Good morning, everyone. The mad ones have decided that we’d throw the doors open and see what sort of ideas wandered in. Sarah, quit screaming and looking for a cupboard to hide in! You know we aren’t looking for plots. They multiply in our heads too fast as is. No, we’re wondering what you guys think about the current state of publishing. What do you think will be the result of the DoJ’s suit again Apple and five of the big six publishers? Will Kobo’s latest announcement that they’d be entering the self-publishing/small press publishing realm along the same lines as Apple’s KDP program be real competition for Amazon? How about for Barnes & Noble?
Or how about this: post your favorite quote about literature, publishing or writing from fiction and explain how you think it applies to the business today (or how it doesn’t).
Or anything else you want to ask or comment on.
Mad Genius Club 
10 responses to “Open Floor”
I’ve got the popcorn popped and a size extra large soda, and I’m just sitting back watching for the train wreck. I swear it’s like a comedy that piles one thing on top of another and _still_ doesn’t come crashing down, until you’re breathlessly disbelieveing that it’s still going. Is this a “Being There” that never crashes, or a “Romeo and Juliet” with everyone dead from (sorry fans) a massive dose of petrified culture?
Pam, I look at it more like the fancy domino designs where someone uses thousands of dominoes and sets them up and then tips the first one. It in turn tips the second and so on. The speed of destruction speeds up until it goes up an artificial hill — agency pricing — and then speeds up again as other market factors start coming into play. You know most, if not all, of the dominoes will fall by the end of it. The question is simply how many and how long will it take.
Publishing isn’t dead and will never be. There’s always going to be some form or fashion of it. However, I think by the time the dust settles, the major houses won’t look the same as they do now.
There’s a line from the show “The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail”, which I’ll have to paraphrase, since 1982 was a while ago. (Only because I wasn’t Thoreau … I still know most of my own lines from half the shows I’ve ever been in, much to my wife’s chagrin …)
“The problem with books is, they don’t put legs on ’em. They just sit there in the shop, waiting for someone who does have legs to come in and buy them. My publisher authorized a printing of ten thousand copies. And in the end over nine thousand of them came running back to me, legs or no.”
Publishing’s problem with the current state of technology, in my estimation, stems from the fact that their product truly is neither fish nor fowl, while bearing meaningful aspects of both. Books aren’t cans of beans, but they also aren’t tailored Armani suits. (Not even books as well-crafted as those written by the various Mad Genii,)
There are some things that will always require brick-&-mortar stores, while other will probably eventually migrate almost entirely to e-commerce. Most people can’t effectively buy shoes or clothing over the InterWebz, unless they have a resident tailor or cobbler to make adjustments. But I really don’t need to “try on” a new wireless router or set of cookware, so consuming vast expanses of retail shelf-space for these things simply doesn’t make good business sense. When it comes to such standardized productes, Amazon and their peers essentially *can* “put legs on ’em”.
The free preview function effectively lets us “try books on”, without needing to go to the store. So, Thoreau’s lament CAN be satisfied, in most cases. I expect that there will always be some specific types of books — large, hyper-technical engineering references, and coffee-table art reproductions, for example — that can’t be effectively marketed via e-tail. But they will end up in specialized boutique-ish shops, not whole-city-block mega-stores like the current incarnation of B&N.
But there’s a different aspect of Amazon’s effectively-infinite shelf-space that I’ve seen as the harbinger of death for brick-&-mortar stores since the very first time I looked up a book on Amazon, more than ten years ago: Backlist. Say you’ve been under a rock, and you’ve never heard of DST. When DSR hits the shelves you’ll pick it up, read the blurbs, and say, “This sounds awesome. Too bad they don’t have Volume One on the shelf.” At which point you could go ask the clerk to look it up and order it for you … or you can pull out your phone, scan the bar-code, and order it either from Amazon or direct from Baen, without moving your feet. Because all those backlist books DO have legs on ’em … which means they aren’t sitting there in the shop waiting for people with legs to walk in.
actually you make another good point on their not being Armani suits. I presume that there might be some people out there who own twenty Armani suits. People who wear suits every day for instance. But say you’re a normal worker today and wear business casual. You’ll own a suit or two, for interviews and business trips and ceremonial appearances. But not twenty. So Armani in estimating the market probably goes “percentage of men who can afford us x an average of two suits.” Publishers have been convinced for a LONG time that books are Armani suits. Hence “percentage of people who like author y x a book a year, or we’ll ‘devalue the product.’” I don’t know about you guys, but if it were possibly for Terry Pratchett to write a book a day, I’d buy them all (though I might save them and read them once a month, given my schedule.) I would pay what I pay now for each of them (we COULD eat spam. Lovely Spam.) BUT publishers don’t GET that.
Publishers don’t get that, because (for the most part) they aren’t Readers. They might be readers with a lowercase “r”, the kind of people who might enjoy a nice book now and again if they have time, but they’re not Readers. Readers with a capital R are the ones who have an endless hunger for good stories, who will devour every book they can get their hands on and still want more. Like me, for example — though now that my teenage years are far behind me, I’m no longer able to devour a book per day, because I have obligations (work, and so on) that consume a large part of my time. But if I had the time? Yeah, a book per day.
Most publishing houses are run by people who never experienced that hunger, so they still think there’s a limit on how many books a single person might want to read, and therefore might want to buy. (Baen is an exception, of course, but then Baen is always an exception when you’re talking about trends in publishing.) From that simple fact — that most publishers aren’t Readers — stem most of the industry’s problems…
i.e. if you’re going to sell Armani, you should wear it. If you’re going to sell beans you should eat them. VERY sound.
On a totally different topic, do you know how bloody difficult it is to find out what happened to the last Byzantine Emperor’s relatives? I did find one really good website while I was writing Impaler (http://genealogy.euweb.cz/) but right now it’s timing out on me. And Vlad won’t let me write the next bit until I work out which relatives are visiting with marriage in mind.
I wonder if we will start to see more subscription-based publishing, especially e-pubs? You like Jane Deer’s short last two short stories, so you can sign up with IndiePub.whatever or on the author’s website and for $1 or $2 per story, $4 for novellas, you get every story she sends out. Not just Baen and not just e-mags, but other indie publishers and more genere authors (ShortRomance.com anyone?)
I think I’ve already seen a kickstarter anthology? Yes — the shared world one recently. And as you suggest, some kind of subscription system (dare I say ezines?) may indeed grow. The nice thing about things like that is that you can get some “rub off” marketing — hey, you bought the issue because it had one of the Mad Genii in it, but Look! We also provided a short by one of the Insane Cats, and a little bit from the upcoming epic by one of the Mod Five, just in case you want to try something else.
With ezines and the like I expect we’ll see a rebirth of the serialized story. Remember when magazines used to run a serialized story in them, with a chapter (usually just 2-3 magazine pages) every month? This works particularly well with novellas, and was a great marketing ploy for the magazine, because people would buy the next issue to see what happens next.