I read an article today at Bookseller.com by Benedicte Page entitled ‘Publishers cancelling books to cut costs.’

Needless to say the thrust of the article was rather germane to what’s going on in the publishing world, and in particular to the evolution we’re experiencing here at Five Rivers. Once more it seems the legacy houses are cutting back, claiming publishing Armageddon, only this time they’re cutting not just staff but authors, in fact killing off titles and their stable of writers. The rationale behind this is explained by Jonathan Lloyd of Curtis Brown, who says publishers are saying to authors under contract their manuscripts are not up to standard.

Lloyd called the issue of a book’s quality a “grey area” in publishers’ contracts. “Who decides if a book is publishable? There are books on the bestseller lists that people say are rubbish. What publishers are meaning [when they say a book is not up to standard] is ‘We’re not going to sell as many copies as thought when we commissioned the book,’” he said.

And there’s the nut of the problem. Legacy publishers still insist on clinging to old publishing business models that are not only archaic in this Communication Age, but not viable. Setting enormous print runs and expecting to sell that run in 10 to 20 weeks simply doesn’t fly today. The consumer is tired of the same old hash, and as a result we’re seeing a rise in indie publishing, to the point the ivy league Princeton Review now publishes an indie best-seller list.

So, while the legacy publishers are cutting to the point of bleeding, indie publishers, like Five Rivers, are picking up the wounded the legacy houses are leaving behind, publishing legacy back-lists that are now the intellectual property of the authors.

What prevents many indie publishers from facing the same Armageddon is the fact we’re using print on demand technologies, and thereby not investing capital in unwieldy stock that needs to be expensively warehoused. We can take a risk on an author, on a title, and leave the title out there in the marketplace indefinitely, employing cost-efficient and effective Internet marketing, sales and delivery systems, and still turn a profit. The authors benefit because their titles remain in print with the potential of royalties ever-present. The indie publishers benefit because they’re able to acquire titles and cultivate authors with minimal risk. The consumers benefit because they’re favourite authors and titles remain available, while being allowed the bonus of having greater variety available to them. And perhaps the most astonishing of all is the environment benefits, because remaindered books no longer find their way to landfill, less energy is consumed through warehousing enormous quantities of books, and fewer trees are sacrificed to the paper industry.

What the legacy houses are unable to comprehend or recognize is they’ve become useless to society, the five pound mobile phone in a world of ultra-light, super-efficient smart phones.