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| Sarah Hoyt: The Publishing Business Is In Crisis |
| 2014-06-21 |
| ...When I came into this field I was told two things by older and more experienced colleagues. One of them was that for all its glitzy innovation and its very real new ways of doing business, the publishing business remained at heart a nineteenth century business: contracts weren't as important as a hand shake; who you were as someone for people to work with was more important than cold hard sales; your publisher would take care of you. All of these things -- except for one publisher in the field (Baen Books) -- were a lie by the time I started in the late nineties. Well, maybe not the first. If your book was a year late in being published, and technically out of contract (my very first published book, Ill Met By Moonlight, now indie) the contract meant nothing. This was my first experience with the fact that the book business was in fact not a nineteenth century business, but a fourteenth century one. You came in and you were an indentured serf. No matter how badly you were treated, you had to be nice to the Lord, because he held your life in his hands. And no matter how badly you were treated, the other Lords would side with each other and conspire to keep you in servitude and destroy you if you spoke out against it. The second thing I was told when I came in was "the publishing business is in crisis. And it's always been." This was meant to imply that for all the moaning and bitching from publishers about how bad things were (usually when making an offer for a book) things went on and the publishers continued being paid their salaries and their pensions and writers had both the security of knowing the business would continue and the awful certainty it would continue the same way -- with them as peons. ...And then this week, I saw the walls tumble down. I saw the statue of Lenin dragged through the streets. I saw Hillary's book tank. Oh, sure, they spin it. They're publishers. They know how to spin. They've been doing it for decades. They say it's selling well enough. They say it's the "changing book market." But it's not. ""The rollout was touted as the best planned book tour ever, meticulously crafted by the smartest Hillary aides, publishing PR gurus, and the savviest superagents," writes another publishing source. "The book will probably debut on the bestseller list at number one and then fall like a rock. After the smoke clears, with tens of thousands of books sitting in warehouses collecting dust, there'll be a lot of handwringing and probably a few people without jobs." The book will debut on the bestseller list, because that's determined not by books bought but by "laydown", i.e. how many books the publisher shipped. (Bet you didn't know a book can be a "bestseller" without selling a single book). What you might not appreciate from the outside is how amazing, how impossible this is. They still have control over what ships (and therefore gets on the bestseller list for at least one week), they have control over the figures they show, they have control over publicity, they can strong-arm bookstores to stock a book and to push it. And you bet your bottom dollar they deployed all this in favor of Hillary. And it tanked. It tanked so publicly, so visibly, it can't be denied. Even five years ago, they could push Obama to bestsellerdom, whether that was true or Memorex. (Those of us with experience saw a lot of discounted Obama merchandise, but never mind.) Now they can't. And if they can't do it for Hillary! having pulled all the stops, then they certainly can no longer do it for the industry darlings, those politically correct parrots they've been pushing up readers' noses for years. They can still probably lie about those. They're not as public a flop as Hillary. But all the lies and all the gloss won't save them from losing their shirts. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #3 Saw it at the Wal mart today 35% off list. no takers while I was there |
| Posted by: USN, Ret. 2014-06-21 22:49 |
| #2 If she's let P.J. O'Rourke or Michael Lewis ghost, I'd buy. Otherwise, LOL. Not even to fill shelf space. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2014-06-21 20:55 |
| #1 Meanwhile the oligarchs that own and operate the companies will continue to |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2014-06-21 14:22 |