Everything passes, Everything changes 

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: 

Everything passes 
Everything changes 
Just do what you think you should do. 

And, you know, the Bard was right. Right about the world, right about publishing. 

You can’t blame the world for changing. You just have to make your own best accommodation with how it is. 

This thought is prompted by an article in the Bookseller magazine – the equivalent, roughly, of the US’s Publishers Weekly. The writer is an editor working in publisher. He/she chooses to remain anonymous, but I’m almost certain that she’s called Hepzibah Plum. She says: 

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 – 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. 

I think that’s right. I honestly don’t 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’ve been playing this game. But it’s got worse and the most wicked effects are to be seen when it comes to marketing. As the good Ms Plum tells us,  

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’ve experienced in my career saw one marketeer overseeing six editors’ lists, and each list was considerable (my own included 17 authors, most of whom were publishing two or even three books a year). 

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’re going to have cover reveal, yay! On Twitter and Insta! And, naturally enough, you’re liable to feel a tad disappointed. The impact of those things on sales is exactly nil. 

The people who are telling you about your cover reveal know that what they’re saying is meaningless, but they’re nice people and they can’t bear to tell you the ugly truth. So you get no meaningful marketing and a packet of sweetly told lies. 

So why don’t 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’s supermarkets that have the real market clout – the ability to place large orders for books and to sell those books fast in a short space of time. 

But do the book buyers at those major retailers have the time to read everything they’re being offered? 

Of course not. 

Result: it’s become ever more of a crap-shoot which books do or don’t 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’re going to sell at scale no matter what.) 

So if it’s a crap-shoot, publishers are – quite rationally – 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. 

But: 

Authors don’t get any meaningful care. They’re going to be lied to about their prospects. Real industry relationships will be attenuated. And the quality of what’s on sale at a bookshop or supermarket near you will be patchy. 

There probably are print-led publishers who do things differently (and, Hepzibah Plum, if you’re reading this, I’d love to know who you rate.) But I will say this: the digital-first crowd do arrange things differently. There’s proper marketing spend for every debut novel. There’s a proper focus on analytics. If one book cover doesn’t work, they’ll try another. Those tricks won’t always work, of course. It’s 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. 

Self-publishing essentially deploys the exact same tools to deliver the exact same result. 

And what do you do with this information? Well, you take your cue from Bob: 

Everything passes 
Everything changes 
Just do what you think you should do. 

You can’t 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’t been properly published if you don’t 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. 

That’s it from me. I’m 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. 

Til soon. 

Harry