PUBLISHING HAS A FUTURE_WE MAY NOT

Why is this such a big topic?

Why do bloggers and twitterers go on about how publishing may be doomed?

Because it hits to the core of who we are as a society.

We live and die by the printed word.

Communities change because of what has been written, and if Aldous Huxley is to be believed, society will suffer tremendously without it.

Nearly every day I read of another magazine or newspaper that is folding,

closing its doors and giving up the ghost of publishing.

Is this signaling the chaos before the end?

I'm an optimist for the publishing industry. A pessimist for what lies ahead for struggling writers

Let me explain. Consider how many books are printed every single year.

In 2005 (the most recent year data was collected for),

there were 206,000 new titles, while the US saw 172,000.

That’s titles, not the actual number of books.

Say there was an average of 10,000 books printed per each title. (Probably a conservative estimate.)

That would mean at least 3,780,000,000 physical, paper books were printed. This is only new titles that were introduced that year.

qHow many of those books hit the NYTimes bestseller list?

How many sold their entire first print run?

How many made back the money that was spent on their physical production?

Not all of them.

Nor even most of them.

It’s relatively few that ever make it big.

The publishers know not every book produced will succeed,
.
But now in these dark economic times for publishing, it is very likely

that will ask themselves,

"Why not save money and precious resources for most (if not all) of the titles that don’t have as much chance for immediate success?"

Translation :

the purchasing agents will slam shut the gates on most of the books brought to them by agents.

Those agents, in turn, will reject nearly every query sent them by unknowns.

So, yes, publishing will have a future. We, as unknown authors, may very well not.

Oh, but there is ePublishing you say.

self-publishing may be the next dot-com bubble:

There's money to be made, so people are climbing over each other to post eBooks on Amazon so they can start raking in their fortune.

Except that's not going to happen, and eventually the flood of first-timers testing the self-publishing waters is going to subside.

some of the self-publishing poster children (Amanda Hocking being a good example) have used their success to procure traditional publishing deals.

And how sometimes it seems like there's more money to be made in teaching writers how to self-publish (i.e., a lot of self-publishing advocates aren't selling salvation, they're selling their own brand).

Amazon is turning eBook shoppers into bargain hunters who will stop paying for books in favor of ones they can get during free promotions.

All of this ebook talk is becoming a business in itself. Money is being made out of thin air in this strange new speculative meta-practice: there are seminars,

conferences and courses springing up everywhere, even at the Society of Authors (a writers' union which, until recently, was largely against epublication). Television and radio programmes are being made about self-epublishing

Everyone can be a writer now: it only takes 10 minutes to upload your own ebook, and according to the New York Times "81% of people feel they have a book in them ... And should write it.

Are we deluding ourselves?

Dangerous if that is true. If it is indeed a bubble, and the epub bubble bursts, as all previous bubbles have done,

the fall-out for publishing and writing may be even harder to repair than it is proving to be in the fields of mortgages, derivatives and personal debt.

Because this bubble is based on cultural, not purely economic, grounds
***

ARE WE KIDDING OURSELVES?

The light of my writing is my heart. I give it freely.

Publishing is a business. We are writers, basically creative souls with little experience in the world of contracts and predators wearing business suits.

Reading for pleasure is becoming a lost art in a video game/TV world.

Publishers are downsizing.

The surviving editors are gun-shy of taking chances.

Purchasing agents for said publishers want a guarantee-return for their advances.

Ebooks are illusionary. Three hundred dollars is a lot to spend for a devise that gives you teeny-tiny books with no color and few graphics with less illustrations.

The odds of any of us getting an agent are atrocious :

.04%

And when you do, you will have no say over the all-important title and cover art. There is the horror story of Allison, a client of sage agent Rachelle Gardner (who, by the way, will not even look at queries for the 1st quarter of 2011) :

http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2011/01/when-publishing-dreams-become-nightmare.html

Many literary agents are so fearful of offending the all-important publishers, who are the source of their livelihood, that they will not challenge outrageous behavior on the part of said publishers.

And no, we are not the source of the agents' livelihoods. Would-be authors are a penny a dozen. Publishers who are still open to looking at unpublished authors on the other hand are getting fewer and fewer.

Ebooks are an option, of course. But with limitations. Go to Raquel Byrnes excellent post to see what they are :

http://nitewriter6.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html

And read what her agent says about the drawbacks of Kindle here :

http://cowboymusing.blogspot.com/2011/01/books-published-on-kindle.html

So are we kidding ourselves?

Why do we write?

I write because I enjoy the art of crafting a suspenseful, lyrical, fun read. If I ever get published that will just be the icing on the cake. But even I get weary of the sound of one hand clapping that I receive from queried agents. How about you?
***

KID LIT TO THE RESCUE?

Publishers of children's books are unbelievably important to the survival of publishing as a whole.

If you think about the long-term future of the industry,

the people who are reading 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' today

will hopefully be reading a thick piece of literature in a few years.

Children's publishing is often viewed as a stable segment of the industry,

thanks to reliable sales to parents and school libraries.

Suzanne Murphy, vice president of Scholastic's trade division, said children's publishers "have fared well during a very tough economic time.

I think parents may -- especially during the holiday time --

cut back in other ways but are willing to spend money on something they think is valuable to childhood and education."

Nielsen BookScan reported

that sales of juvenile books were the strongest of any category in 2008, rising 6 percent from 2007.

In 2009, Nielsen reported, sales held mostly even.

By contrast,

last year adult hardcover and mass market paperbacks both declined nearly 4 percent,

and trade paperbacks fell 2 percent.

Sales of juvenile books may be skewed because many adults are buying young adult titles such as "Harry Potter" and "Twilight."

But the savior of publishing has an uncertain future :

Entertaining the kids with the printed page seems to grow more difficult by the year.

Children's appetite for cell phones, computers, video games and television far exceeds that for books.

In January, a Kaiser Family Foundation report found that the time spent on all entertainment by kids from 8 to 18 rose from 6.5 hours a day five years ago

to 7.5 hours a day.

But only 25 minutes were typically spent reading a book.

The Department of Education found that in 1984 only 8 percent of 13-year-olds

and 9 percent of 17-year-olds reported that they "never or hardly ever" read for fun on their own.

By 2008, the percentage had jumped to 24 percent for both groups.

But publishers are not giving up without a fight :

Last fall, HarperCollins published a missing-girl mystery, "The Amanda Project," with a major online social networking component.


And Simon & Schuster is getting into the game this June with its multimedia venture "Spaceheadz."

Written by Jon Scieszka, author of "The Stinky Cheese Man" and the former Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People's Literature,

"Spaceheadz" is centered on aliens who come to Earth disguised as fifth-graders.

Simon & Schuster also plans to release it as an e-book. Sill, without color, e-books do not appeal to most children.

The question remains whether all these multimedia add-ons to the reading experience will pay off.

"At the heart, you still have to have good storytelling," Kinney said. "You can't resort to gimmickry and hope to retain an audience."

What do you think? Is Kid Lit our savior? Or is it simply a breath-taking story that will save declining readership of books?
***
What does Hollywood think of struggling writers :

BOOK PUBLISHING IS DEAD?

Don't forget to vote for my entry in Tessa's OUTSIDE THE BOX blogfest :
http://tessasblurb.blogspot.com/

Reality is a harsh mistress.

Deny ugly facts all we want, reality will sit on our porch unfazed.

Ignore her long enough, and she ends up sitting on our chests.

1.) The corporate masters of publishing houses can’t afford literature.

A.) They seem to have worked themselves into a corner as dire as that of real estate.

Their industry got financialized, and it hyper-evolved to the point of collapse.

B.) The apparent logic of maximized profit creates a gray and chilly society

where nothing pays off but banks, guns and jails.

C.) The publishing industry is in trouble—

but not just because of the digital revolution.

The real trouble for the publishing industry

has more to do with the gradual unfolding of the economic transformation that led

to this structure of publishing,

where we now have five large corporate groups and a small number of retail chains

dominating the industry.

These corporations have to achieve growth year after year,

and when that top line revenue begins to fall,

as it did when the 2008 economic recession suddenly tipped the narrow profit margins into the red,

it had devastating impact throughout the industry.

And the only way that they can preserve the profit at the bottom line is

to push people out, and to reduce their overheads and costs dramatically.

D.) So that was the real crisis in the publishing industry in the autumn of 2008 to the present.

Now, it also happened to coincide with an upsurge in e–book sales.

E.) End result? A terminally ill book publishing industry.


2.) To witness the future is to rethink the past and learn something from it.

A.) Most people are only as good as their options :

How can a 22-year-old editor intelligently bid on a book?

What does a post-graduate $32,000-a-year, fresh-out of internship, know about

what will score a huge success with the public?

Does focusing on what is taboo to say in the face of superiors cut her off

from what mainstream America is feeling, thinking, and wanting to read?

B.) Why does this frequently appear to be a case of the asylum leaving the inmates to decide?

People in publishing (except those that are up top and doing well) are not really supervised.

Unsupervised inexperience is the formula for disaster.

3.) Literary agents are not like Hollywood agents.

Many literary agents are beyond frightened of angering the editors,

so they won't fight like Hollywood agents will for the clients.

They say things like, "Well yes, it's cheap money, kid, but think of it as an annuity."

Or, "I wish I could do more but they'll never budge" or this one : "You're lucky to get it."

Even if we are,

can you imagine a Hollywood agent (lawyer) accepting that without putting up some kind of resistence?

4.) Reading for pleasure is dying.

A.) According to the NEA, less than 1/3 of 13-year-olds read for pleasure every day,

a 14% decline from 20 years ago.

The percentage of 17-year-old non-readers doubled in that same twenty-year span.

If you're an American between the ages of 15 and 24, you spend 2 hours a day watching television,

but only 7 minutes a day reading, according to this study.

B.) Timothy Shanahan, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and past president of the International Reading Association says

that many young people say they don't read because it's lonely.

When they are online or text messaging, they feel involved with others, but they do not feel this sense of community when reading by themselves.

C.) Shanahan continued,

"The Harry Potter books were popular not mainly because of this wonderful story and the language,

but because it was this huge phenomenon that allowed young people to participate in it.

What was exciting was reading what your friends were reading and talking to them about it. People of all ages are hungry for that kind of community."

*) What do you think?

How can we create that kind of sense of community among young readers nationwide?

Is book publishing sliding into the sea of oblivion? Is there hope? How can we stem the tide?

When and why did English teachers stop trying to teach the correct use of our native tongue, which has a bearing on declining reading?

The two subjects are inter-related, like a dog chasing its tail.
***