There was an article in the New York Times this week about how The Daily Beast (of Emerson is the most dangerous school in America fame) is planning to launch their own imprint with Perseus in December, called, appropriately enough, Beast Books.

The Times explains:

On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores.

What sloth!

At Beast Books, on the other hand:

writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition.

So these are going to be high-quality books, then? With a lot of careful research? The sorts of books that might make ridiculous and unfounded claims about the relative safety of urban colleges?

Now, look, I frequently drone on here at Vernacular about how it’s a good thing for the publishing world to embrace new business models — because, hey, we’d all like to make money doing this, and that sure ain’t happening with the business models we’ve got — but I’m going to arbitrarily draw the line on this one.

Reading the Times piece, you might actually think I’d be in favour of this move: Beast Books’ authors are going to be drawn overwhelmingly from a pool of freelancers, and they’re going to get paid low five-figure advances plus a share of the profits that the bigwigs describe as “meaningfully more” than the standard 15% split for hardcovers. If you figure one to three months per manuscript, that’s four or five books a year — so at least $40k per year plus a profit share, which I could certainly live pretty comfortably on.

Of course, that assumes that each book would be a success, and let’s be serious, here. One to three months to write a manuscript? Even with Beast Books’ rather pathetic definition of a manuscript as 40,000 words, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that with that little time, either your book is going to be shitty, or you are going to be miserable, or both. It’s a misguided publishing industry that thinks quality nonfiction just appears without careful, thorough research, and multiple redraftings, and I don’t want to read a “professional” book that’s been rushed out in three months after a couple of hours on Google and a trip to the public library, any more than I do a freshman comp paper that’s been rushed out in three hours after a couple of minutes on Google and a trip to Wikipedia. (And I’d rather not even think about how poorly something will read that’s only had a month to get copyedited and proofed.)

What I do like about this model is the idea of an e-book in conjunction with a limited paperback run, which seems like an intelligent way to gauge interest in a title in a low-cost way, without having to waste money and paper printing huge runs that never get bought. I just don’t see why that has to include such a short turnaround time for manuscripts that’s going to make nothing released this way worth buying.

Tags:   Andrew · books · freelancing · getting published · publishing industry · This Week in PublishingNo Comments