I've been
preparing this article for a while on the future of self-publishing 2020. One
thing I have learned is that predicting the future based on current practices
and trends is a precarious business. The publishing industry – as a community
and business – is undergoing an utter sea change in methodology and ideology
not seen since Gutenberg’s first print press. When I speak of the publishing
industry as a community – I include publishers, agents, authors, printers,
guilds and associations, as well as readers in this community.
I intended
this article, as part of our series The Future of Publishing 2020, to deal
originally with Control, Disruption and Discoverability in publishing. I’ve
decided to begin with just the subject of control now and in 2020 due to the
length of the articles.
At the end
of my last article in this series, The Future of Publishing 2020: The Push andThe Pull, I spoke about what we should not expect to see in 2020—the familiar big
six publishers, and literary agencies operating as they do today. I also spoke about the realities in 2020 of
the current terminology we so readily use now to describe the rise of the
´independent author’.
In 2020, there won’t be a ‘self’ in publishing.
It’s meaningless. Come to think of it, in 2020, there probably won’t be a
‘publishing’ in publishing anymore! It’s all becoming
meaningless.
But one thing is certain. Writers will be
writing in 2020. Whatever you do, whatever you write, do what you have to do
and believe and enjoy it. Just maybe, someone else will
also agree.
In the strictest sense, mankind has been
‘publishing’ by way of record every experience and story since the first
drawing was etched on the wall of the El Castillo cave in northern Spain forty
thousand years ago. Whether the
record of existence is carved on rock or saved for prosperity into the etheral
clouds of a digital heaven, our mark is made in the world for those who follow
on after we have long departed.
While there are many battles being waged in
the world of publishing today over digital rights ownership, pricing, lending,
ereader device supremacy, disintermediation between author and reader; perhaps
the greatest battle being played out today is for control—but control of what?
Less than a hundred years ago some publishers still used their own print
presses and undertook much of the distribution of published books. Now,
publishers combine in-house staff with freelancers and work with multiple global
partnerships to deliver books into the hands of readers, though ,the days of
vertical integration in the publishing world may not necessarily be over. Walt
Disney Studios might be one of the best examples of vertical integration in the
movie business, but the dot com successes of the 1980’s and 1990’s have given
us Amazon and Apple—potentially two of the strongest players currently exerting
their control on the publishing industry and modern aristocrats of vertical
intergration on a global scale.
Change followed by Control
Up until five years ago, the core publishing
industry had changed very little in a hundred years. Yes, we have seen
publishers focus their strategies and goals on not just being gatekeepers and
intellectual content investors of quality literature and entertainment in word
form, but stallworths of an industry that must also extract profit to maintain
its high moral literary ground. The explosion of the cheap paperback in the
1950’s may have gone a long way to preserve the status quo in the industry, but
in the past five years—with the emergence of digitization—there has been no
time for standing still and an everpressing need to make sense of a changing
and complex industry with new global players and characters at every turn of
the page.
You can’t control what is no longer yours.
Back in yonder days when the ebook was but a glint in the eye of psychic
beholders and the physical book was sacred to publishers, and the only other
kid on the block was the audio cassette book (remember them?), publishing was realitively
straightforward and simple. Audio books proved a nice distraction and side
revenue for publishers, though, the format did prove costly to hire
professional actors to read, but worth it if the hardback or paperback was
still lingering in the bestseller lists. Well, publishers quickly cast aside
serious investment in audio books once the cassette got the boot and some new
kid called ‘digital audio disc’ arrived in the neighbourhood but those
technoheads in Sony and all those Japanese companies with weird names couldn’t
make up their minds on a standard format. Sound like a familiar story? Don’t
let any industry analyst or publishing guru tell you the industry as a whole
didn’t see ebooks coming and the dramatic impact digitalization would have, not
just on the book format, but on pricing and distribution networks. The truth is
large to medium sized book publishers have been refusing to invest in any kind
of real risk strategy for the past twenty years, and that philosphy has
stretched—in part—from the desk of commissing editors right to the very
infastructure and development of the industry.
All industries experience rises and falls in
fortune and new challenges regularly see the emergence of new ideas,
enterprises and shifts in the sand. Most industries also have research and
development facilities and academies where the next generation of talent will
learn and flourish. While the publishing industry is awash with graduates and
experienced professionals, it has the curiosity of having its historial roots
planted deeply in the world of academia and universities. The publishing
industry can appear and behave like an institution, government body, public or
medical health service with its own bestowed rules of etiquette, morality and
engagement—particularly when the industry attemps to communicate and operate
with a singular voice. Industries don’t normally work or operate that way and
possess a multitude of framented voices, stances, opinons and agendas. In
theory, the publishing industry should have been primarily placed to tackle all
the challenges currently facing it—well-versed in its products, passionate to
the core and equipped with highly skilled professionals. Is it perhaps that the
industries CEO’s, talismen and drivers of decision are no longer men of books,
champions of talent, academically introspective yet passionate, and instead we
now have publishers led by media conglomerates and salesmen and agents too
willing to place the needs and requirements of publishers above authors? Is it
no surprise then that publishers have simply allowed themselves to become mere middlemen,
primarily self-inflicted pawns selling books to booksellers and not readers? If
the last five years has taught us one thing about publishers—it’s that they are
good at selling what bookstore buyers ask for, and the largest often do little
more than publish competent and prescribed book products to fit existing trends
and markets. More and more over the past twenty years the relationship between
agent, publisher and bookseller is akin to an overly convoluted book packaging
project. And believe me, dedicated book packagers do it far better and quicker!
When the digital shit hit the fan for the
publishing industry and they had few answers, combined with an historical
instinct to do nothing at all but wait, it’s no wonder—from top to
bottom—integrated partnerships were the only option and place to find a way
forward. And that has come at an extraordinary sacrafice—the very future
existence of publishers as they are today. No agency, book lending rights, or digital
distribution agreement will fix this now to the whole industry’s satisfaction.
The truth is that there are now so many fragmented and disenchanted sectors of
the industry with polarised views and bias opinions, from large publishing
houses to small presses; indie authors to mainstream authors; independent
bookstores to large chains; digital advocats to purists; author guilds and
associations to governments, that the industry will canibalize and distil
itself down to the bare fundamental parts—author/creator, delivery platform and
reader.
Jeff Bezos stole all my books and ate all the
hamsters!
Enter Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Barnes
& Noble, Kobo, and for that matter any other entrepenure with a posse of
Silicon Valley graduates. Please put your
hands together for some of the big publishers in 2020. If you want to talk
about control in publishing during the years ahead—take a good look at that
motley crew. You may not like them, maybe even less than the last big six publishers,
but likely most of them are here to stay and will have a great deal of say and
control, not to mention profit to take from your book content over the coming
years, if they have not already. The debate and development of ebooks is still
at an early stage and whether the ‘purchase’ of ebook content will become
nothing more than access to a specific edition to your ereading device, or by
paying more you can access enhanced and revised editions ‘in the cloud’ remains
to be seen. Much will depend on what degree of freedom we wish to grant to the
new gatekeepers of ‘cloud storage’ or
whether we are happier keeping what we purchase safely tucked away on our
ereaders. When Amazon stretched its mighty hand and removed content from users
ereaders a couple of years ago, I discovered that some of their biggest critics
were people who openly shared the most pertinent and private information on
social network sites.
When the big six publishers moved on Amazon to
sign up to the Agency Model Agreement, they may have felt they were arresting a tide
of control flexed by the goliath of online book sales, but in reality, they
were simply seen by ordinary book readers as trying to make hay while the sun
shone. Bezos, I’m sure, smiled a great deal the week signatures were put to
paper on the Agency deal. For Bezos, the battle might have been lost that week,
but for Amazon, victory on the fronline was already taking place. Publishers
and independent booksellers might not like Amazon’s tactics, but Bezos will
argue that he has stolen nothing but the moral ground and can back it up with a
vast customer, cloud and community base, an online retail platform (with thepotential of physical stores to come), with well integrated products, the
ereader of choice, and a growing array of publishing imprints and digital
publishing deals with bestselling authors. Initially, the Agency agreement with
Amazon had the effect of driving readers to cheaper ebooks, and aligned with
the retailer’s introduction of Kindle Select, a shot in the arm for
self-published authors as they began seeing their books proliferated the ranks
of Amazon’s Kindle Top Bestsellers list. This year, that same Kindle list shows
a marked drop in self-published titles. Conclude yourselves what you will, but
I’d suggest we may be seeing the first signs that readers may already have
accepted that bestseller ebooks from the big six are going to hold a relative
price of $12.99-$14.99 for some time. It may also suggest that self-publishers
using high discounts as a promotion and introduction to a book’s release is
fine for the short term, but outside of the big self-publishing authors only
reinforces low quality in the mind of the reader. Amazon has long understood
the mechanics of marketing to readers—they buy books on the reputation of an
author’s name and not the publisher’s imprint, and every product has a value.
It’s about gauging what the value is, when to impliment it, and where to place
it. Control is not just about pricing—it’s about what you can do without it. And
Bezos and Amazon will argue all this was consumated without harming a single
hamster.
The new big six and their current toys:
Amazon (Kindle)
Apple (iPad)
Microsoft (tablet device imminent)
Barnes & Noble (Nook)
Kobo (Kobo)
Google (iriver)
The new publishing landscape of 2020 will be
controlled by the new big six and will be entirely device-driven for content
delivery. My only fear with the book industry structured this way [and take note, we
are now talking about a ‘(e)book’ not publishing industry] is that large
publishers—in an effort not to fall too far down the food chain—will attempt to
forge exclusive partnerships with specific sellers/devices. My
suspicision—though it might be attempted by both publishers and leading authors
aligned to media conglomerates and big movie studios—is that it will ultimately
fail because readers, sellers and a greater and more coordinated alliance of
independents (sellers and authors) won’t allow it to happen. In spite of my
best wishes for the future of publishing in 2020, the strongest relationship
will not necessarily be author and reader, but reader and seller. Sellers will
integrate far better with new social media networks, provide greater product
discoverability for customers, and be driven forward by renewed public spending
and a derire to reemerge from a long ten-year global economic downturn.
The Shape of Times to Come? (and a bit of tongue and cheek)
In 2020, more than 80% of authors will operate
independently and will control and
manage their entire writing output with less than a quarter earning a full time
living. The remaining 20% will be a combination of writers from national
writing academies, independent publishing cooperatives and publishing houses
owned by media /agency companies. In
2020 ‘an agency author’ will mean an author with PR representation and earning
a living from book publishing through a media imprint. The general term ‘he/she
is agency’ will also denote a more deroggratory
tone for someone in the public eye—meaning someone to be held in
suspicion or someone who is motivated soley by financial or political gain.
In 2020, most global broadcasters will use
content from freelance reporters rather than in-house reporters following years
of claims of media bias. At least 50% of broadcast content will come directly
from social media networks. In 2020, publishing will simply mean disseminating
content for public consumption by way of service, for free or for profit.
In 2020, during a CBS Evening News interview
with the ghost of Dan Rather, outgoing Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, will reveal an
acute hamster-eating disorder he has been battling for more than ten years.
The third in this series of articles on The Future of Publishing 2020 will deal with Disruption.
The Future of Publishing 2020: Control or (Jeff Bezos stole all my books and ate all the hamsters!)
