The talk of the publishing community this morning is this anonymous letter posted over at PandoDaily. I have been saying for years that it was inevitable that we would lose one of the Big Six publishers. In fact, I honestly thought it would happen before we lost Borders, given Borders’ ability to run itself like shit for years and still survive.
I don’t believe that Amazon is setting out to destroy commercial publishing as we know it. That’s just too facile, really. Amazon didn’t set out to destroy the bookstore, either. But frankly, it realized that there were a lot of people for whom going to the bookstore was not convenient and it made it very convenient for them to get books. I think the same thing is happening with publishing. There are a lot of people for whom getting a publisher is not convenient (and we can argue about what those reasons are, certainly) and Amazon has made it incredibly convenient for them. That’s not being out to destroy publishing. That’s recognizing a need and filling it.
The fact that big publishers don’t understand that–that they still expect the parts of publishing that have always functioned as a gentlemen’s club to continue to function as a gentlement’s club–is one of the reasons they’re in trouble.
There are two other things in this letter that tell you why big publishing is in trouble.
1. They don’t know what they’re up against, even though it’s very easy to find out. “So rather than getting a 30% of an ebook (with the other 70% being split between the publisher and author), they’ll be getting a 70% cut (with the other 30% going right to the author). Funny thing is that it’s actually better for authors.” Any author can self-publish with Kindle and, if they price their book at $9.99 or less, get 70%. The assumption that an Amazon publishing contract would strike the same deal a traditional publisher would strike is dangerously naive. If I can get 70% of all digital sales of A City of Ghosts, I would assume any contracted author would at least be getting 50/50 (since presumably Amazon is arguing that their promotion costs are such that it entitles them to a bigger chunk.)
I don’t know, but I would not be guessing that Amazon is doing business like me, if I were a traditional publisher, especially if I know my business model is failing. And yet, one cannot help but feel that, even as they say that their business model is failing, they still think anybody who publishes books would follow it.
2. They don’t see the value in a dependable mid-list. Which means, folks, that Vince McMahon’s business model is better than the publishing industry’s. Let that sink in. McMahon knows the value of cultivating talent and having a lot of talented folks who sit mid-card, building up a good storyline and a fan base while earning their push to superstar status.
Publishers like to pretend that we make our money from discovering unknown talents for small advances and selling millions of their books. That’s a very small part of our business. The bestselling books are all written by celebs, by people with huge platforms, by fiction writers with a long history of bestselling books, or by people who do a proposal that’s on its surface brilliant. In short, there’s a bidding war among the publishers over the big books. We all know what the good books are–it all comes down to how much of an advance we’re willing to pay for them. The hotly fought-for books are the ones that sell. And while we might not make huge profit % on these, we make big profit $ on these. They keep the lights on by covering overhead. Better to cover our fixed costs by going all in on a few big books than trying to buy dozens of mid-list books.
How many big books can there be, though? You think Snooki is going to continue to churn out best-sellers. Publishing a book by Snooki keeps your lights on this year. It sets no foundation for how to keep your lights on next year.
And, as I have said a million times, the people who, in these times, most need publishers are the mid-list authors. It’s like music. New bands and authors can do a lot for themselves with the new technology available to them. Some can even make a living at it that never involves the corporate entertainment industry. Someone as big as Stephen King doesn’t need a publisher. He can afford to do it all himself.
The people who need publishers are the people in the middle. And that’s just who this anonymous letter writer admits isn’t worth their time.
Smaller houses and probably smaller imprints at big houses are going to have an easier transition away from this, since the blockbuster isn’t within their grasp anyway. They’re not gambling big and hoping to cover their losses with the next big win.
But you have to have a good stable of authors by whom you do right (and do competitively with other publishers) and you can’t underestimate your competition or assume that they are just like you. And you have to be able to innovate. Smaller houses will find ways. Some of the big guys may indeed break against the rocks.
But this has been an issue for the last ten years. That’s not Amazon’s fault.
Filed under: Pop Culture
This kinda sounds like the Music Row folks: all top 40 big names wtih a middle of the road appeal and little way for talented people to break in even when the new artists are more talented than some of the mundane big names.
I think the dynamic is very similar to the music industry, but honestly, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The Big Six publishers are by and large owned by the same media conglomerations who own the record companies, so it’s very likely that a “let’s all do business the same way” edict has permeated those conglomerates. I think the switch from having a stable of solid mid-listers and one or two superstars to having only superstars (though superstars whose carriers are more volatile and shorter lasting) came because some higher up thought it was a good idea and told books and records to get on it.
I have more to say about this, but I’m mid-teaching. It’s an odd coincidence, however, that today at 5:15 am — having realized that my print copy of today’s assigned book was irretrievably lost and the other print copy that I ordered from a secondary dealer was not going to arrive in time — I downloaded Kindle for my Mac and by 5:18 was happily reading my “book.” Never had even thought of using an e-book before. I’m liking it. Publishers (and bookstores) are in trouble when they’ve lost people like me.
Update: Now, at 5 pm, I have all three copies under one roof. Guess which one I plan to keep and which ones I’m releasing back to the secondary market? Kindle edition ftw.
One of the things that bothers me about the “oh well, fuck it. Big house print publishing will fail because they are run badly and indulgently and obliviously by media congloms who think books can be sold like Garth Brooks CDs”…is that my book(s) will never be published by those types of houses anyhow. But, when Big print fiction goes down in a heap, I am not so optimistic that small non-fiction and university presses won’t also fold. The university as a place that values knowledge and research for its own sake is almost dead and what will the next decade’s Board of Trustees do with a budget that tries to maintain the staff necessary to publish scholarly editions (print or not). Those of us who depend on peer reviewer and scholarly editors need that content-area specialist who has spent years making a rock-solid series in our subfield, whose judgments we can trust and whose contacts get first-time authors in front of readers who wouldn’t hold the elevator for them at a conference.
I don’t feel sorry for Random House. They were crazily unadaptive. However, I’m going to hate to lose NIU Press just because some asswipe Trustee reads the WSJ and hears that publishing is a dead-end game and we all should be sinking money in nanotech.
Believe me, Bridgett, I sweat over that aspect of it all the time. But I do think that small presses, university presses among them, have been better able to adapt because they can change course more easily and when they can’t, they usually have more understanding parent institutions.
But the truth is that university presses aren’t going anywhere until and unless the tenure system changes. Tenure committees want to see peer reviewed articles and books. Until there’s widespread adoption of other tenure criteria, universities need university presses.
So, fingers crossed. Ha ha ha.
If only D1 universities routinely selected a majority of trustees who had academic credentials, your hope would have wings. However, the academic side (especially the humanities departments) can do all the “reporting” they’d like up the chain of command and at the end of it all, the only thing that most of the off-campus administrative tier (who mostly don’t come from either academic/nonprofit backgrounds) can do is read a ledger sheet. If it doesn’t return value (in the form of sponsored funding, etc), it will not get to stay…and that goes for eliminating departments, presses, etc. Hell, the flagship public U of the SUNY system is now trying to run a liberal arts campus without most of its language departments because languages like Russian (with those costly professors) didn’t generate enough tuition or external research funding. Maybe I’m too pessimistic.
Well, that’s one of the reasons some people *coughcough* make the argument that the administration needs to see all of the reviews and publicity university press books generate, because it’s very cheap, but far reaching PR for the university. And it needs to be framed as such.
Caps lock yes. Speak in the language that they can understand.
I worked with book printers at one point in my career. My suggestion for university press survival is switching major publishing to e-textbooks and e-journals. Would be cheaper than press, even if they have to cough up the money for e-readers for their professors and students. And it would allow the insertion of new instructional methods right in the books, like quizzes, videos, outside linkages, a place for making “margin” notes, and the like. (but stay away from proprietary software)
I also worked in the publishing industry as it was trying to figure out digital media distribution. You’re right that e-pubs have some cost advantages on the print side, but not as much overall savings as you’d think because of the increased costs on the production side (someone has to develop all those value-added things you mention…field test them…market them…etc) Likewise, developing your own wholly unique software is a huge cash and time drain. Finally, there’s user resistance to publisher-unique software — people like to buy what they already know works and the publisher-unique software that I’ve tried (stuff developed by the heavy hitters of academic publishing) isn’t as good as the better-known and bigger proprietary brands. I don’t believe that Eastern State Name Pretty Good Division 1-ish University Press has the technology resources, the staff, or the development budget to make that suggestion feasible.
Plus, there’s the problem of rights. The press I’m most familiar with has a small active list (maybe 300 titles) and it took four months to figure out what rights they needed to make sure they had, how to make sure they had those rights, and, if they didn’t, whether they could be secured for every single one of those active titles.
Needless to say, that’s both a tremendous expense, requires guessing about the future in ways that are scary (what if we have not anticipated rights questions correctly?), and took a lot of time.
But that’s the thing that university presses have not yet stared in the face–at least not fully. We used to think that we took a manuscript and made a physical book. A small part of revenue might come from people who wanted to take a part of that book and stick it in their book.
Then, when we made the jump to including ebooks, we still had/have the mindset that we take the manuscript and now make it into two forms–book and ePDF. And we’re fretting about whether we can also make it into an epub.
But in the very near future, the question won’t be “What forms can WE put this manuscript in?” but “How much or how little of this manuscript can we allow others to reconstitute however they’d like?”
University Presses are notorious for seeing the forest for the trees (which is usually a virtue) and thus thinking that, if they plant a tree, they have a forest. Even now, there are still folks talking about coming up with a university press alternative to Amazon. As if there’s even five people in the world who are like “You know, I only read books from university presses, so it’d be great for me if I could shop them exclusively.” It’s mind-boggling.
So, I’m sure there are folks who are like “We need to come up with our own software” or “our own platform.”
No, we really don’t. We need to have our rights management under control so that tech people can develop new ways of delivering our content and we can license that content to them.
But that’s not a small problem, since it involves a complete change in understanding of what we do–not making books, but managing content–and a lot of work getting the rights issues under control.
To bridgett:
I worked in a university’s curriculum and research development group. I was one of the people tasked with tracking down rights, developing and refining ancillary printed products as well as producing texts. We did work digitally, and sent it out to printers. This was somewhat long ago.E-publishing did not exist at that time. PDFs were rare.
I was really unclear in my statement about making sure to stay away from proprietary software. I actually meant, make sure to use a software package that can be run on any e-reader or tablet or computer, and don’t do the development in-house, but don’t buy into something from developers like Microsoft, Apple, or Adobe that restrict usage to one or two tablets or e-readers. Here, some products developed with java or HTML5 from companies devoted to making device-independant software would be my preference going forward into a digital-only publishing.
To Aunt B. :
Yes, learning and practicing how to use appropriate copyright requests/responses would go a long way. But with e-pubs, it might be as simple as an index filled with forms for people to fill out and send to the e-publisher requesting specific types of copyright requests. From, “I need to make notes and take quotes and deliver them to my classes” to “I need to excerpt this image and put it on a website to sell my own ancillary materials for your e-publication”, or “I would like to send the authors a letter detailing their error on this page” sort of thing.