The BEA’s CEO roundtable discussion hosted by Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Beast Tina Brown was held to a standing room only crowd wanting some answers from a panel consisting of who’s who in publishing.  Brian Murray of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, Carolyn Reidy of Simon & Schuster, John Sargent of Macmillan, and David Steinberger of Perseus Books Group.  Ms.Brown made opening remarks before the panel discussion likening the current digital explosion to the industrial revolution.  She stated, “The publishing industry is experiencing volcanic changes calling for major re-thinking and restructuring. Publishers today must reinvent the wheel while still publishing great books.  They are faced with fewer and fewer places to talk about and promote books because of the collapse of newspapers.”  How’s that for a cataclysmic view?  On to the discussion.

The first issue  tackled was Amazon’s e-book sales.  Amazon charges the consumer roughly 9.95 per e-book but the price to manufacture the books hasn’t changed.  The question was how publishers felt about Amazon pushing them into a corner on e-book pricing. There was a bit of dancing around the issue, but Perseus’ Steinberger spoke up saying, “The danger is of having a monopoly.”  Brian Murray didn’t see this as a huge concern stating, “E-books comprise only 1-2% of our revenue, we’ll take a closer once the numbers hit 10-20%.”  Statistically Amazon does have a corner on the market for e-readers and one of the largest on-line book stores.  My problem with Amazon’s Kindle is its inability to accept all formats.  Once you buy a Kindle at $359.00 you can only download books from Amazon.  And legally you can’t share that book with anyone else.  At some point the e-readers are going to have to all be universal, wireless and affordable.  I agreed with John Sargent when he said, “The true explosion will happen when you can download all books on any wireless device.”

The panel’s address on the issue of marketing and promotion in the digital environment left me scratching my head and questioning what I’d heard. Carolyn Reidy acknowledged that they now incorporate their digital departments in all current promotion and marketing efforts where before they just considered them a separate department.  Later in the discussion she gave specifics on what steps Simon & Schuster takes to market.  “We find out what type of website the author has, how many names are in the author’s database, we use retailers sites, e-mail to existing user names in our database, produce videos, we have the author create ‘extra things’ to put up on YouTube, Twitter and My Space, and we send chapters to specific niche book bloggers.”  Based on Ms. Reidy’s description, it is no different than what romance authors have been doing for many years.  And from what I heard, it appears that the burden is on the author to do the promotion.  Unless you’re an A List author with several best sellers under your belt, it doesn’t appear there will be a car waiting for you at the airport to take you to the next book store on your tour.  There won’t be a publicity director making sure you’re appearing on the Today Show or Good Morning America.  And there’s no assistant to put up your Facebook page, set up your Twitter account, or make that great video of your new release.  Sorry authors, over to you.

John Sargent , emphatically stated that viral marketing doesn’t sell more books.  “We had the #1 video on You Tube and only sold an additional 200 books from the video. The key to selling books is through word of mouth or Oprah.”  The general consensus was that traditional marketing is what gets the book out there, including national publicity and front of store displays.  While each of the publishers acknowledged the way you need to market books has changed, their main attention is on finding and publishing the next best seller.

After the roundtable discussion, Marisa and I chatted with publishing consultant Seth Gershel .  His take on the digital revolution was simply put, “Revolution is what happens overnight with one big change.  This is a digital evolution, where things change and continue to grow and evolve. Technology doesn’t drive the content; the content drives the use of technology.  Publishers will benefit from the tools.”

When Tina Brown said the publishing industry was in danger of becoming like the music industry I shook my head.  Because maybe in fact they are, we all know what happed when Napster and iTunes came along – the music industry most definitely had to reinvent themselves – and they did.  And music is still selling, for the same reason books in whatever format will sell.  The artist reaches out to people and takes them to places they’ve never been before.  In the end, writers will always write because they have a story to tell, and readers will always read because they want to be told a story.