By Emma Darwin

The point surely is not that authors will ever be able to do away with publishers or even want to - I couldn't possibly do without mine, or my agent - but that there are things we can do which they can't or, realistically, don't have the time or the money to do. Nor is it quite true that authors are dispensable: publishers will put up with a lot from an author who sells or supplies prestige, but for every ego-monster novelist there's one who hears so many folk-tales of dispensability that she doesn't dare ask even the most reasonable things of her publisher. The 'long tail' argument also applies: there are excellent books which will always be economically marginal, for which small presses, PoD and self-marketing are the way to find that small but perfectly formed market who will buy them. For these, as for others, Alison Baverstock's book is a mine of wisdom.

18 Jan 08 12:36

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By Edward Alport (Ed Gorty)

The problem that underlies the points in both Carlie and Alison’s blogs is that, while the publishing industry’s technology has developed rapidly and their business models have developed on the back of it, its attitudes and priorities have not kept pace. It is perfectly acceptable for publishers to use the latest gizmos and manage the risks involved in publishing. It is unacceptable for writers to try to do the same by e-publishing, self publishing or otherwise trying to share the risk. Anyone who tries to do so is tarred permanently with the brush of ‘vanity publisher’. Publishing is the same in nearly every way to venture capital. You have the same process of idea generators approaching resource providers for support. You have the agents/entrepreneurs making the deals and the idea generators feeling that they are being ripped off. The main difference is that venture capitalists insist that the inventors keep a part of the risk whereas publishers utterly refuse to let the writer retain any risk at all. They even buy the risk off the writer by paying advances. The other difference is that venture capitalism is very efficient at supporting innovation and publishing is not. Publishers have distorted the spread of risk further by shifting a lot of it on to agents without paying them any more. This means that agents, unlike the business incubators, have to be much more selective and they can’t afford to do the mentoring that was their traditional role. The new generation of publishers do offer some form of risk sharing for new, i.e. high risk, writers. Parallel publishing, non-reliance on agents, minimal advances, marketing support (with most of the legwork done by the author): these are all ways of sharing the risk by allowing the writer, the one person who is anxious to do so, to be involved. I agree with Carlie that publishers can’t be dismissed as Alison suggests. Publishers are important, but not necessarily the established ones. They are irrelevant to a new writer where the chances of being taken on are zilch. I want to be published in print because that is the only way that I can develop my commercial writing career with (I hope) an established publisher. I wouldn’t like the hassle of self-publication even without the stigma this carries in the publishing sector. The new lot of publishers offer all those venture capital virtues of a proof of concept, an exit strategy and portfolio returns. It seems to me that are the only realistic way forward.

20 Jan 08 18:58

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