Hugh Howey Offers a New View of Publishing

If you don’t know Hugh Howey, you should. He is an author who has forged a path to a hugely successful career via self-publishing, and then, even more importantly, has used his immense platform to serve as an author advocate. He just unveiled a new project called AuthorEarnings, whose mission is “to gather and share information so that writers can make informed decisions,” and “to call for change within the publishing community for better pay and fairer terms in all contracts.”

Yesterday he published “The Report” that offers a new view into the world of publishing and raises a ton of interesting questions. I urge you to read The Report, and Porter Anderson’s fantastic follow-up interview with Howey as well.

Critics will find faults with the results and methodologies, which Howey openly recognizes (and even supplies the Excel file so you can crunch the numbers yourself!). It’s not the whole picture, to be sure. But it’s the beginning of a new perspective and a new way of thinking about industry metrics. There is a desperate need for data, and we are past the point of being able to ignore this any longer.

There are two problems with what Porter Anderson calls the industry’s “crippling lack of data:”

1. Publishers ceded customer data to retailers years ago. Now there’s one retailer. Oops. They have all the data, and they are not giving it back anytime soon.
2. Publishers rely on their own highly-protected, secret sales data. The problem is that sales data is an outcome, a lagging indicator. There’s very little you can do to affect future sales by looking at sales reports. History is already written at that point.

Having no data (or the wrong data) forces industry editors to make guesses based on their experience. This used to work when the market was controlled and predictable. But the value of experience degrades in a market that’s churning. Tomorrow won’t look like today, so what good is looking at yesterday?

This is putting an incredible strain on the publishing industry. Their once-reliable “tentpole strategy” is sputtering and failing. What’s worse is that publishers cling to the stubborn belief that they can control the pace of change. What we’re seeing in Howey’s report is evidence that this belief is unfounded, and that in Howey’s opinion, that “the Big Five are powering the self-publishing revolution” through “harmful price practices” and other factors.

Publishers in the future will still have a lot to offer, but the conditions have already changed. The power has shifted to authors and readers. The “self-publishing stigma” is going away, thanks to people like Howey and thousands of others like him who are working hard at their craft to produce good work and form real connections with their audience. The best, most innovative work often comes from the fringes, and what we’re about to see is nothing short of a renaissance.