What do you do when everything you’ve learned is obsolete?
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It’s not often I can sit (or stand) for a whole hour listening to a presenter without having my mind wander, but tonite I was really fascinated by Dan Poynter’s talk at the Arizona Book Publishing Association.
Now if you don’t know him, he’s best known for writing his “Self-Publishing Manual,” which has 16 revised editions and 20 printings in 28 years. He calls it “the book that launched a million+books.”
He was telling us that everything we’ve learned about publishing is obsolete, and as he rattled down the list of things that will disappear from the book publishing world as we know it, it made sense – frightening sense:
- literary agents will disappear
- book proposals will disappear
- the 3 selling seasons will disappear
- print ads will disappear
- book reviews will disappear – Amazon reader reviews are taking over
- quality at the big publishers is going down
- newspapers will disappear
- printing presses are expensive – more and more we’ll move to online
- crowdsourcing for information (wikipedia, for example) is cheaper and better
- independent bookstores will disappear
- returns will disappear
- chain stores will disappear
The best thing you can do is to trim your sails and go where the market is going. He talked quite a bit about ebooks. In 2008, the ebook market grew 125%. People who read ebooks read more books. There are 1.2 million e-reading devices now, and there will be 6 million sold in 2010. The immediacy, price and customer service of ebooks surpass that of “pbooks,” he called them (printed books). There are more than 40 million iphones and ipods, and he says he reads books on his iphone – that way he doesn’t have to carry a separate device
He advised the audience to “do all [their] promotion online – forget the print publications.” The old social networking around the campfire has moved to the internet. “Spend valuable time online.”
I’ve presented several times in the last few weeks on the topic of social media and promotion. I can see in the eyes of the audience members — some get it, and will trim their sails. Others will be resistant to change and will wonder how they ended up off course.
One important thing I learned in college is How To Learn. That was thirty years ago, and the skill has carried me through grad school, a sixteen+ year career in my first chosen field, and now it has helped me for 6+ years in my second career.
What I didn’t learn was how to be passionate, but that part came naturally. That’s the part that colleagues and clients notice. That’s what attracts attention to blogs and helps to market products and services.
Jon, that is so true. College helped teach me how to learn, no matter what the subject. That liberal arts background is helping me now as each new development in technology emerges.