Supply Chain Management for Publishers and Agents
The other day, someone in my online writers group wondered if a particular publisher was still in business. They had submitted a manuscript to them four months ago and had heard nothing. So they’d checked the website and found it hadn’t been updated since some time in 2008. Of course, old hands at the submissions game will be shaking their heads and smiling wryly. Four months is no time at all to wait! they’re thinking. Small press publishers are far too busy to worry about updating their websites. This guy is obviously a newbie and will have to learn to control his patience and live with his frustration. Worse still, these old hands will tell you that you mustn’t express your frustration, you mustn’t let your impatience show. It doesn’t matter how the publishing houses treat you, if you kick up a fuss about it, they will put a black mark against you. Commissioning editors, they say, have long memories – as do agents.
Frankly, I don’t understand this attitude. I’ve been in business for three decades. I have managed business units for some of the world’s largest corporations, and I have run my own small consultancy. I know how businesses run. I know how buying works. I know how to manage a supply chain. It’s painfully obvious to me that the world’s publishing houses are making some basic and very stupid mistakes.
At the front end of the publishing business, the companies seem to be doing better than at the back end. Their attitude to book shops – their primary market – seems to be businesslike enough. It’s a mess, of course, horribly inefficient and the book retailers seem to have beaten the publishers up pretty well over the years, but the publishers are doing as well as they can in a market that has become overly complex and difficult for them. Marketing beyond the book retailers seems to be a rout for the publishers but they are trying hard to redefine the business so that this is considered outside their responsibility.
On the supply side, the picture is patchy. On the one hand you have editing, design, printing and related services, which are going OK. On the other, you have content acquisition and management which appears to be a disaster. Most sizeable publishers only receive submissions from agents these days, having thrown their hands up and given up trying to do it themselves. Despite having been at it for a century or two, the publishers never learned how to do this efficiently. I don’t suppose they think that agents can do it any better, but at least now they have passed a large part of the cost on to someone else.
Since agents and publishers do not know which books will succeed and which will not, they have no way of telling writers what they want (apart from saying “This, this, and this genre – oh, and anything that’s really good.”) This means writers must produce work on spec and hope it fits the requirements/hunches/moods of the moment when they submit it. Agents are not in a much better position, they have to read through heaps of queries and mountains of slush, then take a gamble on their gut feeling, imprecise knowledge of publishers’ tastes and needs, and their (often quite limited) experience. This amounts to a major inefficiency in the system. If you include authors as part of the publishing industry, this process alone pushes the overall productivity of the industry very close to zero.
The gross inefficiencies of the acquisition process, and the lack of effective process management tools, are directly responsible for much of the rough treatment of authors that ensues. If you call your local utility company, a voice recognition or menu system will channel you into appropriate queues. There you may be given an estimate of how long you will have to wait to have your call dealt with. You may be told how many are ahead of you in the queue and this will count down for you as you wait. At the very least, the musak will be interrupted every couple of minutes so they can apologise for the delay and assure you that they are still working on getting to you.
With an agent or publisher, it is very different. You may (or most likely won’t) get an acknowledgement that your submission has arrived. After that you will hear nothing. Sometimes you will hear nothing for three, four, six, or even twelve months, before you get a one or two line pro forma rejection. Very often these days, you will wait forever. Many agents and publishers say their policy is that if you don’t hear from them, you can take that as a ‘no’!
It’s not because they’re rushed off their feet (although that is often true.) It’s not because they’re rude and selfish people (some are, some aren’t.) It’s because their business processes are ridiculous, designed for another age, and propped up by free labour and outrageous demands on salaried staff. It’s because their acquisitions business model depends on luck, rather than on knowing what they want to acquire, leading to huge amounts of additional, wasted work. It’s because their suppliers – the authors – are so desperate for success, so cowed by the system, so petrified by the old hands and the long memories of faceless decision makers, that they will put up with this shoddy treatment.
Do you think the suppliers of paper and transport and warehousing do their work on spec, hoping that the publisher will approve and pay them? Do you suppose the printers submit a quote for services and wait six months without hearing a word from the publisher, afraid that if they complain they might uspset them? Of course not. So why do writers?
Honestly, we get the publishers and agents we deserve.
Right now, the publishers stand with respect to writers as the big supermarket chains stand with respect to farmers. But, in a time when publishers and agents are teetering on the edge of complete disintermediation, this is not the time to be upsetting potential suppliers. This is the time to be raising your game. Writers have long memories too!
As a writer I feel a bit confused by how much of a glacial pace the publishing industry works at. It gives me time to improve my craft but I can’t help but wonder what the future is going to be like for somebody like me who relies on publishers to take interest in my work, then publish it if it meets some “lucky need” that society demands.
I write for an audience that’s old enough to shave, but wasn’t old enough to shave when Harry Potter came out. I suspect since Harry Potter those formerly fresh-faced readers are wondering where the Young-But-Not-Really-I-Mean-20-something-is-pretty-old-yeah Adult market is.
Another question I want to raise is, how much power does a writer have to be treated with respect in the industry? I’m only 20 now but by the time I’m 30 I’d probably come up with something worth publishing. I also do photography which also raises questions about whether I can use a reputation built on one medium in book format to raise awareness of another medium in book format I’ve created. Quite a question actually, one I don’t see asked often.
Usually people ask questions like “how do I get published?” – not “How do I exploit my growing body of work in the art world to get a publishing deal for an art book, then use my link to the industry through that project to make something else like a novel?”
Yes indeed. Machiavelli ruined me. Build those settlements. You don’t have to be a complete tool, you just have to have a spine and an eye for where to build those settlements. And by settlements, I mean anything from blog fanbases to people you know in the industry that are working as your eyes in the land of the blind.
Hi, Jacob. There’s nothing wrong with being Machiavellian in business. You should go far!
On the crossover thing (photos to fiction) I’m not sure you’ll get much mileage out of it unless you find some real synergies between the two and exploit those. Even crossover influence between different kinds of writing is hard to achieve. Publishers of fiction don’t care much if you are doing well in some non-fiction field (unless it relates directly to the story you’re submitting – you know, like the detective used his extensive knowledge of photography to solve the crime.)
I had some success as a non-fiction writer a long time ago. I published three children’s science books, over a hundred technical articles for magazines, contributed to well-known encyclopedias, produced several sets of educational wallcharts, etc., etc. (all for big-name publishers like Macmillan and Hachette.) However, none of that counted at all when it came to submitting fiction. The novels were judged on their own merit, not on mine – which is not a bad thing.
Good analysis Graham!
Let’s face it, publishers can’t stay in business without writers. They might manage without paper and ink (by going digital), but without content there is nothing to publish.
I think you are right about writers’ collective role in this dynamic – except I would express it as “we get the publishers we expect”.
Thanks, Janette. I suppose I shouldn’t rant like this, but it gets up my nose that writers are so craven about being treated like dirt in this business. Yes, of course, writers should behave professionally at all times. That goes without saying. But I have worked with professionals all my life and I have never seen anything like what publishers and agents are getting away with. Professionalism is a two-way street.
What a great analysis! But now I’m wondering if you have practical ideas for how this whole process can be changed. My first thought was “some kind of writers union,” yet there really are countless writers out there who produce dreck, who wouldn’t really qualify to be part of that sort of united group until they had showed they were worth publishing in the first place — which comes back to the original problem.
Using the supermarket analogy you used – is the answer some sort of “local writing/publishing” movement, like the “local food” movement? What an interesting problem.
Must mull this for a while. But it would be interesting to hear what sort of ideas you have.
Actually, Phyl, I’ve seen some local writers’ groups take matters into their own hands and publish their own members’ work (often in the form of anthologies of short stories.) This can be at least successful enough to pay for the costs of production and marketing, and active groups are bringing out a book every year or two.
I suspect that, in the end, it will be ebooks which finally change the game. Companies like Smashwords, which have the software to help you assemble and present a book, manage all the commercial stuff and take a 15% cut on sales, look to me like the biggest challenge to current publishing.
This set-up does not solve the quality control problem but I see that coming from independent book review sites which will do, post hoc, what the agents and editors are now doing before the fact. These reviewers will build up strong reputations in each genre and will become the go-to guys for finding a good read.
Since publishing will be, effectively, free, there will no point in writers handing their work to third parties to publish. Every writer will just publish everything they write and let the market sort out what it wants to read and what it doesn’t. Power will then be in the hands of the reviewers and the smart review sites will probably crowd-source their end of the business. They will also, out of convenience, become the new book retailers.
Oh my. But where does that leave editors? And the books that, while good, desperately do need a good editor’s eye to get rid of the dross?
Well, I can see two things happening. The first is that editing will become a completely freelance service (it has almost gone that way already, with some editors even being paid on a royalty basis, just like the author!) The books that are highly recommended are likely to be the better-edited ones, so authors will still need editors if they want to succeed.
The other is that authors won’t bother with editing and books will stand or fall on how well they were self-edited.
Probably both will happen, with a few, savvy, professional writers involving editors, and the great bulk of writers not bothering and taking their chances. (From what I can tell, most self-published writers don’t see the difference between a well-crafted book and the opposite – otherwise they would have been too embarrassed to publish their work in the first place.)
So essentially, the volume of garbage is going to increase exponentially. And that’s the “perfect future”? I don’t think so.
Lol. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a perfect future! Under capitalism, the best we can hope for is a cheaper and more efficient one. Under democracy, we get the future we vote for. Under totalitarianism, we get what we’re given. Personally, none of it gives me much hope.
As for the volume of garbage, I think you’re right. The thing is, you won’t be aware of most of it because the people producing it won’t have a marketing budget. There are already as many self-published books as commercially published books but the great majority are invisible. I’m confident that intermediaries will arise to filter it in all kinds of ways – including by quality.
Hee! I hope you’re right. Though with the vanishing of the intermediaries, I think it’s more likely that the top quality work will sink closer toward those writing garbage, for the same sorts of budgetary reasons. So I still think the garbage will be much more visible than it is now, and it will be just as hard as ever for quality work to be seen.
I stand between totalitarianism and capitalism myself — I tell people I’m a “capitalism-with-the-hell-regulated-out-of-it-ist.” Which means I think, even in publishing, a little bit of guidance here and there, in cooperation with a market system, will still work vastly better than a rampant market with no restraints.