One of the media transformations I expect to take place over the next 10 years, if not sooner, is that book publishing will become more blog-like — that is, micropublishing, the interest of the New York houses in putting out blockbusters, and the decline of the industry (and its retail counterpart) generally will lead to a proliferation of vanity presses that will, over time, lose their stigma. Publishing is still treated as if it ought to be a mass-market industry, but it has speedily been transforming into a niche-market industry. The idea that a book has to sell thousands of copies from a major house in order to be taken seriously is going to change. Books will become more like blogs in some respects — deprofessionalized and personalized — but in other respects they’ll become more like poetry, a small but prestigious market.

How do you guarantee quality in such an environment? Some printers will have better reputations than others, and that side of things shouldn’t be too problematic. Editorial quality will have to be guaranteed by branding. Institutions that have reputations for quality in their fields — whether those institutions are publications, think tanks, or traditional publishing houses — can lend their imprimaturs to books that meet their criteria. In some cases, authors will have to pay dearly for the privilege (already authors often have to pay for indexing their books). Other, more reputable authors will be essentially given credit by their editors/publishers — if an author is known to produce clean and polished prose, and if he’s known to have some kind of market, editor-publishers can trade their services upfront for a percentage on the sales, a fairly traditional model. This will be bad for new authors, who will probably have to pay out of pocket, but that “defect” will actually help keep some unserious people out of the market. (Indeed, young authors might have to seek patrons to get their first works published, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. I expect, in this day and age, the patrons will be institutional rather than individual. It’s not unusual even now, by the way, for books to be subsidized — God and Man at Yale was published in part because William F. Buckley Sr. paid Henry Regnery to defray some of the costs.)

Many people wrongly think that publishing any book makes you “famous.” That isn’t true now, and it’ll be even less true in the micropublishing era. Publishing a book will have about as much cachet as having a blog. (The analogy extends to the various levels of blog prestige: having a Blogger or Angelfire blog is like publishing with Xlibris; having your own URL is a sign of some status, and being connected with an institution is a sign of higher status, though not necessarily higher traffic/sales.)

Already the Internet publishing and micropublishing age has been great for me as a consumer. Most of the books I buy are older, hard-to-find volumes purchased used through Alibris or Abebooks. I’ve downloaded enormous amounts of reading in PDF form to my Kindle, for free. I have not purchased any imprimatur-free self-published or vanity-press books. But I have quite a few hard-copy Mises Institute books printed-on-demand. Things that might have been totally uneconomical to produce 15 years ago, like some of the obscure works of Garet Garrett, are now economical and readily available. One of the surprising things about the Internet in this regard has been the extent to which is has brought the past into the present — things long out of print are now more widely available than they were when first published. This is something to ponder when considering whether the micropublishing revolution is good or bad for authors: it’s pretty darn good for long-dead, long out-of-print authors. For living authors, I suspect it will be a wash: some of them would have gotten lucky and received nice advances and healthy sales from traditional publishers. They won’t be rewarded as lucratively in the new era. But a lot of authors who would never have been published under the old system, or whose books would have languished for lack of promotion, will be able to get their work out there now, even if only for 200 readers. (Won’t the book still languish for lack of promotion? Yes, but the consequences won’t be as damaging: when a book has a set print run and the author receives an advance, it can be quite damaging to his publisher’s finances, and his reputation, if it only moves 200 copies. It can hamper his ability to publish more in the future — he’s a failure. Under the model I foresee, though, 200 books sold could be profitable, if only marginally, for everyone involved, and everyone would have an incentive to produce more.)

The danger in niche-writing and micropublishing lies in losing touch with the cultural mainstream. But a new mainstream will eventually arise out of this — it’s happened before, after all, as a few literary gems have washed up amid the great floods of rubbish in publishing booms past. Editorial branding, I think, will be the key to getting through the transition with some standards intact.