An excerpt from Michael Hyatt, President & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers:
- Eventually, physical books will be printed at the point-of-sale. Some call this “distributed manufacturing.” As print-on-demand technology gets better—and, trust me, it’s already so good you can’t tell a POD book from a regular one—this is going to happen. The current model, where printers print thousands of books for publishers to ship to bookstores and then bookstores return to publishers when they don’t sell, is too expensive and cumbersome to last much longer. It’s begging for a solution.
- In the coming years, publishers will dramatically reduce the number of SKUs. It’s just too expensive and too inefficient to keep churning out hundreds, if not thousands, of books each year in the hope that some of them will stick. This won’t eliminate mid-list books (as some fear), because publishers have to be constantly looking for the next generation of writers. But it will eliminate most one-off projects. To get published, authors will have to have more than one book in the oven. If publishers are going to invest the money necessary to launch a successful book, they will want to know there are more to come.
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