The horror-meister testifies…
Stephen King crawled out of his Northeast Dracula’s castle long enough to testify against the Simon & Schuster – Penguin/Random House merger. In other words, he supported the government and Simon & Schuster’s anti-trust arguments designed to prevent the Big Five publishing conglomerates becoming the Big Four, with the combined behemoth becoming the T. Rex of the industry.
Publishing is generally a gentrified and global gentlemen’s club (how’s that for alliteration?) except in cases where someone like John Bolton or Andrew Cuomo do battle against Trump and other fascists to get a tell-all non-fiction [sic?] book published. (Actually, it’s the industry is more like a rich country club because women participate, if only as agents—like real estate agents, most literary agents are female pariahs and very similar to those you might find in rich country clubs).
It’s interesting to ponder about what King’s real motives might be. I’m not a great fan (Misery is his only good novel), and I worked hard to complement and correct his On Writing in my little course “Writing Fiction” (a free PDF download available on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page); his treatise, beyond being an obit for him and all other old and formulaic mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables, needed modernizing, to say the least, because it’s mostly an expression of his ignorance about today’s publishing scene.
Of course, S & S share their spokesperson’s ignorance. Hey guys, ninety-nine percent of today’s authors who produce really good stuff do not worry about traditional contracts with $250k or more advances! (Cuomo’s was around five million.) They’re not celebs with scandalous stories to tell like Bolton (or not to tell, in the case of Cuomo), or a formulaic mare or stallion whose books are bought because readers buy books like they buy a smart TV, i.e., for the brand not the quality.
I bet the only reason King testified for S & S is that most of King’s millions in book royalties come from them, so he might want that small publishing house (small relative to the other behemoths, Penguin/Random House among them), to remain independent so he can remain the resident author emeritus. (The latter in academia is reserved for an old mare or stallion put out to pasture who has at least contributed to the education of young women and me, so maybe I shouldn’t use it to describe King, who hasn’t educated anyone!)
I’m now almost a 100% DIY self-published author (after experimenting a bit with traditional publishing), so I, like many other self-published authors, don’t give a rat’s ass about what King and the other old mares and stallions do, and I don’t care whether it’s the Big Four or Five because their prehistoric business model will go the way of the dinosaurs because self-publishing will be their asteroid.
But back to your motives, Stephen. Somehow I suspect that S & S’s and your motives might be a bit more profound. Maybe all this is a plot against Amazon, that infamous and insidious retail site that hs made everyone in the publishing business nuts. The big Bezos bot and his little bots are bad for everyone, all readers, any kind of author, and all publishers. Amazon was the worst thing to happen to book publishing!
If that’s your hidden agenda, Stephen, I’m with you, man! My fellow self-publishing authors and I are not the greatest danger—yeah, we’re formidable, but not your worst nemesis—the greatest danger is a shared one. Amazon! We can never get along, self-publishing and traditional publishing, until the rogue elephant in the publishing industry is put into chains and locked away!
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