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Google and the Future of Publishing

Joe Esposito, at the Society for Scholarly Publishing blog, offers tough-minded comments about Google in a post titled "Publishing in the Google Ecosystem." He notes widespread misgivings, especially in Europe, about Google's ever-expanding array of online book content, to which his response is:

Google is now the defining entity in the information landscape.  To flourish, as best as publishers can hope to flourish, it’s necessary to find a place within the Google ecosystem.  There is no world elsewhere, no little pocket of commerce beyond the reach of Google’s audience aggregation, no opportunity to erect protectionist barriers or to appeal to the legacy of one’s own institutions.  To those who resent Google’s huge bulk and ambition, it has to be said:  Get over it.

There are some interesting replies in the comment thread, disputing some of his premises--the whole discussion is worth reading. My own take, as of now, is much along the lines of Esposito's. I worry about any one company having so much power, not just over my industry but in the cultural marketplace in general. But: a) Google is a fact, and it's simply not going to go away and b) Its products and tools have already been enormously beneficial to publishers and authors (and we have by no means fully exploited them). There's no single more pervasive, more perennial, more frustrating problem in selling any book than the number of people who don't know it exists. 

I'll talk about this more in a future post. But to me it seems clear that Google is the best solution for this problem that we've ever had. We may be skeptical as to whether Google is a force for good or feel that publishers and authors should have a greater share of the revenue Google reaps from book content. But since Google's not going away any time soon, our task is to use it to the fullest.

What's the Value of an Editor?

Trevor Dolby, publisher of Random House UK’s imprint Preface, wrote on BookBrunch the other day about the undervaluing of editorial talent around the industry: the failure of big houses to nurture their best editors. He makes an essential point: publishing is a creative business, and a publishing house is only as good as its editorial staff. Dolby is writing of the UK specifically but one could argue we have a similar problem here.  True, we celebrate some veteran editors with distinguished track records (and deservedly so—see my post from last Thursday). And from time to time a younger one earns public attention—whether it’s a Gary Fisketjon inventing Vintage Contemporaries or an Elizabeth Schmitz seeing the promise in a partial script of Cold Mountain. But as a whole it’s a weakness of our trade that we don’t do as well as we should at spotting, training, or retaining the talented editors of the future.

One of the problems is that the criteria by which editors are judged are fuzzy in the extreme. It might seem horribly crass to evaluate editors purely on the financial results of their acquisitions, and few houses do so. At a few places—the most sensible ones in my opinion—editors are judged partly on their dollar contribution, partly on more subjective measures such as the quality of the titles they have published or whether they have developed authors with future promise. But at many houses, no consistent analysis of editors’ value is ever done. Editors are expected to “bring in big books,” and they go off, lunch furiously, and bring them back as ordered, but what this means is they’re rewarded for huge, splashy acquisitions that frequently turn out to be economic disasters for the company.

Lacking a rigorous method, or simply the habit, of determining which editors are really valuable, management sometimes seems to conclude they are fungible. So some really bright younger ones—or “expensive” older ones—get scythed when it’s time to downsize, as we have seen this year.

And it’s not just the young talent that we find ourselves missing. I remember the downturn of the early 90s, when it seemed a whole generation of veteran editors, along with many of my junior peers, were laid off. Literally hundreds of years of publishing experience and institutional memory walked out the doors of Publishers Row. A great many of those editors are working full time as freelancers today—supplying editorial skills that the houses who fired them found they needed after all. 

Heavy "Whither" Ahead: The Changing Business Model Continued

I asked in an earlier post this week, "Whither BookExpo?" The "Whither"-led headline is the journalist's ironic rubric for the inconclusive, chin-pulling article that muses on the future of Literature, the Iraq War, Marriage, or whatever. We have seen a lot of these pieces in the publishing trade in the last couple of years and we certainly have a few more years ahead of us. Almost every aspect of the business is in flux.

One of them is the role of agents. It's hard to say who is more threatened by the prospect of "disintermediation," as it becomes ever easier for writers to sell their work to readers directly--publishers, booksellers, or agents? Right now the first two are feeling the stresses and strains of change more than the agents are, but I think it will soon become apparent that agents have no less to lose. I don't believe that any of us have become obsolete, but we're all going to have to reconfigure our roles in the literary ecosystem.
This thought is prompted today by a Mike Shatzkin blog post about a conversation he had with three agents about this very topic. If these three are representative, agents are also groping for a handle on how their business can and should change.  "Whither Agenting?" is another question in the air.