“This fascinating exposé of the book publishing industry is must reading for authors, publishers and everyone else in the book business.”
— Dan Poynter, The Book Futurist and author of The Self-Publishing Manual.
“When it comes to publishing, authoring, and the world of books, I know no one as exquisitely full of The Wisdom than Michael Levin. For all would be authors, or those who are even thinking about it, read this book. It will save you a lifetime of pain, anguish and authorship depression. Or, as it was said, “Don’t leave home without it!”
--Michael E. Gerber, Author of the E-Myth (5 million copies sold)
Gutenberg to Google
By:
Michael Levin
Copyright 2011 BusinessGhost, Inc. All rights reserved.
Smashwords Edition
Publicity Contact: Michael Azzano, Cosmo PR
415/596-1978
WARNING LABEL
This is a book about the future of the publishing industry, and it will be highly depressing to anyone who loves books, ideas, or independent thought, all of which are disappearing from society today. You’ll discover why books, unfortunately, are going the way of the vinyl LP and the videocassettes and DVDs you used to rent from Blockbuster.
The book that is most likely to succeed, as the publishing industry fails, is a book that is actually a marketing tool for a business or professional practice. There’s some good news about novels, but let’s not go overboard with excitement and anticipation about the future of publishing. Indeed, this book explains why we are entering a post-literate era, in which books are no longer profitable for publishers or popular with readers. The reasons why will surprise you. But if you love books as much as I do, proceed at your own risk.
Table of Contents
Chapter 2 The Colossal Failure of the Traditional Publishing Industry
Chapter 3 Whatever Happened to Bookstores?
Chapter 4 Literary Agents: Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You. (Actually, No, We Won’t.)
Chapter 5 But I Still Want to Write a Book!
Chapter 6 What Readers Really Want Today
Chapter 7 The Business Book of the Future
Chapter 8 Creating a Marketing Tool Cleverly Disguised As a Book
Chapter 9 Marketing Your Book: Finding Your Tribe
Chapter 10 What About Fiction?
Chapter 11 The Last Word: A World Without Books
Chapter 1
The Last Chapter?
Here’s my greatest fear: that we are slipping into a cultural Dark Age, not unlike the one that Johannes Gutenberg effectively ended when he invented movable type. In the first Dark Age, books were practically nonexistent, the province of monks and monasteries, the educated elite. In the new darkness, books are irrelevant as knowledge and power are concentrated once again in the hands of society’s elite, and the rest of us have no clue about what’s going on.
I love books and always have. To me there is absolute magic in the idea that one person can sit down at a desk anywhere on the planet or at any point in time and develop ideas that change the way the rest of us think. I once heard the novelist Erica Jong say that “An author’s job is to rearrange the molecules in the reader’s brain.” That’s the ultimate power of the book—to shape, or reshape, opinion, to add to society’s knowledge base, to entertain and educate.
And if you’re anything like me, you understand when I say that I love the look and feel of books. My Russian lit professor at Amherst College, Stanley Rabinowitz, said that “You can judge a book by its cover.” Meaning that a well-designed, artful cover indicated a useful, potentially brilliant book inside it. I love a well-bound book, right down to the stitching that holds the signatures or groups of pages together. The feel of the paper. The choice of font, sometimes described in a paragraph at the back of the book, on the assumption that the readers are just as interested in the design as was the book’s creator. I love the excitement of opening a book to the first page and seeing just what kind of journey on which I’m about to embark. Mystery? History? A little bit of both?
To my mind, the first paragraph of a book is a contract between the author and the reader. The contract runs this way: The author’s responsibility, or part of the bargain, is to come up with a story we haven’t heard, a set of facts and interpretations we’ve never known, told in an interesting and entertaining manner. That’s the promise the author makes in the first paragraph. The reader’s end of the bargain is simply to read. If the contract in the first paragraph is strong enough, the reader will stick around, read, enjoy, and learn.
Am I the only one who finds that a book, once read, has a heavier weight to it? An unfinished book is alive, and is easy to carry about. A book, once read, feels differently in the hands. It’s a dead weight, something unnecessary, something to put on one’s shelves, give to a friend, or donate to a library. A book is one of the few things that, once finished, one would never dream of throwing out. This suggests that there is something sacred about books.
There always was. Most of the earliest books in Western culture are illuminated manuscripts, created a dozen or more centuries ago in windswept monasteries like the one at Lindisfarne, a small island off the coast of northern England. Those monks drew some of their designs with human hair dipped in liquid gold, designs too fine for the naked eye to see but visible for their ultimate audience—the eye of God.
So the earliest book in Christian culture was the Book, the Bible, created in glorious color on carefully constructed paper intended to last thousands of years, to honor the King of Kings. And then mortal kings wanted in on the act; some of the most beautiful books in the Middle Ages record the doings of leaders, such as Jean de Berry’s Book of Hours, created in the early 15th century. In those times, priests or potentates controlled literature—who was allowed to read, and what they read. Books were never the province of the common man, for reasons of both fiat and finance. If you weren’t of gentle birth or a member of a religious order, you weren’t allowed to buy books. You couldn’t afford them, anyway.
Yes, there were books in every culture written for the lay reader, but mostly these were epics that some wise hand had reduced to print. In the English tradition, Beowulf. And then Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And then Chaucer, which ultimately was a religious text, albeit a profane one--the story, or stories, of a group of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury Cathedral. God and kings never loomed far from the subject matter for the first few thousand years of books.
And then Gutenberg changed everything in his time, just as Google has changed everything in ours. Prior to Gutenberg, every book had to be copied by hand, an expensive and laborious process that guaranteed that literacy would belong to the noble few. Stop and think what Gutenberg’s invention must have meant to the world. Suddenly, and I mean suddenly, thanks to his invention of movable type, books could be printed instead of hand-copied, thus driving down the cost of reproducing information and driving up the numbers of people with access to knowledge. In Gutenberg’s time, it took more decades for the printed word to spread its influence and enlightenment than it took our Internet revolution; you might say it took a century or two before Europe was fully “wired” and a broader class of people were reading books. But numbers grew, and more people were reading, and more people were writing. For a span of centuries, right down to our day, books reigned supreme as the most powerful, economical, and elegant manner of disseminating knowledge, of rearranging the molecules in readers’ brains. Knowledge was power, and the dissemination of knowledge meant the diffusion of power in society. Monarchies no longer reigned forever in Europe. Revolutions fomented. Commoners took control.1
It turns out that the intelligentsia had been right all along—if you keep literacy in the hands of a chosen few, and keep the rest of the population ignorant, you can control them more easily. It’s hard to constrain the masses when they can think for themselves and share ideas—witness the Facebook Revolution that swept North Africa and the Middle East from the beginning of 2011. And that’s why I fear for the death of books. Not just because I love them, and not just because I derive my living from their creation. In a broader sense, to paraphrase the great journalist Jimmy Breslin, dies the printing press, dies the city. We are moving, with reckless, headlong, breathtaking speed, into a post-literate age, where once again the world is ignorant, but this time it’s different. It’s out of choice.
Let’s face it—95 percent of the population never bought books anyway. Or they might buy one a year, like the old Jimmy Durante song—“I Read a Book!” That book might have been a thriller, it might have been a horror novel, it might have been something about witches or goblins. But it was an honest-to-God book in their hands, an example of someone entertaining himself or herself in the theater of the mind. I used to know the owner of a chain of four independent bookstores in New England who said he had two types of customers. The first group was the commuters, who would stop by frequently whenever they finished their last book and buy whatever the owner recommended. They’d finish that book and then they’d come back and buy another book. The other group were the book-a-year people, about whom my friend said, “When they finished reading it, at the hotel or on the beach somewhere, they’d look up and say, ‘I read a book!’”
Today, the book is giving way to the device, the smartphone, the iPad, the laptop, the Kindle. Yes, some people are still buying books. But for how much longer? And what does it mean when—not if but when—books recede as a cultural force?
The debate has shifted. The focus used to be technological haves and have nots, expressed in the fear that those raised in low income backgrounds would lack access to technology and information that would belong solely to the middle class and the wealth. This is no longer a concern to the same degree--even the homeless have smartphones, which means they can do their Facebooking, or read Proust, for that matter, just as easily as a sophomore at Hotchkiss. In fact, the average, and I mean truly average, seventh grader owns or has access to a Mac that has design capabilities undreamt of by Da Vinci, a built in music studio that dwarfs the Abbey Road facilities where the Beatles recorded, and a film editor (okay, video) that would have been axed from a Flash Gordon serial for being too futuristic. Of course, we have all these tools and I don’t see too many new groups rivaling the Beatles, or directors throwing a scare into Francis Ford Coppola (or even Sofia Coppola, for that matter), or even popular writers who have Stephen King and John Grisham looking over their shoulders.
There’s more computing power in a greeting card that plays James Brown singing “I Feel Good” than in the cockpit of the Apollo spacecraft that landed men on the moon2. The concern isn’t that the poor don’t have the same tools as the rest of us; the concern should be that we have all these astonishing tools and yet all we do is update our Facebook pages. Are books receding as a cultural force? Regrettably, yes, and faster than David Letterman’s hairline.
But what do we do with this unparalleled access to information that practically everyone in our society enjoys?
Unfortunately, not much.
It’s such a waste when you think about it. Each of us could access practically any piece of writing, any document, any piece of art, any musical composition created since man first taught himself to write, to draw, or to compose. But do we? The most popular things people do with their smartphones is updating their Facebook page, Twittering, playing games, and other forms of activity of dubious social utility.
In other words, we aren’t nearly as smart as our phones.
There’s a deeper meaning in the fact that we are Twittering and frittering away all our time, that we are telling ourselves we are acting socially when in reality we are staring solo into a screen.
We are moving from an age of action to distraction.
In some ways, it’s understandable. So much of what’s going on in the world today is so awful that anything affording us a distraction is desirable. The economic news of the last few years. Tragic events in Japan. The deaths of thousands throughout North Africa and the Middle East, and no certainty about who or what will replace the regimes now or soon to be under siege. And so on.
And yet, at a time when the world needs us most to be engaged with the serious issues that must be grappled with and solved, the tendency is to withdraw, retreat, ignore the extraordinary knowledge base to which we all have unprecedented access, leave untouched the tools with which we could create books or songs or movies that would move others to act. What are we doing? Creating a virtual cocoon for ourselves. Updating our Facebook page. Telling our “followers” our latest and not necessarily deepest thoughts, in 160 characters or less, or whatever it is.
The problem is that when millions of people, or tens of millions of people, or an entire society, withdraw from public discourse, stop following the news, stop reading in general, power becomes centralized in the hands of a few. We empathize with, or scoff at, subjugated peoples around the world who have tolerated dictatorship for decades or even centuries. But what about us? The less we read, the more we tether ourselves, our world, and the world we leave our children, to a very small number of people. Those who run the government. Those who run the military. Those who run the media. Those who run big business. They have the power because we ceded it to them, one distraction at a time.
We have the ability, no less than the citizens of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, or Yemen, to communicate one with the other and identify and right systemic wrongs—in our economy, in our government, in our almost obscene projection of military force, in regard to everything that matters in life.
But we don’t.
Emblematic of this rising, overpowering, almost suffocating lack of interest in the world around us is the collapse of my industry, the publishing industry. Book publishing as we know it—the traditional model—is in its last days. The economics of traditional book publishing are no longer, to use the fashionable term, sustainable. This means that fewer times will society stop and read a nonfiction book and be transformed by the experience. It happened when Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, launching modern feminism. It happened again when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, sowing the environmental movement. And again when The New York Times and the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, taking the secrets of the government’s Vietnam War policies out of the shadows. And a few more times, when the world stopped turning long enough for everyone to read, and be changed by, a particular book.
It’s not just the fact that people are reading books on devices like iPads and Kindles. It’s that few of us believe in paying for content if it’s delivered online. And fewer of us believe in reading even one more word than necessary when we are online. One of themes of this book is that technology has shredded our attention spans. Put those facts together—books moving to cyberspace, shorter attention spans, and impatience to read more than necessary, and the book—whether printed on paper or delivered wirelessly—is about to be a thing of the past.
Combine the free fall of publishing, along with the fact that most of us use our smartphones for not-so-smart reasons (game playing, social networking, Twittering), and it’s easy to see that we really do live in a world where we are moving from action to distraction.
It’s not all bad news, of course. One of the most exciting things about the technological revolution we’ve all witnessed in the last decade or two is the fact that it has never been easier for people to write and publish their own books, to be able to communicate to the world at large or to a particular niche, to share their ideas, to promote their businesses, and to promulgate ideas. As a writer, witnessing the collapse of an industry that has supported me for 25 years is alarming. But as a business person, I couldn’t be more excited about the fact that everyone can be an author today. And that’s one of the things we’ll discuss in great detail in this book.
And quite frankly, everyone should be an author. Books still matter, and the future belongs to those who will write and read them. Dan Sullivan of the Strategic Coach, a coaching program for entrepreneurs, says that the Internet is turning all businesses and professionals into commodities that are judged solely, or primarily, on price. This means that no matter who you are or what you do, chances are, your prospects can find the same thing you offer for less somewhere else, and they can find it instantly online.
A book is the greatest differentiation tool in the history of mankind. I write books for people who have great stories to tell—stories about their business or practice, stories about making the world a better or more spiritual place, all kinds of stories. My role as a ghostwriter is to facilitate those stories and help them become books. The same technology that is so rigorously avoided by most people is available to the rest of us for the dissemination of our ideas, through the form of books.
From a societal perspective, it is essential that we keep reading and writing. From a business perspective, those businesses that tell their stories, not just with the excitement that video provides but with the depth that can only be achieved with words, will be the strongest, will distinguish themselves from their competition, and will be able to charge what they deserve for the goods and services they provide.
In some ways, it’s never been a more distressing time for books, for authors, or for readers. And yet, thanks to the same tools that have moved us from action to distraction, we now have the power to create our own books, to create our own revolutions in thought and commerce, to remake the world not as it is but as we think it should be.
And if we don’t do this for ourselves, others will do it for us.
And what about libraries? I just read in the newspaper—no, check that. I read online—I don’t read newspapers very often any more3—that my neighboring community of Newport Beach, California is considering removing all the books from one of its library branches and turning it into some kind of “community resource center.” Huh? What kind of resources are we exactly talking about here? Isn’t the community resource a library is supposed to contain…a book?
The article nevertheless made an intriguing point—that even people who check out books typically take out new ones and never visit the stacks. In these governmentally impoverished times, library funding is on the chopping block. But maybe it should be. If a government agency were buying buggy whips or Victrolas in order to make them available to the general public, that agency would be the butt of talk radio. But if people aren’t reading books or taking books out of the library, why should government spend the people’s money on books? Are librarians any more useful to society than, say, the robo-humans down at the DMV? Why are we paying to heat or cool civic property where tens of thousands of books are stored, if nobody wants to read them? I’m the weird exception to the rule who actually goes into the stacks and takes out books that are more than six months old. When I visit the stacks, I have the same feeling I had when I took my kids to the animal shelter to pick out a dog. Many are culled, few are chosen4.
Why are we paying good taxpayer dollars to add to those endless shelves of unread books? Maybe if we closed more libraries, we could pay more public service pensions. Forget community resource centers. Tear them down and build condos. And once cash-strapped libraries stop buying books, you can kiss your Simon & Schuster goodbye.
It’s not just public libraries that are rethinking their commitment to the printed word. The University of Denver has announced that it will move eighty percent of the books in its main library to a storage site ten miles from the campus, so that there is more room in the library for seating and study areas. Now, my Latin’s a little rusty—amo, amas, and amat, and all that—but doesn’t the word “library” derive from the Latin word “libraria,” meaning bookstore? And doesn’t “libraria” derive from the Latin word “liber,” meaning book? If you take the books out of the library, why are you still calling it a library? Shouldn’t we find another word for a place where people sit around, maybe studying, maybe talking to their friends, mostly banging away on laptops and iPads? Wait a minute—we already have that word. It’s Starbucks.
Now, no offense to the University of Denver, which doesn’t have the same sterling, academic, dare I say, bookish atmosphere you can find up the road at the University of Colarado at Boulder. But unless some of the eighty percent of the books permanently checked out and set in storage (until what future event, by the way?) have to do with snowboarding, they probably will not be missed. In fact, the biggest mistake they made wasn’t removing the books; it was announcing the books were going to be removed. Otherwise, we never would have known. Or cared.
Last night I browsed the stacks at my local public library here in Orange County, California. As I wandered among the biographies, I found myself wondering whether ninety nine percent of these books would ever be checked out again. Breathes there a soul who wants 450 pages on the life of Franz Kafka? Or Thomas Merton? Or Warren Beatty? Or even Princess Di? In truth, these books may never be reopened again. They are cultural relics, not living, breathing repositories of information and truth. They are little more than wallpaper with no relevance whatsoever to the lives of the high school students seated in their midst, pounding away on laptops, unaware of much of history or culture, uninterested in the stories of the lives surrounding them on the shelves.
If books aren’t opened, minds remain closed.
When books disappear, you end up with a population that is more malleable, more open to ideas thrust upon them than to thinking things through for themselves. I truly fear for a society where, as in the pre-Gutenberg world, information is in the hands of a handful, and therefore so is societal power and control.
Spare me the hand-wringing about how authors will make a living. By and large, they never have. Precious few people have made their livings entirely from the advances and royalties of the books they have written. A landmark Authors Guild study in the 1970s determined that authors of books, on average, make little more than individuals working the grill at MacDonald’s. I don’t fear for the livelihoods of authors5; I fear for the disappearance of books as a forum of ideas.6
So why is the book in its last decade or so? The most immediate answer is the shortening—even the death—of the moderate attention span. You can’t stare at a computer all day long and find a book, with row after row of monotonous type, as interesting. My friend Gary Kadi uses the term “thumbsterbating” to define what most of us do in practically any moment of downtime, whether we’re waiting for a flight, waiting for a meal, or simply waiting for our conversation partner to say something. We’re punching away with our thumbs at our mobile devices, updating our Facebook pages, checking e-mail, looking for bargains, glancing at the news (newspapers—and there’s another death to discuss!), texting, and otherwise thin-slicing our time, and attention span, into ribbons. We are a society suffering not just from ADD but from its even more sinister cousin “AD…ooh, shiny!” We can’t concentrate. And books require a modicum of concentration. So a foreshortened attention span is the number one reason why books are losing their usefulness in society.
The second problem is that books have been for a few centuries the province of the publishing industry based in New York, which has an assumed an ostrich-like position with regard to modern information technology. The major publishers have done virtually nothing to prepare itself for the virtual world. It still uses the same archaic business model that worked when there was no Internet and the economy was strong. Much more about that in Chapter 2. For now, trust me when I say that the greatest enemy the book ever could have imagined is the publishing industry, which is about as efficient at creating and distributing books as the former Soviet Union was about creating and distributing bread. Think General Motors without the bailouts and you’ll get a pretty good perspective of how poorly managed, bloated, and self-destructive the publishing industry has become.
And then there’s Amazon. Amazon is fantastic if you hear about a book and you want to buy it without actually having to get in the car and go somewhere. Or if you’ve got a topic in mind and you need to find the right book. We all love Amazon, and if it doesn’t provide immediate gratification, it provides the next best thing—you can have the book tomorrow or very soon thereafter. It’s just how much you want to pay for shipping, and since you’re paying on a credit card, it doesn’t even seem as though you’re paying at all.
The problem with Amazon, as was pointed out to me by mega-agent David Vigliano, over breakfast at the Regency Hotel, is the death of browsing. It used to be that you would go to a bookstore and find the book on the topic you were looking for, and then you would start browsing in other sections. You become aware of other books on other fields, and you might buy one of those as well. What book lover has not gone into a bookstore with a particular title in mind and came out, 45 minutes later, with five or six books, all on different fields, all potentially engrossing?
Amazon doesn’t let you do that. Yes, it will suggest other books to you, but typically these are books on the same topic. You might be searching for the new biography of Mickey Mantle, and Amazon will thoughtfully propose to you three other biographies of Mickey Mantle. But how many times can you relive the 1962 World Series? Not even Bob Costas or Billy Crystal would buy not just the new Mantle biography but four more.
Amazon offers convenience, but it destroys the opportunity for book lovers to spend wonderful time picking up books, reading the first paragraph or two, flipping over to the back cover, checking the blurbs, and doing all the things book buyers do before we commit.
I’m thinking now about Fifth Avenue from 45th Street to 58th Street thirty years ago. At 48th Street, you’ve got Brentano’s, with its vast subterranean assortment of aisles. Then a couple of blocks further north is Scribner’s, a bookstore so elegant you thought you needed a reference letter to shop there, as if you were entering the British Library. Then on 53rd and Fifth, on the west side of the Avenue, a massive B. Dalton’s, on the same model as the Brentano’s—big upstairs, bigger downstairs. Keep heading up Fifth and you come to not one but two Doubleday’s, a smaller one and a bigger one. Why two retail outlets within four or five blocks of each other? Why not?
Today, stroll down Fifth Avenue, and not one of those bookstores remains, all victims of the Amazon revolution. No more browsing. No more seeing what else is going on. No more coming out with an armful of books. You might also remember Coliseum Books at the corner of 58th and Broadway; the plaything of an heir to the IBM fortune in the East 70s; the Gotham Book Mart, oddly located in the midst of the diamond district on West 47th Street7; Shakespeare & Company, on the Upper West Side, targeted and destroyed by a Barnes & Noble Superstore (itself now closed), and other late and lamented independently owned emporia of books. All gone.
In the early ’80s, I was shopping in a Boston department store and came across a sport jacket that was only a few alterations away from fitting me. I asked the older European gentleman who was waiting on me if he knew of such a tailor.
He shrugged. “They all died,” he said sadly.
If you love books as I do, you wince when you hear those words applied to all those beautiful bookstores, big and small. They all died. They’ll come back, in a different form, and I’ll get to that toward the end of the book, but right now, this is the landscape in which we find ourselves.
We also have to consider the death of the mass market. It used to be that America was a more homogeneous society, united in its entertainment tastes, and only offered a few different types of entertainment to begin with. When I was growing up, there were exactly six channels on TV, unless you got one of those circular antennas and you could pick up 31 and 47, and 47 broadcast in Spanish. There were only so many movies released in a given year, and pretty much everybody saw all of them, or most of them. You didn’t feel as though you had to take out a second mortgage to go to the movie theater.
You didn’t even need to show up at the theater on time—you got to the movie theater regardless of when the movie started, you watched what was left of it, you waited a few minutes until it started again, and you left when you came to the place when you came in. No big deal. By contrast, television was entirely by “appointment”—if you weren’t home Tuesday at 8:00, you weren’t going to see whatever the show was. The last episode of a great TV show was a major social event—Dallas, M.A.S.H., Seinfeld. Today, you can have a top ten show on TV with a viewership of 30 million—which means that 280 million Americans have never even heard of the show. Tell the truth—until the whole Charlie Sheen brouhaha, how many times had you actually seen Two and A Half Men when you weren’t on an American Airlines flight somewhere and they were showing it in the hour before landing?
In music, it’s the same thing. If you’re over thirty, there’s absolutely no point in watching the Grammys. You’ve never heard of any of the artists, and three to five years from now, you never will. And even if you had heard of them, when was the last time you actually bought a CD?
It used to be that you bought music as well as books in stores. Now, we either download it through iTunes or we find a way to steal it.8 Either way, just as there are no TV shows that unite the entire populace, except perhaps for the Super Bowl, there are no music acts that grandparents and grandchildren both enjoy. I haven’t been to a rest home lately, but I bet they aren’t tapping their walkers to Lady Gaga. The mass market in music has fragmented, just as it has in television and movies…and also in books.
When was the last time that a new author commanded the stage? It used to be that when a new John Grisham came out, America stopped doing what it was doing, went to a bookstore, bought a copy, and sat outside by the pool and read it. Same thing with Stephen King. Scott Turow. And a handful of other mega-popular authors. Today, that’s all gone. When was the last time a new author broke out and found the kind of mass market audience that a Stephen King discovered? In the last twenty years, only J. K. Rowling, but she’s writing primarily for children (or adults with far too much free time).
So the publishing industry is suffering from the same problem as the rest of the entertainment industry—the lack of a mass market means that there’s no such thing as an event when a new book comes out. No mass market, no mass sales. One of the roles of the publishing industry is to identify and promote great writing, or at least popular writing. That barely exists today, and there’s no mass market to support it, anyway. So that’s yet another problem that books face—tinier and tinier audiences.
It’s not just the way we “consume” audio that’s changed; it’s video, too. Thanks to Netflix, movies and television shows have moved from a model of pay-as-you-go to either subscription (Netflix) or pay a tiny amount of money (iTunes), or don’t even pay at all. Just do what my sons do when Dad isn’t watching: intercept the signal, or convert a YouTube video into an mp3, and you don’t have to pay for it.
Years ago, when the Internet was first created, the slogan was “Information wants to be free.” Today, you could amend that to “On the Internet, everybody wants information to be free.” In other words, when you walked into a bookstore, you had an expectation that if you were going to read something, you had to pay for it. You had to buy it, carry it out of the store, and take it home, and that costs money. On the Internet, most of us are loath to spend a penny for information. Newspapers and magazines are discovering that it’s all but impossible to charge people for anything, since so much information, and even movies, music, and TV shows are available for free. Sure, you can sell advertising, but you cannot make people pay to get in. People will simply go elsewhere to find information for free.
As books “migrate” to the Internet “platform,” they’re going to experience the same fate. Right now, Amazon and publishers are working feverishly to maintain the high margins they get every time somebody buys a book wirelessly. It costs practically nothing for Amazon to fire a book over your Kindle or Barnes & Noble to shoot a book to your Nook. At some point, however, they’re not going to be able to get the 9.99 or 12.99 or whatever it is they charge for a download. If everything that you can do on your iPad is free or practically free, or the subject of a one-time app fee, why would you pay for books that you read in that same metallic environment? The simple answer is you won’t. And if you’re not paying for books, it doesn’t pay for publishers to publish books. So the very fact that books are moving to devices where the “tradition” is that you don’t pay, or you don’t pay much for stuff, suggests strongly that at some point people are going to say, “Why am I paying for a book?”
And that brings up the dirty little secret of the publishing industry—most books are not really meritorious of being book-length. They should never have been books in the first place. The typical nonfiction book has no more than three ideas in it, stretched and stretched and even tortured to conform to the size of the book, just so that publishers can charge book-length prices for it. It’s like when you go to a restaurant and you pay three times what a meal is worth to you, and when the entree arrives, it’s twice the amount of food any healthy human needs to eat at one time. Why don’t they give you just what you need? Because A) you wouldn’t come back, since we’re all so accustomed to humongous, ginormous servings; and B) they couldn’t make any money.
Too many books are the same way--a little bit of information stretched to fit into a book-sized product, a snack served up as a three-course meal. An outrageous example is a book called the Sedona Method, which presents a meditation technique, in which the Method itself is described in about half a page midway through the book. The rest of the book is just stories about how the creator invented it, what you can do with it, success stories, how it’s taught, and so on. Do you really need to pay twenty bucks or however much the book costs for information that could easily fit in one blog entry?
Books are book length so that publishers can charge book-sized prices for them. But if you have a short attention span, a limited amount of information to convey, and an impatient audience, why do you need a book at all?
Put it all together and it’s hard to argue the case that we have not entered the post-literate age, when knowledge and information will be in the hands, once again, of a relative few, while the rest are texting their selections to American Idol or updating others about the miscellany of their daily lives.9 Once again, I lay the blame for much of the collapse of the book as a viable method of disseminating information and entertainment at the feet of the publishing industry. So let’s see exactly how publishers, charged with the business of creating and selling books, could have gotten the whole thing so terribly wrong. And then we’ll find out exactly what role books still can play, and how to keep the Dark Ages at bay.
Chapter 2
The Colossal Failure of the Traditional Publishing Industry
Books might have survived longer had the mainstream publishing industry been considerably, or even marginally, less stupid. Most people think that their industries are inefficiently run. I’ll match the publishing industry against the lot of them. I write these words with deep frustration, which is shared by practically every human being who has ever gone through the exhilaration, and usually, the despair, of publishing a book with a major New York house. I wish I could say something positive about the way publishers work. But I can’t, so I won’t.
For decades, until the 1980s, when things began to change, when you spoke of a publisher, you were speaking of a human being who loved books, had a slightly entrepreneurial bent, and thought it would be fun, or lucrative, or an act of public service, or all three, in varying degrees, to open a publishing house. These individuals were not in the business of overpaying their authors, but they were dedicated to bringing out books they considered important, useful, or even game-changing in society and culture. It took guts to publish James Joyce, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and the Pentagon Papers. Of course they were in it to make a buck, but they also felt a sense of responsibility to the reading public they served and to the authors whom they published. If they liked a particular writer, they would seek to build him or her, book by book, developing an audience and eventually creating bestseller status for that writer.
By the 1980s, everything changed. Individual publishing companies began to merge. Where you once had Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell competing against each other for authors and also for editorial talent, the three publishers merged, forming a conglomerate called, displaying a distinct lack of imagination, Bantam Doubleday Dell. The wave of mergers swept the publishing industry, as Viking and Penguin became Viking Penguin. Harper & Row became HarperCollins. Random House acquired a multitude of smaller brands, and Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich became Harcourt, Brace & World. Or maybe it was the other way around.
The next stage after consolidation was the purchase of these American brand name publishing houses by international conglomerates. For example, Bertelsmann bought Bantam Doubleday Dell, placing that triad of American publishers in German hands. Hachette, the French publishing conglomerate, bought Random House. Viacom, which owns CBS, bought Simon & Schuster. Even Australia got into the act, as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought Harper & Row, which thereupon became HarperCollins. These three phases of ownership, from essentially sole proprietorship into merged publishing houses to international conglomerates, completely transformed the economics of publishing.
The first change was that books now had to pay their own way. If you or I own a publishing house, we can afford to keep faith with an author who needs four or five books to get published before achieving bestseller status. If we are executives for Bertelsmann or Hachette in charge of American book publishing, we no longer have that freedom. We’re responsible to the mother ship for contributing to earnings, and there’s no sense of responsibility to help build an audience for a given author. Every author sinks or swims on each book. This led to the disappearance of the “middle class” among authors, as you now had a small handful of highly successful best-selling authors at the top of the pyramid and a large number of first-time authors, who for the most part weren’t paid very much for their books, at the base.
The publishing term for authors stuck in the middle is “midlist author,” and even by the early 1990s, the Authors Guild, the leading group of book writers in the United States, was bemoaning the loss of the midlist author. Since authors no longer had the relative leisure to build an audience, and since they had to sink or swim much more quickly in order to meet the profit expectations of the headquarters in London (VikingPenguin), Paris (Hachette), or Gütersloh10, Germany (Bertelsmann) repeat best-selling authors became less and less numerous. You might ask where the successors to the John Grishams and Stephen Kings of the ’80s might be found. The answer is there aren’t any, again, with the possible exception of J. K. Rowling, who gets an asterisk in this part of the story because she writes for children. It might have seemed like an intelligent decision to make each book “earn out” or pay its own way. The result was that there are precious few writers of the last twenty years who have attained repeat bestseller status and who have the national icon level of attention as Grisham or King.
The biggest publishing phenomenon of recent years is Dan Brown, who wrote the massive selling The Da Vinci Code. People point to him and say that the publishing industry is alive and well, since that book sold so many millions of copies and boosted the sales of his previous books. In point of fact, Dan Brown’s success is not the typical way that authors usually succeed, with audiences grown book by book. Instead, he had one book that was a phenomenon and thus created interest in his back list or the novels he had previously published, none of whose sales were nearly as spectacular as The Da Vinci Code. His next book was a commercial “event” but not necessarily a very good novel. Sour grapes on my part? Sure! I’d love to have his sales. But no one is going to mistake Dan Brown for the second coming of Ernest Hemingway, or of John Grisham11, for that matter, either.
So the first casualty of the multinational conglomerate phase of publishing in which we find ourselves is the midlist author. Any business person will tell you that failure to keep the pipeline stocked at one end will eventually result in a diminishment of sales at the other end. And that’s where we are now. There simply are no authors who command the nation’s attention with their new books as did Stephen King, John Grisham, or John Le Carre a generation ago. Even those authors are still publishing, but their sales are down, too.
Killing the midlist author was bad enough. The real problem is that publishing in the multinational conglomerate era of today has done something even worse—it’s killed publishing. Let’s take a look at the manner in which publishers actually operate, their business model, and we can see why publishing is in such bad shape.
First, consider that the selection of books by publishers is essentially a passive process. In other words, most adult trade publishers—the people who publish the books that you typically find in a bookstore in the “New Arrivals” section of a bookstore—do not generate the ideas for the books they publish. They will never admit as much. Indeed, whenever a new person is selected to run a publishing house, the first thing he or she says is, “We’re going to decide what we stand for as a publisher.” The problem is that they never do. Instead, these new bosses do the same things that the old bosses did—they wait and see what nonfiction book proposals or fiction manuscripts the literary agents send their way, and then they pick and choose among those projects.
You might ask, “What’s wrong with waiting and seeing what the agents provide?” The response is this: In what other industry do executives sit back and wait for outsiders to suggest what their products should be? Especially when those outsiders are peddling the same wares to all of their competitors. Companies do market research in order to shape decisions, but Mercedes Benz doesn’t wait until some car aficionado writes in and says, “This is what next year’s Mercedes should look like.” Coca-Cola may come out with a new variety of Coke, but the basic idea is generated in-house. Similarly, nobody wrote to Pfizer and said, “Hey, I’m having a little trouble in the boudoir—can you please invent Viagra?” Only publishing waits and sees what people submit to it before they decide what they should produce.
The problem is that literary agents are, for the most part, just as random in their selection of books to represent as publishers act randomly in terms of what they buy. Only a handful of literary agents actually solicit clients and propose books. The vast majority have a business strategy called “wait and see what comes in.” Typically, it’s the usual suspects—experts on politics writing about the President or the pressing issues of the day, business consultants and speakers, motivational gurus, diet and fitness types, and celebrity chefs. Literary agents careers’ rise and fall with the number and quality of the proposals and manuscripts they are able to send to publishers. So the publishers spend almost all of their time shifting through proposals they have received, editing them, and selling them. They spend almost no time generating ideas on what books ought to be published.
As a result, no one is minding the store, and the books that come out this year bear a startling resemblance to the books that came out last year, which also bear a startling resemblance to the books that will be published next year and the year after that. Passivity reigns, and that’s a very strange way to run a business. (I have much more to say about literary agents, most of it negative, a chapter or so from now.)
The next thing that’s unusual, to put it politely, or outright dumb, to put it less politely, is the fact that publishers do virtually no market research before they agree to publish a book. Typically, a literary agent will submit a nonfiction book proposal or a fiction manuscript to one editor at each of the fifteen or sixteen major houses in New York. If that editor likes it, she will circulate the proposal or manuscript to her peers. Depending on how much clout she has, how strong the marketing section of the proposal is, and the mood of the other editors, the editors, meeting together, will decide whether or not to buy the book. Sounds normal so far, except for the fact that virtually none of the people working in publishing houses has the slightest business background.