Traditional Publishing is Dead

Well, maybe not dead now, but more like Dead Man Walking dead. I say this because the sales of e-readers like the Kindle are taking off in an explosive, exponential fashion. Very shortly, faster than almost anyone is realizing now, the traditional publishing houses will be going the way of Tower Records unless they can figure out how to do things very differently. This is already starting to happen for fiction. Authors like Joe Konrath are demonstrating that you can do quite well epublishing without a large publisher behind you. I tend to edge away from the phrase “self-publishing” because it carries the taint of a work that is so amateurish that no “real” publisher will carry it. But that is changing rapidly.

What do publishers do for you? Well, they can offer a nice advance. I have done respectably in that department. And they have a sales force that sells the book to bookstores. And they work on marketing it, setting up media interviews, etc. That all seems to be a pretty sweet deal that is hard to pass up for the less sure and less prestigious route of “self-publishing” (there, I said it).

But let’s look more closely at the traditional route. Yes, advances are nice, but you tend to get 25% on signing, 25% on completion, 25% on publication and 25% when the paperback comes out. So you only really get one-quarter in advance of writing, and only a half in advance of sales. And once you complete the book, it takes about a year for the publisher to take it through the publishing process and get it out in bookstores. They really resist putting photos in the book–that adds a lot to the cost of paper printing–and you can forget color plates, which blow away the cost and expenses estimate they made when they purchased the book proposal. With direct electronic publishing, you can insert an unlimited number of graphics, web-links and other things that totally change the reading experience.

And editors don’t really edit anymore. Non-writers are often surprised by this. First-time authors are surprised by this.

Publishers have a sales staff to talk up the book to bookstores, but if everyone starts e-reading, will bookstores die faster than they are already? Will they matter at all?

The marketing, in addition, is not very good or for very long. The accountants have realized that they really only make money on one or two books per season, they just don’t know which of the 20 books on the list will be the money makers. So as soon as the books are out there and the business people see which are taking off, they can concentrate on those and forget the others.

Now let’s look at the economics for authors. First point goes to the trad pubs: that advance is nice. (Although often I’ve spent a year writing the proposal.) But the whole thing gets spread out over at least three years (four, if you include the proposal writing year). Self pubs can start earning money as soon as you put it out. Here’s the clincher: a book may cost $27, of which the author earns $2-3, less if the books is sold (as they often are) at a steep discount to volume buyers or on the paperback or electronic edition. But put your own book out in Kindle, say for $10 (or $5 or even $1 if you want to go for volume) and you get 70% of that. You do or pay for your own layout and marketing, but that is not bad. Those numbers from Joe Konrath show that you can make a decent living that way. For now, these successes are mostly in fiction. But non-fiction will follow.

In another post I will talk about how trad pubs and bookstores can survive, and how I see the publishing ecosystem changing.

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