This past weekend, at the 17th annual Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, helped demystify the publishing process for the 119 attendees and shared how he was reading on his summer vacation.
"I read on the iPad, iPhone, Sony Reader and a book," he said. Staff at Little, Brown use Sony Readers to read everything from manuscripts to catalogue copy. Long gone are the days of submitting manila envelopes, he assured the aspiring mystery writers.
"E-books are kind of great, and kind of terrifying," Pietsch said as he held up his Sony Reader. "I hate this screen. It's like reading on an Etch-a-Sketch that had the knobs fall off." Yet he assured the attendees that all of the devices would improve, and he said that what he liked best about e-books is the instant availability that feeds into the consumer's impulse to buy.
"But there is nothing online like having books in the front of a bookstore all face out," he continued. "An ecosystem without independent booksellers would be an extremely damaged ecosystem." Still, he added, writers should want publishers to sell books every way they can.
Pietsch gave the attendees a brief, entertaining lesson in editorial and acquisitions meetings and into how publishers calculate author advances--still the riskiest part of the equation. "The big challenge for a publisher is not finding great books; it's finding books that can stand out," he said.
In that regard, Pietsch sees the Internet as the best thing that ever happened to publishing, by accelerating word-of-mouth buzz "30-fold."
"Good news travels faster than it ever did," Pietsch continued. "And books catch fire faster than ever." One example: the publication in 2005 of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. He credits the company's electronic marketing campaign with getting the book onto the New York Times bestseller list in its first week in publication. "That was the first time a first novel did that," said Pietsch.
When Pietsch started at Scribner in 1978, he said, he especially enjoyed working on suspense fiction. Over the years, Pietsch has edited and published James Patterson, George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly. This year, Little, Brown launched a new suspense fiction imprint, Mulholland Books, which brings the press full circle, back to Raymond Chandler. And now, like all genre fiction, suspense fiction does well in e-form.
During the q&a an attendee asked if celebrity books are being published at the expense of fiction. "The things people want from books hasn't changed," Pietsch answered. "They want to lose weight, make money and get right with God."
He concluded by saying that assertions that publishing is a "dying" business are "completely belied by the facts." He described publishing as "a healthy business looking for talented writers.
"The most exciting words in the business are 'first novel,' " Pietsch said. No doubt, music to these aspiring novelists' ears.--Bridget Kinsella