How to predict the future of publishing

[mreefish]

The number of articles and blog entries predicting the future of the publishing industry (i.e. the revolution or apocalypse of e-books) must number in the hundreds by now. Some are positive. Others are negative. (Still others are panicky, or calm, or bemused, or snarky, or ominous, or all of the above.)

But one thing I haven't really seen covered in these articles is the following: Why haven't we simply taken a look at the rest of the entertainment industry? The movie, music, and game industries have already undergone the e-revolution, at least more so than the book industry has. Each emerged changed, but intact. The publishing industry will soon catch up to where the aforementioned industries already are, and it will probably follow a similar path, and it too will arrive intact. Well, mostly. Read on!

In taking a look at publishing's cousins of music, movies, and games, publishers don't have all that much to fear. Just like consumers gravitate toward movies put out by Paramount or music put out by Jive Records or games put out by EA, they will still largely gravitate toward books put out by large publishers. Now, lots of "indie" e-book writers can and will find success just like their fellow entertainers who have already gone through the e-revolution. Webisode creators make great money just from iTunes and YouTube, for example. That doesn't mean production houses are going out of business anytime soon, if ever.

The key to success here, however, is still (and will always be) marketing and platform. If you're independent, you have to get into a new format (like e-books) early and fast. In other words, right now. I work in the video game industry and saw this happen with Facebook apps and iPhone apps. Both are a breakthrough format for games, a creative media that until recently was largely tied to systems (PSP, Nintendo DS, Xbox, PS3, etc). The first wave of independently-coded apps on both platforms did phenomenally well, since consumers only had to scroll through a few dozen pages to see the offerings. Those indie coders became rich literally overnight. Inevitably, the market soon got crowded with hundreds of thousands of indie apps, prices plummeted, and users went back to trusting mostly apps produced by companies (Zynga, Playfish, etc) to find what they wanted to play. There's no real way around this. The occasional high-quality indie app still rises to the top and does so with decent regularity (although nothing like the early app days). The same thing will happen with e-books. And things will be just fine: independent e-book authors will successfully co-exist alongside publishers. Midlist authors in particular may discover a whole new path to their audience. And the reader comes out on top, as well they should.

I'm not afraid for publishers--but the ones I am afraid for are bookstores. It really hurts my heart because I love the sensory experience of browsing in a bookstore. Using the same analogy here, look at the fall of DVD rental/sale stores (Hollywood, Blockbuster), music record stores, and video game stores (GameStop). And the rise of Netflix, iTunes, and online game rental stores like Gamefly. The best thing for bookstores to do is to establish an early online presence and start seizing that market share--before Amazon takes over completely. Because it's not the publishers/providers who will have trouble after the e-revolution dust settles, it's the distributors.

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Marie Lu's debut dystopian YA novel, LEGEND, is coming out in December 2011 from Putnam Children's (Penguin Group). In the meantime, she also created a Facebook game set in the world of LEGEND that currently has 15,000 installs/users.