What Would an Author-Centered Publishing Company Look Like?
In my favorite episode of the greatest TV show of the 21st century, cash is king. As a way of cutting a Gordian Knot of corporate merging (put a pin in that for a moment), the would-be founders of Sterling Cooper Draper Price are deciding which accounts they can bring/poach so that they have a puncher’s chance of getting the business off the ground.
The lynchpin of the operation’s success is leading the cash cow of tobacco giant Lucky Strike to their new Madison Avenue pasture. What Lucky Strike represents for SCDP isn’t prestige or guaranteed riches but something even more important for a fledgling business: cash flow. Lucky Strike means not just “fine tobacco” but a ready and reliable source of cash to spend on the firm’s operating expenses: payroll, rent, and the humdrum costs of doing business. This is the foundation on which smaller and more speculative clients (the upstart sport of Jai-Lai and the unglamorous laxative brand Secor) can be carefully stacked. This is the rock upon which they decide a marketing church can be built. And, in the end, they are right. In the very next episode, which kicks off Season 4, we jump forward to a fully armed and operational…well operation. Secretaries clack away, and junior execs mill about, and copywriters sit around figuring out how to make suitcases interesting. Be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it.
Because ultimately, as a service company, Sterling Cooper Draper Price’s greatest asset is its client list. Everything else the firm does is in service of getting and retaining that list.
It’s the realization that gets me. Don Draper has a moment where he realizes they can just quit (or rather have a co-conspirator fire them) and take their clients with them. It’s that simple.
When reading Dan Sinykin’s recent book, Big Fiction, I thought of this scene. The conglomeration of advertising firms dramatized in Mad Men is contemporaneous with the corporatization in book publishing that he chronicles. The stories are strikingly similar: family/closely held companies establish profitable companies in growing industries and thus become morsels for larger companies to gobble up.
The size, complexity, and sheen of the companies built on both books and advertising masked essentially simple businesses. In advertising, it was acting as a broker between the Hiltons and Kodak’s of the world and the newspapers, radio, magazines, and TV that had ad space to fill. In book publishing, it was (and is) acting as a broker between writers and the book-buying public. This is valuable work to parties on both sides of the transaction, but with conglomeration comes a focus on profit-seeking–and, more consequentially, expanding profits.
What if it were possible for some renegade group to break off a major publisher and create their own version of Sterling Cooper Draper Price? Rather than succumb to the Borg, they jumped in a shuttle and established an outpost somewhere? Who would do the breaking off, and what would they take with them? Put another way, what is portable that the people with money to spend want? In Mad Men, it was the ideas from Don Draper and the personal relationships forged by Roger Sterling/Pete Campbell, and a little business acumen provided by Layne Price. This could be done in publishing.
Let’s assemble our ideal group of defectors. First, we need the creative engine: the thing that makes the thing people want. This means books–ideally books from authors people already know (remember, Draper is already a known quantity in his world).
What if a group of authors, I don’t know maybe 12-25, with existing followings and pretty regular publishing cadences, agreed to band together and form a new house, one organized around the health and sustainability of the work, rather than drained like a hose of (supposedly) ever increasing streams of cash?
There is money to be made in publishing, as the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by KKR (and it’s debt service structure) makes clear. Would a publishing company founded and owned by authors (and maybe also/eventually the staff of the company) actually be any different? (Norton, it should be said, is an employee-owned company, though notably its relationship with authors is structured like any other publisher).
What else would they need? Distribution. Well, lucky for them, the consolidation in the book trade means you can distribute pretty smoothly through one of the two major players left standing: Ingram and Baker & Taylor. It is striking just how hard it was even 30 years ago to get your book to a place where readers could buy it. Modern ecommerce is the Saturn 5 compared to the Piper Cub of book-selling in the mid-20th century.
So far we have the raw material in the form of manuscripts and a path to get into book buyers in the form of distribution. We still need to do two things: turn the manuscripts into products (print, ebook, audiobook) and let readers know they exist. Luckily for our merry band of would-be egalitarian-authors, a host of people who already do this: they are the rank and file of the publishing industry and let me tell you–they will come work for you. People in publishing are two things: passionate about books and overworked. (Ok three things: they are also generally underpaid.) They move around constantly in search of a slightly better situation, and there is not a doubt in my mind that they would live Big 5 Publisher for Authors United(™). (This sort of thing happened once in Hollywood. Didn’t go great, I have to admit). Even just retaining your staff for longer would give you a competitive advantage and, armed with the piles of cash you aren’t sending back to a European holding company, you could make it worth their while to stay.
The irony is that authors with the juice to pull this off have the least reason to do so. They are already selling great, and they don’t have to worry about all the details of publicity, production, accounting, legal, and on and on that comes with even small business operations. This, I think, why it hasn’t been done. Ever since the emergence of robust digital tools made self-publishing the force it has become, I have been waiting for more established authors to strike out on their own. It just hasn’t happened.
But what about Brandon Sanderson you say? Exactly, what about Brandon Sanderson! It seems to have worked! Why isn’t anyone following him? Why does Leigh Bardugo sign a huge deal with Macmillan that looks an awful lot like the kind of thing that could have been Leigh Bardugo Books? It is so easy to imagine Sanderson and Bardugo teaming up with others in their space (NK Jemisin? Sarah J Maas?) and changing the book business in a fundamental way.
It wouldn’t be perfect of course. Books are still hard to sell, and just because you start with a group of marketable authors, there is no guarantee they stay that way for long. Developing the next generation and incorporating them into the company would be devilishly hard. But it would be a different, more exciting mess. At least for a while.
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