Hasty Ents and Branding Publishers
I was going to write about ents from the Lord of the Rings. For those of you who do not know the LTR, ents are tree shepherds who inveigh against other species for being "too hasty" -- and then proceed to hastily demolish the neighboring wizard and send hords of "huorns" (moving trees) out to ravish the ravishing orcs, thereby turning the tide in the direction of good (rather than evil). My point here was to be the difference between text and subtext. In fact, despite their rhetoric, the ents act hastily (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). In fact, despite Google's rhetoric about returning the best search results, Google may not mind having lots of results pages (even if the results are spam) so that they have a lot of pages for ad display. You get my drift.
But something caught my eye in today's Sunday NYT that really irritates me. It's a front page of the business section article about HarperCollins attempting to brand its publishing logos rather than its authors. Branding a publisher rather than the author is a lousy idea, and one that is ultimately doomed to failure. A publisher's brand can support an author, but the attempt to replace it will work in the long run no more than the wizard's foul plots could, when he forgot that he lived next door to the ents.
The article rightly point to technology books as one area where publisher-branded has worked (or at least gone farthest). The Dummies series is pointed to as an example of success. (O'Reilly might also have been used as an example, most purchasers of technology books know that an ORA book will have some degree of integrity.)
A problem with the Dummies series is that the quality of the individual titles varies tremendously. (I'm biased of course, but I think this mostly has to do with the authors of the individual titles in the series. Soem authors are good, and others are just not as good.) Purchasers of books in the series may buy their first one or two based on the series branding, but consumers are not really "dummies" and quickly come to perceive this unevenness.
An author of a book is the bottom line, buck-stops-here person responsible for the integrity and quality of his or her book. While some authors forget this, or let the realities of the marketplace help them forget it, no development editor aided and abetted by publisher branding will ever take the place of the author.
Publishers would be smart to bite the bullet and focus on finding the right books (in technology this means thinking creatively ahead of the curve rather than trailing the curve) and putting their branding efforts into the authors who make the books, rather than out of some foolish arrogance and vain hope chasing the will-o-wisp of series branding.
Where are the ents and huorns to knock a bit of sense into those publishers?
Posted by Harold Davis at February 6, 2005 9:42 AM
