Yep.

I recently interacted with a publisher, and was gobsmacked at how few questions they asked, how little research they did, and how much money they were willing to put into the project. Uploading files? Nope. Creative Commons? What’s that? Hell, they were hesitant to have any conversations by email.

They’re just not hungry enough. But they should be, and will be, and will lay off staff in the first instance.

I fully believe that the whole publishing industry is going to get dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century any day now, and some of the changes they need to make are in line with these things, but there are a few new problems that are worth noting.

1) The attention economy. Publishers could have an almost infinite number of books available, but that is not of much practical use to them. Set aside Amazon for a moment – the business model of book sales is based on providing a manageable number of desirable choices. A huge bookstore still has only a fraction of the books available, and an airport shop or supermarket is only going to have a tiny slice. It may seem counterintuitive, but this works out well for the publishers because fewer choices lead to more sales and help drive blockbusters. Making their catalog larger, by an order of magnitude, hurts more than helps.

2) Amazon changes that game a bit. Without the nozzle of retail space, it is possible to have these huge inventories and infinite choice, but despite this, people still gravitate towards the best-sellers and big names. This is a surprisingly reasonable choice because these are the choices that they can get the most information about and have the highest confidence in. If you have a book of your own on Amazon, there are definitely steps you can take to keep it from seeming entirely sketchy, but you’re still going to need readers to get readers.

2a) 2 is more of a reflection on the current state of things than an eternal truth. An overwhelming array fo choice is the hallmark of many industries, and we’re constantly getting better at it. But today, Amazon alone will not bring a book out of the darkness.

3) Print on demand has a TERRIBLE legacy. If you talk to most publishers or agents, they are likely to lump lulu in with other vanity press publishers. This is unfair – Lulu does not engage in the same practices that have made vanity press a cesspit – but entirely reasonable for them. The stink of vanity press is _profound_, and they don’t want to get any of it on them. This might change in time, but I wouldn’t bet on it, since as much as Lulu’s business practices are better, it has many authors who are of the same ilk.

4) A lot of this intermediary stuff (layout, covers, editing) is arguably better done by a third party. Those are the functions of a service company, and that’s well outside the wheelhouse of a big publisher. They could try to create a unit to do it, but that would probably be far less cost effective than buying or partnering with a third party to do it for them. And that suggests a great business opportunity, except for point #3. All those services are basically the ones a vanity press can offer, so distinguishing such a business from a vanity press would be a very serious challenge.

-Rob D.

Rob, the archaic attitude towards self-publishing is the biggest obstacle and one I’m well familiar with — thanks for pointing it out because I wanted to allude to it and was caught between editing the article and expounding MORE in another one. You saved me. The thing is, this stink is something that they have used and still need to justify their model — if self-publishing is always foul and dismissable then they can pretend that there is no interesting technology on the horizon that is about to change their world (or is in fact already changing their world — as JB put it to me yesterday, they are finally sniffing around wondering who’s stealing all the fucking dinosaur eggs).

They are heavily invested in deriding it. There’s a way in which they can’t not deride it.

More on stink.

I just realised that publishers that perpetuate this stigma face a more interesting brick wall: Lulu is very successful, and that means that there is a growing culture of authors that don’t know they are supposed to stink. They self-publish and self-promote and sell two hundred copies to a small fan base that tells them they are awesome and they take home two thousand bucks and feel great. They repeat the cycle as needed and continue to be satisfied. Fans are satisfied.

These authors may never even consider shopping to a publisher, and it seems likely to me that a few hundred self-promoted sales implies at least an order of magnitude more potential backed by a publisher that’s serious about its weight in marketing.

A culture where two hundred sales is good enough and *it is* (all involved are happy with their transactions) must be terrifying!

Well, here’s the thing, the stink on vanity publishing is well and truly earned. On one hand you have exploitative con artists offering people a chance to become “published authors” and on the other hand you have towering egos whose works are so brilliant that the publishers are clearly too stupid to understand them. And this is not a thing of the past – it is still a thriving little niche.

That lulu is a different business model entirely – on some level they’re a glorified kinkos – is the blind spot.

-Rob D.

For what it’s worth, Lightning Source *is* backed by a big name in conventional printing/publishing, and they do have a tier for being the sales agent (though via back-end rather than the Lulu front-end one-at-a-time paradigm) on titles. Their choice at that point, though, is to let the publisher (that’s using them as their printer and optionally as their sales agent) to have full control on the throttle of when to step up their game and get into the bigger scale stuff (offset print runs, etc).

This is not to say that their approach is as modern as the one you’re talking about, but I don’t think that the printing world is entirely in the dark about it. But as with any *pre existing* enterprise, there’s a lot of mass and a lot of momentum present. Turning the old, massive ship takes a lot more energy than creating a new, small, agile ship.

Fred, thanks for the illumination on Lightning Source. I’ve looked at them in the past and they *feel* like they are backed by a “real” publisher, so the confirmation is interesting. They seemed at the time I looked to have missed the boat on the essential feature that Lulu pulled off: the storefront. With Lulu you are basically done when you click GO if you want to be. You don’t print anything and so there is no necessity to shopping your product around. You can just say “click here” and they do all the work that you actually want done.

Lightning Source struck me as less POD and more short-run printing. That is, it’s POD for the author, but the important new automation is in being POD *for the customer*. LS still assumes a traditional un-automated method for moving product from data to a book in the customer’s hands.

This is obviously based on a vague and year-old understanding of LS. All could be wrong. But if right it more betrays its roots than embraces a new idea.

There’s another trick that POD can do that might be a game changer: scaleable pricing. Two of the obvious factors that drive prices are scarcity and demand. High demand, low availability items can command proportionally higher prices. The Disney Corp uses this to drive interest. When sales for a DVD title start to flag they “Put it back in the vault.”, they stop selling it. There was a time in the mid 90′s when we were selling used copies of The LIttle Mermaid for up to cnd$100. This for an item that was maybe $9.99 new. When they re-released it the demand was such that they sold buckets to Bangladesh.

Traditional publishing can’t respond to scarcity by raising prices, that’s the problem with printing the price on the item itself. But there’s no reason that a POD system couldn’t be set up to respond is such a way. The bottleneck of POD, it’s inability to produce massive quantities quickly, could even be a benefit in such a case by ensuring that there’s always the possibility of demand outstripping supply.