Publisher's Weekly offers this ephemera entitled: 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing. My favorite advice to the industry is "End Kabuki Publishing: As devotees of Japanese theater know, Kabuki is resplendent with elaborate costumes and highly stylized acting, completely lacking in any resemblance to modern reality. I am amazed by how much of publishing today is a Kabuki of ritualized and empty artifice." I mean, right?
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
A Dozen Pieces of Advice
Publisher's Weekly offers this ephemera entitled: 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing. My favorite advice to the industry is "End Kabuki Publishing: As devotees of Japanese theater know, Kabuki is resplendent with elaborate costumes and highly stylized acting, completely lacking in any resemblance to modern reality. I am amazed by how much of publishing today is a Kabuki of ritualized and empty artifice." I mean, right?
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2 comments:
That article was full of corporate double-speak that in the end spells bad news for rank-and-file workers and writers alike. If you've ever worked in a corporation, you know a phrase like "Pay Authors to Market their Work" means "Go Spend Your Measly Advance on Publicity So We Can Downsize the Publicity Department." Something like "One Bidder Per Company" means "We Consolidated the Industry and Now We're Going to Low-ball You Because There is Less Competition." Keep the frickin' kabuki show. It's much better than being screwed by corporate America.
Yeah, the part about paying authors to do their own promotion also made me go meh...That only sounds good on paper, give authors more money to do what the nincompoop marketing department is supposed to do. In reality though, how many authors have the contacts and time to arrange book reviews, interviews, signings, tours, etc, all the crap that the publisher is supposed to take care of? What time will the author have left to write?
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