Yesterday I wrote a few words about publishing and the slush pile being like the piles of books in Fahrenheit 451, if you want you can read it all here and then click back to this tab for the next link in the chain.

Today I looked around to see what I could write about and found the article I really wanted to write if I’d had all the information. This article talks about publishing and how things have changed over the decades. The author, Mike Shatzkin, speaks from a higher position of authority than I do as he has actually been in publishing as was his father before him. I suggest you read it carefully as it indicates a total change in publishing behaviour.

I’m going to assume you’ve read the article. If every publisher stops publishing new books and relies totally on sales of their backlist then the industry is going to get stale very quickly. Of course, that would never happen as people want new books by their favourite authors and then they find new authors and, funnily enough, want new books by these authors too. I was going to posit a society where this had actually happened and therefore publishing companies had a minimum of staff with no slush readers, no editors and really only enough staff to manage the printing and sales of old books or even just enough staff to publish their backlist into digital format. If they went entirely digital then at some point in time they would only need one person to staff the entire organisation. It would be an interesting supposition if this did happen that at some point someone wrote and published a new book, what a furore that would cause.