Ok, we’ve established the publishing industry is going through significant changes right now. People everywhere are predicting what things will look like in three to five years.
The future is hard to predict, but this article over at the Huffington Post so completely misses the mark I honestly wondered if it was satire. From the article:
“The book-buying habits sustaining [mid-list authors’] work may become a thing of the past when printed books are swapped for digital ones. As strolling and perusing the aisles of a bookstore is replaced with a mouse and computer screen, the demise of brick-and-mortar retailers will accelerate and critically important links between midlist authors and their readers will be severed.”
Right. Because if there is one thing we know the internet has a problem with, it’s creating links between people and things. The internet is all about putting people in a silo. /sarcasm
Again, from the article:
“As of yet, there is no digital substitute to this serendipitous manner of bringing readers and writers together. Furthermore an important symbiotic relationship between best-selling authors and their lesser brethren will end. Readers who buy new books by Dan Brown or Kitty Kelley frequently leave the store with another title under their arm. But it is often the invitingly deep and varied inventory of books by midlist authors that lure the reader into the store in the first place.”
No digital substitue? Has the author never bought a book on Amazon? Has the author never looked up a book on Amazon? Because as soon as you do, you’re bombarded with ‘you may like this’ suggestions. The authors suggests that when you go to a store, the clerk might recommend a good book. Online you can read the opinions of thousands of other readers, not just the clerk who may or may not have the same tastes as you. It’s like shopping with a crowd of experts.
Compare this to other industries that have gone through the same digital growing pains.
Newspapers -Imagine ten years ago predicting big newspapers and magazines growing bigger, and smaller voices (blogs, e-zines, sites like Huffington Post) going the way of the dinosaur.
Or what about music? Have the big names gotten bigger, and the ‘midlisters’ dissapeared? Hardly. Just the opposite. Talented musicians have been able to go straight to fans and find a larger audience. They’ve been able to do much better under the digital model than ever before. Just ask musicians like Jonathan Coultan.
I don’t like to predict because I don’t know the industry as well as the insiders. However, I feel very comfortable saying that mid-list authors will in fact NOT suffer in the coming e-book revolution. In fact, we’ll see the opposite. We’ll see fewer ‘rock stars’ in publishing, and more and more good authors finding an audience because they can directly connect with fans.
Joe Konrath is often called a ‘mid-list’ author. You don’t have to read very far down his blog to see how he is faring under this new model.
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