Okay, so I woke up this morning having just had a brilliant dream about how to save publishing.
It's much later now, and the dream has mostly faded, and maybe it was one of those ideas that seemed brilliant in the dim crepuscular light of early morning but which isn't actually brilliant at all.
But, anyway, here it is. I think we need small publishers to establish themselves as lifestyle brands. With merch and stuff. I mean, we've got plenty of lifestyle brands, where people are dying to announce their affiliation with a brand because of what it says about them. So, like, people will spend way too much on a Starbucks travel mug, because it says, "you know, I'm not a Dunkin' Donuts person."
Writers, most of us anyway, can't establish ourselves as brands because we simply don't have enough product. The most prolific of us will put out one or two books a year, and they'll be read once if at all. Compare this to bands who can put out an album a year that people will listen to over and over again. Also they get to tour and remind the public of their existence, and the live show is another product, and the t-shirt is yet another product. So if writers can't really create brands that stick in the public consciousness, why can't publishers? Right now very few publishers have any kind of brand identity at all--do you pay the slightest bit of attention to which of Bertlesmann's subsidiaries published that book you're currently reading? Can you tell a Harper book from, say, a Random House book?
So what if you had publishers who specialized in a certain type of book, and maybe they owned some retail establishments, or maybe they were also record labels (!), and all of their products allowed consumers to feel something about themselves--I'm a hard-workin' American! or "Je suis un citoyen du monde!" or "I'm an annoying hipster who can't shut up about Brooklyn, like anybody else in the world cares about Brooklyn!" or whatever.
McSweeney's comes closest to this--certainly the brand has a message that is reinforced by the magazines. But there's a lot of room in the market for different niches. Tor is trying to establish a social networking site at tor.com, but their identity is pretty much, "We publish science fiction," which I think is actually too broad.
I'm probably not explaining this incredibly well, and, so many hours after I woke up, I'm not really that sure it made any sense to begin with. But if you can't put some half-baked idea you came up with while half-asleep on your blog, well, where can you put it?
