As a preface to this post, let it be known that I really enjoy hitting my thumb with a hammer, pushing forks into electric toasters and tripping over things in my bare feet in the dark. It is that very masochistic tendency that prompted me to write this blog.
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A favorite book for me in the last decade was Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat, published in 2005. It simply made me think differently about everything.
It is a complicated book to explain in a few words, but the basic premise (for me) was that much of our modern everyday world is interconnected and interrelated, where an action in one place has a reaction in another place…basic physics and an apt description of life in the 21st century.
For example, Friedman uses an illustration (pre-Affordable Care Act) that the consumer in him loved the low prices and the stockholder in him loved the corporate profits at Wal-Mart, but the good citizen in him didn’t like that most Wal-Mart employees were not covered by health insurance. Low prices for consumers and good wages and benefits for retail employees most often do not coexist.
I will make a further application. In our everyday lives, low taxes are a good thing as long as you accept the implications of those low taxes. But you absolutely cannot demand low taxes and excellent schools, plenty of police, nice roads, working street-lights, spectacular fireworks for the 4th of July and great public libraries. The two issues are connected.
Consider the issue of public libraries. You can get a library card for free and check out books for free. But they were not free. Someone else paid for it or you simply paid for it indirectly and think of it as free. Physical books (and even digital downloads) in a free public library are paid for by tax dollars and donations from benefactors.
Nothing is free. Ever. It is simply a question of who pays for it.
Traditional publishing has “flat-world” issues every day with actions and reactions.
Do you know anyone who works at a book printing company? The printing industry is surviving through consolidation and merger. As eBook use grows, the need for paper decreases and loggers and paper mill workers are laid off because everything is connected.
Communication technology has made location far less important. Fewer and fewer employees of publishing companies (and for that matter, literary agencies) actually work in the building of the publisher or agency. Many telecommute from their homes in another city.
As buying habits shift to online, the physical location bookstores suffer, people lose their jobs and on and on it goes, because everything is connected.
Consumers love Amazon (I love Amazon) and have shifted almost half of all book purchasing to them, but not without casualties. Amazon is a great company, but their growth coincides with the demise of something else and not the expansion of a market.
Bookstores cannot survive selling books. Today, any Christian bookstore sells far more Bible covers, gifts, greeting cards, framed art and church supplies than books and Bibles combined.
Cause and effect happens all the time in every industry and is not unique to book selling. Every retail segment experiences it at some point. It is a natural reaction to the shifting of distribution channels from one to another. A hundred years ago, the Sears catalog devastated small retail shops. Starting fifty years ago, the big box retailers dealt the small independent retailer another body blow.
Even indie publishing has flat-world issues. Indie authors quickly discover that there are a lot of moving parts to publishing a book and is neither easy or devoid of risk. There are cause and effect decisions to be made at every step along the way.
For example, if you hire a really inexpensive editor or proofreader, the good steward in you liked the low price you paid and you spoke about your wise use of money to friends, but the good citizen in you should probably not feel too pleased about having someone work for close to or less than minimum wage. A traditional publisher will have their work edited and proofread multiple times and spend thousands of dollars to get it right…and they still will have errors or problems slip through.
You can always find someone to do all sorts of things for you inexpensively, but generally those costs are not sustainable or fair long term to the one doing the work. A buyers market is great for the buyer, but not so great for the seller.
The same principle applies for inexpensive cover design, photos, illustrations, eBook formatting and any of the other myriad costs that go into making a book.
Let’s be honest. Books from traditional publishers are more expensive than indie published books because publishers employ people, pay for health insurance and other benefits and provide a stable place to work so people can support lives and families long term. Publisher employees like getting cost-of-living raises each year and being able to take sick days. Someone needs to pay for those.
The aspiring author in you might love the idea that thousands of people downloaded your book for free or next-to-free. But the good citizen in you should wonder if too many inexpensive or free eBooks will have a cumulative effect of training readers that the written word should be inexpensive or free.
The legacy of indie publishing should be one of giving art a chance. But I am afraid what the publishing industry will look like in a few years when millions (and billions) of readers have been conditioned to believe author hard work is worth no more than ninety-nine cents.
