‘You’re Giving Amazon Another Advantage’
I know you’re all very nice people that are a pleasure to work with, and I know you do things in this roundabout way because you love talking and I even love talking to you…
But when you offer workflows that are slower, less functional and more complicated than what people use in their everyday lives, you are no longer helping authors.
It’s hard to think of an author who could have delivered this message to publishers as effectively as the German writer Kathrin Passig did in Berlin.
Passig had been handed a dream assignment, tantamount to performing the #authorsay exercise in person. You’ll remember the #authorsay survey of traditionally published writers. It was created by Harry Bingham and Jane Friedman, and its results were reported first by The Bookseller.
In a show of courage, Publishers’ Forum director Rüdiger Wischenbart had decided to open Klopotek’s two-day industry conference in Berlin not with suits ‘n’ sales onstage but with the quiet, penetrating, relentless roam of a woman dressed in black.
Passig paced like a TED Talker in search of the logo. Unbeknown to many of the nearly 300 people in the room at Berlin’s Sofitel Kurfuerstendamm, Passig was speaking from a prepared text. Her care in tone and tenor were evident:
You might say: Authors can’t deal with anything technical. But they can, they use a lot of software in their private lives and in their other jobs. They write blogs, they collaborate with others, they use all kinds of tools that are more sophisticated than what they have in working with you.
“You” in her lexicon here is the traditional publishing establishment that makes up the biggest part of the Publishers’ Forum audience.
And the experience she’d arrived to tell these publishing players about has to do with her production of a book in February, a compilation project, a book created from a collaborative blog site’s posts.
There’s more: Read the full story at Thought Catalog
By Porter Anderson
Follow @Porter_Anderson
Writing on the Ether: An Author Speaks Directly To Publishers: Kathrin Passig’s Commentary In Berlin
Originally published by Thought Catalog at www.ThoughtCatalog.com
