Barry News from Britain, and other publishing crap

First of all, sales for Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody continue to climb; the book's still at #10 in the London Sunday Times HB fiction list. The redoubtable Simon also tells me that we're going back for a five-figure reprint (#3), so Kate and I are flying high.



I was surprised to see the NY Times do a number on Dave Eggers' latest. In his defense, I can't imagine the pressure that being that kind of egghead heartthrob puts you under. I'd wilt. Luckily there is no danger of this happening.



In yet more meaningless literary asskicking, the WSJ's critic lambasts David Remnick's New Yorker in favor of Tina Brown's frothier predecessor. Where Brown offered "a chocolate bar," Remnick serves up "a compacted stick of low-fat granola."



He's probably right, Brown's magazine was probably more fun to read--but so what? Absent (as usual) are questions like: "If it's not as sinfully delicious, why does Remnick's version have more readers and lose less money?" "Didn't Talk show the limitations of Brown's approach?" "Will The New Yorker ever survive, much less thrive, without Si Newhouse propping it up?" "Why has it lost money consistently after being run by Conde Nast?" The reason nobody asks these questions is, nobody cares enough to rock the boat. The real cultural heat has been in TV and movies since at least 1975. Print people are as big a bunch of sluts for celebrity as the rest of us--so they turn it into a horserace between Tina and Remnick, while the magazine itself withers as an enterprise.



Unless everything I've read is incorrect, The New Yorker prospered for decades under the ultra-conservative financial stewardship of the Fleishmann family (who often turned down ads, either for tone or space constraints) and the equally old-fashioned, celebrity-phobic editing of William Shawn. Its consistent losses since 1987 suggest that maybe not every magazine can thrive (even if we only define that in its strictest, financial sense), using the standard economic model for American magazines. (Quickly, this is: break-even at the newsstands, sell subscriptions at deep discounts and flood your target demographic's mailbox with direct mail, to pump up the "rate-base"--how many people you can guarantee will see a given ad--and then make whatever profit solely on advertising.) The drive for advertiser-friendly content is the primary force at such a magazine, and whether it's Brown's whole-hearted embrace or Remnick's prickly cheek-peck, it's clear to me that The New Yorker doesn't really fit.



American magazines are rapidly becoming one big magazine, because they all are trying to appeal to the same funding source: big money advertisers. Editors are important, yes, but it's obviously the people who sign the checks (the bosses and the advertisers that pay the bills) that set the tone at a place like Conde Nast. Until they're financed differently--on the reader-driven European model, where circulation is king, perhaps--American magazines will be a creative and cultural graveyard. (Ever wonder why Maxim didn't happen here? Or why Tina Brown is British? Audience-driven art forms encourage creativity and risk-taking--advertiser-driven art forms, don't.) Scratch that--they'll simply be ruthlessly conventional, mindlessly pleasant, and completely flavorless, a tabula as rasa as possible, so the advertiser's message comes through loud and clear.



Meaningless literary ass-kicking over.