In a guest appearance on thriller writer Laura Benedict‘s blog, her editor at Ballantine Books, Mark Tavani says the publishing industry shakeup has been a long time coming, and adds that maybe that’s not such a bad thing:
“A few months back I read about how Starbucks was shutting down a few thousand locations,” Tavani writes. “I can say I didn’t notice anyone freaking out and running around, screaming about how coffee was going out of fashion… Anyway, maybe we contract. Maybe fewer books get published. Maybe some publishing folks have to look elsewhere for a paycheck. I don’t say those things lightly, because I love those books, and I’m one of those publishing folks, and I have a lot of friends in the industry. But on the bright side, maybe fewer books will mean better books.”
The argument—”Maybe, in the end, books won’t qualify precisely as mass entertainment, but entertainment for a sizable if select audience”—is a familiar one: Remember Ursula K. Le Guin‘s withering analysis back in January? “Publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism,” she wrote, adding, “think books are here to stay… It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?”
This feels to us like a neat encapsulation of the crossroads at which the industry finds itself: On the one hand, you’ve got the folks who believe that smaller publishers will be able to dedicate themselves to quality over quantity; on the other, people are convinced that big publishers will commit themselves to staying big by relying on celebrity authors and dealing primarily with known commodities. Who do you think has the right idea?