In the new issue of the London Review of Books Jenny Diski looks at the state of publishing in her column, Short Cuts --and finds:
The state of publishing -- in particular of the kind of fiction which is politely called 'literary', meaning not 'easy reading' as in 'easy listening', or necessarily story-led, not bestselling before it is published -- is dire.She's also less than enthusiastic about some of the new approaches out there:
Unbound suggests itself as a radical move away from commercial publishing, but instead of an alternative, it's the concentrated essence of marketing. No one is taking any risks or making a leap of faith. This is a crowdsourcing model that is as crowd-pleasing as populist publishing, but on a smaller, safer scale. Readers control what the authors can write.