A story in the NY Times today about e-book pricing prompted me to share some thoughts about publishing.
Here’s my background. I worked in publishing 1975-1984 or thereabouts. I have published two business books, one of which has been highly successful.1 I also have published young-adult novels under another name.2
I talked with a series of traditional large publishers about an early draft of my first business book. They were interested, but they said I would have to promote it, market it, build a “platform” for it,3 and edit it4 myself.
I asked them, “What do you do, then?”
They said, “We’ll copy edit it, print and bind it, stock it, and make it available to bookstores.”
In other words, they were willing to do only what I could either do myself or have Amazon do for me. In addition, they would take far more money from the sales price than Amazon. In other words, I’d do almost exactly the same work either way, but I’d get less than half as much money with a large publisher as intermediary.
Thus I didn’t go the traditional publisher route.
Since then, I’ve talked with other authors who’ve done the same thing. Some were highly successful with earlier books through large publishing houses; others were relatively new to publishing.
We all asked, What value is the publisher adding?
Now if you’re John Grisham or Suzanne Collins or Stephen Covey, the publishing house will put a vast amount of money and resources behind your book. They will occasionally do the same for a new author whose work catches their fancy and where they believe they can sell a million copies (e.g., Stephenie Meyer) or whose work is highly derivative of such an author who’s tapped into the zeitgeist (the Stephenie Meyer wannabes writing last year’s glut of vampire books).
From a business standpoint, that’s fair. They want to publish what they are confident they can sell.
It’s also shortsighted, for two reasons.
First, it plays to the present, not the future. How will they get future top-selling authors on their imprint if publishers don’t nurture them earlier in their careers? That’s what we did when I was in publishing 35 years ago. We found, supported, and built up authors in the expectation that we turn a long-term profit from them+us.
Second, it opens a huge innovator’s-dilemma door to competition. Specifically, that competition is called Amazon.com.
Amazing, isn’t it, that they could identify and name their competitor and yet failed to react.
Right now, the publishers are trying desperately to spin the story. Amazon is at fault because of their price-setting policies. Amazon wants to sell everything cheap… now. But once they have a monopoly, they’ll raise prices.
That’s certainly a plausible argument, but it’s also a red herring. Amazon is winning because the publishers abdicated. It’s like a baseball team bunching all its players on one side of the field and then complaining when the hitter slaps the ball the other way.
Here’s to Amazon, who for all their faults has walked through a door that their competition intentionally opened for them! That’s why publishers are failing. They’re not doing their job the way they used to. It may be good business and PR strategy to blame Amazon, but it’s not anything like the whole truth.
Now excuse me, I have to get finish my imitation-vampire novel.5