Who Needs Publishers?
A theory about AmazonFail. If you examine what Amazon is trying to accomplish from their point of view, why do they even need publishers? Why not just open the Kindle directly to authors - give the authors then entire 30% that Amazon is paying the publishers now. 30% on a $9.99 book is not that much lower than 15% on $28 hardcover, and if you move more of the cheaper book it could be much more. Plus Amazon could take a page from Harlequin and open the Kindle to anyone - in fact, they could even charge authors for the privilege! $250 to publish your own ebook! I’m sure a lot of folks would jump at the chance. Then Amazon would leave the marketing to the blogverse, which is probably the future of marketing anyway.
Who needs publshers? I wonder if Amazon is offering a 40% deal to selected bestselling authors right now.
As I remarked on FB last night, the book trade has always had a bizarre business model — I’ve seen it from the trenches of bookstore work, as an editor, marketing minion, and Typewriter-monkey at an ad agency specialized in books.
One big thing is that in the Eighties the bean-counters began to take the reins away from the book-folk, but in a very real way books are almost always unlike ordinary widgets — every single one is a new product, and except for a few author-franchises (Stephen King, Grisham, etc.) and a couple of well-known houses like Knopf, there’s really no such thing as a brand-name. And thus almost no brand-loyalty, which is the life blood of modern marketing.
Add to that the totally-warping factor of the returns policy, and you have the literary equivalent of the health-care clusterf*ck. And whereas the one thing publishers had that authors really needed was the whole industrial infrastructure of printing presses and such, that’s no longer true. While I am resisting the Kindle and its competitors cos I really, really prefer the heft and substance of bound pages, print-on-demand is an almost equally flexible technology, with almost as few up-front costs as going totally ePub.
Unless you are a whiz at viral and WoM marketing, don’t really need a Max Perkins or an Alfred Knopf as editor/talent scout, and have at least a working grasp of design, copyright and intellectual property, you can’t really cut out the middlemen *altogether*, but the publisher as gate-keeper is going the way of the pop-music A&R man.
At this point, my dog could devise a better system than the one we’ve lived with since the Industrial Revolution.
I say, go for it. IMO the blogverse is 95% or more a hasty, sloppy, self-indulgent exercise in navel-staring inconsequence, but that last 5% still adds up to a whole lot of talent … the most recent Village Voice has an interesting article on this very subject.
By the bye, Sam, what do you know about Hyperlink novels, or whatever they’re called now?? Some hybrid of creative content, keywords, hyperlinks etc that mate web-site design with novelistic conceptions. Ten years ago I looked into that a bit, but the tech hadn’t really been rationalized yet; by now, though, there must be WebWriter 2.0 sort of software someplace that does for writers what those screenplay programs do for scripts. I think it would be great fun to write a wikiNovel, but I don’t have the programming chops to design a good, powerful tool with a reasonably uncomplicated GUI.
Comment by Peyton Moss — January 31, 2010 @ 12:34 pm
Peyton - I have much less experience than you in the bus, but it has always appeared to me to be a labor of misbegotten love rather than an actual business enterprise. And the merger mania of the last two decades has only made things worse. Adding debt to a business with wafer thin margins? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
My own thought is that ebooks will replace mmpbs, with hardcover and trade paperback remaining viable for the true afficinoados. No one but the wealthy or the intellectual owned books before mmpbs were invented - you could buy a book for %.15! And I think that may be true going forward. The real market and money will be in ebooks. The question is simply how much they should cost and whether they should be protected (DRM) or not.
As for Hyperlink novels (my memory suggests hypertext, but I remain unconvinced that either term is right), there was a vogue for them ten or so years ago, but I don’t hear much about it now. No author I know is talking about them. Might make great sense for footnoted books, but wo wants to take themselves out of a story by following the links? That’s the writer’s job as narrator, to lead the reader to what’s important in the order that’s required.
Comment by Administrator — January 31, 2010 @ 1:02 pm
You’re right, hypertext is the word I was looking for.
I actually did write part of a “sort-of” hypertext piece on the OT forum of a WW2 real-time-strategy game I was playing, using the footnote/pop-up features of MS Word … sort of the mongoloid offspring of a menage a trois among David Foster Wallace, William Shirer, and Thomas Pynchon (yes, I know, the chromosomes and plumbing don’t quite work, but by next week I suspect they will)
Thing is, between links, illustrations, steganography, easter eggs, etc, the features and horsepower are available on every desktop and notebook nowadays. To borrow the notion of whichever Nazi it was, when I hear the words “multimedia” or “synergy” I reach for my revolver, but that’s really because they are so often tossed around by people with no specific idea of how they really can work — Time-Warner/AOL is the Operation Barbarossa of this half-baked strategy, I think — but I believe that one of these days a Joyce or a Proust of multimedia will appear.
I know exactly what you mean about structure and guidance being the author/narrator’s job, and I think that will always be a central pillar of literary endeavors. However, I have lately been on a jag of dense, long, “difficult” books — Bolano’s 2666, Vollmann, Valery Grossman, Infinite Jest (for the second time), and Pynchon, among others, and I find myself resorting to Google rather than skating over allusions I recognize as somehow significant but don’t really “get” … in EUROPE CENTRAL, f’rinstance, I am right at home with the Stalingrad, Kursk Salient, Wolfsschanze stuff, but there’s a recurring Shostakovich motif which I just don’t know enough to get, so I resort to Wikipedia, which is certainly simpler than dropping everything while I hunt up my Oxford Encyclopedia of Music.
And if you think about stuff like Calvino’s IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER, with its endless recursive loops, you are almost as close to programming as to traditional literature. TRISTRAM SHANDY has some of the same attributes. And I myself have a pretty wide repertoire of stories (more or less tethered to the truth) which are the result of my fundamental attempt to impose pattern and polish on the raw data of experience. But depending upon my audience and my own interest at any given time, they take a different shape and order every time I shake my kaleidoscope. Even when fairly altered in state by circumstance or brain chemistry, I actually tend to close all the parentheses of my always digressive narrative stream. And I wonder, why not let the reader follow his/her own interests through the looking glass.
I know that this is like proposing a game of 3D Scrabble or 3D chess when most attempts to play simple single-plane literary checkers or Old Maid turn out less than triumphantly, but I also often remember a friend of mine (one of the earliest victims of AIDS, alas) who was multi-lingual, with a Ph.D in Romance languages. When he quit the book trade, he became the IT guy for a big company at a time when only seriously bright geeks knew how to keep a roomful of Wangs running. One day he told me he was off to Romania for a conference of FORTRAN programmers, and I mused on how exotic FORTRAN must be in Romanian; he looked at me as if I were a complete idiot and said “FORTRAN is what we speak; it’s a language just like English or French.” Which of course is true — and today, 20-odd years later, computer languages are vastly richer than they used to be.
Anyway, no more bloviating on that. I agree with you that there will always be a carriage trade in books qua objet d’art, but that the big-bucks triple-platinum mass-market blockbusters are going to migrate to another platform. My off-the-cuff inclination is to follow some version of the iTune business model; my own experience with DRM solutions is that so far they’re all troublesome in one way or another, and that they all either get hacked and cracked pretty quickly, or break the computer they’re installed on. I think that intellectual-property issue is the thorniest; my guess is that crunching the numbers for a business plan is comparatively trivial, because successful templates already exist although of course they need well-informed tweaking.
PHM
Comment by Peyton Moss — January 31, 2010 @ 5:17 pm
Brief addendum: The “… I reach for my revolver.” quote is always credited to Goering or Goebbels, but in fact it comes from the first scene of a 1933 play, Schlageter, by the Nazi playwright Hanns Johst.” (http://andrewhammel.typepad.com/german_joys/2008/08/when-i-hear-the-word-revolver.html)
I knew it wasn’t the G-boys but I didn’t know who it WAS — and it seems to me that the ease with which I found and annotated this kind of illustrates in a two-bit way the potential of well-deployed hypertext.
PHM
Comment by Peyton Moss — January 31, 2010 @ 5:28 pm
Thing is, the more opaque a piece of writing gets, the less I tend to enjoy it. Never have read Calvino, though I intend to. As for Pynchon, I have tried three times to read Rainbow, and never gotten passed page 200 despite the fact that I think he’s doing something really interesting and I live his prose. But you have to come to the point sometime, which he doesn’t do soon enough for me. Robert Coover, whom I thought was God well into the early ’80s, finally vanished into the vacuum of opaque navel gazing soon thereafter. He was also one of the big proponents of hypertext in the ’90s, I believe.
Comment by Administrator — February 1, 2010 @ 2:34 pm
Point taken … I read GERALD’S PARTY and thought it an awful slog; never bothered with Coover after that.
GR, on the other hand, is a bit like WAR & PEACE; my initial reaction was much the same as yours, but a friend kept assuring me that if you managed to hold your breath long enough to get past all the patronymics you’d find it well worth the effort, which in the end I found to be true.
Comment by Peyton Moss — February 1, 2010 @ 10:08 pm
Gerald’s Party is awful. Coover’s first two books are wonderful, especially The Universal Baseball Association (though you have to like baseball to like it).
I never had any problem with War and Peace, though the end is pretty bad. But better a bad ending than a bad beginning. That way you read the whole book.
Comment by Administrator — February 3, 2010 @ 11:52 am