Re: future of publishing

Jon Noring:
> I did not delve into any detail on this, but traditional publishers  
> wear multiple hats. Certainly those who self-publish can avail  
> themselves of help with each of these tasks, including all of them,  
> either from a variety of people, or a single source.

As they do now. There's a thriving community of service providers.  
But it costs a lot to use them. And you have to know enough to  
realize that you need them. And then you have to find them.
>
> But services which simply assist self-published authors on a fee  
> basis with the technical details (and editing) to get their book  
> into a final, finished form, certainly should not be considered  
> vanity publishers, nor disparaged. Such services only assist the  
> self-published author to improve their product before it is made  
> available to the public (i.e. self-published.)

This already exists, and has for a decade. The (self-) publishers are  
among those 84,000 publishers I discussed in one of my earlier posts.  
The services are called "book coaches" and there's no stigma attached  
at all, because their existence is invisible to the distribution  
channels, and the self-published status of the book is too.

The new-model vanity publishers, however, have truly earned their  
stigma. The first few years after they arrived, people gave them at  
least some chance. The quality of cover design, text design,  
copyediting, line editing, etc. is just generally BAD. And readers,  
while they don't really know what they don't like, DO recognize that  
there's something "off" about the end result. They just don't buy it  
much. And then there's the economics of those books produced in such  
ways . . .


> And even if only 1% of these will reach the writing quality of  
> those published by the majors,

That's just not happening. It's far, far less than that. Mostly  
because to produce good quality books takes more time and effort from  
the writer than most people are willing to apply (assuming that they  
all have the talent in the first place), and then it takes expensive- 
to-acquire skill to put out a high-quality product. And you need the  
design and editorial quality whether you're talking ebook or pbook.

> that's still well over a hundred thousand outstanding books by new  
> authors '

adding to the 300,000 we're already publishing each year? Not that  
big a change, but you're adding 10 million to the pool that have to  
be sorted -- that's a big change. And you're having them sorted by  
the end reader. Right now, we have 2 million sorted per year, at the  
ms stage, before the huge investment of prepping them for the public.  
And it takes a massive and expensive cadre of agents and editors to  
do that filtering.

> -- and most of these authors will be able to write many more great  
> books -- so we are talking millions of great books by today's  
> standards -- with the "old model" most of these books would never  
> be made available to the
> general public.)

Oh, but that's where you're wrong. It's very rare that a ms/proposal  
with any value to it at all gets circulated to more than a few dozen  
agents and editors before somebody pulls it out and publishes it.  
And, as I said before, if the writer of this awesome book can't  
negotiate a system where everyone is PAID big bucks to find the next  
winner, how will they possibly be able to push their book to the top  
of a system that has far lower rewards to those who do the filtering?


> The core argument of my original message is the belief that the  
> future of textual content delivery and presentation to end-users  
> will be primarily electronic (e.g., books as e-books.) In fact,  
> today digital is the dominant form of textual content delivery and  
> presentation: The Web -- by a huge amount.

Web-based books, or delivery by web of e-books, doesn't require less  
design or editorial work. I expect it will soon require more, as the  
level of reading experience on digital devices is rising to meet that  
of reading on paper.

The only things that go away, as far as I can see now, are:
--paper, printing and binding
--returns
--warehousing and shipping expenses
--cost of stocking inventory
--cost of over-printing

> The more formal types of publications will also move all- 
> electronic, although that is occuring more slowly. And this changes  
> the whole economy of publishing, opening the door for self- 
> publishing, and there is a *huge* self-publishing market waiting to  
> spring forth. When it does, it will swamp everything in its path as  
> it flows out, changing the whole publishing landscape. I'm only  
> trying to predict what the landscape will look like afterwards, and  
> obviously there will be a number of possible scenarios.

There will undoubtedly be a huge flood of dreck. And the gems that  
don't get the "old model" treatment will be totally lost in it. I  
very much doubt that there will ever be a replacement of the editor  
or the line editor. (Not so sure about the copyeditor, but given the  
current state of spell and grammar checking software? Not so soon.) I  
very much doubt that there will ever be a replacement for the trained  
cover image designer. And those images are very important even on  
Amazon, or in the Kindle store, or . . .  (Text design and  
composition MIGHT be replaced by software, but again, not soon.)

> Publishing for the Amazon Kindle is an interesting archetype that,  
> in my estimation, presages the future.

Me too. Although I LOATHE the h&j on the Kindle.  Makes my eyes hurt.

> I believe the post-publish filtering systems of the future will  
> help readers to filter out poorly-written and poorly-formatted  
> books. (For example, from what I understand, it is now possible for  
> software to analyze writing and determine to a good-degree of  
> probability the quality of the writing.)

This just isn't likely for many decades. It would require something  
so closely approximating true AI, that I just don't see it anytime soon.

> And with the right publishing tools it will even be possible to  
> publish in POD using pre-defined scripts to get a professional-look

That's what most of the current subsidy/vanity houses are using. And  
it's slop. That's one big reason why the bookstores don't put their   
books on shelves (with a very few exceptions), and why they don't  
move as well once they're on the shelves, not as well as they would  
if they had a decent design/composition.


>> What about publishers' role as venture capitalists? Investing  
>> heavily (see above functions, plus of course, marketing budgets)  
>> in many books, and relying on their skill in picking the best to  
>> improve the odds of success enough that the AVERAGE result (over a  
>> large number of titles) is a decent profit. A single title  
>> publisher, or even one with a small catalog, is up against odds  
>> that are likely to mean they lose their shirt, even when they do
>> everything right.
>
> This is the "old" model. <smile/>

Only if the investment level required to produce a good book (even  
without printing it) and a good marketing campaign drops. And nothing  
in the freelance service provider model suggests that it will. In  
fact, in my experience, and I'm ONE of those free-lance service  
providers, it's going in the opposite direction.

> The whole point of my original message is simply that the vast  
> majority of books (as e-books) available in the future will be self- 
> published, and that new systems will arise to assist readers in  
> filtering through that giant catalog.

That filtering will have to be paid for somehow. Given current price  
elasticity in the book market, it's going to be paid for by the  
(self-) publisher. So the price to get your book out there goes up.  
Again.

Self-publishing is possible. Doing it well is well within the reach  
of many, many people right now. It's not easy, and it's not cheap.  
And nothing in the currently available software, or the projections  
I've seen for future editions of those software products and their  
kin, suggests that it will become so.

Believe me, we in the service providing community watch these  
developments very, very carefully. We HAVE to be on the crest of the  
wave, or go under it. And we're all waaaay too small to block  
anything <grin>. It's just not here, and it's not going to be anytime  
soon.

But, that doesn't mean that there's nearly the lack in variety, or  
the likelihood of undiscovered masterpieces, that popular opinion  
would have us believe.

Remember -- there are ***293,000*** new titles published in the US  
alone, each and every  year. There are **2 million** books "in  
print," one way or another. We're buried in new books that NO ONE READS.

The VAST majority of these books sell fewer than 100 copies. Think  
about that. Think about the effort of writing a BOOK and then no one  
reads it except close friends and relatives. The "getting published  
any-old-how" option is already up and running. And breaking hearts.

The crisis is that most of these writers believed that they could  
publish and then filter. And they can. It just doesn't work the way  
they thought it would.

Unintended consequences bite hard.



Marion Gropen
Gropen Associates, Inc.
By-The-Question Consulting,  Tools for Publishers, & Classes
www.GropenAssoc.com
Her blog: www.GropenAssoc.com/blog




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