The Book on Publishing

[Kumabjorn]

Sometimes you come across thing on the net that makes it possible to withstand yet another LOL cat. The Book on Publishing an article by Keith Gessen in Vanity Fair from October 2011 is such a piece (at least in my opinion). Granted it might have a 5 o'clock shadow by now, but a search on MR didn't turn up anything, so maybe we missed it at the time, but now that we, after the article was published, have two and half years more of electronic publishing history behind us, it might shed some light on how fast the changes are and how slow the publishers react.

[fjtorres]

OH! MY!
What a great find!
I laughed my head off. Every last cliche about NYC publishing is real. Who knew?
They really are that incestuous and dysfunctional.
No wonder the very thought of the 21st century creeping in freaks them out.
Crack-addicted agents? How 80's!
(Nowadays the white collar drug of choice is heroin.)
And there's this:

Meanwhile, over the years, as the book business had become more profitable, and more cutthroat, the publishers were swallowed one by one by large multi-national conglomerates. Periodically a German person would arrive in town and fire everyone.

and this:

...the publishers function a lot like investment banks—albeit very scrupulous investment banks in which five or six people have to read an entire novel before the bank puts down any money. Young editors have to get their boss’s go-ahead for even the tiniest, $5,000 advance, and whereas at some houses the very senior people don’t technically need to go to their corporate superiors unless they’ve gone over some established “level,” for the most part they still do.

Puts so many things in context.

Thanks!

[Kumabjorn]

Here is another perspective on the brave new world of digital publishing. NYTimes: I Was a Digital Best Seller!
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/op...st-seller.html

[FertimSd]

Do you think that publishers still react slowly? As for me, there are a lot of changes in the industry during the last couple of years.

[bfisher]

Nice article here on the rise of Amazon and the reactions of traditional publishers - ostensibly a review of "The Everything Store"

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...-bezos-amazon/

It discusses the impact of Amazon's business practices on the launch of the paperback version of "The Everything Store"