The sick book industry
TeleRead isn’t just about technology. It’s also about a business model that would rely less on marketing and more on the actual merits of books.
For eons, the U.S. publishing industry has been a marketer-dominated creature. What’s new is the extent to which it is. One indication comes from a favorite site of ours, Electronic Book Web, where a publicist named R. Scott Penza is offering writers a chance to pay “$2K-$3K per month plus expenses.” He’ll then help the writers find literary agents and publishers. I’d hope that the full $2-$3K a month would actually be the post-pub bill. But apparently an author could end up spending some real money even before the signing of a contract with a publisher. Presumably we’ll soon need a grant program for writers who can’t afford PR flacks.
Is Penza’s operation a scam? Not if he doesn’t guarantee results. Penza and other pre-agent PR people are a symptom, not a cause, of a sick industry. Penza correctly says: “Many of these houses have severely cut back on their editorial departments. The day of the assigned editor who sticks with the unknown author from query to rewrite to galley is vaporizing like yesterday’s dot.com. So when an agent gets the call from the PR guy or PR gal, s/he is more likely to take a look at your book because, after all, there’s a PR firm behind it. There must be something here worth looking at.”
As a writer-editor, I myself have assisted clients in the preparation of book proposals. But a PR service to help writers find agents? Oh for the days when the writing of actual books was more important than the writing of proposals. Isn’t it possible that the actual content of a proposal might suffer because a PR agent deemed them to be too honest for public consumption? It’s happened to me on a project where a flack–not Penza–was involved.
Meanwhile, yes, this is just one more reason why U.S. book sales aren’t growing as fast as they should. The marketers and the accountants matter more these days; the editors, less. Ideally, small publishers of both e-books and pulped-wood ones can keep old publishing values alive. But that’s not always easy in the era of the super store.
The AOL division of AOL Time Warner, of all outfits, might serve as a positive role model. It’s focusing more on content than before, having suffered disastrous consequences when the bean-counters prevailed even more than they do now. A lesson for the book business?
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