Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
Exactly. I think the age of the Mega-Publisher is over.
|
I wish it were that simple.
The vision of a bunch of small independent specialty houses founders on some harsh realities.
Let's say I'm one of those indie publishers. Let's also forget ebooks for the moment, because the majority of the market is still paper books, sold over the counter in stores.
I'm publishing
paper books, and attempting to make a living. The authors I publish are attempting to make a living (or at least, part of one) as well. To do that, I have to print, distribute, and sell a sufficient number of books.
The first issue I face is distribution. People can't
buy my books if they aren't available in stores. (No, Amazon is not the answer.) How do I get my books to the retailer? A few years back, American Management Services went belly up. AMS had been distributor for a number of independent publishers. Perseus picked up some of them, but many went out of business. Small outfits tend to be undercapitalized, and they couldn't handle the interruption in their cash flow, or afford the "70 cents on the dollar" bankruptcy settlement. It cost us well regarded imprints like Carroll and Graf and Four Wall, Eight Windows. A number who still exist have dropped fiction from their lines.
A lot of the smaller independents may have deals with majors to handle such things. Baen Books, for example, is an independent, but they are manufactured, marketed, and distributed by Simon and Schuster. If S&S goes belly up, what happens to Baen? Nothing good...
Another issue I face is "selling enough copies". One advantage to being a mega publisher is that I don't succeed or fail based on the sales of any particular title. Many (in fact, most) titles I publish may do poorly. But on average, some will do well, and others will do very well indeed, and I'll make enough money to stay in business. If I'm an independent, a bad showing on the part of one book may put me under.
Yet another is the nature of the book retailing industry. Consolidation has been happening there even more than in publishing. The independent bookstore is a vanishing breed. The landscape is increasingly chains, like Borders, Waldenbooks, or Barnes and Noble, and
they are under pressure from discount merchandisers like CostCo and Sam's Club. (And those folks sell an awful lot of books, and their buyers have enormous clout.)
I'm not selling most of my books to the customer. I'm not even selling them to individual bookstores who sell them to customers. I'm selling them to buyers at a corporate HQ who will make purchases for the entire chain. Who do you think is more likely to get those buyer's attention? The salesman for a mega-publisher touting releases by authors with a track record as best sellers, or me?
The mega publishers aren't going to go away, and I'll make a case that we don't
want them to. The process that produced them was inevitable, and if a deity passed a miracle to order and they were all fragmented into a plethora of independents, the process would simply repeat, as smaller folks either went out of business or merged with others to become big enough to survive.
______
Dennis