The End of What?

A reader pointed me at New York Magazine’s blockbuster article on the publishing industry, cheerfully entitled “The End.”

I say: the end of what? The end of corporate hubris, broken business models, and lockstep, marching-into-the-oblivion party lines? You bet. And it’s well-deserved. An industry built on creating superstars to prop up the bottom line, which openly admits they don’t even know how to market their own product to a reader base that they know nothing about (and continues to shrink)—what part of this ever sounded like a good idea?

Some of the quotes are truly classic.

The piece opens with the most telling. Debbie Stier, #2 of HarperStudio, asked her 12-year-old son what they could do to fix the publishing business. He said: “So maybe you have to turn all the books into movies so nobody has to waste their time.”

Or about the audience:

“Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them. Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade. Others vehemently disagree. But who really knows? Focused consumer research is almost nonexistent in publishing.”

Sorry, marketing-guy interjection: WHAT THE HELL? A $30B industry that doesn’t know what its customer base is like or what they want? What agencies have they been flushing their marketing dollars down the past few decades? Didn’t I just say, “Fire your agencies?”

Or about marketing:

“One key advantage of corporate publishing was supposed to be its marketing muscle: You may not publish exactly the books you’d like to, but the ones you publish will get the attention they deserve. Yet in recent years, more accurate internal sales numbers have confirmed what publishers long suspected: Traditional marketing is useless. “Media doesn’t matter, reviews don’t matter, blurbs don’t matter,” says one powerful agent. Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them.”

Wow. Give me a decent budget and a couple weeks of a research-focused AdWords buy and I’ll tell you where the readers are, how to connect with them, and whether it not it will be profitable at the first sale. This is the most basic online marketing stuff on the planet. But somehow, it has eluded the biggest publishers out there.

So, hell, let’s drop all pretense here: any publishers out there who want an agency that is full of readers and writers, which knows how this new intartubey marketing works, is getting real results, and is building for future success, maybe you need to talk to us.

Okay. Commercial over.

And, you know what? I refuse to get discouraged by all of this. Even if everything we know about publishing changes overnight—even if it disappears entirely—I’m willing to bet that the future for creative, flexible people who tell stories is bright. The form may change. The portrait of the lonely, tortured, antisocial writer will likely go by the wayside. We may have to accept different kinds of deals.

But the deals—and the stories—will be there.

September 21st, 2008 / 1 Comment »