Anna DeStefano's Blog

Let’s do some analysis today. I’m providing links to other articles out there (bloggers with interesting takes, though as you’ll see, opinions I don’t necessarily agree with).

1) Is print publishing dead, and is digital going to rule the world?

This guy (the self-appointed “king” of digital book sales) thinks so:

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/08/death-of-print/

Read the comments on this one to see a great discussion from both sides of the issue.

For me, I’m buying my first reader later this year after watching them fight each other for market position (and I’ll be buying the iPad once they work the kinks out and get the second generation going, because it offers so much more than just a reader for the same price). But I won’t be giving up my “keeper” shelves of books. Ever. We’re looking at merging markets, folks.

We’re looking at a world where both forms (and future forms) of reading will become more readily availabe to everyone (when as it stands, something like 75% of us still don’t use a reader and mass market paperbacks increasingly can’t find a home for us to find them in, in bookstores and discount stores).

2) Is Dorchester down for the count?

This article seems to be offering to order their tomb stone for them:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paperback_publisher_goes_all_e-book.php

It’s interesting when they say that Dorchester hasn’t weathered the recession well, since IT’S sales were down %25 last year (this number borrowed from the WSJ article I mentioned in my Day 1 post).

Let me just say, again from my experience as part of the industry, serving on the board of a large writing organization the first year of the recession, and working for several imprints and two different large publishers, that EVERY publisher has had significant trouble weathering the recession. That 25% statistic is mostly likely reflective of the industry as a whole (and helps us understand why Borders and now B&N are also struggling). Again, as I said on Day 1, everyone’s struggling and all of us are buying less of everything. Dorchester’s trying to find ways to cut costs and make money in an at-the-moment loss-leading industry sooner than other publishers, but by no means is this their problem alone.

Articles like this give me a pain. They’re asking questions like are e-books the mass market paperbacks of the future OR are they simply a cheaper means to deliver books to the largest audience. In no way is this an either or question. The form of the mass market paperback isn’t even the issue. The crux of the delima Dorchester and other publishers are dealing with is how to get print books created, warehoused and shipped to stores without a publisher losing their shirts to do it.

In my opinion, the parts of the industry that will be down for the count if the digital model prevails are the printers, wholesalers, distributors and book sellers. The publishers who figure out how to make the digital model work will continue to do business, without the excessive cost and overhead of having to deal with the rest.

The Print On Demand (POD) model Dorchester is exploring is the part of this shift getting the least attention at the moment, and I don’t understand it. There’s a way to make this work (printing smaller runs, warehouse next to nothing, getting stores books quickly without having to pay wholesalers to carry your assets, and eliminating the stripping of books solely at the publisher’s expense). It’s only a matter of time before someone figures it out. Dorchester’s just pushing up the timeline, rather laying on the mat, down for the count, while their time runs out. Good for them, I say.

3) Is the digital/POD publishing model a ploy to rob and pillage authors of their hard-earned money?

No links this time. As I said in my Day 3 post, not going to do the gossip thing here. If you want to indulge, the posts are easy enough to find.

Did authors get hit hard by this? Yes. Is this the last time a change made by a publisher will take its authors by surprise? No. Does that make the circumstances of this situation any easier for the authors involved to deal with? No.

As I said on Day 3, there are real people involved in this unfolding drama. Real lives and dreams and books we’ve worked damn hard on with editors we love. Real decisions to be made beyond the sensationalizing of the situation for the benefit of those who like to watch a house burn to see whether or not the flames can be put out. It’s amazing to me how few of the vehement posts and tweets flying around are actually in support of the authors themselves.

There’s a lot of raging and finger pointing going on out there. But not as far as I can see a lot of trying to understand where the authors are coming from now, how they’re dealing with this change, and what they’re take on all this is. And these are the people we can learn a lot from as we watch them grow and conquer this challenge. Let’s focus on the people a bit more, is all I’m saying.

The industry will shake itself out. Writers will keep writing, and we’ll find a way to make money at it or we’ll go back to writing for ourselves, because that’s what writers do–we write because we have to, even if no one else ever reads a word of it. This is an opportunity to watch our industry change around us and cheer each other on. The rush to lay blame and be the first to label the situation and the roles everyone’s playing in it with the strongest adjectives possible is lost on me.

Let’s keep our eye on the ball, folks. We all want publishing to figure this out, because we all love books and the people who write them for us.

Right?

Tags: Anna DeStefano, digital publishing, Dorchester Publishing, ebooks, ePublishing, Legacy Series, writer, writer resource, writing, writing articles

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 10:21 am and is filed under Publishing Isn't for Sissies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.