Since yesterday, we can talk about the phenomenon of pharmacy as we say “novel de gare”. Ginette Reno confirms the slogan: “At Jean Coutu, you can find everything, even a friend. “Perhaps we will see the popular singer doing signing sessions between the alley of Geritol and that of the Tums.
“Leave the sertraline, Madam Pharmacist, I’ll take the Ginette instead. »
I love Ginette, I even bought her gin (Gin-ette), but I understand booksellers being furious at having been excluded from the marketing of her autobiography. A friend of mine, a retired ex-bookseller, said to me this week: “Hey, Blanchette! Booksellers need books like these to keep poetry on the shelves. And poetry, you need it in life! »
I bise. We’ll talk about the day ChatGPT can imitate Miron. The difference between a robot and a poet is that the latter has a soul. It can even die of it, it is verified. Well, in the meantime, he also receives scholarships and literary prizes to eat, to continue his work. Otherwise, his soul dissolves in the slurry of indifference. And the poet knows very well that neither Walmart nor Jean Coutu wants his moods, except to sell him antidepressants.
imagine life
without the tree that hides you
imagine the night
without a shadow of a doubt.
Like Roland Giguère or Nelligan, long, long after the poets have disappeared, their words still run through the streets.
But don’t kid yourself too much, one of the books that was a hit in 2022 even if you bought The Kremlin MageIt is Pierre Gervais. At the heart of the locker room, by Mathias Brunet, on NHL gossip…
Too much is like not enough
All these pandemic novels written during successive confinements combined with the memoirs of baby boomers who occupy their retirement as best they can are starting to have babies. That said, unless your name is Ginette Reno, less than 1% of manuscripts are published, and Gallimard has even asked writers wannabe to suspend the sending of manuscripts on its website in 2021. A first in more than a century!
An average publisher receives a thousand a year, a thousand envelopes piling up in a corner of the office, seen with my eyes seen. If this publisher publishes less than ten books in the year, including one or two by unknown authors, we can easily conclude that most of these writings will remain a dead letter.
And yet, 8,000 titles are published in Quebec per year (in 2019, and 10,000 in 2010), to which you add 40,000 titles from French publishers (a little less than half of what is published in France: 100,000 per year). So, quickly, booksellers find themselves with 1000 new French titles per week to place on their tables. They are overwhelmed. And journalists and other book channel influencers too.
“We’re shooting ourselves in the foot,” one editor told me. And another confesses to me half-heartedly that many books would not be published without subsidies. But can we let literature (and our culture) be subject to the laws of the market and pharmacies alone?
The earth is covered with a new race of men who are both educated and illiterate, mastering computers and no longer understanding anything about souls, even forgetting what such a word once meant.
The industry players I talk to whisper to me that this is the saturation point in an economy where we are fiercely competing for our attention. And the more authors who engage in burlesque-like stripteases (also called “click whores”) on social networks to harpoon you, the fewer readers there are: a third less books sold by title by author in France between 2007 and 2016 according to the authors Hélène Ling and Inès Sol Salas in their excellent essay The fetish and the feather, which deals with “literature, the new product of capitalism. »
A book only has a few weeks to establish itself, two or three months before being dislodged by the next wave. We “clean up” the tables and, presto, we return the boxes to the publisher. In a nutshell, yes, the book has become a product like any other with planned obsolescence and, no — to respond to a very naive comment I sometimes hear — reaching one reader does not justify all the disappointments and disbursements given the laborious stages and other “hardships” involved in the manufacture of a work. Otherwise, it’s called organ donation.
Make lean
And do not think that with their meager 10% royalties on the cost of your book, the authors grease the leg, far from it, especially when a bestseller draws 3000 copies. Ginette short-circuited the 40% that goes into the pockets of booksellers. Hence the screams.
According to the Union of Quebec Writers and Writers, the median income of authors was less than $3,000 and their average income was less than $10,000 in 2017. 90% of them do not earn $25,000 a year . And even that, the AI will pocket it with the fast books which will soon be available, “perfectly calibrated texts for consumer readers. Neoliberalism only needs this to run the shop,” reads The fetish and the feather.
For thirty years, surviving the month of September has become a challenge for those who dabble in literature.
This caustic essay concerning a milieu generally protected from criticism (although Balzac with his lost illusions had already bitten that hand) shows us what awaits literature at the draft. The paper book is meant to be “netflixed” — consecration! — in increments of ten episodes or to serve as film scripts such as for The plunger, the cobbler Or Women Talking, all three of which I have seen recently, but not read.
“Why read literature — or even why read at all? ask the authors of the pavement in the literary pond published by Rivages and which is 400 pages. “The reserve armies of writers and other entertainers will be exhausted as soon as they are no longer supported by the vital illusion of artistic value. In this area as elsewhere, the logic of speculative profitability inevitably tends to destroy the economy of desire which is necessary for it. »
We can call it anhedonism, a drop in literary libido. From 20 to 25% of the annual production of books would end up in toilet paper (culture does what it can) or in packaging boxes which will be used to transport other books to… pharmacies.
(And I suggest my literary pharmaceutical prescriptions next week at the Salon du livre de Québec!)