Contractions in Publishing
By Jerry D. Simmons | March 28th, 2007 | No Comments » (Click to add yours!)
As many of you may have heard, a very large book customer that represented a large share of the market for all publishers filed for bankruptcy a short time ago. Their business of supplying books to retailers quickly jumped to two other large book customers. This was by any stretch of the imagination an extremely large contraction of the bookselling and distribution marketplace.
This kind of reduction in the number of book customers serving the market has a ripple effect throughout the industry. Fewer large customers mean fewer sales representatives and national account personnel. It means the business is concentrated in the hands of even fewer companies which will squeeze the razor thin margins of publishers and drive smaller competitors out of business.
On top of that already gloomy news is the fact that one of the two largest retail bookstore chains is considering closing stores around the country because they simply cannot make them profitable. All of this means the supply of books to retail will shrink and the prices of the copies that do make it through will rise. Publishers will be less willing to try new genres and new authors. Fewer quality writers will get the opportunity to publish their manuscripts and the business will continue to contract.
There is no new or creative thinking in the world of major publishing. All the top executives are products of the system they helped create and they will continue down their path of destruction until they break. Now that five of the six major publishing companies are foreign owned, the industry still has a pulse but the growth for writers and their books is fading. Thinking outside the box is an oxymoronic statement in the world of major publishing.
This blog is unedited, please disregard mistakes in spelling and grammar.
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