The Future of Publishing – Part One

22 Sep 2014

So, Scotland has decided, the Scottish debate has ended and we can all return to more prosaic matters. Hmm ... somehow I don’t think so. Scotland’s devolved powers have still to be confirmed, the English cat is now out of the bag and we have a General Election to negotiate before the end of May next year. Politics suddenly looks interesting again.

But so does the future of the business I work in ie. publishing and as much as I would like to indulge myself and hold forth on constitutional affairs, this column is supposed to be about writing issues and things are equally as dramatic here. Last weekend I attended the Festival of Writing held at The University of York. So did around 400 other budding authors and a considerable number of agents and editors. It’s one of the biggest conventions of its kind in the country and besides enabling writers to benefit from the top-class workshops on offer and pitch their work directly to influential people, it’s also an opportunity to catch up with the latest trends in the industry. First up on the Sunday morning was a panel discussion on The Future of Publishing. You can’t afford to rest at these events and despite a late finish for many after the Gala Dinner the night before, the lecture theatre was packed with delegates anxious to hear what might lie in store.

The principal drivers in publishing at present are the advent of electronic reading devices and the inexorable rise of Amazon as a distributor. The discussion panel consisted of a children’s book editor, two agents and a gentleman whose livelihood revolved around the publishing of ebooks (no surprises as to where his sympathies lay). One thing they all seemed fairly agreed on – ebooks have stabilised at around 40% of the market, a figure confirmed by my own publisher. This means that the printed book will still survive. Certain books are not suited to the e format and unlikely to be so for the foreseeable future, children’s books for instance and those publications which are heavily dependant on lavish illustrations, the kind we like to display on our coffee tables. It’s also reasonable to assume that many novels will still be printed as many of us like the touch and feel of a book.

The next question then is where will we be able to obtain them? The answer seems to be Amazon, a conclusion that most in the publishing industry find unpalatable. But even here the panel appeared united in admitting that Amazon is an amazingly efficient online distributor both in terms of its cost and its service – it ‘delivers’ the books we want at low prices, quickly and directly to our door. What more could consumers want? Exactly, which is why the conventional bricks and mortar book industry needs to think through its response far more carefully than it has done so far. To tell us that ‘we must support bookshops’ by insisting on purchasing from them, as advocated by one of the panellists, is to hide one’s head in the sand and remain in denial. Fine for those who are passionate enough about the physical book to put their hands deep into their pockets but that wont wash with the general book-buying public. These are the people who quite understandably browse their way round Waterstones for their ‘touchy-feely’ experience and then go home and order what they want online at considerably less price. Try telling them that their Christmas shopping expedition is going to cost them an extra £20 or so for the half dozen volumes they’re planning on putting in stockings if they’re loyal to their bookshop. It all smacks of King Canute trying to hold back the onrushing tide - take that line and you’ll get swept away. At some point in time of course, the bookshop will no longer exist and the consumer will be denied their browsing experience - but by then it will be too late and they can still get what they want from Amazon anyway.

So, unless something dramatic happens, Amazon’s going to rule the publishing world (and possibly some others besides). They already dominate the distribution of ebooks and seem set to do the same for the printed version. At present this suits the consumer but a monopoly situation like that is never going to be good in the longer term. Once they’ve captured the market, prices will inevitably go up, the good service we’ve enjoyed up until now will cease and the benefits we currently enjoy from bookshops will disappear. What can be done about it? Rather than the unrealistic solution offered by my panellist, here’s my own line of thinking.

Firstly, let’s look at the chain of distribution in publishing. I’ll begin with the assumption that an author wants to write a book and a reader wants to read one and is prepared to pay to do so. In other words we have the basis for a market. What readers are prepared to pay for this privilege is an issue. So is whether authors wish to earn a living from their writing. The large majority will understand that they cannot but continue, like me, because they have something to say or because they do it for the love of their craft.

The distribution chain for conventional bricks and mortar publishing is as follows. The author engages an agent who sells the idea of the book to a publisher. If so persuaded, the publisher uses a printer, the book is sent to a distributor who passes it on to a bookshop who (eventually) sells it to the reader. A long and complicated process. Compare this with the distribution chain for a self-published ebook. An author puts their book onto Amazon KDP and a reader downloads it. No wonder all the middlemen are panicking. The distribution chain for the self-published print version is not much longer and merely adds the services of a printer. Companies like Lulu and Smashwords, together with the advent of print on demand, make all this comparatively easy. It’s not rocket science and any author who sets their mind to it can get their book ‘out there’ in both print and e versions in a short space of time, something Amazon is happy to help them with. More and more books are being self-published and the market is becoming flooded with cheap, and quite often poor, literature. Never mind the quality, feel the width.

What becomes clear in all this is that rather than assume a right to their position, the middlemen need to think carefully about what value they are adding to the distribution chain, how much the reader is prepared to pay for their services and how that service is communicated and delivered to the reader. These are the basic principles of marketing. In other words, when a reader buys a hardback book in a bookshop for £19.99 what are they getting that they can’t get in a ebook from Amazon at £1.99?

If my panellists are right and the printed book does have a future, then so do printers and probably distributors (unless print on demand takes over). Their services are well-defined and don’t concern us here. It’s the agents, publishers and bookshops who are the problem and that’s where we should focus our attention.

Next time, in Part Two, I’m going to look at each of these areas in turn and establish exactly what it is that they’re contributing that costs us all that extra.