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By Chris Meadows

image-thumb174[1] Why are publishers so lousy at building the close relationships with consumers that they’re going to need in the coming digital age? Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin suggests that part of the reason might be that their biggest retail customers, perhaps fearful of getting cut out of the loop, don’t want them to.

This is the kind of thing you don’t know for sure from the outside. Conversations between publishers and their top accounts, like conversations between publishers and the agents for their top authors, are private and closely guarded. But it has been anecdotally reported in the past that Barnes & Noble is not happy if publishers sell to consumers. And I’ve also heard that Amazon has told publishers that if they charge any price lower than the suggested retail in a direct sale, Amazon will consider that lower price to be the basis of their discounts, not the suggested retail.

This is probably why more publishers don’t try to sell e-books direct to consumers—their biggest customers will retaliate if they try it.

Shatzkin points out that just about everybody else is trying to form those relationships—authors, retailers, celebrities who might become authors. Publishers with consumer relationships, Shatzkin notes, will be publishers with bigger promotional mailing lists, and hence more effective at marketing. But it’s hard to build those relationships with consumers if you’re not directly selling to consumers. (This is one area where SF/fantasy press Baen really shines.)

And those retailers who are the publishing industry’s aforementioned biggest customers are starting to blur the lines between retailer and publisher, with self-publishing programs such as Author Solutions and PubIt.

Amazon has such a large share of the online print and ebook businesses that, with the publisher disintermediated and the author able to take a much larger share, they can credibly make the argument that a branded author — or one that otherwise does her own promotion and marketing — can make as much money through them alone as through a publisher serving the entire market.

The relationships between publishers, distributors, retailers, and consumers are starting to change in interesting ways. Who knows what the landscape will look like five years from now?

 
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