{"id":928,"date":"2008-12-05T09:44:04","date_gmt":"2008-12-05T09:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/12\/shakeout.html"},"modified":"2008-12-05T09:44:04","modified_gmt":"2008-12-05T09:44:04","slug":"shakeout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/12\/shakeout.html","title":{"rendered":"Shakeout"},"content":{"rendered":"

Besides sorting through Rome memories and trying to adapt to the new WordPress interface (which I think I like, but takes getting used to), I’ve been watching the publishing news closely this week. There have been a series of layoffs and shakeups in all sectors this week:
\nHoughton Mifflin Harcourt<\/a>
\nRandom House<\/a>
\nThomas Nelson<\/a> , which is laying of 10% of its workforce – the latter being a mild surprise since the religion sector has been a consistent growth area in publishing – until this year, it seems:<\/p>\n

When that post came, Hyatt described the layoffs\u2014the second round at Nelson in the last year\u2014as “purely a result of the slowdown in the economy<\/a>,” motivated by the sales reports for September and October. (Thomas Nelson is not a member of the Association of American Publishers<\/strong>, but it may be worth noting as a point of comparison that the AAP has reported an 8.9 percent decline in the sale of religious books during the first nine months of 2008, including an 11.8 drop in the month of September alone.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In some ways this is scary, but in others, not. Publishing has been a questionable mess for a long time, grappling with all sorts of issues, most of which come down, in the end, to the question of what are people willing to pay money to read anymore and how and where are they buying those books?<\/em>
\nWhat has happened, is that a publishing, distribution and sales have consolidated into a few big players over the past few years, it has produced its own set of financial and structural difficulties. For the writers,\u00a0 it has been more and more difficult for non-celebrity writers to get picked up outside the genre sectors. The Long Tail has not managed to whip our way.\u00a0 Besides, given the size and priorities of the big secular houses, it has been more and more difficult for writers to see what benefit being published by them gives aside from the assurance that a third party besides your mother has read this and think it’s worth putting out there. They don’t market anything except their few A list titles, they drop you without even telling you and, as one acquaintance of mine will tell you, they don’t want to let go of the rights to your book either, even if they’ve put you out of print. (Why? Part of the reason is the promise of print on demand, which has encouraged houses to hang on to rights – if they can squeeze a few dollars out of selling 20 POD copies of your book this year, they will, no matter if you know you could sell more if you could have the rights back and either self-publish or sell to a smaller house.)
\nSo, I’m watching with interest and re-thinking things on my end, as are most of us scrambling scribblers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Besides sorting through Rome memories and trying to adapt to the new WordPress interface (which I think I like, but takes getting used to), I’ve been watching the publishing news closely this week. There have been a series of layoffs and shakeups in all sectors this week: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Random House Thomas Nelson ,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nShakeout - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/12\/shakeout.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Shakeout - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Besides sorting through Rome memories and trying to adapt to the new WordPress interface (which I think I like, but takes getting used to), I’ve been watching the publishing news closely this week. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}