The Future is One Year Away?

Over the long holiday weekend we were having discussions with new book sales representatives and the prospects of the world of publishing. There was talk of the announcement by Houghton Mifflin that they wouldn't be acquiring new manuscripts which struck us as a very bad idea for a company that publishes new titles. We were concerned with the seemingly anachronistic publishing method of acquiring manuscripts from authors and then beginning the process of editing, marketing, producing then distributing the title. A process that can take up to a year if not longer for the title to arrive at your bookstore. A process that's about as nimble as an elephant in quicksand. This system is the way publishing's been done since the beginning of time, and that time is over.

It seems the only authors this will be workable for in the future are authors that publishers want to cultivate to customers that already have an unwavering love for the author. An author like Toni Morrison who gives you a "big" book every four years or so.

More and more titles are being published that are derivatives of blogs and bloggers and the 24/7 world of information is quickly making the old time frames of publishing moot. How many customers will be willing to lay out $35.00 for the next Bob Woodward hardback expose in the near future when his latest was concurrently available for the Kindle at $9.99?

James Gleick recently had an article in the New York Times that addressed this problem and the future of publishing. While he rightly believes that the book will not disappear because in its essence it's the perfect medium for reading he does come to an unavoidable truth:

"For some kinds of books, the writing is on the wall. Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia. Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the Oxford English Dictionary, has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever. And those hefty objects called “telephone books”? As antiquated as typewriters. The book has had a long life as the world’s pre-eminent device for the storage and retrieval of knowledge, but that may be ending, where the physical object is concerned."

Save the plodding world of publishing books for books that we'll want to savor again and again. As Gleick states, "Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it."

A Recipe for Royalties, One Author's View

Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking is a great starting point for any home chef to explore essentials of cooking and to ramp up their game. His main point of the differences between the skilled home chef and the pro sweating it out on the line is basically two words - veal stock. If you basically learn to have this on hand and infuse your offerings with this wonderful base you'll improve your cooking and impress the most hardened foodie at your table.

Ruhlman also has a great webpage that's worth checking out. You'll find a wonderful entry about the changing aspects of the publishing world and the financing, advances and payments to authors, and how that world is quickly changing. Although his situation is a little different then most authors - culinary co-author of The French Laundry Cookbook with Thomas Keller, Food Network personality, friend to Bourdain, his relationship with his publisher might foretell the future of the publishing world at least in respects to the place of authors within it. Its a bit heavy on the numbers side but its a fascinating look into the book world that many don't get to see. Its well worth a look.