Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller
Chief among the siren lures of publishing’s Brave New Digital Future is the dream of doing away with the middleman.
From this side of the desk, the poor old retailer is usually perceived as publishing’s Achilles’ heel. It’s every author’s mantra that no book ever receives adequate instore display. Little do authors realise that the humble space they do receive has often been keenly negotiated by the publisher, or secured through bribery (sorry—I mean “marketing contribution”).
To think that publishers can suddenly acquire sophisticated consumer skills is worse than delusionalEvents of the past chaotic year have made publishers anxiously aware of how closely their own fate is entwined with that of the retailers. Hence the mesmeric attraction of digital trading. At a click of a mouse, all those troublesome retailers, wholesalers and distributors will disappear, to be replaced with one vast “digital warehouse” of files . . . earning money 24 hours a day, with a marginal cost per transaction approaching zero. And if you’re lucky, or maybe just plain devious, author royalties can be contained to pre-digital levels. Let the good times roll, bro’ publisher—it’s a new golden age!
Well, not so fast.
Publishing’s wet dream of deposing the retailer is predicated on one vast and potentially deadly misapprehension: that all retailers do is put books on shelves for people to buy. In fact, retailers conduct complex, expensive and frequently fraught relationships with customers. They are the vital part of our business that is consumer-facing.
That skill is all but absent in today’s publishing houses. Traditionally, a publisher will deal with people like me (agents), with authors, with “the trade” and with their own employees. At no point have they ever been consumer-facing. In many cases, they have gone out of their way to isolate themselves against any contact with consumers.
To think that publishers can suddenly acquire sophisticated consumer skills is worse than delusional—it is potentially fatal. If you need proof of this near-vacuum of consumer skills, look at most publishers’ first efforts at their own websites: bland, corporate, pointless and dead. Granted, many of them have now appointed “directors of digital strategy”. Yet this only ghettoises the problem: it allows the rest of the organisation to bury its head in the sand, and get on with “business as usual”. As we say on the net—publishing fail.
This is the real debate we need to be having in publishing right now: how do we transform our culture to become consumer-facing?
I’m listening . . . but I don’t hear anyone talking.
