Retaining Relevance as a Publisher

Michael Jensen | 04/02/2009 | Numérisation

Let’s presume that writers want three things:

a) to be read,
b) to be respected, and
c) to at least enhance their income, by writing.

If that’s the case, then the equation of old—that a), b), and c) required a publisher—is no longer the case.

This has, I’m sorry to say, profound consequences for publishers. For the next two years, it may not matter dramatically. But two to five years out, it will matter significantly.

I’m worried about the value-adding intermediaries (aka publishers). Consequently I’m worried about *dis*intermediators. These are the web-based, print-on-demand, metadata-providing, ISBN-providing, insert-into-Amazon-servicing, epub-on-demand-selling, publisher-free and development-free publishers. 

Today, it’s easy to dismiss the options authors have—Lulu.com, or Wowio.com, or even Amazon and Lightningsource—as also-rans, or as niche, nearly-vanity publishing.

But that’s not unlike the newspaper industry thinking of Craigslist as “a classified ad web site,” or Yahoo thinking of Google as “just a search engine.”

In part because of Craiglist and Google, newspapers are failing, even closing. Because revenue has declined, investigative journalism is threatened.

It didn’t take a big loss of newspapers’ income stream to endanger their existence. Were publishers—a thin-margin enterprise—to lose 20-30% of their income, they’d lose a great deal of their financial resilience.

I think of it as a big-player problem, or as (yet another variant of) the 80/20 Pareto Principle (the long tail). 80% of income tends to come from 20% of our books. We wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time.

This is just generally true in publishing—and if your publishing outfit has a different ratio, I’d like to hear it.

Given this general trend, it’s a signal weakness: the top 20% of authors, the top 20% of our publications, top 20% of our quality, is exactly what could most easily do without us.

The products could, even 80% (even 20%) of the time, sell themselves *enough*—reach enough of an audience, sell enough directly (without a majority of the income going to the publisher), and make enough of an “authority splash” in terms of publicity and blog noise, to make the publisher (perhaps 80% of the time) unnecessary.

This leaves us only with the 80% of the published content that produces 20% of the revenue.

Our challenge as publishers is to find ways to add substantive value: better promotion, better metadata, better Web presence, better integration into aggregators, better quality reading experience, better composition, better indexing, better blurbing, better print distribution, better insertion into aggregations, better long-tail promotion, better authority, better library adoption, better classroom adoption…. the list goes on, of course.

But the key point here is that if we are not attentive to the things we do best—and attentive to the new things we *could* do— we will not distinguish ourselves from the “raw intermediators” who could easily skim the cream from the top.

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