Fun, Fictionalized account of the Decline of Big Publishing

[Telcontar]

Find it here.

Don't have much to say about the content itself, save that it jives with much of what I think about the Big Six: ie, they got fat, lazy, and slow over their decades of control. I cannot say I expect them to survive in recognizable form.

 

[Steerpike]

I think they'll survive, if smart. They'll have to continue to adapt to the market. The branding and gate-keeper aspect is still important in the view of many readers. There are many who, even at a low price, won't buy self-published ebooks. To the extent the big publishers can perform this function and add other value (like heavy marketing, for example) I don't see them disappearing. But they're definitely going to have to adapt.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Hah, that was hilarious. And a good précis of how the publishing industry has worked over the past few decades. To me, the way publishers do things has always seemed kind of insane, but it's obvious now that that insanity was born of the circumstances the publishers found themselves in: having a stranglehold on distribution.

 

[Telcontar]

Yeah. Unfortunately, "It made sense at the time," has turned into a great Famous Last Words epitaph.

 

[Rhi Paille]

I'm with a Small Press and I have to say . . . while there are some definite benefits, the drawback is again distribution. My thought though is that um, the Big 6 is no longer even the biggest publishing houses out there. Case in Point the "BIG 6" is comprised of MacMillan, Random House, Harper Collins, Penguin, Simon and Schuster, and Hachette Group. Yet, Scholastic, DisneyHyperion, Harlequin, EgmontUSA, Houghton Mifflin Court, and Flux (Llewellyn's) all have unsolicited mss policies.

Really, these days it should be more like the Big 12 . . . with plenty of other small presses gaining ground. Angry Robot, Entangled Pub, Rhemalda, Coscom Entertainment, and Spencer Hill are on the up and up, just to name a few, and heck some of those small presses are closed for submissions because if they were open they'd get flogged!