Archive for February, 2009

I mean, I have a master’s in English, an MFA in creative writing, teach writing and I work in a bookstore. You all (all six of you) know this. Everyday, though, I am starting to become ever more concerned about the state of publishing/books/literacy in this country.

Remember the HarperCollins is just Harper’s thing from last week? Well, I currently (stupidly) hold a “supervisory” style position at the bookmines and everything I keep hearing from further up the chain is…what’s bleaker than bleak? My particular bookmine is actually not doing too badly, but my bookmine is also at one of the most affluent malls in north america. Even when the other 99.9999999 percent of the country has no extra money OC asshats driving BMW’s will still drop money at my mall. Now that’s good for me personally because it means I keep getting checks from bookmines inc., but in general the company is expecting things to get a lot worse. What’s bad for us, the humble bookminers, is even worse for the publishing companies because we also sell other shit that isn’t books. Hell, our “stationary” division is one of the most profitable parts of our business.

So I’m idly waiting for the inevitable implosion of the NY publishing industry when I happen upon this (thanks mojo), which I’ll now share the most important (I think) excerpt of:

If King, Dan Brown, JK Rowling and Patricia Cornwell were all to decide to move to selling their books online themselves, rather than going through a publisher, they’d certainly benefit financially. Typically, an author only receives about £1 for every copy of their book sold. Rather than relying on a publisher, big-name authors could afford to simply employ an editor, a PR person, a typesetter and a designer. They could price their books at only £2 or £3 and still make much more money than under the current system.

But without the revenue from these authors underpinning the publishers, the current system would be unworkable. And what would happen then? It’s hard to know. Clearly publishing houses would have to become much smaller, and authors who aren’t international bestsellers wouldn’t be able to benefit from the useful upfront advances. It would be harder to keep writing as a midlist author if you didn’t have a private income. People would still want to seek out great new writers, and so the brands of well-known publishers would still be valuable, enabling readers to sort the wheat from the chaff. But Penguin, Harper Collins and Random House could just become badges on ebook aggregator channels rather than the book-production engines they are today.

In a lot of ways, I would like to see the major houses crumble. If stroll through the “Fiction” section of any bookstore you find (there are exceptions, of course) a lot of novels that sound alike, look alike, and are written alike. Say what you want about music labels stifling the evolution of music (indie labels/bands have been making and selling music for decades) it is WAY harder for a small publishing house to sustain itself. God help you if you are an author with even wisps of non-traditionality in your writing (again, there are always exceptions). In my mind, I see the crumbling of the NY publishing houses as a way of freeing writers, both artistically and logistically. Maybe it would be harder to make money as writer if Stephen King were to self publish, but last I checked it’s nearly fucking impossible to make money at it while he isn’t self publishing so from where I stand it’s no different.

One thing it would definitely change, though, is book retail. If the larger houses no longer accounted for a majority of fiction sales in this country (if all the major writers followed the above formula) then retailers (if there were any left) would be more free to stock their stores as they saw fit. Either that or every non-used book store in the country would just fold up as well.

Anyway…

On a slightly related matter, click this link and vote for Knights of the Cornerstone for Best Fantasy Novel. Even if you haven’t read it!

Kate Nash — We Get On