Saving Publishing -- the Jonathan Karp Way

I have mixed feelings about Jonathan Karp's recent article for Publishers Weekly, in which he laid out his "12 Steps to Better Book Publishing." On the one hand, I imagine they would make publishing more consistently successful and profitable. On the other, the only way they'd do that would be through unfeasible collusion in restraint of trade, losses of the jobs of at least half of the people currently working in book publishing, and publication schedules that resemble Karp's own Twelve imprint (one guaranteed big-seller a month and nothing else). Since I enjoy both reading books outside that narrow framework and a publishing ecosystem with jobs for myself and my friends, it's not a model I can entirely agree with.

And so I'll rephrase Karp's rules in terms that the rest of us -- the ones who don't run our own imprints and have PW fawning over how visionary we are -- can understand.

Prologue: Don't publish books that Karp doesn't like, particularly if they are "arcane." Any book that won't sell a hundred thousand copies is just not worth it! Books by ex-Presidents are a bad idea; likewise books about food, sex and religion. (What do people do to keep themselves occupied in Karp's world, if they're uninterested in politics, sex, food, and religion?)

Also, don't ever publish a book if anyone else has published a book on the same or a similar topic. Unless that topic is the Titanic, of course! The only possible future for publishing is to "invest time and resources into major works and to market them with overwhelming force."

End Kabuki Publishing: Never be enthusiastic about the books you publish. The only sales reps you need to care about are the "key" ones. Only big things count!

Also, Karp thinks big mainstream publishing is made up almost entirely of phonies, and he's going to go feed the ducks instead of playing along.

Prioritize and Specialize: Ignore most of your list. Only care about things with huge potential. Karp urges specialization...but he also urges only concentrating on things with huge potential, which means everyone should have the same specialty. So try not to specialize in anything that might qualify as an actual specialty or genre.

Tell the Truth: It's time to stop being nice to authors and say directly to them the things you mutter to your colleagues. As a bonus, this may also help achieve the massive job losses mentioned above.

Screw relationships! Screw good sense! Tell that big bestselling jerk on your list precisely what you think of the turd that just landed on your desk!

Also, ebooks and POD are to be used as dumping grounds for bad acquisition decisions. A very smart contracts manager will be required to get that language past agents. And talented accountants will be required to deal with the flood of red ink.

Stop the copycat books: That topic was Karp's idea first! So you can't publish a book on it. Never, ever publish a book on any subject remotely similar to earlier books, like a biography of Lincoln, or a Tuesdays With Lots of Morries, or yet another book about politics by an insider. No, no, no.

More editorial quality control: You get to tell Dan Brown what goes in or out of his book, because your imprint is on the spine. More generally, you can publish only great big books and still hope to be more important and powerful than the real authors of those books. You are also the King of Ruritania!

Imprints for everyone: Oddly enough, this is the one I have absolutely no problem with; my current employer operates under a system almost exactly like Karp describes, and I find that works very well. But we don't do a tiny number of great big books, either. We do a lot of very targeted niche books, and have a lot of people in aggregate working on those books, most of which Karp would probably deem not worth publishing. So I don't believe this plan actually fits in with the rest of Karp's suggestions as closely as he believes it does.

One bidder per company: Most of you acquisition editors? Hit the pavement. Or get demoted to development editors. Only your boss's boss's boss will be allowed to negotiate for the company -- you know, the one you always struggle to make understand what your program is and why it's important?

This is the kind of idea that sounds wonderful when you're already the head of a major imprint.

Pay authors to market their work: No snark here, though my experience is that the bulk of authors -- across categories and genres -- aren't any good at this or (to be kinder) know what to do. Though, if we're drastically slashing the number of books published, we can get rid of all the authors who don't already market themselves effectively. That'll increase the average quality of author marketing immediately.

Be loyal to the book, not the ego: Very nice words. When the Marcus Dohles and Brian Murrays of this world repeat them, and back editors/publicists/sales reps rather than bigfoot authors when push comes to shove, people might actually believe them.

(And when books by John Grisham/James Patterson/Nora Roberts/Laurell Hamilton stop selling at massive levels year in and year out, showing that readers are immeasurably more loyal to the author than to the publisher.)

Let's be honest: if one of Twelve's forthcoming books came in from the author, and it was lousy, do you really think it would be suddenly downgraded to POD?

And, once again, Karp is demanding the all-big-books-all-the-time model of publishing: only hit home runs.

Announce all deals: Another nice thing, but making it happen would be an applied exercise in game theory -- the first mover would be heavily penalized, and the last holdout would have the most power. It's very unlikely to happen, unless agents do it -- they have more incentive to do so to begin with.

Downsize: And Karp will go first -- he's resigning to spend more time raising rutabagas. His comments about mid-list authors are laughable; under his plans many writers who are currently at the top of lists would find themselves in the middle of much smaller lists. And anyone not at the top of a list would be gone entirely. But there's always "digital distribution" for all those lousy books he'd rather not see published!

Advertise: Again, only books that you can spend lots and lots of money on deserve to be published. Publishing is about big men spending big money to put out big books!


Feh! If this is the way to save publishing, I'd rather it stay on life-support.

Edit, a day later: Since this post is getting an unusual amount of traffic, I should point out that there are a number of things in Karp's essay that I didn't disagree with. I mentioned a couple of them above, but left the others unstated because that wasn't the focus of the piece.

My disagreements are more important than my points of agreement, because of the overarching aim of Karp's essay. He's trying to force all of trade publishing into a narrowly focused blockbuster-all-the-time model, which is unsustainable. The real problem with trade publishing today is that model, not the fact that smaller books manage to be published along the way.