The Handmaid, Stale
It has recently come to my attention, via the book blogs that serve as the extra handful of pretzels on the lunch plate of my day, that Canadian party-girl and sometime novelist Margaret Atwood is attempting to invent a robot that will replace the function of the author in contemporary society. This may be fine for Ms. Atwood, who's made a nice career for herself writing one great book and a bunch of boring ones, but those of us who haven't yet reaped the permanent rewards of the literary life should be pretty upset that she wants to render us irrelevant through industrialization.
The representative of Ms. Atwood's publishing company says, in the article, that any way publishers can save money on author tours is greatly appreciated at the home office. Note to publishers: Your overhead is not being spent on pens and author appearances. It's being spent on unlimited corporate charge accounts, high-end hotel rooms, first-class tickets bought at the last second, and expensive author guides. I proved last year that you can tour five guys around the country, for a month, on a budget of $5,000, including more than 100 meals and a good 15 nights of hotels. Authors, particulary young ones, are more than willing to crash with friends, drive themselves around, and make moderately humiliating public appearances on the cheap, at least for a while. For some of us, being a writer is a big deal. I got into this business to write first and foremost, but also to be part of some sort of community of people who share my enthusiasms and interests. That's not going to happen if I'm signing books remotely from home with the help of a robot that, by Asimov's fifth law of robot proxy, is ultimately bound to betray me.
Lazy publicity equals low book sales. So do books that no one wants to read, but that's a problem I haven't yet quite solved.