I wouldn’t be surprised to find book-publishing pundits walking the streets of Manhattan carrying signs proclaiming “The End Is Near!”
Sales in bookstores are down, heads at publishing houses are rolling, Borders is on the rocks and may not survive, Amazon.com continues to capture market share—its Kindle appears to be the first e-reader to get more than passing traction with consumers.
And, contrary to Chris Anderson’s theory espoused in his book, The Long Tail, the large publishers are still searching for the next blockbuster, the one book that will make a season profitable for the whole house—a tactic that hasn’t exactly served them well, not to say what it does to most of their non-blockbuster authors who don’t get the advance or the attention they deserve. This can’t be the way to develop a robust, heterogeneous industry.
Is this the end of book publishing as we know it?
Yes and no.
Watch for the following in the years to come:
• A proliferation of small, independent houses publishing fiction. As many independent nonfiction houses found their stride in the last 15 years, independents who publish fiction will make gains.
• Kindle will become the iPod of the book industry. Every book published will concurrently be published in the Kindle format.
• Many books will never see the inside of a warehouse. We already have online print-on-demand services (Amazon’s BookSurge is one), but you’ll soon be able to go to your bookstore (or other venue) and have a book downloaded, printed, and bound while you wait.
What does that mean for publishers? Greater distribution—every book available at every bookstore—less warehousing, shipping, and remainder costs, the economic freedom to publish more titles—blockbusters or not.
Authors will benefit from all of the above, especially mid-list authors.