Boris Kachka takes a long look at the woes afflicting the publishing industry over in the new issue of New York. Really, there is almost zero new here for anyone who has read any of the other "death to book publishing" stories that have been published in the last ten years. And at nearly every literary festival or panel I’ve been to since I started this job has turned to a conversation about the "future of the industry." To that end, Kachka doesn’t offer much new. The idea that Richard Ford and Tom Wolfe switching publishers is somehow indicative of a crumbling industry strikes me as hilarious. It’s like saying Kevin Garnett moving to the Celtics is a sign that basketball no longer matters. But we know how that turned out.
Of course, I don’t think paying Tom Wolfe $7 million for a book is going to bring home the "championship," but I do think Kachka strains to connect too many "signs" to his thesis, without many statistics as to how things are truly any worse (during a bit about how many "serious readers" there are in the country, Kachka throws up his hands and says "who really knows?). It’s a lot of who-got-fired-gossip and anecdotal hand-wringing, and a fair amount of sour grapes; exactly the kind of thing that makes me pleased to live somewhere other than New York. Really, the only true bit of value in the article is the comprehensive look at the relationship between publishers and Amazon.com. Although, I have to chuckle when I hear publishing conglomerates complain that Amazon wants to corner the market. I don’t blame them. That’s their racket, after all.
Similarly, a lot of the "new ideas" in publishing expressed in the story are already being done by smaller, independent publishers. Bob Miller, of HarperStudio talks about his new author contract set-up, which acts authors to forgo an advance for the prospect of raking in 50/50 profits on a book. This brand-spanking new deal has been the working model for established indie houses like Akashic Books, and can actually be traced back to the heyday of indie rock, where it was Dischord’s business plan. So there you have it. You can now trace an idea directly from Ian MacKaye to Rupert Murdoch, and you won’t even need all six degrees.
The bottom line is that the "future of publishing" is not going to come out of articles like this. It’s going to come out of conferences like O’Reilly’s Tools of Change, and it’s going to come from the fringe, small publishers who are already pushing their own ebooks, both with and without Amazon.
Jonathan, you might also be interested to learn what we’re doing at Smashwords (we launched earlier this year at the Tools for Change conference): We allow indie authors to digitally self-publish DRM-free, multi-format ebooks. Authors set the price and the sampling rights, and collect 85% of the net sales proceeds. I won’t go into a long explanation here because I’m sure you don’t want comments filled with commercial messages (feel free to moderate this comment out), but if you get a chance take a peek at http://www.smashwords.com
It’s true that profit-sharing has been done before, and Johnny Temple at Akashic is an especially good example. Small presses and large have done profit-sharing deals; Roger Cooper is having a lot of success with this approach at Vanguard currently, mostly with commercial fiction. Boris Kachka may have presented this as something new, but I certainly never have, though it’s new for me to try to build a whole list this way. And just to clarify: we are paying advances, up to a $100,000 maximum, against the author’s 50% earnings.
I find it very strange that a smart company like Amazon would try to corner the market of a supposedly dying industry. Which suggests to me that it isn’t dying at all.