Microbusiness, cleaning out the debris

Posted on | July 31, 2007 | 2 Comments

It’s a brave new world in the U.S. economy, one full of empowered and impatient consumers and one in which businesses in a number of industries still don’t seem to have caught on and caught up.

I got to thinking about that when I read this saga of a frustrated book-buyer whose experience is a good illustration of why the book publishing industry seems to be behind the curve these days, in spite of the incredible success of the Harry Potter series and its now-billionaire author and in spite of the ever-increasing number of books published each year.

Part of the problem with the industry, of course, is simple inertia. A lot of what technology lets authors do is simply not how things have been done (imagine the quaveringly emphatic voice of Aunt Esmeralda). So, the distribution systems that have been in place forever are inadequate in a world of competitive instant consumer gratification and few mainstream publishers to smell the coffee or jump on the bandwagon or other assorted, appropriate cliches.

Publishing industry muckety-mucks are also not terribly happy about the threat to their traditional role as cultural gatekeepers posed by the flood of self-published books that have hit the market over the last five years or so. So they dig in and fight to preserve the status quo, even though a lot of their customers are running in the opposite direction.

This is an industry that is ripe for the onslaught of microbusiness publishers that have flooded the industry in recent years, because there’s a lot about this industry that needs to be reshaped in the way an industry can be reshaped when folks enter it and then ignore its rules.

Lots of microbusiness publishers have trouble getting their books into bookstores, so they ignore the booksellers who tell them they shouldn’t sell direct to consumers. After all, if you’re not going to carry my books, why shouldn’t I sell them myself?

A lot of the micro-publishers use POD technology to print short runs and handle as-you-need-it order fulfillment, in spite of an industry prejudice against POD technology. When you run a publishing company out of your house, you often don’t have anywhere to store 10,000 copies of every title on their list.

Besides, traditional publishing is expensive enough that it would keep some of those micros out of the business entirely if they weren’t willing to ignore that rule, too.

As a general matter, the book publishing industry distribution channels are largely closed to micro-publishers. They either have to make their own rules or forgo getting into the business in the first place. It’s a pretty cliquish industry, too; if there weren’t people willing to operate outside standard industry practices, the business would stay as incestuous as it is.

And — and this is the bottom line — a lot of great books would never be brought to the public.

There are still authors who prefer not to go the self-publishing route but who, for one reason or another, can’t secure an agent. And the reason is not necessarily because they write crappy books; some of them are truly talented writers. Microbusiness publishers are there for those authors.

Probably one of the best things that microbusinesses do, in every industry in which they operate, is to open doors and create opportunities and rattle the cage in which they keep those industry “rules.”

Think of it as the economic equivalent of forest fires. They clean up what’s dead and clogging the ecosphere in order to make way for what’s new and viable.

[tags]publishing, Harry Potter, microbusiness, distribution channels[/tags]

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