Quote:
Originally Posted by Cthulhu
Regarding backlists, publishers need to read about the long tail
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail_pr.html
With hope, the old business model with adapt to embrace the new digital model, and that means bringing the price of literary content more in-line with reality.
Personally, all ways loathed going to a used bookstore, finding a book for which I ardently searched, and ended paying $4.00 for a book that cost $0.78 when first published. |
The analogue of this in publishing is the midlist.
An editor friend worked for a publisher that was part of a media conglomerate. He once told a story about getting a visit from someone on the film side of the company, who pointed at the midlist stuff and asked "Why did you publish that? Why not just publish the bestsellers?"
Well, there was a publishing house that tried to do that. Lyle Stuart used that model. They published a dozen books a year, mostly of the "unauthorized biography' and celebrity scandal type, printed large numbers, promoted the hell out of them, and crossed fingers that a few
would be best sellers and cover the losses on the rest. They got away with it for years, but eventually hit a bad patch with no bestsellers and had to fold.
Every publisher
wants best sellers, but midlist provides the bread and butter. Sometimes the pressure for a best seller gets too intense. The well respected head of Little, Brown was fired a while back because of it. She was under pressure from her boss to publish more best sellers and increase profitability. She resisted because Little, Brown was known as a literary house, and she saw what she was being asked to do as lowering their standards and pandering to a different audience. (My impression was her boss didn't really want to fire her, but
he was under pressure from senior management, whose idea of revenues and profits came from films. No way a book publisher
can make that kind of money, but try telling that to senior management.)
Pricing is only part of the issue. The bigger question is how you
reach that niche market and profitably address it. There are an assortment of fixed costs in publishing a book that you'll have regardless of whether you do a paper edition, and therefore some lower limits on the size the market needs to be to support doing a book.
The internet can provide tools to do it, but it's no guarantor of success. It simply makes it possible when it didn't used to be.
______
Dennis