Jeremiah Tolbert

This New York Times arti­cle hits on some­thing that I’ve been wor­ry­ing about for some time, which is that it seems that there are more and more peo­ple tak­ing up writ­ing, while at the same time, fewer are read­ing. I thought this was a prob­lem spe­cific to the SF short fic­tion world, but it sounds like a greater issue in pub­lish­ing in general.

I’m not gloomy about the pos­si­bil­i­ties though. For a deter­mined reader, there is more out there to find than there ever has been before (of course, you can say that in any given moment, as old books don’t go away, at least not imme­di­ately). What we need are bet­ter ways of fit­ting the con­tent to the con­sumers. I do think that before the infor­ma­tion rev­o­lu­tion that came with the rise of the Internet, find­ing con­tent you would like to con­sume was eas­ier. There was less to choose from, and you could eval­u­ate your choices more quickly. Now, I sus­pect many are par­a­lyzed by choice.

Barry Schwartz, writer and researcher, believes that infi­nite choice is exhaust­ing. He makes a very inter­est­ing case for this in a talk that he gave at TED recently. He also pub­lished a book in 2004 called The Paradox of Choice (ama­zon). I haven’t read this book, but I think it’s going to go on my stack of things to read.

One aspect of the arti­cle that struck home with me was this:

On the whole, Zaid is unwor­ried about the pro­lif­er­a­tion of books, though he doesn’t think every­one should set pen to paper. “About would-​​be writ­ers, André Gide used to say: ‘Découragez! Découragez!’”(discourage!), Zaid said in an e-​​mail mes­sage. “The impli­ca­tion was that real writ­ers would not be dis­cour­aged, and the rest would save a lot of time. Of course, some medi­oc­ri­ties are never dis­cour­aged, and some poten­tial real writ­ers would be lost. But there is so much tal­ent around that we can afford it.”

I was dis­cour­aged, along with many other 8th grade writ­ers, by James Gunn just as I was start­ing to be inter­ested in writ­ing. He gave a depress­ing and detailed talk to us about how dif­fi­cult that it is to become pub­lished, and how lit­tle money there was to be made. Even before the Internet, things weren’t all sun­shine and roses around here. He was never asked back to our con­fer­ences, which was a shame, because I think he brought up some very good points. But I think he shared the same opin­ion that Gide did. However, his dis­cour­age­ment didn’t stick, and I hope to meet him again some­time in the future to thank him. In some ways, his dis­cour­age­ment spurred me to push on with my writ­ing. At the end of his talk, despite being so neg­a­tive, he encour­aged those of us in atten­dance to mail our man­u­scripts to him and he would pro­vide us feed­back. I don’t know if any­one else did, but I sent a story I had writ­ten recently, a kind of para­nor­mal SF piece. He sent back the most care­fully writ­ten, won­der­fully help­ful com­ments. His gen­eros­ity has not been for­got­ten, and along with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, I con­sider him one of the first to men­tor me in the craft.

I want to write more about this paral­y­sis and para­dox of choice, and some pos­si­ble solu­tions. I think we can find ways to arti­fi­cially and help­fully limit our choices with­out sti­fling new cre­ative work. We already have some ser­vices, such as Amazon Suggests and some fea­tures on Netflix that help to do this. I’d love to see a sys­tem built that tracks as much of the short story mar­ket as pos­si­ble, hav­ing data­base entries for each story. As read­ers, we would open accounts and flag the sto­ries that we liked. And then, the site would make rec­om­men­da­tions based on what we have liked in the past, sug­gest­ing new authors, new pub­li­ca­tions, and new sto­ries that me might not come across oth­er­wise. The sys­tem would learn and be trained over time, and soon, it could be a very effec­tive means of lim­it­ing choice with­out burn­ing down mar­kets or run­ning of writ­ers. It’s a long tail tac­tic and it isn’t going to make any­one rich, but I think it has some merit. I’d look into build­ing some­thing like this, but I think the match­ing algo­rithms are way beyond my pro­gram­ming skills, and the data entry part would be dif­fi­cult to main­tain with­out the help of the indi­vid­ual edi­tors and pub­lish­ers. No one per­son could keep the con­tent up-​​to-​​date, although I sup­pose you could offload that respon­si­bil­ity to the read­ers as well–but then, that sounds like work, and might reduce the poten­tial user base for the site. Also, you intro­duce the pos­si­bil­ity of typos, intro­duc­ing dupli­cate data that would make matches much harder.

I will write more on this sub­ject when I’ve read more on the para­dox of choice, which has impli­ca­tions in web design as well—something I was think­ing about as I designed the lay­out of my new site, and is the rea­son you don’t find a full-​​fledged archive any­where. I attempt to limit the choice of new read­ers to my best entries and the lat­est con­tent, and I put many choices in the footer, kind of push­ing them out of the way so that only the deter­mined would find them, and they wouldn’t inter­fere with the more casual reader. I can’t say how well this has worked yet.

How do you han­dle the glut of choice avail­able to you in your read­ing today? Does it result in you read­ing more, or less? What are your strategies?