Who Decides when a Book is a Book?
The following is from an interview with Jesse Ball in the January 2010 issue of Poets and Writers. I think that it helps keep things in perspective.
"When you write you don't want to surrender to a publishing company the moment when a book is judged to be a book or not a book. You decide if it is a book or not a book. That's your prerogative as the writer. If you imagine yourself as a postapocalyptic world where - somehow you managed to survive - you're in this log cabin and there's a little printing press there, you're writing these books. You produce a book. Then it's a book. You just made a book. . .
In terms of giving the manuscript out as a little book to people, for poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sometimes their audience was just the few friends they managed to pass the book out to. You're no less a writer. As soon as someone makes a book and gives it to someone else, that's the whole thing. There isn't anything to be added to it."
"When you write you don't want to surrender to a publishing company the moment when a book is judged to be a book or not a book. You decide if it is a book or not a book. That's your prerogative as the writer. If you imagine yourself as a postapocalyptic world where - somehow you managed to survive - you're in this log cabin and there's a little printing press there, you're writing these books. You produce a book. Then it's a book. You just made a book. . .
In terms of giving the manuscript out as a little book to people, for poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sometimes their audience was just the few friends they managed to pass the book out to. You're no less a writer. As soon as someone makes a book and gives it to someone else, that's the whole thing. There isn't anything to be added to it."
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