It's Me, Hi. I'm the Problem.

What We are Into

My book proposal course is live and filling up! Very excited that half a dozen of you signed up after I announced it last week. There is still plenty of space, and the offer to email me for a discount if the fee is a hurdle remains as well. Academics and the academisque welcome!

I’ve been thinking about fandom lately. I am tempted to consider it the predominant cultural mode right now. And although I wrote recently that “not being a fan” is one of my very GenX traits, I am also finding myself gleefully falling into it: I read Reddit posts about Succession after each episode airs (I have never been on Reddit before 2023!), and I my casual “she’s so good” has developed into something bordering on lionizing Taylor Swift recently. Most interesting, to me, is that I am able to shrug my constitutional pose of being slightly apart and aloof from my enthusiasm. It can be really fun to go all in, it turns out.

Contemporary fandom, is seems to me, shifts toward individuals. I have always been a sports fan, and always rooted for various home teams, though that joy has been tempered as sports has become so ethically compromised —thinking about how sports fandom has changed is what Craig Calcaterra does so well in his book. One point Craig makes is that it’s okay to root for players instead of teams. That’s compelling to me as a fan of LeBron but not the Lakers, say, but it also syncs perfectly with influencer culture. Celebrity, we say now, is more democratic than ever: there are countless social media-born famous people. Which means there are an ever increasing number of individuals to build one’s identity around following and loving. The cult of Donald Trump is a shockingly obvious example of this. It can be really dangerous to go all in, it turns out.

Why, I wonder, are so many currently so inclined to be fans of individuals? Might it have something to do with the well-earned cynicism many of us feel for institutions? I think so. But basing one’s allegiances around the flimsy spine of a slip of a human seems terribly precarious and superficial, and most certainly fatal.

To shift to my lane: best-selling book publishing is currently defined, in large part, by the Extremely Huge (Big Five) and Teensy Individual (self-publishing). Between Emily Henry and Brandon Sanderson, Prince Harry and Colleen Hoover. Conglomerate publishing created Henry and Harry; Hoover and Sanderson are individual influencers.

My thoughts on this topic are very sketchy and preliminary, obviously— I’m using this newsletter to formulate my thoughts—so I am going to jump now to the next point before really offering much evidence for the above: Where is the middle? Where are the smaller institutions, the interesting upstarts (as opposed to start-ups)? In book publishing, there are few “larger small presses” around which one could become a fan; I have always tried to position Belt so it could be such a press (though I have been hampered by always being ‘undercapitalized’, as they say, lol), and I suppose Greywolf and Norton could be so considered, but I do find it difficult to imagine how deep one could go there. NYRB and Fitzcarraldo and a few other presses do a great job. The best example of a “middle” around which one could base a fandom I can think of now is the movie studio A24, and they seem to have consciously worked to inculcate a following. Why have they succeeded, both culturally and financially, where so few others have, I wonder? How does one create a mission-ish-driven style or group or “middle”? Is the lack of “middles” a reason why we don’t seem to have literary or clearly delineated aesthetic trends or schools right now? (Or maybe we do?) We do have genres that rise and fall in favor, but styles? Not so much.

I think about the problem of the middle when I learn Buzzfeed News is closing down. Is there not even space for an outlet that large? In the sphere of news, is it only Fox and the NYT or your favorite dude on twitter with his smart, topical threads? Is the reason I love listening the The New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast that I like Jane and Evan (and Susan, but to a lesser degree), so I can stan politics through the prism of individual? Why, after a decade or so reading all sorts of liberal and left publications, do I seem to only read the NYT app on my phone every morning and listen to individual-driven podcasts in the evening to get my news? And—we cannot ever not go meta—is the rise of the individual and the loss of the middle why Substack has become so popular? “People say” much of the best reporting and writing is on Substack now, and that may well be true, but there’s always been good reporting that no one read, in smaller “middle” publications. And people rightly critique a model of writing and reporting that excludes editors and others in a cohort that work together to produce something. But maybe it’s not any of that—maybe we just all want to narrow our focus to singular individuals, and build our knowledge, cultural sense, and identities around them. Succession is a collaborative production, but it’s Jessie and Kieran and Sarah and J. Smith that garner so much of the focus. And—-to keep going in the weird places in my mind this thought-exercise is taking me—is this a reason why the book has continued to hold onto a significant slice of culture and entertainment budgets—because they are singularly authored? (I’m leaving this sentence in there but it’s clearly slightly deranged. And I will NOT—not I will NOT—now continue to the next obvious point: AI and writing. Nor will I return us to the Enlightenment, post-structuralism and the whole question of the damned self we thought we had killed decades ago).

I have no real thesis here so no real conclusion, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on if we are rooting for people now more than we are groups, teams, institutions, schools, and, if so, why, and what to do about the missing middle, and of course how any of this helps us think about the future of book publishing in interesting ways. Also you can become a fan of a middle thing by shopping at Belt’s Spring Sale, or root for me, an individual, by becoming a paid subscriber