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139 The Future of Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What is the future of publishing? This is the million-dollar question , isn’t it? Independent bookstore owners, CEOs of chain bookstores , and publishing houses all want to know. I hate writing about technological advances because, by the time this book is published, some devices will already be outmoded and this book will seem like something found in a time capsule: “Ah, well, so this is what the world looked like in December 2010!” I love books. I collect books. I love the artwork on the dust-​ jacket; the typography; the quality of the paper. I like a book’s flaws. I like when other people before me have signed their books or stuck fancy nameplates in them. I like finding cryptic notes in the pages of used books. I like the personal memories attached to buying certain books. I like to have them all out, in front of me, in all of my rooms, one library after the other, so that I can read their spines. I like the publisher ’s various colophons, like the Random House house or Knopf’s borzoi. I like the smell of old books. I like getting my books signed by writers, and I like when readers ask me to sign their books. What I fear is that the rise of the electronic book (or any technology that does away with the traditional book) will mean the death of the bookstore. (We’ve already witnessed bookstore giants crush independent bookstores. Has the time come for all bookstores to be snuffed out?) Once bookstores are gone, the average reader’s options will suffer. Now, I know that those who champion e-​ readers will say, “Oh, but, no. Now, anyone can have their book published! It costs nothing, and you can set up an account, and you’ll make more than you would with a traditional publisher!” But here’s what’s missing from an e-​ book world. When people write to me to tell me that they read and liked my book, do you know what most of them say? They say, “I picked up your book because the cover intrigued me.” In other words, they didn’t go into the bookstore looking for my book; they went there for some other reason, saw my book, and bought it. Browsing in the company of other browsers is fast becoming a lost pastime. Who will benefit from e-​ books? All those writers whose names you already know—John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steele. 140 Getting Published And who will lose? All those writers who aren’t John Grisham, Stephen King, or Danielle Steele, because how will anyone find those books? Oh, and you dear reader—you’ll lose, too. You’ll lose because there will be thousands of writers whose work you’ll never know about. Those writers will be the lost souls in the digital wasteland of e-​ Purgatory. If you think this won’t happen, consider the music industry. In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2009, Tom Petty discusses the difficulty of finding good music: “I don’t think it’s ever a case of there’s nothing good. It’s just getting harder and harder to find it. It used to be that to make an album, you had to do something pretty well. To get to make a 12-​ inch record—that was an honor. Now everybody does it. You go to a restaurant, and the guy playing in the corner has an album.” Once a market gets saturated, the consumer becomes wary of the product. An editorial director of a major publishing house told me that this is precisely what happens with all publishing trends, whether it’s chick lit or African American lit. Once a genre becomes popular, all the publishers jump into the mix and start publishing that genre regardless of quality, and since all the cover art within a genre looks more or less the same, consumers will pick up anything that looks like the book they loved—that is, until they realize that the quality is much worse, at which point they abandon the genre altogether. “Eventually,” the editor said, “we kill the genre by saturating the market with books that aren’t good.” My fear is that technology —the ability for anyone to publish anything they’ve written and package it as though it’s a professionally published book—will have the same effect on literature. Finally, there’s the...

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