Traditional Publishing & Contemporary Literature: Pros And Cons

Traditional publishing as we know it is indispensable when it comes to REpublishing. No private entrepreneur in his or her right mind would take it upon him/herself to put out hundreds of thousands of copies of classics, textbooks, the Bible, etc, knowing that the big publishing houses are doing it anyway (rather well, too). When it comes to contemporary literature, though, a whole different set of production rules should apply which the majors are physically unable to follow.

Let us remember that major book publishers are corporate entities; with them, it is either the corporate way or the highway (which is ironic, since without corporations, we would not have highways; or bridges, or commercial airplanes, or cheap ballpoint pens, for that matter – and so forth).

The main thing about corporations is they tend to be conservative. And that is a good thing as far as Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, et al, are concerned. Really. Corporations do not really like the idea of creating markets, since new markets invariably bring new standards, while corporate business is perfectly happy with the existing model, thank you very much. Corporations stick with what they already know, and they do a good job. They are efficient. They make things better and cheaper.

When a book-publishing corporation seeks to publish a new book, however, the first thing it will look for in the manuscript is whether it follows corporate standards, i.e. – does it resemble anything the corporation (or its competitors) have published before. (If not, the corporation will just move on; if indeed the book is LIKE something the large publishing house is familiar with, the next step is to look at the earlier book's track record. Did it sell well? Did it flop? And so forth.

Meantime, NEW literature should seek to establish new approaches, new methods, new standards. In order to be new, it can't afford seriously to look into anything people have seen before. That is what NEW means, after all.

The problem is that anything new is nearly always a high-risk, high-reward proposition. Publishers of truly new books have to take their chances. Corporations favor ventures in which the risk factor is kept to the absolute minimum. Private publishers would favor those too if only they could afford it. But you cannot beat corporations at their own game.

Today's technologies, however, enable the private publisher to at least alleviate some of the risk. Here are some things I do that no major publishing house can do (physically); I'm serious, folks.

1. Select only those manuscripts that are absolutely, positively riveting, and totally, totally original.

I can do this because there are only two “readers” in my company, and I am one of them. Corporate manuscript selection involves a whole bunch of "readers" who are limited by, not just their own personal literary tastes, but also their idea (usually hallucinated) of what their superiors want to hear from them. With some exceptions (some of which go on to become national bestsellers), the rule of thumb is if a new book (fiction or non-fiction) has made it all the way to the corporate press, passing through the usual sieve of oft-conflicting individual tastes, ideas, fears, whims, moods, and on and on, it must be worthless. Few good books can actually please ten people in a row. A dash of originality is certain to get a book shot down by any one of the ten (or fifteen, or twenty) folks assessing its quality (from the agent’s reader (usually a college student who will read the first twenty pages for a few bucks) to the publisher, with many intermediaries in between, because it is "not like anything they've read before" (and not in a good sense, either), and also because each "reader"'s idea of originality is different from that of the next "reader."

2. Invest very little money in each new project.

My authors do not get an advance, only royalties. I don't have to do any big-time promotion. I simply put a book up on the website and maybe write a couple of articles and/or reviews about it.

3. Do away with the necessity to print a "minimum number" of copies and pay for it.

I'm not a "print-on-demand" or "publish-on-demand" publisher; I'm a print-on-order publisher (go ahead, make fun). When a customer orders a book online, we print one copy of that book and send it to him or her. When a book club orders ten copies, we print ten copies, and not twelve or twenty. When one of our authors wants a bunch of books for a presentation, we usually try to discourage it. As a last resort, we ask him or her to show proof that the copies we print for him or her will actually be sold, all of them, at that presentation. We save a lot of trees in the process, but mostly we spare ourselves a lot of waste motion. Our prices are a bit higher than corporate prices - but the neighborhood bistro, too, charges more for a cup of coffee than the "franchise" and the "chain," and, guess what, the quality is higher.

4. Sell on the Web, or at conferences, or at events, without having to deal with distributors and stores, thus avoiding the risk of a thousands of books being sent back after forty days of lukewarm customer interest.

Sometimes, a good book takes a while to get the readers' attention.

5. Quick turnaround.

It takes up to three years for a major publishing corporation to put out a book. By the time it's out, some of the ideas it contains might very well be out of date.

That's the scoop. The main point, I suppose, is that major publishing houses are better off putting out books that have been put out before, and leaving the whole new, contemporary literature business to us private entrepreneurs