Invasion Of The Pod People

If you can't beat them, join them. If you are beating them, if you have been beating them consistently for decades, well, then you might as well join them too, and crush those small-publishing bastards into the cold, hard ground.

This is the new strategy unveiled last month by large UK publisher Macmillan, in an attempt to seem experimental on the cheap while also sticking it to the small presses that aren't doing anyone any harm.

Macmillan New Writing is the London-based Macmillan Group's new imprint. According to its mission statement, it is "designed to give an opportunity for new authors to achieve publication." What this means is "designed for a large publisher to take a lot of bargain-basement gambles on challenging literature, in the hope that at least one book pays off."

These New Writing books are to be marketed by Macmillan-the past publishers of Kipling and Hardy, one of the few previously highbrow British firms-as regular titles, carried in their catalogs, distro-pushed into chain bookstores as chain lit and into indie bookstores as indie lit. Basically what they're doing is taking the self-publishing movement corporate, and turning the Internet's POD (print-on-demand)-a godsend to ink-stained wretches the world over-into a neat little boardroom revenue strategy based on your aunt's promise to buy 100 copies of that long poem you've been working on for a decade. Yes, that's how desperate publishing is today.

While most people thought downloading and screen reading was the digital future of books, POD has left that dream far in the techno future. With POD you write a book, upload a formatted file of it onto the server of a POD service provider, then order however many copies, from five to 5000; a day later, stacks are at your door.

POD has done so well over the past five years, Macmillan wants in, and rumors have it that Random House is next. Late May, its competitors took one look at the deal Mac's offering and couldn't stop protesting. They want to maintain their business, sure, but the smaller writer-run POD organizations have been making noise with the artist in mind.

"This is a large publisher just trying to own as much content as they can," said Susan Driscoll, president and CEO of I-Universe, one of the internet's most respected POD publishing houses.

"Authors need to see through this. It's criminal. Their rights [the rights to their work, including reprints, paperbacks, film rights, everything] would be tied up forever. And they'd never see any money."

"It seems strange that they would compete [with us]," said X-Libris' Athena Catedral. "It's an attempt to own the whole market, while treating writers like idiots."

With I-Universe, X-Libris and others of their ilk, a writer pays around $500 and gets a few hundred books expertly edited and marketed; most importantly, the writer retains the copyright. In not a few instances, these POD books attract the attention of a larger publisher, who then buys the rights to the book, directly from the author.

With Macmillan, you pay them nothing. You also get paid nothing. And the rights aren't yours. If the book sells three million copies and Ridley Scott wants to do the film, you're fucked. So why would a naive young author go to Macmillan? One reason. The imprimatur.

What Macmillan is doing is something akin to Gucci offering downloadable, printable labels you'd then stick onto whatever ratty sweatshirt wasn't in the wash, like a four-star restaurant advertising the best gourmet burgers in town cooking on a McDonalds recipe.

Which isn't to say that these New Writing books would suck. Far from it. Indeed, most books that don't make it onto large presses fall into one of two categories: absolutely worthless piles of incoherent shit, or well-done novels or story collections just a tad too "experimental" for Oprah. The former of the two has historically been the realm of vanity or self-publishing, the latter the world of the small press. By offering no-fee POD-with no advances paid, minimal editing, zero marketing-under the name brand of one of publishing's most respected houses, Macmillan is erasing these distinctions: doing a disservice to lone crackpots and dedicated literary outsiders the world over.

The days of quantity over quality are here to stay. When one DaVinci Code pays for 10 years of publishing mistakes, Macmillan's editors (read: marketing and distro departments) are hoping that at least one manuscript out of the expected glut will turn gold; Giles Foden, deputy literary editor of the Guardian, said Macmillan's new program was like betting on every horse in the race "without paying for the bets."

After the Guardian shitstorm in mid May, Macmillan produced Michael Barnard, a previously unknown "editor" apparently responsible for this program.

"It's about time," Barnard opined, "that the publishing industry owned up to the fact that there are tens of thousands of good, new writers that don't get published." (Hey Mike, it's who: "who don't get published.")

Prepared-statement grammar aside, this byte contained an awesome revelation. It basically said, "We in the publishing world aren't doing our jobs." If it's a mea culpa from one of the most morally bankrupt arts industries out there, then it's an unconscious mea culpa. If the publishing world can't be responsible for the quality of the writing it chooses to endorse, or for the editorial care of its authors, then they'll spin their crisis and present it as a phenomenal opportunity for neglected artists. No money. No "career." You don't even own your work. Hope they spell your name right on the cover.