Hey listeners, Marcel here. You might have heard that we have a Patreon. And, you know, Hannah and Coach and I, we can talk for days about how great it is, but we thought maybe you might be more convinced by listening to the Patreon supporters explain what they love about the Patreon. on themselves. So, hey coach, you got some tape? Can you roll it? Hi, this is Carolyn, also known as Kalooey or Kalia99 from Raleigh, North Carolina.
I've been a listener of various Witch Please podcasts for years because they bring so much joy and learning into my life. What I've learned has unquestionably helped shape how I think about the world around me. And I'm a Patreon supporter because I value what Witch Please brings into my life. And, you know, the watch-alongs and live tapings are a lot of fun, too. Help us sustain the show and unlock hours of perks by heading to patreon.com slash ohwitchplease.
Hello and welcome to Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitgeist. I'm Marcelle Kosman. And I'm Hannah McGregor. And first off, we just have to start this episode by noting that Marcel is a sickie. I have been sick for so long, I can't remember what it was like to be well. We're going to be so nice to Marcel on this episode. That's all I ask. So this week, Marcel, we are finally dipping our toes into the sexy world of romanticy.
But of course, as is typical to us, we will be taking a decidedly materialist approach to the conversation. But before we do that, Marcel, I would like to know where you are at personally in your romantic journey. Are you reading any sexy fairy books or what? I'm reading the Akotar books. For the uninitiated, it's A Court of Thorns and Roses. That's the title of the first book, and the series has been nicknamed Akotar. You know, it's an acronym. How's your ACOTAR?
exploration going? I'm kind of hate reading the books. I really liked the second book. I enjoyed the second book very much. I really am hating the third. I hated the first. I'm hating the third. And will I read the fourth? Of course. Is there a fifth? I don't know. But if there is...
I'll read it. I'll probably hate read it. Yeah. Well, you can read Fourth Wing next because maybe it's sexy as well. I get the impression that probably it's sexy as well. Yeah. My sister-in-law Jillian told me that Elliot... who has expressed an interest in reading it because she loves dragon stories, is too young to read it. Okay, too sexy. Too sexy for a nine-year-old.
So I wonder if, like, ACOTAR and Fourth Wing are to this generation as, like, the Outlander books were to us. Maybe. Like, our sort of early, exciting peek into the world of... Smutty adult fiction. Yeah. They're not like particularly radical, but they have like just a soupçon of humanity for the female characters. and some open door action.
Hannah, I just confessed to hate reading one of the most popular series on the market today. What sexy books are you reading and are you hate reading any of them? I don't hate read because... My reading time is like a precious little nugget where I only want to read things that I enjoy. Wow, weird. I know. But I read the... nastiest, weirdest, self-published romance on Kindle Unlimited. Okay. All of my ancestors are rolling over in their graves at the filth that I read. Always.
I mean, they're romance narratives, so they are within the larger structure of a romance narrative. But in between, Marcel, the things that people are doing to each other's bodies, shocking. Shocking. Because I read a lot of romance. People often ask me to say what romance I read. And I'm like, nope. Nope. I actually won't tell you. And it's not because I'm ashamed, because I'm proudly telling you right now that it is absolutely obscene. I am a big fan of Omegaverse.
which is a subgenre of romanticy that emerges fully out of the fanfiction world. It's like a kind of set of fanfiction tropes, but that do involve... weird biologically altered penises amongst other things. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love when a penis is weird. I'm not interested in real human penises. Sure. And so... I love when it's like, it's got a hook. I mean, you don't need to make it causal. Like, it's okay. A tentacle. I mean, yeah.
Even listeners out there who do like real human penises. Maybe you like real penises and you also like when it's got a hook. We're going to hook the reader into the next segment with our tentacle penis. Speaking of hooks. It's time for Why This? Why Now? The segment that asks the materialist question, what are or were the historical, ideological, and material conditions for our object of study?
to become zeitgeisty. And Marcel, I have a confession to make. I insisted that we put fourth wing in the title of this episode. Yeah. But it was a trick. We're not actually talking about fourth wing. What the fuck? Well, we're talking about Fourth Wing's publisher. Okay. And nobody's ever heard of the names of any publishers. So we can't put that in the title and call it Zeitgeist-y. Okay. We're just immediately moving into the context of Rebecca Yeros's...
fourth wing series, which is this huge, massive breakout bestselling romantic series about dragons and dragon riders. Yeah. Frankly, I intend to read it at some point. I just haven't read it yet. But what I have read is a lot about the really interesting publisher of this series, Entangled. publishing. This makes sense because you are a professor in the publishing department at your university. So you're very knowledgeable about this topic.
I mean, you know when you're writing about something that you like really, really know and it makes you more nervous than writing about things that you only know a little bit about? Sure. But I am really fascinated by Entangled Publishing because they are... fucking around with traditional publishing paradigms in a way that is paying off for them hugely. And also they are being sued. Right now in a lawsuit that I think also tells us something interesting about how.
their different way of approaching publishing might not fit particularly comfortably into the existing publishing landscape. But this is almost a thesis in advance. No, no, no. No thesis yet, but... So we're not going to talk about dragons at all? Unfortunately not. But I am going to talk about traditional publishing paradigms, which is as exciting as dragons, I think. Yeah. So, Marcel, tell me... how much you know about how traditional trade publishing works.
Okay, so there's like, when you do an episode about something you know like a lot about, and so then it's scarier than when you do an episode about something you don't know very much about. It's also very scary when you, a professional professor in an industry, ask me.
questions about your industry as though I know fuck about shit. I asked how much you know. Your answer can be fuck about shit. Okay, great, great. So I'm going to try to sort of roughly sketch the contours of the traditional approach to publishing.
It's a really tricky field to generalize about because there are a lot of subtle differences from publisher to publisher. And like somebody who works in publishing is going to listen to this and be like, well, that's not how we do it. And it's like, I know that's not how you do it. There's lots of small variations, and then there's also some general trends to how it operates. So generally speaking, the steps are as follows. An author writes a book proposal. If it's a fiction book...
The book proposal is based on something they've already written because you can only get a contract for a fiction book that's completed. If it's nonfiction, you don't have to have written the manuscript. You can write the proposal based on an idea. This is a difference that comes out of the idea that nonfiction needs to be researched, so you need the advance first so that you can actually go and do the research. But fiction can all come from up here.
Fiction all comes from the old noggin. So maybe the book has been written or maybe it's just a concept with a sample chapter, but you know, either way, we've got a book proposal. That proposal either goes to a literary agent. or to a publisher, depending on whether the publisher accepts unagented manuscripts. That is becoming increasingly rare for any publishers to accept unagented manuscripts. Okay. Because the scale of manuscripts publishers receive...
continues to steadily increase. There's more books every year. So agents have become increasingly central to sort of the operation of trade publishing in general. And it's the agent's job to pitch the book. Presumably the agent knows what different publishers are looking for, right? Yeah, absolutely. And the agent will have their own relationships with different publishers.
So the agent might like work with the author to help revise their manuscript. Like in the case of fiction, an agent might work with an author very closely on their manuscript prior to even the book proposal. going out in the first place. The agent will like query publishers. They'll also like help authors to navigate things like.
Book contracts, advances, which is the advance you, the author, receive from the publisher on anticipated royalties for your book. Speculative fiction. Speculative. Well said. And then like licensing deals. right so they're like they're helping with the legal the contract stuff some agents are very hands-on and keep working closely on the book all the way through its life cycle others will like help sell the book and then be like
Go with God. Okay. Really let the publisher take over. Once the book deal is signed, the author might, in the case of nonfiction, go away and write the book. with a particular deadline. But either way, the really crucial next stage is developmental editing. So that's the author working closely with an editor. either employed or contracted by the publisher. Some publishers are too small to have enough in-house editors to do all of their editorial work. So they'll hire a freelance editor.
to work with an author on a book, or maybe it will be an in-house editor, but that's the next stage. You work closely with an editor to revise your manuscript. And then at the same time, kind of as soon as you've sold the book to the publisher, marketing and publicity start gearing up at the press. Oh, whoa.
Sometimes even before the book is written. Sometimes even before the book is written, for sure. That's so bold. So... I mean, you get stories every once in a while in publishing that are like, we had a cover and a marketing plan and had pitched the book to media and the author never delivered the manuscript.
And then the author was dumped in the river. Alas, no. No? Whoa. So, you know, marketing and publicity might be like pitching the book to literary festivals for the following year because that pitch deadline starts. way before you actually necessarily have had enough time for the book to be ready. So like the marketing person might be pitching a book based on like kind of an outline, kind of a concept. So bold.
The production team is probably like slotting the book's actual printing and binding and distribution and warehousing into the publisher's schedule. So it's like, we have to get the manuscript by this date because this is when we have... a spot with our printer.
There's these long timelines of like everything really needs to line up because the book has all of these systems that has to work its way through. Yeah, this is incredible. It's more speculative than economics. I can't believe it. And all of this really important. is happening on the publisher's dime.
Right. So publishers, when they opt to publish a book, you know, they're taking a big risk. They're saying, like, not only are we going to pay you, the author, for your manuscript, but we're also going to pay designers and our marketing people and our editors. And we're going to physically pay for this book to be printed and shipped and warehoused. And all of this is speculative on the premise that once the book exists in the world, people will read it. Yeah. Okay. And.
You can never really know if people will read it. That's also, I didn't even think about that. Some books are flops and then you have so many copies of them and you're like, well, so, you know. Publishing has these long timelines, a lot of risk happening in it. They're often trying to expand the timelines so that there's more time for pre-orders so that...
they can get a better sense of what the level of interest is in the book so that then they can determine the print run and how much money to put into actually marketing the book in the first place. That's why if you like...
hear somebody's got a book coming out, they might start trying to get you to pre-order it like a year before the pub date. You encourage people to buy your books from their local bookstores, you know, order through your local bookstore. Yeah, for sure. Because the publisher wants that, right? They want to know that copies are already sold before they're... putting this big expense into printing them totally so all of these processes
are happening simultaneously and they all have to fit into this like really complex set of timelines. One thing that really strikes me about this process is how like in addition to being So speculative. It's also so collaborative. Like there's so many people other than the author who are involved all the way through and presumably they sometimes have as...
significant impact on the final form the book itself takes. Yeah, absolutely. So I think we tend to think of books as being... authored right as coming directly from the mind of the author and oh yeah the way the author's name appears in big letters on the front of the book encourages us to think of authorship as this like singular point of origin yeah but of course
course someone designed that cover and someone designed those interior spreads and someone painstakingly copy edited every word and someone wrote the cover blurb and unless you're self-publishing most of those someones were not the author. Totally. Yeah. It would be weird to write your own blurb, don't you think? You have to do it in scholarly books. Stop it. Yeah, university press. I've had to write my own blurbs. It's awkward. That's so silly.
But, you know, unless you're an industry insider, the chances are that you don't know the names of cover designers or editors or book marketers because... Of course. Those roles are positioned as like secondary or of service to the author and to the readers. You know, I often hear editors. compare themselves to midwives whoa they're like we're helping deliver the baby but it's not our baby that's so magical
Okay. What does this have to do with this entangled publishing organization? What are they doing so differently, Hannah? Well, for one thing, they're selling a lot of books. Oh, hell yeah. Good job, Entangle Publishing. Yeah, they're nailing it. Make that money. And they're selling them to Gen Z, which is something a lot of traditional publishers are struggling to do. Oh, because Gen Z don't read? Gen Z do read. They just...
read primarily romanticy. Oh, that they get on their Wattpads. That they get on their Wattpads and they read fan fiction and they discover books through BookTok and that's its whole own... ecosystem and traditional publishing is really struggling to penetrate it. So Fourth Wing and its sequel, Iron Flame, have sold millions of copies each. I think Fourth Wing is around 4 million copies at this point.
The publisher's previous hit, Tracy Wolf's YA vampire series, Crave, had, as of December 2024, sold more than 3.5 million copies across the six books in the series. Ah, okay. So 3.5 million divided. by six divided by six still significant significant yes yeah but not four million did you say four million yeah for fourth wing fourth wing has been their huge Undeniably. Not 4 million per book. No. That's huge. No. Okay. And they've had a lot of success also, like...
optioning stuff for film and TV. So much so that Entangled founder Liz Palatier also co-founded a production studio called Premeditated Productions, which is such a funny name. And that's... Literally just have a studio to handle the licensing for all of Entangled's books because so many of the books are. being licensed. I'm guessing that this is unusual. Yeah, for a publisher to also become a production company for sure. And from what I can tell, it's also...
characteristic of Pelletier's approach. So I'm drawing here. She was publishers, weeklies. 2024 person of the year. Okay. So they wrote this profile of her, specifically Sophia Stewart wrote this profile of her for Publishers Weekly, from which I have garnered many of the... Fun facts about Liz Pelletier, such as she was an avid romance reader prior to founding the press and a software engineer. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So really comes out of the like tech.
She founded the press in 2011, specifically as a, quote, opportunity to bridge the gap in the marketplace between traditional publishing and self-publishing, end quote. Wow. Right. With an eye on romance, recognizing that traditional publishing was not really working for the romance world, but that there was an opportunity in the world of self-publishing.
that like people could use some more support than they were getting having to do everything themselves totally and having to like you know really like just kind of give their work away to a platform like kindle unlimited yeah right so She very much identifies as an outsider to conventional publishing and a disruptor. She's got to very like move fast and break things. She's interested in taking big swings, breaking traditional rules.
Fucking around and finding out. I love that. Can you give us some examples? Yes. Actually, I'm going to make you give us some examples in the form of a quotation from this profile. Oh, okay. Quote. In practice, that non-traditional approach takes many forms. Most recently, Entangled's Amara imprint began acquiring print rights. to self-published romance e-books with plans to publish 50 such titles annually.
And from the beginning, the publisher has used shorter lead times between acquisition and publication, test marketed every book before its release and delayed the ones that were not up to snuff, and adjusted marketing copy, cover designs. and ad campaigns based on reader feedback, end quote. Okay, that's really interesting. So they're involving like not just a team, but also readers. Yeah.
process. Yeah. And that's a big part of it, right? They're coming out of the romance publishing landscape where the line between reader and author is much blurrier, right? In the world of romance, there's the sense that any romance reader... could become a romance author. And that's been part of the romance landscape for a very long time. So the idea of like many of the readers are also already writers. Romance authors are much less of a like rarefied special idea. Yeah.
than like the literary author. And so bringing the reader in and getting feedback much earlier is like totally makes sense within the romance landscape. Entangled is also like very trend driven as a publisher. They're paying a lot of attention to social media, especially. Instagram and TikTok. They really have successfully tapped into BookTok as a way of not only building energy and excitement around their books, but also...
finding out what readers want more of and delivering more of that thing. You know, Fourth Wing, for example, was... Definitely a book talk sensation. And it helped to define some of the trends that have emerged in romanticity, such as producing really beautiful special edition copies of books. because the book talk space wants books that look beautiful on screen. So like fourth wing.
started the sprayed edges trend that we're seeing all over the place now which is like the outer edges of the pages being painted yeah so that they look like an image like that really came from fourth wing, which was sprayed black with the outlines of dragons along it. Oh, that is beautiful. Is being trend driven a break from traditional publishing? So not.
Entirely. Traditional publishing is absolutely paying attention to the book market, what's selling well, what readers want, and trying to provide more of the same. But they also face the challenges of these slow turnaround times and these kind of, you know, ossified industry norms, right? Like, it's such a specific way that books are.
written, acquired, produced, marketed. And it's hard because it's an industry with like a lot of moving parts. It's really hard to do things differently in that space. if you do one thing differently, you've got to do a whole bunch of things differently. Yeah, and you kind of fuck the whole, you kind of fuck up the whole, like, timeline. Assembly line? Exactly.
But from what I can tell, Entangled has managed to dodge a lot of these challenges by not caring about them or not even knowing about them because the people who work there don't come out of traditional publishing. So they're just like, right. If you don't know the rules, you can't break the rules.
Okay, you've got to give me some examples. What does that look like in practice? So it's really hard to give details because like most publishers, Entangled plays it close to the vest about their actual internal processes. But a key one is definitely the level of flexibility. They've incorporated into the publishing process from how they conceive of authorship and acquire manuscripts to how they treat their actual employees. So it's a... Do they treat them well? Yeah.
So it's a fully remote workplace and has been since 2011, since they started. Employees are paid significantly better than they are traditional publishers. They're allowed to set their own schedules. And they're encouraged to try out different departments if they feel like it. So if you're in finance and you just want to try out marketing for a bit, you can go and fuck around in marketing.
really cool. I really like it. No. So could you read another quote from this profile of Liz Pelletier? So this quote is primarily from associate publisher Jessica Turner, who's the associate publisher at Entangled. Okay. quote, quote within a quote, the majority of us have been here forever, end quote within a quote, says associate publisher Jessica Turner.
quote within a quote, we all have such deep respect for one another that it really comes in handy when it's crunch time and everyone bands together to bring a project across the finish line. or gives us the confidence to speak our opinion about something that isn't even a project on our slate, end quote, end quote, end quote.
That sounds so nice. And you know, not like a lot different from what we do here. I'm just going to pat ourselves on the back for being the kind of organization where if you want to fuck around and find out, the team's generally going to be like... Cool. Let's do that. I mean, it's a really nice way to like retain talent, right? Is being like, oh, what would be satisfying to you? Do more of that thing so that you don't feel like.
burnt out and disillusioned and leave and they you know that that that thing that jessica turner says right the majority of us have been here forever that like people stay with this company so there's a lot that's really interesting and valuable about how entangled is approaching publishing. And like a lot of disruptors, they've butted up against some of the norms that are not so easily subverted, specifically those norms around authorship.
Oh, no. I'm sensing a turn coming. Yeah, absolutely. And that turn is that Entangled is currently being sued for copyright infringement. Oh, no. Publishers are sued all the time, but it's an interesting lawsuit. So the suit comes from attorney and unpublished author Lynn Freeman, who... rudely in all of the media coverage of this is specifically identified as an unpublished author. Feels mean to me. That does feel mean. Yeah. So she wrote a YA vampire romanticy back in the 2010s.
And she was working with an agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, who sent her manuscript to Entangled. The manuscript was rejected. Entangled was not interested. Kim, the... agent eventually dropped Freeman as a client because she couldn't get any traction on this book. But Freeman is claiming that Entangled's bestselling hit...
Crave by Tracy Wolf was based on Freeman's own novel. Oh, how? Oh, that's interesting. So she's like, you guys had my manuscript. Yeah. Right. My agent sent you this manuscript. You said you didn't want it. And then five years later, a YA vampire romanticy comes out with... a ton of striking similarities. It's set in Alaska. The protagonist's parents have died, or one of her parents has died. Like, there's a bunch of similar story beats.
Okay. That made her go, oh, they stole my story. Now, there are two tricky things about this suit. The first is that the lines between... copyright violation and overlapping tropes in genres like romance can be very blurry oh i believe it The second is that the actual authorship process for Crave, Tracy Wolf's book, was extremely unusual.
Okay, I want to know about both, but let's start with romance tropes. Yeah, absolutely. And for this, I am unfortunately going to make you read a really long quotation, but I think it's extremely useful. This comes from a fabulous New Yorker. piece on this lawsuit by Katie Waldman. In this quote, she really sort of sets out the challenge around copyright and romance.
Quote, Romanticist's reliance on tropes poses a challenge for questions of copyright. Traditionally, the law protects the original expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. A doctrine named for the French phrase scenes affaires, or scenes that must be done, holds that the standard elements of a genre such as a showdown between a hero and the villain, are not legally protectable, although their selection and arrangement might be.
The wild proliferation of intensely derivative romanticies has complicated this picture. The worlds of romance and fantasy have been so thoroughly balkanized, the production of content so accelerated, that what one might assume to be tropes... Falling in love with a werewolf or vampire, say, are actually subgenres. Tropes operate at an even more granular level. Bounty hunter werewolves, space vampires. And the more specific the trope, the harder it is to argue.
that such a thing as an original detail exists. For example, the dark paranormal romance subgenre mandates physical injury and a brooding inhuman male lead. In 2018, the author Addison Cain filed a takedown notice against the author Zoe Ellis, accusing her of ripping off Cain's Lupine Society of Aggressive Alphas and Submissive Omegas.
Ella sued Kane and her then publisher, Blushing Books, arguing that she and Kane were both practicing the subgenre of wolf kink erotica, which is based on open source fan fiction, end quote. Okay. Putting aside for a moment how insulting the phrase intensely derivative is. I take the point that Romanticy in particular borrows a lot from the world of fan fiction, which is, of course, not concerned about copyright in the same way that traditional publishing needs to be, right? Yeah.
100%. Because fan fiction, you're literally working with somebody else's IP. And part of why it works is the sort of community built around the agreement that we're not going to copyright things. Right. we use ideas as a space in which to play and the sort of borrowing of tropes and trends and sub genres across, you know, multiple different works of fan fiction is like not a problem in that space. Right.
File off the serial numbers is the term that's used in the fan fiction world, which is when you sort of take a work of fan fiction and then change. all of the details that belong to the IP that you were working with and then publish it as an original work. Right. Okay. Right? Like Fifty Shades of Grey was originally Twilight fan fiction. Yeah. File off the serial numbers.
publish it as original yeah you know it's when you move it into that world right of traditional publishing then we get tricky copyright stuff right sure so what's even more unusual in the case of Entangled is that All of those characteristics we talked about, you know, their flexibility, the blurring of publishing roles, the short turnaround times from acquisition to publication, the lack of grounding in traditional publishing.
That very much extends to how their manuscripts get written. Okay. So according to the same New Yorker piece, the publishing model at Entangled, quote, falls somewhere between that of a book packager and that of a traditional publisher. End quote. So book packaging is essentially this model where there's these like...
book production agencies that will identify an in-demand genre, like, say, hockey romances, which are huge right now. So huge. Yeah. And they'll basically say, like, hey, we're going to produce some hockey romances. Okay. Hire writers and editors to produce a book. Those writers will often just get like a flat fee, right? It's a writing job. You're just paid to do it. You produce the book and then. The book packager actually owns the work. And then they will sell that work to a publisher. Oh.
And it will probably get published like under a pen name that actually doesn't belong to a particular individual. Right. You know, that's different from the way the authorship works in traditional publishing where the author retains.
the copyright and receives royalties for every copy of the book sold right this is like a contract writing job akin to ghost writing sure not exactly the same okay book packaging It's not super uncommon, like it happens, but it's kind of one of those secret insider practices in publishing that people don't talk about all that much.
Because of the fetishization of authorship. But we'll get back to that. We're going to get back to authorship. Okay. So would you call Entangled a book packager because of their publishing practice? They're not because they're a publisher. Okay. They are doing the actual publishing, whereas book packagers are just doing the production piece. Okay. Right? The, like, actual generation of the manuscript piece. Okay. But they're arguably engaging in a process that is pretty close to book packaging.
Could a book packager sell a book to Entangled? Hypothetically. But a book packager can sell a book to any publisher. Right. Right. The difference is that much like Entangled made the decision to like start their own licensing.
operation, right? They were like, we're going to have our own media production studio, so we handle our own licensing. They also kind of do their own in-house book packaging. Okay. To explain this, I'm going to ask you to read another quote from Waldman's New Yorker piece. Quote. Pelletier denies engaging in book packaging but acknowledged through her attorney that, quote within a quote,
Unlike some other traditional publishers, Entangled tends to work more with its authors at the ideation stage to try to organically bake in a high concept. End quote within a quote. Crave, according to the Defense Council, was, quote within a quote, a collaborative project with Pelletier providing to Wolf in writing the main plot, location, characters, and scenes.
and actively participating in the editing and writing process. On the phone, Pelletier, a former software engineer, insisted that her approach isn't particularly different from those of... publishers in New York. Entangled has no physical office. Pelletier operates out of Austin. They do the same thing, she told me. I've just been very successful at it. End quote. So...
Pelletier is essentially saying this is actually very normal. Like people don't talk about it, but it's really normal. I just have made it work better. It's really hard to say. So I like had a very long text exchange with. My friend, Hilary Atleo, who is a bookseller and like really knowledgeable about the publishing world, about Entangled's publishing model. And she was like, you know, it's really hard to say for sure.
how different this is, but when you talk to other people in publishing, they all say, wow, what she's doing is really unusual. So that does suggest that it is out of keeping with normal models, right? This idea that as a publisher... She will say like, we've got a slot in our publishing slate for next year. And what we need is.
a YA romanticy about vampires because I think vampires are coming back because you know trends work on 10 years and it's been 10 years since Twilight was published so it's time for another big vampire series yeah so
I'm going to seek out a romance writer who is known for being able to hit a deadline and produce fast. And I'm going to lay out the plot for her. This is the book that I want. And then I'm... going to work very closely with her to write that book and that will book we'll have her name on it yeah but like in practice the nature of the authorship is perhaps not what
most of us think about when we think about authorship. Okay. Okay. I'm going to ask you to read one more quote from this profile. Okay. To again, sort of get at the like... really juicy details about how the authoring process actually worked for the Crave series. Okay. And these are details we have because of the lawsuit. Ah, okay. Helpful. Yeah. Quote, Entangled was motivated to push the sequels to Crave out swiftly because COVID was catalyzing book sales. Correspondence among Kim, the agent.
Pelletier, the publisher, Abrams, the editor, and Wolf, the author, suggest that in the hectic days and hours before a book deadline, an already collaborative creative process could become an all-out emergency. it was sometimes hard to tell who added what. Love, our tree of trust is just a twig. Did you write that? Kim texted Pelletier about a line in Crush.
Referring to a different line, Pelletier said, I wrote that sentence, but I was using Tracy's voice. And, I came up with every header but the first chapter, LOL. While closing court, which was on a particularly tight schedule, author, editor, and agent supplied sentences and ideas, all of which swirled together in the various documents being updated in tandem on each of their laptops.
Pelletier asked Kim, Tracy wrote that Moonstone description? Kim texted Abrams, Tracy and I are team speed writing new scenes. And I've stopped copy editing because I helped write all this. The defense said that Kim's contribution was extremely limited and was entirely technical. End quote. This is so complicated. So, essentially... And Tangled is getting sued for this claim that they took the ideas from this previous author's book and recycled them into this new author's book.
In order to try to prove that that is not the case, they're trying to demonstrate that the ideas came from Tracy Wolf. Okay. Right. Because it's like, oh, these aren't the ideas of this author. Right. They're the ideas of our author. Right. But the challenge is for them to make that case legally that they're kind of not. the ideas of tracy wolf it was a meaningfully collaboratively written series that used the author's name because that's how books work yeah but that when they actually
got access to the details of how the writing happened. They might be saying like, oh, Kim, the agent, you know, her involvement was really minimal. But then we've got these messages from Kim saying, I'm team speed writing new scenes with the author and I've stopped copy editing because I basically helped to write all of this. Right. So it's like. Who wrote this? Yeah, like even the idea of an agent copy editing seems unusual, like let alone speed writing chapters.
At that point in the production, right? Like, sure, before the book is being sold, but the book didn't exist before it was sold to the publisher. Yeah. Right? Like they... contracted with this author based on an idea the publisher had. So all of that collaboration taking place in a publisher that specializes in genres that already tend toward
Yeah. It's having a distinctly destabilizing impact on the idea of the author. Okay. So we're going to talk about Foucault for a while, right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. It's Foucault. Hey listeners, Marcel here. You might have heard that we have a Patreon. And, you know, Hannah and Coach and I, we can talk for days about how great it is, but we thought maybe you might be more convinced by listening to the Patreon supporters explain what they love about the Patreon.
on themselves. So, hey coach, you got some tape? Can you roll it? Hi, this is Carolyn, also known as Kalooey or Kalia99 from Raleigh, North Carolina. I've been a listener of various Witch Please podcasts for years because they bring so much joy and learning into my life. What I've learned has unquestionably helped shape how I think about the world around me. And I'm a Patreon supporter because I value what Witch Please brings into my life.
And, you know, the watch-alongs and live tapings are a lot of fun, too. Help us sustain the show and unlock hours of perks by heading to patreon.com slash ohwitchplease. This segment is called The Theory We Need, and we're going to keep it on the brief side because that was a very long Why This Wind House segment. It was so exciting. So we're going to talk briefly about the concept of authorship and how it relates to the history of copyright. Okay. And we are...
As you hinted, starting with Foucault, specifically Foucault's What is an Author, in which he coins the concept of the author function. For folks who don't know, we're talking about Michel Foucault, a French philosopher from the mid-20th century who's probably most famous for his concept of the panopticon.
While when we talk about authorship, we tend to point to Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author, Foucault can also be very useful on the topic, especially when it comes to the historical development of authorship as a concept. So essentially for Foucault, the author, as distinct from the writer, both individualizes ideas by assigning them to particular people.
and contributes to the process of canon formation by determining which works matter and which ones don't. So authorship, for him, is not a simple relationship between writer and text. It's not like I am the person who produced this text. But a way that certain ideas or... discourses, as Foucault calls them, circulate within a society. Okay, so some things are authored and some things are just written. Novels are authored. Personal letters...
Yes. Philosophical texts are authored. Absolutely. Instruction manuals are written. Yes. Foucault goes on to define four characteristics of the author function, but we're really going to focus in on the first one, which is the legal nature of authorship. Appropriate. Marcel, will you read what Foucault has to say about authorship and the law? Of course. Quote.
Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors to the extent that authors became subject to punishment. That is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. Once a system of ownership for texts came into being, once strict rules concerning authors' rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters were enacted,
at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, the possibility of transgression attached to the act of writing took on, more and more, the form of an imperative peculiar to literature. End quote. There's a ton to potentially unpack there. But what I want to focus in on is this. Our contemporary notion of authorship, which is tied to these ideas of...
individuality and originality and by extension, transgression and risk, right? Because you are doing something different that somebody else has not done before. Those ideas are... inextricably tied to the development of our contemporary copyright norms in the late 18th and early 19th primarily played out in the relationship between authors and publishers. Let's say, theoretically, that one didn't know all that much about 18th century copy law.
What are some things that those listeners, definitely not me, would need to understand in order to like really grasp what's happening here? So copyright. originates as literally the right to copy something. It doesn't exist before we have the printing press because the printing press is the world's first copying machine. Okay. Yes. So you don't need to have any concern about who has the right to copy things when you don't.
have a copying machine right then we get a copying machine and they're like oh shit how do we how do we Think about who gets to copy things. Originally, copyright is basically a state license granted to printing press operators that gives them the right to produce copies of a text. And with that. the responsibility to censor any text the government doesn't want circulating. Oh, that's so interesting. Okay. Yeah. So legal responsibility for the circulation of the text falls on the copier. Okay.
Is that the publisher? Am I getting ahead? I'm getting ahead. I mean, it's the printer. The printer. Which, like, this early on isn't particularly distinct from publishers yet. Okay. So prior to the 18th century, copyright really had nothing to do with authorship.
It was about the professional rights and responsibilities of those operating this new technology, the printing press. But then in 1710, we get something called the Statute of Anne, named because the Queen was Anne at the time, which is essentially a way of moving. The legal responsibility for texts and thus the legal responsibility for the censorship of texts from the printer to the author by giving the copyright to authors. Okay. So you, the author.
own the copyright, and you can license it to a printer or publisher, but by natural law, it falls on you. Because it came out of my noodle. Because it came out of your noodle. When Foucault says it's about who's held responsible for the potentially transgressive content of what's being published, this is his point, right? It attaches to the author.
So that they can be held responsible. So you get the author in trouble, not the printer, because they were just printing. They didn't read it. They didn't come up with it. They were just printing the pages. But it was the author who wrote all that seditious nonsense about Anne. Exactly. So copyright also is understood at the time as a way of balancing the public good, which is the free flow of ideas.
with the need to reward authors for their work so that people would be motivated to keep writing stuff. Oh, right. Because... If copyright is essentially a state license, that means the second a book is out in the world, as long as that book's not seditious, anybody with a printing press can produce copies of it, right? So say I'm Milton.
And I have published Paradise Lost. You know, the second it's out there, a ton of like sort of cheap copies start circulating. Yeah. And it's like, well, I don't want that. I want control. That's right. Of my ideas and who gets to produce them. Yeah. Right. And part of that desire for control is about desire to be able to monetize it. Oh, yeah. Of course. So copyright law is also introducing this balance between being like.
we're entering industrial capitalism now. And so people want there to be value attached to things so that if you're going to spend time making money or if you're going to spend time writing books, you can make money off them. But also there's the sense of the public good, right? That like...
People can't just own an idea forever because it needs to circulate. So the original copyright term was 14 years. You owned the copyright for anything that you wrote for 14 years. And then after that, it reverted to the public good. Do you know what it is now? In North America? Is it different in Canada and the U.S.? They had to align them with the last free trade agreement. Oh. But maybe we'll unalign them now that we're in a trade war. Who knows? It's true. Yeah.
Is it 50 years after the death of the author or 70 years after publication, whatever comes first? Yeah. Which is a lot more than 14 years. A lot. Quite a bit. And that's because, you know. the balance has shifted decidedly in the direction of monetizing. Our sense of the right for people to make money off things counts much higher than our sense of the public good.
Because we live in hell. So it's the legal and practical dimensions of copyright that give birth to the idea of the author as a singular figure who is wholly responsible for the ideas in work. Yeah, exactly. So copyright in this sense precedes authorship and becomes one of the major legal structures through which the concept. of the autonomous subject as the origin of a text is developed. Okay. I think Foucault says it better. So just read this Foucault quote.
Quote, I realized that in undertaking the internal and architectonic analysis of a work, in setting aside biographical and psychological references, one has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject. Still, perhaps one must return to this question not in order to reestablish the theme of an originating subject, but to grasp the subject's points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies.
Doing so means overturning the traditional problem, no longer raising questions. How can a free subject penetrate the density of things and give it meaning? How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs that are properly its own? Instead, these questions will be raised. How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse?
The author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work. The author does not proceed the works. He is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses. In short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction, end quote. Let me try to reword this. Foucault's like, cool, we're already working to set aside the centrality of the author.
through our new ways of reading texts by which he means the sort of like post-structuralist approach to texts where you like don't read them through the biography or internal psychology of the author anymore okay all right it's like close reading, the kinds of textual analysis we often engage in, which is much less interested in like author motivation than it is in like the text itself and how it circulates in the world. What did the author mean by this?
Exactly. It's like, well, we can't know. And also that's not really the best way to think about it because we understand that texts do things that the author might not have intended to. That's right. And we understand that that's the case because authors are like... Working within a shared cultural set of languages and discourses, right? A world of ideas that you sort of enter into and like pluck out.
the ones that you're going to use. It's Roland Barthes who refers to text as a tissue of citation. So it's like... Essentially what you're doing in any new text is just like weaving together a ton of pre-existing stuff in a sort of new form. Foucault says this, we're already putting aside the question of like author intention. But then he says like...
Maybe we need to sort of think about the author themselves in a different way altogether. So rather than saying, like, how is it that an individual can come along? and do something with language that is unique, right? Like, how can a person come into this, like, morass of ideas and concepts and stories? And do something different with it. He's like, instead, what if we thought about the ideas as coming first? and the concept of the individual author as arriving later.
as a way to try to conceptually give structure to the world of ideas. Okay. Right? So what if the text precedes the author rather than the author preceding the text? What if there's actually no author at all? Then how do we understand authorship? This hurts a little bit, but I think I'm understanding because Foucault is separating author from writer. And so, like, there is a person who has written.
Somebody wrote the thing. Somebody wrote the thing. But the idea of the author has a function beyond the person who sat down with their typewriter and typed it out. Exactly. Okay. And that idea or that function of the author is, for Foucault, about drawing lines around what fiction can do. Particularly he's interested in it drawing sort of lines around the subversive potential. He's like, if stories belong to everyone and anything could happen with them, then that would be a world of like...
discursive and imaginative freedom that would become profoundly disruptive to the ruling class in the state. Yeah. Because rest in peace, Foucault, you would have loved an archive of our own. He's kind of right about like fan fiction and the kind of radicalism that comes in a space where authorship is put aside and the free circulation of discourse sort of reigns. But, you know, he's saying that like authorship exists to tame and structure.
this radical space. Because authorship is a legal structure. Yeah. Not... a creative role. But a legal structure that we've then turned around and attached these like profoundly individualistic and fetishizing narratives to. Right. The brilliant author alone in the attic producing a text that will change the world. So in bringing together this historical connection between authorship and copyright laws, as well as like the.
artificiality of the notion of the author as like an autonomous subject Foucault is tying together beautifully, I think, the two ways the authorship is being subverted at entangled publications. Okay. So like through, on one hand, the inherent authorlessness of a genre. that developed its norms in a discursive space where legal ownership of ideas is not the primary value. And then, Anna, stop. Why? Because what you're saying right now is the beginning of your thesis.
And that is the next segment. Okay. Okay. Hannah, now please proceed with your thesis. Thank you. Rebecca Uros' romantic blockbuster Fourth Wing may be the breakout publishing hit of the past few years. But to my mind, the really interesting story is happening behind the scenes at Entangled Publishing. This innovative, romance-focused publisher is breaking all the rules. in part because the people who founded it don't seem to know the rules, but also...
Because contemporary romanticcy emerges from a very different publishing landscape, one dominated by fan fiction and the circulation and enthusiastic uptake of tropes and subgenres. The world of publishing already knew that Entangled wasn't practicing business as usual, but Lynn Freeman's lawsuit against them has given us an insider peek at the publisher's deeply collaborative authorship practices.
Practices that are surprising if only for their subversion of the long-held link between authorship, individuality, originality, and copyright. Publishing is always an inherently collaborative process, but since the 18th century, the centrality of the author as originator of the work has been sacrosanct.
But if romanticcy emerges out of a different cultural landscape with different norms around authorship and originality, then it should come as no surprise that the leading publisher of the genre is doing things a little differently.
In this essay, I will— Sorry, I stopped listening. Why do you think we care so much more about the author than any of the other people involved in the book? Oh, my God, it's so interesting. I was having this conversation with another colleague who works in publishing.
And we were talking about Entangled and what they're doing and why it's so interesting. And then he was like, you love a success story like Rebecca Uros' success story. You know, she was this aspiring writer and she had this idea and then here it is and she comes. long and she's a huge breakout hit and we're all so happy for her. And I was like, wait, but why are we coming back to like the fetishization of the individual when you and I both know that what's interesting here is the ecosystem?
And he said, well, you can't tell a good story about an ecosystem. I was like, oh, yeah, okay. I mean, the individual is the unit through which we sell. things and the stories of things. Yeah, but doesn't it seem a little bit Ouroboros-y, like we create this author function, we invent the notion of the author as a legal structure?
Functionally. Sure. Yeah. Whatever Foucault. Remember how the hero's journey, like this like enduring trope that the story is always like the journey of this one person. Yeah. I hear what your colleague VAU is saying about how ecosystems don't make good stories in the way that an individual makes good stories. But it also seems like...
As a hyper-individualist culture and society, we have constructed a storytelling tradition that prioritizes the individual. I think ecosystems could actually make really fascinating stories. There's nothing inherent about an ecosystem that makes it not a good story. What's so interesting about him saying ecosystems don't make good stories is that, for Foucault at least, the idea that... a good story needs to be attached to the notion of an individual subject is a result of
the invention of the author. Right. Okay. So like, importantly, the concept of the hero's journey postdates this 18th century sort of emergence of... authorship and the sort of cultural shift to a notion that important works are created by singular individuals out of the ether. Right. Because Joseph Campbell was writing in the, what, early 20th century? Late early 20th century? But he's looking at the history of literature that he has access to. Through a very particular lens, right? Yes.
You know, he looks at stories in cultures that are distinctly less interested in individuality in which a sort of central figure in a story might be. meant to be understood as a representative of the culture as a whole, for example. But he's reading it through this.
individualized Western masculinist lens in which everything turns into a hero. One of my favorite examples of this is how we take sort of as contemporary... hyper-individualistic readers, we look back at historical practices of art making and try to reshape them around our notion of the individual genius, Shakespeare. I think is a good go-to example. Yeah. Right. People desperately want him to be the single genius who reinvented literature when like.
A historical understanding of Shakespeare recognizes that he was operating in a profoundly collaborative and profoundly citational context. Right? Shamelessly borrowing from pre-existing plays, reworking them in collaboration with a troupe. It's not a guy sitting alone in a room being like, what if Romeo... and juliet like no it's not what's happening but we can also look back at like the tradition of like the great masters right like michelangelo
and be like, oh, we've got, again, this sort of fetishization of the individual, whereas the reality is that those works of art were produced in workshops by teams of people. What? Yeah, it wasn't one guy painting all those paintings. That guy ran a workshop that had a ton of painters in it. Yeah. What? This is news to me. You're telling me. That this fucking guy wasn't suspended from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for like six months? No, it was like a hope. By himself?
Are you sure? Yeah, for sure. For sure, for sure, for sure. I mean, I don't know about the Sistine Chapel in particular, but I do know that the great masters were not individually painting all of their paintings. That's... Outrageous. We're going to have to talk about that separately because I'm a little bit stuck on it. I'll try to move forward because right now we're talking about authorship. Yeah, but it's that, right? It's like...
Part of why you are stuck on it is because the notion of authorship, the notion of individuality, the notion of genius are all attached to... this sort of singularity of the origin of the artistic work has to come from one person. And the reality is that in most cases, it doesn't. In fact, it never does. It never, ever does. Sometimes it does more. You know, sometimes it is the case that somebody sat down in a room and wrote a book. But like that book is still deeply ensconced in a context.
of language and meaning and other texts. And then also, if it's ever going to see the light of day, it's going to go through a publishing process in which a bunch of other people are going to get their nasty little grabbers all over it. Imagine how much different our approach to creativity and collaboration would be if we told stories about these important works of art over time. as though they were collaborations instead of the works of a single genius. Yeah. And I think a lot of people are...
trying to retell these stories, right? Like they're trying to re-historicize, they're trying to re-center collaboration and conversation. A lot of like literary history, for example, is about sort of recovering the role. of those who were erased in the production of great works. Very frequently, the wife or daughter or sister of the great man who was like, doing a lot of the work.
but gets written out of the story, right? So there are these attempts to recover. And then there are also these attempts to build spaces where we can make art. collaboratively without authorship being the central determining framework. And that again is why I think so much fascinating. creative energy has emerged out of the world of fan fiction.
Right? Because it's like this sort of space in which the capacity for collective human creativity is like unleashed, untethered from the fetishization of authorship a little bit. You know, not like fully, but... A little bit and we see how like how juicy that can get. But like it comes back to this like as soon as money gets introduced back into it. Yeah. Right. It becomes this like you need to reassert.
the primacy of the author and their fundamental originality. And that butts up against the authoring norms of fan fiction. And we, you know, we keep seeing this happening. Something that I kept noticing. throughout the episode that I find really interesting. What's happening particularly with like the lawsuit against Entangled.
All of this reminds me so much of the way that pulp magazines were being written and produced in the early, mid-20th century. So many people were using pen names. So many people were like... writing and collaborating on multiple texts at the same time, the speed with which these things had to get produced and go out, the rampant...
not making any comments about entangled the rampant plagiarism that took place because it was like, this is the kind of story that we expect. And so we need this, this, this, and this to happen the way that. readers of these magazines would like then become writers because in reading these magazines and absorbing these story types and tropes, they would like pitch their own. And so it makes sense then. I guess that.
because romanticity is a genre in the way that like pulp magazines themselves kind of invented these genres that like those same processes are still at play yeah they haven't gone away they just take place in a different medium. So it's no longer like cheap pulpy paper. It's you buy the Kindle. Yeah. And then the content is free. Yeah. And like part of why it's no longer cheap pulpy paper is because e-reading.
successfully took over that subset of the publishing landscape, right? The cheap, pulpy paperback. It's just like cheaper and easier. for the publishers to produce e-books and for the readers to access a lot of e-books. But that presents a sort of financial challenge for publishers. How do we monetize it, right? Like people aren't willing to pay, you know.
Kindle Unlimited because the books themselves are free because I'm churning through them at such a rate that it's like, it would be a very expensive hobby. So then we get the like beautiful luxury editions with the sprayed edges and the book talk of it all. you know, becomes a way to like get people to spend $40 on a hardcover because it's beautiful and it's a special edition and you want to own the object even if you actually – Because you already read it. Yeah, you already read it on ebook.
But it emerges out of, I think, a really similar set of publishing constraints and cultural context to Pulp. And I think reminds us that a lot of the author function is to attach prestige to a text as well. So I just Googled it and 13 other people helped with the Sistine Chapel. How's that make you feel? Betrayed. Like I feel like truly, truly deeply lied to by my entire...
educational experience up to and including at least half of university. Yeah, we do love to teach via the great works, great minds model. What the fuck?
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And I guess this was us giving it to you. We'll be back soon with a whole new episode. But until then, later duplicators. Marcel here. You might have heard that we have a Patreon. And, you know, Hannah and Coach and I, we can talk for days about how great it is. But we thought maybe you... might be more convinced by listening to the Patreon supporters explain what they love about the Patreon themselves. So, hey coach, you got some tape? Can you roll it? Hello, witches.
My name is Annika and I have been listening to you since 2017 from Sweden. You make me laugh. out loud and i love that and i make my boyfriend listen to me laughing out loud to you on a regular basis But also, I learned so much from you. And apart from getting new and important perspectives, you make me navigate being a fan in a world that is not always very friendly. You know, the patriarchy and stuff.
I hate the Patreon app so I don't use the extra material at all. But I like contributing to people getting paid for creative and research work. Thank you for existence. I love you. Help us sustain the show and unlock hours of perks by heading to patreon.com slash oh witch please.