Why Traditional Publishing Is Really In A ‘Golden Age’

How healthy is the traditional publishing industry? Not very, says Mark Coker, founder of the self-published book distributor Smashwords. On Monday, Coker told NPR’s Audie Cornish that “over the next few years, traditional publishers are going to become more and more irrelevant.”

But Michael Pietsch, soon-to-be CEO of the traditional publisher Hachette Book Group, disagrees. “I think we’re in a golden age for books — reading, writing and publishing,” he tells Cornish. “And the ways that publishers can work to connect readers with writers now are the kinds of things that publishers have dreamt of doing since Gutenberg first put down a line of type.”

Take, for example, the trend of big publishers picking up profitable, self-published best-sellers. Coker argues that, in the future, those authors will be less inclined to to sign a big publishing deal.

“You’re going to earn four to five times more per unit that you sell than you will if you work with a traditional publisher,” he explains. “Traditional publishers only pay 25 percent net, whereas as a self-published author, you’re going to earn 100 percent net.”

But Pietsch says there’s still a big advantage to a traditional publishing deal for those authors: “Part of the reason it works so well is when it happens it’s a great PR story — the press loves to pick up the story of the writer who sold the book out the trunk of their car or out of their garage and then made it into a mainstream publishing deal, as happened recently with E.L. James [author of Fifty Shades of Grey], famously and hugely.”

Pietsch joins Cornish to discuss how the Internet has helped open doors for the industry, rather than close them.

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