authors will be authors…

While the people who watch TV (that is, most of us) hung on Oprah’s every word and gesture during her trial-by-television of author-poseur James Frey, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus found the whole affair “profoundly uninteresting,” according to Ron Hogan of GalleyCat.
Sara Nelson, editor in chief of the trade publication Publishers Weekly, regrets flat overall book sales in the U.S. but marvels that even now there is an audience for Joan Didon’s bestselling “brilliant but mournful essay on the death of her beloved husband.”
The consensus of the tastemakers is that everything is just fine with book publishing, thank you. Now: shut up!

Insiders are circling the wagons.

It takes former insiders who are now very much on the outside–say, like Alberto Vitale, formerly of Random House and now impressed with the advances the Chinese have made in e-publishing–to see, and say, the truth:

…publishers need to have a broad vision, not a “Gutenberg” vision. … At best, we are the present, but really, I think we are the past. That’s why we must find a way of working with Google, instead of saying “no” the whole time. That’s the future.

Internet visionary Esther Dyson has an even harsher prediction, and some advice:

Esther: …it seems likely that the traditional music and book publishing industry, for example, will have to change radically, or die. They have huge investments in marketing and distribution, but that value is eroding rapidly, leaving them with costs that are increasingly hard to cover. The new digital and networked online environment simply does not support big intermediaries; the revenues, moreover, can flow more directly to the artists rather than to the intermediaries. That’s not to say that they can’t perform useful functions in career management, production, editing, marketing and the like – but they can no longer get much of a return on the distribution function that was their mainstay.

This is a point that Jason Epstein made in his 2002 book Book Business. No one was listening then, and they’re not listening now. They’re entrenched in their positions and they want to keep saying “no”–to Google, to Amazon, to anyone who would usurp their backlist (and their position).

Esther Dyson understands the conundrum:

OB: This leads us to perhaps the most pressing question in the IP debate, which basically goes like this: If everything is available for free who will produce blockbusters, who will invest in them and how can authors make a living? Some point to examples such as authors putting their whole book online as a PDF and making more money through the printed book than they otherwise would. Yet, I look at it and think: well, that’s a smart author. He envisages that this will be good marketing and that more people will be aware of his work, and access it, but not print it themselves because it’s inconvenient and expensive. In that sense I can see there are individual business models, which make sense for individual authors, but not how a whole industry can be supported… how, for example, quality journalism can survive in such a world.

Esther: I think nobody has found an answer so far. There are two questions here: What’s good for authors is not necessarily good for (traditional) publishers. End of story. They have to figure out non-traditional value to add [emphasis added].

The debate will continue…somewhere. But not in the boardrooms of midtown or the parlors of the Upper West Side.