The Business of Publishing

It has been suggested that I am in love with new concepts, new media. It’s true. I am absolutely in love with “new” media models (as opposed to new media models, though I am very fond of those as well). As an old media person who has witnessed successes and failures and inefficiencies, I am excited to see people shaking up existing business models because, like our outdated laws, the current models don’t reflect the reality on the ground. To entice the talent needed to keep publishing viable in the future, the economic model must change. I figure it’s going […]

There are sacred cows in publishing. Lots and lots of sacred cows. You have the “smell of books” people. You have “the publishing business model ain’t broke” people. And you have the “advances are divine rights” people. Suggest that advances are not written-in-stone obligations on the part of publishers and you’re considered naive. Ill-informed. Nutso. HarperCollins has proposed a radical shift in the business. Yeah, well, I was accused of all that and more when I suggested that publishers, if they could, stop paying advances to authors. The genesis of my speculation came on the heels ofGuy Hands, the new

It is no secret that I hate publisher websites. The vast majority of them can be best described as “suffers from multiple personality disorder”. And I’m not just talking about the fact that publishers can’t figure out who the target audience of their site is. Visiting a publisher site means being subjected to bad design, bad search, and — yes — bad content. Not a single one of these is forgivable. Are you just serving up the same old book blurb they can get anywhere else with less hassle? I imagine that most of the industry is working frantically to

I have a serious question for you. What if thousands of kids were reading and writing and nobody bothered to notice? I swear it’s happening. We are raising a nation of readers, writers, artists, and even activists. Better, we are raising a nation of communicators. Now we have nurture and protect this new wonder. I’m serious. All of you are, in some way or another, connected with the world of publishing. If you want to reach readers, you need to offer content that reaches these readers where they are — online. If you’re seeking writers and artists, what comes over