Reading this drivel is exactly like being jabbed incessantly in the ribs by an idiot savant who recites name after name in a narcotizing monotone, giggling after each jab. The prose is irritatingly incompetent.
Should we forget that all German nouns are capitalized? Silliness abounds. Beckett recoiled from the entertainment industry as if it were a cancerous polyp though he was not entirely indifferent to fame: See Stephen Dilks, Samuel Beckett in the Literary Marketplace.
Are we credulous enough to believe that folk singer Woody Guthrie composed music and lyrics for Broadway shows when he never did—and would have probably found the very idea of doing so repellent?
Though Resnais opened up a new way of seeing, most of humanity has ignored his oeuvre. Muriel , his masterpiece, is almost completely obscure. One suspects that chuckpalahniuk hates books himself, given how little effort he invests in reading and creating them. Tell-All is a nonliving entity, a throwaway, a trifle, a triviality, a little slice of nothing. Being taught how to write fictionally by chuckpalahniuk is exactly like being taught how to play football by a one-legged man. Pingback: Selected Essays and Squibs by Dr.
A review of Tell-All chuckpalahniuk by Dr. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Further, Palahniuk stated that the advance offered by Substack "was comparable to what I was getting from Hachette for the book". The 'exodus' of writers to Substack has some already labelling the phenomenon as the "end of the novel", while others are hailing it as a "return to roots". Other aspects of the discourse have focused on how Substack could upend traditional publishing. Is its impact being overestimated?
How is it this different from, say self-publishing, for which many platforms proliferate anyway? Could Substack truly be in a position to ultimately replace the publishing industry as we know it? But as the mediums change, being rendered increasingly irrelevant, decreasingly subscribed to, the serialisation must swerve too — from bloated soaps to limited web-series, newspaper columns to blogs, and magazines a dying breed, as it is to newsletters.
Will this be the much touted change, the next chapter in publishing history? And here I am having another go, I guess, at killing it. It is true that Rushdie is the first high profile fiction writer to take to Substack. It is also true that the creator economy is in a moment of radical flux, a desperate pursuit for the next format. But I hardly think Substack is the solution, or at least a replicable solution. At best, it might be a tapering side-car. This is because Substack rewards existing clout.
But what about the rest? The second issue is the financial model. Given that Substack notes that roughly, at best, 10 per cent of the subscriber base goes paid, it would be interesting to see how financially viable this is for an author in the long run.
Rushdie, it must be noted, has been signed on by Substack. This means he has gotten a substantial advance payment to cover their first year on the platform, and in return Substack gets 85 per cent of the subscriber fees, and so this move has relatively no risk, financially speaking, for him. But this kind of contract is offered to very few writers, who otherwise have to pull in whatever revenue they get from their subscriber clout.
Does it then make sense to buy a subscription now, given that the book, anyway, has a chance to be published after this serialisation exercise? Authors of Substack own the rights to their content. Many authors on Substack are offering more value-adds. The novelist Elle Griffin has another subscription tier for those who will receive a hardback copy of her ongoing novel serialisation.
The journalist Anand Giridharadas is having Zoom book club sessions for paid subscribers to discuss the first two chapters of his book The True American: Murder and Mystery in Texas which he is publishing for free on his Substack, lassoing it back in conversation.
I guess, then, it entirely depends on how much of a Rushdie fan you are to make that trade-off between current and future consumption of his work. While I might be in the latter category, there are swarming fans waiting. In , Catherine Nichols wrote in a tell-tale article for Jezebel , that submitting her manuscript under the nom de plume of a man had gathered eight times more responses than when she did it as herself. The publishing industry may like to posture as a wide open window, but it has over the years become, like any other business, an exclusive group of elites who decide just how wide and in what direction this window would open.
Rushdie, so far, is one of the biggest literary icons to throw his hat into the Substack market. The writer, more famous for the fatwas against him than his work, has now been followed by Chuck Palahniuk, another iconic writer committed to putting his next book on the platform. Other than the headline leap by Rushdie, one fact that needs to be understood before we deliberate over this move is that anything being published on Substack can still be published later as a book because the author retains the rights.
The fact that Rushdie has made heads turn — and marketing departments in publishing houses throw up — is evidence of a number of things. Second, the digital world is upon us and it has now become the most democratic way to communicate and express.
The proportion of novels in selfies and image backdrops is perhaps lower than the number of novels now talking about social media and its generational effects.
To break down this prospectively monumental step, let's first assist the world of publishing to get off its high horse.
The purpose of any book, at the end of the day, is to be sold, to reach people and eventually become, with a handful personality-driven caveats, popular. A lot of writers write to become popular, while others write to gain critical acclaim. The motives themselves classify books as commodities, targeted at different types of audiences.
When you accept the basic premise of the whole publishing-reading cycle it becomes simpler to understand and appreciate just how straightforward publishing could be, and yet how knotty it has unfortunately become.
Agents, editors and awards have over the years come to represent a hegemony, an access-driven industry that like any other economy, functions like a sort of mafia, at most times for reasons neither literary, nor holy. That he has now turned to a democratic platform is not solely the wake-up call that publishing needed, but could also be the motivational chapter that distressed authors turn to in their time of desperation. Writers, at least in India, are woefully underpaid and massively under-utilised.
If reach and sales-worthiness are decisive parameters inside these colosseums of self-designated watchmen, then what exactly does the world lose when the author bypasses them to approach his or reader directly? The inherent romance of holding a novel or stacking a library as opposed to straining your eyes in front of a digital screen is perhaps a long way away from being universally replaced. That said, the publishing industry has also gradually become the centre of systemic censorship.
As long as there are structures in place, oppressive, exploitative forces can unscrew its loose parts to quietly replace them with narratives they want to be shared instead.
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