i was trying to sleep, but woke up because i was too angry to dream.
here is what was making me so angry. this "i give up" attitude in the publishing industry is infuriating. not only the book publishing industry but also the movie and music industry are riding similar bandwagons to hell. the despair over the decline of the book. "nobody's buying books!" this is
NOT TRUE. books sales are up, however slightly. it is
single title sales which are down. what does this mean? not that you need to abandon fiction, per se, but that you need to reassess the market and operate under a different business paradigm -- with less emphasis on single titles and a greater emphasis on author "brand" names and publisher "brands" as well as imprint subscriptions, sales of related ephemera, etc.
it is time not only to reconceive the structure of the publishing industry, but to reconceive what constitutes a "book" -- to determine the limitations and the possibilities of the book industry in this new millenium.
it all reminds me of the music industry. here is an industry who began focusing on a Top 40 format -- singles-oriented radio -- and then was surprised when people began downloading singles and stopped buying albums. that invested in quick-boom, disposable artists who would peak early and drop off, instead of investing in career artists who would produce lower initial sales but whose fan base would support them steadily if not increasingly over time. that aggressively markets a small number of artists, and then is surprised when people grow sick of these artists. that caters to casual listeners, people who buy less than 10 albums a year for a period of about 10 years, instead of people who care about music and typically buy 15-30 albums a year for the majority of thier lives. then napster comes along, and they are surprised by a lack of brand loyalty. and when overall album sales go up, but single title sales go down, they bemoan the failing industry (in which consumers purchase and listen to more music than they did previously).
message to the large book publishers:
people are still buying plenty of books. they are just not buying YOUR books. in other industries, researchers determine why market trends have shifted, and then adapt business practices so that the industry can continue to grow and thrive. in the entertainment industry, businesses blindly stumble forward, increasing the desperation with which they flail, sinking larger amounts of money into failing practices in the hopes that money will magically solve everything. and then complain of rising costs.
the only entertainment industry that has really come out on top of this all (aside from the porn industry, which has profited for similar reasons) is the gaming industry, which is realizing incredible profits. this is largely because the gaming industry has succeeded in one particular area where other entertainment industries are failing.
they have considered the impact of new technologies in terms of their impact on the FORM of their product as opposed to simply considering it in terms of its potential as a new delivery method. when the internet rolled around, how did the publishing world react to its presence? by offering "e-books" -- scanned books! -- instead of investing in experimental hypertext work which reconceptualized the book itself to make fiction newly accessible to a changing audience. an absolutely luddite, ridiculous approach to the astounding potential of digital technology. only now am i seeing value-added packaging when books enter softcover printings (I'm seeing this on HarperCollins books, where they've appended interviews and major reviews, etc, to the back of books which ran previously in hardcover). and why do so few authors have web sites? or book-specific blogs, which cost NOTHING?
(the movie industry is even worse. message to the movie industry: STOP SPENDING OVER $100 MILLION DOLLARS ON MOVIES FOR PEOPLE WHO WATCH THREE MOVIES PER YEAR. "nobody's watching movies!" they're watching movies AT HOME. they are DOWNLOADING MOVIES. they are STILL WATCHING MOVIES -- JUST NOT PAYING YOU. the solution? "let's try to stop piracy!" NO. YOU IDIOTS. the obvious solution is to reconceptualize the theatrical experience, so there is a reason to attend the theater instead of downloading a movie and watching it on your plasma screen. instead they throw money at the problem. "let's spend $200 million on the next one!! increase the marketing budget!!" hmmm.... not a bad idea.... or, you could STOP MAKING TERRIBLE MOVIES. and STOP CHARGING $10 FOR POPCORN. and INCORPORATE LIVE ELEMENTS TO MAKE THE MOVIE-GOING EXPERIENCE LESS HOMOGENOUS, DIFFERENTIATING IT FROM THE HOME-THEATRE EXPERIENCE... etc.)
the whole thing will come crashing down, like the music industry is crashing down, and (like the music industry) the winners in the whole debacle will be the small presses that manage to (collectively) step in to fill the vaccuum. and maybe a few intelligent publishers will clean up their acts. but don't bet on it.
why doesn't anybody ever market to me and people like me? i read 50 books per year. i watch 30-40 movies per year. i probably listen to 100 different albums every year. but why bother marketing to me? instead, they market to people who buy 5 albums a year (maybe), watch less than 10 films, and probably read less than 2 or 3 books. ridiculous.
