There’s a lot of change and unrest in publishing. Kind of like the rest of the world. Try to point to an industry that isn’t experiencing this. But publishing is being impacted by various forces that include new technologies, changing buying habits, rising costs of doing business. The changes are eliminating bad practices and inefficient businesses because they simply can’t survive in the current environment. When things are easier, you can get away with more. The harder it gets, the less this is true. This isn’t necessarily bad. Weeding out bad practices is good in the long run.
The changes create new opportunities. Some markets are shrinking but new ones have come up that show a lot of promise. Stories aren’t going out of style. Writing and publishing isn’t going to cease to exist, but when you see how content can be manipulated on a touch-screen like the iPad, you see that how people experience content is changing in a big way. And so are the delivery systems. Publishing is a delivery system for content that writers produce, but what that means in ten years may look very different from how it looks today.
I don’t believe for a minute that printed books are going away. Not any time soon, at least. The people who are declaring NY dead are premature at best. And the people who think publishers don’t add real value are probably in for some surprises, too. This doesn’t mean that an enterprising author can’t learn needed skills to design and format their work, and you don’t get to be pro level without learning to self-edit. (Which doesn’t mean editors don’t add value; but it’s also true that not all editors are equal and failure to provide real value happens in all positions.)
But while I don’t think printed books are going away, you can’t ignore the fact that it’s now possible to walk up to a book vending machine and order a title that’s printed while you wait. Content delivery change.
What does all this mean for writers? Well, probably publishers are going to try to take as many rights as they can get for as long as they can get them to exploit these new options. It means that reversion of rights becomes very tricky when a book is ‘in print’ if you can buy it through Google Books or an Espresso Book Machine, but having rights tied up may not be to an author’s advantage when where the sales happen and where the revenue is is subject to change and the author can’t move a title from a position of trickling sales to where the sales are surging.
I think publishers and authors alike will have to be light on our feet, able to change direction, innovate, adapt. We’ll all have to add real value, because nothing else will survive. What it means to be an author or publisher is changing. Being small may be more advantageous than being big; a large company has so much entrenched in old business models that change is difficult and slow. None of this is any different than it was five years ago when I had my first book out in stores, but the economic pressures have become significant and the new technologies have gained ground during that time.
I think if publishers and authors see each other as valued partners in changing times, the results will be very different than if we see each other as enemies. We’re all still in the same business; content delivery. We just have to adjust our thinking about what that means and partner with people who share our vision.
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