Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, posted an op-ed today in the Huffington Post, calling on authors to throw themselves on the gears of the machine. This is a reference to Mario Savio‘s 1964 speech in which he called on students at UCLA to resist the administration’s attempts to curtail free speech. In the case of Mark Coker, the machine is Big Publishing and the mechanism of censorship isn’t an Orwellian authoritarianism, but rather a pervasive economic ideology which has turned the book into a commodity and little else. The answer to this evil is to self-publish and to distribute online through a service like, surprise, surprise, Coker’s own Smashwords.
Has anyone else picked up on the irony that Coker published his opinion in the Huffington Post? Arianna Huffington recently sold the Huffpo to AOL for a cool $315 million and screwed over thousands of indie authors in the process. The Huffpo was supposed to be an alternative press which, like Coker’s Smashwords, would leverage the advantages of online print. More than a year ago, I unfollowed @huffingtonpost and deleted it from my news aggregator because it was feeding junk content in an obvious play for traffic at the expense of depth. A sellout seemed inevitable. Just like I stopped submitting reviews to Blogcritics four years ago. I could smell the sellout coming and knew that if I stuck around I was merely letting someone else make money off my back.
What about Smashwords? How long before Coker announces an IPO or a purchase by Google? The only big player who has resisted this pattern is Jimmy Wales, and he did it by transferring Wikipedia’s assets to a not-for-profit, Wikimedia Foundation. Is Coker willing to go that far? Or will he keep the sellout option in his back pocket just in case?
Three weeks ago, I gave Smashwords a try. I finally took the plunge and published a novel called The Land using the Smashwords platform. No, I didn’t do it as a last resort. There is no mountain of rejection slips threatening to topple my desk. I never even tried to flog it with conventional publishers. So I can’t say that I was feeling oppressed by a Big Publishing machine that has conspired to silence me. That’s ludicrous. Nevertheless, I was motivated by some of the same concerns Coker expresses in his op-ed. I watch the traditional publishing game at play and recognize it for a microcosm of larger economic patterns unfolding in today’s world: the concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands, the decimation of local concerns, the bland uniformity of Big Publishing’s product lines, the encroachment of advertising which Orwell aptly described as “the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket“. Fuck it.
Coker’s rhetoric is a little over-the-top. Especially when you consider that a lot of the books published via Smashwords are utter drivel. In my view, this isn’t about freedom of speech. In the online ecosystem, free speech is easy. Effective speech? Now that’s a challenge. If there is any speech-related freedom I would want to assert online, it’s freedom from speech. There’s so much of it, and at such a volume, that it becomes exhausting searching for speech which deserves my attention.
It is (stereo)typically American to write an over-the-top op-ed asserting boundless freedoms while forgetting to mention their corresponding responsibilities. Then again, that would be boring. So let me be (stereo)typically Canadian and mention the boring stuff. If you want the freedom to publish your book as a way to throw yourself on the gears of the Big Publishing machine, then you should accept the responsibility of ensuring that your book doesn’t totally suck. Otherwise, you’re just driving readers back into the arms of Big Publishing and you deserve to be chewed up in the gears.