In the first two parts of our series, we talked about where publishing has been and where it is now, especially in regard to the publishing business model. And while there is much more that could be said about the current business model, suffice it to say for now that this is a bad deal for publishers and especially for authors. For part three, let’s take a look at the possible future.
Publishers have managed to stay afloat in this worsening marketplace by shifting much of the marketing responsibility to authors. If you’ve submitted a book proposal to an agent or publisher in last few years, you know there is a requirement for a comprehensive marketing plan to be included. The buzzword for this is Author Platform. Authors are expected to blog, to be on Twitter, to be on Facebook, and, preferably, to have a large mailing list to which they can sell books. Some authors lament that, between a fulltime job and their marketing activities, they barely have time to write. This is not a good situation—especially when you consider that there has not been a corresponding increase in author royalties.
Enter technology.
Just as technology caused a paradigm shift to occur in the mid fifteenth century, it is causing another to occur in our day. The rise and proliferation of e-books and print-on-demand has removed the technological impediments to getting books into the marketplace. This has given both new and established authors pause to think about what is truly in their best interest. Truth be told, the one indispensable factor in the publishing equation is the author. The big publishers have either not realized this yet or are engaged in some form of subterfuge to keep their authors from recognizing what a bad deal they’re getting. However, savvy authors have begun to wonder why, if they have to do the bulk of the work anyway, they are not making the bulk of the profits generated by their own work.
Publishers and agents have long tried to build and maintain a mystique around the, so-called, gatekeeper function as a means of validation for authors—if you can get past the gatekeepers you have been validated as truly good. I’m sure some of them actually believe this, and I know many authors believe this. However, it is good to remember that publishing is a business—it’s not about validation—it’s about making money. Publishers need authors, but advances in technology mean that authors don’t necessarily need publishers any more. The authors who have recognized this have begun to abandon traditional publishing and the absurd notion of validation.
E-books and print-on-demand have provided the path to product. Amazon and Barnes & Noble (among others) have provided the path to market. Traditional publishers are becoming more and more irrelevant in this new publishing paradigm, and I predict that things will get worse for them before they realize that business as usual isn’t going to cut it anymore. Pity the poor publishers who think they can go on forever operating on the old paradigm. Lacking the political influence to obtain government bailouts, they will go out of business.
So the story of publishing, like all good stories, has essentially come full-circle. It is not necessarily a good thing that traditional publishing is in trouble, but it is a good thing that authors have more choices about how they will get their work into the hands of readers.
This is good for readers, too. In the former paradigm, having a real choice was like Henry Ford’s fabled statement about the Model T—you can have any color you want, so long as it’s black. In other words, you had a choice, but only from the few books publishers made available. In the new paradigm, readers truly have more real choices than ever before.
Will traditional publishing disappear? Almost certainly not; and it’s important to say that it’s not a bad deal for everyone, but when all dust settles the publishing landscape will look radically different than it does today.
In future posts we’ll take a look at how to profit from this new publishing paradigm.
SDG
