Tech Won't Save Us - How Amazon is Changing the Books We Read w/ Mark McGurl

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Mark McGurl to discuss how Amazon is reshaping the publishing industry and altering the form of the novel itself.Mark McGurl is a Professor of Literature at Stanford University. He’s also the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing and Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. Follow Mark on Twitter at @markjamesmcgurl.🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Jeff Bezos’ valedictorian speech was about space colonization.Paris wrote about Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s early days.US publishers, authors, and booksellers have written to Congress about Amazon’s effective monopolization of book sales, with more than 50% of the US book market.Jane Friedman explains how Amazon shut down many of its writer-oriented programs, makes exclusivity hard to avoid, and dominates Kindle charts.Novels and authors mentioned: Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner.Support the show

The same culture that delivers you a book overnight is the same one that deprives you of the time to read it. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Mark McGurl. Mark is a professor of literature at Stanford University. He's the author of The Program Era, Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, and most recently, Everything and Less, the Novel in the Age of Amazon. Now, in this conversation, we'll be speaking about that most recent book because, you know, Amazon started as this company that was selling books and has moved into many other product lines and businesses since then.

But we shouldn't ignore the impact that it's had not just on the publishing industry, but on the book itself. You know, in the same way that we can recognize how Amazon's e-commerce platform has kind of transformed the way that a lot of people shop and the expectations that they have around delivery times, Amazon's kind of colonization of the publishing industry has had a notable effect, you know, really helping e-books to take off, launching the Kindle and Kindle Direct Publishing to allow self-publishing on a scale that really wasn't possible before, but also taking over much of the print book

market in terms of selling the books because a lot of people buy books from Amazon, not just ebooks. And so Mark argues that in the process of doing that, the book has become less of this kind of physical object that contains information and more of like a service that we expect to always be there and for more of it to be provided. And that naturally has an impact on what the book or the novel itself actually looks like, how it's structured, and the ways that stories are told when it comes to fiction. This is a topic that I've been interested in for quite a while,

so I was really happy to have this conversation with Mark, and I feel like you're going to learn a lot from it as well. So please enjoy. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. This episode of Tech Won't Save Us like every episode is free for everybody because listeners like you support the work that goes into making it every single week. So if you like this conversation and the show more generally, you can join supporters like Josh from Brighton and Ben

Codron by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Mark, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Very happy to be here. Naturally, Amazon is a company that most of us, I think, interact with fairly regularly, even if we don't know it in many ways, you know, with its control of cloud computing and things like that. But your new book looks at, you know, the impact of Amazon of this kind of behemoth company on, you know, the publishing industry, but more specifically, on the novel itself, and how that has kind of been shaped or changed by Amazon's power and by its role in the

publishing industry as well. And so I wanted to go back to kind of the starting of Amazon to get some of that context, because Amazon started in 1994 as a book company, right? It was a bookseller, an online bookseller. Jeff Bezos, you know, the founder, read science fiction, most notably, his then wife, Mackenzie Scott, would go on to be an award winning author. So what is the importance to understanding that kind of origin story, its founding in books and literature, to understanding what Amazon has become today and kind of its impact? It's double-sided. On the one hand, books were a very convenient place to start. More of them exist than could possibly be held in any physical bookstore. They already were rigorously trackable by ISBN numbers. They're all roughly the same shape. They're durable. And so that was something important about books that made them a very inviting place to begin. And there's no doubt that books were

never going to be enough for Bezos as he can sort of see conceived of the possibilities of the internet as a commercial medium. That said, it is interesting that, you know, he was himself a reader, his wife was a reader, and at the time of the founding of the company, an aspiring author, and then ultimately a successful, a modestly successful writer of literary fiction. Jeff's sort of epic imagination has always been part of the business. In fact, it's been part of his life since he was a kid, giving his valedictorian speech in high school. And so I think that's always been deeply embedded in the company beyond the pure, as it were, just pure convenience of books as a certain type of commodity that it made sense to sell first. There are all sorts of literary

things that just are really unusual. So no PowerPoint presentations are allowed in the company. You have to write a six-page narrative and deliver it at the beginning of a meeting. And then everyone sort of reads it, and then the discussion begins. And this is a theory. This isn't fiction, but it's just writing a narrative as being somehow cognitively superior to a PowerPoint visual presentation. So all sorts of little things like that. And then, you know, in one of the elevator landings of corporate headquarters, this big, huge sign right in front of the elevator that says, build yourself a good story. So this idea that to found a business and to grow a business

is a certain kind of 3D narrative enterprise is the idea. Yeah, you know, it's really fascinating to hear those aspects of it, right? You know, naturally, Amazon and its founding, you know, even before it was Amazon, Jeff Bezos was really focused on those kind of business aspects, right? It was located in Washington for, you know, the ability to evade paying sales tax in much of the rest of the country and the lack of the state corporate tax rate. And so while they were readers, books were a very simple product to start with, because as you mentioned, they were already trackable. They had this kind of easy size to make them easy to ship. But there are also these important things, as you say, that kind of come from that, that kind of shape the company and how we understand the company.

Yep, I think that's true. Yeah, so it's really interesting. And, you know, you talk about building a story. I think it's really interesting as you talk about Jeff Bezos and how he, you know, has this kind of idea of himself and these kind of broader visions of the world, how that comes to play in Amazon itself. Because at one point, you talked about how, I can't remember the exact quote, but how it wasn't like Amazon was happening to the literature industry or the book industry, but the future was happening to it. Yes. An infamous statement on his part. Yes. Like totally absolving himself and the company of any responsibility, a classic neoliberal move, right? You know, ultimately it's the aggregate

of consumer demand that runs the world and we're just surfing that wave. So don't look at us. And yeah, Amazon didn't happen to the book and to the publishing industry. The future happened to the publishing industry. One of the classic statements of where he's coming from. Yeah. But I found that really interesting, you know, the desire to kind of write the story, right? While it might not be fiction in particular, and, you know, naturally, we're going to get to the publishing side of this and the book side of this, but I find it interesting that, you know, you can see in Jeff Bezos, in Amazon, but also in many other tech companies, this desire to kind of tell a story, to weave a narrative about what the future is going to look like and how that seems really key to many of these companies when we're thinking

about, you know, the impacts that they're having, right? Like, obviously, Amazon started in books, but there is also this desire to kind of tell a story of its own to the world that we would engage with and believe. Yeah, and there are multiple levels of that. So it starts with the story you tell in your pitch to investors. It continues as the story. In some ways, this is a key feature. The story you tell your shareholders about what the company is doing and why. And that's one of the most remarkable things in Amazon's history was that they pulled off this avoidance of the necessity to show a profit for 20 years. That's a major

boon to a company that wants to grow. And that was via powerful storytelling to investors and shareholders. Yes. And then more broadly, of course, there's the sort of global narrative that we're all brought into as customers or potential customers. Absolutely. So one of the things that I found really fascinating when we're looking at, you know, Amazon's impact on books is that you talk about how the book kind of being shaped by technologies and by companies and, you know, the economic system more generally, I guess, is not something that's new to Amazon, you know, going right back to the printing press where the book itself was, you know, a commodity that was printed. But you also talk about how, you know, I think it's important to understand how there is a shift, right, when it comes to Amazon from this kind of, I guess, industrial product to the book being a service. So can you talk a little bit more about that kind of distinction and what changes with the, I guess, the Amazon model and what that does to books?

First of all, it's quite true that this isn't a story about the arrival of commodification to literature. You know, print capitalism is a couple centuries old. The novel in particular has always been, the modern novel at least, has always been a commodity of a certain kind. The printing press is one of the original machines making identical multiples of things, right? So it's often been observed that if you want to know what's going on in capitalism at any given moment, look at the book industry. Because the state of the book will tell you a lot about that moment. And I think that's true now. Yeah, so my idea was that, in a way, this could always have been true. It just wasn't thought of this way. When you think of a book as

a physical object, often, you know, in the past, a very beautiful physical object. Obviously, what happens in the 20th century is the book starts to realize itself as the medium for delivery of information where one isn't so much worried about the quality of it as an object. And that begins with the paperback. You know what I mean? We can reduce the cost of the object and get it into the hands of more people. And then Amazon, in some ways, is the final step in that, where, sure, yes, you can buy the physical book, a very well-designed physical book,

but we'll also sort of let this drop out of the air onto one or another device that has the Kindle app on it. And so the idea there is that, wow, that's sort of a liquefication or liquefaction, whichever word is appropriate, of the literary object into a sort of something that starts to approach the idea of an always-on service. Always there at your command, the way that your, you know, other infrastructural things are always there, like your cable service. It's always there like your cable service it's always there for you to use and similarly you know one can think about the the novel sort of beginning to be assimilated to that idea so it's not about the singularity of any one novel the greatness of the great novel the epic

making novel james joyce's ulysses say or what have you it's more about a feed of fiction, where the novel starts to look somewhat like the other feeds that we pay attention to, the news feed, the social media feed, etc., where it starts to have that quality, as well as its traditional quality as a well-made physical object. I think it's fascinating to kind of see that development and see that change, right? And naturally, that has effects on books and the people who write them as well. And so when we think about authors, then, you know, naturally, they are going from, you know, I guess the writer who is providing this novel to more of like a service provider, right? Who is, you know, creating this service who is providing these novels on a regular basis to kind of keep up with this constant flow of information or of words or what have you. So what does that mean

then for the author and I guess the approach to the book and to the novel? Well, I mean, one very alarming thing it means it, it particularly means it in the sort of space of Kindle direct publishing. So self-publishing, which is, you know, exploded under Amazon. Anyone who starts a blog knows this. Anyone who does a podcast knows this.

There's an absolute necessity for continual provision of new product or people forget about you and you're just, they lose the habit of listening to you. Right. And so too in literature. I mean, again, this is also not completely new because serialization of fiction was a key feature of 19th century literary commerce, but we have some return of that in a new form in the present. So that if you're a popular writer, especially if you're a self-publishing writer, you better be prepared not to just write your one great book that you've got inside you. The way if you're going to have any chance at making any kind of living at it, is you're going to need to produce, in effect, a narrative feed. So one novel after another. So

if you look at the successful self published writersublished writers, they are all writers of series fiction, of genre fiction of one kind or another. And you get people hooked with the first volume in the series, which you price at 99 cents. And then if you get a readership, then you can sort of start to up that amount, get up to all the way up to 22.99, and then finally you're at $9.99. But it's an idea that the optimum rate at which you will deliver a new novel to your readership is something like once every three months, which as somebody who just spent five and a half years writing a book is just boggles the mind. So you better write pretty quickly. You don't want to get overly precious about things. But people, you know, are out there

sort of looking for the next sort of installment in the series. And so you have to be able to provide it relatively rapidly, or you fall off people's cognitive map. And they just don't, you know, they forget about you in favor of other authors who are delivering the goods. Absolutely. You know, I think that's really fascinating. And I remember the talk about how, you know, there was a need to produce a book every three months or like the algorithm would kind of forget you or down rank you or something like that.

Right. And so, you know, there was this constant kind of need to produce as we were talking about before we started, you know, I was paying constant kind of need to produce as we were talking about before we started. You know, I was paying attention to Amazon self-publishing in this kind of, I think, golden period, as we talked about from 2013 to 2016. And so I wanted to explore that a bit more with you because I feel like it kind of illustrates something about at least kind of Amazon's kind of impact on the publishing industry and on what books are looking like, because it seemed to me, and I'm sure that you can outline this even more, that there was a particular kind of entrepreneurial framing of the author in self-publishing that kind of, you know, fits into this broader neoliberal trend, I think, that we're seeing with with labor. But so can you talk about

that aspect of it and kind of the the framing the author then as someone who is escaping these kind of traditional gatekeepers and being their own kind of entrepreneur who is starting their own business and things like that. Sure. Yeah, that was all made very explicit at that moment, at that early moment. I do think 2013, 2016, 17 was the golden age. Or it was like, you know, the golden age in the sense that it was sort of the childhood of the phenomenon when it was most idealistically considered. And the sort of catches hadn't really dawned on people yet. But yeah, so Hugh Howey, a writer, I write about a lot in the book. He's a very talented, popular science fiction writer. And he's one of the great success stories of self-publishing.

And in fact, his huge hit, The Wool Saga, has been optioned for television. Quite explicitly, you know, was, you know, telling other would-be successful self-published writers to think of themselves as an entrepreneur. You are a startup, actually, is how he put it. You are a startup, actually, is how we put it. You are a startup. The sort of interesting personification of the company. And at that moment, especially, there was a real sense of enthusiasm, like, wow, we have a way of getting around the gatekeepers of traditional publishing. And you had examples like him and others who are really succeeding in doing this in a way that seemed like it might be open to everybody. But of course, in the attention economy of literature, that's not ever going to be really the case.

And, you know, I think what's happened slowly but surely over the years is that, A, you know, that Amazon isn't an entirely benign corporation, as it sort of dawned on people. That, you know, it wasn't like, oh, the big, bad publishing conglomerates. Well, sure. And then Amazon is the salvation. But, of course, Amazon has its own interests at work in enabling you to do this. It was their means of competing with the publishing conglomerates,

one of the ways. And then, you know, certain things happenglomerates. One of the ways. And then, you know, certain things happen over the years, certain programs get canceled. You know, that certain writers are making money from the gate gets canceled. Like,

oops, sorry, that revenue stream is gone. There's, you know, if you want to participate in Amazon unlimited, which is a, you know,

basically a subscription model of litter of the provision of literature, which is completely fascinating, a monthly fee for as many of the million books that they offer that. But if you're an author and you want to participate in that, you have to sign an exclusivity agreement. And a lot of authors are like, oh, wait, that's going to be my only channel? And so, oh, suddenly the heavy hand of this corporation, Amazon, starts to present itself. And then just more broadly, I think over the years, it having to cultivate your email list, having to do your SEO, your search engine optimization, all of your marketing, your cover design, all of this for every single one of your books,

even as you're trying to write the books on a relatively rapid schedule. This is a tremendous amount of work, right? So that initial moment is like, aha, I have my entry into the sort of glorious model of unalienated labor, which is novel writing, expressing myself for a living. And then all of the realities slowly settle in. And it becomes clear that this is quite a grind if you want to make a living from it. And so lots of interesting things start to happen. So you start to get writers getting together to write things. So collective authorship, parceling out the labor. Businesses spring up online. So somebody will copy edit your book or

design the cover of your book or all of the sort of various things that can reduce the labor a little bit. And as we stand here today, I think that, you know, Amazon just isn't quite the hero. It was once sort of conceived to be in this sort of community of so-called indie writers. I think that, I think the story has gotten a lot more complicated. And in fact, I think maybe the state of the art

of self-publishing right now is that it's almost like a farm system for traditional publishing. So like the real success is you gain a following, you have some success on KDP. And if you have enough, you'll get noticed by one of the traditional publishers, and they may come to you with an offer and you might not be able to refuse it because you're so exhausted. Like, God, you know, sure, making 70% of the cover price of my e-book was great. But even that can't make up for the unlivability of my life as I try to do all of these things. And so, yeah. And maybe I'll hold on to the e-book rights if they'll let me and let them do everything else. Because for a physical book,

you know, if you self-publish a physical book by Amazon, it's more like 30% of the cover price is what you get. Although, as we said, even that, a few reviewers have gotten on my case for not being hard enough on Amazon. And I think the book's pretty hard on Amazon, but you've got to understand, if you haven't published a book, 70% of the cover price, 30% of the cover price going to the author is astounding. That's an astounding amount of money, percentage of sales going to the author. And so no wonder at first it looks like Christmas for authors until all the various other complicating realities of the situation enter in. Yeah, you know, I completely agree. And I think that outlines it really well. And just to add to what you're saying, like to explain it, I guess, a little bit more for the listeners, you know, when these authors are self-publishing with Amazon, in order to get the 70% rate in a lot of markets, you have to be exclusive to Amazon.

In order to get particular promotional opportunities, you need to be exclusive to Amazon. In order to get particular promotional opportunities, you need to be exclusive to Amazon. There are a whole range of things that these authors rely on that if you're not exclusive to Amazon, you're not going to get. And Amazon is kind of the whale in the ebook industry and in the publishing industry more general. And so you need to be on there. Just classic monopoly behavior. You literally can't afford to go with somebody else because the penalties will just instantaneously be too high. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, as you're talking about there, it did seem like a lot of these more successful ones, depending on the genre they were in, and I'll get to the genre point in just a

second. But, you know, they started to make these deals with traditional publishers when it came time to do so. And so you could see that, you know, it wasn't completely about, you know, escaping the gatekeeper, but once the gatekeeper could work for you, or, you know, gatekeeper in quotation marks, I guess, then it was perfectly fine, because they had that leverage then to go to the traditional publisher and, you know, get better terms than what they might other ones. Yeah. So I already have hundreds of thousands of fans. And let's, okay, let's deal. I'll get an agent. And it ends up being worth it to them to be

more or less traditionally published. Before I get to the genre point, which I think is important here. You know, you talked about how obviously there was this promise that this is the this big opportunity, you know, you go into it, you know, you can self publish, there's nothing holding you back. There's opportunity for success for so many people. Is there an indication of the number of people who are actually successful through that? Because, you know, as you mentioned, the attention economy is very concentrated. We see that in music and other, you know, I guess, artistic mediums as well, where it's really hard to actually break through for most people. And it's only a small number that really get to that size. Is that also reflected in Amazon self

publishing? Oh, absolutely. I mean, so I remember a press release from a few years ago, Amazon came out when they sort of like, I think I might get there. I might be misremembering the number slightly, but this is sort of roughly the case. Like, so hundreds of writers have sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their book. First of all, a lot of those may have been at 99 cents. So, so we need to have a grain of salt here, but let's give them that hundreds of people are succeeding. But in a context where, according to Boker, the company that doles out ISBN numbers, 1.6 million books were self-published. And I think it was 2018. You know, hundreds is just like the it's just an incredibly small fraction of those books.

Now, mind you, maybe not all of that 1.6 million books. Maybe all of those people aren't aspiring to making a living from it. And certainly, surely one of the most benign aspects of this platform is just like grandpa's memoir. It could be published and it's sort of available to the family, even if the family is scattered. And you know what I mean? Look, you can imagine like use cases that are fairly benign. It's when you get into the realm of literary commerce and people trying to make a living and where novel writing is a form of labor that it all becomes way more complicated. So I think that the success stories are always trumpeted the way they always are in the history of capitalism. You too can be, you know, John D. Rockefeller, are in fact statistically vanishingly small chances of actually succeeding, certainly in succeeding in a big way. Although there are

probably lots and lots of writers who add some income to their life by doing this. The question is how much work are they doing to make that so? And is it sustainable? Do you end up after four or five years just being utterly exhausted and letting it go? I think that's a real open question. Absolutely. And I think that leads into the question that I had around genre here, right? Because many of these books, many of the popular books through self-publishing are genre books. That is what sells best, romance, science fiction, horror, things like that. And we were talking about how, you know, there was this kind of push to ensure that authors are publishing very regularly, whether it's every three months, but sometimes even less than that. So then what does that do to kind of the

content of the novel? Because I remember when I was paying attention to it, there was a particular focus on needing to like write to market and hit, you know, the particular points that people are expecting. So then what is the effect of that on the kind of books, the kind of novels that are being produced? The answer is complex because it's a big literary world at the very top of the prestige hierarchy. I don't think Sally Rooney is worried that much about, And she might be, as a person, worried about Amazon, but as a writer, you know, she's exempt from worrying about that too much. Although there are ways,

I think, of thinking about Amazon as having been sort of influential, even at that level, in the sort of relative eclipse of the idea of the important, difficult novel. I mean, it's an interesting characteristic of even a very, very highly regarded novelist like her or Colson Whitehead or on and on and on,

that they are relatively easily consumable, that they offer up their pleasures without too much of a struggle, right? But then again, over on the other side of the prestige spectrum, genre is the whole deal. Because the way I put it in the book is I say that genre is a version native to the literary world of product differentiation and market segmentation. It didn't start that way. You know, genre goes back to antiquity. There are different kinds of texts for different kinds of purposes. But when Amazon enters the scene, this really gets supercharged. And so anyone who's looked for a book on Amazon, you'll notice that there are typically three bestseller lists a given book is

on. And those bestseller categories might be sort of novel to you, like Swedish divorce fiction. And if there's a bestseller list for Swedish divorce fiction, I don't even know if that's true. But it wouldn't surprise me, okay? So many, many more opportunities for bestseller status when you have something like 10,000 bestseller categories out there. And all that really does is it shows the sort of overlapping of genre, which has lots of meanings outside of marketing, but the overlapping of genre with market segmentation and sort of identifying the work and reaching out to potential readers who read in genres.

It's an interesting feature of popular literary life. There are lots of folks out there. They read, but everything they read is genres. It's an interesting feature of popular literary life. There are lots of folks out there. They read, but everything they read is romance. They might read 400 romances a year, right? Which is an interesting kind of reading, reading really quickly in the spaces that you have during the day. You mostly know the story already and you're looking for interesting variations and you're actually pleased by the repetition of the story. It's a mode of reading that we're not very familiar with where I work on a college campus where the game is completely every literary work is a singularity. And the whole point is to slow down and mull over its artistry as carefully as we can. Over on the other side of things, it's genre consumption. And

that looks very, very different, I think, from the way that English professors look at literature. I think what you're talking about there about the speed is important because you bring that up in the book as well, where Amazon itself is trying to speed up the delivery of goods and of everything to us, right, to get it to us more quickly. But then, you know, in that kind of speed up, we lose the time to actually, you know, sit with a novel, for example, and actually enjoy it and take it in. There's this need to, you know, read it really quickly if you have time to read it at all, because everything gets sped up. Yeah, we live in an accelerated sped up culture. There's no way around it. And Amazon's ability to deliver you a book overnight is part of a much, much larger

phenomenon, right? And that's interesting and important across the economy and across life, frankly. A lot of people, I think, would testify to just feeling just like time famine is a central feature of contemporary life, even when things are being delivered all the more quickly. And isn't that interesting paradox? And it's just that Amazon brings this paradox to a head, right? So the way the sort of one-liner version of it I put in the book is the same culture that delivers you a book overnight is the same one that deprives you of the time to read it. And so there's that inherent, yes, we can get you the book really quickly, but are you going to of the time to read it. And so there's that inherent, yes,

we can get you the book really quickly, but are you going to have the time to read it? Probably not, just because everything about the contemporary world is about speed up and about finding the nooks and crannies of time and filling them. And so for literary culture as traditionally conceived, this is definitely an interesting moment, I would say, in literary history. There are those readers who read really, really quickly, but then there's traditional literary reading, which is supposed to be ruminative if it's going to be valuable, and a lot of pressure is being put on that idea, I would say. Yeah. To that point, you write in the book that the literary novel is, in a sense, just becoming

another genre in this whole array of genres. And so what effect does that then have on the literary novel that most people are used to interacting with through school or university, but other people, that's just kind of what they enjoy, right? So traditionally, there was genre fiction and then literary fiction, which is putatively non-generic. And there are some ways that that's actually still true. I think when you call something literary fiction, you know less about that work than you do when you call something a crime novel. A crime novel is going to have a dead body. Literary fiction, you still need to be further informed about what's actually going on in it. So there's a truth, actually, to the fact that, to the idea that literary fiction isn't quite as generic as

genre fiction. On the other hand, from Amazon's perspective, it's just another product category. It's a genre. Some people like that kind of fiction. And so we'll slot it in. And we'll also probably further subdivide it in terms of what kind of literary fiction it is. And then the influence on the literary novel, this is very sort of abstract. It's hard to prove, but go back to that idea that even in literary fiction space, there's a strong gravitational pull toward easy consumability. It's sort of a truism of 20th century or post 1945 literary history it's kind of remarkable if you go back to the 1950s and 60s really hard books could be bestsellers and that had to do with the GI Bill and lots of new people going to college and a certain kind of cultural idealism

wanting to know the best that has been thought and said, and understanding that culture sometimes is hard. It demands something of you to get what there is in it. And I just find that I don't want to blame Amazon for this, but I want to associate Amazon with this idea that the impatience of the reader is really sinking in, I think, across the board. And it's not that there aren't difficult writers out there. Of course there are. across the board. And it's not that there aren't difficult writers out there. Of course there are. But the point is that they're not finding their way to the center of the culture the way they once were. Yeah. I think that's a really important point. And it brings me back to something that you mentioned in the book as well. If we move our

focus from the reader to the writer, how you wrote know, you wrote about how, you know, usually, or traditionally, the kind of writer would come through training programs and MFA, you know, particular programs that are designed to kind of improve that literary capability. And then when we think about the Amazon era, you know, and self publishing and things like that, there's none of that. And there's the idea that, you know, you just write your novel, you put it out there um and there's none of that training kind of provided so you know what is the importance of that shift yeah i find this totally fascinating my previous book was on creative writing programs so the comparison was always in my mind and the whole of course the whole idea of a creative writing program is to give you some ideas about how to write a good book like what counts as

literary value that's the whole game there you turn You turn to the Amazon moment, and it's the whole idea of the platform. And that's sort of, on one level, at least, what looks like a passivity on Amazon's part. It's like, whatever people want to read. They don't have a lot of strong ideas about what good literature is. There's just, it's just not there. They have some strong ideas about how it's best to carve yourself out a literary career. So they're like, you know, they have this thing. It's very funny. It's called Kindle University. And you can tune in.

It's a series of videos from successful self-published writers who will give you the tips. Like, how did you do it? Did you enter into email list sharing agreements with other, you know, like a little really nitty gritty kinds of things, none of which have to do with what we might think of as sort of the deep questions of literary value. The question of literary value goes very, very quickly. Are people going to like this and want to buy it? I mean, it's just a different way of thinking about literary value, which begins with the desire of the reader as customer, rather than the author as artist, as autonomous artist, who we then try to be equal to in our efforts as a reader.

This is the writer trying to sort of become equal to our desires in advance. It's fascinating. You know, what it makes me think of is kind of the replacement of that kind of institutional training with the blogs and podcasts and course series that people are putting together this kind of, you know, broader neoliberalization that has occurred. And, you know, you just see it reflected in, you know, the writer, what the writer is expected to be, as we were talking about earlier, you know, just see it reflected in you know the writer what the writer is expected to be as we were talking about earlier you know the kind of idea of the entrepreneurial writer content provider exactly yeah yeah no i think that i think that's where we are now mind you there are large pockets of resistance to this the whole space of prestige literary

fiction and the booker Prize and all that, you know, that's a world unto itself. And it's strongly connected to the book business, no doubt. Prizes are marketing opportunities apart from anything else. But, you know, a certain degree of creative autonomy sort of persists in that world. It's just that if you look just behind that world, you sort of see this remarkable, huge phenomenon that takes a quite different form. And then the question for the future is, will the gravitational pull of pure marketing forces further affect the space of literary fiction or not? And I don't think we know, but I think there are ways of saying it already has to some degree in that like the impatience of the reader is now just a given. And so asking somebody

to do hard work, I think the last writer I can think of who really, really did that and did that really consciously was David Foster Wallace in the 1990s with Infinite Jest. He had a whole metaphysical notion like, reader, this is going to be hard, but the therapy here is going to come from your struggling to understand this book. And sure enough, a huge mass phenomenon, but he got several hundred thousand people to be like, yeah, damn it. I'm going to do this and I'm going to be proud of myself for having done this. That's an extreme version of it. But that model, I don't see much of it these days. I just don't.

And it could revive. It could exist on the margins where I don't see it. But it's certainly not at the center of literary culture right now. What's at the center of literary culture are highly prestigious literary writers like Colson Whitehead and Sally Rooney, who write in slightly elevated versions of generic forms. You know, Harlem Shuffle, which I loved, by the way, Colson Whitehead's new novel. It's a heist novel. It has that degree of just fun built into it. Sally Rooney has described her own work as certain kinds of romance novels. Yes, they're not like Fifty Shades of Grey. One can notice the difference. Different kinds of

people inhabit them. Love is a little bit more complicated in her work than it is going to be in a more or less mass market romance novel. But nonetheless, all of those pleasures are there. And many, many people, even on the left, have said, you know, Sally Rooney, I read her. Boy, that was pleasurable. Okay. And then I move on, you know, that it doesn't really stick because it's not doing that thing of demanding a confrontation with the difficulties of the work that makes demands upon you as a reader. And the thing that every English professor knows is that when you rise to that occasion, you really do make literature something different. You really do create a

different kind of value. And that's where you get transformative experiences with literature, experiences that are never forgotten in one's life because you rose to the occasion and you did some work and you've met the author halfway in this struggle to understand life, which is after all a very complicated thing. Yeah. I have a question about romance that I want to come back to, but what you're describing here, and I think what I'm taking away from a lot of what you're explaining is that obviously with these literary novels, you needed time to digest them, but there was a payoff, right? It made you kind of think about things that challenged you in an important way. But, you know, with so much of, I guess, the focus of fiction today, and that is reflected in the broader

culture of, as you say, us not having enough time, needing to consume things quickly, just needing something that's kind of generic to consume and then move on, that, you know, there's something important that is lost there in kind of challenging us or, or, you know, trying to move the culture forward, maybe in a, in a way, um, that isn't there, or that is being eradicated in some sense by, you know, it's not just Amazon, but by this broader, broader occurrence that is happening that Amazon is certainly a part of. Yeah. I don't talk about this in the book because I had enough to talk about without getting into this, but like the shadow behind my book, this book on Amazon is what's happening in the academy and literary studies and they fall off of English majors. And you know what I mean? The sort of

status of literature as an object of study and the sort of pressure that's being put on and on the humanities in general. I just did not want to make it another crisis of the humanities book, of which there are a lot. Nonetheless, that shadow is there in the book, right? Because what I'm describing in the Amazon model is certainly quite distinct from the way that traditional culture has understood what literary value is. And then certainly, insofar as that literary value is sort of attended to and examined and experienced in the college classroom, I think is self-evidently under a lot of pressure from a different kind of model of literature as a kind of something that's, you know, saying it's a kind of entertainment is putting it too simply.

And I do a lot of the work in the book to try to unpack what we mean by wanting to be entertained by a work of literature that has a certain therapeutic dimension. I think, you know, we want to be taken somewhere, we want to alter our mood by entering into a fictional world. But in any case, it's a discernibly different model of what literary value is from the traditional university-based one. Totally. I think what you're saying there just resonates with me in the sense that after a day when you're just totally exhausted from working so much, which I think is the experience of a lot of people, you just want something easy to escape into instead of something that's going to challenge you, you know, whether that is good or not, but that is just naturally what happens. But I did want to ask you, you know, one of the important things that you lay out about this kind of development of genre or what Amazon is doing to the novel in the book is by focusing on the kind of minimalism versus maximalism, you know, the examples of the romance novel and the

epic novel. You know, why is this illustrative of what Amazon is doing to the novel? Great. I mean, that's one of the more weirder and more complicated parts of the book, I think, is where I try to get down into the level of sort of form and not just point at all the different genres, but say, wait, you know, it's interesting. It seems relatively plausible to me to say that there's a kind of tension at the heart of literature, whether the idea is going to be to sort of take you as far as possible and to encompass as much experience as possible, as much of the otherness of the world as possible. On the one hand, which I think of as an epic motive. You go on and on and on until you've sort of encompassed as much of the world and of world history as you

can on the one hand, and then a very, very different, more or less minimalist model of what literature is trying to do. And I labeled that romance. And this is a very particular understanding of what romance is, of course, it's a word that means a lot of different things. But in the case of the romance novel, the romance novel is all about forging the couple. It's all about two people meet, they probably hate each other at first. And then, you know, after a while they learn that they're in love and they're either married at the end or going to get married at the end. And so you have the formation, the couple form is where that arrives. And the couple has this

sort of little world. And that really is kind of like how marriage sort of transpires, like modern marriage as a source, not of the alliance of families, but rather of a reconstructed space of intimacy in a modern world that drags us in various different directions, right? So we look to relationships as a kind of redemptively small space, right? And I think that the romance novel sort of embodies that formally.

And that's quite distinct from a huge, sprawling epic text that wants to get a hold of as much of the world system as it can, and all of the interconnections of the global economy, and of, you know, transformed identities. I just think that's a different motive. Now, mind you, most individual works of fiction fall sort of in between those motives, but I want to just get a handle on the fiction on the one hand is trying to be epic. It's trying to more and more and more of the world into its maw. On the other hand, it's often doing the opposite. It wants to shrink the world. And then there's a way of

thinking about any novel as a shrinking of the world, of course, because the human lives we read about in fiction are condensed lives almost by definition, right? You can read a whole life in a few days, whereas it takes a whole life to live it. And that condensation surely matters. And so I was just trying to get a hold of what is, in fact, a very complex dialectic of more and less in the very form of fiction and the appeal of different kinds of fiction. Sometimes I'm in the mood for something that's just huge. And then I'm just going to get lost in and that's going to, you know, go from here to there and go through historical time, the family saga, you know, and then other times,

you know, a really crisp work of auto fiction really hits the spot. Because apart from anything else, there's so many incredibly talented novelists who are working in that sort of mode, from Rachel Cusk to Ben Lerner, etc. Those are typically small novels, and tightly focused on the experience of an author figure, you know what I mean? And that has a certain kind of pleasure to it as well. And so I just try to lay out these, I'm trying to map things. And it's certainly a crude map, but I thought it was sort of a place to begin to try to see how the problem of quantity, quantities of various kinds, quantities of information, quantities of stuff, quantities of time, how they start to be embedded at the deepest level of literary form.

I think it makes a ton of sense, right? You know, for me, when I think about, you know, self-publishing and whatnot, you know, the romance novel was incredibly central to that, you know, what was coming out of it. But, you know, obviously there's a much larger industry around that of people who are just voracious readers of romance. And I feel like it's also indicative of, you know, as you're talking about, there are all these stresses on people's lives and it's a great kind of escape to just escape into this very particular relationship experience that's very focused. Whereas on the other hand, the epic, you know, is sprawling, is large, it consumes and encompasses everything. And, you know, that to me almost feels like a representation of Amazon itself,

trying to take over and consume everything. Yeah. That's why I make it clear as possible that Amazon itself, it would be Epic Enterprise. All you have to do is listen to Bezos, notice his space exploration company, for Christ's sake. The Epic notes are everywhere to be seen, but there is this other side of things. In some ways, we live in an epically capitalist culture, but that's as a matter of course going to inspire their desire for different ways of dealing with that as individuals and groups. We can't live epically all the time. It's incredibly exhausting, right? And so we look for certain kinds of compensations in relation to that. And then that mode of literature is trying to make the world smaller, miniaturizing it and giving you a more comfortable relation to the world

than you have when you're constantly being stretched out. Yeah. Mark, I think this interview and your book gives us such a great insight into, you know, Amazon, what's happening with the book and the kind of effect that that massive company is having on it. I really appreciate you taking the time today to chat with me. Thanks so much. Oh, thank you. Great questions. And I really liked being here. Thank you so much.

Mark McGurl is a professor of literature at Stanford University and the author of Everything and Less, the novel in the age of Amazon. You can follow Mark on Twitter at Mark James McGurl. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.