Authoring the future.
The stand off between Amazon and Macmillan over the last few days has been covered all over the place by people with a firmer grasp of the economic and legal ins and outs of what’s going on than I possess . But. This is not going to be the last such confrontation. For reasons that are all about technology and business - and have next to nothing to do with writing - the shiny spotlight of new gadgetry, and all the money that powers it, has turned its heat on the world of book publishing. Of all things.
(And I do mean books. I don’t mean newspapers and magazines, which are a separate business. And one in which the application of new technology makes more sense. While there are cross overs and tangled interests, the similarities tend to be red herrings.)
The books business has operated on a fairly predictable, if complicated, model for a long time now. There are subtleties and oddities, and I’m simplifying somewhat, but basically …
1. The author writes a book.
2. The author hands the book to an agent.
3. The agent finds a publisher for the book.
4. The publisher has the book edited, designed and printed.
5. The publisher markets the book to retailers and readers.
6. The retailers buy the book and present it to readers.
7. The reader buys the book.
8. The reader reads the book.
In an ideal world, steps 2 to 7 would not exist. In the world of new technologies - of Amazon, the iPad and iBooks, of the Google Book Agreement - steps 3 to 7 are in a mess, scrambled, being fought over, argued about, and written off and on again as everyone tries to find the right combination that will keep everyone employed.
Notice anything? It’s pretty much certain that ten years from now, those 5 steps from 3 to 7 will have been cut down to maybe 4 steps. Maybe even 2 or 3 steps. We are approaching the ideal world.
The only essential steps in this process are steps 1 and 8. If I want to pay my rent, step 7 is good too. And in order for step 7 to happen, some of the other steps are going to have to stay in place in one form or another. But the process is going to shrink. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Mostly the debate about what to shrink and how is being had between publishers and retailers. Agents are a canny lot and are keeping a watching brief. Readers are interested, and are vaguely hopeful that when the dust settles they might have some cool new ways of reading books, and that it might be a bit cheaper. Authors are worried. Authors are always worried of course. But in this instance, how worried should we be?
Publishers certainly need to worry, particularly the big ones. Traditional retailers don’t need anyone to tell them that they need to worry. But non traditional retailers, Amazon chief amongst them, need to worry too, and from their actions over the last week, I think they know it. Neither of these two giant cogs in the process want to give way. So inevitably the pressure is being forced outwards. Readers are feeling it (or, are being asked to feel it by Amazon’s pricing games), and authors are feeling it - mostly by being told that the days of big (or any) advances are over, and that royalties aren’t going to improve either, sorry about that, and that we should shut up and be grateful that anyone does us the honour of publishing us in the first place.
This is bullshit.
Retailers and publishers are non-essential. New technology means that I can, in theory, sell you my new book on this website at a price that suits both you and me, and cut out the middle men. But I want to be a writer, not a businessman, and you want the enjoyment of browsing your local bookshop and stumbling over my book there, all nicely presented. So, I employ a middle man. But why on earth would I need two middle men?
Authors have power.
It’s very difficult to convince any but the biggest name authors of this. Most of us feel that we have no power whatsoever. This is because we tend to forget, indeed we are encouraged to forget, that we are, to use the iLanguage, the ‘content providers’. And what is content? King. Without us, there are no books. No books, no business.
It’s difficult to do anything with that. It’s difficult to organise a bunch of isolated, solitary social misfits. But it’s not really necessary. Agents form a strong, though admittedly not comprehensive, bodyguard. They act of behalf of individual authors rather than some greater ideal, but they know what side their bread is buttered. The generality of agents’ work is done to the benefit of the generality of authors. They are, after all, a non-essential step as well, and they know it.
And within publishing there is a core of people who know full well that the business is about writing, and that what serves the writing will in the long term win out over what serves the process. These people are clinging to door frames maybe, but they’re there. And they’re right. And the wrong ones who have replaced their colleagues will not last.
I’d argue, and I don’t think it’s a controversial argument to make, that publishers and retailers have done a pretty good job of diminishing quality over the last, say, fifteen years. They’ve become involved in the chase for big money phenomenon books; they’ve invested in non-writing celebrities and have tried to contrive titles to appeal to perceived markets; they’ve sacrificed long term modest sales authors in favour of one off high sales ones - part of the misguided strategy of focussing on titles, not on writers; they’ve taken discounting to an absurd level - seeming to misunderstand the very nature of what it is they’re selling, believing books to be as amenable to regular bulk buying as ready meals. They have, and it’s a generalisation that doesn’t have to contend with very many exceptions, behaved bloody stupidly.
The current scramble for the future of books hopefully lends itself to a refocussing on books themselves. People want good ones. Formats and methods of delivery may change, but people will continue to want great books and great writing. Anyone who misses that point, be they author, agent, publisher or retailer, is going to lose out. Anyone who forgets that it’s about connecting the reader to the writer is going to lose out. Anyone who thinks the authors are the non-essential cog in this process are going to lose out spectacularly.
A future is opening up in which retailers and major publishers will in all likelihood merge, probably bloodily, and will start cannibalising each other’s traditional roles. The biggest book publisher in ten years time could be Amazon. Or Apple. Or perhaps the biggest books retailer in ten years time will be Barnes & Noble. Or Apple. But certainly, something has to give. Probably not Apple.
It may be that big corporate publisher/retailers will become simply an annexe of the entertainment industry, publishing only the brand name authors with guaranteed returns. And that literature will be carried out elsewhere, by smaller, independent publishers working both with old fashioned physical books and their digital counterparts, selling directly online to a worldwide readership. Some would argue that this is exactly what’s happening now.
But I’m not simply whistling past the graveyard here. At least I hope I’m not. Authors are the books business. In all the shouting that’s going to go on (and on) in the next while, listen out for the businesses - be they retailers or publishers or both - who are putting writers at the centre of their plans. They’ll be the ones left standing.
February 2nd, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Even the best selling authors can’t exercise any control over the strategic directions that Apple, Amazon, Google, Bertelsmann. Pearson etc take. Neither can their agents. Agents can do either better or worse deals for their clients - achieving the former is hard enough.
The privileging of big hits over building great catalogues of authors’ work by good publishing (not merely corporate acquisition) has changed the culture of publishing. Your ‘core’ of publishing people who know about, and value writing are less able to work with authors on texts in depth (and over time) because many of their superiors don’t understand the value that this produces. Publishers do a lot of selling to retailers and very little connecting with readers. They have nursed Amazon to robust and insatiable good health at the expense of bookshops, at the best of which readers are actively or accidentally-on-purpose brought together with books. The web, however wonderful, has not completely substituted for what has been lost in millions of interactions with books. (Parallel to this public libraries have been sytematically underfunded and books displaced to the margins.) Kindle and the iPad could enable Amazon and Apple to disintermediate the publishers. Why would authors turn down a deal with whoever it is that can reach the readers? The editing and design part of the process can be bought freelance, as can the publicity part - many publishers are doing this as it is.
I do think that authors will have a chance to reach more readers direct with their work and maybe agents can help with this. I agree that publishers and booksellers that don’t put writing, and by extension authors, at the centre of what they do deserve to fail but I’m not sure that it’ll work out like that.
February 2nd, 2010 at 9:15 pm
I don’t really disagree with anything you say. I suppose my point is just that I think the changes we’re going through can be/could be seen as an opportunity for authors, after a period of being devalued by publishers and retailers, to re-establish our writing as the point of all this. I’m choosing to be optimistic.
Your pessimism may well be closer to the truth. In which case I do see literature, or the sort of writing that I do, relocating. There are all sorts of models for how that might happen, from authors operating as their own publishers and retailers, to groups of authors acting as de facto publishing houses, to literary agencies doing the same thing, etc
Certainly, the machine is being broken up. And given that, as we both seem to agree, the machine has been doing a pretty poor job lately, there are opportunities here.
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:41 pm
I suppose what I meant was that authors are unlikely to be able to shape these massive changes but I agree that there’s much cause for optimism on the tactics that can be adopted to keep writing alive and readers reading.
I had the misfortune of attending a book industry event some years ago where the discussion was ‘how to expand the book market’; for which read ‘how to make stuff that looks like books for people who hate books.’ These people won the argument - hence the cack that now clusters around the front of many bookshops.
I’m aware that authors are under pressure, sometimes spoken other times not, to ‘aim for the middle’ and produce a kind of generic ‘fine writing’. The only way that literary writers are going to have a real place is to resist this with main force and, as you say, to put writing - and by implication - reading at the heart of the culture. Which also means being able to say that Beckett or Barthelme or Lispector or Patrick White - or whoever - are better writers and not dismissable to a marginal category of ‘literary genre fiction’. That’s a merchandising and not a critical category.
March 11th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Food for thought from Portland, Oregon:
http://www.publicationstudio.biz/
An experiment by Matthew Stadler et al.