Changing trends

Despite the fact that most serious academic books are commissioned, a large number of unsolicited manuscripts turn up on a variety of subjects. Most of them are turgid doctoral theses that are rejected with a polite refusal after a decent interval of time. But there is always an odd chance that a work, well written, deeply researched, may be found in the slush pile. As against this, there could be a work that is not, but which covers a wide area, is relevant with few competing titles but has to be heavily edited for language, style and subject matter. Which of the two would the publisher?s editor choose and why?

The answer would be the latter because it has a sales potential if properly ?straightened out?; the former would be rejected because it is confined to a very narrow readership spread across the entire country and hence difficult to reach. This great change has come about in the last decade: micro studies are out, macro is in, especially if it is laced with some entertainment value.

The upside of this is that the literary world is open to anybody who can ?see? what matters and put it across in a reasonably competent manner. When the dominant philosophy is that the market determines what matters and what does not, a good work that is unfashionable will be neglected and a mediocre one will enjoy an inflated reputation because it is fashionable.

The downside is that, in the absence of any consensus about aesthetic value, some other value system will take over. And given the nature of our acquisitive society, it is not surprising that a materialistic notion of success as measured by sales, advances, prizes, media celebrity and so on has filled in the vacuum. To put it crudely, success has become an index of fashionableness. If you need further elaboration, check out Martin Amis, whom many consider to be a representative novelist of our generation with two of his novels, Success and Money.

You may say this was not always so and regret the passing away of an age where success and money were not the only criteria for selection. Whether it is altogether a bad thing depends on the books that are being eliminated. This is a difficult exercise because if you go by the sheer number of titles that are being published, it seems that everything is in, nothing is out.

There are, of course, dangers of the contamination of literary values by considerations of fame and money. But they differ, only in degree, not in kind, from what had always been the case, at least up to the mid-Eighties: it was always necessary to be an artist while writing your novel, and a man of business while publishing it. The business side of things was never lost though it never came out in the open in the manner it has now. All one says is that the conditions of modern publishing, the costs of distribution and other overheads make this balancing act particularly difficult and requires an absolutely clear head if one has to survive in the ruthless marketplace. If they don?t have it, they will simply go under.