Veteran agent, Jane Dystel of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, best known for discovering Barack Obama, weighs in on the changes in the book publishing by giving GalleyCat her predictions for the industry in the next 10 years.
Jane Dystel:
1) There will be even more consolidation–companies, lists, staffs. This will mean there will be less of everything–but this might not be a bad thing.
2) Publishers will become more aggressive in pursuing more rights to each book.
3) Agents will become more aggressive in pursuing more rights to each book causing pre contract negotiations to take longer than ever before; bigger authors will push to sell only print rights to publishers.
4) Publishers will have to stop “windowing” e-book titles because they’ll see a loss of revenue
5) Territory will become a bone of contention as e-readers and e-book smart phone apps become available more widely.
6) The tablet computer will not change the world as we know it dramatically but it will impact certain segments of e-book publishing
7) We will see another uber-successful YA series like Harry Potter or Twilight
8) The trade paperback format will increase in both fiction and non fiction
9) Outrageous advances for “big” names will get even larger while those for others will continue to decrease
10) Finally, the role of the agent will grow and change–in a good way–as authors take on more responsibility for a range of things that used to rest solely with publishers (marketing, publicity, e-book publication)