After reading this article, I couldn’t help but slap myself in the forehead and wonder why, oh, why do publishers do this to themselves?
It’s the 21st-century people. Try something a little new-ish. There are so many wonderful technologies available today that either would have prevented this kind of thing from happening, or fixed it at little to no cost.
Let me ‘splain. First up: email. All you had to do was email (and pay) a few real experts in these areas and have them check the book. All those inaccuracies would have been caught before the book went to press. It’s not as if this is some hot, now topic that had to have a book this very second to hold relevancy.
Next is a little something I like to call “word processing software.” I know it’s a crazy new phrase I’ve just invented for this piece, but stay with me. In the flash-bang future we have software that allows us to edit manuscripts when errors are discovered. This helps to prevent embarrassing things like printing books that are contrary to the facts.
Then we have e-books. I’m sure the word scares you big time publishing houses out there, but try to breathe and don’t panic. When you release an e-book it’s a simple matter to update the files that are sold and edit out errors even after the book is released. It’s not magic, but it’s close.
My personal favorite on this crazy talk train is POD, or print on-demand. There are these wonderful machines that can print a single copy of a book, digitally. You can print as many as you want at a time. How it works is you contact a company that uses POD technology and they will print books for you as the orders come in. There’s also digital short run printing when you want a thousand or so books at a time, for when you have an initial release to get lots of units out there. The great thing about both POD and digital short run printing is you can update the electronic files those books are printed from and edit out any errors that were found in the book.
I know. This is hard. Change is hard to handle. I get it. I once had to change my socks. It hurt. I cried. But thankfully I’ll never have to do it again.
How this all comes together is you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars, and an ass-load of embarrassment by combining the above and fixing the errors that inevitably creep into a manuscript. When you use POD and DSR printing you don’t have tens of thousands of books sitting in a warehouse somewhere that are either bought as a joke or will need to be pulped.
When you print 100,000 copies of a book cross your fingers and hope like hell that the manuscript is damn near perfect. Especially when it comes to things like historical facts. That’s one hell of a costly mistake you guys just made.
There are what, a dozen, a few score people working for your publishing house? And none of them caught this. None of the editors caught the mistakes. None of the production people mentioned any POD or DSR printing. Guess what? I know 100 college kids that would have pounded pavement for you to ferret out every one of those mistakes and given you a manuscript that sung. You could pay them half what your current employees make, and they would thank you for the job.
This is why your business model is failing. The world’s changed under your feet. You thought yourselves eternal. Your old paradigms are simply in the way. New ideas, new blood, new century.
Cronos meet Zeus.
