Flipping the bird at answers

As publishers, I think we’re picking up some bad habits. Maybe this is partly due to the panic of digitisation – more likely it is due to an increase in competition as producers from people like Amazon and a decrease in disposable income. Whatever the reason, there are a few specific phrases I am utterly tired of hearing bandied about, and should be stricken from any publishing rhetoric going forward.

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1. ‘Market share’
This is a Publishing All Time Classic Favourite. My problem with this is that it seems to be directing business focus away from the readers and toward the competition. As far as I can tell, and I’m not in a management level position or indeed one where I would ever be asked to analyse data on market share, this preoccupation stems from the desire to achieve global market domination. But why should any publisher need to do this to survive? And what about building your market/reader base through innovation? If you know your market (not as a percentage but as a target audience whose needs/wants you can meet), if you make enough money not to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy every year, and if you publish titles you can be proud of, then you’re doing superbly. Even if you’re not doing any of these things, I doubt a focus on market share would remedy any of the above. I reckon if publishers were as concerned about developing innovating digital delivery methods as are about their competitors’ sales figures, we’d have a very different industry on our hands.
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2. ‘Service Industry’

A service industry is one where no goods are produced, so using this phrase to describe the publishing industry is a bitter pill for me to swallow given I work in production. It is just a much a delivery industry as it is a service industry, in that we’re ‘delivering’ stuff to customers, but this still isn’t representative of what happens. I know this is a somewhat literal interpretation of the phrase, but I am yet to see anyone use the words ‘service industry’ in a way that doesn’t imply a business model where consumers tell the company exactly what they want (not vaguely through surveys, but explicitly face to face) and then have it delivered to them just as they specified. This is not what the publishing industry does, nor should it. Publishing is still at heart a creative pursuit, no matter how big your marketing budget is. We are not commissioned by readers to produce a novel to their taste, we source the talent and produce something at the end of it. If we want to be a service industry – ie: provide but not make – then we had better be willing to surrender any initiative toward development of the industry to developers and others who aren’t currently in the business of making books.

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This whole rebranding seems to have spawned from a fear that what we do produce isn’t good enough and therefore should be wrapped in a full body experience. Well, I think it is good enough. I think we as an industry produce a lot of excellent stuff that we can be proud of. What’s wrong with the phrase ‘publishing industry’ exactly?

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3. ‘Marketing/Web’

I don’t even need to tell you what’s wrong with this. Never should the two be interchangeable. The days when the Internet was used as primarily marketing tool are gone along with the allure of Comic Sans, and websites built entirely in Flash. Websites are fully functioning content delivery tools, not global banner ads. Let web designers and UI experts do their job.

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All these phrases imply a distrust in our market’s ability to discern between a good product and a terrible one. If the effort goes in at the production stages, it won’t have to be bandaged by slogans and a hard sell at the marketing stage, all after the dreadful pursuit of something utterly irrelevant in the long term (market share). But many publishers seem to be foregoing this very simple fact, and emphasising the final bit, the bit where they try to force the hand of the consumer. Effective marketing is one thing; polishing a turd is quite another. The latter shouldn’t need to be done, and we as producers shouldn’t necessitate its investigation.