50 Years - The Authors' Report (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
Literature and film generate symbolic as well as economic capital. As such, aesthetic productions exist in various contexts following contrasting rules. Which role(s) do authors and filmmakers play in positioning themselves in this conflictive relation? Bringing together fourteen essays by scholars from Germany, the USA, the UK and France, this volume examines the multiple ways in which the progressive (self-) fashioning of authors and filmmakers interacts with the public sphere, generating authorial postures, and thus arouses attention. It questions the autonomous nature of the artistic creation and highlights the parallels and differences between the more or less clear-cut national contexts, in order to elucidate the complexity of authorship from a multifaceted perspective, combining contributions from literary and cultural studies, as well as film, media, and communication studies. Dealing with Authorship, as a transversal venture, brings together reflections on leading critics, exploring works and postures of canonical and non-canonical authors and filmmakers. An uncommon and challenging picture of authorship is explored here, across national and international artistic fields that affect Africa, Europe and America. The volume raises the questions of cultural linkages between South and North, imbalances between the mainstream and the margins in an economic, literary or “racial” dimension, and, more broadly, the relation of power and agency between artists, editors, critics, publics, media and markets.
This paper uses the example of Ponte City, the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize prize-winning photobook by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, to examine the role of collaborative production in book publishing in a ‘post-digital age’ - a term deployed by Alessandro Ludovico (2013) to account for contexts in which print is being revitalised rather than replaced. Ponte City provides an example of how the independent publishing sector resists certain aspects of digital transformation in the wider creative industries and especially the mainstream publishing industry, but also of how it struggles to escape complicity with the governing neoliberal imperative for such transformations. By fully crediting all those with creative input – amazon.co.uk lists Ivan Vladislavić (editor) and Ramon Pez (designer) as its ‘authors’, not Subotzky and Waterhouse – the book, co-produced by the German publisher Steidl and The Walther Collection, provides a platform from which its contributors are able to recoup their co-operative creative investments in the form of symbolic capital. Similar to the workings of the film industry that this in some ways comes to resemble, however, these returns are not evenly distributed. This niche sector of the publishing industry projects collaborative production as the kind of ‘art world’ Howard Becker (1982) describes: a convivial ‘network of cooperating people, all of whose work is essential to the final outcome’ (25). Yet this model of networked collaborative production remains largely in thrall to a neoliberal symbolic economy dominated by the author-figure – evidenced in this discussion by the auteur-like role played by the book’s editor, Ivan Vladislavić, in this and similar collaborative productions.
The professional author in the Netherlands in book historical research. A case study
Quaerendo, 2003
An investigation into the professional author, from the Middle Ages until the Nineteenth Century in the Netherlands. Research on their income & reflections on being famous. The article shows how complex the whole process of production, distribution and consumption of books was and is. All the links are so closely interwoven that book history resembles some kind of loom in which publishers, booksellers, writers, readers and many others all operate alongside each other yet at the same time all depend on each other, coming together to produce the colourful tapestry that is the transmission of culture. A professional author only becomes a professional author when he is seen against the background of publishers and readers.
The writing profession in France: Between symbolic and professional recognition
French Cultural Studies, 2019
This article examines current transformations of the writing profession in France. Based on qualitative research (interviews with writers and their representatives, as well as organisers of literary events) and on a national survey conducted in 2016 by the Centre national du livre, it emphasises the tension between symbolic and professional recognition at different moments of a writer's 'career'. In a country where literary agents are only now starting to organise, and where creative writing courses are not as well established as elsewhere, publishers still play the key role of 'gatekeepers' into the literary field. The relationship with the publisher is thus crucial and is based on elective affinities. Yet, once published, an author still needs to be distinguished and recognised. Apart from the traditional literary prizes, which give symbolic and professional recognition, literary events (festivals, public readings) and residencies offer new career opportunities. These related activities, or 'activités connexes' have significantly increased in number: the article focuses especially on analysing how they now fit into and structure the literary careers of authors, as well as how authors themselves perceive them.
Publishing Research Quarterly, 2020
The world of book publishing is currently undergoing a major paradigm shift, but this was already fully under way in the 1990s. In the German novel Abstieg vom Zauberberg, published in 1997 by an anonymous author under the pseudonym Jens Walther, we are given an excellent insider view of the concrete situation within literary publishing houses and how they operate behind the scene and in public to secure the best possible titles and to fend off manuscripts that appear to be trivial literature. The author proves to be highly educated in the history of German and western literature at large and also demonstrates great expertise regarding book fairs, book reviews, and book prizes, framing all this by a somewhat twisted love story involving a young author, Anna Becker, and two men, first the young Johannes Rieger, then his father Helmut Rieger, both representing the fictional publishing house Engsfeld.
Amateur Creativity: Contemporary Literature and the Digital Publishing Scene
New Literary History, 2017
verybody's a critic. So goes the old adage that anyone given the opportunity to judge another's performance will do so. It is a phrase often uttered in exasperation and with the implication that "everybody" lacks expertise and authority, if not circumspection. This "everybody," in other words, is an amateur. He has access to the means of production (in the case of criticism, a voice), if not necessarily the education or training to form a sophisticated opinion. It is now routine to observe that the Internet has turned everybody into a critic and much more. Social media platforms and software packages have turned amateurs into photographers, graphic designers, journalists, and authors with followings that rival professionals in these fields. The ease and ubiquity of digital publishing have enabled the "mass amateurization" of the critical, creative, and communicative arts, allowing amateurs to bypass the gatekeeping practices of specific institutions (e.g. the gallery, the newspaper, the publishing house), and to perform acts of photography, journalism, or authorship without necessarily identifying with a specialized guild or benefitting from its resources. 1 Whether a cause of chagrin or excitement, the digital domain of publishing culture is definitively changing the ways in which contemporary writers, artists, and audiences conceive of their creative works and creative selves. The task of this essay is to examine the organizational, collaborative, and economic practices that are blurring the lines between amateur identity and professional activity, as well as between professional identity and amateur activity. As this chiasmus suggests, the crossing of amateur and professional practices defines the digital publishing scene of online writing communities, for-profit social networks, and for-love fandoms. In these spaces, amateurs share what they love while being exploited for their data; they climb the career ladder while also learning to game the system. Most of all, they partake in communal processes of reading and writing that exert transformative pressure on august institutions of literature, from the publishing house to professional authorship to reviewing culture.
The Write Stuff: Employment and Earnings of Authors, 1970 to 1990
1994
A study surveyed and synthesized available information about the employment and earnings of authors over the 1970-1990 period. Data came from United States and other government censuses, a variety of surveys of authors, and from records of writers' unions and professional organizations. Results indicated that: (1) the author occupation is growing rapidly; (2) authors are concentrated in states along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; (3) members of the author profession are well educated; (4) authors had higher rates of unemployment than other professional and technical workers, but lower rates than other artists; (5) compared to the average artist and the average professional end technical worker, authors were far more likely to be self-employed and less likely to work for private sector employers; (6) real personal income fell by $924 between 1969 and 1989; (7) significant disparities exist between the average earnings of men and women authors; (8) differences in earnings among White, Black, and Hispanic authors were smaller; (9) multiple job holding rates for authors in the United States and other countries were higher than for all other professional workers; (10) authors are primarily white with an average age around 40 years old; and (11) general patterns for authors in the United States tended to hold for authors in other parts of the world. (Contains 42 references and 75 tables of data.) (RS)