 | 24 Sep 08 |
I really don’t know why I do this to myself….reading stuff about current trends in the publishing business. Every time I do it gives me heartburn. UGH! But . . . as the saying goes– In order to win a war, you have to understand your enemy.
That said, here’s a bit of recon I received this morning….
FROM:
NEW YORK MAGAZINE- NEWS AND FEATURES
THE END
The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.
HarperCollins occupies floors 1 through 22 of a giant steel-and-glass box on 53rd Street. But up on 26, the receptionist for a tiny offshoot of the company sits alone, gatekeeper to a few drab rows of empty cubicles. A glass container on a table holds a mysterious pile of bright-yellow lightbulbs.
“Welcome to our temporary home,” says 51-year-old publisher Bob Miller, ushering me into a colleague’s more inviting office. Inside, he and his staffers prepare to impart a cheery message: They’re going to fix publishing!
But first, a horror story. Debbie Stier, Miller’s No. 2 at HarperStudio (as this little imprint is called), has been collecting videos for their blog. “You want to see what happens to books after they go to book heaven?” she asks. On the screen of her MacBook, a giant steel shredder disgorges a ragged mess of paper and cardboard onto a conveyor belt. This is the fate of up to 25 percent of the product churned out by New York’s publishing machine.
Everyone’s eyes widen, as though watching some viral YouTube gross-out. “It’s like Wall-E,” says marketing director Sarah Burningham. “It’s depressing,” Miller adds. They had sent in a Flip camera with a warehouse worker. “You can see our books go through there,” says Stier. “The Crichton, the Ann Patchett.”
Miller recently left Hyperion, which he founded seventeen years ago, to start his own imprint at the urging of HarperCollins’s then-CEO, Jane Friedman. She was replaced in June, but HarperStudio lives on. For all its ambitions, it’s a modest outfit: Miller and three women, two of them in their twenties, hope to publish two books a month starting next May, having convinced 25 authors to forgo big advances in return for half of their books’ eventual profit. The books they’ll be doing aren’t particularly outré—Emeril Lagasse on grilling, 50 Cent is collaborating with The 48 Laws of Power author Robert Greene—but they’re hoping that their process will be revolutionary.
Over the past few weeks, Stier has turned her own Flip camera on friends and colleagues, asking them to hold up those yellow lightbulbs and share their “bright ideas” on publishing. She plays us a few of the clips, including one of a publicist who delivers Stier’s intended punch line, tentatively: “Have fewer authors and sell more books?” But the suggestion that gets the biggest laugh in the office is from Stier’s 12-year-old son, who says, “So maybe you have to turn all the books into movies so nobody has to waste their time.”
“It is a very trying time. I’m kind of down about it myself.” —JONATHAN GALASSI, PRESIDENT OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.
Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.
So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.
One by one, these would be difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis—a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it’s not too late.
Okay, so WHY are we doing this writing thing again?
There’s quite a bit more about the publishing business as it relates to many of the larger houses. If you’ve got the stomach for it, you can check it out here . . .
http://nymag.com/news/media/50279/
© 2008 – 2009, Deborah LeBlanc. All rights reserved.
Deborah LeBlanc is an award-winning author and business owner from Lafayette, Louisiana. She's also a licensed death scene investigator and an active member of two national paranormal investigation teams.
She is the president of the Horror Writers Association, president of the Writers' Guild of Acadiana, president of Mystery Writers of America's Southwest Chapter, and an active member of Sisters in Crime, Novelists Inc, and International Thriller Writers Inc. In 2004, she created the LeBlanc Literacy Challenge, an annual national campaign designed to encourage more people to read, and founded Literacy Inc. a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting illiteracy in America’s teens. She also takes her passion for literacy and a powerful ability to motivate to high schools around the country.
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Hey Deb. I’m not nearly as pesimistic as Boris (the writer of the NY Mag piece). I believe there is a future for books….though the publishing model has to change as the world moves or we’re going to go out of business. I’m hopeful though…..so don’t give up.
by Debbie Stier September 24th, 2008 at 1:04 pmOkay, I need chocolate now.
by Amanda September 24th, 2008 at 2:21 pmI don’t know. Call me skeptical, but they predicted the “end” of reality tv a few years ago (I know this because I was a Communications major in college at the time) and it’s still going strong. And I really can’t foresee a total end to printing books. Bottom line, reading on the computer for long periods of time is bad for our eyes. Books in print are not, provided we have proper lighting.
by ALR September 24th, 2008 at 2:50 pmDebbie, I agree that the publishing model has to change. The industry as a whole is so antiquated, I’m surprised it’s survived this long. Either way, change or remain the same, the one making the least amount of money in this business is the writer….well, save for the handful who get the gazillion dollar advances.
Throw a Hershey bar my way, will ya, Amanda!
I get where you’re coming from, ALR, but never in all my years in business have I ever seen an industry seemingly so intent on destroying itself. It’ll be interesting to see the direction the business heads.
Hmm, not sure about that, Harvey. Without editors and agents, I might still write, but doubt it would go farther than a grocery list.
I think of myself more as a storyteller than an author, and what good is telling a story if there’s no one to listen to it?
by deborah September 24th, 2008 at 4:51 pmDeb, it’s all so depressing. But you know, right now I’m in the middle of a book and I just don’t have room for that stuff. With the entired economy in a melt down, all I can control is what I write
I write to quiet the voices in my head, but make no mistake, I want very much to have a career at this. And for the record, I really VALUE my agent and editor. My agent works hard on my career and my editor works her butt off on my books. They are both amazing.
by Jen Apodaca September 24th, 2008 at 5:59 pmSorry, Deb, but I didn’t read it. The topic was enough to tell me I didn’t want to see whatever the writer had to say. (So sorry if my comment misses the point.) I can’t believe books would ever stop being printed, and maybe the model would change but the process wouldn’t just stop. Perhaps in the future, new books would mostly be electronic, but there will always be people like me who want to hold a physical novel in my hands rather than a gizmo. I tell you one thing, if they ever do stop printing books in my lifetime, I’m going to fill my house with used books and hoard like the dickens. (And I won’t be the only one).
by B.E. Sanderson September 24th, 2008 at 7:39 pmi’ll remain in my cave of denial a bit longer…
by Karin September 24th, 2008 at 8:35 pmBook publishing seems to follow the economy. When the economy was thriving, books were selling well. When the economy went south, so did book sales.
We’re going through a book realignment of sorts. With new technologies in both production and end product, the business is still sorting everything out. It will level out and then book sales–in whatever format–will go back up with the economy. We’re still selling a lot of books in total; the problem is that individual authors are selling fewer of their titles because there are more choices. That’s niche publishing–printing books with smaller readerships in the effort to give people everything they want. (Coke, diet Coke, cherry coke, vanilla coke, caffeine free coke, caffeine free diet coke . . . and on and on.)
Storytelling was here on earth long before there were pens and paper. It will be here long after the book business as we know it today has changed. Change is scary, and I would much prefer to have things stay as I know and (sort of) understand them; but we all know that lack of change and growth is bad as well.
As far as writing? I’ll always write. I wrote before I got serious about being published, and I’ll write even if my career tanks and I can’t give away a book. There are so many different mediums and alternatives out there, that even if books keep tanking (which I don’t think will happen), something will replace the format.
by Allison Brennan September 24th, 2008 at 9:44 pmArghhhhhhhh. How depressing….
by Natalie September 25th, 2008 at 6:20 pm