The only really surprising thing about Seth Godin’s announcement last week that he was leaving traditional publishing behind was that so many people were surprised by it.  If you were one of them, and you work in publishing, you should start updating your resume.  You’ve got a few years, at most, before you’re in an industry you don’t understand.

There are a couple of big, important functions that traditional publishers have always provided:  editing, filtering, distributing, and marketing.  All of these things are still important.  The big change is that you can get pretty good providers of all of these outside of traditional publishing.  This is not to say that traditional publishers aren’t doing these things well.  It just means that people now have other options that are good enough to be successful.

First, editing.  I don’t have any sort of data on comparing editors at big publishing houses to good freelancers.  I suspect that there are really good ones and really bad ones of both categories, with a better good-to-bad ratio at the big publishers.  But I do know that you can get a good editor without a big publisher.  This has probably been true for a while.

Next, filtering.  The self-publishing world hasn’t quite figured this one out yet, but neither have traditional publishers, so I’m going to call it a wash.  There are plenty of books that get published by respected publishers that are just garbage.  And there are plenty of books that are really good that don’t get published at all because they don’t hit enough of the checkboxes to qualify them as a good bet, so they get ignored.

Amazon and Lulu have distribution pretty well covered.

Marketing is the one big thing where traditional publishers still have a huge advantage.  Unless you’re Seth Godin, and know a thing or two about marketing yourself.  People talk about authors needing a “platform”, and some hate that word, but having a platform makes the marketing a lot easier.  The bigger the platform, the less marketing you need to do, and the more your network will do for you.  Seth Godin’s platform is one of the biggest out there.

The point is, everything that traditional publishers do is easier now than it was ten years ago.  Some of it is easier than it was last week.  It will only get easier.  Smart publishers will start focusing on the advantages they still have, and look for new ways to use what they know and what they do well to gain more advantages.  Smart publishers will survive.  Others won’t.  Whining about the death of this or that, the relative merits of ebooks versus print books, and most of the rest of it just isn’t productive.

I think what we’ll start seeing is publishing-as-a-service.  Make a list of every step that goes between the author finishing a first draft and a satisfied customer parting with money.  A good publisher can help with all those steps.  A smart publisher will figure out how to let authors do some of those steps themselves, perhaps in exchange for a higher royalty rate.  An author should be able to choose which of these steps to handle, and which to let the publisher handle.

Some will probably say that sounds like vanity publishing, and I agree.  There is nothing inherently wrong with vanity publishing.  If the publisher is taking money from the author and not giving anything back, then that’s wrong, but that’s the publisher, not the process.  If I give you a list of services related to publishing that we do, along with a list of prices, and you choose which ones you want and which you don’t, no on is taking advantage of you.

The bottom line is that there is no one right way for every author to make a living by writing.  There are more paths available now than ever before in human history, and this is a fantastic, exciting time to be starting in the industry.  And I’m really looking forward to what’s going to happen when the big publishers start thinking about where the market wants to go, and how best they can serve it, rather than crying about agency models and ebook cannibalization and copyright infringement.

But if you are stuck in the mindset where this is the way it has always been done, so this is the way we must always do it, then you’re going to have a problem.  The subtext of Godin’s announcement that I haven’t seen discussed much is the implication that he’s not even sure the book form is useful to him anymore.  For most people, the books will be important for a while (though I think the ebook transition will happen faster than many are predicting), but getting stuck thinking about selling books is dangerous.  Think about selling your authors, or helping them sell themselves.  Then, when we transition from ebooks to direct brain interfaces with nearly human-equivalent artificial intelligences designed to immerse you in a story, you still have your business.

Edit to add:  I’ve been asked to firm up my conclusion.  It is this:  If you want to remain in publishing longer than a few more years, stop whining.  Stop thinking about how you can make the industry keep behaving like it always has.  Think about things you are good at that are hard for other people.  Find more people who need those things done.  Make a compelling case to those people that you should be the one to do those things for them.  Continue to refrain from whining.

Industries change.  The companies that survive those changes are the ones who scour those changes for opportunity.

Much has been made of the impending demise of the newspaper, as the Old Media (With a few exceptions) has steadfastly refused to embrace the new opportunities of digital delivery of content.  Many seem to think that, without newspapers, we will have no accountability, no one to peel back the layers and expose the wrongdoing in the world and in our government.

Meanwhile, Comedy Central and The Daily Show are making a pretty strong case that we may actually have more accountability.

Stewart’s point was that Wall Street got fat off of all our pension plans, 401K’s and long-term investments, while the “Fast Money” crowd cashed in our long-term investments — and CNBC was complicit in the entire gambit…

Click through below and watch the video, which I believe includes unaired content, and watch Stewart skewer Jim Cramer over CNBC’s role in our financial mess.

Far from needing newspapers to keep everyone honest, perhaps the time has arrived when newspapers are actually holding us back.  If they go away, we won’t see an end to journalism.  In fact, with greater freedom, unshackled from the old ideas of what journalism is, we may see a renaissance.  In some ways, with anyone who cares to observe and share the world, we already have.  People can complain about the quality of much of this sharing all they want, but the fact that much of it is well-produced, well-thought-out, and spot-on is inescapable.

The world does not need newspapers.  It simply needs good journalism.  And that shows no signs of going away.

via Jon Stewart slaughters crazy finance guy Jim Cramer — video – Boing Boing.

There’s a long and interesting article at Ars Technica from a guy who’s been in the ebook business for a long time.  His point is, basically, that everyone has gotten it wrong for the last ten years, making the same mistakes, over and over.  And the big players today are still making those mistakes.

He lists many of them, and most will sound familiar – Ebooks are too expensive;  DRM hurts honest customers and doesn’t do a thing to stop piracy, which is a vastly overstated problem anyway;  No one has tried anything really and truly new with ebooks.

It’s all a little depressing.  I was hoping he’d get to some brilliant idea to save the book industry, but he never really does.  But he gets it – he sees the ridiculous state of the industry now, stubbornly clinging to the old way of doing things instead of embracing all the new things you just couldn’t do before.

The world is still looking for publishing business models that work and will continue to work when all books are ebooks.  Someone could make a lot of money . . .