I understand Amazon wanting some quality control. I understand Amazon looking for a "better" model for funding self-published work. Heralding 50 Shades of Grey as a triumph of anything other than discovering that people are more than willing to buy sex is the wrong argument. I think that the funding model has possibility. No one writes to get rich. Writers write because of the passion for crafting story. Amazon has the means to change the funding model...I say let them. They will get burned. Someone will figure out how to make cash by hacking Kindle hardware and Amazon will bleed for it. The truth is that traditional publishing doesn't protect nuance or favor art any more than Amazon does. They want to make more. Books of caliber don't make more money necessarily. Popular books do. It will be a cold day in hell when someone finally convinces me that Harry Potter was anything other than derivative pap...but the fact is that every publisher wishes that it was in their catalog. But that derivative pap was entertainment. It was escape. It was something that caught fire with the mass market. Self publishing will make the model different. Better? Worse? Who knows until we try, I for one welcome our new benevolent overlords and look forward to hacking a "page turner" that will make me rich.
Self publishing has the potential to obliterate non fiction. Without a publishing house to fund actual research that takes months or years to complete I don't see a lot of people producing quality research based text. You make a good point about good books often not selling well but shouldering promotion and editing while also presumably working so you don't starve is unrealistic. The publishers are a necessary evil and so are record labels and movie studios. Strip out all the protections afforded by a big guy with money in your corner and you get 50 Shades of Grey and the YouPorn of erotica kleinbl00 mentioned. It's nice to have the gatekeepers weakened so a potential talent isn't overlooked but tossing them out completely is at the bare minimum foolish. Since I mentioned record labels, where are all the Internet musicians making it big with direct distribution and YouTube promotion? I can think of one and his name is Justin Bieber.
The non-fiction is an angle I'd never considered. Though as a response that I have no reasonable way of checking, don't university presses make a lot of the non-fiction for the academy? As I said, probably wrong, a legitimate question. And the difference I think that we're thinking of is scale of success. You mention Bieber as the scale of success that you are familiar with, but underground success can make you a living in the music industry, and I think it could be able to with publishing if authors weren't being paid like slaves. The without publishers people would still write, and without record labels the music industry survives because art isn't a commercial product that scales. The Odyssey was written before publishing.
Mozart wrote before record labels. The difference is the definitions of success...megahits versus supporting yourself. Consumerism in contrast to satisfaction.
I worry about Amazon because they're the #1 retailer of books in the world. They're so powerful they can push around traditional publishers on issues of price and those publishers are huge companies backed by other huge companies. Anyone with a reasonable working knowledge of antitrust laws couldn't argue that they aren't abusing their market share in monopolistic ways. This self publishing trend is nice but it produces abject shit for the most part. Publishers take incredible risks on books that go nowhere. Go to Goodwill or the remainder pile in Barnes and Noble to see how much money is spent on books no one reads. Traditional publishing wants to sell your book more than the record companies want to sign your band, your book just sucks. No one, not even publishers, get into the book business to get rich but Amazon by virtue of its market share can make publishing much worse if it ends up assuming end to end control of publishing which seems to be within their goals as a company.
Fair enough. But the phenominal thing about monopolies and large companies is that they are very difficult to keep in the position of market leaders. They eventually get out innovated by the market. Even when Microsoft was at its worst and either buying or crushing everything that opposed it in the 90s a company came back and beat them. I mean now Apples is getting pantsed, but beside the point. The problem isn't that there is something wrong with publishers putting money out marketing and printing books. But with digital distribution, the issue at stake here, what is the problem with a funding model that rewards better click rates? Isn't that the application of the internet funding model on books. We're all okay with bloggers getting paid that way, newspaper and magazine writers getting paid that way, but we've got a problem with self-published novelists? I know Amazon won't last because the strategy is flawed.
Bieber didn't really make it big until he got picked up. There's always this discussion of "gatekeepers" as if their job is to keep you out. It isn't. Their job is to find the stuff they think is valuable and then exploit it for a percentage. An agent who gets ten great books out of ten submissions is going to push all ten towards publication so that she can get ten points off of all ten. Unfortunately agents generally get zero out of ten so they have to say "sorry, no thanks, best of luck" as politely as they can. Trust me - the publishing industry has the nicest "gatekeepers" I've met.
Books with holding power make more for longer. If your model was accurate there would be no reason to purchase back catalogs or issue reprints. If Harry Potter is "derivative pap" what is it derivative of? And if it was nothing special, why was there a bump in literacy that coincides nicely with its publication history?
Harry Potter really isn't orginal in terms of story, but in terms of setting. Boy is orphan raised by aunt and uncle.
Boy feels alone and wants something more.
Boy gets message that leads him to a wondrous place.
Boy finds out he has powers and great things are expected from him.
Boy gets training for coming war where he will be a hero.
Boy defeats great evil from his past.
Boy is hero. That's Harry Potter, or Star Wars, or any of a hundred other stories. Harry Potter is unique because of setting and richness of character development, and though it may be derivative, it's not pap. It's a story we want to be told again and again because we all want to be Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker.
Because structure is a commonality across all drama. Despite what pedants think, nearly all Western narrative consists of a beginning, a middle and an end. Audiences enjoy seeing character growth. The fundamental cycles of the monomyth, Campbell aside, can be found in a plurality of stories and legends across cultures. Psychologically speaking, we like to have certain elements in our storytelling. Alexander Polti divided all possible works of fiction into 36 dramatic situations and when you look at it like that, everything is "derivative" of whatever came first, whether or not the author is even aware of prior works. It has been argued that The Hunger Games is "derivative" of Battle Royale but this argument is largely made by people who want to hate on Suzanne Collins. The fact of the matter is, both stories deal with schoolchildren made to fight on television. Collins had a much different message to convey, however, and although the scenario is the same the denouement and plot are very different. Besides which, Suzanne Collins was unaware of Battle Royale until Hunger Games was finished, so if the definition of "derivative" includes derivation, Hunger Games ain't. Both stories owe an awful lot to Walter Moudy's "The Survivor" but dollars to donuts neither one of them had ever heard of it. As a part of the collective unconscious, maybe - but then, all three stories owe their existence to Fredric Brown's "Arena" which most people know from this: Now - is Hunger Games derivative of Kirk v. Gorn? NO. But they definitely have elements in common. Wanna see derivative? This is derivative:
If you want to be that hyperbolic you could say that writing letters to make words is not an original invention. We're talking about major story elements here which play out across a ton of stories. I think that's derivative. You don't and you've made your point well. I guess I enjoy derivative work equally alongside original work. If Harry Potter is telling the same story as Star Wars it doesn't matter to me. Both were fun to watch though I prefer Star Wars.
I answered that question succinctly with Star Wars. You said that it was guarded from guilt of derivation under the protective category of the monomyth. I disagree with your argument as too broad and told you as much. If you'd like to have another try at explaining why stories which are as similar as Star Wars and Harry Potter are not derivative of the former as the former is derivative of many stories which came before it you are welcome to it, but your tone is rude and doesn't help you in any way.
Don't get me wrong I like Harry Potter. But it is hardly some sort of renaissance of literary art. It is the intertwining of two very British literary traditions. The coming of age story and Arthurian legend. If it seems hard to believe think of it this way. Take all the wands, wizards, talking paintings and faeries (the fantasy elements) and you end up with a story of a public school coming of age novel. Probably set from 1938-1945. You take away the public school coming of age and you get a predestined hero being helped by a group of friends to overcome supernatural evil, Arthurian legend. I know that I am oversimplifying but there is no element of the story that is unique in its own right other than the combining of the two stories...which in itself wasn't really original because other authors had done it before see "The Worst Witch" by Jill Murphy. Was Harry Potter good? Yeah, I think it is very entertaining. Is it literature? No. But then again I think a lot of what counts a literature is worse than Rowling. And don't pretend that the bump in literacy is anything other than the by-product of mass consumerism. Think of all the good we could do if we treated scientists like we treat Bill Nye.
You're arguing that Harry Potter owes a lot to TH White. Sure, obviously. That doesn't make it derivative of The Once And Future King. "Derivative" means, at its most basic, "imitative in a negative way." Having written 500 words or more on how Harry Potter is not the most amazing new thing under the sun, I think we can stipulate that JK Rowling owes a lot to basic literary tradition. But that's a long damn way from being "derivative pap."