Friday, June 15, 2007
What Publishers can learn from my Cat
This quote is from Publishers Lunch:
There is a slow but steady worldwide decline in the sales of printed products, roughly matched by growth in sales of electronic media, and gravity is reasserting itself in the UK trade. In 2006, it became clear that book publishers should probably expect medium and long-term sales stagnation and decline in their printed products, just as newspaper publishers do.
Anyone who checks out the A-list bloggers of the Tech Altiverse (I just made up that word since the Uber-Geeks do, in fact, inhabit an alternate universe: see e.g.,
Tech Crunch,
Guy Kawasaki or
Robert Scoble) knows that the geekish are rolling their eyes at newspapers for not understanding what's happening to their business model. For the most part, the Uber-Geeks are right. Newspapers moan about
Craigslist taking their revenue without making the leap to gee, maybe readers want want ads that work like Craigslist so we better do that! It took me about 2 minutes, maybe three, to post my old printer on Craigslist and within 2 minutes, I kid you not, I had a taker. Could I have done that, as easily or as quickly on any newspaper want-ad site? No. Do I go to newspaper websites that are behind a pay wall? No, I do not. I go get my website news somewhere else, and by the way, view someone else's ads when I do. Lest you think that there's no money in Google's ad-sense, I've seen creditable reports (but not proof) that many of the the A-listers make a few thousand a month in ad sense revenue. (A-list bloggers have hundreds of thousands of impressions, not a few hundred. For comparison's sake
Miss Snark, despite her avid fans, would not have been considered an A-lister, though before her retirement from blogging, I was starting to think she might get there.)
The cat analogy is coming up, by the way.Have people become news averse? No. They're just consuming it in places where it's convenient for them. But I still look through 2 print newspapers at home, too.
So here's the cat analogy. My cat Jake loves to sleep on my printer. My brand-new printer! So I keep it covered with two thin-ish kitchen towels. The other day I thought, hey, I'm going to cover the printer with this much bigger and vastly thicker cloth! The printer will be even more impervious to cat hair and Jake will be comfier, too!
That's not what happened.
Jake refused to sleep on the printer. Instead, my big, fluffy 15 pound cat decided to sleep in the space where I put my manuscript binder when I am transferring paper edits to the computer. At first, I thought, man, this is just so inconvenient to have him trying to sleep on my MS! We spent a couple of days irritated with each other about that. And then I removed the big cloth from the printer and Jake got up on the printer and went to sleep on the two thin cloths.
Oh. There was no abandonment of cat-napping behavior, merely a displacement of its location.
See where I'm going with this? If this publisher is right, the medium is changing. But the need for stories people want to read is not.
So authors have no need to panic. Publishers do, if they don't wake up to the translocation.
In writing news, I've deleted two chapters from Magellan's Witch. But things are getting better.
Labels: editing, Magellan's Witch, publishing
