This 85-year-old writer accepted an award for her distinguished contribution to American Letters and made a brief speech that apparently brought the house down. Here’s a link:
And here’s an excerpt of NPR’s report that gives an idea about the nature of her remarks:
She reserved her most incendiary language for the recently resolved pricing dispute between Amazon and the publisher Hachette Book Group.
“We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa,” she said. “And I see a lot of us, the producers, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant!”
And she had more to say, much more, even though her speech was very brief. (You can click the link for a video.)
It made me think of a line in an email from my 87-year-old cousin: Don’t mess with old people. We don’t have time to waste on nonsense.
In a recent conversation with a much-younger writer friend, he pointed out (unnecessarily) that publishing is a business and a business must make a profit. Verily. I get that. But I’ll never forget a Catholic publisher’s reason for rejecting my first novel, Treason: It has a prostitute in it, and he was concerned about offending his Catholic market. The novel was eventually published by someone else (Sophia) and won Best Religious Fiction of 2014 from Independent Publishers Association.
And I remember sitting between two publishers having a drink at a bar (sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it?) as they bartered my contract—in my presence. I felt like a slave on market day. Was I invisible to them? No—just irrelevant. They were both devout Catholic publishers.
But then, on the other hand, neither will I forget the Catholic publisher (Full Quiver) of my second novel, The Lion’s Heart, who didn’t hesitate to publish a novel about a same-sex love affair. I was very happy to find out recently that the book topped all the others on their current list for sales.
Integrity matters. Freedom matters. Perhaps it matters more to writers than to publishers, who often seem to think that freedom matters only if it’s marketable. In any case, Le Guin’s speech made me think about such things. It’s rare to hear someone say such things out loud, without fear of being accused of being a prima donna. Maybe you just shouldn’t mess with old people.
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