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Flatiron Building New York
The Flatiron Building (centre), New York, home to Tor Books and Macmillan. Photograph: Allan Baxter/Getty Images
The Flatiron Building (centre), New York, home to Tor Books and Macmillan. Photograph: Allan Baxter/Getty Images

Publishers and the internet: a changing role?

This article is more than 12 years old
Connecting with the audience is still publishing's aim, but does the internet make it distribute first and publish later?

Once in a while, someone will say something that's so self-evidently true, and so unexpected, that you'll spend the rest of your life working through its implications. For me, one such truth is "A publisher makes a work public, it connects a work and an audience", and the person who said it is my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, senior editor at Tor Books, the largest science fiction publisher in the world.

I first heard Patrick say this a decade or more ago, sometime after Google was founded, but before it was the enormous powerhouse it is today. Patrick was talking about the role of a publisher, and how it might change as a consequence of the internet. As soon as he said it, something clicked for me: the Flatiron Building, the famous skyscraper in midtown Manhattan that houses Tor and its parent company, Macmillan, is essentially in three businesses.

The first is identifying works for which it believes there may be an audience: reading slush (the uncharitable but accurate term for unsolicited manuscripts), entertaining agent pitches, and scouting around for writers to solicit.

Then there is the process of taking steps to prepare the work so that it will be of interest to that audience: editing, typesetting, proofreading, packaging, adding art and design elements.

The third business is connecting the work to the audience: writing catalogue copy and distributing catalogues, despatching a salesforce to major retail and wholesale channels, soliciting testimonials, placing ads, soliciting reviews, touring authors, and these days, producing internet collateral from accompanying videos to online chats to full-blown game tie-ins.

The mergers-and-acquisitions craze and the boom-and-bust cycles of the 80s and 90s drove publishers to move many of these functions out-of-house, so that manuscripts might come in through a freelance acquiring editor, be proofread by a freelance subeditor, receive a cover from a freelance artist, and be publicised by freelance publicists. This outsourcing revolution wasn't entirely straightforward, and there have been many bumps and false starts on the way as publishers worked out how to integrate freelancers into their workflow (it helped that many freelancers were former employees who already understood how things were done). Slowly but surely, publishers have delaminated themselves, separating out many of their vital functions and repositioning themselves as co-ordinators of many disparate suppliers who work in service of identifying, improving and delivering works to and for audiences.

In a world in which producing a work and getting it in front of an audience member was hard, the mere fact that a book was being offered for sale to you in a reputable venue was, in and of itself, an important piece of publishing process. When a book reached a store's shelf, or a film reached a cinema's screen, or a show made it into the cable distribution system, you knew that it had been deemed valuable enough to invest with substantial resources, not least a series of legal agreements and indemnifications between various parties in the value chain. The fact that you knew about a creative work was a vote in its favour. The fact that it was available to you was a vote in its favour.

Partly, this was the imprimatur of the creator and publisher and distributor and retailer, their reputation for selecting/producing works that you enjoy. But partly it was just the implicit understanding that no company would go to all the bother of putting the work in your path unless it was reasonably certain it would recoup. So "publishing" and "printing" and "distributing" all became loosely synonymous.

After all, it was impossible to imagine that a work might be distributed without being printed, and printing things without distributing them was the exclusive purview of sad "self-publishers" who got conned by "vanity presses" into stumping up for thousands of copies of their memoirs, which would then moulder in their basements forever. But just as the internal functions of publishing were separated out at the tail of the last century, this century has seen a separation of selection, duplication, preparation and distribution. Every work on the internet can be "distributed" by being located via a search-engine without ever being selected or duplicated or prepared.

It's true, of course, that the works that are best selected, best prepared and best distributed tend to reach wide audiences and/or find commercial success. You're more likely to watch a video that's been well-shot, publicised by a deep-pocketed pro, that bears the stamp of a major studio, and that has been inserted into a major distribution channel like LoveFilm or Netflix or a theatrical distribution arrangement.

But it's also true that many works are viewed on the internet without having any of these things. And sometimes they get them out of order: an obscure work is "discovered" by a blogger or a highly ranked tweeter, goes viral and is seen by many – and so is distributed first and published second. Clay Shirky calls this "Publish, then select" (in contrast with the old model, which was "Select, then publish"), but that's not quite right. The work isn't "published" until some force connects it with an audience.

Why does any of this matter? Because the point of a publisher is to connect creators and audiences. Partly, publishers do this by ignoring creators who have nothing to say to the audience whom they can reach.

Partly, they do this by revising the work in ways they believe will make it better for that audience. Publishers incidentally collect money from audiences, advertisers, or other third parties, and they sometimes remit part or all of the money to creators, but there are plenty of traditional publishers who did neither – the people who put Bibles in hotel rooms, for example; or the major newspapers that paid little or nothing to guest editorial writers who valued their reach more than the per-word fees.

The internet has created a large number of new kinds of publishers who act to connect works and audiences. These essentially group intosearch engines, then bloggers, curators, and tweeters, and finally suggestion algorithms (such as Amazon's "people who bought this also bought…" recommendations; Reddit's human voting system; Netflix's suggestion system).

In their own way, each of these entities acts to toss works over the attention transoms of audiences. There's not always money involved, and when there is, the entity that gets the bulk of the money differs for each example. But generating and distributing money are no more essential to publishing than printing or distribution are. Collecting societies like the PRS gather lots of money on behalf of musical performers but do no "publishing" to speak of; meanwhile, the people who pay them may be doing rather a lot of publishing, as when a hot club plays an obscure track for its impossible-to-reach, rarefied customers.

Publishing – including film and music and game publishing – has always been first and foremost about connecting works and audiences, because without an audience, there's no reason to improve a work, to duplicate it, to distribute it, nor to sell it. But for the first time, it's possible to "publish" without engaging with any other part of the process, and that is a weird and wonderful thing. It changes the power relationship between publishers and creators and investors – think of the musician who storms out of her label deal, puts her own work online and relies on Amazon or Magnatune or an influential MP3 blogger to promote the work to her fans.

Critics and skeptics of the internet characterise many of the present-day publishers as parasites. This is nothing new: musicians and writers have been griping about labels and publishing houses forever; but this time, it's often the labels and newspapers and other rightsholders who believe they're getting the short side of the deal.

But just as traditional publishers found new efficiencies when they outsourced many of their key functions, today, the signal duty of a publisher has become a standalone function. "Publishers" are everywhere, as general purpose as Google and as specialised as the obscure blog that manages to show a link to the three people in the world who care about it. Anyone with a future in a creative industry is going to have to make peace with this fact.

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