1: Traditional publishing—The Castle mentality

Once upon a time, in the 1400s—

—Okay, our story doesn’t really begin that far back. But the simile applies, so let’s pull up our leggings and get set for a quick history lesson. Back in the 1400s, feudalism ruled in most of Europe. Men with money bought or grabbed land, and bought or grabbed men to help them hold on to it. They constructed community homes called castles, where they and their most trusted men, their women and their servants would live.

Outside the castle were the peasants, the people who worked the land owned by the landowner, providing the food for the landowner, cloths and leathers for clothing, and assorted knick-knacks for daily living. In exchange for this work, the peasants received a modest share of the food and goods, and protection from outsiders… in theory. In practice, however, the share of goods were often meager, depending on what was left after the landowner and his trusted inner circle had their share… and the amount of protection given to those outside the castles was often minor to non-existent. (In fact, after a time, most landowners tended to respect other landowners’ property, so there was rarely anything to be seriously protected against.)

For the peasants who lived outside the castle walls, the choices were few: You either did your local landowner’s bidding; or you left his land, and in exchange for living on a new piece of land, you had to work for that local landowner; and things were rarely any better from one landowner to the other. A third possibility was to do something that would get you into the castle as one of the landowner’s trusted inner circle. But this was even more difficult to accomplish, as you had to have a skill or possession so impressive as to beat out all of the other peasants who wanted into the castle as bad as you. In general, the majority of the peasants would never see the inside of the castle throughout their lives.

The landowners were well aware that their resources, their comforts, and their space, was finite. In order to maintain their standard of living, therefore, it was in their best interests to keep most of the peasants outside of the castle and out of their valuables, maintaining a distance whilst meting out resources, and trying to maintain enough of an air of authority and promised security to convince the peasants not to leave and work someone else’s land.

One of the ways landowners did this was to convince the peasants that those in the castle were their betters, special by way of birth or right, and deserving of their respect and service. Often they adopted titles, like Lord, King, Master, etc, to more formalize the difference between themselves and their workers. Other landowners maintained control by physically dominating and intimidating the peasants, making it hard or impossible for them to do anything but what the landowners told them to do. Thus, by either psychological or physical manipulation, did the landowners stay in power. Needless to say, it was no fun to be a peasant at the time… but great fun to be a lord.

It was a precarious balance of social and economic systems, constantly under threat by either side: If the landowners were too cruel or stingy, or too weak, their peasants would not work well, or deserted them, and the valuable land went fallow; or they might storm the castle and take over, temporarily gaining the stored valuables inside, but usually ruining their local economy in the process; and if the landowners didn’t know how to manage, all the industrious work of the peasants could be wasted, their work uncompensated. But this was the way of the world, and it persisted for centuries, even after the beginnings of the Enlightened Age created a new Capitalist society that heralded the things to come.

~

The abbreviated history lesson was required in order to illustrate the parallels between the old feudal society, and the modern western publishing system as it has stood for roughly the last century. The ironic fact is, despite the greater knowledge of a newer age, and the publishing industry’s image as generally being led by the more learned of men, publishing’s feudal system was inspired by the same fears as the 1400s landowners, and has been maintained with essentially the same tools.

The printing revolution kicked off by Gutenberg’s wonderful invention actually took a few centuries to stabilize into the well-run capitalist machine that we are all familiar with today. Previously, documents were created by individuals working manually to reproduce texts, whose work rarely extended much past their local area, and quality and subject matter were all across the board. As the young printing industry developed, it had a few major roadblocks to overcome, including the image of books as “elite luxury” items, the low literacy level of the bulk of the population, the challenges of international markets, and the cost of the books themselves.

The 1700s saw many of these challenges taken on by the more forward-thinking nations in Europe, as well as the Founding Fathers of the new nation to the west, the United States of America: New laws were set down to enact a semblance of control over individual published works, as an incentive for more creators to create; known as copyright laws, they established a period of time wherein a published work would be considered by law to be exclusive to the creator, and thereby guarantee any profit from the work to him. Thanks largely to copyright law, it became possible to make a decent living off of writing and publishing your own work.

Inspired by publishing’s newfound ability to make money, individuals banded together to form the first publishing houses, organizations set up to make a major business out of publishing. Most of the first houses would be dedicated to certain types of content, or to satisfying a particular class of individual with the content they craved. The content itself could be anything, from the most cherished of fine literature and reference books, to the “penny dredfuls,” cheaply-made pocket-sized books that often contained racy and unrespectable stories… the equivalent to today’s tawdry romance novels and cheap pornography.

By the 1800s, publishing houses were establishing themselves as respectable businesses throughout Europe and the Americas. They banked upon their status as learned men, and leveraged that reputation heavily, to the extent that certain publisher’s works might be sought out by those in the know, as being more carefully edited, more appropriate to the audience, and more finely crafted products. It might have been commendable to have written a book; but to have it published by a major publisher was especially impressive, and such an accomplishment earned writers more respect with their peers. At this time, those houses could be thought of as Big Publishing (which I shall also refer to hereafter as Big Pub), an industry in its own right.

The 1800s into the 1900s saw Big Pub, like many businesses, taking liberties with the somewhat lax controls over businesses and trade in general, to establish exclusive agreements with their partners, essentially agreements to work together to maximize profit, and incidentally to quash the efforts of competitors, wherever possible. This was the beginning of the movement to marginalize all writing and publishing outside of the established Big Publishers and their partners: At the business end, contracts and trade agreements forced outsiders to either play ball with Big Pub, or go home; and at the consumer end, access to content was being increasingly restricted to the output of Big Pub.

There were, of course, small outfits that still produced printed matter… a basic printing press could be operated by a single person out of a garage or basement, and there was nothing Big Pub could do to prevent that. In order to combat the threat of the little guys, therefore, Big Pub took the elite track: Essentially they waved their credentials, highlighted their expensive printing machinery and ensconced themselves into modern and ostentatious offices, and began a subtle campaign to convince the public that their trappings were a reflection of the quality of their product; and in fact, absolutely required to make printed matter a quality product. This campaign was even applied to prospective authors, used to cajole a desired author to work with a particular publisher over another, and thereby cement their superiority over others. Anyone outside of their sphere of influence was by extension considered of lesser quality or authority, or at least influence, among authors and consumers, and incidentally marginalized at the retail level to suggest a lesser quality and popularity. This created a self-perpetuating process of outsiders simultaneously supporting and clamoring for entry into Big Pub’s inner circles, and maintaining the status quo of the industry within and without.

To be clear, this wasn’t an organized marketing campaign at work; it was psychological warfare, waged in the offices as well as on the streets; comments made here, decisions made there, which seemed to indicate that literature produced outside of the system was no good; and exacerbated by a sales system centered around the publishers that shut out non-publisher material, another implied slight as to its quality. Big Pub used its influence to suggest at any opportunity that any works, other than their own, were not worth looking at, and through their sales and marketing tactics, made sure other elements learned the same lesson. Vendors and consumers alike bought into the campaign, mainly because it profited them to do so… and after awhile, they were spreading the same message, like duly-indoctrinated members of a populist or religious movement.

So: In order to maintain their sovereignty and retain their property and profits, Big Pub had created a façade, a castle, placing them as the lords of the industry, establishing a clear boundary to keep out the undesirables (the consumers, and to a great extent, all but the authors upon whom they directly profited), and using physical (contracts) and psychological (marketing) tactics to maintain their superior status. The fix was in, and everybody was in on the gag.

~

This is the state of the modern Big Publishing industry: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, being ruled by fifteenth-century thinking. And because this thinking has allowed them to maintain their status quo and profit for so long, Big Pub has seen little or no reason to change, and has steadfastly defended its castle walls against all comers.

Until recently, there has been little to challenge Big Pub: They had been incredibly successful at establishing themselves as the ones in control of the publishing industry. Big Pub was the perceived nexus of the collaboration between authors, printers, paper manufacturers and retailers, any one of which could have equally ruined the entire industry if it had collapsed on its own… but Big Pub had assumed the position of the brain of the entire organism, the controlling entity, in full control of the entire industry’s actions. Big Pub had calmly and deliberately tweaked every aspect of the publishing process over the decades, and as a result, had reduced the procedure of publishing to rote and formula, from the felling of a tree, to the ringing of the cashier. Their methods were not to be challenged, because they were optimized to provide the maximum return on investment, with Big Pub naturally pocketing the lion’s share of the profits.

There have been very few challenges to this formula over the past century. A challenge of the early twentieth century, the paperback book, made possible by cheaper printers and improved printing efficiency, threatened to undercut the inherent value of a book as a valuable object… whereas a hardback book was large, impressive and expensive, saying something positive about its owner, almost anyone could afford a paperback book. Big Pub dealt with this challenge by producing its own paperback material, considered to be of a more base nature and lesser quality, in the paperback formats, simply in order to win the money of the less discerning buyer and crowd out the small-time early paperback producers. Later, they would re-release their hardback books in paperback form, again to win increased sales for the original work without having to put in the writing and editing for a new book. Eventually the paperback became a legitimate product in its own right, and the transition from hardback to paperback in the production lifespan of a book became a standard procedure. But the hardback book was always held up as the premium product, to which everyone should aspire, and is to this day.

Another challenge to the existing publishing industry was the sudden gain of leisure time witnessed in the mid-twentieth century, similar in effect to the gains of the nineteenth century. This resulted in a surge in the number of hobbyist writers and professional writers seeking to expand their own markets. These writers duly descended upon Big Pub, as they had been pre-programmed to do by Big Pub itself, and quickly began to overwhelm the publishers. The industry responded by augmenting and promoting the value of the Agent, a middleman designed to act as a pre-publishing filter and reduce the amount of material arriving at Big Pub’s door. Although the agent worked for the author in theory, he was really an agent of the publishers, knowing their ins and outs, and negotiating its deals more according to the publisher’s demands than the writer’s.

It was at this stage that I was introduced to Big Pub, in trying to get my first novel published. I was certainly prepared to deal with turn-downs, critiques and slush-pile realities, knowing what I did about the industry. However, I was not prepared to be told not to bother to send anything at all. It seemed that the publishers were so full of work, and so sure that they were not passing up on a potentially good thing or author, that they were not even accepting submissions. They had totally walled themselves off, and cut the chains that opened the gates. Even their agents were telling me not to bother, as they had plenty of clients already. Big Pub had become completely isolated from the very people who purchased their material, and those who might provide them more material to sell.

This establishment and successful maintenance of formulaic control has resulted in an industry that is not only complacent, but happy to relish in their complacency, even tying it into their façade of superiority by saying that because they are so good at what they do, they can afford to be complacent. Big Pub has used this strategy to downplay and ignore most efforts to modernize and improve any aspect of the publishing process, ably demonstrating their established formula as superior to any new scheme, and emphasizing their desire to maintain the façade, the castle as they had built it, and defend it against any effort to reduce its sovereignty.

But this strategy has left them vulnerable to major changes from without. Like a medieval castle that hopes to withstand a World War II howitzer or a cruise missile, it is only a matter of time before the walls will be breached.

~

When e-books appeared in the 1990s, mostly as manuals written by programmers and amateur fiction written by fans of science fiction, fantasy or pornography, Big Pub had little reason to take immediate notice. The very limited phenomenon of creating and sharing electronic files on storage disks seemed related more to computers than books, and computers were only then beginning to make a significant impact into businesses, with an eye to the home market on the horizon, thanks to the efforts of Microsoft and Apple. In addition, literature did not seem to be the dominant media being shared by computer users: A quick perusal of the many disks available in legitimate and less-than-legitimate sources indicated commercial interest for electronic files was primarily about software, games and dirty pictures.

Fan fiction, of course, had been around for years by then, especially in the form of typed and copied short stories and novellas distributed by hand amongst fans of a particular TV show or comic book series. This material was shared freely, since fans generally were more interested in someone reading their material, and telling them how good it was, than to try to make money off of it. Besides, Big Pub had already applied the rules of copyright to establish a mind-set in the consumer sphere that any attempt to capitalize on someone else’s work would result in painful lawsuits and public humiliation—a rare action, but the cost of falling victim to one was enough to keep consumers at bay. Not to mention the implication that “fanfic” was by definition badly written, by virtue of the fact that it had not gone through the Big Pub machine. Amateur writers accepted this without much fuss, and didn’t ask a dime for their work, so the publishers let them alone, a sign of their magnanimity and tolerance of the hapless Little Guy.

The ongoing proliferation of computers, with their inherent ease of producing and disseminating documents, did little to phase Big Pub. They foresaw, at most, that the same unimportant fanfic would flit about from individual computer to individual computer, still not making the amateurs any profits, and still not threatening their own profit base. To be fair, they were as much taken by surprise by the meteoric rise of e-mail, and then the internet, as most industries, no more or less. But by the 2000s, computers had developed by leaps and bounds… and it was the amateurs that were taking the raw potential in the hardware and software, and creating masterworks of programs, games, and new media types, forcing the big boys in the computer industry to struggle to keep up.

A combination of factors finally caught Big Pub’s attention. One was the occasional sighting of a document, some piece of literature that someone had gone through the trouble of transcribing into an electronic format. The other was the rise of the e-mail attachment, allowing the e-mailer to send a copy of the attachment, each as good as the original, to any number of recipients with the press of a button. And finally, it was the realization that there were people out there who were perfectly happy reading those documents on their computers, or printing them out into letter-sized pages, instead of buying carefully crafted and formatted books. And still, Big Pub thought nothing of it. One or two books, sent to a few people, were no threat!

In fact, only one group saw a threat early on: Textbook publishers. Their niche was fairly unique in publishing: They commanded a captive audience for their works, and because that audience was relatively small, and their works were generally only usable for a few years (given regular textbook rewrites), they could charge large sums for their books to finance R&D and rewrites. In upper level schools, students had been talking about digital textbooks for years… and some of them were smart enough to actually create and disseminate texts of their own, if they were so inclined, putting direct pressure on educational publishers to look into the e-book thing. But these learned people could not figure out how to make a viable financial model out of e-books that would be nearly as lucrative as their print-based system. A few test programs were attempted, but there was always the impression that it was a foregone conclusion that they would only support the predetermined findings, that ed publishing couldn’t do e-books. Maybe next year. They were among the first publishers to investigate e-books, and one of the first to pass on them… but at least they’d acknowledged that they existed.

Finally, a few intrepid readers began contacting publishers with a new idea: “Why don’t you release your books as ‘e-books’? If you did, I’d buy ‘em.” But these requests were too few and far between, and Big Pub hadn’t even looked at “e-books,” whatever they were. So the requests were easy to ignore… and in the process, Big Pub missed out on the another quality of the nascent internet: The ability to spread electronic “gossip” and comments about anti-consumer sentiments and actions amongst millions of people, literally, overnight. By taking no action, Big Pub went from nigh-omniscient authority on literature, to Luddite organization holding back progress, before they knew what had happened.

~

When e-books started to make a mark in the computer-savvy public’s consciousness in the 2000s, Big Pub was woefully ignorant of this supposedly future version of the very product through which they made their living. But they had recently watched as the music industry had been thoroughly drubbed by the ascension of digital music, and they were well aware that a lot of consumers were suddenly turning away from the bloody MP3 tableau, looking at Big Pub, and saying, “You’re next.”

Unfortunately, they were unprepared to mount a serious effort into the adoption of e-books into their finely-honed, now-decades-old system… in fact, many insiders still insisted it wasn’t worth the trouble. And in the absence of Big Pub influence, the e-book market had taken advantage of a total lack of industry or standards guidance to begin development in a number of directions, leaving the 2000s e-book landscape looking disordered and confusing at best. So the initial research by Big Pub revealed a chaos of standards, formats, selling methods, bad habits, predatory practices and lack of regulation. Trying to straighten all of that out, they realized, would require teams of programmers, media blitzes, and the assistance of major corporate players in the computer and internet landscape. And every publishing company knew they did not have those kinds of resources available, or if they did, did not want to spare them for fear of eating through their profit margins. Before Big Pub had even entered the gate, it seemed that the race was already lost to them.

So, they fell back on Standard Operating Procedure… in this case, giving the impression that Big Pub was perfect as it was, and there was nothing in the e-book world that would ever impact them. They told themselves the whole thing was a fad, and would soon go away. More importantly, they told their vendors, their stores, and their consumers the same thing. A few publishers made some efforts for consumers, to make it look like they were actively pursuing an e-book agenda… but in reality, they were token efforts, with no budget or personnel applied to them, no decisions made, and no clear directions established.

~

Only recently, with the sudden onslaught represented primarily by Amazon and the Kindle store, has Big Pub finally been forced to take notice of the e-book phenomenon. Unfortunately, many of them are either unwilling or unable to accept that the mechanics of a computer-based industry are radically different than the horse they have been riding for the past century. Many of the elements are radically different, some are new, some older elements no longer needed at all, and the delicate balance between writer, editor, supplier, producer and retailer has been forever changed in the new, computer-dominated landscape.

Some of the Big Pub familiars are working feverishly to adopt to the demands of the new world. Not all of them will succeed, however. For many of them, the challenges of retooling a business system for a new era will tax them beyond their abilities, and they will either have to concede defeat, or fight to the last until they go down in flames.

Other publishers are defiantly sticking to their guns, hoping to stave off progress, supposedly, at least until the present executives are all ready to retire with their accumulated fortunes. These companies will abruptly, but predictably, sell off their assets and shutter themselves when the higher-ups decide the business is no longer viable, and leave a wake of discarded partners and employees wailing after them.

In the end, some of both groups will undoubtedly face the same end: Collapse, a buckling of the old infrastructure under the weight of the new. Some of the original Big Pub players will survive, and will join new players in the publishing arena in picking up the pieces of the twentieth century, and trying to build a publishing scenario for the twenty-first.