It’s hard to convey, today, just how stark the divide was between the world of mainstream and independent music in the ’80s. While very few artists (R.E.M. in the USA, the Smiths in Britain and the Church, or, for one album, the Triffids in Australia) managed to walk in both worlds, almost universally the line between commercial and independent was harder drawn than the demarcation between ‘white’ and ‘coloured’ neighbourhoods in 1950s America.
The mainstream absolutely hated the indies. For most of the first two decades of his career, Nick Cave could no more get played on commercial radio than a pig could fly. Not that we minded: it was just as axiomatic that the ‘mainstream’ was dull and creatively barren, while the indie scene sparkled with creativity. Punk almost destroyed the music industry. In only his second-worst crime, Michael Jackson ‘saved the record industry’.
The same story is playing out, today, in the publishing industry. The ‘trad publishing’ world is widely regarded as dull and morally and creatively bankrupt, especially poisoned by wokeness. ‘Indie’ publishing, whether by small, bespoke publishers, or the once-derided self-publishing industry, are where the creativity and interest are.
Not least for male reasoners. Trad publishing is almost completely dominated by women – and it shows. Men, traditionally big readers of Fantasy and Science Fiction, are being increasingly alienated by feminised ‘Romantasy’. Even cover design is geared to Marie Kondo style minimalism, rather than the gorgeously illustrative covers readers prefer.
But short of a miracle, entrepreneurial and courageous authors may still write new books that break out of this literary wasteland, and discerning readers may still buy, read, and talk about those books.
Indie publishers have one, huge advantage that indie record labels did not: distribution and reach. It wasn’t just prohibitively expensive for indie labels to physically get records stocked by mainstream stores in Boondock, USA, it was often impossible. The big commercial labels had distribution sewn up.
Indie authors have no such setback. Thanks to the internet and, yes, global corporates like Amazon, an indie author can get their book in the world’s biggest marketplace with the click of a mouse.
This brings its own drawbacks, of course. An indie publisher is a very small fish in a huge and crowded sea. Standing out is a marathon effort.
Just like the indie music scene, too, quality can be an issue. Where indie records were often badly recorded and mixed, without access to the editing process available in trad publishing, indie books can be a crapshoot of bad writing. But, like indie music, while they might be amateurish and rough, indie books can spark with the sort of creativity and fun that’s all but dead in trad publishing.
“Wild” self-published or independent novels are not good by dint of being different. But difference is at least a precondition of a renaissance. If talented writers can’t get into the system, then they should stop performing tricks for it.
Ross Barkan’s new and much discussed novel, “Glass Century”, signals a shift. The author – a contributor to these pages and a New York magazine columnist – offers a moving, multigenerational social novel set primarily in the less glamorous parts of the five boroughs. “Glass Century”, in terms of form and content, is a novel of the midcentury: it slowly builds a picture of life. Like many older novels, but few new ones, it remains open to digressions and to detail – and is less fundamentally concerned with pace and voice: more substance, less flash.
It’s significant that Barkan has published “Glass Century” through a small imprint (Tough Poets) and has seemingly done much of the publicity for the book himself; rather than write a novel that momentarily fits a hot category or responds to a strain of contemporary discourse, Barkan wrote an ambitious novel first, and has used his own platform (primarily Substack) to attract and naturalize readers to the style; make readers come to the book, not the other way around. This is the way.
Trad-published genre fiction, such as fantasy and SF, are sinking into a quagmire of wokeness, plastered with a too-knowing ‘meta’-ness. That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf: yes, that is an actual title of an actual trad-published ‘Romantasy’. It just reeks of the ‘how do you do, fellow kids’ bullshit of soulless corporates trying to ‘get down’ with ‘the kids’. It’s a Harvard grad in a Manhattan steel-and-glass box trying to pretend they’re Tom Joad.
Trad-published literary fiction is even worse.
[They] too often take a meta-modern stance with flat, self-absorbed protagonists desperate for erotic attention or furious they can’t get it. Many of these books feel like they were written by people who were quite literally born after 2020 – after the fall. There’s no outside, no historical ground to stand on. Just the internet, just memes. No future either – just a flat, stale now.
So called alt-lit novels – which now means something like: select former indie authors repacked by a Big Five imprint — too often deploy the same basic trope: a solipsistic protagonist who narrates her own phantasmagoric breakdown. Dissociation and internet addiction, in the 2020s, have become axiomatically literary. Take this representative passage from Tao Lin’s Leave Society: “After three days of consciously attributing hazy despair, static negativity, and loss of mind control to modern urban society instead of other people, personal failings, or existence itself, he felt stably in a good mood again.”
Apparently an actual human being wrote that crap. If this is the sort of ‘writing’ threatened by AI, then it deserves to die.
I suspect that, assuming the novel form will survive this decade, novels will not be written, largely, as they have been since at least the Nineties, by MFAs [Master of Fine Arts graduates] and publishing insiders, but by radical traditionalists and outsiders who can use tools like Substack (and whatever platforms on or offline emerge in the future) to assert counter-aesthetics […] written for sheer pleasure, rather than Big Five exposure.
For the same reason I disdained godawful corp-pop like Michael Jackson and Madonna in the ’80s, these days I’m glad to fork over my Kindle Unlimited subscription for access to a wide world of indie fiction. The good, the bad and the just plain unreadable, at least it’s fun. As a young Johnny Rotten once said, you do remember what ‘fun’ is?
