Publishing as a Buiness Model—Seriously.
This week Carolyn Kelly of Jacket Copy discussed Seth Godin’s recent post that holds up publishing’s finance system as a model for other industries. Seth’s post reads, in part:
It works like this: you have an idea, a fledgling business or a new market to enter. You find an amateur investor (a wealthy dentist, a retired executive) and raise the money to bring it to market. And in return? The investor gets $xx for every unit you sell. From the first one until forever. […]
Of course, this is exactly how the math of book publishing works. The publisher puts up money and keeps 80 or 90 percent of the income. You get the rest.
Carolyn points out—quite rightly—that Seth’s choice is a little odd given that “everyone in publishing is becoming increasingly concerned that publishing, as a business model, isn’t working.” But take a look at the reasons it’s flailing: oversized advances, archaic delivery/return models, proliferation of free content online, concerns about piracy, etc. These are not part of the business model Godin lays out. Instead, they’re problems our industry is facing—and ones we can solve.
We’ve spent a lot of time fretting about piracy, online readers, bookstores closing. And indeed, it is a worrisome time for us all. I’ve said before that I don’t think the printed book will go anywhere. The way we acquire, publish, and market those books, however, is changing dramatically. And now is the time to face up to those changes and reshape our industry for the future. How can we streamline the publishing process? Rethink the financial sense of typical contracts? Turn online curiosity about books, authors, and topics to our advantage? The smartest people in publishing are asking these kinds of questions and exploring solutions (think HarperStudio, Twelve Books, Shortcovers, and Harlequin, to name just a few).
Carolyn wonders—as, I think, we all do: “Will today’s toddlers even give what we think of as a book — the kind with covers and paper pages — a second glance?”
I’m reminded of something Seth Godin said during his talk to the Publishing Point (then known as the Digital Publishing Group) this September. Roughly paraphrased, he said: Publishers seem to have forgotten what business they’re in. They’re not in the chopping down trees, paper-making, folio-binding business. They’re in the curation-of-ideas business. Content is everywhere; the value of publishers is that they signal what parts of that content we should read.
The challenge is to take that value and leverage new technologies to keep it relevant.
Notes
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