The Coming Wave of Changes in Publication
Seven changes coming that affect writers
and readers
The business of publishing is
still stuck in the industrial age even though we have long since entered a digital
age. When a business gets stuck in a former age delaying and denying the
future, new ways of doing things get dammed. Eventually a “tipping point” comes
when the dam holding back the changes that bursts and sweeps companies out of
business along with it. However, as slow as publishers are to see the coming
changes, writers are even worse. Traditionalists by nature, most writers shut
their ears and hope these changes will go away. They won’t go away. The dam is
leaking and about to burst. In the coming decade we are going to see massive
changes in how writers, publishers and readers work together to disseminate
“intellectual property.” Here are my predictions. [1]
1. Middle-sized publishers will go out of business. In the past, writers who had a book to publish were
stuck with finding an agent and a publisher who would gamble on it. In the
future writers will cut out the middleman and make their book available
directly to readers. The new publishing world connects writers and readers more
directly. If you have a book someone wants to read, you can publish your work
this afternoon and within a few hours it will be available for others to buy.
This new world will cut mid-sized publishers out of the market and they will go
on to other things like selling scented candles and gifts. [2]
2. POD self-publishing will become normal. The old industrial age model of publishing printed
5,000 books then shipped them out to stores hoping people would buy them. If
customers didn’t buy them, the books were dumped at fire-sale prices at
half.com or discarded in a dumpster. POD (Print-on-Demand) publishing changes
this model. POD publishing stores books electronically and prints one when
someone orders it—a sort of “just in time” inventory applied to books. This
means a publisher can now “publish” your book without printing a single copy.
When people order your book the POD publisher prints a single copy and send it
direct to the buyer (even using the publisher’s own label). POD is already a great boon to publishers
(especially medium-sized publishers) by allowing them to avoid investment in
inventory. It will be the normal way most books get published in the future.
The problem for mid-size publishers is that writers
have also discovered POD publishing and will eventually “cut out the middleman”
and do the POD publishing on heir own. POD self-publishing will serve as a sort
of “farm team” for the big publishers. In case we think self-publishing is for
losers, we should remember that the list of initially self-published books
includes The Living Bible, T. D.
Jakes Woman Thou Art Loosed and the
current bestseller, William P. Young’s
The Shack. When your own self-published work sells 10,000 copies the larger
publishers will come knocking at your door. Then you will have to get out your
calculator to figure if you want to sell out. [3]
3. The Long Tail
will get longer and fatter. The “Long Tail” is the observation that
there is more money in the sales of many little things combined than all the
big blockbusters combined. Online music downloads are the best example. Long
Tail publishing suggests that the sales of a million books that sell 100 copies
might produce more income combined than the sale of five one-million-copy books.
The EBay principle (someone somewhere in the world wants your stuff if you can
find them) combined with POD publishing enables an individual writer to find
the people who want to read their book. The Internet provides that opportunity
to connect sellers/writers and buyers/readers. There will be more books in the
future selling fewer copies. [4]
2. Blockbusters will get bigger. Even though there will be more sales in the Long Tail
we’ll see even bigger printed blockbusters in the future than we have in the
past. These marketing phenomenons will keep the giant publishers afloat. We
will see even bigger books than the Prayer
of Jabez, Rick Warren’s Purpose
Driven Life (well over than 30 million[5] copies) and The
Shack. Many writers hope for such a blockbuster
and try to figure out the recipe. Forget the figuring. Blockbusters “just
happen.”
4. “Open source publishing” will explode. Why should people pay for your book (or curriculum or
article) if they can get something just as good for free? In the future,
millions of books will be free and royalties will not be the way ordinary
writers make money. Good writers will figure out other ways to cash in on their
open source writing. Advertisements and product placement will grow in books.
Writers will get their income from seminars and speaking engagements. Books
will increase web traffic at writer’s web sites (where “traffic is income”).
Organizations and movements committed to a cause will finance writers. In the
academic world, institutions and libraries will become patrons of writers and
their work will be given away as a contribution to the academy. [6]
5. “Rights” to intellectual property will go into
meltdown. Copyright battles are still
being fought (and won) by those who “own” the property. Among future
generations, global intellectual property rights will go into total meltdown.
People will find other ways to make money off their work. This will be the
mother of all legal battles between the haves and have-nots. I think the
have-nots will ultimately prevail. This will happen as soon as the owners find
other ways to get income.
6. Printing will go local. For the time being, the Big New Thing will be the POD
publishing mentioned above. A reader will see your book on Amazon.com, review
it electronically then click the purchase button. Within 12 hours of your
click, the POD at LightningSource will have your book in the mail to your
reader. UPS and FedEx will make lots of money. However, this is only the
beginning. Why wait a day? Very soon, your local Barnes & Noble (actually
Wal-Mart!) will have a POD machine just twice the size of a large Photocopier.
You will browse books there (or at home on the Internet) then enter a 13 digit
code and this machine will print a perfect-bound beautiful book in three minutes
for you to start reading now—no wait for UPS or damp books left in the
rain on your doorsteps. In the not-too-distant future POD will be coming to a
store near you. If you are a writer, you want your work to be among the 250,000
works stored in this machine! [7]
7. E-books will eventually prevail. I am a traditionalist. I absolutely love the sensuous
feel of a real physical book. I touch a book long before I read it—I feel its
cover, touch its edges, and enjoy curling up with it in a romantic relationship.
My students have no such preference. They touch their MacBook instead. As my
generation recedes into the wings, the coming generations will see no reason to
drive to Wal-Mart to pick up their new book. They will click the purchase
button and download their book directly to their E-book. Amazon’s Kindle
is only a first generation of the future easy-to-use E-readers. If you have a
Kindle it will show in your garage sale in a few years with your IPod shuffle.
The coming E-readers will compete successfully with the old industrial model of
cutting down trees, grinding them up to make paper, shipping the paper to a
printer and printing little squiggles on it. Students of the future will have
access to 100 times more books available on their E-readers in their dorm room
than the greatest educational institution’s library on earth. “The Library” is
going global and anyone with an Internet connection will be able to access it
for pennies per book, or even at no cost whatsoever. If you are a writer you
want your work to be in that number. [8]
There are other changes coming,
but I think these and the major ones. How do you react to these changes?
So what do you
think?
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