Bait 'n' Beer

I spend a lot of time reading blogs about publishing and books, on Twitter listening to people’s conversations about these subjects and talking to people in and out of the business about the current state of the industry and the future of reading, books (however we define them) and the publishing business. I try to keep myself reasonably informed about what’s going on in all corners of the publishing/reading ecosystem and to separate facts from opinions as I digest what I see, read and hear. It’s not always easy to tell them apart.

And that’s particularly the case in the blogosphere and in the social networking world where many commentators seem to ignore the distinction between fact and opinion, spouting ungrounded assertions as if they were facts and offering prescriptive advice to publishers without any basic understanding of the underlying business issues. This leads to a lot of misinformation floating around and some open hostility toward people and businesses who are just trying to find their way through a very complicated period in an industry that, for better or worse, is unaccustomed to radical change.

There are a few memes currently out there that are, to me, particularly troublesome and that deserve special mention:

  1. Publishers should...(fill in your favorite). There are two things that get overlooked in blanket statements like this. First, not all publishers are the same. While there are some commonalities among the hundreds of publishers, there are major differences between trade, academic, educational, reference and othertypes of publishers and even within those broad categories, there are major differences (even within the same house) between fiction and nonfiction, text and illustrated, genre and general fiction, children's, YA and adult titles And I've only named a few. What works for O'Reilly may not necessarily transfer to Pengiun. What works for Harlequin isn't necessarily transferable to Random House.What works for Ellora's Cave may not work for anyone else. The point is it's dangerous to take individual examples and generalize them to an entire, very diverse industry. The second reason publishers don't do everything critics think they should is that not many publishers are rolling in cash at the moment. I can't name a single publisher who wouldn't want to spend more on investments in marketing, quality, workflow improvement and editorial, but the money's just not there. So we need to temper our expectations with a dose of financial reality.

   2. The cost of producing an ebook (or print book) is $X.xx. No it's not. It depends on all the variables listed above plus a number of other factors depending on the publisher, the vendors it works with and its internal workflows and production processes. Each title is different. Again, generalizing from a specific example is misleading.

 
 3. Traditional publishers are trying to kill (or discourage the growth of) digital books. I've spoken to lots of publishers at large and small companies and to people at all levels in those companies. Nobody is trying to kill digital books. Quite the opposite, they're tremendously excited about the opportunities that digital publishing can offer. What they are trying to do is find a balance between their existing businesses (which currently account for 95%+ of revenues) and their future businesses. Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks has said she's running two businesses...her present business (generating cash) and her future business (where experimentation with new models is using significant investment dollars). She believes in the future but she can't ignore the current business if she wants to live to participate in the future and neither can any other responsible publisher. So the entire digital book revolution may be coming more slowly than you might want, but it's not because of a conspiracy of some publishing cartel.
 
These are just a few of the misguided things I've seen in the past few days. There are dozens more out in the ether. We had a rule when I ran Consortium that when you said something you had to clarify whether it was based in fact or was your opinion; it was a good rule. The more we swat down misinformation and sort facts from opinions, the better chance we have at finding our way through the gut-wrenching change we're undergoing to a place that meets the needs of readers, authors, publishers (in whatever form they take) and the evolving distribution chain.