Two Publishers on a Hill

You know the old joke:

An old bull and a young bull are up on a hill watching a bunch of cows. The young bull says, “Hey, let’s run down there and **** one of those cows!” The old bull says, “No. Let’s walk down and **** ‘em all.”

This is an apt, if vulgar, metaphor for the choices publishers have for dealing with the new world of ebook self-publishing.

What is a publishing company? It is a professional editing engine embedded in a consumer product marketing machine and steeped in a weird combination of tradition and cutting-edge mentality. There is a lot of risk and overhead involved in the business of printing up thousands or millions of physical books and trying to sell them through brick and mortar stores worldwide, not to mention through internet retailers where they have precious few tools for manipulating interest.

As such, some publishers panicked when ebooks started taking off. They played games with Amazon, who had a good start on an effective monopoly (which could have been disturbing, however well-earned it was). They were encouraged by Apple (for business reasons that were understandable given Apple’s position in the ebook market). And they succeeded in keeping control of the pricing of the ebook versions of their products. As a free-marketeer, that sounds good to me, in principle.

The problem was that a lot of them instantly chose to use this power for ill: specifically, to keep their ebook prices unreasonably high, in a move that seems transparently punitive toward those consumers who choose ebooks. I cite as an example the latest Dresden Files book, Ghost Story, which costs 50% more in Kindle edition than it does in paperback. This is asinine, and obnoxious, and can only be the result of desperate decision-making within a publishing house that doesn’t seem to realize it needs to court ebook readers’ goodwill rather than punish them for having grown out of the old game.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though, and some publishers are evidently starting to realize this. Perhaps more accurately, some people within publishing companies are starting to realize this. I say it this way because I would not be at all surprised to learn of a single company simultaneously playing the punitive pricing game and bringing successful self-published authors on board.

What I’m talking about is the enormous opportunity self-publishing affords mainstream publishers, whose biggest problem has always been risk. Imagine: you’re an ebook author and you’ve chosen self-publishing as the lesser of terrifying choices. You wrote a good book, you’ve gotten some traction, you’ve got some good reviews and ratings, the book bloggers have taken notice, and you’re selling hundreds or even thousands of ebooks a month. Where do you want to go from there?

There are a fair number of stories now of this kind of moderate success, and where a lot of them will go from there is to self-publish the sequel, or simply other books. But some of them, perhaps most, would like to come in out of the cold, given the opportunity. They might like the stability afforded by an advance on royalties, or the prestige of a contract.

To a publisher, this state of affairs represents an opportunity that is as revolutionary in its own way for them as the ready accessibility of self-publishing is for authors, and as the cheap plenty of ebooks is for readers.

What we’ve seen so far is that a few publishers have started picking out diamonds in what is from their perspective the rough. We’ve read stories of how fat contracts have been offered to certain ebook writers who achieved stardom in self-publishing. This is a good precedent for all concerned. Some of the more radical proponents of ebooks might view this as selling out, but that’s patent nonsense. It is the writer’s life and livelihood we’re talking about, not a political point.

Already we’ve seen cases where the writer takes the contract and at least one case where he’s famously turned it down. It’s hard to decide who to cheer for harder.

But my point here is a little different, centered on the publisher.

Granted, publishers have had it good in some ways, at least from the perspective of the writer. They’ve had almost all the power. They get all the submissions they could ever want coming at them, and they have total control over which they choose to develop, the changes that get made to the content before publication, the amount of marketing a given book gets, and all sorts of other advantages.

Looked at another way, though, these advantages really only serve to make a tough position a little less untenable. I haven’t worked at a publishing company, but I have had some experience in independent film production, and there are certain similarities. Let me tell you, getting submissions from random people all the time is not a wonderful thing. It’s a burden at best and a legal time bomb at worst (if someone claims you stole an idea or something). It’s easy to understand why recommendations from anyone with a remotely professional reputation—an agent, or a well-known writer, or an editor’s brainy 10-year-old—can carry weight. It’s just so much better than nothing.

I mention these things to show a slice of what I surmise content sourcing has traditionally been like from the perspective of the publisher.

But think about what publishers have available to them now. They’ve got hundreds or thousands of writers self-publishing, taking all the risk, doing all the work. They can follow the trails of reviews directly to the cream of the crop, at least as far as the customers are concerned. For an average of what, $3? they can buy a copy of any book that shows potential, read it, and if they like what they see, they can get in touch with the author right then and there. If I were starting a publishing company now, this would be the only way I would source material.

If you ask me, instead of trying to hang on to a business model that’s already showing signs of massive decay (e.g. the downscaling and outright failure of massive brick/mortar bookseller chains), publishers should be thanking Amazon and the other ebookstores for what they’ve done here. They’ve given publishers unprecedented access to eager, creative authors; free, near-perfect market research; and a fast-growing group of customers who will be reasonably happy if they only have to pay the same amount for an ebook as for the much higher-overhead paperback edition.

All they have to do is walk down to where the writers are peddling their wares, and be nice.