Book Authors Lamenting Publishing

Those who writer books often complain about the publishing industry, and some you have to take with a grain of salt. But I've been talking with colleagues, editors, and lawyers at the annual conference of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and much of what you could hear has been frustration. Writers are frustrated with publishing companies that, as a whole, can't seem to move beyond how they've always sold books and even thought about books. The authors often get tired of pitching ideas that go nowhere, or knowing that they will have to do all of the marketing because the publishers won't past the first three months, and often the efforts right after a book comes out are still hard to see. The premium is for the writer with a "platform" - the ability to provide a pre-existing audience and virtually guaranteed sales. And then, to top it all, the publishers are often highly inefficient and clumsy in how they operate, so even the corporate drive for more profits are frustrated. top management would do far better with fixing their in-house systems so that they didn't waste so much time and money. Then they could afford some chances and the possibility that they might actually find the next big thing by doing something that no one else is rather than by doing only what others have before. Until then, I don't hold out much hope for reading that startles you with its originality.