Commentary on various aspects of publishing and marketing, primarily focused on books, magazines, and social media.
"Editorial control" is a four-letter word in my book. It's a legacy of the pre-participatory era, and journalists, editors, authors, etc. who fight to maintain it, or the illusion of it, are spitting into the wind that should be filling their sails. Credibility is more important than control, and that comes from your community.
While Wall Street and technology pundits continue to devalue those who create and curate content professionally in favor of dumb pipes, content aggregators, and social media pyramid schemes, the fact is, at the end of the day, it all starts with good content. Without it, the digital business is a cork floating on the publishing stream, and the new shiny devices are little more than electronic bricks sinking to the bottom at varying rates of speed.
On the publishing side, the devaluation of content isn't anything new, with publishers themselves as guilty of it as the technology vendors they often rush into bed with without thinking through the ramifications.
The reality is, once the eBook market shakes out in the next year or two and becomes more efficient, the publishing industry will still be the dominant supplier of books people actually pay for. Will the players change? Maybe, maybe not. Will the business model have to change? (drink!) Sure, for some publishers. Same for agents and authors, too.
The public library is one of the fundamental pillars of our peculiar flavor of democracy, and yet, recent events in both political and publishing circles suggest that our commitment to them is wavering. And there's certainly no shortage of opinions about their place in the "digital future," some optimistic, but most some ignorant variation on "Who needs libraries when we have Kindles, Netflix and Wikipedia?"
Of course, last week’s much hyped and completely vague announcement of Bookish, a new joint venture between three of the “Big 6? – Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Group — caught my attention, not for its unusual (but not unprecedented) collaborative angle, but for its disappointingly unimaginative and shortsighted value proposition.
Now, with a new job serving a new community that doesn't officially (or unoffically) require my writing skills, there's an exciting light at the end of the tunnel and I'm seizing the opportunity while trying to find the right balance to ensure it's all sustainable.