Sarah Lacy's Five Lessons

Certain sectors of publishing are buzzing over Sarah Lacy's article in Business Week yesterday, in which she laid out five lessons to make book publishing better and more like Web 2.0.

With the caveat that, like everyone else trying to remake publishing, she focuses on the very narrow range of potential bestsellers, mass-marketed fiction and non-fiction -- and this is brutally clear when she says that she thinks $50,000 "for a lesser-known writer" is "less of an advance" -- her ideas generally have merit. But I always have to quibble, don't I?

Make it social.
Lacy wants to see more social networking technology applied to books, which can only help sales. No disagreements here, though in practice it'll have to be the author who does most of this, most of the time.

Take book tours out of the stores
I think she really means "take book tours out of the control of the publisher," since she describes her own efforts at pinpoint targeting of her audience in particular cities around the country. Since the point of book tours is to sell books, having a store attached to it -- whether the event is in the store or off-site -- is very useful to both author and publisher.

Obviously, a book tour has to be accomplishing something: selling books, getting media attention, or otherwise contributing to the success of the book. I suspect book tours have dwindled because a number of them only existed to prove to an author that she was important and that her publisher would spend money on her.

Lacy almost seems to be describing events for people who have already bought her book; if an author has secondary materials (lectures, T-shirts, tote bags, bath soap) to sell that audience, than that model could work. If not, it's just the author spending money to meet her fans, which is fun but not a sustainable business model.

Create stars—don't just exploit existing ones
True, but every publisher tries to do this several times a year. Her specific details, such as publishing contracts requiring that new authors blog, tweet, or what-not, are more likely to have solid results but not palatable to all authors. And I'll repeat that her model of publishing is strongly skewed towards the high end; there simply isn't that much money to throw around for the vast majority of books. Most of this stuff will be done on the cheap, by authors themselves.

Go electronic from the get-go
What I take from this section is that Lacy's publisher, Gotham Books (a Penguin imprint) is an institutional Luddite. Not all houses are, thankfully. But she is right that no publisher of appreciable size should be so non-electronic in 2008.

Make e-commerce even easier
Lacy does not work for a publishing house, so she didn't instantly think of the gigantic counter-example from earlier this week: Chelsea Green. Her point is that publishers should have instant one-click ordering from anywhere; that will not go over well -- and I'm understating the case immensely -- with the people who currently sell books.

The reason we don't have one-click ordering from anywhere is because we have a number of channels through which books are sold (online, brick-and-mortar) and several competitors in each channel. Now that all of the major brick-and-mortar chains have a real web presence, it's technically possible to build a system that sends sales to all of them, allocated however the publisher decides will work best. But that's still not one-click; one-click would either go only to one preferred vendor (which would make the others angry) or directly to the publisher (which would make all of the booksellers angry).

Some things don't happen even though they seem like good ideas, because even though they are good for some of the interested parties, they're quite bad for other interested parties. This is one of those cases.