Tuesday, July 16, 2013

5 Ways to Fix Book Publishing

July 12, 2013 The Daily Beast

Is there any way to reverse the industry’s demise? Anis Shivani says the system dominated by executives, publicists, and agents needs to be torn down—to give control to readers.

Earns Barnes & Noble
The CEO of Barnes and Noble resigned amid falling profits, one more sign of the problems facing the publishing industry. (Elise Amendola/AP)
Do you like going into a Barnes & Noble and shelling out $30 for a book the store has decided is good for you, which is why it’s front and center and screaming for your attention? On the way out you’re greeted by a wall of discounted cookbooks and illustrated travel books no one wants. It’s a little different at the independent bookstore—if you have any left in your town—but you’re still limited by the top-down model of publishing, which decides what is written and what you should read. Not being part of a literary community, you determine what to read—by the day’s Franzen or Egan—according to reviews and awards.
This model of literary production is doomed. The idea that there should be centralized, massively consolidated, bureaucratic organizations known as the major trade houses, with multiple layers of editors, vast publicity departments, and books fed to them by an entity known as literary agents, only to take repeated losses and rely on a few stars to help them break even, is bound for extinction.
Is the current publishing model salvageable? Or is it time to scrap everything and start over? If book publishing is to survive, something drastic will have to occur. The technology already exists to make publishing a democratic venture, driven from the bottom up rather than the other way around.

The discussion of the crisis of publishing persists mostly at a pedestrian level. The alternatives offered are minor fixes, taking existing production, distribution, and consumption methodologies for granted. We don’t need to figure out how to maximize sales with the latest e-reader. We need to reconceive the concepts of writing, editing, and reading, and subject every institutional component to radical critique. It isn’t a question of which reading device is best, or how publishers will make up for the loss of Borders, or how they can squeeze more money out of the present distribution model.

The crisis of publishing is really the crisis of writing and reading. The publishing industry today generally obstructs the free flow of energies between readers and writers. It is a broker for celebrity authors, taking the entire literary culture on a downward slope because the definition of “commercial” is constantly being dumbed down. Hence, cookie-cutter books, formulaic sensations, highly publicized advances, the anachronistic book tour, and literary stars with all the trappings of their brethren in the movie and fashion industries. Rather than pushing more of the product that publishers already offer, the nature of the product itself must change. Yes, there is a crisis in publishing, but this is good because it means that the public isn’t buying the hype.
The discussion of the crisis of publishing persists mostly at a pedestrian level.
The structures of distribution are not written in stone—why must there be so many intermediate layers that the final product must survive to make itself visible? With that in mind, I propose the following key principles for a major restructuring of the publishing industry:

1. Decentralization
Even within existing economic and social conditions, it makes no sense to have giant conglomerates located in grand isolation in New York and making all the major decisions about publishing.
Decentralization should cover every aspect of publishing, including acquisition. The big publishers are going to have to break up into smaller units, and address the real needs of real markets, not cater to advertising-created images of “national” readers. Regionalism in publishing can be a great spur to revitalization of reading.
To some extent, what I’m calling for is already being followed by independent literary presses and the best among the university presses, except it would be on a far more radical scale. The elite gatekeeping function of a highly centralized elite, with common educational and class backgrounds, is a barrier to the flourishing of vital writing.
All of the apparatuses of centralization need to be subject to reconsideration.

2. Autonomy
Instead of a literary product that results from every actor along the line—writer, editor, sales representative, reader—fulfilling his or her expected role in the continuum according to grand marketing plans and corporate strategies, each of these actors needs to be freed, in order to assume responsibility for the acts of writing, editing, selling, and reading.

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