Publishing Goes to the Movies: Part 2

I’m not in the this business to make art; I’m in it to make money to buy art.

–Producer Joel Silver

More similarities between publishing and its West-Coast cousin, the movie business:

• They have a star system that caters to those who generate the most business. Hollywood suffers from “sequelitis.” It needs brand names, either “bankable” actors or the titles of series, billion-dollar “franchises” like science fiction epics that begin with the word Star or include the name Harry Potter. You know when the stars in publishing’s firmament have a new  book, because their names pop up on bestsellers lists. The most visible celestial body? James Patterson, who, with the help of coauthors, had nine books out and made $70 million last year. His publisher has earned the right to change its name to Big Brown.
• They want big openings. Although the first weekend’s income from a movie rarely determines how much it will ultimately contribute to the bottom line, a big opening weekend is a good portent. Books can also start slowly and become bestsellers, but the explosion of sales when books by stars are published catapults them onto bestseller lists.
• Publishers and movie studios make editors and producers who generate enough profits intrepreneurs, in-house entrepreneurs. Studios support producers while they develop projects for them to distribute. Publishers give editors their own imprints so they can publish what they want and benefit from the sales, marketing, and production resources of the house that sustains them. 
• They have a parallel release pattern. Movies in theaters are like the hardcover and ebook publication. DVDs, pay per view, and Netflix, like paperback editions, follow. Finally, they are on cable and network television, and sold in stores that mark down DVDs and sell remainders and used books.
• They recycle what they produce in as many forms, media and countries as they can, and have a growing international audience.
• They rely on their backlist for part of their income. Movie people call their backlist the  “library.”
• They are dependent on chains that are replacing single-screen theaters and independent bookstores which struggle to survive.
• They create synergy. Publishers test-market books for Hollywood, which buys many books for the screen. Bestsellers sell movie tickets, and when movies succeed, they can make books bestsellers or return them to the list as it did for Eat Snooze Love. A portent: Relativity Media, which will film Nicholas Sparks’s new book, Safe Haven, is promoting the book, online and off, even though they don’t even have a screenplay yet.
• They have an insatiable craving for fresh ideas, new writers and good writing. Newcomers are more likely to make their way in the system by starting out producing their own work or with independent publishers and producers. But when they’re ready for the big time, the big companies will welcome them with open arms and wallets.

Write to meet the needs of the marketplace and sooner or later, you’ll get where you want to go.

 Upcoming Event

The Third San Francisco Writing for Change Conference: Changing the World One Book at a Time / November 13-14, Hilton Financial/Chinatown / www.sfwritingforchange.org / Keynoters: Dan Millman (The Way of the Peaceful Warrior) and John Robbins (Diet for a New America)

The Most Important Letter in Publishing

I eat my peas with honey.

I’ve done it all my life.

It makes the peas taste funny,

but it keeps them on my knife.

–Colonial ditty

However you eat your peas, know that P is the most important letter in the alphabet stew of publishing. Here is a taste of Ps that drive publishing for you to digest:

• Publishing: The art of transforming black lines of words into a green bottom line and an industry with an unknowable future.
• Problems: What publishers have always had and have always figured out how to solve. When you’re using a publishing system that goes back a century to sell a technology that goes back five centuries, problems are inevitable.
• Progress: Technology is 

              * transforming writing and publishing

              * creating profit, turmoil, uncertainty

              * forcing us to be creative and improvise

• Power: Publishers have the power to say no and make decisions about the commitment they make to a book and how to publish it. Agents with potential bestsellers, bestselling authors, and major customers have the power to make demands. Writers have the power to be publishers.
• Profit: What publishers must make to survive and pay authors. Authors survive on hope and a paying job.
• P&L: A computerized profit-and-loss form editors prepare for books they want to buy guesstimating how the books will be profitable enough to justify buying them.
• Price: An evolving number determined by costs, competition, powerful customers, the need to maximize profits, and what the traffic will bear.
• Print on Demand: Behind the explosion in self-publishing because publishers only produces books when there are buyers for them. An alternative for new writers, if only to test-market their books, and for established authors who can reach their readers. Publishers are using it for backlist books, and booksellers are starting to use Espresso Machines in their stores to produce and sell books they can’t stock.
• Privishing: the premature demise of most books that are deprived of the time and other resources they need to succeed because of the plethora of books published every year that prevents publishers, booksellers, reviewers, and book buyers from doing justice to them.
• Process: From deal to bookstore, publishing a book at a big or midsize house can take two years, a process that’s hard to accelerate if you’re publishing hundreds of books a year.
• Prose:  Style, voice, and impact determine readers’ responses to a proposal or manuscript for which the writing is crucial. Prose must be as effective as it needs to be to satisfy readers. How well writers string words together to embody their ideas will, sooner or later, determine a book’s fate, regardless of how it’s published.
• Passion: Publishers yearn to be passionate about every book they publish, a luxury only small houses can afford. Authors have to be passionate about their work.
• Pitch: The brief description of a book that must excite agents, editors, sales reps, booksellers, the media, and book and subsidiary-rights buyers
• Proposal: A 35-to-50-page business plan for a nonfiction book that must convince a publisher to gamble on it. For fiction, a synopsis as  much of the novel as agents’ and editors’ guidelines request.
• Platform: Continuing visibility, online and off, with potential readers. Authors of  certain kinds of books need one to sell books to big and midsize houses.
• Promotion: Online and off,  marketing is vital for success, and authors do more of it than publishers. Authors and publishers can only be as effective as their books enable them to be. Promotion can’t sell a book that doesn’t deliver what it promises.
• Publicity: Free time and space in the media are more cost-effective than touring and advertising. The Web empowers authors to publicize their books without leaving their desks.
• Perseverance: What it takes to see publishers (and authors) through the complex, creative, time-consuming challenges of writing and publishing books, despite the hurdles involved the process.
• Pride: Like authors, publishers want to be proud of their books. Only your best will do.
• Promise: Publishers are perpetual optimists who let themselves be seduced by their hopes for a book and an author’s potential.

I hope this pot pourri of Ps has given you a perspective that will push you to persist in getting published.