one last before I go...
Dec. 4th, 2008 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lagilmanLots of discussion across the blogosphere about What's Wrong with Publishing, How Publishing Is/Isn't Dying, etc and What it All Means.
To that I can only say what I've been saying about the economy all along: it didn't get broken overnight, and if it were easy to fix -- a simple matter of changing A for B -- it would have been don already. Really. TBTB? They're not stupid, most of them. Venal, short-sighted, and stuck in a previous generation, maybe, but not stupid. And none of them want to lose their jobs (or answer to corporate head-choppers) for screwing the pooch if they can avoid it.
So what's the answer? Damned if I know. Got some ideas.
-Telling shareholders to take their narrow profit margin and be happy with it, damn it.
-Adapting faster to new technology.
-Bringing prices back into line with reality -- I love me some books, but even for my addicted-to authors, $25-30 is a lot to shell out. Give me a $12 trade paperback and I'll go away happy. A $6 mass market, likewise. Yes, I know what production costs are. See points 1 and 2.
-creating a single industry-wide format for e-books, by god, and telling manufacturers to create readers around that, rather than scattering their focus.
-Creating a new delivery system -- I used to think that direct-from-publisher sales were a bad idea, because it limited reader access. Now I'm not so sure -- if you can skip around from imprint to imprint via websites to look at what's available, is that any better/worse than a bookstore? And that way every title could be showcased, not just what a buyer thinks will sell. On the other hand, that puts a lot of people in the chain of events out of work, too. So...
Meanwhile, all I can do is keep on keeping on. 38 pages and one rather major comment to hammer into better shape, and HARD MAGIC is done. I've rescheduled my dinner plans [pity the person keeping company with a writer on deadline!] and plan to hit fini by the time I sleep. That may not be until dawn, but...
To that I can only say what I've been saying about the economy all along: it didn't get broken overnight, and if it were easy to fix -- a simple matter of changing A for B -- it would have been don already. Really. TBTB? They're not stupid, most of them. Venal, short-sighted, and stuck in a previous generation, maybe, but not stupid. And none of them want to lose their jobs (or answer to corporate head-choppers) for screwing the pooch if they can avoid it.
So what's the answer? Damned if I know. Got some ideas.
-Telling shareholders to take their narrow profit margin and be happy with it, damn it.
-Adapting faster to new technology.
-Bringing prices back into line with reality -- I love me some books, but even for my addicted-to authors, $25-30 is a lot to shell out. Give me a $12 trade paperback and I'll go away happy. A $6 mass market, likewise. Yes, I know what production costs are. See points 1 and 2.
-creating a single industry-wide format for e-books, by god, and telling manufacturers to create readers around that, rather than scattering their focus.
-Creating a new delivery system -- I used to think that direct-from-publisher sales were a bad idea, because it limited reader access. Now I'm not so sure -- if you can skip around from imprint to imprint via websites to look at what's available, is that any better/worse than a bookstore? And that way every title could be showcased, not just what a buyer thinks will sell. On the other hand, that puts a lot of people in the chain of events out of work, too. So...
Meanwhile, all I can do is keep on keeping on. 38 pages and one rather major comment to hammer into better shape, and HARD MAGIC is done. I've rescheduled my dinner plans [pity the person keeping company with a writer on deadline!] and plan to hit fini by the time I sleep. That may not be until dawn, but...
