There were two great articles in _The Wall Street Journal_ a little while ago: one titled "Blockbuster or Bust" by Anita Elberse, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School and another called "Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams" by Stephen Greenspan, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut.
I read Elberse's first, and you'll understand why: Elberse's piece had, for me, an irresistible subtitle "Why struggling publishers will keep placing outrageous bids on new books."
Did I have a choice? No. I swallowed the piece whole.
This is a subject: 1. close to my heart; 2. one which keeps me eating that same heart OUT as I try to comprehend why Sarah Silverman (attractive as she is, and as much as I enjoyed her video "I'm F***ing Matt Damon") received a $2.5-million dollar advance for a first book.
I mean, I genuinely understand why Tiny Fey deserves $17-billion -- or however much she's getting -- because she's a proven writer. She's written lots of pages of, well, writing. But Silverman? She performs -- and she's great at it. But $2.5-million as a chance to see whether she translates onto the page?
Not that I'm bitter. Really. Hahhahhahahhhhaaaaaa. Whew.
But Elberse explained in clear, precise terms (as heartbreaking, scary, demoralizing, unnerving, unfair, and -- misery of misery -- as absolutely predictable as it might seem) why "the blockbuster strategy remains the most sensible approach to lasting success."
Sigh.
Only after I struggled with concepts of the publishing industry as an "informed crapshoot" (as one executive put it) and accepted--with a struggle and some gnashing of teeth--the idea that "Even if they (the publishers) could develop extraordinary competence in finding gold in the ‘slush pile' of hundreds of pieces of unsolicited material received each week, the dividends would be limited," did I turn to Greenspan's article in the WSJ which was about how otherwise ordinarily sensible folks can get lured into financial debacles.
Of course I saw a connection.
The two articles seemed to echo one another -- I saw the same forms of seduction and ignorance playing on the emotions and hopes of vulnerable investors as the ones playing on the emotions and hopes of writers (all of whom are incredibly vulnerable, except maybe for Sarah Silverman). Investors and writers are all looking for a break, an "in," a connection to the lifeline, pipeline, sure thing, and blockbuster -- even on a smallish scale.
And that's was the appeal, in part, of Madoff's scheme, according to Greenspan, who himself invested in one of Madoff's scams. Greenspan uses his own case to illustrate parts of his argument concerning the lure of the leg up -- even if the leg isn't FAR up.
My impression is this: Madoff was like an elusive, prestigious, independent publisher who wanted YOUR literary fiction even though everybody else told you nobody was buying literary fiction these days. Everybody else told you to write books about dogs (Marley) and cats (Dewey) but Madoff said, no, no, you're the next Roth, Updike, Proulx, and Winterson all blended together in a perfectly marvelous mix and he, only he, could guarantee you a devoted, if select, audience.
You're a good writer. You deserve the kind of return on your investment this publisher promises. You believe.
That's the key: Like Muldar from the X Files, we Want To Believe.
Just as some searched the sky for Super Bernie to rescue them from financial obscurity, writers look for the Angel of Bestseller Lists and await a visitation from the New Yorker Fairy Godmother.
What's a writer to do?
(crossposted from The Chronicle of Higher Education)
