Check out this interesting article from the NY Times, in which publishing bigwhigs debate about the industry and how little they know about the marketplace:
...other industries...have made a point of using new technology to gain a better understanding of their customers. Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions. Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines and hotels have developed increasingly sophisticated databases of customers.
Publishers, by contrast, put up Web sites where, in some cases, readers can sign up for announcements of new titles. But information rarely flows the other way — from readers back to the editors.
“We need much more of a direct relationship with our readers,” said Susan Rabiner, an agent and a former editorial director. Bloggers have a much more interactive relationship with their readers than publishers do, she said. “Before Amazon, we didn’t even know what people thought of the books,” she said.
Most in the industry seem to see consumer taste as a mystery that is inevitable and even appealing, akin to the uncontrollable highs and lows of falling in love or gambling. Publishing employees tend to be liberal arts graduates who enter the field with a starting salary around $30,000. Compensation is not tied to sales performance. “The people who go into it don’t do it for the money, which might explain why it’s such a bad business,” said WilliamStrachan, editor in chief at Carroll & Graf Publishers.
Apparently, little has changed in the industry since Guttenburg's press:
It’s the way this business has run since 1640,” he says. That is when 1,700 copies of the Bay Psalm Book were published in the colonies. “It was a gamble, and they guessed right because it sold out of the print run. And ever since then, it has been a crap shoot,” Professor Greco said.
There is a “business model” that supports this risk-taking. As Mr. Strachan puts it, “Lightning does strike.”
3 comments:
“The people who go into it don’t do it for the money, which might explain why it’s such a bad business,”
sign of a true writer
1. You totally inspired my last post on reading.
2.A few years ag0, I read Phyllis Rose's Memoir in real time "The Year of Reading Proust" she sometimes applies what she learns from reading Proust to her daily life relationships and leanrs so much about people from Proust.
Business data really makes business run, I think publishing should work harder than present indicates for it. Equal though is product--matching readers find writers if writers work hard too.
The Hood Company
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