The Future of Book Publishing from South by Southwest
It’s that time of year again, when thousands of people with Macbooks and iPhones migrate to Austin for the annual South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival. Following up to last year’s trailblazing but ill-fated New Think for Old Publishers panel, this year’s A Brave New Future for Book Publishing brought together a stellar line up — and some of my favorite publishing bloggers — including Booksquare‘s @booksquare, HarperStudio‘s @debbiestier, The New Sleekness‘ @pablod, Vook‘s @vooktv and Booktour.com‘s @weegee. Among other issues, they discussed the iPad (of course), ebook pricing issues and the importance of an author’s online platform (or “tribe”).
You can follow the original Twitter stream of the panel at #futurebook (although there were so many tweets flying back and forth, it left my head spinning). For a more concise wrap up of the panel, I recommend Peter Miller’s post for the Los Angeles Times‘ book blog, Jacket Copy and GalleyCat‘s compilation of some of the best tweets.
Since the future of publishing is a particular interest of mine (if you have a chance, check out some of the Future of Publishing Blogs on my blogroll) and since I must admit I enjoy naval gazing as much as the next New York City media type, I thought I would weigh in on one issue that always looms large: what is the role of the publishing house in a world in which self publishing platforms are ubiquitous and the Internet has turned the traditional retail model on its head?
I work for a large publishing house (“legacy publishing” as some call it), so don’t let it take you by surprise when I say that I believe we, i.e., publishing houses, do indeed play a vital role in today’s cultural marketplace. Publishing isn’t perfect — even most in the industry aren’t shy about admitting that — but not acknowledging our role in bringing books to readers even in this 2.0 world is naive and short-sighted at best. Here are a couple reasons why:
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The Filter: It was interesting — and not a little amusing — to see people in the #futurebook Tweet stream clamoring for “slush pile software” that will trawl through writers’ submissions and pick out the best ones. (Coincidentally — or maybe not — I received a press release yesterday about WeBOOK , a site that matches up writers and literary agents.) There are a lot of would-be writers, some of whose writing could use, shall we say, a little work. Until that slush-pile software is developed, it’s publishing houses (and literary agents) doing the filtering.
The Distributor: If you self publish a book and no one reads it, are you an author? Publishing houses also help turn words on a page into a book in someone’s hands through advertising, marketing (bookstore events, media coverage, etc.) and sales (distribution to and placement in stores). Granted, we’re not the only “book funneler” — the Internet being another — but we still get lots of books to lots of readers.
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You get my point. I think we’re important. On the other hand, if we don’t acknowledge that readers today are looking for ebooks and vooks (video books) and POD (Print on Demand) and not, say, Gutenberg bibles, then we’re being naive and short-sighted. The truth is that most publishing houses do indeed recognize the need to change and adapt. The crucial question, though, that has yet to be answered, is that in this changing marketplace, how exactly is the role of a publishing house changing and how can that role(s) best be executed? For the answer to that, you’ll have to, um, check back next year.
Ode to change
Over at Booksquare, a thoughtful publishing industry blog, Kassia Krozser penned Competing for Eyeballs, in which she exhorted publishing companies to change the way they (we) reach readers. (Patience, Kassia — you can sometimes still hear the clack of typewriters as you walk down the halls of a publishing house.) And publishing consultant and Cursor founder Richard Nash posted about the evolution of independent bookstores.
As a book publicist, my role is to reach readers through venues like the media (or bookstores), so these are issues that directly or indirectly affect what I do. Of course, word of mouth always has and continues to win over new readers, but while the “word” has not changed, the “mouth” has — now, people are as likely to hear about books from Twitter and GoodReads as from friends and family (or their local newspaper).
For many readers, books are also popularized by movies, as Phenix & Phenix Literary Publicity points out. (These are called “movie tie ins” in publishing speak.) These aren’t new, of course, but it seems like there have been more movies based on books in recent years.
The point is, readers, as Kassia said, are moving at the speed of light (Exhibit A, the Networked Book). And that means that publishers need to, well, move.
The future of publishing a la Book Expo America
Being rather interested in both publishing and the future, I wanted to put together a post about the future of publishing. The first panel I attended was Do Publishers Still Hold the Keys to the Kingdom? A Panel of Authors Weigh In, held on Friday afternoon. Moderator Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air, was joined by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, author of the new book Free and the Long Tail, Lev Grossman (TIME senior book critic and author of the upcoming The Magicians) and Tom Standage (editor at The Economist and author of An Edible History of Humanity) as they discussed whether publishers are still necessary or whether authors could (or should) go it alone with self-publishing platforms. Tweeps in the audience commented on the, well, lack of publishers on the panel. Which sort of was a recurrent theme at the convention.
Jumping Off a Cliff: How Publishers Can Succeed Online, moderated by Publishers Weekly’s Andrew Albanese with Chris Anderson, Scribd cofounder Jared Friedman, and New York Times digital guru Nick Bilton, also lacked a publishing house presence. (Thanks to PW for these recaps.)
And Thursday’s The Concierge and the Bouncer: The End of the Supply Chain and the Beginning of the True Book Culture panel featured Richard Nash, former Soft Skull publisher. Hmm.
But before the conspiracy theorists jump in, I’ll say that I helped organize the “Keys to the Kingdom” panel, so I can say firsthand just how tricky a situation this is. When it comes to discussing the future of publishing, publishers will admit that we’re at a crossroads but are, understandably, reluctant to issue more detailed public proclamations. It’s unfortunate because there are plenty of people interested in and knowledgeable about the publishing industry who would like to participate in these “future of publishing” discussions. So how can we rectify (or at least amend) the situation? Here are a few suggestions:
1. Tackle part of the problem first
On Saturday evening, for example, publishers Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks and Bob Miller of HarperStudio participated in the discussion about Stupid Things Publishers and Booksellers Do, moderated by Praveen Madan, co-owner of The Booksmith in San Francisco. Carole Horne, general manager of Harvard Book Store in Cambridge rounded out the panel and Carla Cohen from Politics & Prose in Washington, DC and others in the audience chimed in periodically. Each panelist spoke about three things they feel should be changed about the book publishing industry — no one divulged the meaning of life, but those three things (actually, 12) provide a place to start figuring it out.
Or in the 7x20x21 panel presentation on Friday evening, seven people in the publishing industry spoke about issues that excited them. Again, no one shared their secrets about how to save book publishing, but everyone was able to provide a few nuggets of inspiration.
2. Take the discussion online
If “future of publishing” issues don’t have much of a future in offline discussions, then (to state the obvious) let’s continue them online where they’ve been for a while. There are a number of general interest publishing industry blogs like Booksquare, Follow the Reader and Galleycat where you can read about important publishing issues. There are many more, some of which are listed on this Book Publicity Blog under “Future of Publishing Blogs” and “Publishing Blogs.” (Check the blogroll on the right.)
3. Be patient
What can I say — Rome wasn’t built in a day.
BEA begins
I didn’t get a chance to stop by BEA yesterday — there was too much to do around the office. (Plus, I couldn’t for the life of me find a list of the panels on the website beyond the sparse “Events at a Glance” PDF.) Which was a pity. But fortunately, Publishers Weekly was there, so I’m linking to their coverage.
Here are some panels that caught my eye:
Combating Print and Digital Piracy of Publishers’ Works (AAP)
Giving it Away: When Free ebooks Make Sense — And When They Don’t
I’ve been very interested in finding out more about ebook giveaways — on the one hand, you’d think that a free ebook would lead to fewer sales, but that hasn’t seemed to be the case. Or has it? Peter Balis, director of online sales at Wiley, and Brent Lewis, v-p for digital and Internet at Harlequin, discussed “rules” for giveaways and talked about cases in which free ebooks have both helped and hurt sales.
Richard Nash, formerly publisher at Soft Skull Press, and Dedi Felmen, formerly a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, discussed their new venture, Round Table, a mash up of sorts of a subscription service and a social network that gets writing to readers.
I’ll be heading up to the Javits Center later on today — it’s shaping up to be a busy afternoon (and evening).
Is email outdated? Enter the discussion group
Many of you are familiar with my antipathy to voicemail (not so much the quick messages from people I know, but the lengthy ones from people I don’t about something that requires a lot of explaining and a lot of writing and, typically, a lot of follow-up phone calls and messages). Email provides a handy solution in situations like these since a written message can be a one-stop shop of information about both topic and sender.
But sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. (Like the time I polished off a theater-sized box of M&Ms as a nine -year old and subsequently couldn’t stomach anything sweet for days.)
When it comes to discussions — versus simply providing information — email, too, can get pretty cumbersome. I know that when I see people start to weigh in on a message, I … wait until the end of the day to weigh. I sort the messages by subject, respond to the latest message in the thread and delete all the earlier ones (sometimes unopened, depending on the topic).
And this is where discussion groups come in handy. Two popular discussion groups are Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups. Both are relatively easy to use (although everything takes a little getting used to). Ning has a few more bells and whistles — it’s sort of like a social network plus a discussion group. (And social networks themselves like Facebook and LinkedIn do have discussion functions.) Of course, Twitter is the venue du jour for many discussions as well: yesterday I attended the first meeting of the Digital Publishing Group organized by Daily Lit. You can see some of the commentary at #digpub.
As a book publicist dealing with authors and journalists, I can see the value of email — and I certainly don’t envision myself *not* using it — but for my sake (and for the sake of anyone with whom I might interact), I’m going to try to make more use of discussion groups. What is your favored platform for a discussion group? And what do you use it for?
