Bordering on Hysteria

You can't turn the pages of Writer's Digest or any other writing magazine, or browse the blogs of writing, without finding legion articles about the changing face of publishing/book-selling. A particular favorite among fear-mongers of the book's "demise" is the collapse of Borders; and a particular favorite among fear-mongers of the publisher's demise is the e-book. Here's my take.
First, on Borders: lest we forget, a lot of businesses failed the past few years, and a lot more came extremely close to failing. It was called a recession, remember? General Motors nearly failed, and the car is certainly more permanent a commodity than books. Couple the recession with e-books (remind me what e-reader Borders came up with? Do you even remember?) and you have a recipe for a non-progressive book-seller's demise. And given the rise of e-reader and wireless transfer, we should expect to see fewer bookstores. I know it's a loss, but forgive me for seeing things from a writer's perspective: people are still reading.

Now, the e-book. My question is: what is writers' and publishers' problem? The music industry didn't blink when music went electronic; they attached as best they could to a product that seemed viable (iTunes is doing quite well, thank you) and continued to produce tons of music. Movies transitioned from VHS to DVD to BluRay to live-streaming all within twenty years without this much fuss. Oh, there was a weird period when the industry thought Microsoft could make a better DVD, but they came to their senses eventually. Perhaps the edge these other industries have is their foundation on shifting sands: music and movies are constantly doing new things -- new artists, new markets, new marketing ideas -- while the book has been largely unchanged since the 15th century (now with glossy cover!).

Now, in defense of books I will say this, and I know a lot of very smart, very professional, very knowledgeable people will disagree with me, and I know they're right for their reasons: self-publishing is...sketchy. Let me say from experience: any monkey can "publish" on Amazon or Lulu or any other number of free self-publishing websites. I've read manuscripts by very well-intentioned people who were making a serious go of publishing, and I wish them all the best: but their manuscript was in absolutely no condition to publish. Even ignoring spelling and grammar, the dialogue or the narrative just didn't flow well at all. And Amazon and Lulu and the others don't have viable editing standards -- Amazon doesn't have editing standards at all. I don't know what takes them 24 - 48 hours to process, but they're not editing. And the last thing you want to do as a serious, professional writer, is look back at a self-pub and cringe...or puke. And I say this as someone who has self-pubbed on Amazon. Another author I know even paid a ton of money to have editing and marketing done for his book, and I wish he had paid me. I know I found a lot duriung my read-through, but meeting up with him a year later, he gave me numbers: 72 editorial corrections, a lot of them spelling and grammar. He was ashamed of his first publishing run. And he had paid several thousand dollars for this self-publisher's package. Yes, from a strictly vain position, he was published -- if that's your only goal, go do it. But if you take pride in your work, and want it to be the best it can be, you need to hire professionals. Like, professional professionals, not just people who got good grades in creative writing classes in high school who are willing to take your money.

And for pity's sake, calm down and accept the change. People are reading. And who cares what format they're reading, already? We've had five hundred years. I love physical books, and I will continue to buy physical books as long as they're available. I even paid $45 a pop for 45 quality, leather-bound books. (I was on my way to 100, but money ran tight. I'm still working on reading all of them, but I've read some gems that I had never heard of before.) But from a marketing stand-point, there is no reason to cry over e-books. It's the same text, and the same ideas being advanced. Let's move into the new century already.

See you Friday.