Time has an interesting (though not entirely timely) article on the future of book publishing.
Some of this we already know: it's getting harder to make it in the book industry.
Some recent facts:
Publishing houses--among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt--are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company's history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be "the worst year for publishing in decades."
I'd say, in Denver we've had some local measures, including the closing of one of our favorite independent bookstores, Book Buffs of Denver, in November, and the recent shuttering of our long-time printer National Hirschfeld.
More interesting is the account of Lisa Genova's transit from unknown author to agented and signed talent through the conduit iUniverse, one of many growing self-publishing services, provided. Though this is also nothing new. Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass (he even typeset and printed the first edition) in 1855. A century later, A. R. Ammons self-published his first book, Ommateum in 1955. He didn't move from his early obscurity very quickly, but a decade later he was a major force in American poetry, and another decade beyond that he'd been inducted into the big leagues by critics like Harold Bloom.
The technology is changing. It's much easier to find self-publishers and much easier to take control of the publication process. I know several young poets who've decided on this route---distributing their books POD through lulu.com (for example). This is happening much faster. And, yes, a persistent author, like Lisa Genova, can break out of that initial obscurity into notice. Yes, good work can make itself known and get the recognition and backing it deserves.
Still, and here's what interests me, the publisher---in Genova's case Simon & Schuster---retains a cultural and even economic power (however uncertain the latter). Through the self-publishing conduit an author rises not only into notice but into relative (economic and cultural) wealth. The publisher-author relationship still adds value to the work: the publisher is not merely a conduit.
I can't say Copper Nickel makes anybody wealthy, but I do think we create value here, both by publishing something and by placing it in relationship to other works that make it's particularly valuable qualities more visible, and, as I hope you know if you're reading this, we make what we publish look good. One of my persistent concerns with self-published work is that it often isn't designed very well. Authors do often know their work better than anyone else, but when an author is left to his or her own devices, tastes, and decisions, the product often isn't as good as it could be. The relationship between the publisher, who knows books better than any author, and the author who knows this book better than anyone, does produce better results.
By the same token, the relationship between a publisher and his or her readers is also a productive relationship. Copper Nickel is a relatively small operation, and right now we have one product: this print journal that comes out every six months. We want to sell this to you. More to the point, we want you to read it, which is why we're embarking on a number of expansions.
In the next four weeks, we'll be launching an online reader, inspired in part by Agni and Arts & Letters Daily, and in part by the great work being done by The Southeast Review, The Missouri Review and so many others. We'll be remixing some content, adding some new content, and linking our content to other items of interest we find in the wild.
And later this year, we'll be offering iPhone/Stanza-optimized versions of even more material as well as podcasts. We're still not big fans of Kindle, but we're hopeful for the advent of Plastic Logic's Reader and are getting ready, as well, to start using Issuu to deliver even more material out to you, the interested party.
As always, if you want to be among the first to know, keep visiting here, sign up for our mailing list, or join our Facebook group.
We look forward to more of that publisher-reader-author dialogue in the coming year.
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