The destructive force of corporatism is no more evident than it is here -- an indifference to even the written word in the search for impossible profits. Years ago, Routledge, beloved by us nutty pomo academics, a leading press for avant garde thought (and the publisher of Wittgenstein, among others) fired Bill Germano, who had resurrected it as a force in thought, once bought by a German conglomerate. You had to wonder then, and I continue to wonder now, what is going to happen.

As an author (who is in an article in yesterday's Salon!) with a major university press, I am beginning to think that such places may be our last refuge, though even here, it is becoming almost impossible to make the profit needed to continue. Are we entering a new dark age?

I'm a novelist and poet who has published eight books in sixteen editions worldwide, including a translation into Japanese. In print publishing I met agents with no taste, editors who thought they and not the writers were the important people, publicists half my age who treated me like an ignoramus and ignored my hard-earned understanding of my most receptive audience, and in general a snotty indifferent attitude. The print publishing business, in its vanity and hauteur, has rivalled Hollywood for self-importance and self-flattery, except with far smaller stakes. Its denizens liked to pretend they were hardnosed businesspeople, even though, as I read years ago, the major houses combined returned about 3 cents a year on the dollar. Hell, a savings account does better than that.

As the previous letter-writer pointed out, the "industry" (and the fact they refer to themselves as an "industry" ought to have been a clue to the problem), like most commercial entities worldwide, made the corporate mistake of thinking that specialization always equals efficiency--resulting in morons trying to sell books who "know" selling but not books--and the other corporate mistake of assuming that the trick was in selling the "product," not in having something worth selling.

Now they're paying the piper, and for quite a few literary writers (this does NOT include Grisham, Crichton, or most of the big-money names) there will be very little mourning. What has print publishing done for us? Very goddamned little. So long, people. We aint gonna miss you at all.

Greetings

I walked up the Avenue of the America's recently and i was struct by the close proximity of the publishers. Kind of a metaphor for their group think...

Its made of fail. Hunker in your NY office an wait for the next big thing to miraculously sail over the transom. Mostly they just toss it back. No surprise that Rowlings Harry Potter was published by a boutique press

But the biggest failure of vision was their total inability to see WEB 2.0 coming!

You want to get your story out self publishing isn't vanity anymore, I can publish on my own site and with paypal I share with nobody and with LuLu I have POD

But whats hilarious is even if I or another writer did those things building a market, The NY mavens have no friggin idea how to make that built in demand work in their tiny inbred world

Like I said group think at its worst, made of FAIL may they all drown in their cosmopolitans

That's not a typo. The mainstream publishing industry in many ways remains in the 19th century, bent out of shape by the business practices of Hollywood in the 1980s. Instead of taking moderate business risks for moderate -- but reliable -- business gains, everyone is playing the "high roller" model, hoping for blockbusters, but since everyone is betting on the same few people, they are only sinking higher and higher amounts of money into bets which have less payoff as a consequence. Spending millions on one author -- as is often the case today -- means you can't spend thousands on new authors.

A more sensible business model -- a small business model -- is to invest in a large number of good new authors, of which there are many, and nurture them over time. The average advance for a first book is still under $5,000, which is unchanged since the 1960s, when you could live for a year on that amount. The ludicrous $10 million dollar advance paid in some bids (which in a number of cases have only broken even) could pay for two thousand first-author advances, or even 100 authors for whom a publisher could have the $100,000 mentioned as "mid-list" in the article. Then you are playing better odds, because some percentage of those people are likely to do well, and you have a better chance of an even bigger hit.

With all due respect to the good people at McSweeney's, they were far from the leader in alternative publishing techniques. Speculative Fiction small presses have been around for decades, long before McSweeney's, and I well remember Mark Ziesing describing how he made a good living and paid authors well. He also said he used four people for the same work done by a full floor of Random House.

There is no doubt that small presses are the wave of the future, if only because the distribution model has changed radically. With the internet, Amazon.com, and giant chains like B&N, the trick will be to get the attention of the audience or of one of the big bookstores, and let them market you. The Motley Fools investors started self-publishing back around 1998, because they could sell directly to customers on a large scale through their TV show and website, cut out several layers of middlemen, and make far more money. Similarly, electronic books and printing on demand and on location could eliminate or greatly reduce the costs of shipping or even printing.

However, 80% of Americans say they would like to write (and presumably publish) a book. And of course Sturgeon's Law notes that 90% of everything is crap. With more readily available "publishing" resources, we could be wallowing in online and printed crud in a very short time -- even more than we are already. The future publisher, in my view, must establish some means of indicating that their writers are better than average, which may mean the renaissance of the editor, as the person who both selects good authors and nurtures great ones, and is associated with or leads a house that then develops a reputation, indeed as Salon.com has acquired a reputation.

Technology is neither the panacea nor the nemesis -- simply moving online is not enough. Fundamentally, it is still about the quality of the writing and the writer, and finding a way to alert a reader to it so that he or she can buy it. Ideally, that transfer of money should provide enough wherewithal to a writer that they can continue to write rather than market or work a day job. Currently, that is not the case for the vast majority of published writers. But what technology does permit is the possibility that that could change.

As a published writer, and the husband of an award-winning published writer (both in print and other formats), I have seen this close up; as a management consultant, I can see where the business model is failing. I for one have been predicting this sort of shift for several years; but this is the first time I've seen any serious efforts actually moving there from the traditional publishing world. We'll see if the shift continues -- or is enough to be successful.