Where editors once answered to publishers with something of a vision and could
therefore take risks in the authors they chose, they now must show a profit. Further,
because of a change in the tax laws, bookstores can no longer afford to keep
books on the shelf for long and accordingly return unsold copies to the publisher
with great promptness. The result, of course, is that publishers favor authors whose
work sells quickly, and the work that sells quickly is what the reader can easily
recognize. My purpose here is to show how this happens, next to describe the
genre of “normal art” and the kind of writing it uses, which I call “writerly writing,
and last to suggest an alternative to it, “readerly writing.”
