by Ben Temchine, producer
Which would you rather own: a newspaper or a book publisher? What about a poke in the eye with a stick? The collapse of the book publishing industry has been prophesied for decades, but it finally looks like it is coming true. Publisher’s Weekly called 2009 “the worst year for publishing in decades.” The major publishing houses— Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—are in a race to shed jobs, a race Random House has been winning during their multi-year reorganization. Membership in the American Booksellers Association is down 75% in ten years. Not that the corporate behemoths are doing so well: Borders is nearly certain to go bankrupt and Barnes & Noble may just be pushing the inevitable farther down the road.
Lousy economy. Worse business model. An American public that just isn’t that into reading more than 140 characters at a pop. Pick your reason, there is a no question that the businesses that connect readers of long form narratives to the people who write them will be vastly different in ten years.
This weekend, our program begins a three-part series taking the long view of the publishing industry. We’re speaking with visionaries about the future that is already here, the entrepreneurs trying to find where the money is hidden and authors and booksellers navigating the new world with no map to guide them. What is the future of the book? Would you be happy to read most of your long narratives on one or another screens, and only buying the dead tree version for special—read expensive—editions? Do you have a kindle? iPad? Are you reading Moby Dick one postage-stamp sized page at a time? If the publishers fall, would you care or even notice?
Do you have an idea to save publishing? Let us know. We’ll pass it on. It’s just as likely to work as most of the ideas being tried out there.
U.L. Harper,
Interesting comments. Even excellent authors can write a ‘bad’ book. It’s difficult to write a book to begin with, much less insure that it will be top quality. Some of the work that I’ve done in the past makes me sick to look at it today. All part of the growth process.
POD companies aren’t called the ‘vanity press’ for nothing. The vast majority are books that publishers wouldn’t touch due to either content, quality or market. PODs take your money and will print just about anything. Publishers are in a high risk situation and have to make money on something or go out of business.
Market locally? A few hundred miles? My POD book, "Going Dutch, Trials of a Wage Slave" is about the vast differences between working conditions in the USA and Europe. Not to mention the actual court trials. I’ve done the miles, the book signings, the radio interviews, emails and blogposts trying to market it.
AS it is, I DON’T RECOMMEND that anyone buy the current copy of the book. Why? I’m not getting royalties from it! I plan on doing a video series on YouTube about it. For FREE.
Will be glad to "…take to the road."
Been there, done that, got dozens of T-shirts from all the places I’ve been. Would love to add to the collection.
Regards,
Tom
It’s pretty simple. They need to stop publishing bad books, for one. Secondly, they need to take a lesson from the POD companies that everyone hates so much. Have the public order it and then produce the book. It will only cut down on return costs and losing money on novels that don’t sell. This would make book stores simply warehouses…but that’s really what they are anyway. They need to set up like a video store and set up a large used book section and have a strong marketing floor available.
From there they need to sign authors by area. Don’t send them around the country but market them rather locally (give or take a few hundred miles). And finally stop with the big advances. Give the authors a start up cost to promote themselves based on their genre and audience. Publishers need to stop trying to maximize and instead become consistent which they’re not.
Make the author take to the road.
GREAT to hear that you are doing this series on publishing. The idea that the internet is going to open up opportunities is flawed, in more ways than one. Living in the hills of Tennessee, I have less bandwidth and terrible ISP service, compared to what I had in Europe, 10 years ago. At prices that are nothing short of banditry. I had faster, better dial-up service for $4.00 USD per month in the Netherlands, in 1999. The satellite service out here in nothing to brag about, barely better than dial-up.
On the subject of publishing companies, some of the Print On Demand and internet retailers need to be held accountable. I’ve had my POD book out for 7 years. My publishing company sent it to Amazon. They made it available as an e-book. I’ve asked for an accounting of sales, but nothing is forthcoming from Trafford Publishing or Amazon. Why? Because when I contacted them, they told me they didn’t know if I was the author. Amazon instructed me to contact the publisher to have them verify that I wrote the book. Trafford Publishing representatives told me that they couldn’t verify that I was the author, either. This is how the legal eagles can claim ‘orphan author’ and say that royalties can’t be paid out. IF the companies don’t try to claim copyright for themselves.
If you can track down someone on the internet using the various search engines, then companies with contracts can certainly honor and pay royalties. Too many ‘legal’ excuses to get out of being responsible to your customer or author.
I plan on putting my work on the internet, along with videos and photos. Problem is dial-up…do you know how long it takes to download a single photo? It’s like half of America is in the fast lane and the rest of us are in the swamp.
Worse comes to worse, I’ll move. I’m sending this from a computer that’s 20 miles from my house. It’s the only way I can download videos, etc.
You wonder why people are reading less? We have become a ‘drive-thru’ culture.
Looking forward to the rest of the series.
Today, I drove through downtown Beckley WV as I listened to your interview with Jeff Biggers, probably 10 miles from the Upper Big Branch Mine as the crow flies. I enjoyed hearing the passion and conviction in Biggers’ voice; he sounded like a preacher testifying on Sunday, humbled by the truth of his own words.
The pickup truck I was following as I drove through town had two decals in the rear window. The first was a Massey bumper sticker that read "I love mountains that produce coal", a riff on the "I (heart) mountains" bumper stickers produced by ilovemountains.org. The second was a skull and crossbones, modified so that the skull wore a miner’s lamp and the crossbones were a mattock and pick axe. The graphic was ringed with the words, "Suck This Obama".
I’m leaving West Virginia after 15 years in the state. I love my home here, but the dramatic contrast in attitudes and ideals has become too stark for me to justify staying. I’m not sure if the fight against mountaintop removal mining is being won or not- the mine behind my house on Gauley Mountain has been closed thanks to action from the EPA. I only know that I don’t want to raise a family on the front lines of a war.
I think you realize with books now, we are at a moment of invention. The iPad and Kindle start a digital industry by rear-viewing readers with a familiar page formatting scrollable files. Like any horseless-carriage, eReaders will take us places. (Hopefully they will emulate better layout and typography.) But what will they become? There is something deeper about books that digital technology can uncover – voice and mediation of experience. For when you read a book, you hear a voice, imagine pictures – the conjurings of the author. What happens when you go beyond the rudiments of textual language in your story telling, and summon other transcodable media. That will really shake your tree. Finally with high tech comes high touch and I agree with Richard Dash that publishers should make richer book offerings, tallismens like Prospero’s books (the Peter Greenaway kind).