{"id":30399,"date":"2023-05-19T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-19T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/?p=30399"},"modified":"2023-05-19T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-05-19T13:00:00","slug":"everything-passes-everything-changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/everything-passes-everything-changes\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything passes, Everything changes\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A year or two back, when the world was young, I loved the music of Bob Dylan and knew much of his canon by heart. One of his lyrics has always stayed with me: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything passes<\/em> 
Everything changes<\/em> 
Just do what you think you should do.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, you know, the Bard was right. Right about the world, right about publishing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t blame the world for changing. You just have to make your own best accommodation with how it is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This thought is prompted by an article in the Bookseller magazine \u2013 the equivalent, roughly, of the US\u2019s Publishers Weekly. The writer is an editor working in publisher. He\/she chooses to remain anonymous, but I\u2019m almost certain that she\u2019s called Hepzibah Plum. She says: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over a decade ago, when I first came into the commercial publishing industry, my fellow assistants and I were well versed in early starts and late finishes, and regularly worked weekends. However, what I have seen a marked leap of in recent years is what is expected of each editor, publicist and marketeer in terms of the volume of books \u2013 a growth that, in my experience, is often not supported by an increase in budget and resources. The inevitable result is a cutting of corners elsewhere, and it is author care, whether intentional or not, that is effectively deprioritised.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that\u2019s right. I honestly don\u2019t think that author care in the industry has been satisfactory at any time in the last quarter of a century, which is how long I\u2019ve been playing this game. But it\u2019s got worse and the most wicked effects are to be seen when it comes to marketing. As the good Ms Plum tells us,  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is simply impossible for each book to have a comprehensive marketing and publicity plan or for each author to have direct contact (or indeed any interaction) with the wider publishing team. The worst setup I\u2019ve experienced in my career saw one marketeer overseeing six editors\u2019 lists, and each list was considerable (my own included 17 authors, most of whom were publishing two or even three books a year).<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That means, effectively, there is no meaningful marketing for almost anyone. So what you get is an editor telling you excitedly that (ta-da!) you\u2019re going to have cover reveal, yay! On Twitter and<\/em> Insta! And, naturally enough, you\u2019re liable to feel a tad disappointed. The impact of those things on sales is exactly nil. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people who are telling you about your cover reveal know that what they\u2019re saying is meaningless, but they\u2019re nice people and they can\u2019t bear to tell you the ugly truth. So you get no meaningful marketing and a packet of sweetly told lies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So why don\u2019t publishers just get more selective about the books they take on and give each one a proper marketing spend? Well, alas, the Big Publishing strategy is perfectly rational. The books which sell in volume are the ones bought in volume by the biggest retailers. And although Barnes & Noble and Waterstones (in the UK) sell a lot of books in total, those chains are now managed rather like chains of indie bookshops, with each store manager making their own buying decisions. That means they can no longer reliably build a bestseller. Instead, it\u2019s supermarkets that have the real market clout \u2013 the ability to place large orders for books and to sell those books fast in a short space of time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But do the book buyers at those major retailers have the time to read everything they\u2019re being offered? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Result: it\u2019s become ever more of a crap-shoot which books do or don\u2019t sell big. An excellent book cover will do more for you than any amount of wonderful prose. (Of course, big name authors will always be picked up by the supermarkets, so they\u2019re going to sell at scale no matter what.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if it\u2019s a crap-shoot, publishers are \u2013 quite rationally \u2013 buying and publishing more books and investing as little as they can in them. Each book is an extra lottery ticket and if you manage to invest very little in the book, then you can pick up a lot of tickets at very low cost. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Authors don\u2019t get any meaningful care. They\u2019re going to be lied to about their prospects. Real industry relationships will be attenuated. And the quality of what\u2019s on sale at a bookshop or supermarket near you will be patchy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There probably are print-led publishers who do things differently (and, Hepzibah Plum, if you\u2019re reading this, I\u2019d love to know who you rate.) But I will say this: the digital-first crowd do arrange things differently. There\u2019s proper marketing spend for every debut novel. There\u2019s a proper focus on analytics. If one book cover doesn\u2019t work, they\u2019ll try another. Those tricks won\u2019t always work, of course. It\u2019s not like there exists any sure-fire strategy in publishing. But effectively, a good digital-first publisher works to get the right books in the right packaging in front of the right audience in the right way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self-publishing essentially deploys the exact same tools to deliver the exact same result. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what do you do with this information? Well, you take your cue from Bob: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything passes<\/em> 
Everything changes<\/em> 
Just do what you think you should do.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t change the world of publishing. Lots of people still want to work with a print-led publisher, because they like the sense of a book as a physical object, that idea that you haven\u2019t been properly published if you don\u2019t have something you can put on a shelf. But digital-first is wonderful, and less overstretched, and more meritocratic in terms of outcomes. Ditto self-publishing. So make whatever choice you want. Just do what you think you should do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s it from me. I\u2019m going to wear a red-silk dressing gown, drink a glass of mint tea and smoke a thin-stemmed pipe, packed with the best Moroccan hashish. Best of all, I shall do it outside, in the sun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Til soon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harry<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Right about the world,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJericho Writers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/everything-passes-everything-changes\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Everything passes, Everything changes\u00a0 – Jericho Writers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A year or two back, when the world was young, I loved the music of Bob Dylan and knew much of his canon by heart. 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