Let’s get filthy!
A very Jabber status report
In anticipation of taking further steps on scorched publishing earth, we at Jabber embrace getting filthy.
Why?
Because this is an industry so fraught with metrics, monies, markets, marketing, publicity, hired goons, Amazon review bots, review trading, review scrutiny, reviews from people with a right to say what they please however inane, backbiting, upsucking, agents ignoring, agented submissions of cut cookies delivered promptly to factory presses, square pegs fitting easily into square holes, big bucks to the best at the game, paltry sums to the garden-variety awkward artists whose eccentricities don’t charm, reliance on TikTok, BookTok, Bookstagram influencers, capitulation, rebellion, desolation, despair, decimation of an ambitious near miss in favor of the easily swallowed, staying in lanes when a car crash would be more interesting, sanctioned politics, fashionable dissent, bumper sticker morality, hashtags, tote bags, tchotchkes, lattes and snickerdoodles for sale at the counter near the nearest bestseller memoir of how my mom was mean, legacy bookstores resting on laurels (Hi, Strand) or arguing for relevance just because, distributors dying or monopolizing, small presses’ small impacts against Big 5 business, Wall Street ethos and Silicon Valley post-literates, functional myopia, willful disengagement, confirmation bias, curated curiosity, intellectual dilettantes, unempirical bomb tosses, condemnations, critiques both delicious and opaque, empty calorie improvement, T-shirt activism, Spotify playlist accompaniment, book as small spoke in a multi-media wheel, ten Taylor Swift songs to play on repeat while skimming surface-level prose, snark and edgelord assholism posing as postmodern, post-woke, Post Malone or Bukowski’s Post Office and the diminishing returns of provocation, promotion, self-promotion, self-help, celebrity ghost written memoir of the moment, book as comestible, digestible, disposable…
Because of this, we at Jabber see success in such waters as inherently putrid. Enviably putrid, but putrid still.
Which is our way of announcing that we are full steam ahead and other clichés away toward creating more physical books with actual ISBNs! Because we like getting as disgusting as the next fucker.
Coming soon: books. Filthy, filthy books.