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101 Reasons is proud to welcome a new contributor to our ranks; one with impeccable credentials and decades of experience, both as a journalist and in the publishing industry. Sir Thomas de Kay’s column "Balderdash" has appeared for many years in the Guardian newspaper (South Gloucestershire edition). This is the first time he has written for a Web-based publication.
In an industry besieged by variables, there is but one reliable constant in publishing — everyone thinks they know how to make the business better (more profitable, more reliable, more efficient, or "fairer", whatever that means in their perspective), and they are all wrong.
To further understand their wrongness, the set of everyone must be divided into three groups:
It’s this third group that provides the most fun — mostly because they think they’re in the first group.
In my Guardian column, I frequently lampooned the half-baked, self-centred, hopelessly flawed and often counter-productively idiotic theories of journalists, authors and social commentators who pointed their rose-tinted telescopes at a segment of the publishing industry and pronounced it any number of unflattering adjectives — usually without explicitly stating their central complaint, that no-one was buying their book. Begging your indulgence, it’s a tradition I wish to continue.
![[Screenshot]](http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/uploads/2008/05/mitraarticle.png)
Sramana Mitra’s column at Forbes.com
In this instalment, we will examine the argument presented by one Sramana Mitra, in a recent column for Forbes.com called "How Amazon Could Change Publishing". Now, I know little about Ms Mitra beyond her biography, which says she’s an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. Please remember this fact.
If you haven’t read the article, fear not: I’m told that you can click on the words in blue in the previous paragraph. However, the thrust of her argument is that Amazon (the web retailer, not the river) could — nay, should — dominate the publishing industry, removing the "middle-man", and the entire concept of publishing as it is known today, by printing and retailing every book directly.
I’m going to leave that elephant in the room for a few minutes, and deconstruct some points in her argument. Mitra states that:
This is a blinkered, seriously inaccurate summation of the economics of traditional book publishing. But it’s the necessary foundation for Mitra’s absurd theory:
[Amazon] could directly engage with authors and cut out the middlemen: the agent and the publisher. That would free up 30% to 40% of the pie, which can easily be split between Amazon and the author.
It gets better:
Let’s say, in the new world, Amazon becomes the retailer, marketer, publisher and agent combined and takes 65% of the revenues, offering 35% to the author–we end up with a much better, fairer world.
And the result of this:
Amazon likely will use its power to build direct relationships with authors and gradually phase out publishers and agents. It will first go after the independent print-on-demand self-publishers and get the best authors from that world [like Amy Fisher]. Amazon will then take on the large publishers.
It’s difficult for a man of my years to be sure he grasps all the implications of such outstanding wrongheadedness. But let me try to elaborate how I interpret this:
Let me just reiterate that this plan is coming from an entrepreneur and strategy consultant — someone to whom those "middle-men" would usually turn, to consult on a strategy to avoid this exact scenario. Nowhere in the article does Mitra hint at how other companies could combat this, or even survive in such a market. (The article is clearly written for Forbes’ ambitious-but-uninformed-writer demographic.)
There are any number of minor concerns you might have about such a "change" — such as, the death of free speech and independent thought — but my chief concern is the staggering hubris and myopia demonstrated by one of Mitra’s remarks in the commentary after the article:
As for authors choosing to work with Amazon - well, if Amazon can guarantee that using their recommendation / co-branding / merchandising system, they can sell a million copies of my book, why wouldn’t I work with them exclusively? I don’t know about you, but I certainly would.
Not only is this a blunt statement of Mitra’s prejudice — she’s only thinking as a (possible) author, not at all as a rational economist — but it’s also prima facie stupidity. Amazon is not going to guarantee to any author, save maybe Dan Brown, that they’ll sell a million copies. Given their 15% share of the book market, only the uber-bestsellers like James Patterson are even likely to sell over a million copies of a title through Amazon alone (Amy Fisher is certainly out of the race). Based on Mitra’s figures of 35% royalties on a book selling for $24.95, that’s an advance of $8.7 million dollars. (There’s the solution, then. Authors should agree to work with Amazon exclusively if they guarantee payment of $8.7 million dollars per book.)
There are problems in the publishing industry, certainly — but the solution to this, and indeed any economic problem, has never been "Let the big guy own everything". The publishing industry will survive, as long as it continues to refrain from taking advice from unpublished authors.
Sir Thomas Evelyn de Kay’s long-running Guardian column "Balderdash" won an unprecedented five straight Jonathan Swift Awards ("the Swifty") between 1983-88, for Best Use of Metaphor or Allegory In Social or Artistic Criticism.
If you would like to recommend an article about books or publishing for the Balderdash treatment, please send the URL to balderdash@101reasonstostopwriting.com.
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Whenever I see the words “entrepreneur and strategy consultant” in anyone’s bio, I usually run as fast as I can…to get a suitable instrument to spay and/or neuter the individual abusing these words. Weed-eaters for boys, Roto-rooters for girls, and anyone who complains about their treatment doesn’t get anaesthesia. These four words together are MBASpeak for “individual who gets paid ridiculous sums to give rim-jobs to CEOs and tell them that they’re going in the right direction.” I once worked for an editor who later had delusions of becoming such a strategy consultant: he spent years lambasting Dallas’s sole weekly newspaper, going on and on about how the paper was making a big mistake by hiring Harvard MBAs as consultants instead of SMU journalism majors with serious online porn addictions, and when he was finally let go from his last paying position, started up a consultancy on the idea that the paper would pay good money to hear the same exact opinions that he’d been giving out for free. (The fact that he’s back to working as an editor for the same publication that let him go fifteen years ago shows exactly how many people were willing to pay for his advice.)
Now, I have no doubt that Ms. Mitra is trying that same strategy: either she’s trying to jam her tongue so far up Jeff Bezos’s ass that he’s left with permanent calluses on the backs of his eyeballs, and he gives her a six-figure consultantcy fee so she can tell him exactly what he wants to hear, or she’s trying to scare Amazon’s competition into giving her a six-figure consultancy fee so she’ll agree with whatever boneheaded plans they have to regain market share. The “strategic consultant” Faith Popcorn, once one of the two darlings regularly invoked by Wired magazine as proof that the Cat Piss Men were finally inheriting the Earth (the other being Bruce Sterling), ran much the same scam in the days of the dotcom, where she’d go on and on about synergy and strategic relationships without understanding what any of those words meant. In both cases, they’re going for a core audience that desperately wants to believe in what some smartalecks call “the Green Lantern business plan”: it’s possible to do anything if someone has enough will to make it happen. As with the nickname, it requires a very simplistic universe to make work, where people can wear underwear on the outside of their pants with the same aplomb as they can break existing purchasing patterns and business models.
Personally, I hope Ms. Mitra does very well with this cunning plan. I myself, back when I was a beginning writer, had just as much a grasp of the realities of publishing when I argued for the need for an effective writer’s union to protect its members from editorial abuse. The reason why I hope that her idea gets more exposure than mine is because I’m a firm believer that the best scams are those which work on those both stupid and greedy, and anyone dumb enough to hire her as a publishing consultant deserves to be rooked for whatever fee she can wrangle out of her new employer before it declares bankruptcy. In fact, I’d love to see her hired by Borders Books & Music to assist with its new strategery: I have a deadpool bet on Borders going bankrupt and being liquidated by the end of September, and her hire might expedite its inevitable demise.
Sir Thomas’ otherwise excellent article fails to mention one side-effect of the prevalent belief that self-publishing (via Amazon, or whoever) will ‘revolutionise’ publishing:
If you eliminate the ‘middle-man’ and sell every shitty book that someone is prepared to upload, your storefront becomes the slushpile, and you’re outsourcing the role of slush reader to your customers. Who the hell wants to pay $25 for a book that no human being has read before?
Selling this way depends on the patience/gullibility of at least some customers to wade through the hundreds of thousands of utterly mediocre products, to move some good ones up the ‘recommendation’ scale. Those hard-core readers are the bread-and-butter of the book market, exactly the ones you don’t want to piss off.
Amazon currently makes money by selling books to readers. Vanity presses make their money by selling books back to their authors. Vanity presses make a lot of money doing this, but Amazon makes more.
Sean, I’ve heard of at least one gaggle of idiots with a similar scheme: this business accepts manuscripts from all over, and then charges editors and publishers $100 for the privilege of sifting through their manuscript pile to buy stories and publish them. Interestingly enough, not only was this idea not immediately divebombed and destroyed, seeing as how far too many MBAs are incapable of reading and have no idea of what goes into writing, but it apparently won a grant as one of the best business ideas presented at a particular conference. I can’t wait to see how many weeks this runs before the perps literally drown in a pile of slush: did they learn nothing from the implosion of Contentville?
Mr. Riddell, you’re a treasure. Your comment is better tha deKay’s analysis.
but it apparently won a grant as one of the best business ideas presented at a particular conference
The lobotomised have a conference?
Without a lobotomy, does anyone willingly attend a business conference?
Oh my gosh! Get rid of evil oppressive meanie publishers and have everyone self-publish! That’s so original! I’ve never ever heard that idea before! 6 million titles published every year and sold exclusively through Amazon! It’s so simple! Why has nobody tried this yet?
*ahem* Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
[...] two links. Here’s an article on BEA’s attempt to go green, and here’s one bashing a stupid article that posits that the best way to change publishing would be to let Amazon p…. (Seriously.) You know you want to read an article that starts: “In an industry [...]
Oh, and I almost forgot: for the real entertainment, read the comments to Ms. Mitra’s original article at Forbes. I don’t know what’s funnier: the rampant screaming about Amazon being nothing but a gaggle of poopyheads, or the screaming being followed immediately by advertising for the screamer’s own POD publishing company, complete with typos and nonsensical sentences. I’m starting to think that after Sean finishes with his 101 reasons to stop writing, we need to focus on 101 reasons to stop editing and publishing.
By the time Sean actually *gets* to the 101st reason, we’ll all be receiving this blog straight out of the ether via the holographic cortex chips the alien robot doctors implanted in us after World War IV…..
Amazon the only publisher? A monopoly of any kind is NEVER a good idea. Amazon would be free to dictate anything they like that’s good for them. If they decided to reduce the author share the author would have nowhere else to go. If they decided that Romance, say, was making the most revenue and SciFi wasn’t, they could decide to stop publishing SciFi. Without alternatives, without healthy competition, both readers and writers would suffer.
[...] Reasons to Stop Writing has other criticisms of Mitra’s theory. I’m thinking that monopoly power over a creative industry is really [...]
The other glitch is how much a company like Amazon would want to start marketing all its authors at the level publishers currently do for their writers. Authors already complain about having to sponsor their own book tours when publishing through some of the smaller presses or that they don’t get enough marketing attention from the big presses, but were all books to become the giant slush-pile at Amazon (all self-published, all the time!) it would make it even harder for authors to make their books stand out. Somehow I doubt Amazon would want to put the same amount of money or marketing man-power into every book as if every book were promising to be a bestseller.