Love Letter to Our Corporate Brethren, as Inspired by GalleyCat
Galleycat: Now that we've all had a chance to read Jon Karp's WaPo brief on the state of publishing, which, as Leon Neyfakh notes, is in many ways a Twelve mission statement "to invest in works of quality to maintain [a] niche," I've got a question for you editorial types out there:
Which of the growth strategies Karp identifies are you feeling the most pressure to achieve?
( polls)
As Karp points out, the first strategy has generally proven popular, but I'm guessing that y'all are getting pulled in plenty of other directions, too. But you tell me—and feel free to elaborate in the comments section.
(And, by all means, feel free to make the argument that Karp's "quality rather than quantity" approach is already being successfully deployed by smaller independent presses in service of creating and distributing "the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else," excellent books that speak with perfect clarity to an audience ready—eager, even—to read them. If you do, though, help us figure out: Is that solution scalable to the level of the big houses? If so, how radical a reorg will it require?)
Soft Skull: It really wouldn't be very hard since they're already doing it in children's books, they're already doing it by providing client distribution services to other publishers and they're already doing it in sales by establishing corporate-wide organizations to supply sales services to the existing imprints. The corporate publishers have to convert themselves into distributors akin to Perseus/PGW, Consortium, etc except that they also provide editorial, design and production services, and they provide office space and human resources support. But editorial and and marketing/publicity gets disaggregated into multiple imprints. Each has a budget, anyone can get fired for not staying within budget or not have a plausible explanation as to why budget will be made, and then some, in the subsequent fiscal year. (That is, approximating the fiscal discipline of the average independent publisher.)
To make this work there would be one critical adjustment to make, which is to ignore those agents who play publisher egos off one another and convince them when they've overpaid for yet another debut novel that they've "won," that they "beat" the other house. However, I believe that having the smaller imprints will render more transparent those who know how to reach an audience, and be profitable, compared to those who just know how to "win" auctions. As a result, kudos will go to those folks who are reaching their audiences, rather than to the editor whose strengths lie in talking the suits into writing big checks.
Corporate publishers have the talent, the sales force, the publicists, the management information systems, they just need to realize that while things are not yet fucked in the publishing business and while it might seem for each senior management person that they've more to lose by rocking the boat than by holding tight, you don't want to be trying to turn the aircraft carrier into the flotilla of destroyers while sales are down 10% like in the music business and you're getting strafed from above, forgive the militaristic metaphor.