Not surprisingly, 1999 — a year
which occurred in that surreal interlude before anyone
could imagine the impact of April 2000’s dot-com dump
— was a year when everything came up “e”. And, as we
glance at our prognostications of last year, we find
that Publishing Trends exhorted publishers to
embrace the opportunities that were rushing at them
on an almost daily basis. As many of these were risk-free
(flush with money, dot-coms offered to digitize files
gratis and, in some cases, return them to publishers
for their own use), we don’t regret our enthusiasm,
despite another year having passed with no discernible
e-book, or even POD, market in sight. Nor do we regret
our urging publishers to exercise more flexibility in
devising contracts with these new partners, on the theory
that no one knew (or knows) where the business is going,
nor when the profits are coming.
What we couldn’t have guessed,
however, was that our fear of losing publishing people
to new-media firms turned out to be less likely now
than it seemed at the onset of the year. Why did many
ambitious youths decide not to flee to e-publishing
concerns, and instead stay put in the apprenticeship
that traditional publishers have always exacted? April’s
tech crash obviously hastened an early death of even
the most promising Internet companies. The stories that
disillusioned participants told were received by most
publishing types with a mixture of sympathy (to work
that hard for naught!), empathy (I almost went there
myself!) and glee (I may be frustrated/ill-paid/despairing
at times, but it’s a job, a career, even!).
The second factor was Bertelsmann’s
decision to increase entry level salaries by 20%, thereby
forcing up lower and mid-level salaries and causing
(as Random is now wont to do) a ripple effect
throughout the industry. But the more surprising factor
in keeping the best and the brightest interested in
the publishing biz has been — perhaps ironically — coverage
of the biz. Just think of it: Five years ago, Amazon.com
was just entering the collective consciousness as the
first real online retailer, and a book e-tailer at that.
Two years ago the promise of e-books began to look like
a reality. Suddenly publishing was the biosphere of
the e-world — a known environment where, for a variety
of reasons (multiple discrete products, distributed
through myriad channels to targeted markets), new technology
firms could test their wares. The media was riveted
on publishing, from Business Week to the Industry
Standard and Variety. Then online magazines
like Slate found themselves surrounded by online
trade magazines and email newsletters. Suddenly there
was PW Daily, Inside.com, Variety.com,
and then PublishersLunch.com. Then the terrestrial
magazines and newspapers beefed up their coverage.
Count the column inchage in The New York Times
or Wall Street Journal, to name the two most
prominent. Throw into the mix high visibility authors
like a Stephen King, Frederick Forsyth,
or Elmore Leonard, add a few public squabbles
between agents and publishers over the rights of authors,
don’t forget Harry Potter, and you’ve got more publicity
than Croesus himself could have bought.
Is this a chimera, or an industry
that accommodates itself to changing times and new opportunities?
It’s too early to say, but what we would argue is that
it needn’t be the former and it could be the latter.
Here’s to the new, millennial, year.
