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Jeanette Winterson at The Quarterly Conversation
If there’s one man in publishing I trust to predict the future of the industry, it’s Richard Nash. His 8 predictions for publishing in 2020 are worth checking out. Here are a couple:
4. Long-form text-only narrative will continue to thrive as it has since cavemen gathered around the fire, just as painting has thrived since Lascaux. The advent of more and richer iterations of multimodal entertainment and edification will not kill off others (either multi or single mode) in the future, just as they did not in the past, though they certainly will kill businesses with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement based on past success in a given mode.
8. In 2020 the disaffected twentysomethings of the burgeoning middle classes of India, China, Brazil, Indonesia will be producing novels faster than any of us can possibly imagine.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
fascinating stuff, but my question is this: what will all those disaffected middle class Chinese writers do AFTER they’ve produced all their novels? If all the bookstores are gone, if all but a handful of the publishers are gone (and that handful are only putting out Stephen King novels), what will the new ‘means of distribution’ be?
It’ll depend on how we define the term—the word publisher might not survive the decade, but there will be tens of millions of intermediaries connecting readers and writers all over the work. Remember, bookshops have existed for only about one quarter of the lifespan of publishing. Though note I didn’t say all the bookstores would go, either, just that the chains would go. Amazon will likely still be with us, along with several hundred bookstores/boutiques/dealers/community centers.
(My predictions focused on what’s likely to happen with the corporate pubs, it didn’t address what I expect to be the massive proliferation of alternatives, with a great many business models.) See also my essay on 2020 at http://publishingperspectives.com