ami with an i

It Depends

Because I am a giant publishing nerd who enjoys tempests in teapots, last week was basically off the scale in terms of excitement. The New York Times weighed in on whether or not bookstores should be charging for author events, launching a thousand blog freakouts about whether this is elitist or not, and about who gets or does not get to stare at Joan Didion.

And weirdly/excitingly Pottermore.com was announced to potentially be any number of things—an online community, additional Potter content by J.K. Rowling, which may or may not be included in the ebooks she is going to sell exclusively on her site, which somehow Sony (?) is involved with, and also the ebooks won’t be available until October (??), although some people will be beta testing the site in July. It was firmly decided that Pottermore was either The Event That Would Change Everything, or A Luddite Author Joining The eBook Game Way Late.

While I am a big fan of armchair quarterbacking events with my friends in publishing, because we don’t have kids and therefore have a lot of time to devote to talking about things like this, I found last week to be especially frustrating for its lack of restraint from the backseat drivers.

The answer to both of the questions above is the same answer that a rational person would apply to most questions about publishing: it depends. Can certain bookstores charge for particular author events? Probably. Can every bookstore everywhere charge for every author event ever, even if it means turning their backs on a retiree on a pension who dreams of a glimpse of Joan Didion, just for one minute? Probably not.

Publishing, we need to cool it. One of the badass things about where we’re going is that there’s a potential to escape one-size-fits-all solutions. J.K. Rowling can partner with Sony (???, seriously) to sell her ebooks directly for whatever price she wants, and John Locke can sell his ebooks for $0.99 and there can be space for both of those writers and both of those readers. Our job right now is to increase the pie of potential readers knowing that some of those readers will be people who don’t pay a lot for a title and do it only when they’ve beat Angry Birds (note to ed: is this possible??), and some people are going to be willing to pay $100 to stare at Joan Didion as long as it supports their local indie bookstore, and that there are publishing models that can accommodate both.