For the past few months, I’ve laid back and soaked up the goings on in publishing, and the economy in general. Here are a few things I expect to see as we wrap up 2012 and head into the beyond.
1. Apple is in the process of cutting its own sizably profitable throat
I was once one of Apple’s biggest proponents. This was back when they produced the best computers going, especially when paired head to head with Microsoft’s crap-of-the-month they’ve spent the past 15 years cranking out. But no more. They are far too expensive in an atmosphere with downward pressure on device prices, and are showing far too many issues with signature devices like the iPhone. The iPad Mini is nothing if not a cannibal that has the potential to swallow the market for the full size (and pricier) model whole. Add to that the fact that, fairly or otherwise (I say fairly) Apple is a poster child for exploitative labor practices, offshoring of jobs and stashing large profits out of the country to avoid taxes, and I see a company who has reached its apex and is poised to begin the long decline down. If Steve Jobs were still alive, I’d give them a shot to pull out of it, but he’s not, and Apple is in the process of becoming just another mega corporation focusing on profit at the expense of all else.
There’s a reason Apple is putting more and more resources towards patent lawsuits. It’s corporate complacency. Live off the value you have today, and do everything you can to stifle competition or progress beyond that point. It might work for a few years, but it’s a long-term loser bet. Much like Microsoft, the world will pass them by and they’ll learn that it’s much harder to play catch up than be the industry leader, especially after your corporate culture shifts from profit through new innovation to profit through exploitation of past innovation.
2. Consolidation amongst the largest publishers is a sign of desperation not forward-thinking strategy
Corporate consolidation and mergers come in many forms. Sometimes, they are aggressive, competitive moves, other times they are backs-to-the-wall defensive maneuvers. The Big Six mergers going on are in the latter group and, as such, are little more than time-buying exercises. The Disney purchase of Lucasfilm is just the opposite. The mouse didn’t snap up Star Wars to squat on the crazy-lucrative rights, they intend to use them. Publishers, on the other hand, are merging not as an aggressive bold move, but as a means of cutting costs and combining assets to add sheer bulk in some kind of misguided dick-measuring contest with the big retailer of the moment, Amazon.
I expect the Big Six will filter down to three, possibly even two within the next two years. The remaining giants aren’t going anywhere, they’ll still be raking in money, still produce bestsellers by the bushel, still be big name players, but while they get individually bigger, the overall share of the market once held by all six separate companies combined will decline.
While this consolidation will very likely appear positive on the accounting ledgers, in the real world, it means less skilled people employed in traditional publishing, less opportunities to get books published traditionally, less competition for authors between traditional houses, lower advances, lower royalties and more stringently pro-publisher contracts with increasing restrictions on writers. If you’re one of those people who still see a traditionally published book as something to aspire to, your work just got a lot more difficult and a lot less potentially lucrative.
If anything, I expect consolidation among the industry leaders will drive more writers to control their own destinies. In fact, I would not be the least bit surprised if, eventually, the bulk of the work coming out of the last of the giants winds up as work-for-hire ghost written material. Anonymous author-mills, basically.
3. Any improvement in publishing’s fate depends on a functioning economy
We just had an election that comes at a pivotal time for us and the one obvious problem that’s suffocating us went completely unaddressed. How, exactly, do we convince the corporate world to reinvest in its workforce through better pay and benefits, thereby investing in the market for its own products? Many corporations have become virtual crack-whores to ever-increasing margins, and the du jour move of the moment is to cut everything not nailed down from your employee base to improve the bottom line. We need to convince them to break that addiction, sacrifice some of those profits in the short term for the betterment of everyone, and mostly, their own long term bottom line.
The current system is clearly unsustainable. They need customers, and lots of them, which they’re not going to get if corporations en mass continue to bleed the workforce of any and all disposable income to pad their own criminally undertaxed capital gains. It’s doubly damaging condition because egregiously low wages also add to all of our tax bills. Walmart, for instance, made $15 billion in profit last year. Their employees, however, were paid over $2 billion in government assistance. That means we subsidized billions in Walmart profits with our taxes. But its the poor single mother on food stamps who’s the parasite, right? As things are now, obscene percentages of capital are being sequestered totally out of our economy, with more being drained every day. That has to stop, and it has nothing to do with tax rates. It’s a grab-the-cash-right-now strategy, and it’s sacrificing the future for everybody, rich and poor alike, to support gluttonous profits today.
It’s a common problem. Publishers suffer from it. They invest less and less into the actual productive areas of their business and more into their corporate structure. In doing so, the financial barons on Wall Street reward them for their stats on paper, which always look good right away but don’t reflect the long-term negative consequences of the cuts. Those come later, and inevitably lead to more cuts. It’s a death spiral writ large. Amazon, by contrast, does reinvest large chunks of profit back into its business, and Wall Street punishes them for it routinely. It’s a good thing Jeff Bezos doesn’t seem to care what Wall Street thinks or Amazon might never have been anything more than one of the online retail pack. Our financial system, where nearly all of our resources are controlled, rewards corporate behavior that is destructive to the real-world economy and punishes actions that help it. How a system that was originally intended to allow companies to raise money with which to expand business has been allowed to mutate into this self-sustaining casino game is one of the great disgraces of the late 20th century. Our ends are fundamentally at odds with the ends of the financial sector.
These things have to change, or our very basic social fabric risks being torn asunder. It’s not going to matter what ebooks cost if people can barely afford food. A severe rich/poor class system will rip itself apart in this country. And all it takes to fix it is if our corporate leaders give up a small percentage of profits in favor of better compensation for employees. Stop hoarding your money overseas, pay your damn taxes, and pay your employees a fair, living wage. Actually give something back to the market you’re getting filthy rich on. There’s nothing to harvest if you don’t plant a few seeds. I’m not sure how, or even if we can change our corporate culture from its current parasitical nature back into a sustainable one, but I do know that if we don’t, the changes we’ve seen the past few years are but small scratches on the surface of what’s yet to come.
4. I’m holding to my opinion that the smart money is for people to develop their own skills and use them entrepreneurially
We can no longer count on steady, good paying employment on a wide scale. Companies aren’t going to give up the exploitative profit margins they’ve grown used to without being strong-armed, and any means of forcing them will have immediate, very ugly consequences. So let’s not do that. People everywhere need to cultivate ways to make money outside of traditional employment. The get-a-job thing is becoming a worse and worse deal by the day for workers and unless we are all happy ending up as poverty stricken wage slaves, we need to start creating our own economic opportunities. For writers, this means get off the fence and learn publishing. “I just wanna write,” sounds great and all, but it’s becoming increasingly unrealistic. Not knowing the business side intimately isn’t going to be a matter of choice much longer, either figure it out or get stuck under the boot heel of a giant publisher. It’s not an intriguing little side-light to consider any longer, but a virtual requirement for your long-term survival interests.
And it’s getting to be the same with everyone else. Wide-scale employment is becoming a race to the bottom, creating bottom-rung, benefit-less, minimum wage level jobs in droves while shedding living wage jobs. Figuring out how to generate adequate incomes on our own is the next essential skill we’re all going to need. Getting started sooner than later is probably going to be a very good idea.
The Watershed Chronicle 