Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.
Sabitha: Today we’re turning the blog over to two Night Beats authors, Dale Stromberg and Tucker Lieberman, to talk about Dale’s story ‘Art is a Service’ in the upcoming anthology Instant Classic (That No One Will Read). Dale, can you start us off by introducing your story and the anthology?
Dale: The anthology collects satirical takes on the creative industries. Creators are indispensable in the crafting of the stories, songs, and images we all love, but their rewards are often paltry. If you imagine a stream of money trickling from the public towards the creator, then here and there farther upstream, various people have built dams. Each dam is a chance to skim a few bucks. One such enterprising skimmer is the interviewee in “Art Is a Service,” Nao Hovgaard, a publisher whose innovative marketing involves, among other things, a trampoline.
Tucker: So, novelists on trampolines. In “Art Is a Service,” Nao Hovgaard compares plugging novelists into AI to using “trampolines to the nth power.” Some authors might say it’s all unfair: the AI trampoline, the regular trampoline, everything. But if all trampolines are bad, how can authors write and market books? On what may we jump to elevate ourselves?
Dale: I feel there’s a nearly Darwinian, invisible-hand–like inevitability to the advent of the trampoline whenever art, music, drama, or literature are commodified and subjected to the inexorable libertarian robo-logic of consumerism. Authors who hope to make a living from their work are, in a pragmatic sense, engaged in a consumerist pursuit: offering a mechanically reproducible product for sale at a thin margin and hoping that a bunch of people will buy it—cumulatively earning one enough that, at the least, one’s bones don’t end up in a pauper’s grave. For this, one depends on an appeal to the many.
I see no inherent link between success in making such an appeal to the many and success in the loftier pursuit of “the good” (however you define it) in the arts. If the peacock with the biggest plumage gets the mate, then peacock plumage evolves bigger, even if it encumbers the bird’s ability to fly. When, in the creative industries, the bottomless inventiveness of a human on the make furnishes the world with a “trampoline”—a business tactic or marketing gizmo that appeals to different drives/desires than a creative work itself might appeal to—and when this trampoline produces more “sales experiences” than literary merit can do, then the trampoline gets the mate. It passes on its big-plumage genes.
If I’m not wrong, if the vending of stories on a consumerist model must lead in the end to trampolines, then what alternatives can we envision? The diametric opposite of the appeal to the many is the appeal to the one: scoring yourself a wealthy patron, like some kind of Renaissance poet sucking up to a viscount. Which sounds far-fetched to me, but—not gonna lie—it’s at this point that I run out of ideas. So I can write you a snotty satire of the garbage chute we’re all funnelling down towards, but if you want a ray of hope that things could be any different, I’ve got nothing.
Tucker: When you pick up a book, do you ever sense that the author or publisher believes they are performing a service? And does that make you feel well served or ill served?
Dale: Hmm… I want to think about “service” itself first. We will say so-and-so “served as president” or “served as CEO”, which certainly isn’t the same thing as “serving in the Navy” or “serving as a juror”. Furthermore, none of these positions is the position of a “servant” per se. I note that our society has a great penchant for talking about “service” even as we avoid referring to ourselves as “servants”.
To be a servant to an imperious master is a hard lot, but do we not also conceive of service as noble in its humility, as when one human bends voluntarily to wash the feet of another? Still, when I hear “service” (and maybe this is true for you as well), what comes at once to mind is an economic transaction (probably somewhat demeaning): the exchange of money for labour whose aim is not to make a thing but rather to do a thing.
So, if someone provides you a book not as a thing made but as a thing done, what are they doing for you? How are they “serving” you? Perhaps they are “serving your turn”—fulfilling some concrete use (and I am reminded of all those dreary claims that reading fiction will power-up your empathy, much as the consumption of fine cuisine can stock you up with antioxidants); if so, yes, I can easily imagine many authors/publishers solicitously offering a written work as a kind of utilitarian vitamin supplement to the soul.
Or perhaps they are “serving refreshments”—offering nourishment not because it will fortify you with nutrients but because to do so is a kindness, and will comfort you, and is one part of the conviviality and ease we hope our labours will purchase us. I tentatively speculate that this form of service is part of what motivates many or most true creators. I think it laudable.Or perhaps they are “serving you the ball” as in a game of tennis—sending something your way, maybe a lazy lob, maybe a more challenging slice, and provoking a response. A book like that will say, “Your move.” It will nudge you to hustle, to see and judge and react. My own values and preferences tell me that this is the sort of service I’d be glad to receive as a reader, and would hope to offer as a writer.
Tucker: Hovgaard spake, “Fuck the bestseller list.” Do you not think his judgment might be a bit harsh? Do bestsellers truly deserve the bad rap? I’ve heard that some bestsellers are good.
Dale: Oh, what Hovgaard hates is the list itself. He’s the publishing equivalent of a libertarian tech bro, which means he makes “disruption” a point of pride and nurses especial contempt for his victims.
Now, the NYT list is, of course, notoriously inaccurate, based on spotty data, and not in fact based on sales figures reported by publishers—entities which themselves appear to have little idea how many books of theirs actual readers actually buy. In other words, the list is emblematic of a shambolic industry which seems actively haughty about its ossified, opaque, esoteric and byzantine business practices. This is the sort of field any entrepreneurial legerdemainist like Hovgaard would hungrily eye, as a leopard on the Serengeti eyes a wounded impala: ripe for “disruption,” which is a stylish way of saying, “Finding someone who gets money doing a thing, and making that money come to you instead.”
Such disruptive exploits, to the extent they threaten to capsize the rusting hulks of the industry, might actually inspire some merry schadenfreude in authors, whose hopes and dreams have traditionally made us easy patsies for trade publishers—until we realise where we will end up sitting within the new model Hovgaard offers. It is, in truth, merely a new take on the same old crap: the capitalist monetising someone else’s years of silent, private, unpaid, invisible labour even as that labourer is made to feel fortunate for the chance to surrender most of the spoils… the offloading of risk down the hierarchy (where the authors dwell) and the shifting of wealth up the hierarchy (where Hovgaard waits to collect it)… the precarity, the exploitation… the pageantry, the hauteur… the squeezing of blood from every available stone. Same grift, new name—or, if you like, same book, new cover design.
On the other hand, my guess would be that Hovgaard has no opinion either way on bestselling books themselves. He’s agnostic. He’s never read one.
Sabitha: Thank you both for this—I am so excited for this project! Where can readers get their hands on a copy? And where can they find your other work?
Dale: They can get a free review copy of the anthology here—all we ask in return is they share the anthology on a platform of their choice. Or they can pre-order a copy on Amazon. I hang out on Bluesky, Medium, and Goodreads, and info about my work can be found on my website.
Night Beats Extended Universe 