The Washington Post has an excellent article by Jonathan Karp, a publishing industry insider with a perspective on the publishing industry that readers of this weblog will find familiar. In his article, Turning the Page on The Disposable Book, he writes:
Visit your neighborhood superstore, and you will be overwhelmed with ephemera: self-aggrandizing memoirs by recovering addicts; poignant portraits of heroic pets; hyperbolic ideological tracts by insufferable cable TV pundits; guides to staying wrinkle- and toxin-free; odes to Warren Buffett and Jesus Christ; manifestos for fixing America in 12 easy steps; manly accounts of the best athlete/season/team ever; and glittery novels about British royalty, love-starved shoppers, mournful cops and ingenious serial killers. (There are more novels about serial killers than there are actual serial killers.)
The whole article is interesting and good, and the author basically summarizes in two pages everything I’ve been saying about the new revolution of publishing. He cites several problem with the current system (these are my paraphrases):
- Publishers focus on celebrity garbage and other trash because they think it will sell.
- Publishers are less willing to take chances on unknown authors or styles because they’re afraid it won’t sell and they want predictable income.
- Publishers pressure authors to write more books, more quickly, for less money.
None of this is news, but it’s rare to hear an industry insider admit that it’s part of the business plan. He goes on to point out these things about the impact of current trends of technology (again, I’m paraphrasing):
- Reference nonfiction is already replaced by web resources.
- Timely nonfiction is transitioning to web resources.
- Independents are eroding the rest of the book business from the bottom.
He has this to say about the last point:
The barriers to entry in the book business get lower each year. There are thousands of independent publishers and even more self-publishers. These players will soon have the same access to readers as major publishers do, once digital distribution and print-on-demand technology enter the mainstream. When that happens, publishers will lose their greatest competitive advantage: the ability to distribute books widely and effectively. Those who publish generic books for expedient purposes will face new competitors. Like the music companies, some of those publishers may shrink or die.
Can you say revolution? What does all this mean for the lowly fiction writers?
The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.
Sounds to me like you’ll be okay as long as you write things like reading.
That’s the revolution in a nutshell.
