IMO, so long as they offer pre-payment for books, they will remain in existence. Prolific and profitable authors benefit from being paid ahead of time for their work, which can often take months or years.
As a self publisher who’s used Kickstarter for 4 books now, let me say: the creative side of writing the books, doing the layout, getting it print ready, coordinating with artists etc is a beast.
Then when you add on the publisher side of distribution, fulfillment, lost orders, customer service, marketing etc you have a whole other beast.
It’s manageable in the right circumstances, and pieces can be sort of automated or out sourced, but (at least for me) the other grinds begin to absolutely kill my ability to do the creative work. And meanwhile fans are like “omg when’s the next book coming out?!?!?”
That’s said, I think the publishing “industry” needs to be ripped down and overhauled, but the work a publisher needs to do is very valuable and different than the creative needs.
It seems like a creator or their commissioned agent coordinating a disintermediated "supply chain" of service providers, with the creator retaining ownership of the intellectual property rights, could be a viable and lower-overhead alternative.
That exists in the form of "vanity" publishers and "hybrid" publishers, which tend to rip off their clients, instead of providing actual value.
In addition, people tend to vastly underestimate the difficulty of building a successful marketing campaign to actually sell books, in addition to the extreme difficulty of actually building relationships with distributors. Successfully selling a book is not that different than running a business. There's a lot more you need than just coordinating a "supply chain."
I feel like there are a lot of "experts" on publishing in this discussion, but few actual publishers who know the reality of the business.
I wonder how many times a book will not sell without a marketing campaign simply because it is not good. It seems to me that in a world of electronic communication & social media, it should be possible for a good book to become widely known & demanded by simply being good & the news about it spreading.
Individual book sellers still could do some marketing simply to increase sales once such a good book shows up.
Extremely frequently - I love to bash marketing at every given opportunity but books are tough - if I hand you a book you have no way to do a surface evaluation without leaning on associated knowledge - is it by an author you know - is it part of a series you like[1]. If not, then you've got the dust cover summary to go on and those will often be overwhelmingly positive even if it isn't warranted.
A friend of mine is an independent author who self-markets their books and they've learned over years where money will pay itself back and where you're throwing it into a hole - but not investing in promotion at all just means you'll be relegated to obscurity.
When I'm shopping for a broom I have some expectations - I've really grown to appreciate the rubber headed brooms over bristly ones and I am pretty tall so length is a decent consideration... When I'm shopping for a book, what do I have to go on? Cover art and the summary, probably... and those are hardly helpful.
1. Specifically I'm thinking of multi-author series like SW:EU or Dragonlance.
I'm ignorant about the way the industry works, for sure.
I'd love to know how much of the publishing and book-selling industries are coasting on inertia of "we've always done it this way", or the fear of "we've never done it this way".
It seems like electronic distribution should have massive ramifications for the business model. Does the publisher/distributor/retailer model really still need to exist in an electronic distribution world? I don't know enough about the value, beyond purchase aggregation, that distributors in that market actually provide.
What you see as "building relationships" sounds, to me, like needless middlemen exacting a tax on commerce.
Many businesses are little more than expertly coordinating a supply chain. That's a competency that offers a competitive advantage. Why is this business so different?
If all book sales were electronic, that might indeed invite a reassessment of publishers' value in securing distribution. But ebooks are only about 20% of book sales (and that figure is not rising).
It is for some authors. The bigger problem is that artists or developers or whatever need to pay the rent and buy food while they are in the process of creating.
The difference is that publishers have professional editors that ensure a minimum level of quality.
Kickstarter is more about how good your pitch is.
In fact quality control is, I think, where publishers bring the most value today. Both in science and in the general case. Maybe the only one in the digital era.
This exists in the UK, it's called Unbound. They've been around for ten years and they've done... fine. Some decent books. But their business model has not exactly conquered the world. As an author myself, I would never consider defecting from my "legacy" publisher to a service like that, because my publisher has been extremely valuable to me.
The percentages aren't particularly relevant to me, because I live off advances, not royalties. Sales are still meaningful, because they help determine what advance I get next time, but in my case the idea that I'm getting a cut of each one is basically just symbolic – I've already been paid. Just one of many reasons I could never have had the same career without my "legacy" publisher.
(I should note that your percentages are way off, by the way – in the US I "get" 25% of the cover price for digital and between 7.5% and 25% for physical depending on the edition.)
What do you think will drive the market towards that? In my city our bookstores are closing. Many individuals use tablet electronic-readers. Will it be the electronic books, or the demise of bookstores that drives a publishing industry revolution?
It is happening (I recently got a kickstarted atlas of Mars - how fricking cool is that?!). But then the authors also have to do their own marketing and promotion, another care taken over by the publishers for these few authors.
And editing. Good editing can be very important. There's a lot of "R&D" work being done by publishers, I don't think it's fair to equate them to a glorified kickstarter. Same goes for music studios and movie producers. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
