What are traditional publishers good for? Absolutely nothing

Or at least this is what John Kay writes on the FT. He states that traditional publishers have weak contractual power in the new market landscape because they disinvested from all the real value-added publishing activities, i.e. helping authors writing great books and promoting them.

The role of the book publisher has been based on control of access to channels of distribution. The ambition of the aspirant author has always been to “get published”. Along with the decision as to what should be published, the company has traditionally provided a collection of associated services: identification, support and finance of the underlying literary project, editing of the draft manuscript, and marketing and promotion of the finished work. 

But the large conglomerates that have come to dominate publishing are run by people who love money more than they love books. These support activities have been cut back in the interest of maximising the revenue, from control of access to distribution. Today’s bestseller lists are filled with imitations of books that have already been successful; footballer’s memoirs, celebrity chefs, vampires and female-oriented erotic literature [...]. 

What matters to the success or failure of a book is the quality of conception and execution of the underlying project, the competence of the editing, and the effectiveness of marketing and promotion. Most new self-published titles fail these tests; in particular, the lack of a competent editor is often obvious. But this is also true of many titles now published by established houses. 

Some existing publishers will thrive on the basis of their strengths in author support services. But most will not. Savvy and well-advised authors, often helped by agents, will be able to buy editing and marketing skills with the receipts from a much larger share of the sales proceeds than the traditional royalty model allows.

You see an application of this in the experiments of traditional publishers with Swoon Reads (owned by MacMillan) and other websites in which readers are asked to decide which manuscripts or book projects deserve publication. If successful, these websites will allow publishers to save costs by firing editors but ultimately will also make publishers irrelevant.