Traditional book publishers face a challenging future as authors find they get more value from self-publishing.
It was good to head across to Oakland’s East Bay Social Media Breakfast for Shel Israel’s and Robert Scoble’s discussion about their latest book, The Age Of Context.
While the book itself is an interesting overview of how the internet of things is changing the world, Scoble’s and Israel’s self publishing journey though combination of corporate sponsors, crowdfunding and alternative distribution models is an interesting tale in itself.
“Self publishing gives writers much more power than they’ve ever had before,” says Israel. “In many aspects, the traditional publisher just isn’t there any more.”
“By using the tech community and social media to market the book, I’ve sold more copies of The Age of Context in seven weeks than my previous four books combined,” Israel states.
Israel’s point illustrates the challenge facing traditional publishers, like many other industries the publishing houses have reacted to a changing market by cutting costs such as replacing experienced staff with fewer, less experienced workers.
Failing to add value
That cost cutting has the effect of making the businesses irrelevant; if a publicist has to rely on HARO or Source Bottle to contact journalists rather than a contact book built up over years of experience, then they are doing little the writer can’t do themselves.
One of the biggest advantages book publishers offered authors was rigorous editing — good editors are worth their weight in gold to both a writer and their book and in the past self-published books were notable for their lousy editing.
Today, that function has been almost eliminated by publishers have eliminated most in house editors. If a harassed, time poor contractor only has a few days to spend editing the manuscript, as what happened with my last book, then the publishers hasn’t added much to the product at all.
Similarly with design and layout, historically publishers have been strong on this front with experienced editors knowing what covers will work for certain genres in the bookshops. The cheapest graduate worker in the world can’t replicate that understanding of the marketplace.
Most damaging of all though to publishers was losing the distribution channels; when bookstores were the way most readers bought their books the publishing house’s sales team were essential for getting books on shelves. In an age of Amazon and online shopping, they are no longer the gatekeepers they once were.
Self publishing risks
That’s not say there aren’t risks with self publishing, particularly with having corporate sponsors pay for development costs.
Scoble and Israel overcame the increasingly stingy author advances by raising $105,000 from corporate sponsors to cover the initial researching and writing costs.
“We were scared to death that this was a credibility issue,” said Israel. “However our sponsors were incredibly good with not messing around with editorial credibility. They, like others in the book, got to see what was written to check for technical accuracy but not change the content.”
“An example is that Google was not a sponsor and Bing was, yet we said an awful lot more good things about Google than we did about Bing.”
Adopting the financial risk
The biggest risk of all for self-publishing though is being stuck with a stack of unsold books with a pile of bills for editors, designers and printing. In the past the publisher carried all the financial risk which was probably the greatest service they provided to authors.
Even that risk isn’t as great as it was a few years ago as print runs are cheaper and shorter while outsourcing sites make it cheaper and easier to find professional help.
As Israel and Scoble illustrate, book publishers have made themselves irrelevant to most authors. It’s probably the best case study of an industry reacting to change with cost cuts that ultimately destroy their own competitive advantage.
That’s something that other businesses and industries should consider when looking at how to deal with their own disruption.
