The creation of books is a cottage industry: solitary artisans or small teams labor away in private to produce eccentric products tailored to the recondite needs of an audience which may be tiny (in extreme cases of academic publishing, the reader community may number a couple of hundred, worldwide) and is in any event very small by mass media standards. Even a wildly successful global-scale bestseller is unlikely to rival the audience (much less the profitability) of a mid-ranking Hollywood movie. Publishing as an industry is only large because it is so prolific, with roughly 300,000 trade books published per year in the US (“Books published per country per year”); it may come as a surprise to realize that the global turnover of the publishing industry is around the $20 billion mark.

Moreover, much of this turnover is absorbed by the supply chain. Amazon alone has three times the turnover of the Big Five multinational publishing conglomerates (who account for 80% of the industry’s revenue). Publishing is, quite simply, not a very profitable industry sector – it’s labor-intensive, inefficient and the only reason we put up with it is (to paraphrase Winston Churchill) because all the alternatives are worse.

Part of the reason we put up with the system is because it gives authors (the “we” in this context) a mechanism for remuneration. Writing is hard brain-work. Worse, non-authors underestimate it. (Most people have the basic literacy skills to read a book, and also to construct a sentence or write a paragraph. Books are, to a first approximation, just lots of paragraphs strung together: “so why shouldn’t I write a novel?” thinks the lay reader. This ignores the fact that a novel is structurally different from a high school essay the way a wide-body airliner is structurally different from a balsa-wood toy glider: there’s a complexity angle that isn’t immediately obvious. But I digress.) So books and the labor that goes into making them are persistently undervalued.

The mechanism by which working authors currently earn a living is copyright licensing. We automatically own copyright – literally, the right to control copying – over material we have invented. If we’re successful, we license the right to make copies to a publisher, who sells copies to the general public and pays us a pro-rata share of their receipts (a royalty).

There’s an interesting paradox implicit in the copyright/royalty licensing paradigm, of course. The more expensive the product, the more money the author receives per copy – but the fewer the number of customers. Consumers are convinced that anyone can write a book: how hard can it be? So the idea of charging, say, $10,000 a copy for a novel strikes them as ludicrous, even if the work in question took the author years of hard work to produce. In economic theory, the term for the change in demand as the price of a product increases is the price elasticity of demand.

Books are problematic: it turns out that e-books in particular suffer a drastic drop in demand if the cover price exceeds a very low threshold – around $4.99 in the US market. This is considerably lower than the price of a mass market paperback, much less a hardcover: consumers, it would appear, value the information content of a book less highly than the physical object itself.

As an author I have two goals. I want to maximize my income, and I want to maximize my readership. But by seeking to maximize income per copy sold, I may inadvertently minimize the number of copies sold, i.e. minimize my readership. The two goals are not merely orthogonal; they may be in conflict.

Anyway, this brings me to an interesting thought experiment: what would be the consequences if a large internet corporation such as Google were to buy the entire publishing industry?

Bear in mind that Google or Apple have a sufficiently large cash pile that they could take out a majority stake in all of the Big Five – it would only take on the order of $10 billion. Also bear in mind that the paper publication side of these organizations could remain largely unaffected by this takeover, insofar as they could still be operated as profitable commercial business units. The focus of the takeover by Google would be on the electronic side of the industry. The purchaser would effectively have acquired the exclusive electronic rights to roughly 300,000 commercial-quality books per year in the US market space. They could provide free public access to these works in return for a royalty payment to authors based on a formula extrapolating from the known paper sales, or a flat fee per download; or they could even put the authors on payroll. The cost would be on the order of a few billion dollars per year – but the benefit would be a gigantic pool of high-quality content.

From an author’s point of view, the benefits should be obvious. Having your books given away free by FaceAppleGoogBook maximizes your potential readership, while retaining print royalties and some sort of licensing stipend from FaceAppleGoogBook should maintain your income stream. Win on both counts!

Such a buyout would amount to a wholesale shift to a promotion-supported model for book publishing. Google would presumably use free book downloads to drive targeted advertising and collect information about their users’ reading habits and interests. Apple might use the enormous free content pool as a lure for a shiny new proprietary iReader hardware device. Facebook could target the authors, wheedling them to pay for promotional placement in front of new readers. The real questions are: is there enough money in a new shiny iReader device or the AdWords market (indeed, the advertising industry as a whole) to support the publishing sector as a promotional loss-leader; and, would this get FaceAppleGoogBook something they don’t already have?

Perhaps we should ask why they haven’t done this already.

The dismal answer probably lies in the mare’s tale of contracts and licensing agreements and legal boilerplate that underpins the publishing industry. The 300,000 books/year figure points to 300,000 legal contracts per year. Contracts which in many cases ban advertising, or place bizarre constraints on licensing and sub-licensing and distribution through anomalous channels such as Edison wax cylinder reproduction rights and talking stuffed character toys. Untangling the e-publishing rights and renegotiating the right to distribute them for free in return for a flat payment would be a nightmare; only an algorithmic approach to massively parallel contract negotiation could succeed and such an exercise might strain even Google’s prodigious programming capabilities. And as an afterthought, why should FaceGoogleBook try to buy books so that they can advertise through them, when they can plaster advertisements all over the search pages that lead readers to the books, or the commerce sites that sell them?

Looks like my utopian future as a salaried Google employee churning out Creative Commons licensed, freely downloadable novels for my enthusiastic audience (enthusiastic because everything is suddenly free – in return for their eyeballs, of course) will have to wait.

I spent more than ten years working at Writer’s Digest, a media brand that provides information, education and services to writers both new and established. In the span of those ten years, a lot happened. Most of the U.S. population got online, social media and Web 2.0 evolved and e-books took off.

Expectations for authors have changed dramatically. Perhaps we never lived in a world where a writer could just focus on his writing to the exclusion of all else, but certainly there was less to worry about if you were writing novels pre-Internet. Your publisher wasn’t asking you to tweet, be on Facebook, write blog posts, have a website or build a platform.

On the other hand, pre-Internet, an author had few options for making a living that didn’t involve working with a publisher. Today’s authors live with the burden and opportunity of being able to reach their readers directly, without anyone’s help. In fact, an author can make a full-time job out of marketing, promotion and audience development, waking up to find that, somewhere along the way, the writing became secondary. Steven Pressfield has talked about this phenomenon, what he calls the “shadow career.” He writes in Turning Pro, of people who get distracted by activities that lie outside of the work (in our case, the work of writing):

Instead of composing our symphony, we create a “shadow symphony,” of which we ourselves are the orchestra, the composer and the audience. Our life becomes a shadow drama, a shadow start-up company, a shadow philanthropic venture. […] The amateur is an egotist. He takes the material of his personal pain and uses it to draw attention to himself. He creates a “life,” a “character,” a “personality.”

There is a danger in the industry’s call to authors to build relationships with readers, to be responsive and engaged, to be in “conversation.” How big of a danger, however, totally depends on the values and goals of the writer. If the goal is sales and long-term readership growth, there might not be any harm at all. But if the activities impede the writer from pursuing his primary purpose (however that may be described or quantified), then we can see the call to engagement as seriously detrimental and distracting.

This has been the conclusion of many “literary” authors, or those people who see their purpose as producing art and meaning, something that goes beyond entertainment or “satisfying” the reader. Author Will Self said in an interview with The Guardian: “I don’t really write for readers. I think that’s a defining characteristic of being serious as a writer” (qtd. in Day, “Will Self”). What happens to such writers in the future of publishing, if it is defined or driven by author-reader interaction?

I’ve often tried to tell writers (of all stripes) that the Internet is the best thing to happen to the introvert. Before the Internet, an author would probably be put upon by a publisher to do tours, talks and other public appearances that can be time-consuming and draining. Post-Internet, the introverted author can decide exactly how, when and where they want to interact with the public – do it completely on their own terms. There’s a great deal of control and planning that one never used to have over marketing, promotion and networking activities. The Internet, in short, is a great blessing for introverts.

But that doesn’t really solve the problem of the author who has zero interest in putting on a show or being revealed. Another serious author, Benjamin Anastas, argued:

Distance is the writer’s friend. It’s nice to break out from your seclusion every now and then and give a reading to a room of actual people, or visit a college class that’s reading one of your books, or introduce yourself to someone on the subway who’s got his nose in your first novel. […] But for the most part the old adage holds true: You should never meet your heroes. And if your heroes are writers, you really don’t want to meet them. Writers are generally vain, and needy, and shut inside for most of the day listening to the voices in their head, so when they come out, their behavior can be erratic. […] Mystery plays a big role in our love of books, and by using social media to promote yourself, you’re only demystifying your work for everyone who follows you. And that makes you lose potential readers.

What is to come of the author who holds this philosophy? Does such a species survive? Does the future of publishing, which is becoming more and more focused on reader interaction, favor a very particular type author, one who is comfortable serving his customers? Or is there a class of readers out there who, just like the authors, prefer no interaction, and recognize the wisdom of never meeting your “heroes”? Perhaps a patronage system will evolve to support such authors and their art, if they can neither support themselves (through entrepreneurial activities) nor gain publisher support.

What nags at me, however, is that our culture’s idea and concept of authorship is destined to change. As Richard Nash pointed out in his essay “The Business of Literature,” the concept of the author is a fairly recent one, which was invented side by side with the printing press. The digital era may entail a new type of authorship, one that is built on resampling, remixing and collaboration. Authors may evolve to be leaders, moderators and synthesizers of information, rather than the dictator in control of it.

Bob Stein, at the Institute for the Future of the Book, has advised, “Go back and study […] what McLuhan called the shift to print, the place where an idea could be owned by a single person. One of McLuhan’s genius insights was his understanding of how the shift from an oral culture to one based on print gave rise to our modern notion of the individual as the originator and owner of particular ideas.” We are outgrowing the era where someone owns an idea, or, as Stein eloquently says, “If the printing press empowered the individual, the digital world empowers collaboration” (qtd. in Bustillos, “Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert”).

Online publishers have been struggling to modify for the online media the product-based,  reader-paid business models. This recompense model needs to be flipped on its head, so that humans are paid to think out loud, in the secure, trusted, selected, and recorded environment  of their choosing, either anonymously or for attribution (different pay scales for each). Publishers will license “cogniright” instead of copyright, in this instance, and cognactivity would include such online actions as:

• generating original prose or commentary
• footnoting: linking to related sites or publications to buttress one’s original thoughts
• opinionating: endorsing or damning other publications
• living out loud: publishing one’s online thought pat

This reader-paid model might best be first implemented in medical publishing, as the life and death impetus has a way of sharpening the business need. And truth and timeliness in publication is critical. Also, in STM or Tech publishing, we frequently see heuristic cycles  of defined content domains where authors who are also readers who are also authors. What’s missing is the business model that compensates readers (and editors) specifically for their online editorial and publishing duties. And when I say compensate I don’t mean only a one-time hourly or retainer fee, but an ongoing residual for contributing to and assuming responsibility for the validity of online content.