Whose Business Model Is Broken Anyway?

It's been some time since your friend the Doctor has posted here--preoccupied as he has been with sorting out the syntax of authors far and wide--but a publishing story in, of all places, the New York Post, has prompted him to pick up his quill and stab it into the inkwell, with a snort of irritation. 

Once again poor old book publishing, the Post's Keith Kelly tells us, is to be "disrupted," this time by the online platform Substack, which has already taken a whack at disrupting magazine and newspaper publishing by peeling writers away from their media-company employers and offering their content directly to readers via subscription. Now, apparently, it's coming for the book industry. 

Media journalist Zack Greenburg, who has written four books for houses like Penguin Portfolio and Simon & Schuster, will release his new book, We Are All Musicians Now, in weekly installments on Substack. A paid subscription will cost $5 a month or $50 a year (typical of Substack); he will also post other content weekly that readers can get free. In the Post, Greenburg sounds pretty jazzed: "All in all, with the advance money being in the same ballpark, I’d rather go to a place where I can be my own boss with a higher upside than try to force it through an old business model that I think is broken." 

I'm all for exploring new business models, but when I hear someone bashing publishing as "broken," I cock a skeptical eyebrow. As I've said in my own book, What Editors Do, publishing has been declared broken repeatedly since Gutenberg. The industry has plenty of problems, but in fact it has weathered the digital era--and even a worldwide pandemic-- far more successfully than many other media businesses.  To compare Substack's "disruptive" model with conventional books,  let's look at the "value propositions" side by side by doing a little arithmentic. 

A typical book might run 75-100,000 words. Let's say Greenburg's is 80,000, just to make this math simple. And let's say Greenburg posts a 2000-word excerpt each week--that's long for a Substack but we'll assume he's a real fast typist....It'll take 40 weeks, roughly 8 months, to get his whole book posted, by which point a subscriber has paid $40 (or $50 if they went with the annual rate). 

In other words, the subscriber is paying $40-50 for content they could buy for roughly $25-30 in the form of a hardcover book, or $10-15 as an ebook. In either of those formats, they could read the whole thing at once (no waiting a week between chapters); bookmark or search passages--even give it to another person in the case of the print book. 

So Greenburg and Substack propose to charge their consumer a price four or five times what tired old conventional publishing would ask for a more convenient, more enduring version of the same product. But they will dribble it out over several months. Well, that's a new business model all right!  But it's not clear to me that it's any kind of improvement on what "broken" old book publishing has to offer, from a reader's perspective. 

Maybe what Greenburg believes is that it's a better deal for him, and given the markup just described, you'd think it would be. But that's not clear either, given the chunk of subscription revenues that Substack takes in return for what it advances an author. Other authors who got Substack advances have not necessarily found the economics favorable. One, Matthew Yglesias, concluded accepting an advance had cost him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue.  

I'm no knee-jerk defender of traditional publishing, as readers of earlier posts here are aware. And writers are entitled to make a living however they want--there is no easy way, goodness knows. But bashing the industry as "broken" is a cheap shot, especially if your whizbang new model is a worse deal for readers.

[photograph via libertypressia.com] 

Why Are Publishers Telling Us E-Books Are So Profitable? Another Book-Business Fallacy

Coverage of the Hachette-vs-Amazon dispute has recycled various misconceptions about what’s happening, as Michael Cader noted Wednesday in Publishers Lunch. But one of the most widespread fallacies you may hear, and not just relating to Hachette/Amazon, is that “e-books have been more profitable for publishers than print books,” as Evan Hughes put it in Slate. The chunky margins generated by e-books, the thinking goes, are what the publisher and the 600-pound gorilla of bookselling are tussling for.

Even before this dispute, some industry voices, led by Mike Shatzkin (echoed by Hughes in the piece just cited, and of course the agent community), have argued that in a sense publishers have been asking for trouble by maintaining such high margins on e-books—like kids walking back from the candy store, their pockets bulging, past the local bully. Shatzkin proposed that publishers raise their royalty rates on e-books so that they could gain some advantage by sharing the “extra” profits with authors before the retailers could zero in on them.

Mike’s suggestion was prescient, and there are other good arguments for passing along more e-book revenue to authors (starting with, "they could use the money"). Nonetheless I believe publishers would have been better served by pointing out, long ago, that the notion of e-books as a magical cash cow is wildly misleading. Because the supposedly greater profits from e-books—when published alongside traditional print editions—are an artifact of accounting. The margins that both Amazon and Hachette find in e-books are only as high as they are because of all the resources Hachette devotes to hardcovers and paperbacks.

Today in mainstream publishing, e-books are almost invariably published alongside a hardcover or paperback edition. This means the e-book edition floats on top of a huge investment in whatever that title is, which in most houses is not charged against the e-book edition.

Consider the following costs incurred in publishing a new title:

The advance—frequently the largest single line item in the investment in a given book, and in many houses charged entirely to the first print edition. Even when it’s allocated otherwise, there are many other costs that are charged the print book, such as:

“Plant” costs—such as copyediting and proofreading, typesetting, design, illustrations, legal vetting, maps. These are typically charged to the hardcover edition, even though the paperback or e-book editions benefit equally from them. (Side note: for the same reason, even in pre-e-days, paperbacks were often seen as more profitable than they "deserved" to be.)

Furthermore, marketing costs are also charged to the hardcover even when the e-book is published simultaneously. These include promotion (catalogues, advance reading copies, BookExpo displays, etc); advertising; and publicity (review copies and ARCs, author tours). Obviously all these efforts are working to sell the e-book just as much as the print edition.

And alongside those expenses are the heinous, eye-watering costs of producing and distributing physical books:  Printing, sales commissions, warehousing, shipping, and all the hideous inefficiencies of taking returns.

Wait a minute, you’re saying, now you’re going too far. Why should the new, innocent e-book be charged for costs of the bad old dead-tree "legacy" (shudder) business?

                       

Because the existence of printed books, the trafficking and display of them, is still a critical marketing tool for e-books!

What is the currency of advertising? Impressions. Every physical book you see as you go through your day is an impression, just a like a Coke ad on a bus shelter or a Coach logo on a handbag--each of those glimpses is a little hit of marketing. Think about the millions of printed books out in the world--displayed in store windows, piled on tables, racked at the checkout in supermarkets and drugstores. Or seen in the hands of people on airplanes and buses; given as given as Christmas or Mother's Day presents to people you know. 

We know that one of the reasons people buy books is that they see other people enjoying them (hence the enduring popularity of bestsellers, even in a long-tail marketplace). There is no question that many of the titles on the e-book bestseller list are boosted by the visible popularity of hardcovers and paperbacks. The thankfully still-robust presence of printed books contributes significantly, I would argue, to the “mindshare” enjoyed by any e-book--not to mention the overall "mindshare" of "book" as a category of entertainment.  

There are, to be sure, e-only bestsellers—works that achieve significant sales without riding the coattails of a print edition. I would guess, though, that very few titles which have achieved true blockbuster e-book sales—tens or hundreds of thousands of copies—have done so without a blockbuster print edition helping to spread the word. (Fifty Shades of Gray, a bestseller as an e-book, became a megahit when Random House published a print edition.)

Perhaps I’m pressing a point if I go from there to arguing that the cost of trucking a new title to a Barnes & Noble distribution center ought to be spread across its e-book edition. But the larger point is that it’s arbitrary at best, and again, misleading, to think we can neatly separate print from e-book costs, when publishing any title is a multi-platform campaign. And it leads to fuzzy thinking about the business if we look at the P&L spreadsheet for a given book and say “wow, the e-book is really profitable” when the poor hardcover is carrying 80 or 90 percent of the investment load. What’s really happening, if you look at this another way, is that the print edition is subsidizing the e-book!

My point here is not to bash the e-book business. It is true that e-books have an enormous economic advantage over print when it comes to manufacturing and distribution, because the incremental unit cost of creating & delivering an e-book is virtually nil. (Even better, no warehousing and no returns.)  You need no publishing expertise to see this, and it’s one reason why it seems intuitive to say e-books are more profitable.  

Some publishers, I’m afraid, have encouraged this misapprehension. Corporate houses in particular like to trumpet the profitability of their digital businesses because it makes them look “innovative” and tech-savvy and gives Wall Street an easily-grasped, upbeat story of a growth driver in the industry. Trade publishing companies have historically thrown off quite modest, not to say anemic, profits and have for decades been caricatured as quaint, retrograde, etc. so maybe we can’t blame them for bragging about better margins that seem to come from new technology.

But for all the reasons above, it's wrong to consider the profitability of an e-book edition separately from an accompanying print title. And it makes no sense for publishers to boast of wonderful margins on e-books, unless they are also going to apologize for the lousy margins they get on print titles.

Publishers are straining mightily to maintain a healthy publishing ecosystem that includes print and e-books, online selling and brick-and-mortar bookstores. This is not out of nostalgia or an inability to grasp the digital future, but because they understand, as explained above, that print and e-book sales boost each other.  And if they give away too much of their revenue from e-books, whether to retailers or to authors, they risk making that multi-format marketplace unsustainable.

Reports of Editorial's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated (or, Why Mike Shatzkin Is Wrong)

Readers of this page or the @BloomsburyPress twitterstream know that I think Mike Shatzkin is one of the smartest observers of the publishing industry today. I cite and retweet the posts from his Idea Logical blog so often that I sometimes feel I'm just a distribution service for him. So I'm perversely happy to report that I think one of his most recent posts grabbed completely the wrong end of the stick.

His title says it all: "Marketing will replace editorial as the driving force behind publishing houses." Mike starts with a thumbnail history of the rise of sales departments in publishing, noting rightly that large sales forces and the tools they used--cover, catalogue, and the summary of key selling points we call title information sheets or tipsheets--were "critical factors to a book's success." I agree with Mike that as he has often written in other posts, the ability to put titles in front of readers simply by getting a lot of them on bookstore shelves has been for a long time the biggest "value added" by publishers for authors. The sheer scale of a big publisher's sales operation, its reach into the widest number of bookstores (or other outlets), was often its key competitive advantage.

So far, I'm with him. And I'd largely agree with the next part of his history, which explains that as the marketplace changed (he points to e-books but in fact online bookselling was critical long before the e-book explosion), "selling"--getting books onto shelves--became only a part of the much broader effort to make consumers aware of a title and motivate them to buy it. Publicity, advertising, author branding, and nowadays an ever-evolving range of social media now outweigh wooing booksellers as critical parts of the process of delivering the author's work to readers. I concur with Mike that the "pull" function of motivating buyers has eclipsed the "push" function of bookstore sell-in in importance.

(Parenthetical note:  This isn't to say booksellers, or sales reps, aren't crucial! The hand-selling that good booksellers do is actually the best marketing we have, creating that "pull" at the store level.)

"So," Shatzkin writes, "marketing has largely usurped the sales function. It will probably before long usurp the editorial function too." This is where we part company. Mike believes that publishing houses "went from editorially-driven in my father's time to sales-driven in mine," and that "the new transition is to being marketing-driven." The fact is that all great publishing houses, and I would argue most really successful ones, are driven by editorial taste, passion, and savvy. ("Savvy" includes commercial savvy, a point I'll come back to.)

I know we bloggers are supposed to make lists, so here's my list of 5 Reasons Editorial Still Drives Publishing.

1. First of all, as my old boss Tom McCormack used to say, "salepeople can't sell, marketers can't market, publicists can't publicize, until editors bring in the books." However the marketplace has changed, attracting and developing new works that people want to read is the sine qua non of a publishing house. Sales couldn't perform this function, nor can marketing.

2. The current explosion of self- and small publishers and the hugely expanding universe of titles available makes the role of a trusted curator that much more valuable. It's a cliché in the business that publishers' brands are meaningless to consumers. But with tens of thousands of new titles, mostly mediocre or worse, flooding the market, that is going to change. Houses whose editors consistently find works that readers respond to are going to have the most success.

3. The development of those works--that is, editing--is still a really vital part of what publishers offer authors. It's easy to romanticize, and overvalue, the mystical author-editor bond and the brilliant contributions of editors who turn sprawling stacks of manuscript into future classics. Such transformations are very rare; more often, the best an editor can do is take a book from a B plus to an A minus. Nonetheless, that might be what breaks that book out of the pack--there are a lot of B plus books out there. And whenever I meet with prospective authors and ask them what they're looking for in a publisher, the first thing most of them say is "an editor who will help me make my manuscript the best it can be." So the editing process is still a place where publishing houses truly do add value.

4. Most important, the best editors ARE marketers. To acquire and edit a book well, an editor needs to identify and understand the audience for that book, whether it's a poetic literary novel or a frat-boy memoir.  Editors need to understand those potential readers and what they're going to respond to in a book; with more specialized content (say, history or science or cooking) they need to know something about the field. The editor has to articulate the "sales handle"--the reason why someone would part with $10, $25 or more to own this particular work. (That sense of the reader's interest is also critical in the editing process--the way you edit the book is shaped by what you intuit readers are looking for in it. So "marketing" and "editing" are not in fact separable.) All of this is what I meant above in saying that great publishers are driven by taste plus commercial savvy.

Sometimes an inspired sales or marketing person, or a publicist, has a new inspiration for how to pitch or package a book, and often those colleagues will refine and sharpen the editor's take on it for their own purposes. But as my marketing colleagues will remind me, it's the editor who has to generate the passion and excitement that gets the machinery of the house moving. When editors don't do that, it's hard for marketers to manufacture that excitement themselves.

5. By the way, not only do editors need to know what readers in a given field are looking for. The best ones also find things that readers aren't looking for--yet. They recognize when an author has written something that doesn't fit an established template yet is fresh and compelling enough to create its own audience. It might be a first novel by David Foster Wallace, Art Spiegelman's Maus, or The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. Marketers are great at selling books to audiences they recognize, but usually very reluctant to embrace things they don't recognize. The first question marketing asks an editor with a new project is, "what are the comp titles?" When the answer is "there really aren't any" the editor meets stiff resistance. So a drawback of a "marketing-driven" house is likely to be that it follows trends rather than sets them--over the long term, a recipe for diminishing returns.

Mike's column cites the example of a small publishing house where the head of marketing is also an acquiring editor and remarks, "I think many publishers will come to see the benefits of marketing-led acquisition in the years to come." But the fact that one smart, creative person with an editorial background has a marketing job doesn't mean that marketing is taking over editorial. In fact, it might be the reverse!

There is no question that marketing is now more important, and more complex, than it has ever been in publishing, and it is likely to become even more so. But--and I say this with complete respect for the many superb marketing people I have worked with--as long as publishing houses as we know them exist, editors will remain at their heart.

Publishing and Bad Publishing Are Not the Same Thing: A Publisher's Response to "An Agent's Manifesto"

The London agent Jonny Geller stirred up a lot of discussion, and a flurry of Twittering, by posting "An Agent's Manifesto" a week or so ago. Jonny contended that in the "maelstrom" of the current book business, authors are being forgotten, taken for granted by booksellers and, in particular, by publishers. The original post seems now to be behind a paywall but it's extensively quoted here and here. He writes:

The author is not an object which a publisher has to step over in order to achieve a successful publication. If they have a problem with the cover, blurb, copy or format, then something isn’t right….Remember, we don’t have a job without [the author]. For those of us still working in the legacy business of publishing books, here’s a reminder of the primary mover in this chain.

A great many people retweeted his column or commented on it using words like "fantastic." And his dim view of publishers was echoed elsewhere. At her blog, the novelist and ghostwriter Roz Morris had even more negative opinions of my colleagues:

It is common, behind the scenes, to hear editors talk about authors with undisguised loathing – not just individual ones who may be difficult, but all of them, authors as a breed. There is a culture that authors must not be listened to.

I have to say that I don't buy these generalizations about our business.

I have worked at publishers large and small--two Big Six houses, a literary indie, a university press, and currently a house I'd describe as mid-size. Never, ever, at any of them, have I heard authors discussed with "loathing." At all of them it was fully understood by editors, marketers, and management that the author is, in Jonny's words, "the primary mover" in the publishing firmament. The whole enterprise would not exist without authors. To put it another way, as one of my colleagues says, "the author is our customer." I simply don't know anyone in publishing who thinks of an author as "an object we have to step over to achieve a successful publication."

At Bloomsbury, we regard the author as a key partner in marketing the book, because as Jonny correctly observes, "the author is the expert" on the subject, setting, and likely readership of her book. We want to tap into that expertise, and use the author to help mobilize the networks of readers who are going to respond to what she's doing.

I have made clear elsewhere on this blog that I'm fully aware publishers often fail authors (and themselves for that matter)--for all sorts of reasons. One is simply the tendency of any complex organization to screw up from time to time. Another is that most publishers are under-resourced. Trade publishing is a chancy and low-margin business, and there's rarely enough money and man-hours to lavish on each title--on any title--as much as it deserves. In the hustle to get things done, there can be a temptation to take shortcuts--and one of the most ill-advised shortcuts is to discount the author's input about jacket design, flap copy, or marketing ideas when they are at odds with the publisher's. This does sometimes happen, and sometimes with the arrogant justification that "we're the professionals." I have no hesitation in saying this is simply bad publishing, and any author who experiences such treatment is right to resent his publisher for it. But in my experience it's relatively rare.  It may be more common at the biggest houses, where the sheer volume of titles can, at its worst, lead toward a book-as-widget mentality. Throughout our industry, however, dedicated people are expending sweat, toil, and sometimes tears to meet authors' expectations.

By way of example, in the past week, I've been working with our creative director to find a jacket for a fall title, where in attempting to satisfy the author, we have gone through not less than a dozen different designs. I have exchanged numerous emails with another author, trying to choose a title and subtitle from among 5 or 6 possibilities--this after his original choice had been embraced by our marketing team but he had second thoughts. And I spent an hour on the phone with a third author, negotiating the precise wording of the captions in his photo section. This is not because I'm a unique paragon of editorial virtue; all around me, and not just at Bloomsbury, my colleagues are toiling away with their authors in similar ways. Down the hall from me, a publicist was booking and rebooking flights for an author's book tour in response to her changing schedule. And out in the Northwest a sales rep was arranging a dinner for a debut novelist to meet with booksellers for the region. None of these authors, by the way, are bestselling VIP types, although we hope they eventually will be.

I submit that these authors are, as Jonny urges, being "valued, understood, appreciated, included, nurtured and spoken to like adults." Furthermore, I can think of no other major creative industry where a single artist has so much control over his or her content and how it gets presented to the public. The author has absolute final say over the text of the book (contrast this with Hollywood, where a director may not even have final-cut approval, or journalism, where a writer's copy may be heavily rewritten at the editing desk); and--the above-noted Bad Publishing exceptions aside--typically has consultation even on covers and catalogue writeups. 

Editors, especially, value authors because they are our closest partners in the process. The relationship can be intimate, and like any close relationship it can be fraught. Authors do things that make editors grind their teeth from time to time, just as spouses do to one another. And publishing people do, it's true, vent about authors now and then, just as authors vent about publishers. That doesn't mean there's a lack of respect on either side. 

Several of the commenters on Jonny Geller's and Roz Morris's posts cite "horror stories" they have heard about author mistreatment. I note that most of these horror stories are secondhand. In saying such stories are unfortunate and rare, I'm not saying none of them are true. By the same token, I think most agents do a good job for their clients, even if one of Roz Morris's commenters wrote "I still want to punch something when I think how my agent mistreated me." In any case, I was pleased to see that several authors also posted comments about how happy they were with the care and attention they received from their publishers. It's human nature that "horror stories" circulate more widely than "satisfaction stories."

I have no quarrel with Jonny Geller’s manifesto. Authors will always be at the core of whatever publishers do, and it is worthwhile to remind us of that. But to the charge of disrespecting authors, on behalf of all the publishers I know, I plead not guilty.   

The Doctor Takes Questions: A Q & A on Publishing with Doug Morrison

I recently learned of writer Douglas Morrison's blog, The Novel Road, which is worth a visit for anyone interested in the writing trade, especially the fiction side of it. He posts links to a variety of other blogs and articles, and has been conducting his own series of author interviews, with writers such as Brian Haig, Robin Becker, and Dale Brown. Doug flattered me by including me among his interviewees this month, asking a lot of good questions about editing and publishing, which I answered to the best of my ability. The best part is that Doug included two of Thomas Rowlandson's satirical images with his post. (The one here is captioned Dr Syntax, in the middle of a smoking hot political squabble, wishes to whet his whistle.The Doctor is in black by the fireplace, next to one of the smoking squabblers.)

Here's the Q & A, with thanks to Douglas Morrison:

Doug Morrison: Do you have a character, from a manuscript you have edited, that has left a mark on you?

PG: Many, so I’ll pick one from a manuscript I’ve just published: Stephen Douglas, who lost the presidential election of 1860 to a dark-horse candidate named Abraham Lincoln. Douglas was on what we’d consider the “wrong” side of the slavery issue, and he had often acted from expediency and ambition. But when he knew he was about to lose the office he had coveted for his whole career, Douglas barnstormed the country trying to hold the Union together. He literally died trying to prevent the Civil War. The story is told Douglas Egerton’s book Year of Meteors, and I found it surprisingly moving.

DM: The editor in you must have an intuition for the “special” book; the one that seems destined to huge sales or a place in literary history. Among the books you have worked with, what made your “I knew it” list?

PG: The humbling thing about being an editor is the flip side of your question: how many of the books you know are special never achieve the sales they deserve. That’s much more common than thinking “I know it” and seeing the title on the bestseller list. But it’s exciting when you’re right. I knew David Hackett Fischer’s Washington's Crossing was a masterpiece when I first read it—it was brilliantly researched, wonderfully written, and thrilling to read. It became a New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for history. But I have had the same feeling about other books that never hit the jackpot that way.

DM: The editors I’ve researched, seem to stick to comfort zones when they choose a manuscript. Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone?

PG: I’d hate to think I always publish in a “comfort zone,” because I think you should always be looking for works that challenge you and that are different from what you have done before. At the same time, it’s hard to be a good publisher for a MS you don’t know anything about or you’re not enthusiastic about. For instance, my politics are moderately liberal, but I’m always ready to publish books that make good arguments for conservative positions, or far-left ones for that matter. On the other hand, I’d never be the right editor for a book on organic gardening, because I’m not a gardener of any kind. I don’t think you should edit a book that you’d never buy in a bookstore. To publish something well, you have to know how to connect with its intended reader. So I don’t ask, “is this in my comfort zone?” I ask, “do I know who would want to read this and how I’d get them excited about it?”

DM: Publishing Non-Fiction has a higher degree of speculation (i.e. advances, deadlines) than Fiction Publishing. Is this a true statement?

PG: To use a favorite publishing phrase: it depends. In general the advantage of publishing nonfiction is that you can identify the audience for it and have some idea how to reach that market—whether it’s organic gardeners, Obama-haters, Civil War buffs or dog lovers. You can make some guesses about the market based on how other titles have performed. In fiction, it’s much more unpredictable, with the major exception of genre fiction. Historical romances, cozy mysteries, steampunk, anything in a series –those niches help you target the readership. But for many novelists it’s hard to predict how a new work will sell, so it’s highly speculative. In general I’d say fiction is more of a guessing game for a publisher.

DM: What is Bloomsbury Press looking for right now?

PG: That’s a question I’m always reluctant to answer, because there aren’t one or two things we’re “looking for.” We are always looking for well-written books that have something interesting and preferably original to say, on a subject of importance. I have written more about this on our website, bloomsburypress.com.

DM: I send you a 150,000-word manuscript. It’s a mess, the title is even misspelled , but you read the first page and it catches your interest. Do you send it back with a note explaining, “Spell Check”, margins and sentence fragments, or do you keep it? What state do you like to see a manuscript in before you work on it?

PG: In all honesty, if you can’t spell the title I’m not going to read much further unless your first paragraph is stunningly brilliant. Authors who can’t achieve a baseline level of professionalism are, in my experience, extremely unlikely to write a book that can be published with success.     

DM: How much author editing is too much? Where should an author stop editing before submission?

PG: Keep editing until it’s really good, but by that I don’t mean “tinker obsessively with your MS for months.” Get feedback—candid feedback—from readers you trust. I work with a lot of scholars. In the academic world, even the most senior authors routinely show their drafts—sometimes single chapters, sometimes whole manuscripts--to other people who know their subject really well, and get their comments. It amazes me how often an author will say something like “I showed this to three readers and they all thought it was the best thing I’ve done,” and it turns out the readers are her husband, her mom and her next-door neighbor. Find some readers who aren’t afraid to tell you your script is boring, and get their comments.

DM: Freelance editors, hired by authors. The consensus with literary agents seems to be an author doesn’t need one. You would think a closer to finished manuscript would cost them less to move forward?

PG: I don’t know which agents you have talked to, but I question that “consensus.” Most of the agents I know tell me it’s getting harder to sell anything that needs work, because editors are reluctant to take on really time-consuming projects. And I know a lot of freelance editors who are being hired by authors and agents to get their work ready to submit to publishers.

DM: I’ve written about how I think editors may be going into a “Gold Rush” market for their skills. I base this on the increasing number of fairly sloppy e-books that seem to make it onto the market. Will Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc, have to address this problem? If so, what’s your solution?

PG: I’m not sure what problem you’re referring to. The sloppiness of e-books is often a problem not in the writing or editing, but in the conversion of print book text to e-book format. This is a matter, more or less, of proofreading, not “editing” of the kind that I do. And I think it will dwindle away as publishers learn to plan their work flow to incorporate e-books. That said, I am sure that the skill of editing manuscripts and preparing them for publication is one that will continue to be needed, in whatever format books are produced.

DM: I’ve written a post on literary agents, in an ongoing series I call “Writer’s Angst”. What would you like writers to know about the world of the editor? The Publisher?

PG: Even though we have to say no to 95 percent (or more) of the submissions we receive, no editor was drawn into this business by the idea of turning people down. We’re always hoping that the next thing we read is going to be something that we love.

DM: Dr. Syntax is an incredible site, offering insights to both new and experienced writers. How do you find the time to blog and maintain the incredibly high standards at Bloomsbury Press, as well as have a personal life?

PG: Thanks for all those flattering adjectives. I squeeze the blog in as best I can, and readers will probably notice that I sometimes go a long time between posts, which mostly reflects how much else is going on in my working life at any given time.

DM: You wake up one day and decide to pitch it all to write a great book. What would the subject be and who would edit it?

PG: I have often thought I’d like to write about the history of publishing in the early 20th century, which is so often held up as a golden age. I’d love to examine how the dynamics of the industry worked. I suspect the book business in Maxwell Perkins’ day was closer to ours than we commonly believe.

DM: The Publishing Industry is facing enormous challenges in the not so distant future. A number of smaller Houses have closed, Literary Agencies are taking on fewer, if not more select clients. Paint us a picture of the Publishing Industry five years from now.

PG: Predicting the future of publishing even two years from now is probably impossible. But I think within ten years it will look very different. E-books will be a much bigger piece of the market, but we don’t know whether they’ll be the predominant format. Conversely, retail bookstores will be many fewer in number. The shrinking of retail space is going to hurt the revenues of publishers, big publishers in particular, and we may well see more consolidation of major houses. I suspect author advances will go down on average—again I mean at the larger houses. Meanwhile I think we’ll see an increase, maybe an explosion, of alternatives to the big-house model of publishing. Smaller houses, e-book-only publishers, houses that sell books on a subscription basis as well as conventional print sales. Maybe every bookstore will have an Espresso machine printing books on demand in the front window.

Amazon, Crossings, and J. A. Konrath: Is This Week a "Game Changer"?

Sarah Weinman has a good post up at Daily Finance about two announcements this week from Amazon: first that they have made a deal to publish a new, original book by crime author J. A. Konrath in their Amazon Encores program, previously devoted to republishing older and out-of-print titles. Konrath, who has promoted his own work very effectively on the web and has blogged about how successfully he has sold his work at a very low price on Kindle, parted company with the trade house who had published his earlier books and now will sell his work directly through Amazon.  Weinman points out that, alongside the second announcement--that Amazon will start a wholly new publishing program called Crossings that will publish literature in translation (books formerly unavailable in the U.S.)--that the online retailing behemoth will now be competing directly with publishers, in an arena where Amazon has some powerful advantages. 

With an admirable trace of hesitation at trotting out the buzzword of 2010, Sarah calls these developments "game changing" and quotes the ever-brainy Mike Shatzkin in support of the statement. Meanwhile the also-savvy MJ Rose has a great post at her blog making a seemingly contrary statement: she says there are no game changers any more.  So has the game changed, or not? 

At the risk of saying "everybody's right," I have to take a different point of view: I agree with Weinman and Shatzkin that it's a momentous development if Amazon is really going to start competing head to head with publishers. They have already started picking off the backlist of major authors like Stephen Covey and Paulo Coelho, and if they are now going to get into the frontlist business things will get more interesting. But if you look at the larger picture, it's this: EVERYTHING is changing. So many elements of the industry as I've known it are in play that the one thing we can be sure of is, the game is going to be different five or ten years from now. But I think it's way too early to know whether this particular play of Amazon's is going to be decisive in their favor. Here are some things we don't know that will bear on the answer:

The market for books in translation (as Mike S. points out) has historically been pretty small. Can Amazon's retailing power make it much bigger? If not, the Crossings move may be less significant. 

Will Amazon really want to be in the editorial business? It's one thing to find worthy or marketable backlist titles or new books by authors who have proved themselves. Seeking works undervalued in the current marketplace--like translations--is a logical next step. But to truly compete with publishers, Amazon will need editors--people who find new books and attempt to choose ones that will connect with readers. This process is inherently unpredictable and therefore risky and inefficient--very different from their algorithm-driven business of selling existing books, even obscure "long tail" titles. I suspect Amazon Crossings will find, even with the company's unique ability to reach, say, "readers who bought French novels by women in translation," that some titles on their list do much better than others. 

How big a share of the e-book market can Amazon retain as e-readers proliferate? This question is complicated by the fact that you can read Kindle books on devices beside the Kindle, but whether authors are willing to give Amazon exclusivity on their e-books will surely depend on how much of the market they risk giving up.

Or, will Apple decide to compete with Amazon in the same way? The explosive growth of the iBooks store is going to give Apple similar power to Amazon's in presenting authors to readers. So far they have taken a very different approach, dealing only with the biggest publishers and a few aggregators. But they deal directly with thousands of suppliers in the App Store, and may well move in that direction once iBooks are well established.  

How will contract terms shift between authors and publishers in the coming years? Konrath points out that he makes more money self-publishing via Kindle for $2.99 a copy than he might have in a conventional print deal with a major house, Hyperion, at $14.99. If author/publisher deals evolve, as they are likely to, will the marketing and distribution power of a big publisher become less easy to give up? 

How many authors will be able to replicate Konrath's success at marketing himself? Amazon didn't pick Konrath to sign up just because of the quality of his writing. He has been a creative and assiduous promoter of his work, as Jason Pinter observes in a HuffPost piece. In my experience only handful of authors have the marketing savvy and drive Konrath has shown. If you're already a bestselling author, or a celebrity, you may not need Konrath's smarts. But the model that works for Konrath or Covey may not work for a majority of authors. (This of course still leaves the danger for publishers of Amazon creaming off the most profitable books at the top of the sales curve.) 

How will the role of agents affect the way all this unfolds? I'm not the first person to notice that if there's a danger to publishers in disintermediation, there's a real risk of it for agents too. If all an author needs to do to make $400 a day is upload titles to the Kindle store (as Konrath says he's doing), does she need an agent for that? There's a disincentive for agents to move toward a world where they can't auction projects to Random, Hachette et al. Will they push authors in a different direction, and how many authors will value their agents' advice more than the revenue the agents carve off the author's income? 

I realize I'm much better at asking questions on this blog than at giving answers. But my point here is that with the book marketplace in flux in so many different directions (the above are only a few), it's not even totally clear what "game" we're playing, much less whether even big news like this week's has "changed" it. 

Illustration: Matrix Chessboard, via Wikimedia Commons

When the Publisher Gets the Last Word, It's Often "Goodbye"

In my last post discussing why publishers, in general, don't fact-check their authors' work, I mentioned that it's accepted in the business that the author has ultimate say over the text. While an editor may request, urge, pester, or cajole an author to make a certain change (I have done all of the above), the author gets to say yes or no to it. But as one reader, Judith Ingracia, pointed out, that's not the whole story. 


Publishers have one final recourse if the author refuses to make a change we think is critical: we can refuse to publish the book. Boilerplate contract language requires the author to deliver a manuscript that is "satisfactory" to the house. So if the author digs in her heels, and refuses to revise something that the editor feels will make the book unmarketable--or perhaps, may make it libelous or otherwise legally questionable--or again, let's say, untruthful--the author and publisher may simply part ways. 


Judith asked, 

the book belongs to the author, but if the author wants a *published* book, he/she better listen to the publisher, at least that's what I gather. Am I mistaken in this view? 

Good question. My answer is, you're not mistaken, but the threat of cancellation is almost too blunt an instrument to use as a tool in editorial negotiations. canceling a book amounts to using the "nuclear option," laying waste to the whole project and vaporizing the time everyone has invested in it. (Quite likely vaporizing the publisher's money, too, as on-signing advances can be difficult to recoup.) I'm happy to say this situation has arisen very few times in own experience, but it has happened--it's very unpleasant for all parties involved. 


In general, editors will sigh and let an author get away with some pretty misguided writing before they try reject a manuscript--threatening termination is so traumatic to an author that I at least rarely mention it unless it's a real possibility. In fact, with nonfiction, one would rarely cancel a book for mere differences of editorial opinion: it would most likely be over issues of veracity, accuracy, or legal liability. 

(National Lampoon cover from January 1973, 

photograph by Ronald G. Harris from a concept by Ed Bluestone)

Should Publishers Trust Their Authors? or, Hiroshima Mon Cul

[Thanks to the Huffington Post, which ran this piece on their lively Books page today. You may see future posts of mine there from time to time.]

The kerfuffle of the week has been the news that an acclaimed new book, The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino, had to be withdrawn by its publisher following the revelation that important details in it, including the testimony of a supposed eyewitness source, were apparently fabricated. 

As happened in earlier cases of authors doctoring the truth, some readers have raised questions about "quality control" problems in publishing, and asked, don't publishers fact-check their products?

Well, no, actually. A major difference between book and magazine or newspaper publishing is that publishers don't have fact-checkers on staff, and never have. This is not, as some cynics might suppose, because book publishers don't care about accuracy as long as a book sells. It's partly because, unlike those media where advertisers support (or used to) a large editorial staff, book publishing has been a far leaner enterprise (or as some would say, a cottage industry).  But a more important reason, I believe, is that in book publishing, unlike journalism, the content has traditionally belonged to the author, not to the house.

This is reflected in book contracts, where copyright is typically retained by the author; more to the point, it's firmly established in publishing culture that you never make editorial changes without an author's consent. As an editor you may lean pretty hard on an author to make revisions you feel are necessary (Gordon Lish's interventions with Raymond Carver being the extreme example)--but ultimately, "the book belongs to the author," and to change it or not is his or her prerogative. With that prerogative goes, inevitably, a greater responsibility for the quality of what you write.

Now, any good publisher wants to produce the best books possible. While we don't have fact-checkers, we have copyeditors who go through manuscripts with a fine-tooth comb, after the editor has already worked with the author to get the book in shape. I have done my own fact-checking from time to time when an author's statement seemed questionable, and the best copyeditors will frequently check sources as well as spelling and punctuation. Furthermore,  any manuscript that might raise issues such of defamation or privacy goes through a careful legal review. In the end, though, we have to trust our authors.

I don't take on a work of nonfiction, especially a controversial or even unconventional one, without satisfying myself, perhaps just at gut level, that the author is presenting the truth responsibly. But I have to recognize that I can be fooled. Reading about the case of Charles Pellegrino, who supposedly produced--or at least, said he had--documentation of his bogus souce (who was a real person, but apparently not present at the event he claimed to witness), I suspect I might well have accepted the author's account.

Once we have decided to trust an author, we usually give him or her the benefit of the doubt on matters of fact just as on matters of style or argument. Of course, this leaves us vulnerable. But in book publishers' defense, the impulse to trust the people you work with is a hard one to overcome. Look at the cases of Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, or Jayson Blair, whose fabrications sailed through the presumably gimlet-eyed fact-checking operations of the Washington Post, New Republic, and New York Times respectively.

(Photo of the Bocca della Verita, or Mouth of Truth, at the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome, via Wikimedia Commons. It's said that if you tell a lie with your hand in the mouth of the sculpture, it will be bitten off. Maybe every publisher needs one of these?)

The Perfect Book to Read in a Blizzard: Cro-Magnon, the Story of Ice Age Humans

With the mid-Atlantic region recovering from one blizzard and bracing for another, we might be forgiven for wondering whether, instead of worrying about global warming, we ought to be learning how to make igloos. Let me call your attention to the perfect book to read after shoveling three feet of snow off your walk: Brian Fagan's Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans.

Cro-Magnon people were the first fully modern Europeans. We know them best for their stunning cave paintings at Lascaux, Altamira and elsewhere. But the Cro-Magnons were not just artistically gifted; they were ingeniously inventive. In fact they were the most adaptable and technologically creative people that had yet lived on earth. They lived side by side with an older species, Neanderthals, for some 15,000 years. In the end, the Cro-Magnons were better able to cope with the changing climate as the ice age blanketed Europe: they had better tools, better communication, and warmer clothes. They survived and Neanderthals faded away.

I really enjoy working Brian Fagan, an archaeologist who has a gift rare in his profession for bringing the prehistoric past to life. He can evoke the mystery of a cave flickering with torchlight, or the hesitant, wordless encounter of a Cro-Magnon hunting party and a Neanderthal settlement. A few pages later he can explain the cutting-edge techniques scientists use to date and interpret artifacts or tiny fragments of bone. And he can provide illuminating insights into the ingenuity of humans, revealing how what seem like simple innovations could push human history forward. For instance, what tool--probably more important than the wheel--allowed our Cro-Magnon ancestors to make it though the frigid winters of the Ice Age? The needle. With a sliver of bone pierced at one end, it was possible to sew together hides or furs and make real clothes. Imagine shoveling your walk, or chasing a deer, while trying to keep a bear hide draped over your shoulders and you'll see pretty clearly why this is important. 

If you have enjoyed the works of Jared Diamond--or for that matter, Clan of the Cave Bear and its bestselling sequels, I think you'll find Cro-Magnon an absorbing read. Here's a brief interview with Brian about the book. (Someone said he looks "like Indiana Jones's dad." I think she's got a point there.) 

(For more information on Brian Fagan and his other books, including the New York Times bestseller The Great Warming, visit www.brianfagan.com.)

Two New Approaches to Publishing: Notes from Digital Book World

I’m just back from attending the Digital Book World conference. I thought briefly about attempting to give an overview of  the whole thing, but there’s way too much ground to cover. For what might be called the strobe-light account, I recommend searching Twitter for #dbw, where many participants tweeted updates from the panels. And Publishers Lunch has posted summaries of most of the key sessions.

Out of many informative and sometimes provocative presentations—and unfortunately I missed several because I could only be in one room at a time—two new “business models” that people talked about yesterday especially intrigued me. One might be called an attempt to fix what’s most broken with the traditional big-house trade publishing business. In that sense it’s backward rather than forward-looking, but a smart and promising way of addressing our problems. 

First, the profit-sharing model of HarperStudio, as explained by founder Bob Miller, where instead of traditional advances and royalties (he reports), the publisher pays a small advance, but splits all revenue, minus direct costs (but not overheads) evenly with the author. The beauty of this approach is not only that it drastically decreases the house’s unearned advance risk, but that it aligns the interest of publisher and author more closely throughout the process.

Marketing budgets and strategies, for instance, can come out of a conversation between publisher and author, not the kind of negotiation where the author and publisher haggle over whether to spend on a book party or a publicity tour.  Bob’s account of the warm fuzzy feelings between HarperStudio and its authors sounds almost too good to be true, but as someone who has always tried to make the author part of the publishing team, even with a more conventional contract, I think there is a lot going for his program. (Roger Cooper’s Vanguard Press, which also offers authors less money up front, more later, plus a guaranteed marketing budget, is a similar and also appealing consultative approach.)

If HarperStudio and Vanguard are smart attempts to fix what’s broken in Big Publishing, Richard Nash’s Cursor is an attempt to “skate to where the puck is going to be,” in Wayne Gretzky terms. Looking forward to the likely future (see my post from Monday) when general-interest publishing is a relic and the publisher’s relationship with a community of interest is its key asset, Cursor envisions selling those dedicated readers not just books, but a variety of ways of interacting with authors—expensive, deluxe editions; 99-cent e-books; even classes or other forms of in-person access. As Richard noted in his presentation, paying $25,000 for an MFA, as thousands in our country do annually, is really a very expensive way of buying access to established writers.  Also novel is his plan to make contracts with three-year terms (and no advances), in the belief the publisher should earn the author's ongoing loyalty rather than aking him  (His session, too featured some other innovative models, Eoin Purcell’s Greenlamp and Angela James’s digital-first Carina Press at Harlequin. Cursor seems to me the most ambitious of the three.)

These ventures have been much written about already,  and in truth it's too early to say how well the results will pan out over the long term.  But they look to me like really welcome developments which, if they work, could point the way for publishers large and small to follow. I wish them all success and will be following them closely.

Arrrh! The E-Book Piracy Nightmare Scenario

Just yesterday my first Unanswered Question about the future of publishing was, Is pirating of books, which is now so easy to do, going to be an annoyance--i.e. a perpetual problem, but one that is not large enough seriously to affect the industry--or is it going to take a huge, crippling bite out of sales as it seems to have done in the music business? Right on cue, Sathnam Sanghera of the London Times has stepped in with an article that offers his own alarming answer, looking at how digital downloads have affected the music industry. Citing the Digital Music Report 2010, he writes that the industry

has been decimated. Even though legitimate digital sales have grown nearly ten-fold in the past five years, overall the music industry’s global sales have fallen 30 per cent over the same period. Illegal downloads still account for 95 per cent of music downloads worldwide.

I don't happen to believe that the music business is a perfect analogue for book publishing. For one thing, the experience of listening to a song from your iPod is he same as listening to it from a CD, but reading a book on your Kindle is not the same as reading a hardcover.  So I suspect printed books are going to remain a much bigger piece of the market than either CDs or vinyl did.  


I also think Sanghera's article conflates different approaches to "free" book content. He treats publishers deliberately giving away free samples to spur sales as if it were the same as illegal file sharing. Nonetheless, it's salutary to be reminded of just how cavalier consumers can be about paying for the sweat of an author's brow.  To go from the faceless statistics of the Digital Music Report to the anecdotal evidence of one candid ripoff artist, just read this eye-opening interview from The Millions with one file-sharer calling him- (or her) self The Real Caterpillar. 

In the past month, I have uploaded approximately 50 books to the torrent site where you contacted me. I am much less active then I once was. I used to scan many books, but in the past two years I have only done a few.

"Only" 50 books uploaded this month!

Caterpillar has a complicated morally self-justifying calculus by which he/she doesn't pirate new books by some authors, to "avoid causing noticeable financial harm to the author whose work I love enough to spend so much time working on getting a nice e-copy if I were to do so." But Caterpillar cheerfully acknowledges "it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing" while continuing to do so. 


It seems pretty likely most file-sharers don't even bother to think about the moral issues this much while they do their Blackbeard act on authors', and publishers', livelihoods.  Having read these two articles back to back today makes me feel that anyone who doesn't think piracy is going to be a really significant problem in the coming years is being willfully naive. 

(illustration by the great Howard Pyle, from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates--copyright expired!)

Amazon "Fires Missile" at Book Publishers--But Is the Target Really Apple?

I had hoped to avoid writing about e-books for a while, not because I don't think they are interesting but because I'm reluctant to have one topic monopolize this page. But  developments are coming fast and furious in this quarter of publishing so you can expect to see a lot more about this here for the foreseeable future.  Witness two events of the last couple of days: First, we learned that Apple has been in discussion with the "Big Six" publishers about terms for making e-books available on their much-bruited new tablet computer. According to Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch, these discussions center around an "agency model" in which--unlike other e-tailers (notably Amazon)--publishers will own their book files and set prices while Apple will in effect take a commission on those sales rather than buy and resell the books to consumers. Although the functional difference between "reselling" and "licensing" is trivial, as Cader points out, it's huge to publishers because it gives them control over pricing and allows them to experiment in this area, instead of acceding in Amazon's attempt to commodify all titles at $9.99 or less. 

Almost simultaneously with this news, Amazon announced a new e-book model for publishers and authors, offering a 70 percent royalty (a big improvement on their usual terms) with certain key conditions--including a) the e-book must be priced no higher than $9.99 and b) it must be at least 20 percent lower than the printed book price.  

There seems to be some confusion about what this announcement means. Henry Blodget, at The Industry Insider, hollers that this move "fires a missile at the book industry" and will force publishers to cut their prices for e-books; also that it " should also solidify Amazon's already tremendous dominance of the ebook business" by enhancing the popularity of the Kindle. 

I think Blodget has it backward: Amazon is staring at the possibility, even likelihood, that a host of new e-readers--numerous models have been announced--will rapidly grab much of its share of the e-book market. Many readers, me included, actually prefer buying e-books via the Kindle store, then reading them on iPhones with their crisper more responsive display. When we can read them on a large-screen Apple tablet--and buy them via an elegant, simple Apple-designed e-book store (or through iTunes), we won't need either Amazon or Kindle. 

In other words, Amazon is trying to compete on price while Apple and others compete on quality and features. So far, Apple has been highly successful at that kind of contest. In short, I see this as a would-be preemptive strike by Amazon in anticipation of the Apple tablet. Amazon is going to be a major player in this market for the foreseeable future, but rather than being the game-changing "missile," their current move seems like an admission that they will no longer be a sole 600-pound gorilla. 

So far these events seem like good news for publishers. With several players competing to sell e-books to the public, we're less likely to be bullied by one of them, and with these differerent business models in effect we may be able to accelerate the necessary process of trial and error regarding pricing, timing and so on. 

Still, one aspect of the new Amazon pitch has the potential to further destabilize the marketplace and threaten publishers. The 70-percent royalty is surely meant to attract authors to make direct deals with Amazon, cutting out publishing houses altogether. Amazon may well offer even better terms to carry a certain e-book exclusively. This has already happened with one bestselling author, as I've discussed here. If this becomes a major trend, it could really damage publishers' profits and they can't afford to take this threat lightly. 

Where Do Authors Come From?

One question editors are frequently asked at cocktail parties is, "where do you find the books you publish? Do they all come from agents?"  Some editors, probably wiser ones than I, simply answer, "Yep." My answer is, you never know where you are going to find a publishable book or a promising author. True, the vast majority of titles I publish (probably 95 percent) come from literary agents. But a few come from other sources. When I was at Oxford University Press, many of our authors submitted their work directly, and an important part of an academic editor's job is maintaining relationships with important people in the field (whose graduate students may be the star authors of the future). I still, happily, publish some scholars whom I deal with directly.

I also believe that a good editor will create his own books: instead of sitting at a desk waiting for someone to send you something, you think of an idea for a book and go looking for the right author. Very often, that author has an agent, but creating a book this way is different from, and sometimes more satisfying than, leaving it to other people to bring you stuff.  I have published several titles, from how-to books to award-winning works of history, that came from me pitching ideas to authors.

Another happy occurrence is when authors refer their friends or colleagues to you. Some of my best authors have come to me through authors I've worked with who suggested a friend or colleague contact me. Again, often this connection involves an agent, but it's not quite the same as the agent flipping through her Rolodex and putting my name on a list. I always take referrals from an author very seriously whether or not an agent makes the submission.

But as I say, you might find an author anywhere. Many years ago, before internet shopping existed, I was an impecunious editorial assistant who bought shoes from mail-order catalogues. One day I phoned an order in to Land's End and found myself having a longer conversation than usual with the customer service rep. Hearing that my shipping address was "Persea Books," he said, "Oh, are you a publisher? I'm just learning about the publishing business now, because I'm writing a novel." This aspiring writer was working at Land's End to pay the bills, and while he actually had an agent, he wasn't going to miss an opportunity.  My shoes arrived promptly, with a literary fiction manuscript as a free bonus.

This story might be funnier if the manuscript were lousy, but on the contrary, it was quite well written. In fact, I thought it was too quiet and literary to sell, and turned it down--but a couple of years later, I saw the same manuscript was published by Simon & Schuster. Where do you find authors--or publishers? You never know.




P.S. This story is not meant to suggest I yearn for unsolicited and unagented manuscripts. I will write at another time about the slush pile, and why I don't read it any more.

How to Make a Small Fortune in Publishing, or, A Bit More on the E-Book Wars

Whew. As I might have expected, last week’s posts on the E-Book Wars (part 1 here and 2 here) attracted a lot of lively and thoughtful comments. They expressed several points of view but two opposing themes can be seen.

One group of commenters asks: Who needs publishers? In a digital marketplace authors can readily reach readers directly. Sure, editing is important but, wrote one, “what’s to stop authors from forming consortiums that hire editors?” Instead of settling for a big publisher’s split of royalties, you could distribute the book yourself and keep 100 percent of the profits, or use a service like Smashwords that offers an 85 percent share. This commenter continued, “Right now the business model is that writers are the suppliers of publishers. But it is conceivable that it could become the other way around.”

Another group sticks up for publishers. In defense of Random House’s claim to control e-book rights, these commenters noted that “Books are words in a precise order and meant to be read,” and ask why an e-book is any different. They also point out “the amount of time, effort and money [involved in] making what goes between the two covers of a traditional book.” They ask, not unreasonably, shouldn’t the publisher be entitled to a significant share of income from an e-book whose value is enhanced by the careful editing, copyediting, proofreading, and so on that go into it?

Both groups have legitimate points to make. The book business looks from one perspective like publishers “buy” content from authors and then resell it. But from another perspective, we’re providing a service—enabling the author to reach readers (and collect money for his content). Around Bloomsbury we sometimes say “the author is our customer.” In a sense we are selling the services of editing, design, printing, marketing, distribution and so on. Could a group of authors do the same things themselves? Yes. Of course, then in effect they’d become….publishers. An authors’ co-op might produce more money for writers than a conventional publishing contract, but I don’t know if it would make either writing or publishing radically more lucrative.

As old hands in the business like to say, “If you want to make small fortune in publishing, start with a large one.”

Much ink and many pixels have been spilled on the Random House e-rights issue discussed here last week, and I don’t think I’ll wade into that still-unsettled question again now. I would observe here that although I raised questions about Random’s position on backlist contracts, I agree with them, and most every other publisher, that e-book rights should not be separated from print rights.

Reading a book is reading a book, whether the item being read is a hardcover, a Kindle, or a PDF on a laptop. Amazon and other e-vangelists argue that e-book sales are additional to print sales—that e-book lovers wouldn’t be buying print copies if they weren’t reading them on their Kindles. I’m sure that is true for some books and some readers, but to some extent we know e-book sales replace print sales. It’s clearly essential for a publisher to control all versions of a book that their readers might want to buy. That much is widely accepted by both houses and agents, though there is still debate about what royalties should be paid.

I also agree that those who want to chop down publishers’ share of e-book royalties are often neglecting the big picture. Not only do publishers enhance the value of an author’s work by editing, proofreading and performing those other tasks that go into producing the product you find in a bookstore. They perform a range of other functions that contribute materially to that value. And one of the most important things that publishers do to market electronic books is—sell printed books! I’ll talk about this more in a future post.

(illustration: Grub Street, later known as Milton Street, from Chambers' Book of Days)