Big Idea: Bringing Instincts Back to Book Acquisitions

Book Business asked industry thought leaders to discuss the big ideas that are changing the book industry. We are excited about the future of publishing, and we hope these essays invigorate you with new and illuminating perspectives on that future. View the complete essay collection here.

There are agents and editors working in book publishing who may love a new project under consideration but realize they cannot justify it given the likely modest sales. This is especially true for first-time novelists, but also for other midlist authors who have been published before and are running out of options as the trade print marketplace continues to narrow around bestsellers.

Editors have lost much of the power they once wielded to marketing and sales. It used to be easier to operate on a hunch, to believe in the merits of a riskier work and "push it through." Some of publishing's biggest success stories have been the surprise, low-advance breakout titles. That is much of the fun of working in publishing-the Vegas aspect.

As publishers consolidated into larger media groups with other more profitable business units, the pressure to operate less on instincts and more on "science" was inevitable. This trend towards evaluating product ideas based on what sales and marketing thinks the market can support is common within most industries today. The conflict between a business unit product manager championing a new idea and the sales and marketing people challenged with selling it has been a tension created precisely to improve accountability.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs I have known all share one common belief: If the market can actually identify what it wants, then the product potential is already limited. A trend is gone as soon as you can spot it. Which leads me to why I feel ebooks offer large publishers a great way to rebalance how they operate back towards the hunch method.