On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:15 PM,
<Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:
ricky said:
> I'm not sure.
i'm sure. i'm absolutely positive.
> As content creators, it's in publishers' best interest
except publishers are _not_ "content creators".
_writers_ create the content. always have; always will.
the publishers have traditionally taken that "content"
and made it the subject of large press-runs so as to
make affordable the print-books they then placed in
brick-and-mortar bookstores. they are _middlemen_,
and all the services they rendered were a function of
the former nature of the book as _a_physical_product_,
and they extracted the lion's share for those services...
but now writers can turn their own content into e-books
-- using a few dozen lines of code, as i've just shown --
that are easily uploaded and then available world-wide,
without necessarily giving up _any_ cut to a "publisher".
the old days will soon be history, and publishers know it.
indeed, they are _sure_ about it; even absolutely positive.
the only question is how long they can ride it until it dies.
It's certainly a popular view that the future doesn't need publishers (e.g. Amanda Hocking etc...).
I happen to disagree, but love to hear the counter view though. I do believe that publishers add value beyond just moving words around. If you look at the financials of the big publishers, you see that the expenses aren't in moving books around or printing pages anymore. The costs are in marketing, copyediting, etc...imagine what happens if no one is doing this job? (see -
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/neal-stephenson-reamde-ebook-replaced-on-amazon_b39074).
So it seems to me that these functions are needed to be performed by somebody - even if not by the publishers. It's hard to predict what the future will be. But take a look at the industries that are ahead of us digitally, when YouTube celebrities or professional mom bloggers become big, they start hiring people to perform functions for them. Naturally, you see job specialization when you go beyond a one man/woman show.
My hypothesis is that for folks who are really big (e.g. J K Rowling) or really small (indie writers) you'll see them owning the whole operation. The former wants customization/personalization and the ladder is more like a startup and the writer (i.e. the founder) has to do everything. In the middle (which Amanda Hocking herself has just entered), would partner with someone who is good at editing, branding, social media marketing, SEO/SEM, etc...it's more efficient for this partner to do this because they have the experience working across many titles and become good at these things (it's inefficient for authors to become expert in these tasks themselves). Whoever do this job, we can call them the "publisher".
Note: An alternative scenario is that these jobs get subdivided by different specialist companies, then the 'agent' becomes the project manager for the author and outsource these functions to various specialists. It's also a possible scenario.
-bowerbird
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