Speculate on the Future of Publishing

[jaxx6166]

In Mother Russia, road forks you!

Seriously -- good advice though.

[Zerhackermann]

Ficbot is on it for the most part.

Authors will still face the common issues - obscurity and making a living out of the written word. They will have to be more involved in the business of authorship

Publishers will have to face the fact that they will have to partner with the author in which the author is more a customer than a raw material.

Selling reams of paper will no longer be a viable business model for either of them. The stories, the written works, are no longer finite in supply and artificial scarcity is simply a dead end.

Thats the bad news.

The good news is that authors will be more in control of thier businesses. Better able to construct a business that involves more than just throwing manuscripts over a wall in hopes of a better deal each time. They can involve themselves in creating many business opportunities more than just writing.

Publishers have an opportunity too in that they can partner with authors to help create that business built around the author. Promotion, editing, presentation, accounting are all still efforts that many authors wont want to be involved in.

One interesting thing I saw was a book supposedly written by the character in the "Castle" TV show. its exactly the sort of thing we'll see more of. In this case, fans of the tv show are buying more than a book to read. When they buy the physical copy, they are essentially buying a prop from the show. A physical fan item. people who read the digital version may become interested in the show and drive its popularity and thus more advertising dollars are gained.

[Adoby]

Because it is so easy to publish an ebook, a lot of aspiring writers with an idea will try to write a book and publish. Most will be bad or mediocre. But there will be some gems as well.

Forums and communities on the internet will help the readers to find what they are looking for, and help discover the gems. Hopefully... The aspiring writers will be eager to improve and gain insights on how to become better.

The authors of the gems may provide access to themself using blogs and chats that are member only. Or if you prefer, "patron" only. The readers become voluntary patrons, giving donations and membership fees to help/support their favourite author, in return the are given insight to the creative process and may even help with suggestions and research as a book is written. And may even figure by name or nick in the book. Who, knows, they may even learn enough to become great authors. Perhaps even groups of patrons will "order" and pay for a book with some specific theme from their favorite author.

A few authors will still be/become so popular that they can sell their work on the open market, and people will pay. There will be experiments with DMR that will be broken and new types will be invented. I think the most successful method of sale will be "Pay for this eBook, and we will later send you a beautifully bound first edition hard cover paper copy as well, within 6 months."

Most likely the most popular authors will need some help to administer the contact with their patrons, too much and there will be no time for writing. That help may even help groups of authors with marketing on the net, forum coverage and blog updates, provide an outlet for the books, help print paper copies, manage patronage money and make the whole process more efficient for the author. What should we call this help?

Publisher?

[llreader]

I think it is possible that in the future that JIT publishers (like WordClay) who offer their services for a fee or take a piece of the sales are going to grow. Instead of the publisher contracting the writers, it will be the other way around. You can sell an electronic version of a book, and if it sells well, you can publish on paper for folks without readers (who remain the majority).

The biggest question will be how to choose what to read. Right now, I am reading what my favorite authors like.

[Zerhackermann]

At the risk of sounding like a fanboy - Michael Masnick has introduced what I consider to be the most compelling formula for digital goods. Now whether he is right or not is hotly debated. But I think it is the most reasoned and thought out process I have seen yet and it applies to all digital goods in which the problem is that what was once a finite good is no longer the case and thus is impossible to force everyone to pay directly for that good.

Connect with fans, give them reasons to buy.

That is - find ways to make new fans, connect with them in a way that makes them want to buy your goods and services. Give them reasons to spend.

Within that model, there are many methods for both authors and publishers to form businesses and to make money.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Anybody; publisher, independent, collective or what-have-you that continues to charge set prices, or any price at all will be dead in the market place within 5 years. The rules of object=price are gone, and they're never coming back. It's all going to be good will and community, and that's the bottom line. That's what the internet does best. Good will and community. Writers will have to work ten times as hard, do everything for themselves and still bite the bullet and give it all away for free in the hopes that somewhere down the line their hard work is rewarded either monetarily or in kind.

This isn't a fanciful notion, it's not even a philosophical notion, it's merely practical. When you can get the cow and the milk for free, who the f**k would pay for a milkman?

On the contrary: Nothing about this is practical.

Good will and community? Right. Expecting all those experienced, professional writers to just "write for free" is just plain nuts. People have to make livings, including writers... and given a complete loss of income, and no future income to even dream of, they will simply walk, get paying jobs elsewhere, and as hobbyists and evangelists come to dominate writing, the amount and quality of available writing will plummet.

(As for the whole "cow and milk" thing: A capitalist economy is the only thing that provides the volume and quality of milk for everyone... if it were free, or people were allowed to invade others' farms and draw their own milk, how many farmers would go through the trouble of keeping and taking care of cows, just to give away the milk? This saying simply does not apply to a non-limited product, but if you insist: The majority of people will never see a drop of milk, because the farmers will stop keeping cows.)

So let's put aside this "Age of Aquarius" talk and start talking about realistic, workable futures.

In terms of e-books, publishers will find themselves fighting to gain business from good authors who are finding that they can do more of the total publishing job themselves. Pubs may find that their future income will come from authors, not the other way around... being paid for one-time services to edit and prep a book for e-book dissemination, instead of making money through actual book sales. This will mean a necessary shrinking of publishing houses, essentially, to editing shops, possibly with promotional services included in their portfolios.

Some pubs may morph into portals used to find e-books, but the e-books will be sold by the authors themselves (because it gives them immediate and total control of their income), and the pubs will make income from referrals (if someone found a book through your portal, you get a cut of the sale). Portals will also fight for market share, being that authors will have to feel enough sales are being driven through their portals to merit using them at all.

The fight between editors/publishers (and their perception of the value of their work) and authors (and their perception of the value of their work) will dictate e-book pricing, but it will be lower than today's typical prices for comparable printed products. Higher prices will usually indicate the status of the publisher the author worked with... lower prices may mean no publisher was used at all. It will still be considered an intimation of higher quality to use a publisher, but not as absolutely as it is considered today, especially as more quality self-published e-books appear and prove to the market that publisher-less quality is possible.

Above all, format and delivery standardization will eventually take hold, and remove a lot of the unnecessary flotsam that accompanies e-book production now. We are in a "Model-T Ford" state of e-book production, and as such, may have a long way to go before we reach what will be considered the "standard" e-book going forward.

And yes... there will be some form of security applied to e-books, to mitigate loss through theft, just like every other paid-for product in the world. The method will most likely be biometric in nature.


Hey, that's why they call it "speculation."