Do we still need publishers? Some thoughts from Anthony Horowitz

[annis]

At an event hosted by children's booksellers The Book People last week, Horowitz gave a talk questioning the role of the publisher in today's literary world.

Article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/book...eed-publishers

[wendy]

Originally Posted by annis

At an event hosted by children's booksellers The Book People last week, Horowitz gave a talk questioning the role of the publisher in today's literary world.

Article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/book...eed-publishers

Horowitz raises some good points. And at the end of the day we do need some form of quality control to stay sane.
Personally, I love my agent and my editor, who are both worth their weight in
fees!

[SarahWoodbury]

You can pay a professional editor to edit your book. I did. Many of these editors used to work for the Big 6 and have been laid off.

[Ludmilla]

As a consumer who has been reading a sizeable number of eBooks for over a year now, I don't feel like the big publishers are doing all that much better with quality control. Maybe they should consider hiring some of those editors back, because I'm noticing mistakes in bestselling books by the big six that should have been easily caught by a human reader. I do hold them to a higher standard than I do self-pubbed authors. If I'm going to pay a higher price ($9.99 or more) for a new eBook published by one of the big publishers, the least they can do is fix some of the formatting and typographical errors.

[EC2]

I was amused by the response on Twitter of @missdaisyfrost who's an industry insider with a wicked sense of humour and sharp perception: She said re the Horowitz article:
"Only a bestselling multi-millionaire author would dare write this piece."

[MLE]

Interesting. As I've said elsewhere, what is needed in the new world is reliable curation, some way to sort through the quantity. It used to be the profit motive that did the job, as publishing was an expensive proposition no matter who did it. Now it isn't, and marketing the old way doesn't work.

Word of mouth (or keyboard) is where the sorting will happen, and it won't be by a few big reviewers, editors, or others. It will more and more be a function of 'the cloud', as the dh calls the algorithm of stats which Google, et al, use to figure out what a given individual likes. Amazon started it, with their 'recommended for you' feature, but it's getting sharper and sharper as the programmers refine things.

Also, books will have a much longer shelf life, virtually imperishable, I think. Notice how some old editions that were really good are being rediscovered here on this forum? Given time and opportunity, the best stuff will be found by more and more people, shaping the algorithm in their direction. Which doesn't work for the publishers, because they need to pay their people NOW.

It's a different world. The only answer is to write a story that is so right for your reader that they will have to talk about it to other readers like themselves. Which takes work and a good, harsh, savvy editor, whatever route you take.