Roblog

Publishing, like virtually every other industry, has attuned itself to the ocean of data that now exists, using it to measure the worth of art and artists in real-time. From Thea Lim:

“Only twenty years ago, there was no public, complete data on book sales. Until the introduction of BookScan in the late ’90s, you just had to take an agent’s word for it. ‘The track record of an author was a contestable variable that was known to some, surmised by others, and always subject to exaggeration in the interests of inflating value,’ says John B. Thompson in Merchants of Culture, his ethnography of contemporary publishing.

“This is hard to imagine, now that we are inundated with cold, beautiful stats, some publicized by trade publications or broadcast by authors themselves on all socials. How many publishers bid? How big is the print run? How many stops on the tour? How many reviews on Goodreads? How many mentions on Bookstagram, BookTok? How many bloggers on the blog tour? How exponential is the growth in follower count? Preorders? How many printings? How many languages in translation? How many views on the unboxing? How many mentions on most-anticipated lists?”

Lim’s heartfelt piece explains powerfully what that culture of measurement does to an artist – and what it’s doing to all of us.

“We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth.”