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Why Write Books?

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It didn't feel like a dying industry. The aisles between booths at BookExpo America last weekend were shoulder to shoulder. The whole vast acreage of the Jacob Javits convention center was filled with publishers, sellers, agents and ancillary wheeler-dealers, like the vendor who was handing out leaflets and twirling an umbrella illustrated with famous literary faces, while barking, "As seen on CNN!"

For the biggest North American trade show in an industry whose demise has been much heralded--book publishing has been declared "in decline" since at least the 1930s--it felt positively vibrant. Actual numbers are open to interpretation: Attendees, not including exhibitors, numbered 12,025, up 30% from last year in Los Angeles but down 11% from 2007, when the show was last held in New York.

At the very least, the industry appears to be handling technological change more gracefully than the music business or ink-on-paper newspapers, in ways that are reassuring to an author. Publishers will automatically make new books available in a digital format, suitable for the Kindle or other e-readers--though mid-list authors may have to ask, or arm wrestle, publishers into digitizing their older books. Nobody knows whether sales in the still-tiny digital books market will cannibalize print book sales or add to them, nor whether margins on e-books will be enough to keep publishers in business. It seems wisest, though, to give the people what they want, how they want it.

Along the same lines, booksellers are experimenting with print-on-demand contraptions, in particular the Espresso Book Machine 2.0, a printing press in a transparent 4.5-foot-tall box that does not, unfortunately, make coffee. Northshire Books, an independent book store in Manchester, Vt., says that by the end of this year a customer will be able to purchase a copyrighted book using the service and have it in hand within minutes. (Northshire already prints self-published and public domain books.)

Together, these innovations mean that books never go "out of print" in the way that was once every author's deepest fear. It's the fulfillment of Wired editor Chris Anderson's long-tail prediction: Every half-decent product can find its niche and sell forever, even if the market at any given moment is minuscule.

Still, BookExpo is a dizzying and probably unhealthy place for an author. A glimpse of the modern book industry can be enough to provoke an existential crisis. Wandering the halls of the convention I found myself asking, why write books at all? Here are some reasons people have traditionally done it, and ways in which they've been turned upside down in recent years.

Money

A book expo is different from, say, a home appliance expo in that it attracts relatively few rational market actors. Publishing has one central thing in common with other creative industries like music and film: No one has come up with a better way to predict demand than a team of blindfolded monkeys throwing darts. You can smartly measure the market for breakfast cereal or dishwashers, but not for creative output. Hollywood has worked harder than any sector to systemize and scale-up the hawking of imaginative entertainment. It tests movie endings with audiences and spends more on marketing than production--and it still produces financial flops.

Meanwhile publishing, for better or worse, has had no discernible system beyond trying to do what has worked before. Spooky Dracula novel sold well last year? Throw a million-dollar advance at the author of a spooky gargoyle novel this year. Books about pets and atheism are flying off the shelves? Get one about atheistic pets.

Sometimes this "system" works; sometimes it fails spectacularly. Doubleday purchased The Gargoyle for a rumored $1.2 million, marketed it hard and sales did not measure up; in 2008 corporate parent Random House folded the Doubleday imprint into Knopf. In the last year, as big publishing houses have undergone more consolidations and layoffs, the big-guess method of acquiring books has come to look particularly ineffective. There is talk that it may be permanently broken, and that publishers, going forward, may make more, smaller acquisitions. This, too, would be a good thing for most authors, reducing the number of lottery-style book advances but spreading the money around.

A smaller advance can have an additional advantage for the author: If you get a big one but end up losing money for the company, you'll be hard-pressed to ever sell them another book. If you get a small one and "earn out," or make it back, you'll be regarded as a modest success. Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan was mocked for taking an advance of $75,000 from Public Affairs for What Happened?, his account of the inner dealings of George W. Bush's administration. It was significantly less than book advances paid to other Bush White House alumni. But McClellan made much more than that on royalties, and almost certainly continues to do so. Just as importantly, the book earned money for Public Affairs. Isn't it in the interest of authors to have solvent publishers?

Fame

Call it celebrity, renown or just respect--authors want readers. So do publishers. The process of finding them is in transformation.

That guy proclaiming his umbrella was "seen on CNN" was technically speaking the truth, although the seal of approval thereby implied was misleading: CNN had broadcast footage of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor carrying one on her way to the White House. More to the point is this question: Does anyone actually care if something was "seen on CNN"?

Judging by the tenor of BookExpo, "seen on Twitter" would be a better endorsement. Book people are hot for social media. At least six panel discussions were explicitly devoted to it. I attended one on social networking tools for publishers, where the panelists were two authors, Erik Qualman, who has written a book called Socialnomics, and Chris Brogan, author of Trust Agents. Both books will be published by Wiley in August, and both are about using online social networks as business tools.

Not surprisingly, both authors advocated using sites like Facebook and Twitter to get the word out. Pressed for an example of a personal Twitter success, Qualman offered this: He told his online followers he would be speaking at BookExpo America about Socialnomics and solicited their suggestions. ("It's about listening first, then selling," he said.) As a result, two followers got in touch to ask him to speak at other events, one in Chicago and one in London. "You build relationships before [an event], then continue them afterward," Brogan said. As the two authors left the stage, they announced the booth location where they would be selling and signing their books. To sum up, they have social networked like mad to sell books that tout the power of social networking to sell stuff.

At a later panel, author Lev Grossman observed, "I don't think anyone has done the numbers on followers versus book sales." Following someone on Twitter has zero cost. Correlation to a willingness to buy is unknown.

Grossman's panel was called "Do Publisher's Still Hold the Keys to the Kingdom? A Panel of Authors Weigh In," and included Chris-the-Long-Tail-Anderson, now author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson, for the record, used his blog to promote his first book but is using Twitter for this one.

By and large, the speakers on both panels seemed to agree that there is no kingdom anymore. The drawbridges are down. The peasants have created a people's democracy. These being writers, they were able to torture the metaphor in various imaginative ways, but the basic point was: A publisher is not what it once was.

Fame, too, is not what it used to be. Andy Warhol's vision was slightly off the mark: We're not all taking turns being famous for 15 minutes. Rather, no one is famous anymore because everyone is, all the time. Any renown we gain will be drowned in white noise, and we'll remain invisible in plain sight.

Love

In short, book-writing is a worse-than-ever means to a livelihood, and mass-market renown is disappearing as a concept, fractioning into a million niches. Ultimately the only good reason to write books remains what it probably always was: The compulsion to try to entertain, persuade or make meaning is irresistible, and the process absorbs you like nothing else. If it doesn't, there's no reason to bother.

Elisabeth Eaves is a deputy editor at Forbes, where she writes a weekly column. Follow her on Twitter here.