Kate Eltham ruminates on publishers, brands, the author, and the web. Does a publisher’s brand have any relevance for readers? Should a publisher invest heavily in a significant web presence, or leave that to the writers? Kate goes back and forth on the question, bouncing around ideas about the new experimental imprint at HarperCollins, HarperStudio, and their blog the26thstory.
Which I find sort of … well … shocking, in 2008. Anyone who wants people to find their stuff needs to be on the web, thought part of the question the HarperStudio people were asking was: “Should we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a fancy website, or stick with the blog.”
To which I would answer: stick with the blog, it’s flexible enough to do what needs to be done, namely: create a searchable web presence, and make space for writer profiles.
But I must say I’ve always been shocked at how poor most publishers’ web sites are, from the perspective of a reader. What I want is pretty simple:
- Pages for all authors
- Bios
- Book lists
- Samples, or ideally the whole book
- Links to where I can buy their books
- Links to all reviews, press, blog postings about the book(s)
- Listing for events, talks, readings etc
When establishing a web presence, a publisher should ask: what kind of things does a reader want to know or do? Then provide that for them.
Back to the specific question of brands and publishers, raised by Kate and refined by O’Reilly, I answered on O’Reilly as follows:
Part of the problem is that publishers these days have all become so big and generic that their brand power doesn’t matter too much to most readers. Yet some still have an association with quality, Picador and Faber come to mind.
Look at the music business for some clues: BMG or Virgin probably doesn’t matter in the least to buyers, they are just big labels, all the same more or less. But smaller “craft” labels – concerned less with pushing product, and more with finding quality – value their listeners and their musicians in ways that the big labels don’t.
I think we are going to see similar movement in publishing, as new, smaller publishers start appearing, and gaining global audiences through the web. While the big guys will continue to be seen as generic brands, indistinguishable from each other, the smaller presses will increasingly take on the curator role.
