The future of publishing (part four)

[This series started on 2/20/08]

So why will authors need publishers in an all-electronic, all-digital world?

First of all, I think physical books will continue being sold for a long time, just as CDs are. While paperbacks won't last once a good ebook reader comes along, hard cover books will continue to be important for a number of reasons. Still, their sales (and the profit from them) will pale compared to the cheaper and more easily produced ebooks of the future. And for publishers, this is an enormous problem.

Individual authors can set up their own web sites and, in an environment where the ebook dominates, cut their own deals either with the customer directly or retail channels. Stephen King essentially did this several years ago. Most analyses of his experiment grade it a failure, and in one sense if clearly was: King could have made more money by going through traditional channels.

But that experiment shouldn’t necessarily be judged by that standard alone. King couldn’t achieve mega-author status on the internet alone – but he could still sell a significant amount of “product” at a time when the technology was far from perfect, and the tools for exploiting the technology (marketing on the web, etc.) were not yet (and are not yet) fully developed.

I don’t think that authors working alone will be able to reach mega-sale status, and that’s one area that traditional publishers can continue to leverage. They can also still deliver some amount of prestige and, at least in theory, increase the quality and therefore value of the book by careful editing. (Of course, if they're not doing these things to begin with - but that's another topic . . .)

But those are things that publishers can offer to writers – what can they offer readers?

1) A convenient place to acquire books. To do that, they have to control the distribution – their websites, etc., have to be the only place to get the product.

2) When they’re selling a book, publishers are really selling an experience. That experience is not just that one story, but the feeling of belonging to a community of readers that has experienced that story, and wants to experience similar stories or adventures. By collecting a number of authors together, the publisher enhances and expands the experience and community – and not coincidentally, sells more books. The web offers publishers a chance to create mini-salons and cyber cafes that complement and add to the experience of reading the book.

3) Publishers can use their resources to enhance e-books, adding to the virtual experience. While authors can do this on their own, the ability to finance better productions and thus raise the readers’ expectations can benefit the publishers, marking their product as more professional and therefore desirable.

Note that none of these things necessarily help writers, at least not directly. Even if they were all done successfully, the changes in technology are so fundamental that publishers may not be successful. But if they don’t at least start thinking along those lines, I think they’ll all be out of business by 2020.

* * *

The interests of publishers and writers are not precisely parallel, but they don't have to be diametrically opposed. One often gets the feeling these days that they are - not so much from the editors, but from corporate-centric decisions that harm the product and the industry in general.

As traumatic as the changes in technology have been and will continue to be, people will still want a good story, will still want usable information, will still long for the sort of reality-suspending experience books currently provide. The question is, how and who will provide them in the future.

The future of publishing (part three) . . .

. . . giving it away

Book publishers are where the record companies were before the Ipod & Itunes were announced. The technology for a revolutionary music machine was almost there. People could almost see it. And then, within a year or two, it was the way that a large number of people were getting their music. It didn’t eliminate CDs or record stores, but Apple (and of course everyone on the same bandwagon) changed the business dramatically, cutting those sales dramatically.

Recently, a number of book publishers created a mini-flurry inside the industry by giving away ebooks. All of the reported comments that I’ve seen have been positive. None of the authors I’ve spoken to about it, however, think it’s anything like a good idea. They don’t blame the other writers for going along with it – and that’s the way they tend to put it – but to a person they believe the thinking behind the program is flawed. As do I.

It may be argued that giving away ebooks will help publishers do #2, make the publishers known to their customers. It would be a good argument if the giveaway was part of a comprehensive program to drive readers to their site. As it stands now, the activity is very passive – you go once, give them your email address, and have no reason to return, even if you like the books. The publisher’s identity is not going to stick in the reader/user’s head, or even necessarily their favorites list.

Worse, they’re teaching readers that ebooks should be free.

One illustration of how flawed the thinking is on so-called “new” media and how to deal with it was the reporting on the effects of giving away Suze Orman’s book as an ebook as part of-in the wake of publicity from Oprah. The stories claimed that there had been no decline in sales – and they did this by citing the book’s ranking on Amazon.

Of course, anyone who has ever sold a book through Amazon knows that the numbers are not exactly a scientific measure of anything in the real world. Putting that aside, the fact of the matter is that Orman’s book benefited first from the Oprah connection, and secondly from the wave of publicity relating to the giveaway. Surely those are the reasons it sold well.

(to be continued)

The future of publishing . . .

. . . or at least publishers (part 1)

A few people have been talking with me about ebooks, giveaways, and publishing, and suggested that rather than being my usual wise-ass, I take a more serious approach.

Heh.

If I were a publisher, I would be very worried about the direction of the industry. So many things have changed over the past two decades – the loss of independent stores and regional distributors among them – that it’s very easy to overlook the potential impact of the web, ebooks, and alternative delivery systems for books. Or not so much ignore it, but not position myself to deal with the revolutionary change that is coming.

But it’s an absolute necessity. What has happened to two other media – record companies and newspapers – are frightening examples. The music industry has been devastated by the technological changes in the way music is delivered to listeners. Large record companies, which had very little identity to listeners, once were able to have dominant positions because they added value to the music “product” – recording and making it into a format that could be consumed easily – and controlled the distribution. They no longer do the latter, and have seen their role in the former steadily reduced.

Newspapers were in a somewhat different position. Well ahead of the arrival of the internet, they had consolidated and achieved, in most markets, a competitive monopoly. Once that happened, they met any new economic pressures by taking a relatively easy route to maintaining profit levels – they cut staff and, in turn, harmed their product. There has been a steady erosion of not only quality but volume of news coverage in print newspapers over the past two decades. (While this is an industry-wide trend, it is not the inevitable result of inroads from television and radio, or the general decline of literacy, as is often claimed. Magazine pages have increased over the same period.)

To be continued . . .