A Whole New Ballgame?
Yesterday saw the launch of the Publishing Point, an industry group—originally called the Digital Publishing Group—dedicated to bringing together forward-thinking people in the book industry for education and interaction. The first Publishing Point event also took place yesterday, with Hanny Hindi, a Clickable Guru, speaking to the group about SEM.
I’m lucky enough to have been able to learn about SEO/SEM basics through my job, but nevertheless Hanny’s talk gave me lots to think about. One of the best nuggets I took away from his talk was this statement, roughly paraphrased:
This isn’t totally new. This is still Don Draper stuff—the same marketing questions, the same need for quality campaigns. It’s just a new way to ask those questions, do market research, find and connect with buyers.
With SEM there are terms to learn and new concepts to cover, but fundamentally it’s just marketing—what we’ve been doing for years.
It seems to me this is also an apt and helpful way to think about massive changes that are transforming publishing. So often we—and the press—get taken by hyperbole: we hear that the “death of publishing” is nigh; that the Kindle is a “book-killer.” I don’t think the book will ever die, nor do I think publishing will die.
But what we can—and must—change is how we think about the role of the publisher. People will always want quality content to read, and they value publishers to find that content for them (and they also value “real,” physical books, too). As Craig Newmark said today, it’s about trust and curation, which are the heart of the publisher’s mission. The rest of it—formats, production, returns, pricing—is details, and clinging to the details as we’ve always known them is slowing us down. I don’t mean to downplay how important these “details” are to our industry, nor how big—and sometimes painful—their evolution will be. But they’re not, to return to Hanny’s comparison, the Don Draper stuff. They’re just the packaging.
The name of the game has changed. But it’s not a whole new ballgame. (Plus 10 points for the timely baseball metaphor!)
So let’s stop “being distressed” over digital and figure out how to make publishers’ most valuable asset—their knowledge, taste, and expertise—work in today’s market.
