The future of publishing…
While COVID-19 and unrest over policing excesses has certainly affected readership and publishing, the Big Five publishing conglomerates have been struggling for a while. The reason? The digital revolution. In a couple of articles, the NY Times analyzed those struggles (7/16/2020 and 7/17). The first article can be summarized as women beginning to take over higher positions; the second is more about black women’s struggles to enter the Big Five publishing hierarchy. While these articles portray the biases in the old white boys’ environment of major publishers, something that needs to change, they barely mention the ongoing digital revolution.
The Times isn’t immune to that journalistic publishing disease of emphasizing scandal and sloppy reporting, of course. They’re part of the NYC publishing establishment, after all. Readers might think the latter is healthy. Simon and Schuster is making millions off Bolton’s and Trump’s tell-all books (that’s Mary Trump, the president’s niece, for those who haven’t been paying attention). Like many scandal and celeb books, I’ll ignore those as a reader. (I have some better non-fiction to read, and lots of good fiction too, none of the latter from the Big Five.)
To be fair, the Times’s articles are okay as far as they go—I’ll celebrate tearing down the old white boys’ institutions whenever it occurs, from Church leaders to publishers—and they do mention audiobooks (my, aren’t those Times’s writers twentieth-century tech whizzes?), as if they were going to save the Big Five. But if memory serves, only once do they mention “digital revolution.” And that just doesn’t mean ebooks, folks. The whole process is becoming digitized now, from editing to final product and beyond. Software is used to format books, be it Amazon, Smashwords, or Ingram’s, and once that template is made, POD can and often does take over. Why should a publisher endure warehousing costs for print versions when they can be printed as orders come in? Only doorstops like Bolton’s and Trump’s books are warehoused now. Ingram, the quintessential predatory dinosaur of the Big Five dinosaurs, won’t even warehouse small book runs anymore, so traditional publishers are warehousing with Amazon, if they warehouse at all. They do this even though they do POD with Ingram’s Lightning Source, what many small publishers are using to remain somewhat competitive.
In short, traditional publishing in general and the Big Five in particular, are dinosaurs waiting for the asteroid to fall! That’s the real news the Times should report. Their articles only report on the scrambling they’re doing because they see the approaching asteroid. Print won’t survive—even with POD, it’s too costly and caters to older people who still like print (we can call them the tree-killers), but they’re dying off; younger people read ebooks if they read books at all (ebooks are bargains, unless publishers artificially inflate their prices to make print versions more attractive); and the very young are illiterate and addicted to streaming video and computer games, so they don’t even know what a book is, except in their academic studies. (Educational publishing is changing too—when a syllabus requires only certain chapters, students buy only those chapters.) In brief, readership is down (in spite of COVID) and it will continue to go down.
The gravest omission from those Times’s articles is self-publishing, the primary reason traditional publishing’s days are numbered—no asteroid is needed to kill the Big Five dinosaurs. No management changes can halt the bleeding when the new, interesting, and entertaining authors follow the Pied Piper of self-publishing toward true independence and control of their destinies. Self-published authors include those writers smart enough to contract out their own editing, formatting, cover art, and marketing (they have to do the latter even in traditional publishing now); they’re in charge. Moreover, self-publishing allows them to spend more time on what they do best: write! (An example is below.)
The “digital revolution” means that authors don’t need traditional publishers! That whole bureaucracy controlled by the good old boys—agents, acquisition editors, copy editors, marketers, and so forth—is not needed, an so there’s no reason to give the lion’s share of royalties to traditional publishing’s hyenas.
I published my first book, Full Medical, in 2006, after several years of trying to break into traditional publishing. My career hasn’t been travel along a superhighway since then, far from it. I’ve done POD, ebooks, and dabbled in traditional publishing—in other words, there have been potholes along the way and some broken axles. The winding road I’ve taken has led me to this conclusion: Most authors are now caught between two hostile armies of endangered species.
On one hand, they have a diminishing and increasingly fickle readership that prefers gruel to steak—stories with no interesting themes or confrontations so they don’t have to think too much. On the other, there’s a publishing bureaucracy out to exploit them and force them to write the gruel and market it to readers. They call that being sensitive to market demands. (Is that why more women and blacks are entering publishing now? I sure hope not!) Political correctness is the name of the game. If an author tries to include a minority character in a novel, the far-right or far-lift vigilantes go after them, as well as the anti-cultural appropriation fanatics.
I am done with traditional publishing. But I won’t stop telling my stories as a self-published author, even if some of them make readers uncomfortable. I believe there are still readers out there who prefer steak, enough of them to keep me happy all the way to the grave. After that, who cares what happens?
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Comments are always welcome!
A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. To prove my point, here’s the first book in my return to self-publishing (I have several manuscripts still on the shelf)—it’s a wild road trip among various universes. I wasted time looking for a home for it with a traditional publisher. Carrick Publishing prepared and put this out in record time! They’re great. Here’s the blurb:
Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Gail Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She wants to travel through time but discovers she can only go forward. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse, never to return to her little lab outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this sci-fi rom-com a far-out road-trip story filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic situations, first encounter, robots and androids—all that and more await the reader who rides along.
This sci-fi rom-com is available wherever quality ebooks are sold.
I have several other manuscripts ready to go. Please be patient. Even Carrick Publishing needs some time.
Around the world and to the stars.
