The other alternative is that the big names will belong to publishers or book clubs e.g. readers will trust the Harlequin/Mills & Boon brand or trust Oprah to pick interesting, enjoyable books for them.

Branding does seem to work, and there’s tons of respect for it in the business corridors of the media/entertainment world. I’ve heard publishing types say that most book purchases are impulse purchases and perhaps that makes branding more important.

I do think that the big names in publishing are their own brands as opposed to being a sub-brand of a bigger brand such as harlequin/ silhouette. H/S promotes itself and not so much authors. The Oprah brand promotes herself ultimately and not the authors of Oprah books. The big names being their own brands may give them more freedom in terms of which house they write for, but it may also hinder them creatively.

I haven’t paid that much attention to POD. Do books that are sold POD still get edited? I’ve worked in the cable/media industry for about 9 years now, and I’ve heard lots of debates about the different quality levels between user-generated content and professionally-produced content – with lots in the industry (naturally) arguing that professionally-produced content is better and not to worry about the “threat” from user-generated quantity.

In books, I do think there is a quality argument somewhere – though who is the arbitrer of what is quality obviously is tough. Case in point – I got offended by Karp saying genre-fiction readers were dying out – so we would probably disagree on what is quality at times.

The other alternative is that the big names will belong to publishers or book clubs e.g. readers will trust the Harlequin/Mills & Boon brand or trust Oprah to pick interesting, enjoyable books for them. I think that’s probably how quite a lot of people choose their books now, and certainly it’s true for Harlequin that quite a lot of their readers sign up to buy the entire month’s output in at least one line. These readers trust that publisher to consistently find and print the books that those readers want to read. Obviously the reader has to like whichever line it is that they subscribe to, but if they do, then they’re in luck, because the publisher is selecting stories that reader will like from among all the thousands of offerings in the slush pile and on the market.

Of course, there is a risk to that strategy, because they’re not likely to become known as a company that publishes “truly novel” books, and if large numbers of readers decide they’ve no interest in what Harlequin’s offering, all their authors will suffer, but Harlequin do seem to take risks with new lines and new formats.

With the increasing presence of POD books, the market will be flooded to such an extent that it is not feasible for the genre fiction reader to be able to fight its way through the thousands of new books released every month and thus only a few will survive. Whether the few will be “truly novel” or simply big names, I am not sure.

The part that got to me was the following:

Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it’s hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.

I wonder how much those remarks truly reflect the genre-fiction market. I’m in my 30′s, read tons of genre fiction and hopefully am years away from “dying off”. Is it his take that genre novelists by definition can not be truly novel? Or, only the best voices in genre fiction will survive?

(For the record, Mr. Noriega was a lot more pleasant to deal with than Mr. Aiken.)

As in Manuel Noriega, ex Panamanian dictator, and Clay Aiken. I predict Mr. Karp will soon regret his candid statement once the Claymates get hold of him. :-)

I was amused by his observation that “There are more novels about serial killers than there are actual serial killers.”

Ha. The romance equivalent would be “There are more novels about dukes than there are, or have ever been, actual dukes.”

Course I’m guilty of writing about a ducal heir. But in defense of myself, that identity was set 10 years ago, before I realized there was such a surfeit of dukes in romancedom. :-)