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October 28, 2005
This Demographic Has A Terrible Aftertaste
One would hope that the sentence "They live and eat and breathe the demographic." would be the most grisly of whatever article it comes nestled in. Terrifyingly, the sentence, which appears in yesterday's NYTimes article about Simon Spotlight Entertainment, a new imprint of Simon & Schuster "devoted to pop culture for reader age 18-35," was not.
In case you were not aware, these are the people we have to thank for this minor masterpiece and the novelization of Napolean Dynamite. Things to look forward to: the hilariously! titled "Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay," a book about fantasy football, and a The L Word tie-in called "Same Sex In The City."
In short, SSE is the reification of everything vomitacious and dispicable about Publishing: they are interested in making money, not good books ("'The thing that impresses me most about our editors is that they understand that it's not all about the book,' she said. 'It's about the money you can make from that book.'"); they are entirely market-- and marketing-- driven (. . ."when the series 'The L Word' was burning up Showtime on cable television . . . They gathered a focus group of about a dozen gay women to talk about what type of book they would want to read. . . It is not exactly a formula, Ms. Bergstrom said. 'But we usually know what we want to publish,' she said. 'It's then a matter of wrapping the right author and spokesperson around it.'"); authors are selected for celebrity, not writing ("what we decide to publish is greatly affected by our publicity department - who we can get on 'The Daily Show' or who might be great on a radio tour."); they are the whores of a vertically-integrated media conglomerate (Viacom) that is designed to produce cyclicly-reinforced crap in a closed system ("'most of [SSE's authors] have platforms in other media,'" Ms. Bergstrom said recently."; "the imprint sponsors events with the likes of Jane magazine"; "At one recent meeting, the staff was batting around ideas related to celebrities and MTV"; "What Simon Spotlight Entertainment has done - rather successfully in its first year in business - is to tap quickly into pop culture currents."). The entire SSE imprint is, essentially, a PR department for recycled celebrities.
Not that there is anything shocking about what the article reveals. Still, there is something really eerily Stepford Publishers about the piece. Everyone-- the journalist, the subjects-- is so blithely indifferent to the media or publishing ethics. No, more than indifferent-- they seem completely unaware that there are ethics in media and publishing. The opening anecdote of the SSE head skipping Frankfurt in favor of the Aspen Comedy Festival is delivered without irony. There is the suggestion of iconoclasm in the assertion "that an editorial assistant would be given that level of responsibility is evidence that the imprint does not hew to the traditional hierarchies in many publishing companies," would be funny if their corporate whoredom wasn't so dreadful and frightening.
What, exactly, was the aforementioned 25-year-old editorial assisstant responsible for?
"One book of pictures and quotations from the film [Napolean Dynomite] is already in stores, and another, a flipbook of Napoleon's sweet dance moves, is on the way."
Posted by hissycat at October 28, 2005 11:12 AM
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Comments
I was sitting at work and feeling like such a sell-out. Maybe I could find hope in the idealistic world of writers and thinkers...but then I read your post. Now I just want to stab my own eye out with a plastic spork.
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