Will Authors of the Future Need Publishers?
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A good follow-up to yesterday’s post about Daniel Menaker’s post on trade book publishing comes from Nathanial Bransford’s popular blog (81 comments so far on the entry). Titled, of course, Will Authors of the Future Need Publishers? Bransford makes several important points. 1. Book sales are off 2.5% for the year as of July, compared to a 9.5% drop in broader retail. This is not so bad. 2. “For the last hundred years the publishing industry has been built around one key advantage that no one else could match: distribution.” I’ve argued in favor of this point for many years, but too many publishing staff are caught up in the romance of their trade. Their brand is essentially meaningless to readers — it is meaningful mainly to booksellers and librarians. (When was the last time you started a conversation with “I just read a great new book from HarperCollins”?) 3. “Right now, with e-books hovering somewhere around 5% of sales, authors still need publishers. Even the self-publishing success stories almost always involve self-published authors finding their way to traditional publishers. Why? Someone’s got to get the books into the stores, and publishers are the best at it. “But what about in the future if e-books become 50% or more of an author’s sales?” This topic dominates the rest of the post. Bransford wisely notes that “all of this assumes that e-books become dominant, and to be sure, that’s a big ‘if.’” But it’s certainly not inconceivable, and his post paints an interesting picture of how trade book publishing will change if eBooks take over half of the current retail market. |
Your post sent me to searching out the book publishers I knew from my stint in the industry a few decades ago. What I realized is that those book publishers are now just fleeting memories with no meaning in today’s world. The mention of HarperCollins led me to reconstruct memories long gone: Harper & Row, for whom I did a few freelance editing and proofreading jobs, was acquired by News Corporation in 1987. News Corp merged them a few years later with UK publisher William Collins. They belong to News Corp and thus to Rupert Murdoch and thus venerable old literary institutions are now melded into a single sister company of Fox News and the New York Post.
I then looked up Grosset & Dunlap, where I had my very first office job long ago (my first assignment there was to gather up loose materials used in publishing Nixon’s memoir and return them to San Clemente). They were bought by G.P. Putnam’s Sons (ALL his sons?) in 1982, which somehow became part of the Penguin Group eventually (and for whose namesake imprint Penguin Books I did a couple dozen manuscripts of all sorts), which in turn is now part of the Pearson Empire.
Then I thought, surely venerable old Random House, another source of work for me in the past, must still stand tall. Bertlesmann.
Prentice-Hall. I did tons of work for them. Surely they were big enough to survive on their own. Pearson.
Macmillan. I did one novel for them. Now? Part of the von Holtzbrinck uber-giant mini-empire that also owns many of the other once-independent book publishers I knew so well.
It’s hard to imagine that any of these names have any value other than for branding these days. They’re not publishing “houses” of the sort that once nurtured writers, editors, and illustrators. I think the question is not as much “Will authors need publishers?” as it is “What does it mean for the future of publishing that publishers won’t need authors anymore?” If the premise of the latter question is in doubt, ask writers how things have been going lately.
So, yes, any thought whatsoever about the romanticism of the good old days of book publishing extending to today’s world are just meaningless dreams.