PUBLISHING HAS PERISHED

Mike Shatzkin (I think)

This quote is from The Shatzkin Files, an enewsletter about selling books.

But the idea that all of this, and more, might be pulled together as something called “marketing” . . . didn’t really arise until the 1980s. Before that, the power of the editors was tempered a bit by the opinions and needs of the sales department, but marketing was a support function, not a driver.

In the past decade, things have really changed.

While it is probably still true that picking the “right books” is the single most critical set of decisions influencing the success of publishers, it is increasingly true that a house’s ability to get those books depends on their ability to market them . . . 

In the past, the large sales force and the core elements that they worked with — catalog, jacket, and consolidated and summarized title information — were how a house delivered sales to an author. Today the distinctions among houses on that basis are relatively trivial. But new techniques — managing the opportunities through social networks, using Google and other online ads, keeping books and authors optimized for search through the right metadata, expanding audiences through the analysis of the psychographics, demographics, and behavior of known fans and connections — are still evolving.

Not only are they not all “learned” yet, the environment in which digital marketing operates is still changing daily . . . Publishers using their own proprietary databases of consumer names with ever-increasing knowledge of how to influence each individual in them are still rare but that will probably become a universal requirement.

So marketing has largely usurped the sales function. It will probably before long usurp the editorial function too.

Fifty years ago, editors just picked the books and the sales department had to sell them. Thirty years ago, editors picked the books, but checked in with the sales departments about what they thought about them first. Ten years from now, marketing departments (or the marketing “function”) will be telling editors that the audiences the house can touch need or want a book on this subject or filling that need. Osprey and some other vertical publishers are already anticipating this notion by making editorial decisions in consultation with their online audiences.

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The Shatzkin Files is meant to serve publishers, bookstores and whatever authors are interested.  It is distinguished by the fact that the current Shatzkin is the second generation, so he has the benefit of a very deep field of knowledge.  Beyond that, Shatzkin is exceptionally open to new ideas.  He’s not afraid to be wrong or surprised, which means he learns as he goes and passes it on quickly.

One lesson of economics is that when there is a gold rush, the people who get rich are not the miners -- they are the suppliers of what the miners need.  Now that people are so convinced that “books” are as lucrative as digging nuggets out of a hill, what is it that they need?  Ego will make them willing to pay.  Today’s publishers are NOT publishers, who used to have a focus on some subject or theory and to keep a staff of readers and editors who interacted with authors or their agents.  Today the companies known as publishers are mostly marketers of whatever they think will sell as suggested by sales stats.  It’s no longer an honor -- it’s a Popeil Pocket Fisherman.

Whatever sells well will be replicated until it stops selling.  The slush pile no longer exists and the editors who used to do development with authors have been pushed out to become agents.  Most publishers won’t accept manuscripts that don’t come to them ready to sell.  The system of advancing money to keep the writer eating while he works on a book has died.  But this doesn’t mean that a publisher won’t demand changes in the manuscript if the theory is it will sell better.  More sex, less sex; more science, less science, and -- most weirdly -- an assurance that it’s “genuine,” whatever that means.  On the one hand readers want to read what everyone else is reading, but on the other hand they’re like a person who visits a prostitute and wants assurance that he (or she) is loved for herself, that all the declarations of love are “genuine.” 

From the other side of the transaction, the authors hope that their readers are having a genuine experience.  They need reassurance that they’re doing an effective job of stimulating their audience.  Making money as an author is roughly as promising as making a living as a bucking bull rodeo rider.  But you can make a pretty good income as a person who coaches bull riders or raises rough stock.

Anyone who figures out how to serve the book marketers, the readers and the authors -- a function called “discovery,” meaning finding what you really like but maybe didn’t know about before -- will clean up.  Here’s one attempt, which matches author manuscript with possible marketers.  http://www.pubmatch.com/blog/  

But one of the real problems is that thousands of people out there are convinced that their own writing is brilliant, though they are dismaying wrong.  There ought to be ways to give them the nasty truth but no one makes money by saying NO.  On the other hand some of that work could probably be redeemed by an insightful reader/editor.   Some websites are “cloud” feedback sites where you post your work and people comment on it.  Could be good or really bad.  Some academic editors now have people on staff who look for grants that will pay for the printing of worthy manuscripts, but there’s rarely profit for the author or much distribution.  It is a gimmick for “publish or perish” professors.

When the internet came, the middle person of many humanities structures simply fell out.  Now in retirement I have the freedom to write, to roam philosophically, even the freedom to offend people.  But if I wanted to publish I would have to stop writing, because the agents, publishers, agents -- all those interface people -- have disappeared.  No longer do lunches, Rolodexes (are you kidding?), galleries, and networks weaving in and out of universities mean anything.  The element of educating buyers, of defining movements, is gone.  Long term continuity of understanding is gone.  The people who used to know how to scan for talent are gone.  There are as many online ezines as there are blades of grass and no one has time to read them, even if they last long enough for readers to realize they exist.

Repeatedly people tell me they are starting a publishing business.  Can you pay advances?  No.  Do you have a distribution network?  No.  How many reviewers can you bring to bear on a book/painting?  None.  Do you have a productive customer list?  No.  Do you have a well-known place (a website counts) that stays alive and stable?  No.  What kind of books/paintings will you sell?  What is your “personality,” your specialty?  Whatever.  How will people find you?  Um -- Google.

Discovery is as hard for publishers as it is for authors.  Beyond that, around here people who are consumers, even at the level of stocking a bookstore, are 19^th century passive, waiting for the drummer.  In Fort Benton, where their splendid new gallery is now showing the Blackfeet bronzes of Bob Scriver, they do not stock the biography of Scriver in the bookstore because, as their patriarch explained to me, “No one came and told us we should buy it.”  Their customers do not buy on line because the point of their visit is to say they have “been there” and they want to buy things to show the neighbors, like a souvenir ashtray (now that ashtrays are politically incorrect).  They want evidence of presence, not a book to read later. 

Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park, Chicago.  

I own stock in this one and got my "real" education with my butt on this warm subterranean concrete,

searching for things I didn't know existed.

In addition, people over thirty have a hard time grasping that a book doesn’t conform to what they’ve always called “book.”  An odd size, a different format (2 columns per page), a different binding (spiral instead of glue), a cover that is not gaudy and shiny will NOT sell.  It doesn’t “read” to their minds as “book.”  They do not buy and use books for content -- only to talk about, the way they buy athletic shoes.  They are after the opinions of others, not their own value system.  So Netflix and Amazon assume you will want to know what your friends are reading and you will want to know what they read.  Do I want everyone I know to realize I’m reading books about sex?  No.  (They won’t read blogs.  I don’t know why.)

People who write for readers who want content are blogging now.  Anyone can pull content off the internet and bind it into a “book.”  Publishers STILL don’t get that.  And they are running out of content.  Publishers never ask themselves what's out there.  They ask, “Where is the dynamite book that will sell in big enough numbers to make the best seller lists and therefore make me rich?”  They won’t find it by sneering and paying pennies.  Or even by asking their salesmen.  But if authors market their own books, they will have no time to write.