An independent publisher emailed yesterday to tell me that he was pleased to see that I’d cited Alex Ross‘s essay on the classical music boom, but offered a different and provocative spin on the lessons the publishing industry might draw from it. “What the classical music world is doing, and what we need to do,” he says, “is strip out the unnecessary manufacturing and inventory and distribution hassle out of the process of connecting to the audience.”
“Of course, then what happens is that a chunk of folks start yapping about how ebooks are bullshit blah blah blah. And I’m as sick as Jeff Gomez must be of having that argument with folks who think that because they don’t like doing something (say, reading on a screen) then no-one does.”
So how does he see the future playing out? “I just gotta hang in there for a few years in these crazy times, by which time electronic content will be sufficiently advanced that we can all afford to be publishing the writing we think there’s a reasonable audience for, and build them up through methods that rely on the quality of the work, and its appeal to the audience, than on access to the capital required to play in the publishing and bookselling business.”