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.
