The Great Anachronism of our Time

You’re no one unless you have a book.

It’s true for just about everyone. Even bloggers. Suddenly Markos Moulitsas is all over TV…because he has a book. (It’s a good book.)

But this really came home when someone got me Bill Maher’s book, New Rules. It’s nothing but a set of short monologues from his TV show. No longer than blog postings, really.

Now I get it about the discipline. When you do a book you’re looking at organizing 50,000 or so words into a coherent whole, a single story (fiction or non or maybe straddling the line), at least a theme. You’re creating a product. A product with a business model that works.

But you’re also creating an anachronism.

The fact is that books have all the ingredients that frustrate online content-producers.  They take a defined amount of time. They take money to publish and (mostly) market. They kill trees. They honor gatekeepers — the book publishers. They are a competitive hurdle most of us can’t cross.

And, increasingly books themselves are mere products of TV. The Maher book is a good example. Half the stars in Hollywood have books like this — every comedian with a show has a book like this. Stars who can’t write do kids’ books like this. The Maher book took me barely a single evening to finish. It was like a box of Junior Mints. The only thing that made it tolerable reading was I was able to "hear" Maher’s voice saying what I was reading. Otherwise it was no good at all.

TV and books, in fact, have a symbiotic relationship. You get on TV (if you’re a General, or a politician, or a pundit) by doing a book. Everyone who sits next to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show has a book (or a movie). The TV exposure may (if you’re lucky) get you another book. Pretty soon you’re on The Surreal Life and things have come full-circle.

A book, in fact, is very easy to do. I’ve done several in the last few years. It costs a few months and $1,000. Of course you’ll have to do your own marketing. Which means you’re wasting your time and money.  I probably do several books a year on this blog. It’s better than my books.

And in the end that’s what frustrates me about the whole process. Book
sales are like units of fame. They’re also units of separation, from
those who can’t sell books. Books are how fame is monetized. Go by a cheap-o bookstore sometime and see
all the faces that you used to know.

Books are also units of political influence. Has anyone read Neal Boortz’ The Fair Tax Book?
Anyone? There is a reason for this. Political groups "publish" these
"best sellers" and then have them bought back in bulk and warehoused. I
actually found where they go to die — these $1 bookstores down on I-75
in South Georgia. Stacks-and-stacks of ’em.  Want to make nonsense seem
sane? Publish it as a book, with a "celebrity" author, print a million
copies, set up a "bookstore" and claim they’re all sold — now you’re
on the NY Times best-seller list and sitting next to Bill O’Reilly.
It’s a scam.

By the way, my wife loves books. She doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t surf the Web, she reads books. Fiction, mostly, plus some science. She enjoys them, laughs with them, tells me about her favorites. I wrote a book once whose main character was based on her. She said she liked it. (Send me an e-mail and I’ll send you the PDF.) I’ve got nothing against books per-se.

And if a publisher wants to get me a deal that will let me sell, say, a million or two books, I will not say no. But to make a living writing good books that sell modestly and bring in a good living? That’s an anachronism. Those days are over.

Why?

New rules.