A panel of experts, including Indigo president Joel Silver, House of Anansi's Sarah MacLachlan and authors Paul Theroux and Katherine Govier, discussed the future of publishing and e-books on Saturday as part of Toronto's Luminato arts festival. After the discussion, MacLachlan — president of Toronto-based Anansi, which publishes Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, among others — sat down with CBC News to talk about whether self-publishing is beginning to have any allure.
Here is One Question and a Part of a Answer from the Interview:
With Amazon and Apple making it easy and enticing to self-publish, how does a publisher keep authors — especially established ones — from defecting to this model?
House of Anansi's Sarah MacLachlan Replies:
You sort of answered the question right off the top and that was by saying "established authors." Established authors can pretty much do whatever they want, but established authors are probably 10 people that we can name. Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, Stephen King, maybe it's only three people we can name. And then it's maybe Stephenie Meyer and what's her name who wrote Harry Potter … we've almost forgotten about Harry Potter now.
But for everybody else, my question is, "OK, you write a book, the thing you traffic in is ideas, do you also then want to become your own manufacturer, your own sales and marketing department, your own shiller of your idea?"
I think publishers have a place as cultural aggregators. We put a stamp of approval on something by accepting it and by saying, "Yes we want to get behind this and put our resources behind it." That's something that a lot of people don't necessarily think about. Publishers add value.
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