(2008-10-01) Kachka End Of Book Publishing

Boris Kachka on the end of the Book Publishing (or at least publishers). It sounds like the key problem is that they lose money on 90% of titles, and they're not very good at predicting which books will be hits.

One key advantage of corporate publishing was supposed to be its marketing muscle: You may not publish exactly the books you'd like to, but the ones you publish will get the attention they deserve. Yet in recent years, more accurate internal sales numbers have confirmed what publishers long suspected: Traditional Marketing is useless. "Media doesn't matter, reviews don't matter, blurbs don't matter."

Two new bios from LyonsPress, about Michelle Obama and Cindy Mc Cain, are going straight-to-KindLe long before publication.

Back in February, Bob Miller and Jane Friedman met at the bar of the Omni Berkshire hotel for one of their freewheeling chats. "How would you do it differently if you could start all over again," she asked him. He said he'd try to reduce advances and returns, put out only a few books, and focus on cheap Internet marketing. "Why don't you do that?" she asked, and within a week they had a deal. Miller has worked out separate contracts, co-op and all, with booksellers and authors--capping advances at $100,000 and reducing returns. Their list now includes not just 50 Cent but Michael Eisner, his former boss at Hyperion; John Lithgow (a memoir); and Isabella Rossellini adapting her short-film series on bug sex. All these authors will contribute to their own pre-publication marketing. Miller doesn't wait for agent submissions, instead accosting writers at conferences, telling them how much more a writer can make under 50-50 profit-sharing.

Book publishing is still a big-league business, and that's a hard thing to let go of. "There's something terrible," says an editor at a prestigious imprint, "about admitting that you're not a mass medium." (Mass Media)