Good Times

Submitted by Agent on 13th January 2010 - 9:04am

My first column of the year in the British publishing trade magazine The Bookseller has just been published - reproduced here...

Call me crazy, but I'm wildly optimistic about the new decade. In fact, I believe it will be publishing's Golden Age.

Before you phone for the men in white coats, hear me out. No, I'm not in denial. Yes, I do realise that our industry's collective problems have never been more acute. Nonetheless, in times of great turmoil, great opportunities arise. In evolutionary terms, we are leaving a time of stasis, and entering one of speciation. Small furry book-rodents are about to vanquish grotesquely proportioned publishing dinosaurs. Which are you? Here are seven rules to help you survive.

1. If you don't enjoy a scrap, get out of the business now. And I don't mean become an agent. The once clubby world of publishing is dead, RIP. The future belongs to the pugnacious: grab what you want, it's all there for the taking (hey, it worked for Google, didn't it?). This is the magic decade: the future will be what you and I make it today.

2. Please—get to know your customers. Research the heck out of them. Hang out with them. Get drunk with them. Spend less time in the office, more in pubs. Or bingo halls. Or woodworking. Or wherever your instincts tell you there's a market.

3. If you wouldn't stand naked on a street corner hustling your latest book, don't publish it.

4. Become a media whore. Publishing used to be centrally relevant to our nation's cultural life. Back in the 20th century, my first book scored both the BBC's "Six O'Clock News" and "News at Ten" (gee, when was the last time that happened?). Get in the media's face! Evangelise them until they call security; you'll win.

5. If you run a big corporate publishing company—don't. Corporatism is the enemy of great publishing. Be honest with your shareholders—the stark truth is, they will never again achieve the adipose ROIs (return on investments) of yesteryear. Then do a management buyout and give your most prodigious talents a piece of the action.

6. Cherish genius. Where are tomorrow's Anthony Cheethams or Judith Regans? Plan to nurture the new crop of brilliant mavericks. Publishing is by definition anti-establishment, we thrive by giving the finger to the status quo. You are a publishing rebel, and so are all your brightest people—love them for it.

7. Sack your new media consultants. Also dispense with anyone whose title includes the word "strategy". They spread fear and confusion, and actually know far less than you and me. You can trust me on that, by the way—I'm not a consultant.

Consultants... Coming from a

Submitted by calamus on 2nd March 2010 - 3:03pm.

Consultants...

Coming from a different branch of industry, I find that most consultants don't know anything more or better than any other industry expert. It's quite the opposite, consultants learn from you and sell the collected information as their own findings. If there's anything useful about them, then it's in the bench marking field.

So yes, let's hope for the good times!

The dinosaurs didn't know

Submitted by agamede on 16th January 2010 - 1:44am.

The dinosaurs didn't know enough to not overpopulate their environment. They just kept eating and breeding like the earth would support them forever. If you want to admire a creature worthy of it, look to the cockroach. Cockroaches ate dinosaurs. Cockroaches would survive a nuclear holocaust.

I think the the ones who survive the publishing evolution will do just like the cockroaches, they will eat the corpses of the dinosaurs.

Not all the answers have been questioned yet.

Agamede

Huzzah! Huzzah! It's

Submitted by RL Sutton on 14th January 2010 - 8:06pm.

Huzzah! Huzzah!

It's gratifying to read that someone, even remotely hailing from the stodgy, old publishing world (pre-eBooks, Amazon, etc.) can see their way clear to profit in the frantic, new (post Google, etc.) publishing world. Methinks the dust will eventually settle. It always does.

Peter, if I could bank on what you just wrote, I would... wait... I guess I already have. Independent authors and publishers everywhere thank you for the little bit of encouragement in an increasingly discouraging environment.

7. Sack your new media

Submitted by cathmurphy on 14th January 2010 - 11:58am.

7. Sack your new media consultants.

Hope everyone reading this takes that advice to heart. I'm also looking forward to seeing publishers naked on street corners hawking books. Is that what a media whore is?

Sound advice, Peter and a much needed breath of fresh air for an industry which seems latterly to have lost some of its enthusiasm and spark to humourless corporatism.

No please Peter not you and

Submitted by skipperjeru on 13th January 2010 - 11:26pm.

No please Peter not you and that awful overworked dinosaur cliché. Dinosaurs ruled the land for 150 million years. They evolved into every terrestrial ecological niche so well that they either outcompeted mammals or ate them as soon as they became big enough to be worth the effort.

Some (slightly fringe) palaentologists hypothesize that there were signs of early brain enlargement in some bipedal dinosaurs before the asteroid did its work - terrible lizards on the way to intelligence 70 million years before our ancestors were chucking pooh at one another by way of communication? Maybe.

Despite what some lazy copywriters and ad execs say (what fun to put a few of them in the Coliseum with a couple of Allosaurs...) dinosaurs survived the asteroid. You want to see them? Do as Crowe asked elsewhere, hang a fatball out in this cold weather and watch as the creatures some zoologists think should be called dinoaves come and get stuck in.