After Toronto’s Luminato arts festival publishing panel the CBC interviewed MacLachlan, who is the publisher for such authors as Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. Here’s an excerpt:
With Amazon and Apple making it easy and enticing to self-publish, how does a publisher keep authors — especially established ones — from defecting to this model?
You sort of answered the question right off the top and that was by saying “established authors.” Established authors can pretty much do whatever they want, but established authors are probably 10 people that we can name. Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, Stephen King, maybe it’s only three people we can name. And then it’s maybe Stephenie Meyer and what’s her name who wrote Harry Potter … we’ve almost forgotten about Harry Potter now.
But for everybody else, my question is, “OK, you write a book, the thing you traffic in is ideas, do you also then want to become your own manufacturer, your own sales and marketing department, your own shiller of your idea?”
I think publishers have a place as cultural aggregators. We put a stamp of approval on something by accepting it and by saying, “Yes we want to get behind this and put our resources behind it.” That’s something that a lot of people don’t necessarily think about. Publishers add value. …
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/06/21/ebooks-self-publishing-luminato.html#ixzz0raasY6zs
MacLachlan’s position is fine and dandy.
But it assumes the publisher will actually *do* all that to support the author and that they will do so for the life of the contract.
A big *if* at some Big Publishers, no?
I’m not sure that I follow MacLachlan about the value that publishers add.
Once upon a time, the editors at a publisher actually edited. Today, editing is pushed onto the literary agents and sometimes even onto the authors, who are expected to hire independent editors. The publisher expects to receive only ‘ready to print’ files.
Similarly, at one time the editors would work personally with their authors to help them grow. That task has been pushed onto the literary agents.
Once upon a time, publishers were active in promotion of books. Now, they expect the author to ‘establish a platform‘ to market themselves, and reclusive writers like JD Salinger don’t stand a chance of being published today. Unless you’re already a big name, publicity is your own problem.
From the author’s point of view, what trade publishers do provide today is an advance on royalties, which is typically the only income that the author will ever see from a book. The alternative is to self-publish in print, which requires the author to put up money instead of receive money, or to self-publish in e-book, which typically doesn’t cost anything but still falls about 100% short of getting a royalty advance.
The trade publishers also provide a couple of ego boosts for the author. First, getting accepted for publication by a trade publisher is a big deal. Second, since the trade publishers want to recover their costs, the books can show up at Barnes & Noble or Borders or Indigo or wherever, where everyone can see them.
From the reader’s point of view, publishers are just some nebulous organization that puts together and prints books. Most readers don’t know one publisher from another, with a few exceptions like Harlequin.
So, in general the trade publisher’s value-add for the author is, “I got an advance.” The value-add for the reader is, “I got a book instead of a manuscript file.”
But the gap between a manuscript file and an e-book is pretty small. For the reader, the publisher’s value-add on an e-book is pretty low. Mark Coker at Smashwords probably would have a lot to say about that.
But there’s still the question of the work that literary agents currently do…