Alan Jacobs

As Cosmos Malick: More on the way Malick seeks life in his films. 

Here are the relevant facts: 

• Oxford University Press USA is a “crossover” publisher, which means that they’re an academic press but they publish many books meant to have some trade success also, e.g. showing up in the local Barnes & Noble. 
• But OUP UK, with whom I am publishing this Sayers biography, is pretty much strictly academic in its orientation, which means that it charges high prices for books and expects to sell them largely to libraries. (I only signed with them because they promised to sell my book at a reasonable price: other books in the series are two or three times as expensive.) 
• Most of the academics who publish with OUP UK are doing so for reasons of professional advancement and job security — tenure, promotion, moves to more prestigious institutions, etc. They don’t expect their books to be purchased by the general public, and even whether they get read (and reviewed) by peers is a secondary consideration. What matters is the new bullet point on the CV. 
• I am not seeking professional advancement; and even when I write academic books, I write them to be read by actual human beings. 

Therefore, we are seeing a mismatch between my interests and those of my publisher. The book didn’t come out on its pub day, the Kindle edition is unreadable to some, I have no idea when people will actually be able to buy the book, I am very unhappy — and as far as I can tell nobody at OUP UK understands why I am bothered. I have the new bullet point on my CV, don’t I? 

I’m still trying to discover (a) why no copies of my book were available in the U.S. on pub day; (b) why, if no copies of the book would be available on pub day, pub day was not delayed until they were available; (c) why nobody at OUP bothered to tell me that my book would not be available on pub day; (d) when copies of my book are likely to be available; (e) why the Kindle edition of the book is in gray e-ink, something not true of any of the hundreds of other books I have ever read on Kindle; (f) whether the Kindle edition can be fixed and, if so, when. I have no answers to any of these questions and no clear indication of when, or indeed whether, I will get answers. 

It’s been a rough day, so: whisky, chocolate, Sinatra. 🎵

Turns out that this is not really the publication date for my book at all. See the update here. I am a pretty unhappy camper. 

It’s pub day for my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers! Sayers is a fascinating person and I had a wonderful time writing about her. For this one week I’m gonna emerge from my social-media Faraday cage and be prepared to answer questions, here and at my Buy Me a Coffee site. (I’m not turning up on X or BlueSky. I’m no hero.)

Related: When I was writing the book I often posted on DLS-related things that I couldn’t fit into the final version.

UPDATE: Maybe I should think of my actual pub date as the day when Amazon next has the book in stock. Sigh. Maybe there were more pre-orders than Amazon and OUP had expected? That’s a consoling thought. But I suspect that there has been a delay in the manufacturing process, because I haven’t received my author’s copies either. Basically, at this point the book exists only digitally.

Paul Chan:

Sometime during the mid-2010s, I noticed photographers, videographers, and artists of all kinds referring to what they made as “content,” as opposed to photos, videos, or art. The case was the same with writers: Blog posts, essays, and articles were lumped together and called content. The term “content creator” also appeared, which further collapsed distinctions among writers, artists, and performers. In 2023, for the first time, I heard a representative from the entertainment industry rebrand it as the “content industry.”

As I understand it today, content is a type of expression that doesn’t rely on concepts like “quality” or “meaning” to differentiate itself. The way content stands apart — which is to say its primary appeal — is that it can be created at scale. The more of it, or of its kind, the better.

Content is tailor-made for a sense of immediacy. This means content is best — is most itself — when it’s fresh, when it belongs to the here-and-now. It also doesn’t, or shouldn’t, take much, if any, time to grasp the substance of content. In other words, content is expression explicitly for the moment, created by who or what wishes to define that moment.

When AI can mute my TV during commercials and unmute it when the show/game comes back on, I’ll be all in. Not until. 

As we’re seeing more and more sophisticated robot/drone warfare, I find myself wondering whether the next step is what Adam Roberts described in his fabulous 2010 novel New Model Army — which I wrote about here.