Where Will We Find Literature’s Radiohead?

I don’t know for sure how directly applicable the conversation between David Byrne and Thom Yorke about the online release of In Rainbows in the latest issue of Wired will be to the book publishing industry, but it’s certainly worth thinking about. Like, here’s a question: Are things as bad for new authors trying to land a book deal as Yorke says they are in the music business: “I don’t see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway”?

Actually, Byrne’s advice for emerging artists might be more applicable to our situation:

“What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians.”

Byrne lays out six different models for distributing music—by which he means the actual content, not the container products—that offer some rough analogies for the future of publishing. You can see parallels to the standard book deal, the Creative Commons licensing approach, and all-out self-publishing; and then there’s the equity deal:

“Every aspect of the artist’s career is handled by producers, promoters, marketing people, and managers. The idea is that you can achieve wide saturation and sales, boosted by a hardworking machine that stands to benefit from everything you do. The artist becomes a brand, owned and operated by the label, and in theory this gives the company a long-term perspective and interest in nurturing that artist’s career.”

I was going to say we aren’t quite there yet, but after spending a minute thinking about it, isn’t this pretty much the way V.C. Andrews and Robert Ludlum product is sold to readers today? And how long will it be before living authors allow their “brand names” to be used the same way? (I know who you’re about to mention; I don’t know enough about his situation to speak authoritatively, but from what I have heard, it doesn’t sound quite like this…yet.)

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