Dan Sinykin Interview
[GS-INT-031]
Dan Sinykin currently shares a sense of humor with his three-year-old daughter, but fears she will soon outgrow it.How do you define "mechanistic" as it relates to a characteristic of someone's brand?
When I write about Danielle Steel as mechanistic, I mean it as denigration, and as a collapse of her brand. For most of her career, Steel fought against the perception of herself as mechanistic. I'm not young, but Steel's been publishing since a decade before I was born. By the time I was conscious, I experience Steel as a mainstay by the cash register at the grocery store. I thought of her like I thought of Little Debbie, not as a real human being. It surprised me to discover that she is quite profoundly human and was, at least, deeply invested in her individual authorship, in the flesh and blood humanity of it. She talks about her fingers bleeding, her back aching. That her work has become utterly, humiliatingly, desperately mechanistic in that last decade is a tragedy of the species.
Feel free to research his catalogue if you're not familiar, but do you think that Stephen King went the same path as Danielle Steel? Or was he the progenitor?
Steel published her debut in 1973 and was lifted to a blockbuster brand with her fourth in 1978. King published his debut, Carrie, in 1974. His editor, William Thompson, got it for $2500. Thompson then sold the paperback rights for $400,000, or more than $2.5 million today. King was teaching high school and living in a trailer with his wife and kids. When Thompson told him the news his knees went out.
King and Steel were the greatest beneficiaries of conglomeration's investment in marketing and its commitment to blockbusters. And both felt, too, the burden of their brand. Worried that his books were only selling because of his name, not their quality, King published several books under a pseudonym, Richard Bachman. They didn't sell (until later, when he was outed). Much as Steel repeatedly allegorized her struggle by pitting authentic, artistic individuals against mechanistic forces, so too did King, especially in a spate of novels in the 1980s: It, The Tommyknockers, Misery, The Dark Half.
Would you say if "appearance reflects morality" in the characters, you're probably reading slop or a children's book? Are they the same?
An insult to children! I have a toddler so I know that children's books have their own range of sophistication from slop to serious art. But also art novels can fall into the trap of allowing appearance to reflect morality. Saramago's Blindness. It actually goes back to Plato who argued in the Sympoisum that beauty is the external sign of inner beauty. Not to say late Steel is Platonic!
If there was legislation to keep books labeled as slop like a warning on a cigarette pack, would you be in favor of it?
No. It would be patronizing and counterproductive. What we need—and we are a million miles away!—is an education system that fosters social freedom from kindergarten.
As much as we don't like corporations, is it better for a publisher to be publicly traded, as opposed to private equity owning them? In that way consumers have some influence?
I’d frame the question differently. Some private equity firms are publicly traded—such as KKR, which owns Simon & Schuster. Some multinational conglomerates are privately owned. Penguin Random House and Macmillan are both owned by privately held German conglomerates. The material distinction, to my mind, is private equity or conglomerate, not public or private.
Conglomerates prioritize the bottom line, but might allow some room for other aims. Macmillan owns FSG and FSG is the most aesthetically exciting Big Five imprint: it regularly publishes books whose artistic value exceeds their economic potential. Private equity is rapacious in its pursuit of capital. It only has eyes for $. Under KKR, Simon & Schuster quickly acquired VBK, the largest publisher in the Netherlands, which is using AI to translate books into English. S&S launched a new imprint, Primero Sueño, dedicated to commercial literature for Latinx readers, leading with self-help, memoirs, translations of Colleen Hoover, and new adult fiction with proven success on Wattpad. S&S also launched an “audio-first” imprint, Simon Maverick. For the opening keynote of the 2024 London Book Fair, then-president Jonathan Karp declared S&S, no longer under conglomerate ownership, “now the largest independent publisher” in the U.S. With KKR, he said, “A lot of innovation has been unleashed.” S&S ousted Nan Graham, one of the best editors in the business, whose authors included Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Miranda July, Dana Spiotta, and Kushner. Marysue Rucci, a commercial editor, was installed in her place, “to try to teach us how to sell books” an S&S editor told me, “and to find the next Stephen King.”
So conglomerates are better than private equity. But actual independents are better than either. There are a whole range of possible financial structures within that category, with their own implications, which I won't go into here.
I’ve always wondered this. What is the line with AI, in your opinion? Like, as a creative writer, can I use it for research without being crucified? I’ve used it to look up historical records, with the strict rule to not bring anything up without verifiable sources that I can visit myself. Which is essentially Google on steroids, but still. And I know Mia Ballard is the go to story right now about this, but let me just clarify, there are people who literally go into a ChatGPT (or something similar) and say “write this story”, and attempt to publish it?
At Emory University, where I teach, the attitude toward AI varies wildly depending on one’s discipline. Those in my department, English, detest AI and want to banish its use to the maximum possible extent. Many faculty in computer science, economics, and psychology, among other disciplines, have already fully folded AI into their research habits. The line, that is, looks different depending where you stand.
As Sarah Brouillette pointed out on Substack, AI has already rabidly resurrected (insofar as it was dead) the distinction between high and low art. Yes: many, many people are using AI to write fiction and have been for several years. Probably hundreds of thousands of AI-generated novels were self-published last year. This year maybe millions. And many people like AI-generated novels. Those who want to distinguish themselves can differentiate what they read and write from such slop—and of course this is what is happening, with extreme emotion attached. Pride and shame cascading.
One thing at the symposium where you did your keynote that I didn't hear come up was high schools in the US. To this day, are students still reading Things Fall Apart, The Great Gatsby, and To Kill A Mockingbird? I can say from my experience, high school was the period that turned me off from books for years. Is there a plausible solution to this?
A major survey published last year found that The Great Gatsby remains the second most taught text in high school, after only Romeo and Juliet. To Kill a Mockingbird was sixth. A different survey has those at #2 and #3, with Things Fall Apart at #21. At the same time, high schools have been moving away from teaching whole books and have been turning to pop songs, video games, and other multimedia objects to try to reach kids. There's a great scholar, Alexander Manshel, who is writing a book about how high school English shaped literary history, with an early article from the project just out in American Literary History that everyone should check out.