John Wray, Poster Boy?

I agree with many of Julia's (and the article's) points. Frugality is something that has been missing from the publishing industry for decades now, it would seem. Gigantic profit margins are just not feasible in the American literary market. I don't think it should even be called a market, really. Innovation is something long due in the publishing world, as well. Technology certainly isn't everything, and relying on that to rebuild the industry would be foolish. In many cases technology simply poses in the guise of a new idea, rather than truly innovating. Just because something has been moved to the Internet does not mean it is completely new. I think for this reason e-books initially failed.

But the responsibility for innovation need not be solely on the shoulders of the publishing companies. Authors can do their part, too. In the current literary climate, it would seem that stylistic and promotional innovation are merging - at least in the case of John Wray, the author of The Right Hand of Sleep, Canaan's Tongue, and the just released Lowboy. For Canaan's Tongue he toured for two weeks in a makeshift raft down 600 miles of the Mississippi River, stopping to do readings on the way. The novel focuses on a horse thief who in reality haunted that same area in the 19th century. The story of this interesting though gimmicky move are detailed in this New York Times article. The readings were a bust, and the reporter notes that "there are few things more useless on a river than a novelist" but the scheme worked, in my opinion - I mean, it got a whole story in the New York Times. Similarly, Wray wrote the majority of his new novel on the New York subway, where most of its action takes place. I think by further collapsing the boundary between the author and his work, no matter how outlandish the work or the collapsing movement are, Wray's fiction rings with more of this "truth" that Stephen King and many other authors have spoken of. And as I said, it hasn't hurt his publicity.