Mike Shatzkin and the Changing Value of “Delivering Quality Words Quickly”

As his new book goes to market, the veteran observer and analyst looks at a storytelling market transformed by technology, big retail, and visual vocabulary

Mike Shatzkin is likely the longest-active insider in book publishing, having spent nearly 50 years in the business. The Shatzkin Files blog site is a regular stop for industry players whenever he posts a new entry, and he’s to be honored on April 26 with the Book Industry Study Group’s 2019 Lifetime Service Award in New York City.

Considering his deep positioning in the business, it may surprise some that his new release, The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), is slanted toward the uninitiated, not fellow insiders. We can readily recommend it to trade and indie authors and others in the business for just that reason: it’s full of the kind of clarifying information on how publishing works that no one tells you going in. Shatzkin co-wrote the book with Robert Paris Riger, a fellow publisher and author who unexpectedly passed away in January 2018 after the book’s manuscript was done. With typical irony, Shatzkin now jokes that he’s having to actually read the book they wrote together to handle press calls like ours.

We started our interview by discussing what amounts in recent decades to a near abdication of content discovery by publishers to the literary agent community. Shatzkin confirms that using the agent network as a filter or screen has become more important to publishers than ever, not least because “they’ve wanted to shift money to marketing because digital requires it.” Literary agents are well positioned, he points out, to take on the acquisition-search functions in publishing. “Every agent wants their stuff looked at first and immediately,” he says, “so they want a reputation for giving people what they’re looking for.” It’s a symbiosis that works, then. “Which is why agents have lunch with publishers 200 times a year,” Shatzkin adds, with publishers picking up the tab, an unusual case in which the buyer entertains the seller.

Chapter 7 is one of the most enlightening in the book because its study of Amazon’s evolution reviews easily forgotten stages of development. For example, when looking at Seattle’s innovations in online retailing, Shatzkin lists the arrival of a reliable promise date for delivery, affiliate sales relationships, one-click ordering, the Prime program, and the Marketplace that gives outside vendors access to the big platform.

As robust as the trade-house Amazon Publishing operation has become, Shatzkin says that if Amazon were to face serious antitrust challenges, APub could be a casualty. “My hunch would be that at some point when antitrust becomes more of an issue or Amazon grows to a point that everybody’s pulling their hair out, that publishing would be one of the things they would feel comfortable giving up. I doubt that profits or margins [from the publishing division] move the needle at Amazon at all.”  

Shatzkin also says, “If you’re anybody else in retail, the last thing you want to do is sell an Amazon book.” Something well known in the industry is the resistance of Barnes & Noble, for example, to stocking Amazon Publishing books. While Amazon Publishing may be able to control large portions of the market in some areas, Ingram, rather than Amazon, could become the “Big Sixth” of the future, not least because of the broad stable of publishers it distributes.

In self-publishing, Shatzkin sees potential success for Ingram in entity self-publishing—corporate or organizational books in which publishing as brand extension is supported with books that can readily be placed at retail points that might be resistant to Amazon products.

For authors, however, Shatzkin points to the digital reality that while your books aren’t going out of print anymore, neither are anyone else’s. “Today,” he says, “you can read 99 cent books, $1.99 books that are two years old, four years old, six years old.” And where once such a read was new to the market and an unknown commodity, those older, low-priced offerings, particularly in the self-published sector, can now be evaluated quickly by scanning Amazon ratings and reviews.

All of which, Shatzkin says, means that “Every new book that comes out has a much bigger challenge to establish itself than it would have had 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Nothing ever dies anymore. Everything that’s published is available. … So I think the self-publishing route is not as attractive a way to make money and establish yourself” as it had been in the past, particularly around the years 2010 to 2013.

Bottom line: Writing well and choosing to produce what’s most important may never have been as crucial as it is now. Shatzkin says that writers—along with the rest of the publishing industry—have a steeper hill to climb today because of the shift from a verbal culture to a visual one of selfies, Instagram, videos, and cinematic narratives. “It was always the case,” he says, “that words were the easiest thing to copy and distribute … until the iPhone. Pictures and moving images became easier to capture and easier to transmit than words.” But maybe worse, he says, is the plethora of content in the never-out-of-print market. “Writers in general are challenged by other media in ways they’ve never been before,” Shatzkin says, “But even if that weren’t the case, there’s no way to grow the audience fast enough for the average writer not to suffer.”