has historically understood books, or in the way that people have counted on HarperCollins to have understood a book.
So true! There’s all this other stuff, though–”[Books are] fake. A lie. So many are just simply not written by the people the publisher tells you they are written by. Somebody should sue.”–that I can’t get behind, not since I finished Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City on Saturday and cried myself to sleep. That book was definitely not a lie.
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1:22 pm
Michael Wolff is the uncreator of value. Is he really the fella to be judging a dying industry for trying to sell products people want to buy?
1:51 pm
Argumentum ad hominem! *Wand-waving motion*
I think Wolff’s argument is stronger for that fact that he simply co-opted the more general argument against people who write celebrity memoirs, and tweaked it into a critique of the houses that publish celebrity memoirs.
But now that I’ve had 13 minutes to digest his rant, I think he’s missing a great biz opportunity. HarperCollins could use its shiterature to prop up its literature! Like WaPo and Kaplan!
For the record, I have nothing against celebrity memoirs. I’ve been reading Paul Mooney’s Black Is the New White, and it’s really good. Like Dreams From My Father if it were cut up and then mad-libbed by Richard Pryor.