In the last post, I discussed the book titling process as I’ve experienced it — and raised some critiques about what the publisher’s ownership of this part of the process means for the resulting book. I wanted to explore that idea a bit further here, taking some other parts of the publishing process into account.

When I think of a book, I usually think of the physical object: what you might take down from the shelf of a bookstore and hold in your hand and examine. By that definition, the cover and frontmatter are at least as important as the text that actually constituted the original manuscript — most of which is publisher-created. 

This was odd to me the first time I realized it: that, for example, that a foreword is not actually part of the book, per se, but more part of the product, which is only an adjacent concept to that of the book. At the Press, the conversations around forewords were almost always centered on the marketing of the book. Rather than a foreword writer paving the way for the impact of the author’s words, it functions almost as a separate piece of promotional writing that refers to the author’s work — and how could it be otherwise if it’s written after the fact, almost always in isolation from the author? 

Same, of course, with blurbs. And the cover design itself. The author has input in all this, but the publisher holds the power of final say. So it’s quite possible to pick up a final copy of a book from the Press, examine the cover, begin reading, and not reach anything the author actually created for several pages. 

I find this troubling, and I’m encouraged to see the rise of self-publishing as something that is able to transcend mere vanity publishing. This seems to work well enough for authors with existing platforms of some kind — meaning that, to some extent, it’s still a question of marketing. But, of course, it feels more integrated when it’s the creator of the book doing the marketing.

To some extent, it sounds unrealistic to separate a book from being a product. I don’t fully have a picture for what this might look like, mostly because I’m so immersed in the current way things are (as most of us are) that anything else is inconceivable. But my suspicion is that any way forward beyond this would require extremely limited scope — a local community of writers and readers that has their choices limited enough that they can truly evaluate books on their merits and not through the means of marketing. 

The closest I’ve experienced to this utopian vision is in the music scene. For a little while, there was a three-day festival in a neighborhood of Grand Rapids where only local artists played, and the venues were all houses (open to the public for the duration of the festival). Music sales of the performers’ music operated out of another local house — creating a hyperlocal scene of beneficially limited scope. I think something similar could work for the world of writing.

Of course, there are downsides to these kinds of limitations — most notably insularity and homogenization. But these are not necessarily inherent to the model and could be counteracted with deliberate diversity and inclusion initiatives in concert with intentional community building. Furthermore, the hyperlocal model need not be the totality of a reader’s experience — they could still supplement their reading with traditionally published material. But the portion of their reading experience that occurs in the hyperlocal model would be an eye-opening experience that begins to separate the conflated ideas of book and product that have distorted our assumptions about what a book is and who is its creator.