Bad news, readers: Spiegel & Grau closes, Wattpad launches imprint
Two stories that came across my radar in the same recent week suggest something about the future of books and publishing.
The first story was the announcement that Wattpad, a popular app for the posting of fan fiction and original stories is launching Wattpad Books, a publishing division that will use their “Story DNA Machine Learning technology to take ‘the guesswork’ out of the publishing equation,” as Wattpad CEO Allen Lau told The New York Times.
The other story announced the closing of Penguin Random House imprint, Spiegel & Grau.
I try my hardest to resist my curmudgeonly tendencies, but neither of these is good news.
The average reader likely doesn’t pay much attention to a book’s imprint, a subdivision within a larger publisher granted to editors of particular accomplishment and influence. Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau individually and then together have been responsible for books like “Orange is the New Black,” “The Kite Runner,” as well as works by Brene Brown, Suze Orman, the Beastie Boys and even Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abbate, producer of the Howard Stern Show.
Their imprint was also the home of Chris Jackson, who Vinson Cunningham of The New York Times credits with “building a black literary movement” by publishing such writers as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson (“Just Mercy”). Jackson has gone on to helm an imprint of his own at Penguin Random House, One World.
A publishing imprint is an embodiment of a particular editorial sensibility, even when those sensibilities range from highly literary to Artie Lange (“Too Fat to Fish”) as was the case at Spiegel & Grau. Imprints are personal, human, the product of individual passions and reflective of the individual quirks we all have inside of us.
The Wattpad algorithm, on the other hand, will crunch and munch the “opinions of 70 million users” to see “what’s resonating with them as a starting point,” according to Ashleigh Gardner, who will oversee the new publishing initiative.
Wattpad claims this will correct for the “monoculture” of the publishing industry.
I can testify from experience that it can be frustrating to find the right editor to say yes to publishing your book. As the author of several unpublished novels, it’s tempting to believe that if one could just bypass the gatekeepers and get to the people themselves, accolades will surely commence.
And like any industry, the upper echelons can perhaps get a little insulated, but to believe that publishing is a monoculture is to never have walked into a single bookstore and seen the incredible diversity of titles. Granted, it’s a diversity that still could improve, but that happens through the intentional efforts of editors like Julie Grau, Cindy Spiegel and Chris Jackson.
Our algorithms, on the other hand, are more than willing to bake in existing status quo biases while hiding those biases under a sheen of “math.” Please don’t mistake these algorithms for anything like objective or democratic processes.
More importantly, books are not like other commodities. Even when a book is loved by many readers, each of those individuals may love it for a different, sometimes unknowable reason. Writer and publishing industry veteran Maris Kreizman reminded us of this in a 2017 essay, declaring, “The best things in life are unquantifiable,” while telling the reader how she found both a husband and dog when she turned away from the algorithmic intrusions of Tinder and Petfinder.
Not all technological interventions are, by definition, progress.
If we’re not careful, we’ll filter our way right out of the experiences we find most meaningful. It’s mostly fiction on this list, but I’m recommending Susan Orlean’s
because it’s absolutely delightful and there isn’t a human alive who would write into a columnist asking for a book recommendation who wouldn’t love this book.