The Publisher’s Dilemma

August 12, 2011 By Aminda

Creative minds and innovative problem solvers – the publishing industry needs your help to guide it into the future. Affordable eReaders have brought eBooks to the masses and Google’s rapid entry into the eBook retailer space seems to signify a tipping point of sorts, when it’s clear that the domination of eBooks is in the not-too-distant future. The challenge to writers and publishers is how to make this transition successful and sustainable and beneficial to all parties; publishers, retailers, authors and readers.

A Huffington Post article provides a concise, insightful look at this transformation, pointing out some of the major challenges and opportunities. On one hand, ePublishing provides incredible opportunity to aspiring writers. The ease of self publishing allows anyone to profit from their work without dealing with the chain of agents and publishers. It’s a liberating development for many authors, according to one writer, who explains that as traditional book sales have declined, publishers have gradually provided fewer benefits to their authors.

Authors have been responsible for having their works professionally edited and for not only having a marketing plan in place but for much of the marketing expenses. Publishers can still get books into bookstores, which are still important at present, while print books still account for 80% of sales. But with bookstores rapidly disappearing, have publishers figured out their role in a world where that figure is reversed? As Anne Hill writes, “publishers will have to start thinking more like software start-ups, displaying a level of intelligence and creativity that eluded the music industry in the 1990s and signaled its own demise. The smart money says that things will get worse before they get better.”

Or as another author states, in a Guardian UK article, “we’re in one of those 50-year windows when an entirely new medium is being created and no one knows what to do with it. Of course there are innovative publishers trying to figure out what to do with it, which will be featured in a future post.


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