The publishing industry is getting its butt kicked. Plain and simply what used to be the American group of publishers has long been, for the most part, foreign owned. As such the smaller publishing houses were absorbed mainly by the larger houses, until one conglomerate became another and another, all publishing the same kind of books.
There are layoffs galore and big outfits like Random House are reducing their divisions. Houghton Mifflin is enduring a credit squeeze and might be sold. Even Thomas Nelson, a religious publisher, is laying off about ten percent of its staff. Sales in mass market paperbacks are way off, and the industry as a whole has invested in too many alleged blockbusters that have lost money.
On one hand you could view this all as tragic. On the other it may be one more industry that as a bloated mess has failed to realize the market and change with the times. It is much like the auto industry in this way. Though change was coming, the industry itself seemed to be the last to recognize that fact and implement solutions. Like the auto industry, it is dealing with modern advances and consumer desires, the segmented marketplace, etc., as if we were still in 1965.
With the publishing industry, it has been relying largely on bestsellers to pick up slack on the more modest publication. This strategy doesn’t work. Clearly, you can’t rely solely on what you expect to be bestsellers to pull you through. House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, just published a book, and I’m sure the publisher’s advance was pretty generous. Last time I looked, the book sold something like 28,000 copies. Not bad, but bad, certainly, for the kind of advance she received. This has posed for the publishing industry a common problem.
As a writer, I have had more than a passing engagement with the publishing industry. I sold my first book at twenty-four-years-old, back in the Paleolithic era and another at 27. Then, even as the market was changing, publishers still took risks. Now they only take what they think are risks but are really not risks. Instead, they publisher either major sellers, same-same books or more generic and innocuous goo that they try to pass off as cutting edge. No wonder kids don’t read books.
In the age of celebrity, we see all the celebrity books. We see children’s books. We see so many books in these two categories, along with the same-same sexual manuals and pop psych tomes, that we are suffering from a surfeit of mediocrity. Sure, we have best sellers and nothing wrong with best sellers. But most best sellers, while entertaining, well, sometimes, will hardly alter our perspective on life.
Publishers had on staff actual literary editors. Now, for the most part, they retain only acquisition editors. The difference is that one group actually knows how to edit while the other just knows how to buy. No literary lions like the legendary editor Max Perkins are gracing the hallways of any publishing house.
Time was publishers gave writers a chance to build an audience. No more. You get one book, maybe two, to do so. Then you are off the list. And the book, unless it ships bestseller to start with, gets almost no publicity and then occupies an obscure shelf in the mega-chains for maybe a month before being exiled to the remainder sheet. That means it goes to the bargain bins.
While the auto industry is different in many ways, it moves ahead like a curmudgeonly old uncle who suffers from myopia, won’t invest in a hearing aid, and uses a paper towel roller for a walking stick. In both cases, while they produce quality at one level, most of the product is lousy. It is boring. It doesn’t work, doesn’t help, makes no sense, and costs more than most people want to pay.
So there are lessons to be learned here. You can learn a lot from bad examples. In this economy to not only survive but to prosper, you must innovate quickly. Your key executives must learn to move with speed and decisively. You must be able to hire people on the cutting edge, who can bring new ideas to your business. I’m sure those exist, in publishing and the auto industry. But they are probably shuttered to the back office where they languish and are generally ignored. Come the economic downturn, they are the first to be laid off. They are not usually the political people. If they were, people would listen to them.
Once laid off, they put their innovations to the test and start their own business. They are successful. And everyone wonders why.
