How healthy is the traditional publishing industry? Not very, says Mark Coker, founder of the self-published book distributor Smashwords. On Monday, Coker told NPR’s Audie Cornish that “over the next few years, traditional publishers are going to become more and more irrelevant.”
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Hear Mark Coker’s Full Interview:
Self-Publishing Now The First Choice For Some Writers
But Michael Pietsch, soon-to-be CEO of the traditional publisher Hachette Book Group, disagrees. “I think we’re in a golden age for books — reading, writing and publishing,” he tells Cornish. “And the ways that publishers can work to connect readers with writers now are the kinds of things that publishers have dreamt of doing since Gutenberg first put down a line of type.”
Pietsch joins Cornish to discuss how marketing sets a publishing deal apart from the self-publishing model.
Interview Highlights
On why writers pick publishers over self-publishing
“For marketing. They want someone who can help them take what they’ve created and get it everywhere. And the business of publishing has become much more complex. You’re not just selling books to local bookstores. You’re selling them to independent bookstores; you’re selling them to bookstore chains like Books-A-Million and Barnes and Noble; you’re selling to Costco, to Target, to Wal-Mart, to Urban Outfitters, to this huge, complicated physical book network, and at the same time on all the digital retail platforms that are out there. You want your book … in these places in prominent ways and displayed at the time the publicity is happening, and that’s what the publisher orchestrates. A publisher, when it’s going well, gets that book in the front of the store, on the home page of the website at the moment that that writer is sitting down with Audie Cornish on All Things Considered to talk about her book.”
↬ via. Why Traditional Publishing Is Really In A ‘Golden Age’
Related articles
- Goodbye vanity: Self-publishing goes mainstream (theglobeandmail.com)
- CS Marks Talks to AuthorHouse About Book Marketing & Traditional Publishing (selfpubbooks.wordpress.com)
- Self-Publishing Now The First Choice For Some Writers (npr.org)
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