‘The stories, they stay the same, how the stories pass from author to reader, well that is still in flux’, says Andrew Rhomberg, of Digital Book World [1], about creative industry management in publishing. The FutureBook conference in London last week was a good example of this. Trade book publishing is still very clear about the distinction between the medium and the message, but the consumers and the users are not. In fact, consumers are using the advancing medium – computer, tablet, smartphone – as the message and saying to each other – look what we can do, look how we can do it.
At Futurebook, Andre Breedt from Nielsen had some of the most telling things to say, as he extrapolated the trend of usage to show that most of the younger generation of users of devices were increasingly playing games, instant messaging and calling each other; other uses were falling away, with reading book-type things falling away most swiftly. That may be because the form is unsuited to ‘book’ readership, or that as people get older they may choose to read more of certain types of books on devices. The anxiety induced by this apparent trend was evident in the discussion of the dominance of Amazon in the customer base of trade publishers, so much so that there were calls for government action to make life more ‘fair’.
However, Jonathan Glasspool from Bloomsbury Academic was clear about the profitability and growth of the long-established digital channels of distribution and the editorial workflows in the higher education market. Alison Palgrave, from Palgrave Macmillan, emphasized the flexibility and pace of her new imprint, listening carefully to her audience and publishing in online or POD outputs according to users’ personal and momentary needs. Both emphasised the significance of knowing and reaching their customers directly.
The consumer publishers have great difficulty doing this, because knowing who and where your readers are, particularly if they buy through intermediaries, is tricky. Readers’ Digest and Time-Life used to know through their colossal, and for decades hugely successful, efforts to create mailing lists via magazine publishing and customer acquisition through direct marketing. (They didn’t make it across the digital chasm – why?) Janet Meadowcraft gave a very interesting presentation on a successful social media campaign in a magazine/book crossover for a particular craft interest consumer group, which demonstrated very clearly that concentrated and knowledgeable hard work, not necessarily expensive, can deliver a sustainable and loyal audience and readership.
From the Big Ideas session, focus and pace were key themes. Such qualities are utterly valuable, but hardly startling – yet they are fundamental. Add concentration and fiercely dedicated curation – see Meadowcraft – and the business of publishing can continue to play its role in the marketplace of the world’s public discourse. But the atomization of the business, very ably characterised by Mike Shatzkin in his blog earlier this year, was clear at FutureBook. It is the atomization of consumer publishing that was clear. To stay in business (over the medium term), consumer publishers will have to become smarter and faster; the mighty audiences in scientific, technical, medical, legal and educational publishing are increasingly well served.