Plagued

In the Dallas Morning News, publisher Jonathan Karp discusses the problems plaguing the publishing industry and offers five options for overcoming these problems:

1. Add more titles to augment sales.

But no one knows whether the books will sell! When a new project is acquired, we base our sales projections on the way similar books have performed in the marketplace – an assumption based fundamentally in blind hope. Often, these financial projections turn out to be more fictional than the novels we publish.

2. Sell more copies of existing authors and titles. A worthwhile endeavor, but also a difficult one in a retail environment that is essentially flat.

3. Ask popular authors to "increase output." Which can result in twice as many of those ingenious serial-killer books per year.

4. Diversify your "product line." Which is why there are six new diet books and presidential biographies every season: Publishers are engaged in an endless war for market share in the same limited categories, even though there's little demand for new books in many of them.

5. Cut costs, pray to the gods of movie tie-in paperback editions, or hope that one of your authors gets his or her own talk show.

Given those pressures, I understand why a conscientious publisher would choose the first option – to add titles fast and hope to catch some cultural wave. Think of Hannah Montana, Obama-mania, entrepreneurial self-promoters with a brand to build or political provocateurs such as Jonah Goldberg, whose pointless thought exercise Liberal Fascism is just the latest example of what the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once termed "boob bait for the bubbas."

Comments

[Richard]

Jonathan Karp is one of the smartest people in publshing (as well as one of our best musical theater lyricists) and he's totally right.

I love the opening about publishing people never using the word "mulched" for sensitive authors too afraid to question what happens to all their unsold books.

As for me, I am thrilled that over 2,000 copies of my 1979 short story collection "With Hitler in New York" have provided much pleasure to gardeners and landscapers all over Long Island. When I see an azalea in Amityville, a sycamore in Syosset, or a gladiola in Great Neck, I am proud to think that I might have, in my small way, contributed to the beauty of America.

In that way a writer can make the greatest aesthetic contribution to our society.

[WarrenAdler]

Does it follow that in an allegedly "creative" business that bigger is really better? Has the consolidation of the publishing industry run by big international conglomerates resulted in more compelling content and increased readership? With independent bookstores mostly fallen over the cliff, have all these gargantuan changes resulted in a better or worse intellectual climate? Some things to think about.

[tom]

Rather than "how can the publishing industry survive", my question is "should it"? All indicators of technology and social networking trends indicate that bigtime publishing as it exists is likely to go the way of the independent bookstores they helped to bury (and as a former independent bookseller, I won't be crying at their funeral).