Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 3 Volume 9 | Page 33

or any part of that infrastructure to an ev-
er-growing number of publishers. Many of
them are new players enabled by this
change of circumstances to create a pub-
lishing company with a fraction of the in-
vestment that would have been required
three decades ago. But many of them are
longtime publishers who are shedding fixed
costs for variable ones by relying increas-
ingly on Ingram. (And, it should be noted,
pure sales and distribution services are al-
so provided by the large publishers who
are continuing to do it themselves in a
shrinking market.)
And all the things that publishers do
that don’t require a big infrastructure: find-
ing and developing books, editing them, de-
signing them, and marketing them (increas-
ingly using digital opportunities to talk di-
rectly to consumers) can be delivered by a
vast network of freelancers and small com-
pany service providers. And many of them
gained valuable experience delivering these
same services to the large publishers that
continue to use them.
Proceeding from this analysis of today’s
circumstances, here are some predictions
about how the world of publishing will
evolve over the next few years.
1. S ALES WILL CONTINUE TO MOVE TO ONLINE .
The movement of book sales from phys-
ical stores to online has been unabated
since Amazon began. There is no reason for
it to stop. Books have a ton of characteris-
tics that make them perfect for online
shopping. You want to shop from a full se-
lection no store has. It is very seldom when
you must have a book right now. And books
are heavy, so you don’t really want to carry
F ALL 2019
them around if you can avoid it. The view
from here is that it will continue to be very
challenging to make physical book loca-
tions commercially viable.
2. T HE OTHER BIG GENERAL ONLINE RETAILERS
WILL BE A MAZON ’ S BIGGEST COMPETITORS FOR
BOOK SALES .
So far, Amazon has been about the only
beneficiary of the shift to online buying.
That may be changing. Other big retailing
brands like Walmart and Costco have built
robust online businesses. Ingram now ena-
bles them to carry a full line of books as
well. There are shoppers who would really
prefer to avoid Amazon and there are
shoppers with loyalty to some of these oth-
er retailers. The guess here is that it will
become visible before long that it isn’t
bookstores that will cut into Amazon’s book
sales, it is other mass merchants
3. T HE BIFURCATED BOOK MARKET WILL CON-
TINUE : LIKE MASS - MARKETS IMMEDIATELY POST -
WWII.
There is a whole digital-first publishing
world, spawned by self-publishers, that of-
fers (mostly) genre fiction at prices com-
mercial publishers can’t match: $4.99 and
under. The net result has been that com-
mercial publishers are finding it increasing-
ly difficult, if not impossible, to compete in
the genre fiction market of customers who
measure their reading in books-consumed-
per-week. This has happened before. Mass-
market paperbacks right after World War II
became a separate publishing system from
“trade” until the two started to blend in the
mid-1960s. What brought that prior era to
an end was pressure on both sides of the
equation. The mass-market distribution
P AGE 29
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE