What do publishers really really want?

In a white room...

When away from home my life is decided by my iPhone. My total control-freakery, weirdo nutjob iPhone. Arbitrarily it decides whom I shall see and whom I shan’t; whom I should talk to and whom I shouldn't. Whole lotta whoms here, huh? 


Sometimes it will cheerily download my emails; sometimes it has a hissy fit and refuses access.  If it does let me on, it often decides – quite off its own back – that my responses (time-consumingly tip-tapped onto its tiny screen – torture for touch typists) should not be delivered.  Ditto Twitter – sometimes it will deliver tweets and DMs, sometimes not.  Facebook?  Don’t even go there.

So, when I was in London, I saw some friends but not others; certain publishers but not others. I caught some PRs while others must have thought me exceedingly rude.  I had hoped to catch my old friend Sam Baker and couldn’t quite figure out why she hadn’t responded to my nudges, and then – finally – I realized it was because she hadn’t received my missives.  Sigh.  But - who knows? – maybe there is method in its madness. Maybe I saw the people I needed to see…rather than those I just really really wanted to see.

I did learn some interesting things though, from those I saw.  That sentence bothers me too, but never mind.  Like, apparently a review on a good blog can be worth more than a review in a national paper or glossy mag in terms of sales. Now - although I am a firm believer in the power of social media - that still surprised me.  But one PR cited the instance of a page feature in the Daily Mail drawing in far less response than a blog post. Amazing.  In my own experience (as both a blogger and a journalist) many PR companies are still sniffy about blogging.  But maybe that is changing. 

And, you know how people all whitter on about What Publishers Want?  And Which Way the Market is Going?  The wannabe authors amongst us, that is (cos the others, frankly, don't give a shit). Well, hey, guess what?  The publishers haven’t got a clue what’s going on either. We’re all of us together, paddling blindly in circles. Honest.  I popped in to see an old friend who is now a head honcho at one of the Big Six.  ‘We used to know our customers,’ she said wistfully, leaning back on her comfy sofa in her big corner office.  ‘Y’know, Waterstone's, Smiths, Borders etc.  We knew what they wanted; we knew who they were.  But now…’  She shrugged eloquently. ‘We haven’t got the foggiest. Our customers are now the public, and we don’t know them, not remotely.

‘Celebrity still sells,’ she said with an eye roll. ‘But the rest is wide open. Wide wide open.  And content is key.’

What about self-publishing, I asked her. ‘Hell yes, of course,’ she said.  Really?  
‘We can’t come anywhere close to offering the royalties Amazon do,' she said sadly. 'We just can’t afford it.’ 
But surely, I mused, people still want – or should want – a traditional publishing contract?  She looked deeply unconvinced. ‘Why? Sure we can get them a good cover and good editing but, really, you can get that yourself if you know where to look.  What we do do well is to hold people’s hands – we look after authors a lot more now, we’re much better at it. We have to be.’

As I walked away I got the impression of leaving a huge rudderless supertanker gyrating slowly in the middle of a vast ocean.

It was pretty much the same story when I had lunch with a much smaller, more niche publisher.

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.  He shrugged and mopped up some hummus with a bit of bread. 
‘It’s easier to say what we’re not looking for,’ he said.  Paused, swallowed, and shook his head. ‘No, actually that doesn’t work either. It’s wide, wide open.  We just don’t know really; nobody does.’

And as I looked round the big bookshops in London I could see what they meant.  There are no real trends; no discernible patterns.  Which, actually, I found rather comforting.  
‘It comes down to passion,’ said Mr Small but Perfectly Formed. ‘If a book has real passion behind it, it can be a surprise bestseller.’ 

He also said that they were shamelessly watching to see which self-published books were making the grade and stepping in to offer deals.  Does that mean we get great new talent plucked out of nowhere?  Not necessarily. As everyone who's ever self-published knows, you don't just need a decent product, you also need uber-marketing skills - or a shitload of luck. 

‘I’m looking at our backlist,’ said Mrs Big but Vulnerable. ‘There are some real gems there which I’d like to see polished off and brought back.’ Ah, that’s rather comforting too. 

But how, I asked them both, do we (the customer, the public) choose books - with the sheer volume out there right now? How can we discover the real gems and avoid the cowpats?  Mr Small reckons like-minded communities are the answer – online forums. Interesting.  Mrs Big cheerily admitted she really didn’t know. ‘Amazon sure as hell can’t do it – their algorithms aren’t sophisticated enough.’  

I said the one thing I did like about Waterstones was their ‘favourite books’ lists and staff recommendations.   Because they seemed to like a lot of the books I'd already read and loved, I took a chance on Pema Chodron, figuring she might be good too.  And she was. 


And Mrs Big agreed.  But then, she would.  :-)


But seriously.  Word of mouth.  Which is maybe where we turn full circle and look at the value of blogs and social media again.    We're in a world of too many authors and not enough readers, with the big publishers generally no longer acting as decent gatekeepers.  The mainstream press doesn't really help either - they play the celebrity game and, to be fair, are simply overwhelmed by Too Many Books.  So perhaps this is where blogs and Twitter and so on come into their own.  Except...hmm... they're clogged up with people shouting about their own books.  Aaaghhh.  


Maybe we all just gyrate in a sea of more and more books? 


Anyhow, I wrote this a while back and it made sense at the time but, reading it back now, I haven't got a clue what I'm going on about.  what do you think?  Do we know where we're going to?  Does it matter?  


'What do you want to write next?' asked both Mrs Big and Mr Small.
'Not the foggiest,' I said.   :-)