Authors

What about people who harbor a desire to live off of their writing? After all, most writers write because they couldn't imagine not doing it. It is not a profession in the normal sense. They feel compelled to write in the same way that painters feel compelled to paint and musicians are driven to create music. But they have to eat and pay the rent, too.

Intermediaries who mistake that urge to write as a willingness to be exploited will get their heads handed to to them. In a free market, intermediaries are always replaceable, but we need both our authors and readers to always remain motivated.

We are seeing today the early phase of intensified competition in book publishing, as is happening in other industries affected by digitization. Competition will mean, first, more choice and lower prices for readers and, secondly, a bigger share of the pie for authors.

Specifically, we expect to see the following:

1. The end of advances. The irony is that the authors who really need advances, the new ones scraping by on Ramen noodles, cannot get them. Meanwhile authors who don't need them, the ones living the high life off of previous royalties or whatever made them famous enough to get an advance, are showered with ridiculous advances at the end of bidding wars between big publishers. Authors will write without advances. Unlike movies, books are relatively cheap to create. In the digitized world of e-books and print on demand, authors get paid as soon as someone buys the first copy. The lack of an advance will be compensated for by a bigger share of the revenue pie.
2. Authors getting a bigger share of the pie. It makes no sense for authors to get only 10% in a digitized world. We expect this to grow from 10% to 30% or more. Digitization takes most of the costs out of the supply chain. So, unless an intermediary such as Amazon charges monopoly-like rents, authors will get a bigger share. Amazon has amazing power today and will squeeze everyone in the supply chain. But new competition will emerge (we'll look at this later), and keeping authors happy is critical to the success of publishers. Authors are like software developers, not powerful individually but incredibly powerful en masse (and just as ornery!). Authors will need a bigger share also because prices will be coming down. But the drop in price, coupled with globalization, will open up new markets in which to sell books and therefore generate more revenue.
3. Authors creating the finished product. Today, authors write and publishers look after the cover art and editing. If authors were to get 30% or more, they would have to take on these two other jobs. But in a world of desktop publishing tools and social networks to organize work and editing, this will not be hard.
4. Online marketing replacing book tours. It is the bane of the author's life. The book tour is wonderful the first time: "Wow, I am a real author now." But this is not the same as musicians going on tour. Musicians are performing their job in its natural environment during live shows; not true of authors reflecting on their books on stage. There are many and much better ways to promote books online.

The future of authors can be summed up, then, as: do more of the work and get a bigger percentage of the retail price, which will be lower.

Printers

Printers. Who loves you, baby! Predicting the decline of the printing industry is easy, but hopeful signs exist:

• Print on demand will significantly increase the types of books that can get printed.
• Lower prices, resulting from costs eliminated from the supply chain, will increase demand.
• Globalization will increase demand.

It will be interesting to see how digital printing technology, the fundamental driver of print on demand, changes the role of printing over time. Today, we have two extremes:

1. Mass-scale printers, centrally located. We even saw printing move offshore, where labor is cheaper. But this will likely reverse in a print-on-demand world, where immediacy and delivery costs are critical: printing will be done closer to the consumer.
2. Do-it-yourself printing, also known as using the printer in your home or office. Do-it-yourself printing is both expensive (those ink cartridge costs really add up) and a hassle.

Digital printing could quite possibly move to a hyper-local network model. Orders would be automatically routed to the printer closest to the consumer. The already existing infrastructure of small-scale local print shops would welcome this model. The book would then be delivered (quickly and cheaply) to a local retailer or the consumer's home or office. Perhaps the printer would be located in the back office of the retailer?

This fits the trend on the Internet of everything moving towards the edge. It is also an environmentally friendly model, reducing emissions from delivery trucks.

The model won't really help existing large-scale, centralized printers, though.