More Musings from a Dinosaur

March 22, 2009
Thanks for the many comments. As one sarcastic Twitterer (sarcasm on Twitter? I'm shocked!) mentioned, my blog seems pretty untrafficked. Tell me about it. We are the website equivalent of a...well, used bookstore on the sleepy Brooklyn waterfront. So I was genuinely shocked and appreciative for the feedback. Especially those taking me on and making more than 140 character suggestions.

I guess there is a certain distinction in placing dead last in popularity at SXSW. And I totally get it. The audience arrived for an air show and instead of watching some badass Blue Angels ripping across the sky in F-18s they got a Piper Cub trailing a banner saying "Howdy from Publishing!" But I am confident that this will all lead places and the dialogue is only beginning. Rematch at SXSW 2010?

That next conversation (which in all seriousness will happen much sooner than the next interactive conference) should aim to be productive and macro, rather than bogged down in the specific issues of bit players like myself. I realized by the end of our panel that my goals for it were less grand than others. I'll talk about those goals farther down (which are worthy of a separate forum at some point), but basically I wanted to address my challenges of promoting books today on the internet, regardless of format. When I referred to mediation, I had a particular definition in mind that was at odds with what others were thinking.

But looking over the discussion online to date I do want to add my two cents and suggest some guidelines for the dialogue to come. Keep in mind that the three publishing panelists--John Fagan, Ivan Held, and myself--may represent the old media and seem protective of our turf, but we recognize that we can coexist quite nicely with new media and with the DIY publishers. Publishing is vast and pretty Balkanized. It can accommodate a lot.

All the comments were terrific and certainly many on the backchannel and on blogs were the right ones to tackle. I do want to single out a few criticisms though that I think are nonstarters (I speak for myself here, not the other panelists or colleagues in the industry):

That we are like the music industry. Consider me the idjit that just hasn't accepted this analogy, the lone Confederate still fighting the War of Northern Aggression. I understand why people outside of publishing confuse us with our much sexier cousins. Simply picking up an Entertainment Weekly you might get the impression that we are BIG media, up there with movies, tv, and songs. In the Sunday New York Times we get our own section! Those other guys have to duke it out in the Arts and Leisure insert.

Though on the surface they share a lot, there are important distinctions with music that make the comparison false. After World War II the means of production and distribution did improve for both industries. Pocket paperback editions brought literature to the masses, not just the elite. They were sold by a network of nationwide bookstores, supermarkets, and department stores and promoted by a robust regional newspaper book review sections. Meanwhile small and large record labels seized on vinyl, transistor radio, and television to broadcast their product to a growing youth consumer market.

And that's the cruel joke. Just as the media revolutionized popular music and gave voice to a generation, it cut into the attention span of young readers. Books were now everywhere, but the readership was aging. The 1960s are a kind of high water mark. Books could be mainstream and counterculture, from the introduction of the megabestseller (read Michael Korda's often hilarious profile of his former author Jacqueline Susann) to the legal battles of Barney Rosset over his transgressive literature. Into the 1970s commercial publishing had some go-go to it, spectacularly featured at Simon and Schuster, but that was short lived. Publishing has been in a slow slide ever since. Every publisher throws crazy money around to get the next Angela Ashes or Da Vinci Code, but the vast majority of books--and this has been true for the two decades I have been in the business--sell a modest 5 to 15,000 copies. Even the books on an average New York Times bestseller do not go much higher than six figures.

During that same time period, technology kept growing the record industry and new innovations like cassettes, car stereos, FM, cable television, and finally CDs only boosted sales to ever new heights. By that point the economics were so bloated--would a record exec have taken a risk on a band that would move only 5,000 units?--that they fell that much farther off the digital cliff when MP3s flooded the market.

I guess you could argue publishing has its own bloated A&R, but the costs are just not the same as the music industry's. I can count on one hand the number of times any publisher I've worked at threw a book party not under duress from an author or an agent. And advertising? I wish we had payola. Ad budgets are minute or non-existent. A full page ad in the New York Times Book Review can exceed the author's advance and production costs of many books. Often the budget is blown on such ads, so repetition (the key to any successful campaign) is impossible. In other words, publishers get by on very little--and most of it is free publicity via the media, new or old.

That we are dinosaurs. Ok, I agree with you there. But as the above is meant to make clear, we've known our dinosaur status for a loooooooooong time. Back when analog was cutting edge. Tell us something we don't know. The point is that publishers serve a core community that has stabilized since those heady days of the '50s and '60s. The NEA famously issued a study in 2007 that 40 per cent of the American population didn't read a single book for pleasure. But a much smaller percentage of the remaining population supports the industry and flacks like me. I would argue that like the good old LP (which is being discovered--not rediscovered--by twenty somethings new to the turntable), the physical book will always have enough fetishests willing to jeopardize their personal relationships to clutter their homes with the chunky things.

But I come from a background of trade literary publishing. What about the commercial stuff? The disposable mass market books? Here the changes will be more profound with readers bypassing the publishers to reach the authors. However, I get the sense that many genre lines (like Tor / Forge) are winning praise for making themselves useful.

Book publishing may scale down but it won't disappear. Digital formats are a growth market whether or not self-published authors suddenly take hold and dominate the field--as many at SXSW suggest. I'm not personally insulted or frightened by that prospect as suggested by William Aicher. He was the last questioner at the SXSW panel and he has said we no longer hold the keys to the kingdom. The kingdom being, as I mentioned above, lifetime sales of 5 to 15,000 copies.

Let's talk about Clay Shirky. Clay was open to being published by Penguin. But Penguin had to be open to publishing Clay also. Why pursue a book with a man whose following is largely on the internet? Couldn't he achieve Penguin's success with his book on his own? Self published authors have been around for as long as publishers themselves. They definitely have more direct access to readers now and that is an amazing and positive thing. But this leads to my last point. About mediation.

That we no longer mediate the message. Maybe we never did. At the top I mentioned I had a different definition of mediation as a publicist. I'm paid to promote books, so for me the mediators are not the publishers but the press. In fact, for that kind of mediation book publishers are in the same boat as the DIY crowd. We have a vested interest in the success of our investments and just like a self published author we are a little biased. I can run, wave my arms and say what an amazing work of art each one of our books is, but why would you believe me? Why would you believe William Aicher?

A third party needs to step in. It's those third parties that are befuddling all of us. It used to be print newspapers. NPR still is a huge force. Television less than you might think. All hopes ride on the internet. And there is a hell of a lot of content for bloggers to sort through. Being corporately published does not bestow the author with quality, but more eyes, more input from editors can help a book transcend the ephemeral. I'm guessing that the future influential critics on the web will still want to know if a digital or analog book has been edited, vetted, advised somehow, someway before simply pressing the "publish post" button.

Walt Whitman would have loved the internet, the savvy self publisher that he was. But is his brilliance an outgrowth of his self promotion? What if Leaves of Grass didn't have an esteemed man of letters like Ralph Waldo Emerson in its cheering camp. Would the cream rise to the top again because he maintains a Facebook page? Maybe. After Upton Sinclair published The Jungle with Doubleday (after being rejected by several publishers) to huge fanfare in 1906, he often went directly to the public with forgettable self published work. If he had held a few back and let a Maxwell Perkins edit them, might he be remembered for something more than Chicago slaughterhouses? Possibly not.

I'm not saying that writers are doomed if they say screw Penguin, FSG, Knopf, and Norton. But publishers choose to publish writers, and will continue to do so, because there is business to be done, money to be made.
--Peter Miller