Squawk from the Blue Heron

Everyone's piling up on this guy:

"In today's Kindle and e-publishing environment, with New York publishing sliding into cultural irrelevance, I find questions about working with agents and editors increasingly old-fashioned.  Anyone who claims to have useful information about the publishing industry is lying to you, because nobody knows what the hell is happening.  My advice is for writers to reject the old models and take over the production of their own and each other's work as much as possible--" Ryan Boudinot writing in "The Stranger" blog.

I mostly kinda agree with him.  See, here's the thing:  there are 6 big book publishing conglomerates in the US, all of them centered in New York.  Nothing wrong with New York.  I LIKE New York. The people are friendly, smart and alive in a thrilling way because a lot of them come from elsewhere and live on their wits till they land on their feet in unimaginably tiny apartments.  But, and this is where you might disagree with me, I find everyone there kind of the same too.  Understandable: they live in the same vertical landscape, eat at the same expensive places with paleo menus and small portions, know the same kind of people who live in the same unimaginably tiny apartments.  If can't help but form the way you think, any more than living in say, Allentown, forms the way you think about cars, carbs, guns...things.  Another blog that.  I'm getting to publishing.  So everytime someone says they're sending a manuscript off to NY and "wish me luck" I always picture the person on the other end of the mail route who is opening this hard worked manuscript with their own agenda, their NY agenda, their tiny apartment and art-openings-on-Thurdsday-nights and their little-black-wardrobe agenda and I think "what the heck do you think is going to happen here?  Even if they like your worldview, what does that say about you?"  That last part is disturbing.  A part of me thinks you haven't been true to yourself if someone from New  York "gets" your worldview.  It's like you look at yourself from an alien point of view.  Pandering.  It's not everyone's club.  You've got your own damn club.  That's why I agree with Boudinot when he says NY publishing is sliding into cultural irrelevance.  It's not irrelevant to itself, of course.  But it can't speak for the 99.9% of the rest of the world either.  Everything it produces, even if it's something about say, the Nigerian experience which is hip now, squares with how New York sees the Nigerian experience and so is maybe not true in its own context.  It's the New York experience draped in mudcloth. It would be nice if a few of those 6 publishing conglomerates would operate out of places like Allentown.  The rent is cheaper.  It would expand their scope. Maybe pick up a few good manuscripts about the rest of us.  Sell lots of books.  We all like to read about ourselves.  And that's where the Blue Heron comes in.