In impassioned speech, author of Looking for Alaska says he'd be nowhere without 'tireless collaboration' of publishers
John Green: 'Authors need editors and we need publishers and we need booksellers'. Photograph: Ton Koene
A rallying cry from the author John Green in support of traditional publishing – in which the bestselling young-adult author calls on readers to "strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation … because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature" – is reverberating its way around the internet.
Green is a social-media sensation, with more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter, a hugely popular Tumblr page and a YouTube account with more than a million subscribers, where the videos he makes with his brother Hank have been viewed more than 200m times. The New York Times bestselling author of novels including Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, about a teenager with cancer, Green is frequently described as an author who, thanks to his online followers, has the wherewithal to go it alone and self-publish.
But speaking to the Association of American Booksellers, who handed him the Young Adult Indies Choice award last week, Green – in an expletive-filled speech – said this was never going to happen.
"I am sometimes held up as an example of someone who is changing the publishing paradigm or whatever because I have a lot of Tumblr followers and YouTube subscribers and I can speak directly to my audience and I don't need the value-sucking middleman of bookstores and publishers, and in the future everyone is going to be like me, and no one will stand between author and reader except possibly an e-commerce site that takes just a tiny little percentage of each transaction," said Green. "Yeah, that's bullshit."
Green said he wouldn't have any books to his name at all without the "tireless and committed collaboration" of his editor and agent, the staff at Penguin and the "thousands of other people, copy editors, warehouse employees, programmers, people who know how to make servers work, librarians and booksellers".
"We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature," he said. "They hold me up as an example but I am not an example of publishers or bookstores extracting value because without an editor my first novel, Looking for Alaska, would have been unreadably self-indulgent. And even after she helped me make it better it wouldn't have found its audience without unflagging support … from booksellers around the country. I wouldn't have the YouTube subscribers or the Tumblr followers, and even if I did I wouldn't have any good books to share with them."
Authors "need editors and we need publishers and we need booksellers", said Green, adding that he was not in the "widget-selling" or the "profit-maximisation" business.
"I'm in the book business, the idea-sharing, consciousness-expanding, storytelling business," said the novelist. "And I am not going to get out of that business. So fuck Ayn Rand and fuck any company that profits from peddling the lie of mere individualism
Green is a social-media sensation, with more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter, a hugely popular Tumblr page and a YouTube account with more than a million subscribers, where the videos he makes with his brother Hank have been viewed more than 200m times. The New York Times bestselling author of novels including Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, about a teenager with cancer, Green is frequently described as an author who, thanks to his online followers, has the wherewithal to go it alone and self-publish.
But speaking to the Association of American Booksellers, who handed him the Young Adult Indies Choice award last week, Green – in an expletive-filled speech – said this was never going to happen.
"I am sometimes held up as an example of someone who is changing the publishing paradigm or whatever because I have a lot of Tumblr followers and YouTube subscribers and I can speak directly to my audience and I don't need the value-sucking middleman of bookstores and publishers, and in the future everyone is going to be like me, and no one will stand between author and reader except possibly an e-commerce site that takes just a tiny little percentage of each transaction," said Green. "Yeah, that's bullshit."
Green said he wouldn't have any books to his name at all without the "tireless and committed collaboration" of his editor and agent, the staff at Penguin and the "thousands of other people, copy editors, warehouse employees, programmers, people who know how to make servers work, librarians and booksellers".
"We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature," he said. "They hold me up as an example but I am not an example of publishers or bookstores extracting value because without an editor my first novel, Looking for Alaska, would have been unreadably self-indulgent. And even after she helped me make it better it wouldn't have found its audience without unflagging support … from booksellers around the country. I wouldn't have the YouTube subscribers or the Tumblr followers, and even if I did I wouldn't have any good books to share with them."
Authors "need editors and we need publishers and we need booksellers", said Green, adding that he was not in the "widget-selling" or the "profit-maximisation" business.
"I'm in the book business, the idea-sharing, consciousness-expanding, storytelling business," said the novelist. "And I am not going to get out of that business. So fuck Ayn Rand and fuck any company that profits from peddling the lie of mere individualism
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