The Future of Publishing Is Boutique, Baby
View this email in your browser
Our inaugural list of books is coming together.
“You’re so free to go ahead and publish however you want!” That’s the comment we’ve received the most about the books and the authors we’re signing to our first list of titles coming next spring, summer, and fall. That comment has been unsolicited, and perhaps demonstrates the contrasting images about what people have come to expect from the publishers they know with what they are seeing from an independent publisher like Like Drive Books.
If you haven’t yet, go take a look at the authors that have joined in recent weeks and hopefully you, too, will see what looks like exciting authors with fresh new approaches to the content they are offering. Click through to their websites and learn more about them, sign up for their email newsletters, or follow them on their socials. Each one is sure to bring more light, insights, and hope into your life. And stay tuned for more on these authors in the future.
Our publisher (uh, that’ s me, David) has had valuable years of experience in publishing businesses that have given him certain birds-eye views on what is happening out there. The below article talks about some of the sea-change forces going on in publishing, and how that impacts the new opportunities in publishing for today’s world and book marketplace. Book publishing is always connected to our culture and the way our world is constructed. So it can be helpful to understand some of these changes and forces that affect your reading, or your writing.
Thanks for your interest in Lake Drive Books, where we strive to create books that help you heal, grow, and discover.
The Future of Book Publishing Is Boutique, Baby
If you listen and watch carefully to what’s going on out there, you can figure a lot out, no matter where you are.
So here are some interesting things I’ve heard and seen from where I am in my experience as a publishing executive and now publishing entrepreneur, things that are pushing us all in new, dramatic directions.
I’ve heard it said that that the only way for a publisher to create a successful business is to acquire books at a very high advance level. I’ve heard that literary agents sometimes use a similar number as a benchmark for taking on authors. I’ve also heard that a publisher only wants to publish bestsellers and leave the rest to other publishers. And, then, it’s also been heard that books that breakout can be correlated to books that are acquired at, you guessed it, a significantly high advance level.
Hearing or observing these definitions of success has sometimes, if not always, been mind-blowing to me. While I can understand that some publishing businesses want to work at a certain scale, what I don’t understand is how those businesses continue to cultivate that goal of mass-market scale with little open concession or nod to business on a smaller scale, as a cultivation strategy. The “only bestsellers” approach seems shortsighted, like a professional baseball team that might try to do without any farm league investment.
What makes this stated approach even more puzzling is the fact that everything is so different in the digitally segmented marketplace we live in today.
Ours is a world where we live online, and one of the key dynamics of our online lives is that we can be more selective and specialized in what we consume. My go-to example of this is music. It used to be that we only knew the music of radio, which in my case on an everyday basis at least, was a lot of rock. Then the disruption of the internet and the infamous Napster came along in the late 1990s, and we had the chance to discover music of all kinds that weren’t determined by mass-market forces like commercial radio. That moment in time for me was the beginning of a love for American roots music. That was a good thing, a big improvement that made my life feel more unique, the world a place with more options.
So if you’re in a media business like major book publishing, how can you say you want to publish only bestsellers?
Click here for the rest of the article.
Copyright (C) *|CURRENT_YEAR|* *|LIST:COMPANY|*. All rights reserved.
*|IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE|**|LIST:DESCRIPTION|**|END:IF|*
Our mailing address is:
*|IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE|**|HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|**|END:IF|*
Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe
*|IF:REWARDS|* *|HTML:REWARDS|* *|END:IF|*