Today was day one of the New York Independent and Small Press Book Fair. Predictably, I spent too much money buying cool books that will now go in the ginormous stack of books I have yet to read. I attended two panels: The first was on publicity, and the second was a Q&A with Ian MacKaye of the band Fugazi. If, like me, you might wonder "why is a guy from some rock band doing a Q&A at a book fair," the answer is because he published a book about the band, and is in general one of the pioneers of the DIY (that's Do It Yourself) movement, running his own record label and self-publishing his own music back when that wasn't at all common. The two panels were interesting contrasts, since the publicists were (as one would expect) all about how to sell books, talking about how they work for months trying to get their books reviewed and one publicist (Sarah Reidy of Soho Press I think) talked about how she "takes bloggers to lunch." (Is it ethical for bloggers to let publicists buy them lunch? I don't know, but if any publicists are reading this, I like Chinese food.) Ian McKaye, on the other hand, said things like "Everything is being used to sell something else. Weekly papers these days are like advertising circulars with a bit more content." It reminds me of a guy I knew who worked in the publicity department of a small record label, and he tried hard to convince me that reviews were just another form of publicity. Of course, to a publicist, reviews are a form of publicity, but it's imperative that reviewers don't see it this way, because if a reviewer looses her integrity than she is useless as a reviewer. Readers have to be able to trust reviewers. More to the point, the reviewer's job, unlike the publicist's job, is not to sell you on a product, but rather to give you enough information about a product so that you know whether or not you want to buy it. This is a very, very important distinction. But to be fair, in the book publishing world just getting the name of a book out to people is a bit of an accomplishment. I don't envy book publicists their jobs.
But I digress. The Ian MacKaye Q&A was marred mostly by people asking him questions that had nothing to do with publishing or DIY and were instead about his bands and his music (including a long answer from him to a question about some controversy with Nike stealing one of their album covers that I couldn't have cared less about). I really would have liked to get a lot more from him about how to start a business with a DIY aesthetic, how to market products without subscribing to a culture that he thinks "is always trying to sell you something else" and what he meant when he said that "punk is the freespace, and it's been around forever" a statement that I thought was very strange and enigmatic. I would have asked him about these things myself but I didn't get a chance to. Maybe I'll send him an email.