2017
May April February2016
June May2015
October September June April March2014
August JulySEE ALL ARCHIVES
December 08, 2008
If readers begin again to browse
The economic crisis has sped up the need to recognize some likely changes in book-consumer behavior, but there’s real (and transparent) resistance to doing so. Super-agents are going bravely along whistling this tune: “It is seriously going to be a time for known commodities.” And other voices are sure that the commercial houses will continue “buying authors, but not books.”
It’s not hard to imagine that Acquiring Editors in the conglomerates will persist in the systemic processes of Brand-Name/Celebrity publishing. And I expect their Publishers will, for a while yet, give them money to do so. I’m also sure that Barnes & Noble will assume that such a focus will continue to work for their myriad stores. There’s a kind of black hope that in hard times people will come again to what they know—as though David Baldacci were a Chevy Truck. (Okay, suddenly that’s not a good metaphor.)
Anyway, hiding beneath the bad economic times may be readers who just aren’t behaving as buyers in the way the dominant industry wants—and this may not be completely a result of diminished disposable income. It seems possible that each season commercial publishers will face increasing difficulty in guiding sufficient numbers of readers to the handful of targeted books they most expect to sell, most need to sell.
Boiling reader taste down to the offerings of celebrity culture and marshaling customers into the chains to make target purchases has had, I think, an unsurprising correlative effect: Too many readers years ago lost the sweet habit of browsing through the bookstore stacks.
But they can and do comfortably browse online, which is why their buying behaviors may be changing. And if so, they will change in ways that will not support the conglomerated, blockbuster publishing industry that is so dependent on a reliably habitual reading public.
If the (ever fewer) book dollars are dissipated deep into a mine of links and personal recommendations and are no longer fully spent on the books for which publishers have paid the most and behind which they have put the majority of their marketing resources, then the baseline changes. In other words, there may have been a method to killing the practice of browsing in bookstores, and this might be the long-term price to the dominant industry for having done so.
As an independent publisher whose books are a ways down in that mine of links, I find myself (transparently) hopeful. And I think that authors should be, too.
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
Previous Entry: Getting nearer the real questions | Next Entry: The Format Formerly Known as Print
Comments
There are currently no comments for this entry yet.