The Myth of Traditional Publishing Leading The Way

Ed Grabianowski blogged about a talk I gave at Origins in June, 2009 entitled Writing Careers in the Post Paper Age. Ed did a good job summarizing an hour’s worth of lecture, but a couple of points generated a lot of controversy his blog’s comment section. (My favorite is the screed that began, in reference to me, “I want to destroy this man.” (Cool. Bring it.))

In the interest of clarity, and in case anyone wants a preview of this talk when I give it at Gencon and Dragoncon this year, I’ll present several essays that address points which seem to have some people’s knickers in a knot. This is the third.

My talk about digital publishing and the revolution which is upon us makes a lot of people terribly afraid. Why? Because they’re working hard on getting published, and they’ve locked on to one method, one target, one reality about publishing. What I’m telling them, from their point of view, is that all that work is now worthless, and that they have to start all over again. Their choice, then, is to get over their fear and look at the future, or point out that I’m evil, don’t have a clue and, by the way, am just a hack without an artistic bone in my body.

The path of least resistance looks good there, doesn’t it?

As I pointed out in the last essay, digital publication and the traditional model can work together, even work well together, especially during this time of transition. There’s nothing to stop you from having New York publish a novel while you write and publish short stories about those same characters from your website. The fact that you’ll make more off a $2 short story than you will an $8 paperback should even encourage you. You reward readers who liked the novel, and you offer a taste of the book for those who aren’t sure if they want to risk the $8. Win-win.

Clinging to the myth that traditional publishing will lead the way through the digital revolution isn’t healthy. Let me explain the roadblocks in front of traditional publishing and why I think their leadership in this realm will make World War One generalship look brilliant by comparison.

The modern book industry is not about delivering entertainment or story. It is about printing, transporting, warehousing and accounting for blocks of wood. Nothing more, nothing less. Books are not promoted on merit, they are promoted by the author or the popularity of the genre—even if the quality of the book, in a word, sucks. While editors do their very best to make sure the books coming out in their list are the best they can be, they are answerable to the accountants who view books as SKUs. If you have to put out four Paranormal Romance novels every month, and the only ones you have to slot this month are an A, a B+ and two Cs, that’s what goes into the list. If an author refuses to make editorial changes to stop his book from being craptastic—especially if it is the last book in a contract—it goes out as is.

Though publishing houses believe their imprints are a brand, we all know this is nonsense. If it wasn’t, bookstores would shelve books by publisher first, then genre, then author. As it is, unless the publisher buys an end-cap or other preferential positioning, the imprint branding plays little or no part in the shelving or buying process. (Quick, without looking, name the publisher of the book you were reading last night. My point exactly.)

Most large publishers are part of entertainment conglomerates who all have music and video/movie arms which run in fear of digital piracy. How a publisher can look at what happened to the music industry, and what is happening to the newspaper industry, and assume it isn’t coming in his direction is unbelievable. Yet, when your warehouse has nine miles of track for machines to pick and pack books, and you have a Vice President in charge of Warehousing and Shipping, you have an entrenched interest group that sees digital publishing as a direct threat to their fiefdoms.

Let us not forget that publishers have told us, for years, that the cost of paper is the reason prices have gone so high; yet when they release a digital copy of their books, they price it at exactly the same price as the physical book. Greed much? They’ll point out that their business model—which has to account for overhead in pricy Manhattan—demands they keep prices high. (Any other business would find a way to lower overhead, mind you.) Of course, since delivery costs are negligible for an ebook, and returns don’t exist, even cutting the price of an ebook to half that of the physical book would result in significantly higher profits.

Traditional publishers are afraid that lower-priced ebooks will cannibalize sales of physical books, but there is no evidence to prove this to be true. The gaming industry, with which I have great familiarity, has been releasing books in PDF form for many years, prior to, to coincide with or just after print publishing them. I have yet to find anyone in the industry—and I’ve talked to the leading publishers—who has seen any cannibalization. In fact, folks tend to buy both, leaving one on the shelf for reference, and carrying the other in their computer or PDA.

Probably the point that has had me shake my head the most about traditional publishers and their attitude toward ebooks, is summed up in a letter that went out to agents earlier this year. A large publisher announced that henceforth, the percentage of money from ebooks that went to authors would be 25% of monies collected, down from 50%. Their rationale? “Making ebooks isn’t as easy as everyone thinks.”

Apparently saving to PDF is a lot trickier than I’ve found it to be over the last dozen years. And the half-hour I lavish on prepping work to go on the iPhone or the Kindle takes others far longer. (It was funny to note that Random House produced an ebook reader for the iPhone six monthsafter Michael Zapp and I managed to do it. I imagine we did it at a fraction of the cost, too.)

Traditional publishing’s inability to get a handle on the implications of technology goes much further, and is the real source of my concern. A publisher wanted to use an excerpt of a novel of mine on its website and asked permission. I asked to see what they wanted to use. They wanted to use half the first chapter. I noted that the chapter’s last line was the hook that would sell the book. I suggested they use the whole chapter. Their reply: “We don’t have enough pages.”

Which is akin to saying there aren’t enough parsecs in the day to accomplish something. It just doesn’t compute.

A different publisher brought out an anthology in which I had a story. The webpage looked fine, and reproduced the cover beautifully. The ad copy was cool, but only mentioned four of the dozen authors in the book. While those four authors were heavy hitters, the fact that they didn’t at least list the rest of us meant that our fans would never find that book using “the Google.”

Traditional publishing has had control of the dominant paradigm for information transmission for several centuries. For decades now they have watched book sales slipping, and slipping more and more quickly as people do lots of reading on the computer (reading things like this blog in fact). Their assumption has been that folks have stopped reading.

Imagine if Budweiser saw sales slipping. Would they assume folks had stopped drinking beer? Probably not. What they would do would be to take a three-pronged approach to dealing with the problem. First, they’d figure out why sales were off instead of assuming no one was drinking. Second, they’d start pushing their product to rebuild demand through advertising and sampling. Lastly, they’d figure out a way to dominate whatever phenomenon was eating into their sales so they could profit from it, too.

But Budweiser is a business, and publishing really isn’t. It’s a badly run AAA sport that lacks (but could benefit from) uniforms, mascots and promotion.

For all of these reasons, and yet more, I have no confidence in traditional publishing leading us into the future. I’m not even certain they believe there is a problem they need to address. They’ve missed the fact that digital publishing is easier than they think it is, which means that their services are not necessary. (Traditional publishers, by the way, use lots of freelance editors, so they don’t even have a monopoly over that aspect of the business.)

How long until the collapse? I won’t hazard a guess because any figure I put on it will be twice as long as it will take.

Which is why I believe any author who is not looking into digital publishing for, at the very least, his back-inventory of stories that have been published once and are now unavailable, is missing a bet on securing for himself a chunk of the future.

I comment a lot on writing and the nature of publishing in my writing newsletter The Secrets. I’ve been writing it for five years. For only $25 a year, you get twenty-five issues that talk about writing and provide tips and techniques that will get you published and making a profit off your writing. Try it. You have nothing to lose but that steady stream of rejection slips.