Lost in Translation

I confess I've never seen the TV show Lost (I may have to rent the first season DVD some day) but there is an interesting "horizontal marketing" strategy associated with it:

THIS SEASON, the TV drama "Lost" will make pop culture history when it becomes the first show ever to have a character write a book in the real world. Hyperion (a division of Disney, which owns ABC, which airs "Lost") plans to release "Bad Twin," a mystery novel credited to one Gary Troup, who, the publisher informs us, was a passenger on "Oceanic Flight 815, which was lost in flight from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles in September 2004."

Although that air disaster is the genesis point of "Lost," the event from which the entire series unfolds, Troup is hardly a central figure in the action — in fact, he's not a living presence at all. He died in the plane crash, leaving behind the manuscript of his private-eye story, which will be found in the wreckage during an episode this spring. The discovery of this manuscript will magically overlap with the novel's release date.

The LA Times book editor, overdosing on tweed and indignation perhaps, is not amused:

This is how a show like "Lost" wants to operate — framing its viewers as a community and itself as the centerpiece of a shared point of view. There's nothing inherently wrong with that; in fact, it illustrates the nature of fanhood, the way our affinities help us find purchase, a sense of identity in the world. At the same time, there's something creepy about the nudge-nudge, wink-wink insistence that "Bad Twin" was found instead of manufactured, and it goes beyond the idea of writing as a commodity, a gimmick, a ploy.

In fact, the marketing of the novel suggests something far more insidious — that we, the audience, exist not only to be manipulated but to participate in our manipulation by seeing it as cool. This is the kind of thing that literature has traditionally stood against.

Oh, come now. Sure, it's probably going to be a bad book, but it sounds like some harmless fun for fans of the show. Will a fictional author get a fictional royalty check? (As someone who has his share of things like Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise stashed away among the relics of my youth, how can I complain?) And, hey, if it gets people to buy a book, how can that be a bad thing?

Writing and literature have always been about marketing and making a buck (sometimes that's literally true!) from one's writing, and any writer who tells you otherwise is either lying or is a fool. Dickens wrote for money, as did Shakespeare (i.e., by writing and staging successful plays) and every other "classic" author. I find nothing wrong with this; I think that being able to make a living doing what you are good at and like doing is probably the best thing there is. Not that this "fictionally authored novel" is going to rank up there with Dickens and Shakespeare, but the principle is the same. The real trick is not to shun marketing and the unusual idea of actually selling one's work, but how to be financially successful and good simultaneously. What we should be getting indignant about is that really good books are rarely successful and thus book publishers seldom publish them--or worse, rarely market them when they do.