Have you ugly cried this week? I hope so. (Plus: my thoughts on Taylor Swift's book.)
I mean, I don't *really* hope you've ugly cried today, because I don't want you to be sad, but from a professional perspective, I'd rather you feel your feelings than try to outrun them.
Before my stupid feelings caught up with me just now, I was going to talk to you about Taylor Swift’s book.
Oh, maybe I’ll do that anyway, just for a minute.
*Sniff* I’m courageous that way.
You might have heard that Taylor Swift recently joined the self-publishing-o-sphere. On Black Friday and exclusively in Target stores, she (“she”) will release The Official Eras Tour Book, a $39.99, 256-page photo retrospective of her mega-popular concerts.
This is big news in book publishing, largely because none of us had any idea it was happening. Aside from (I’m guessing) a few freelance editors, writers, and designers, all of whom are almost certainly now gagged by NDAs, Swift and her team bypassed traditional publishing entirely in the creation and distribution of this book, which, spoiler alert, is probably going to sell more copies than any other US hardcover this year.
Foreign publishers—especially in countries that don’t have Targets, although Target does ship pretty much everywhere—are now going insane trying to figure out whether at least they can scoop up some rights.
Some of my industry colleagues seem upset by this.
Not me, though! The hot take I was going to share with you was basically just a bunch of maniacal laughter.
What a delightful poke in the eye this is to Amazon. (I see my girl Kathleen Schmidt agrees.) What a discomfiting little zap in the arm to Authors Equity, the new-ish publishing company founded to entice famous people away from legacy publishing with higher profit-sharing terms and a fun new “lean” business model.1 Turns out some famous people don’t need to share much at all.
Yay to anyone and anything that undermines the terrible shareholder-value-theory logic overtaking many publishers’ c-suites: “fewer and bigger books;” more investment in advances to already-rich celebrities; less investment in the bottom line (i.e. employees) and market R&D.
Taylor Swift’s example ought to freak out any publishing executive who’s bought into this kind of eight figure-advance celebrity book monocrop ethos as the future of legacy publishing.
For the rest of us, though, I’m kind of excited.
Truly, though: just kind of excited. Let’s be real: this is not actually a business plan that’s going to see hockey-stick growth among authors any time soon, even the mega-famous and/or mega-rich. Taylor Swift has the wealth, army, negotiating power, and fanatical cheer squad of a midrange Communist nation-state. There are maybe five to ten individuals on Earth capable of generating their own internal thermonuclear fusion like this,2 and you really need that kind of thermonuclear power to succeed in this model (at least on purpose).
At best, what Taylor Swift has done here is simply start her own personal-brand-driven publishing company, which is a thing individual billionaires have been known to do cough cough hi Catapult just ribbin’ we love you guys. Any publishing executive with a brain will understand that this is not an imminent threat to the status quo.
My highest hope for this development is simply that it will psych those people out. Maybe they’ll start having thoughts like this:
Should we start diversifying ye olde corporate strategy, lest other megacelebrities catch on?
Ought we to take some of the bajillions of dollars we’ve been throwing at the megafamous and reinvest it in a range of modestly profitable authors who actually need the services of a traditional publisher?
Mayhaps we should rehire our laid-off marketing and publicity people?
Could it be that traditional publishing was never actually supposed to work to Milton Friedman’s preferred economic specifications?
A girl can dream.
…Anyway, that’s what I was going to write about.
As in, I was going to write about it at my usual length, padding out my opinions with homespun asides and granular research into the overall success rates of other high-platform public figures who’ve opted to self-publish (or publish with companies like Authors Equity).
But that was before I made the mistake of listening to NPR.