CELEBRITY AUTHORS, LIBRARIES AND CULTURAL WARS
A few weeks ago there was a brief flurry of tweets in another outburst against celebrity children’s authors, brought on by a comprehensively researched article in the Guardian ‘Famous first words: how celebrities made their way onto children’s bookshelves.’
The piece explores attitudes in the publishing industry towards celebrity authors, and how these attitudes impact on non-celebrity author sales and morale.
The article went viral in the children’s publishing world, and several high profile children’s authors and journalists took to twitter berate the publishers for, as they see it, unfairly channelling their budgets into their celebrity authors and leaving mere crumbs for all others. It seems this trend has led to an ever increasing virtuous circle for celebrity authors who reap the benefit of massive exposure and marketing by increased sales, thus securing further large advances. For them it’s a win-win. The fear expressed by some is that not only are ‘real’ authors not being promoted or widely read, but that children are not being given access to a range of authors. Parents are too often only buying the biggest names which are being given the most prominence and space on the shelf or promoted on Amazon. You could draw an analogy with junk food being more easily accessible than a healthy diet.
Publishers justify this strategy, arguing that it is the revenues generated by a small number of highly rewarded authors that allows them to pay for other, less high profile authors who are likely to sell less books. But clearly not everyone agrees that this is a healthy strategy for fostering the best writing and giving children incentives to stretch themselves with more challenging ‘nutritious’ books.
While I have enormous sympathy with authors who struggle to be fairly rewarded for their work, I feel that getting angry with publishers, although wholly understandable, is a pretty useless strategy. Which publishing business, or any business for that matter, is going to take a course of action which is less profitable, less commercial? Does the responsibility for a meagre diet in children’s fiction, (ie a narrow range of books and authors offered by parents and schools due to brainwashing by publisher’s marketing departments and the media) really lie with the publishers? Is it their job to promote a wider range of books, even if that means poorer sales?
So here’s my view. Surely the problem begins with our notion of our collective culture. Without libraries, in a free market capitalist society, books choices are primarily mediated through publishers’ advertising and marketing strategies and by bookshops, whose prime purpose is to sell books. But imagine a world where all books were free and a child (or an adult) could walk into a bookshop and choose whatever they wanted. Where they could sit quietly, with nothing to distract them, and, having made a selection, become absorbed and engage with the ideas in a book, with no distractions, no tempting buttons to press or controls to flick to another channel. Where they could ask another, real, human being for information and guidance. Where they could choose several books and take them home for free. Where they would be no pressure to buy. Well that is a description of a library. But as we have seen in the past few years of austerity, local government have cut library funding, which is deemed non essential, in spite of their immense cultural value, and almost 800 public libraries in the UK have been forced to close. In addition our governments no longer prioritise funding to ensure that every school have a library and a librarian.
So, are our politicians trying to keep us stupid? By depriving our children and the less well off of wider reading opportunities, does this work in their interest, keeping the population less well informed and less able to make their own minds up about what matters and thereby more vulnerable to manipulation and propaganda?
A 2017 Guardian article (My dad predicted Trump in 1985, it’s not Orwell it’s Brave New World) quotes Neil Postman’s book, ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death.’
‘…the vision that Huxley predicted way back in 1931, the dystopia…we should have been watching out for’
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
Here is a link to a prescient Aldous Huxley TV interview from 1958:
It seems we have to stand up and make choices about what we value at a cultural level. The more widely disseminated books are, the more access you give to a population, the more informed intelligent readers will demand more intelligent books.
That is how we challenge mediocrity and begin to create a virtuous circle of quality books and intellectual curiosity.
