What's happened to the music and newspaper industries in the last ten years is admittedly very complex, and neither is an exact model for publishers. But it does seem to me that some lessons can be drawn from them:
2. If you devalue the product you’re selling, it’ll eventually catch up to you.
There are three things publishers can do to meet the challenge of the changing technology:
1. Increase the value of the product they are selling. They can do this by paying more attention to editing above all, but in other areas related to the books as well. Part of this probably means they should decrease the number of books they publish as well, allowing them to concentrate their resources to do a better job on the books they do publish. But it primarily means that they should pay more attention the quality of the talent they have working for them. Every editor I know is underpaid by a good mile, especially the young ones. Anyone entering the profession basically has to swear an oath of poverty and work under ridiculous pressure. Editing is a difficult art to master; many if not most publishers make it even harder with their work conditions.
2. Make themselves known to their real customer. Most readers don’t have a clue who publishes a book. There’s a legitimate reason for this: For years, the publishers’ customers have actually been the bookstores, and the people who deal with them. But the internet and other facets of modern commerce have weakened these middlemen, in some cases making them irrelevant. The publishers have to build a brand identity with the end customer, so that the house name means something. “We’re the people who bring you Stephen King and all those other writers you like...”
3. The publishers have to take back control of the distribution channel. If that sounds a little antagonistic, it is. The big mistake the record companies made was following the old model of letting the middlemen sell their music. Yes, the first threat was to record stores, etc., but the ultimate victim were the companies that depended on those stores for their sales. Why should I go to Itunes to buy music? If I’m buying my music on-line, it’s just as easy – or rather, it could be just as easy – to buy it from XYZ as it is from them.
. . . (to be continued)
2 comments:
Agent: Bad news. The publisher really doesn't want anything that's New York-centric right now.
Author: But my editor asked for the first series proposal to be written to spec twice, and said she wanted the heroine to live in Brooklyn or Queens and attend NYU. She also said her boss really liked my second proposal for a series that would be set in New York, and asked me for specific plots, and said her boss loved them too. So what happened here? How come all of a sudden nobody wants New York-centric here?
Agent: Look, you need to calm down.
Author: Calm down? This is, like, a hundred pages of writing for me in total. That they asked for. What's going on? How am I supposed to make a living?
Agent: Look, you shouldn't bring up that part about having to pay the mortgage again. It always gets you in trouble. . . .
It'd be funny if it weren't so true . . .
Few years back a friend of mine was pitching a TV series about Italian-Americans in a gritty setting . . . Sopranos without the guns . . . meetings, etc., multi-rewrites . . . network's behind it all the way . . . everyone's psyched . . . more-more-more on the Italian-american thing . . .until the network VP calls him up one night . . . 'We see this as more a Jewish-Irish family . . .'
He applied for a job at the post office the next day.
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