DITCHWALK

A Road Less Traveled

Topics / Books / Docs

About / Archive / Contact

Copyright © 2002-2023 Mark Barrett 

Home > Archives for HarperStudio

The Successful Publisher

April 7, 2010 By Mark 6 Comments

I’ve been thinking about the previous post, and it seems to me the same advice holds for anyone looking to get into publishing — whether as a self-published author, or as a publisher of other people’s works on any scale. If you don’t define success yourself, the miserable soulless scorekeepers are going to define it by how much money you’re making, or whether or not you’re still in business.

The recent dissolution of HarperStudio is not simply a case in point, it’s a case that demonstrates the utterly bankrupt way the miserable soulless scorekeepers go about their business. What happened at HarperStudio, as far as I can tell, is that the guy who ran the place — Bob Miller — decided to go do something else. In a corporate context that’s the equivalent of leaving your wallet on the street, because there are always other factions in a corporation that want to play with the money in your budget. But is that the same thing as failing?

Seriously: how many people inside HarperCollins were rooting for HarperStudio, and how many were hoping it would fail? If you worked for the mothership, did you really want someone proving that a stripped-down version of what you were doing could actually work? Or did you want it to blow up, with or without your own finger on the trigger? I have no idea if Bob Miller was a hampered visionary or bumbling idiot, but that’s really the point. Does anyone know what was happening behind the scenes? Does anyone know what the money flow was like, and how HarperStudio’s subsidiary status with HarperCollins affected its ability to be successful?

What if Bob Miller had not decided to leave HarperStudio? What if he was still there, doing his job, but the company was badly in the red? Would that be a success story? Better yet, what if he was still doing his job, but he was embezzling money from the company and cheating authors at the same time? From the outside it would look like he was still in business, and thus not a failure — at least until he got caught. Is HarperStudio a failure because it tried to play fair? Are vanity presses that prey on naive customers demonstrating a better business model? (I’ll leave you to guess what the miserable soulless scorekeepers think.)

And what about the absurdity in all this? Anyone who thinks that HarperStudio failed in an objective sense has to reconcile that view with a larger context in which publishing is a wounded, dying animal that has little chance of continuing in its current form. If you really want to say that HarperStudio failed, isn’t the entire industry failing by that score? How many other companies are being held together by their leadership, while the bottom line bleeds out through an artery shredded by the internet? Isn’t there general agreement even now that the big publishers are playing for time in their dealings with Apple and Amazon, and their imposition of the agency model? Is there anyone who can point to a model that’s going to be an unbridled success a year from now? Five years? Ten? Are you shaking your head?

Publishers at every level need to define why they’re doing what they’re doing. Leaving that task to the miserable soulless scorekeepers will always result in the inevitable charge that you’re a failure, because that’s the point of keeping score. If you care about books or writers or publishing, defining that passion will prevent others from defining it for you. You won’t ever be able to get them to admit it, of course, but that’s not the goal. The goal is saving your sanity, if not your soul.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: HarperStudio

It’s Not Who You Know

January 26, 2010 By Mark 9 Comments

We’ve all heard the old adage:

It’s not what you know but who you know that matters.

Apart from being a conspiracy-theorist’s dream excuse, the adage does have a grain of truth in it. Relationships and networking may matter as much or more in business as your skill set.

I mention this because of a blog post put up by Debbie Stier, Senior V.P. and Associate Publisher at HarperStudio, and Director of Digital Marketing at HarperCollins. It’s a short personal piece about an epiphany in Debbie’s work life, but it also speaks volumes about the book business and how it actually works.

Like many would-be authors I used to think that writers wrote books in little cottages in the woods, bleeding truth onto pages already saturated with tears. When a book was done the author then agonized over query letters, blindly attempting to appease personal idiosyncrasies that each agent somehow believed to be an industry norm. If, against all odds, the author managed to land an agent for his book, the agent went through a similar process trying to generate interest in an editor at a publishing house. If, against these even-longer odds, an editor became interested, that editor then went through a similar process trying to get the support of the person or group that was responsible for pulling the trigger on an actual deal.

Read Debbie’s post about the five new books she’s excited to be working on and you’ll see none of that. In fact, there is no direct mention that Debbie read a single word by any of these authors as a means of discovering them:

I’d heard him speak at the Web 2.0 conference and I wanted desperately to work with him.

…

The next author to sign with HarperStudio was Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com. I’m a huge fan — have been following his blog, twitter, videos, etc. for some time…

…

Jill Kargman is a novelist. I saw her on Samantha Ettus’s show Obsessed TV six months ago and knew I wanted to work with her.

…

I’d been thinking a lot about merits and challenges of being a small company within a large corporation, and Bob suggested that there’s a book in that. Nick Bilton from the New York Times lead me to Ryan Tate at Gawker, and he is now writing a book for us called Skunkworks, which I can’t wait to read.

…

One more author who I want to mention who signed with HarperStudio, though it was slightly before that December epiphany, but still very much part of my process of realizing how much I love my job, is Melanie Notkin, the Savvy Auntie. She’s writing her Savvy Auntie’s Guide to Life.

Here’s what Debbie did not say: ‘I read Author X’s novel/manuscript and it knocked me out.’ And yet there’s nothing wrong with that. As noted above, this kind of book-production paradigm may actually be the norm these days.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books, epiphany, HarperCollins, HarperStudio, Publishing

Reality as Anchor

September 30, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

HarperStudio floated a link on Twitter today pointing to a post on their blog. The post, titled Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose and written by Bob, reflects on a recent panel discussion of publishing bigwigs which was moderated by Chris “Long Tail” Anderson.

After detailing Anderson’s recent experiment of giving away e-versions of his most recent book (which Bob does a poor job of relating: see comments for Chris’s corrections and Bob’s apology), Bob says this:

“The problem is when authors want to have their cakes and eat them, too…getting a large advance but wanting to experiment with free content models, or getting a large advance and then deciding that what they really want is more marketing.”

It’s hard to respond to this sort of thing, in the way that it’s always hard to talk to someone who has an entirely different reality base.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: HarperStudio