Publisher’s Weekly’s report of the London Book Fair’s 2012 CEO panel  (on the question: “Is the Publishing Industry’s Business Model Sustainable?”), featuring co-founder of Unbound, John Mitchinson.

Is the publishing industry’s business model sustainable? That was the question for the London Book Fair’s 2012 CEO panel, chaired by Association of American Publishers president Tom Allen. With the industry facing “seismic change,” Allen said it was a fascinating time to be involved, and characterized his role at AAP as working to establish “rules of the road,” that will allow the publishing industry to survive, and thrive, mainly through copyright advocacy and legislative efforts. On that front Allen acknowledged that 2012 has yielded some “spectacular failures,” namely, the failures SOPA/PIPA, the controversial, publisher-backed copyright legislation in the U.S. That failure, Allen, noted, highlighted a new reality for publishers—they now compete with new, big industries with sometimes divergent business and legislative agendas—Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. 

The first CEO to address the question of sustainability was Donald Katz, CEO of digital audio publisher Audible.com, now part of Amazon. Katz drew on his experience as an author, and with booksellers, as well as in the transition of audio from tapes and CDs to digital, observing the publishing business has always been in flux. He then seized on a theme that’s become popular at this year’s fair—that publishing must become more consumer-oriented. “Publishers should never start another imprint,” he noted, saying that imprints were inward facing models, and instead should focus on “developing consumer brands.” He also noted that territorial rights should go away. “It’s a global economy.”

Katz was followed by John Mitchinson, co-founder of Unbound, a reader-supported funding and publishing platform. Mitchinson said the current publishing model was “probably not sustainable,” and said there was a lot of “bad karma” in publishing. “Publishers like to come here to parade their inadequacy,” he quipped, “talk about how bad they are doing.” But publishers haven’t done a bad job of delivering content, he observed, as reading culture is in fact surging. Nevertheless, he described the publishing business as “broken,” and as madness, where books don’t earn out advances, retailers get high discounts, publishers lie to authors about how well their books are doing, and say no to everybody. Like Katz, Mitchinson also pegged the key problem for publishers as a lack of connection to readers, as publishers have traditionally outsourced that “critical piece” of the value chain to retailers. He urged a model “that brings readers and writers together,” that was format neutral, and that would help turn readers into “marketers.”

Click here to read the rest of the comments, including the response from the CEO of Bloomsbury.

[Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian]

Unbound’s John Mitchinson is in the Guardian today, replying to author Anthony Horowitz’s article (also published in the Guardian) from last week about the need for publishers. Read on for an explanation of what Unbound is really about and how we differ from self-publishing. 

I enjoyed Anthony Horowitz’s witty article about the writer’s need for a publisher (The battle for books, 28 February). And I agreed with almost every word. Like him, working as an author and a publisher, I talk about books, not “content”; and like him I believe that a publisher’s job is to deliver “story, character, style, originality, design, typography, literacy, good grammar, education, enlightenment”.

I agree that most publishers aren’t, by and large, venal Luddites. They are trying to publish the best books they can in a market that is undergoing its biggest change in 500 years. But change demands new ideas. And, as usual, these are coming from the periphery not the core. From start-ups such as Byliner, Box Fiction – and Unbound, the crowd-funding publishing company I founded with two other writers last June.

But then the creator of Alex Rider had to go and spoil it. “I could, of course, go it alone,” he said. “I could self-publish, as former Python Terry Jones did last year, through unbound.co.uk.” Go it alone? Self-publish? Has Horowitz visited our site? Has he asked Jones or Kate Mosse, or the famously fastidious Jonathan Meades, what being published by Unbound actually involves? If he had, he would have learned that his litany of things publishers do – ie making exactingly edited, beautifully designed and imaginatively promoted books in printed and digital editions – is being performed here by people who have worked in “proper” publishing for decades.

Then he made things even worse by quotingquoted a reviewer who had asked: “What do they do if the writer delivers a damp squib? On the evidence, they’ll publish it anyway.” We wouldn’t, of course. The irony is that a lot of people would like us to do just that.

Click here to read the rest of the article on the Guardian’s site & let us know your opinion in the comments.

26 (an association for writers, editors and language consultants) has posted a great interview with one of our founders, John Mitchinson in which he shares advice for aspiring writers keen to get published by Unbound…

John Mitchinson is the co-founder of Unbound, a revolutionary crowdfunding publishing concept. He is also the co-author of QI books and director of research for QI. As 26 Treasures builds support on the Unbound website, John tells Elen Lewis why we all need to make sure the 26 Treasures book sees the light of day.

What makes 26 Treasures an ideal project for Unbound?
It’s exactly the kind of book that might get overlooked in today’s rather confused publishing environment. Yet it comes with wonderful writers attached – some well known; many not – and four museums supporting it. It offers us the chance to collaborate with readers to producing a memorable, beautiful object – an artefact in its own right – made from words and images. That kind of idea – one which stimulates excitement and offers the chance for readers to create something new and different seems to be the ones that work best for Unbound.

What advice would you offer aspiring writers keen to be considered by Unbound?
Be bold in your ideas and don’t become preoccupied with which niche you fit into. There’s far too much second-guessing in publishing already. Send us your ideas as a pitch, in your own words explaining why you want to write it, with an excerpt of 1,000 words or so. If we like what we read, we’re pretty sure other people will too.

Click here to read the rest of the interview…

We’re publishing a book by 26, called 26 Treasures - it’s an illustrated anthology in which 26 writers (from established authors like Alexander McCall Smith and Gillian Clarke to up and coming talents like Lucy Caldwell) respond to 26 treasures in 4 museums, using only 62 words.

Click here to find out more about the 26 Treasures book, and how you can support it in return for things like a creative writing workshop with the authors, a museum tour with one of the authors to see the featured treasures and plenty more.