The Demise or Rebirth of the Book Business?

There's a lot of upheavel, turmoil and change in today's book publishing industry. But, I feel it's just a bump in the road to improvement; and I also feel the "printed" word will be around forever, it will just have brothers & sisters. I have discussed aspects of this changing environment in previous posts. Boris Kachka published a relevant & insightful piece in the New York Magazine last September:

'The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.

HarperCollins occupies floors 1 through 22 of a giant steel-and-glass box on 53rd Street. But up on 26, the receptionist for a tiny offshoot of the company sits alone, gatekeeper to a few drab rows of empty cubicles. A glass container on a table holds a mysterious pile of bright-yellow lightbulbs.
“Welcome to our temporary home,” says 51-year-old publisher Bob Miller, ushering me into a colleague’s more inviting office. Inside, he and his staffers prepare to impart a cheery message: They’re going to fix publishing!
But first, a horror story. Debbie Stier, Miller’s No. 2 at HarperStudio (as this little imprint is called), has been collecting videos for their blog. “You want to see what happens to books after they go to book heaven?” she asks. On the screen of her MacBook, a giant steel shredder disgorges a ragged mess of paper and cardboard onto a conveyor belt. This is the fate of up to 25 percent of the product churned out by New York’s publishing machine...' Read entire article at http://alturl.com/dm8q

Thoughts on the Publishing Industry, My Novel and Other Stuff

This post is taken from my website at http://johnraustin.yolasite.com/ :

6/9/09: Although I've had the query letter and book proposal for my nonfiction novel written forever, I have not sent any out due to the upheaval in the publishing industry and the economic downturn.
I have been researching self-publishing as perhaps a maturing industry, coming into it's own as a result of new technology, to get my novel published and keep more of the money in my own pocket. I have been reporting on this a little in previous posts. This throws us headlong into the necessity of then having to market our own books...but, hell, we had to do that as first-time authors with the traditional publishers anyway!

I will send out queries, however, it's just a dream to be published by a traditional publishing house.

Good, reputable Literary agents used to be able to get you better deals, I'm not sure anymore. Some spend so much time on blogs that I don't see how they have any time to properly agent your work...and some have just gotten a little too big for their britches...So, BEWARE of agents that have found new-found fame and followers on their own blogs!!! Could be they are positioning for new jobs in the present industry upheaval.