Release the Caged Bird: Go Set a Watchman and the Danger of Self-Publishing
Reading Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is one of the more unique experiences a bookworm can have. Though released just this month, Watchman was originally written in the 1950s. Lee submitted the manuscript to publishers, but according to HarperCollins, the editor asked Lee to put the story on hold while she expanded on the narrative’s numerous flashbacks. Those flashbacks, about a young girl growing up in Maycomb, Alabama, grew until they became To Kill a Mockingbird. Watchman, the first draft of an eventual Pulitzer-winner, was forgotten until now.
Go Set a Watchman was branded by some as a sequel to the 1961 novel, but that’s not quite accurate. Nothing in Watchman is written with To Kill a Mockingbird in mind (after all, when this was written, Mockingbird didn’t exist), and this results in some brow-raising-at-best, jarring-at-worst inconsistencies. It’s believable, then, to hear HarperCollins say that, aside from a routine copy-edit, they didn’t change anything about the novel before its release. That is to say, Go Set a Watchman never saw any revisions between its initial 1950s proposal and now.
The signs of imperfection carry the smell of something unchecked by an objective party, and it brings to mind another section of the literary world: the vast sea of self-published works. It’s a legitimate, if oft-maligned, category. According to a 2014 report by Publisher’s Weekly, self-published books represent 31 percent of e-book sales on Amazon’s Kindle Store and 40 percent of the total revenue from e-book sales goes to independent authors. The Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster) only account for 16 percent of the e-books on Amazon’s bestseller lists. Self-publishing has thrust its meaty, unpolished paws into the mix, and it’s taking away chunks of the industry with it.
In a lot of ways, this is great for the book world. Easier publishing means greater selection. More content means more appeal to niche audiences and greater reach toward people less likely to buy books from the traditional Big Five. Certainly, the literature world might be consolidating onto screens, but the bevy of choice on those screens has never been higher. Bowker reports that 458,000 books were self-published in 2013.
Of course, critics will argue that self-published books tend to be of poorer quality — no one’s there to weed out the duds. From the outset, it’s a pretty unfair statement. Indeed, for every Fifty Shades of Grey, there’s a Still Alice, but when we look at something like Go Set a Watchman, which essentially followed the pattern of a self-published novel, there might be some substance behind the aversion to independent books.
Consider that To Kill a Mockingbird exists, in all its resonance and staying power, because Go Set a Watchman had to go through a publisher first. Mockingbird is the product of editing and revising and suggestions from professionals. If Harper Lee had been born 50 years later, and hit her literary prime in this modern world of self-publishing, there’s a good chance that Go Set a Watchman would be all we have from the author.
It’s not a huge leap, in turn, to say that To Kill a Mockingbird, as a nitpicked by-product of Watchman, wouldn’t have been conceived if it weren’t for the second opinions and intentional guidance of the industry pros. Thus, what we have with the 60-year-old Watchman is an ironic representation of a book written in 2015: one that is unpolished, rough-hewn, and ultimately worse than the masterpiece cut from its pulp.
Maybe this can all be written off as a thought experiment, but with self-publishing as pervasive as it is within the literature business, how many Mockingbirds are we missing out on? Quantity of books is up, and with that is bound to come some critical darlings, but could this rise of independence devalue the people of the industry? What happens to the editors and representatives who peer through the forests of prose and find the truffles of greatness within?
The people of the literary world have proved their worth, but if the industry continues on its current course and those indie numbers keep climbing, how many great novels will be lost? How many Mockingbirds will remain buried in the Watchmans?
It’s an exciting time to be a writer, but the words of one Atticus Finch ring as true to the Kindle world as they did to Scout back in 1961. We can’t forget — it’s still a sin to kill a Mockingbird.
