{"id":768,"date":"2014-01-24T21:29:05","date_gmt":"2014-01-24T19:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=768"},"modified":"2014-01-24T21:29:05","modified_gmt":"2014-01-24T19:29:05","slug":"underpaid-and-overrated-authors-hierarchical-reading-in-the-age-of-globalization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2014\/01\/24\/underpaid-and-overrated-authors-hierarchical-reading-in-the-age-of-globalization\/","title":{"rendered":"UNDERPAID AND OVERRATED AUTHORS: HIERARCHICAL READING IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two pieces published within days by Alison Flood in the Books section of The Guardian<\/em> catch my attention. I\u2019m wondering here how they connect \u2013I think they do. The first one announces that \u201cMost writers earn less than \u00a3600 a year, survey reveals\u201d (http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2014\/jan\/17\/writers-earn-less-than-600-a-year<\/a>); the second reports that \u201cWriters attack \u2018overrated\u2019 Anglo-American literature at Jaipur festival\u201d (http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2014\/jan\/20\/writers-attack-overrated-american-literature-jaipur-festival<\/a>). Not much to connect them at first sight, you might think. They are, though, twin aspects of the same issue: how to make your literary voice heard in a seemingly open but actually hierarchical global market.<\/p>\n

The article on the poverty-stricken writers, refers to both \u201ctraditionally and self-published\u201d authors: 54% of the former and almost 80% of the latter earn less than $1,000 (\u00a3600) a year. I\u2019m confused about how print and online publishing overlap with these categories. The grandly called \u2018Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest Author Survey\u2019, covered 9,000 writers (possibly all in English) \u2013more than 65% calling themselves \u201caspiring authors\u201d. The survey authors clarify that only the top 2% authors can be safely called professional. These include the tiny, tiny percentage making a fortune based on global sales\u2026 and luring all the others. The overnight success of a handful of self-publishing luminaries is also pulling ever more writers into the market. The survey authors believe we should celebrate that today \u201cfive to 10 times as many people are paying bills with their craft today as there was just a few years ago.\u00bb Taking as a reference the 9,000, today only 180 of them are full-time professionals in comparison to between 36 and 18 a few years ago. Suppose this refers to the UK, with 63 million people, or even only to Ireland, with 6 million. I don\u2019t quite see much to celebrate\u2026 <\/p>\n

The other article reports Xiaolu Guo\u2019s harsh critique of how English-language \u201cmainstream\u201d spoils reading tastes. Guo is Chinese\/British, and \u201cone of Granta\u2019s best of young British novelists.\u201d She dislikes in particular US Literature, which she called \u00abmassively overrated\u00bb to the face of US top novelist Jonathan Franzen. This was within a session on \u2018the global novel\u2019, whatever that might be. Gao complains against the reign of plot-driven narrative, and how this tends to flatten all stories into quite similar novels, leaving no room for lyricism and \u201call the alternative things.\u201d For Indian\/American Jhumpa Lahiri the problem with American Literature is that it lacks the healthy infusion of other literatures through translation. Guo agrees. Franzen shows a polite concern with the \u201chomogenisation of global culture\u201d (meaning US-dominated corporate publishing business).<\/p>\n

His other remark links the two articles. Even supposing everything could be translated automatically, no reader would be able to cope with the flood. \u201cIn a funny way,\u201d he says \u201cyou’d think there\u2019d be greater diversity in what is read, but I worry that the trend in a more global literary marketplace is even more towards a kind of star system and a vast sea of people who can\u2019t find an audience.\u201d We come thus full circle \u2013 the tiny group of millionaire writers at the top of the survey are, I\u2019m sure, producers of English-language mainstream novels. Most readers, unable to find what they might enjoy in a sea of 9,000 writers, chose the top 180 or, more likely, the top 18. Possibly not even the top 18 writers, but the top 18 mainstream novels of the season. If they\u2019re American 17 will be American, if they\u2019re European, 8 will be American.<\/p>\n

I know the argument is a bit fuzzy but now that the internet has created a truly global foundation for the liberation of Literature from publishing restrictions, we still have to cope with two serious problems: language barriers (which favour English), and the readers\u2019 tendency to choose for safety (which favours the mainstream). The bigger the market, the smaller the chances to become a professional writer\u2026 for more than two novels. For readers, the tragedy is that possibly most of the books that we\u2019d love to discover bypass us, either because they\u2019re in a language we cannot access or because we never even learn they exist.<\/p>\n

Gao, of course, ironically represents those who cannot understand that the ideal market for literary innovation is a market as tiny as possible for a select group of readers, whether they read poetical literary novels or hard SF. Globalization means they needn\u2019t be in the same place, and might be a relatively much bigger group than if they were in just one nation. But her implicit dream that if you suppressed mainstream US literature, the world would be a wonderful intercultural forum, a truly democratic global world, is simply not realistic. She herself, by the way, writes in English. Her other language is Chinese. Not exactly the best possible position to understand how it feels to be really marginal in our global world.<\/p>\n

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Two pieces published within days by Alison Flood in the Books section of The Guardian catch my attention. I\u2019m wondering here how they connect \u2013I think they do. The first one announces that \u201cMost writers earn less than \u00a3600 a year, survey reveals\u201d (http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2014\/jan\/17\/writers-earn-less-than-600-a-year); the second reports that \u201cWriters attack \u2018overrated\u2019 Anglo-American literature at Jaipur […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}