LJ_Reloaded
バクスター の
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2010
- Posts
- 21,217
Here's how I see it.
Major publishing houses already screw small-time writers over by paying them an advance but then making them pay it back before you make a dime on your book sales; then small writers have to go out and market their book, too. Then they have the nerve to tell you what you can write (like they did to Lynn Viehl, among 10,000 other examples), on top of all of that. Then they go mess up your book covers like they did L.A. Banks' Vampire Huntress series for a while. And that's on a good day. If they even pay attention to your work at all.
It's no wonder that major publishers are slowly being pushed aside by a smattering of big self-published hits. Big publishers aren't unlike dinosaurs in stature, with self-publishers scampering around their feet like prehistoric rodents, who may have first existed in the late Cretaceous Period. These tiny mammals managed to outlive the dinosaurs, though. There's a lesson to be learned from that when looking at the book industry.
I see big publishers as becoming obsolete. But before these dinosaurs realize the comet has landed, they'll start requiring that before they even look at your work, you must self-publish the book, build up a big social network, and make your own sales. A small number of writers have moved from self-publishing to working with a publisher; this will become a full-blown trend, and then at the end of the book publishers' Cretaceous period, it will be the norm. It'll save them precious money gambling on a flop, and they'll be able to outsource their marketing efforts to their already overwhelmed writers.
The ONLY deviation that separates this from a Chicxulub meteor metaphor is that the proverbial meteor will be one that is fashioned by the publishing industry itself. And that the resulting extinction events will occur in regions, pushing publishers out of one genre at a time, not all at once like it did with the dinosaurs.
I'll go into the obvious question, to which just about everyone knows the answers: what does a publisher do? The short list: a publisher markets (kinda) a book, mass produces it, provides cover art, and has an editing staff.
The problem is that publishers have failed their duties in all of the above, almost to the point of being a matter of routine. As I said before, publishing companies have been known to produce screwed up cover art, sometimes intentionally. The romance genre is rife with examples of cover art whitewashing of minority characters. Plus publishers have told authors not to put "too many" minority characters in stories, or to refrain from giving them prominent roles, etc. And some big hits nowadays were rejected by publishers and were self-published. As for editors? Fat lot of good they did authors like Lora Leigh when the editing staff at St. Martin's Paperbacks let her "Dangerous Games" book hit the shelves with a US Army character who supposedly was a US Army SEAL *facepalm* stationed in ATLANTA and frequenting BDSM clubs which violates military law.
Is "failed their duties" too strong a word? Only Darwin can decide that - and in my opinion, Darwin will decide in the affirmative. In a microscopic way, I say that Darwin already has.
There are artists out there who sell their services to create unique and engaging cover art. There are freelance editors. You can sometimes retain their services for the price of a percentage of your sales.
As for marketing, there are ways to market your books; one such way is reading a ton of books and posting reviews on your own personal blog. Book review blogging is especially powerful: you can use this to both strengthen your understanding of writing (the more you read, the better you can write) and amass a readership that will become potential customers when you decide to write your own book. It can also help you network with other writers who might cross-promote your book.
So what, exactly, does a book publisher provide in terms of value, if you're a savvy guerrilla marketer who can make a deal with a good cover artist and editor? Very little, aside from properly formatting a document into e-book format for Smashwords, etc. - which, from what I've heard, is a headache in and of itself.
How will the comet hit the book publishing industry? The publishing industry is always trying to save a buck or two by pushing more work onto their writers. The sheer competitive nature of the industry dictates this. Many companies will find that it's cheaper to only sign on established self-published authors, who will at some point realize that they would be better off staying self-published. The sheer number of self-published authors will mean more big hits that publishers don't get to produce. This will become a self-sustaining reaction that ignites a self-publishing craze, with more unpaid artists seeking to enter the book cover market (thus saturating the market with higher quality and lower cost labor). That, and editors, too. One can imagine legions of English Lit students doing paid and unpaid internship jobs helping out with this. Translators, too. All of this will erode away the total usefulness of publishers.
The plus side for authors will be that they keep more of the money they generate in sales. The down side will be the loss of all hope of getting an advance; but then again they have to pay that back anyway, so whether or not this is a loss, is debatable. Some people who self-published got movie deals. That's gotta count for something in the ol' profit department.
In closing: I believe the biggest benefit will be to writers of ANY genre of story that includes lots of minorities, particularly writers who wish to avoid cover art whitewashing or publisher-dictated story whitewashing. But eventually, one genre at a time, corporate book publishers will find themselves competing against self-publishers who will decide that they can go it alone and that the prestige of a publisher no longer has the currency it used to have. It'll be a slow death, leaving the relevance of book publishers largely restricted to areas like publishing schoolbooks and the like.
Major publishing houses already screw small-time writers over by paying them an advance but then making them pay it back before you make a dime on your book sales; then small writers have to go out and market their book, too. Then they have the nerve to tell you what you can write (like they did to Lynn Viehl, among 10,000 other examples), on top of all of that. Then they go mess up your book covers like they did L.A. Banks' Vampire Huntress series for a while. And that's on a good day. If they even pay attention to your work at all.
It's no wonder that major publishers are slowly being pushed aside by a smattering of big self-published hits. Big publishers aren't unlike dinosaurs in stature, with self-publishers scampering around their feet like prehistoric rodents, who may have first existed in the late Cretaceous Period. These tiny mammals managed to outlive the dinosaurs, though. There's a lesson to be learned from that when looking at the book industry.
I see big publishers as becoming obsolete. But before these dinosaurs realize the comet has landed, they'll start requiring that before they even look at your work, you must self-publish the book, build up a big social network, and make your own sales. A small number of writers have moved from self-publishing to working with a publisher; this will become a full-blown trend, and then at the end of the book publishers' Cretaceous period, it will be the norm. It'll save them precious money gambling on a flop, and they'll be able to outsource their marketing efforts to their already overwhelmed writers.
The ONLY deviation that separates this from a Chicxulub meteor metaphor is that the proverbial meteor will be one that is fashioned by the publishing industry itself. And that the resulting extinction events will occur in regions, pushing publishers out of one genre at a time, not all at once like it did with the dinosaurs.
I'll go into the obvious question, to which just about everyone knows the answers: what does a publisher do? The short list: a publisher markets (kinda) a book, mass produces it, provides cover art, and has an editing staff.
The problem is that publishers have failed their duties in all of the above, almost to the point of being a matter of routine. As I said before, publishing companies have been known to produce screwed up cover art, sometimes intentionally. The romance genre is rife with examples of cover art whitewashing of minority characters. Plus publishers have told authors not to put "too many" minority characters in stories, or to refrain from giving them prominent roles, etc. And some big hits nowadays were rejected by publishers and were self-published. As for editors? Fat lot of good they did authors like Lora Leigh when the editing staff at St. Martin's Paperbacks let her "Dangerous Games" book hit the shelves with a US Army character who supposedly was a US Army SEAL *facepalm* stationed in ATLANTA and frequenting BDSM clubs which violates military law.
Is "failed their duties" too strong a word? Only Darwin can decide that - and in my opinion, Darwin will decide in the affirmative. In a microscopic way, I say that Darwin already has.
There are artists out there who sell their services to create unique and engaging cover art. There are freelance editors. You can sometimes retain their services for the price of a percentage of your sales.
As for marketing, there are ways to market your books; one such way is reading a ton of books and posting reviews on your own personal blog. Book review blogging is especially powerful: you can use this to both strengthen your understanding of writing (the more you read, the better you can write) and amass a readership that will become potential customers when you decide to write your own book. It can also help you network with other writers who might cross-promote your book.
So what, exactly, does a book publisher provide in terms of value, if you're a savvy guerrilla marketer who can make a deal with a good cover artist and editor? Very little, aside from properly formatting a document into e-book format for Smashwords, etc. - which, from what I've heard, is a headache in and of itself.
How will the comet hit the book publishing industry? The publishing industry is always trying to save a buck or two by pushing more work onto their writers. The sheer competitive nature of the industry dictates this. Many companies will find that it's cheaper to only sign on established self-published authors, who will at some point realize that they would be better off staying self-published. The sheer number of self-published authors will mean more big hits that publishers don't get to produce. This will become a self-sustaining reaction that ignites a self-publishing craze, with more unpaid artists seeking to enter the book cover market (thus saturating the market with higher quality and lower cost labor). That, and editors, too. One can imagine legions of English Lit students doing paid and unpaid internship jobs helping out with this. Translators, too. All of this will erode away the total usefulness of publishers.
The plus side for authors will be that they keep more of the money they generate in sales. The down side will be the loss of all hope of getting an advance; but then again they have to pay that back anyway, so whether or not this is a loss, is debatable. Some people who self-published got movie deals. That's gotta count for something in the ol' profit department.
In closing: I believe the biggest benefit will be to writers of ANY genre of story that includes lots of minorities, particularly writers who wish to avoid cover art whitewashing or publisher-dictated story whitewashing. But eventually, one genre at a time, corporate book publishers will find themselves competing against self-publishers who will decide that they can go it alone and that the prestige of a publisher no longer has the currency it used to have. It'll be a slow death, leaving the relevance of book publishers largely restricted to areas like publishing schoolbooks and the like.
