Ah, this is the key misconception. If you think Charlie is the only thing going into his books that provides you value, think again. Good development editing, copyediting, fact-checking, typography, and illustrations all go into an excellent book. Amazon has no skill at any of these things.
The future of publishing will belong not to middlemen like Amazon, but to people who can reliably put out high-quality, profitable books even from middling writers, and who can turn a profit based on the carrot of quality rather than the stick of DRM. That means cutting out a lot of the people in traditional publishing, but it doesn't mean that publishing as an industry will go away.
O'Reilly, Five Simple Steps, A Book Apart and other technical publishers are paving the way here, and it won't be long before someone starts an ebook-specific publishing house for trashy romance or adventure novels and makes a killing.
I'm aware of that argument, I just don't find it credible. The prevailing arrangement is that the publisher pays people to edit and do cover art, just like they pay people to actually print the physical copies. It does not matter to me whose name is on the check that goes to the person who edits Charlie's book -- Charlie, Amazon, the publisher, whatever. The internals of supplier's accounting systems do not surface value to me.
Right, but if Charlie pays, does he know good editors? He might not have the time to research and network (and, in fact, it might be a bad idea to let him choose his own editor). If Amazon pays then they are, for all intents and purposes, playing the exact same role as publisher.
Just because something is possible without a middleman doesn't mean that it is desirable.
Really? That's what we're down to? Save the publishers because they're the only ones who can find good editors? That's another arrangement that sucks for everyone --- the readers, the writers, and the editors --- except for the publishers.
This strikes me as the same as saying "save the newspapers, they're the only ones who can run classified ads!". Except, the newspapers do other stuff. What else do the publishers do?
The arrangement we have today made a lot more sense when books lived or died on the retail channel, to which access was a scarcity acquired and allocated ("curated", to use their words) by the publishers. But that world is gone. My grandkids will look at bookstores like soda shops: historical curiosities. There's value in curation, too, but when it isn't backed by the scarcity of access to bookstore shelves, it's not enough value to justify the middleman role.
I think he was making a good point: That there is a role for a middleman to add value by providing services (or access to services) that an author may not already have on his own.
That we refer to this middleman as a 'publisher' (which already has meaning in the soon-to-be-outdated book publishing model) is, I think, what you take exception to.
And if these middle do actually provide value, they will continue to be included in the process. If these organizations (currently known as publishers) are capable of providing capable editors and providing other value to the finished work, I'm sure they'll be able to charge a fee and stay in business.
Job boards have not replaced the headhunter. If anything, people complain about the job boards being a miasma of trash resume. Likewise, those authors who seek such expert consulting might end up positively differentiating themselves.
In the long run though, the business has been disrupted and it is up to the publishers to positions themselves in a way that their expertise and value is appreciated and accessible to authors who might not want to go through them in the traditional means. So perhaps they would do well to charge for the services which still add value (like editorial work or cover art services).
Judging by the deplorable quality of the editing and cover illustrations on many Kindle books, I question whether the traditional publishers are adding anything of value. Oftentimes it's obvious that the cover illustration was tossed together in Photoshop or Illustrator in an afternoon, and the editing wouldn't pass muster in a freshman composition class. Sometimes it doesn't look like they've even bothered to run the spell-checker.
This doesn't excuse the editing, but I've heard that one problem is that publishers often don't have electronic rights to use the cover illustrations they use on physical books.
Why would editing, cover art, etc. be something that can be best done by a middleman though?
It seems more logical to me to see this as a service provided by separate agencies, paid for by either the author or the publisher. Such agencies could be of various sizes and compete on price or a reputation for quality work.
* Such agencies could be of various sizes and compete on price or a reputation for quality work.*
Right, but would an author want to deal with comparing all the agencies and selecting the best one? Is he/she necessarily qualified to do so? Like I said, having a middleman in there is of use at times.
So people will set up companies that work for the authors to set this stuff up, and those companies won't be able to capture most of the proceeds from the authors work, but instead will be forced to price according to the value their work provides to the authors.
The future of publishing will belong not to middlemen like Amazon, but to people who can reliably put out high-quality, profitable books even from middling writers, and who can turn a profit based on the carrot of quality rather than the stick of DRM. That means cutting out a lot of the people in traditional publishing, but it doesn't mean that publishing as an industry will go away.
O'Reilly, Five Simple Steps, A Book Apart and other technical publishers are paving the way here, and it won't be long before someone starts an ebook-specific publishing house for trashy romance or adventure novels and makes a killing.