Selling Authors, Not Books

As Balzac's vulgarian Dauriat has made clear, the commercial publisher is apt to be more interested in selling the famous name of an author--in selling an author--than in selling an author's writing. One may find this epitomized in the ever-crowdedness of the bestseller lists with celebrity memoirs that, in spite of being ghostwritten on behalf of the illiterates whose names are the object of the traffic, with little regard for the truth, still have nothing to offer an intelligent reader.

Indeed, people have come to expect such selling so much that even those who should know better seem to be taken in by all the nonsense, with the blow-up over a certain gratuitously and superciliously insulting profile of Brandon Sanderson that the editors of Wired magazine bizarrely decided to publish exemplary. Brandon Sanderson was, in the view of the interviewer in question, interesting only as a writer of books that a significant fan base enjoyed reading.

There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, that is all anyone can--or should--ask of a major commercial author. But the interviewer, who did not seem to understand this, started another of those Internet tempests-in-a-teacup that are all people can talk about for hours, but which they have completely forgotten a month, even a week, later.

It is a sad, sad testament not only to what book-selling had already become in Balzac's day, and how it has only gone on getting more disgusting since, but to the way in which the "Fourth Estate" so utterly assimilates and promotes the logic of those whom it should be challenging.