Before I decided to start pursuing self-publishing as an option, I had researched the publishing industry. I followed various blogs, read the submission guidelines of literally hundreds of agents, read the web sites of most of the big name publishers, and then started writing query letters. I hated writing query letters. What was worse, was that every agent’s requirements were different. So I literally spent about 2 – 3 hours per query letter, to peruse the agent’s requirements, and customise the query letter. I knew it had to somehow stand out against the other hundred the agent was going to read that day. Then one day, I read about an author whose book was a best-seller at the time, who claimed to have written more than 100 query letters – that were all rejected. It was then that I decided to stop. Being an Organisation Development practitioner, effectiveness, efficiency and productivity are things that are important to me. And writing query letters seemed to be none of those. In fact, the whole publishing industry seems to be built on concepts and assumptions around processes, cost, manufacturing and customer behaviour of a hundred years ago.
Here is a summary of what I learnt about the traditional publishing industry, in this time:
1. The rate of growth in writers who are trying to get books published is phenomenal.
2. The reported sales figures from most traditional publishers seem to show slight growth, but prices seem to have gone up –so it seems that the reality is that in real number of copies sold, traditionally published books are actually down in sales. To survive, publishers are “streamlining” or, in simple English, shrinking their operations, and consequently, the number of books they will take on.
3. So agents, who have become the first line of defence for the publishers against the avalanche of newly written works, have to become increasingly selective, because it’s becoming more and more difficult to get a publisher to accept their proposed projects. At the same time, the number of query letters they are receiving seems to have grown hugely over the past five years. Most agents whose blogs and web sites I’d looked at, report receiving a hundred or more query letters every day (including Saturday and Sunday, when they don’t work, public holidays, when they are on leave, etc). It is becoming humanly impossible for them to truly make the best choice regarding which ones to pick to request a chapter or two for a read through.
4. So inevitably, writers are finding it increasingly difficult to get an agent to even look at their books. Your query letter writing skill used to be the main determinant in your chances to catch the agent’s eye, but when the agent is reading a hundred query letters, all written by writers who have read the same web sites and blogs as you have, about writing query letters, your chances seem to become more and more reduced to a gamble. If your query letter is the last one to “quickly read and tick off before I go on lunch,” your best seller might have just gone to the Recycle Bin.
5. This is fuelling the phenomenal growth self-publishers are seeing.
Having observed all this, I became an ardent supporter of self-publishing,. But at the moment, I’m afraid that the self-publishing industry is not doing a great job at making things better either. Here is what is happening in self-publishing;
With all of the above happening, good editors are losing their jobs. So are good cover- and book designers, and professional marketers who are specialists in book promotion. So all of these people are resorting to the world-wide web, offering their services at a fee … a fee many authors cannot afford up front. And because the market is tough, the luxury of being picky about the work you take on is falling away as the traditional publishers are shedding more and more of your peers into your market space. Very often, the best new writers simply don’t have the money to purchase these services, or they don’t have the appetite for the risk. So their books either just stay on their hard drives, or get published quietly in a corner – not very well edited, designed, or marketed – and that is where it will stay. In a little corner. Maybe selling a few copies. Maybe not. Maybe it will suddenly be discovered by some 200 years from now, and you’ll be dead and rich.
One thing the “old” publishing industry got right, was to select the best, make it better, and bring it to market. Now they’ve been overwhelmed by change. The “new” publishing industry hasn’t got that right yet, in fact, it’s getting it wrong right now. Unless this gets fixed, we are going to see the world flooded with second rate reading material, and as much as the theory that the good stuff will bubble to the top is great, the truth is: The bigger the haystacks, the more difficult it becomes to find the needles.
The one thing that I’ve found which is positive in all my wanderings across the publishing industry’s presence on the World Wide Web is that apparently people are actually reading more than ever before.
So it seems to me as if the new publishing industry is in desperate need of at least the following three things:
1. A new way for the various people out there who are really good at making books better (editors, book designers, cover designers) to find the best writing, and then, when they find it …
2. A new model to connect good writers with people who are really good at making books better, as well as with professional marketers who will be able to take these excellent final products to market
3. A new way for readers to be able to quickly find exactly what they want to read, and to have some form of certainty that when they find it, and pay for it, it will be of good quality.
