Samantha Ettus has an hour-long video with Jane Friedman and Larry Kirshbaum posted on her internet interview site Obsessed. Friedman remains optimistic about book publishing in general, but is bearish on the prospects for the biggest trade publishers (“the large publishers, which we’re now calling ‘legacy publishers'”) with their oversized cost structure: “The question is what will happen to the giant companies that are hurting very, very badly now. Can they come back? Can they reinvent themselves? In my opinion that would be very difficult, because there’s too much history and there’s too much overhead.” She also notes, “You’ve got […]
How Publishing Works
Shatzkin's New Big Ideas for Publishing's Future
This morning’s biggest Big Idea presentation came from consultant and publishing theorist Mike Shatzkin, who expanded his previously-presented master thesis that general trade publishing will fade and “the future means ‘vertical’ and ‘community'” to look more broadly at what publishing will look like in 20 years. Perhaps the biggest extrapolation was this: “Something we don’t pay enough attention to is that anybody with a web site is a publisher. Not all publishers are content creators, but they need content. That is the big unfolding opportunity for publishing and the people in it over the net 20 or 30 years.” Put […]
New Think for Old Publishers? Not According to the Audience
At SXSW, the disconnect between traditional book publishing and the forward-thinking conference attendees was never more apparent than in reaction to yesterday’s “New Think for Old Publishers” panel featuring Clay Shirky (whose recent essay on the newspaper industry has been much discussed over the weekend.) The panel writeup had audience members believing the session was about learning what was wrong and right with publishing. Panel members, which included Penguin marketing director John Fagan, Putnam President Ivan Held and Bloomsbury Publicity Director Peter Miller, and moderator Deborah Schultz, evidently had something else in mind: to invite the audience to tell them […]
Mailer Estate: The Client Wylie Lost
As an Observer article reports, Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency represented Norman Mailer while we he was alive but the estate has selected Mailer’s friend and longtime collaborator Larry Schiller to represent all unpublished material, including the trove of “something like 60,000” letters. J. Michael Lennon, who just signed with S&S for an authorized Mailer biography, has been working on one book compilation of Mailer letters “on and off for about five years.” The Observer suggests that publishing rights to that collection might have been ambiguous under Mailer’s contractual relationship with Mailer: “Though at one point last winter there […]
Barnsley Looks Ahead
Harper UK ceo Victoria Barnsley gave a speech called Media’s Last Diehard? at the London School of Economics last night. Improbably, though it has taken 10 years for online sales of physical books to comprise 12 percent of sales at HarperCollins, she speculated that “within say 10 years more than half our sales will come from digital downloads.” She acknowledged that territorial rights will be “pretty hard to police” if ebooks become that prevalent and “also said it would be difficult to establish a profitable pricing model when most consumers are used to free digital content.”Bookseller
Stalking Steve
The NY Observer seems to think Doubleday group publisher Steve Rubin should just retire already, what with the “devastation” of Jon Krakauer’s cancelled manuscript, disappointing sales for Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle, and having the world’s most successful adult novelist not yet ready to give a delivery date for his new book. And they’re miffed that Rubin is canny enough not to play the game with them: “So far, Mr. Rubin has remained silent on the matter. When approached by Pub Crawl for a profile last week, the onetime publishing reporter declined repeatedly to be interviewed and took impressive measures to […]