A DIRE PREDICTION
Changes are coming to the publishing industry. Big changes.
It’s not just the Kindle. There’s the iPhone. Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. Blortcejil. If your company doesn’t already have a business plan in place for how to deal with the coming rise of Blortcejil, you’re two years behind the curve. If you don’t even know what Blorcejil is, then you might as well pack up your typewriter and head off to Florida, because you’re as good as retired.
Luckily, in the confusion and chaos of the current publishing rEvolution, there are some people who are profiting. Like me. I’ve been offering my services to various terrified publishing companies. I’m a Post-Paper Evolution Consultant. My credentials are impeccable: I’m 29. I was practically raised by an original Nintendo, so I was there the first time a video game (Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest) showed a richness of characterization, lyrical language, and elegant plotting that rivaled the finest novels. I was blogging by ’02, Facebooking by ’04, bored of Facebook by ’06, thinking it was lame how thirty-five year olds got super in to Facebook in ’08. Like it or not, I’m the future.
Usually I offer my consulting services for a fee, because these days desperate publishing companies are doing what desperate publishing companies do: throwing huge amounts of dumb money at problems. But I’d like to here offer, for free, a view of things to come.
THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING
1) Money. The economics of publishing are about to change, which means the enormous sums of money are going away. So everyone who got into to poetry, short fiction, or editing for the money, I’m afraid that’s over. No more will literary quarterlies bid each other into the sky over the latest terse, Carveresque masterpiece. No longer will small presses offer their massive signing bonuses to every newly minted MFA. I’m told New Directions is already considering canceling their “daily table” at Le Cirque. Sources also tell me Melville House is leasing their helicopter. My own publisher, Grove, has sold off both their Nantucket and Cote d’Azur properties, and is no longer offering free summer stays to their interns.
2) Readership. The media landscape is getting a lot more crowded, and there’ll be a lot more competition for eyeballs. Remember when every single person on a plane was reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead? When the subway floors were strewn with used copies of Ha Jin’s War Trash, and on Saturday night at bars it seemed like everybody was arguing over which was their favorite Alice Munro story? Well, bad news: in the next few years, some people are going to prefer going on the internet to reading literary fiction.
3) The Kindle. Electronic readers like the Kindle are going to have a huge impact. This will mostly benefit publishers of vampire erotica and books about Hitler. People enjoy both these kinds of books, and now they can read them without fear of creeping out their fellow subway riders.
4) Bookstores. “Bookstores” – physical places where paper objects called “books” are sold – are going to seem antique as a spinning jenny by next winter. I advised one client – I can’t say who, but it was a venerable independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon – on a new business model, based around renting cubbies to strangers who met on Facebook and want to hook up.
5) Amazon. Some publishers are panicking about the detrimental effects of Amazon.com. They’re right to panic, in fact they should be panicking harder. But they’re panicking about the wrong thing. Within seven to nine months, you won’t need to go on the internet to purchase books. You’ll be able to browse, purchase, and return books merely by activating a chip which will be installed into every consumer’s eyelids.
6) Day to day. Right now, most editors work like this: they get in around nine, they check their email until ten, they move papers around for an hour, then they go for a two hour lunch, after which they play red pencil for an hour and then go home again. But once the publishing industry has fully evolved, the new standard will be efficiency. Editors will rise with the sun, purchase two books by nine, update their videoblogs by eleven-thirty, consume food pellets for nine minutes, and spend their afternoon and night adapting their backlist into iPhone apps and ringtones.
7) BEA. Avoid the coming BookExpo. Given current conditions, I predict everyone’s true, primal nature will be exposed. BEA will turn into a bloodbath that will rival the sack of Rome. Only a few people (probably from Random House) will survive. They will do so by clawing with their fingernails through the flesh of their enemies.
This is what’s coming. Be prepared.
**
Original image special for The Rumpus by Jon Adams.
18 responses
Can, or is it may?/// is it possible to sell used e-books? What is a library of 1,000 e-books worth? apart, of course, from the knowledge therein? Will there be garage sales with bins of e-books piled high? Can you check out an e-book?
There are several things I don’t know about this upcoming world.
This was funny, but made me really sad.
Thanks for this. Funny and wise.
For what it’s worth, here’s links to a couple non-satirical pieces about the future of book publishing. From what I’ve seen these two stories are the Smartest and Stupidest takes on this topic to date:
1. SMARTEST: Collector and NYT reporter David Streitfeld on the online used book market
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/weekinreview/28streitfeld.html?_r=1
2. STUPIDEST: Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s March cover story in Harper’s, “The Last Book Party”
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/03/0082428
The Harper’s piece is nearly 10,000 words long and spectacularly boring and off-the-mark. The author seems to think the problem with publishing is with big advances for mediocre books. Has this guy ever shopped online?
I have to disagree on Gideon’s piece. I really enjoyed that article.
One reason to believe that “the problem with publishing is with big advances for mediocre books” is that even the editors giving those advances believe this is exactly the problem. Though there are some signs of resistance to this dynamic – the advent of Harper Studio, for example, which “caps” its advances at $100,000 (what I wouldn’t give for a “capped” advance!) – the current meltdown in publishing has most houses thinking they have no choice but to try and reel in the biggest names, no matter what it costs, and no matter how mediocre the book. What this means for emerging and mid-list authors hardly needs further explanation.
Lewis-Kraus’s story in Harper’s may have been long (though no longer than many Harper’s stories), but it certainly waasn’t stupid. Getting behind the scenes for the horse-trading, hotel-bar-hopping, and adolescent swaggering that goes on in places like Frankfurt (or the just-wrapped London Book Fair) goes a long way toward explaining why the future of the publishing industry looks so bleak. These people aren’t even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic – they’re staying put and ordering more piña coladas and charging them to rooms that are already underwater.
Hee.
Love ya’, Andrew. So wise and funny. Great article, Steve Hely. Excuse me while I look for another career.
Jim’s right. That Harper’s piece is awful.
Andrew & Stephen,
You’re right, calling Gideon’s piece “stupid” was a bit harsh. It’s well-written, with plenty of wit and elegance. What’s so maddening to me though is its premise that a “behind-the-scenes” look at the horse-trading and whatnot at book-fairs will tell me anything I couldn’t have guessed beforehand. Is it really news that publishers — or professionals of any stripe, for that matter — will abuse expense accounts at an industry event? Or that the week will be as much about partying and logrolling as about the principles underpinning the business? Certainly this behavior doesn’t happen at AWP, right? Or SXSW? Or Cannes?
What’s more, Gideon keeps circling back on this daft Richard Ford vs Lauren Weisberger/Paul Coelho opposition. Early in the piece, he writes,
“What is coming to an end is the idea that Richard Ford is going to be richer than Lauren Weisberger [or Paul Coelho] … What is coming to an end is the wishful insistence — for it is, ultimately, a wish, deeply felt, by a lot of people — that Richard Ford is going to be rich at all.”
Honestly, what serious writer a few years out of college still believes that literary merit makes people rich? Who is surprised when the lowbrow and the middlebrow sell better than the highbrow? I’ve got no proof of this, but my gut says that the Paul Coelho phenomenon isn’t all that different from the Khalil Gibran craze, or that the pulpier of the chick-lit titles aren’t all that different in market share from 19th-century penny dreadfuls.
We all know that great literature doesn’t often sell. There’s exceptions of course, and it’s wonderful for everyone when that happens, but is Richard Ford really the first great author (not counting top-notch writers of genre fiction) who’s not getting rich? Faulkner, anyone? Joyce, Dick, Bronte, et al? Not to mention the large majority of our talented colleagues from writing programs?
Finally, my last beef with Gideon: if someone is going to write 10,000 words on the death-throes of publishing, even if they choose to focus on bidding wars in Frankfurt, shouldn’t they at least devote a few paragraphs somewhere the demand side of the equation — the people who buy books? These are the real customers, not the tippling publisher at a book auction.
As NYT reporter Streitfeld writes in his piece, “No industry undermined by its greatest partisans will thrive long. CD sales plunged after music could be downloaded. Newspapers are hurting even as their readership is mushrooming online.”
Nowhere in Gideon’s piece does he even mention online markets, unless you count that passing mention up top where he lumps Amazon together with Barnes & Nobles because they both discount bestsellers. Um, what about the fact that few students I know buy textbooks from campus bookshops anymore if they can help it? *Everyone* knows you can get books cheaper — both new and used titles — online. The revenue from the backlist that’s kept so many bookstores and publishers afloat this long is vanishing, and that’s a problem at least as worrisome as the questionable behavior of editors on a business trip.
This, in the end, is what kills a business model: the drying up of revenue streams its executives have counted on for so long they’ve forgotten how to survive in their absence. Look what’s happening to newspapers now that they’ve lost their classified revenue to Craigslist, their eyeballs to Google, and their print ads to — well, we don’t know where the print ads went. But they’re missing.
I hope this is under 10,000 words or I’ll really look like a fool.
Jim
Nice illustration by Jon Adams. Who knew book murder could be so disturbingly cute?
LOL
Nice dig at pomposity Steve. But neither you nor your commenters referred to probably the biggest real change well underway. This is the rise of the small publisher and publishing author using POD, short run offset and online selling.
I maintain the printed book will continue to increase its number of titles, though actual number of copies printed will fall because technology enables tighter matching of production to demand.
At the same time ebook sales will rise and free ebooks will be eagerly downloaded!
However, the economic downturn is going to have a few effects that most in publishing and particularly those forecasting the end of print and tree pulping have not considered. That is the full testing of the web economic model!
There is a lot to shake out in this in terms of cold hard assessments of investments, the value and supportabioity of ‘free’, and how far users will be faced with the full costs of the system. Calculations are near impossible because so much of the cost is hidden by the optimism about the ‘online revolution’.
You may have noticed a few banks which ditched traditional trading models have already had difficulty ;-). The more conservative ways of trading have weathered a lot of stressful times; many of those will adapt and survive again.
And the biggest problem for the dedicated ebook and other digital content readers is that the hardware are all classic mass production items. But not cheap! Thir continuation ill be in the balance. By my calculation it will be a very testing time for all business, as well as we jane and joe does!
OMG! Where did that rude, crude, laugh-so-hard-the-beer-comes-out-my-nose graphic come from?
Jon Adams: https://therumpus.net/sections/jon-adams/
Still waiting for ebook sales to rise. Short-run publishing is not cheap.
Anyone want to review a copy of GUD Magazine?
http://www.gudmagazine.com/vault/reviews.php
A note on HarperStudio capping their advances: rumor is they paid for Gary Vaynerchuk’s book by offering him $1M for 10-book deal. This keeps to their “capped” advance rule, while obviously breaking it since they’ll never do 10 books with the author. So even this new experiment couldn’t hold out.
OK, so what’s Blortcejil or Blorcejil? No one picked up the spelling inconsistency in the article.
mok — no inconsistency! it’s a versioning thing. Blortcejil is the next generation of Blorcejil. Keep up, man! 😉
“Right now, most editors work like this……”
dude, i’m not an editor, but that comment of urs makes u sound ignorant & suggests ur word isn’t to be taken v seriously
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