Booksquare asks: “Do Publishing Houses have a future?” - By Melinda Carroll

Do Publishing Houses have a future? It’s an interesting question. With the wider range of publishing options authors have, Kassia Krozer of Booksquare talks about the future of big publishing houses and how they will have to evolve to compete.

Kassia Krozer writes:

“Most books simply aren’t marketed, at least in ways that impact the reader. Most books are dumped on the market and told to sink or swim.

Publishers will distinguish themselves with editing and marketing skills. Editing, we have decided will gain new importance in the future world — an about-face from today’s bottom-line, shareholder driven model. In a world where anyone can throw up their work, it will be the good stuff (or the most salacious) that attracts a wider audience. We might chide today’s youth for their casual approach to things like punctuation and spelling, but complete sentences and words that are not one step away from initialisms will continue to matter. Good editing will continue to matter.

Marketing, too, will be an asset offered by publishers. As we all know, today, most books simply aren’t marketed, at least in ways that impact the reader. Most books are dumped on the market and told to sink or swim. This is an inefficient way to run a business, but that’s how it’s always been done in publishing, and only the future — that future with more competition and more at stake — will change this. Once committed to the notion of fighting to acquire and retain authors, we believe that publishers will find new and creative ways to market the books these authors write.

Publishers must, necessarily, adapt to new processes to grab an increasingly fragmented audience… We are not sure that publishers — the big entrenched ones — fully understand how to go about this. Time and again, they miss what’s going on, they lack the key ingredient of today’s online culture: authenticity.”

(Read the full article)

Krozer brings up good points. I think this is why more and more authors today are turning to Indie publishers like Noveltown. Indie publishers work more closely with their authors, pay more attention to editing and find creative ways to market books and reach readers. Books aren’t just thrown on the market to sink or swim with Indie publishers like Noveltown. Rather authors and books receive individual attention to make each book as successful as possible when every dollar counts.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Thursday, March 08, 2007. You can leave your response.