Wait for it

I was wondering when this piece would get written.

Good thing Boog does such a great job of getting past the inevitably recurrent "but seriously, publishing is fucked and this time we really mean it" trope. He navigates pretty quickly to the more interesting question: who might benefit from a genuine shakeup of the industry? He suggests--rightly, I think--that it will be independents working from a model of low advances, high royalties and modest print runs.

That's not to say the road is clear for the indies. Just last summer the knell was ringing for them, what with the PGW bankruptcy and the postal hike. But I hope he's right. Every time I hear news of a humongous advance--for Joe the Plumber or whoever-- my imagination is drowned in a quantity of quantities: next year's backrooms and the stacked returns (and/or remainders), the money itself and, most personally, the legions of more worthy writers who could have been buoyed by some small fraction of it.