This is the unpredictable world of twenty-first–century publishing—a paradoxical place in which more and more Americans each year possess a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing, yet the percentage of American non–book readers has tripled since 1978. According to the CLMP website there are approximately six hundred regularly publishing literary magazines in the United States (not counting online journals!), and a general estimate is that the number of U.S. literary magazines has tripled just in the last thirty years—yet since the turn of the millennium most newspapers across the country have gutted or shuttered entirely their “books” sections. For decades, the largest, most influential publishing houses have consolidated under massive corporate umbrellas, yet thanks to the advent of desktop publishing programs new independent journals and book presses pop up at such a rate it’s nearly impossible to keep up with them.
Meanwhile, the Internet has revolutionized how literature is discovered, marketed, and read; print-on-demand technology has substantially reduced the costs of short-run printing; online publishing has made significant gains in readership; VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts has in a short time drawn national attention to questions of gender parity in literary publications; and each year the AWP conference attracts more than twelve thousand writers and seven hundred presses, magazines, and literary organizations from across the country. All this while every year another article comes out declaring the death of American poetry, fiction, literature, and publishing. How do editors and publishers keep up with—and adapt to—this shifting and contradictory world? What, if anything, remains constant? …
Already we know that people don’t read in the same way. Writer Nicholas Carr, we may remember, made a big splash, first with a cover article in the Atlantic and then in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. In the article, which had the catchy title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” he began on a note of personal worry. He had noticed in recent years an increasing difficulty in sitting down and reading a book in the old way. He found himself having a hard time focusing on any single text; he felt impatient, skittish, frustrated. He theorized that the difficulty might have to do with the fact that he spent the better part of every day working on a computer, doing all of the usual multitasking behaviors so familiar to all of us. Looking further, he began to test his hypothesis using all kinds of studies coming out in the burgeoning field of neuroscience. What he found and documented in his book was the striking corroboration of his intuitions. Our astonishingly “plastic” neural system adapts with great rapidity to its behavioral environment. Fire: wire. Which is to say: we are changing in tandem with the media that are bringing about the changes.
—Travis Kurowski, Wayne Miller, Kevin Prufer, and Sven Birkerts
Transcribed from pages ix, x, and 8 of my first edition copy of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, © 2016, Milkweed Editions.
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