Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I wasn't talking about self-publishers banding together; I was considering a third party stepping in to cover that aspect--one that had no direct stake in the books, but a stake in pleasing the customers who'd buy the books.
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I think what you're talking about is an agent -- in the market sense, that is, not the publishing sense. That would be an entity that searches out things that match certain criteria of yours.
For example, if the guy at your local comic book store knows you want to subscribe to any new series by a certain writer or artist, and automatically puts them in your bag for the next time you come in, he's acting as your agent. You have a set of criteria, and he's acting on anything that matches. For that matter, if you shop at a certain store because you know they usually have shoes in your size, or flowers that will do well in your garden, or tools that you want, they're in a sense an agent, though a somewhat more diffuse one. They're enabling you to make your choice of shoes, let's say, from the ones they have in the store -- the ones that will probably meet your needs, because they're a specialty store that has your kind of shoes -- rather than having to sort through all of the tens of thousands of styles of shoes on the market.
That's a role book publishers, and to an even greater extent imprints, have filled in the past. For example, if you want moderately hard SF, often with a military bent, you want Baen. If you want soft formula romance, you buy Harlequin. Etc. But with the splitting apart of publishers' responsibilities -- they're dropping the marketing and editing parts like hot potatoes, and without those, more and more new authors are going to wonder what they actually
are getting -- there's no reason for that "agent" role to remain with the publisher, either. Amazon's recommendation system -- an automated buyer's agent -- doesn't care what publisher a book actually comes from, only whether it matches whatever criteria are set up in there somewhere for "books WW will likely buy".
Incidentally, responsiveness to the customer's needs, not the marketer's, is critical. I haven't used Amazon's recommendations much lately, because someone at Amazon has decided that although my lifetime hardcover purchases from them total approximately five, they're going to recommend HC's to the exclusion of all else, because they make more money from them. This makes me wonder how much money they think they're making from a book I'm not buying. If the system went back to recommending MM paperbacks, which I
do buy, and buy a lot of (they just need to check their sales records) I'd go back to using it all the time. Recommending what you want to sell doesn't work; that just loses you customers. You need to recommend
what the customer wants to buy, which is why I'm suggesting buyers' agents separate from the actual sellers of the book -- someone/something that gets exactly the same payment if I buy a HC that came out last week or a MM that came out last decade.
I have no difficulty at all envisioning agents like that becoming common. They've been talked about for years, but in the past they haven't really had a pressing need to fulfill. With the dramatic rise of indie publishing, their time may have come.
Look, again, at the people who subscribe to
Consumer Reports -- either the printed magazine or the website. That's their agent: someone who goes out and tests all those microwaves so they don't have to. I like reading books. I like finding new authors. Long before I'd subscribe to a microwave review website, I'd subscribe to one that goes out and finds those books for me so I don't have to. And, naturally, like its Amazon kindred, it would get better with time. Like, don't like, bought, don't want ... all would factor into fine-tuning its results. There's a role for that, and I'll be in line to subscribe at the site that best matches my interests.