My five o’clock in the morning option is that the UK publishing world is long overdue for a disruptive newcomer. It is well known that ideas had in the wee small hours come in two flavours – terrible and crazy. It is the crazy ones you have to look out for. They tend to change things.

Here are my five in the morning when I should be in bed thoughts. I will leave it up to you to figure out if it is terrible or crazy.

Do publishers fear technology

Sir Terry Pratchett allegedly once said something along the lines that it would be significantly easier to squeeze a melon through the eye of a needle than it would be to get a UK publishers to start thinking about post-Gutenberg-technology. He probably said it a lot more succinctly and was a great deal more witty about it too.

However, the man had a point. It has been my experience that publishers have not got the foggiest idea of how to write a press release. Let alone use bloggers, or even understand what Microsoft Word should (and should not) be used for.

The fact that UK publishing is woefully bad at promoting books, authors, or anything remotely modern is embarrassing enough. Add to that the way they are letting Amazon steal their lunch money. You have to wonder how authors make a living. Oh, right – we don’t.

Sooner or later, in any industry where the established giants are fat, lazy, and out of touch, some newcomer takes over. They show up and dominate by dint of being marginally less awful.

Failing at the basics

I once spent a day finding email addresses for every UK publisher of note. I wrote to them and very briefly said that I would be happy to give them free publicity in exchange for a list of upcoming book releases. You know, actual publishing news. I got one single attachment sent back. An evil hodgepodge word document that was about as readable as a fart in an elevator. The only possible way to make that file any worse is if they had used comic sans.

Even though this release was awful and near impossible to use, I was delighted to have it because it was more than I had before.

Apparently, a web feed (RSS or otherwise) of current or upcoming book titles is beyond the scope of UK publishing technology. Or rather beyond the grasp of the dinosaurs that are the current publishing ecosystem. Just one publisher that knows how to get their information out there and the others will all be in trouble.

Publishers do not seem to have even mastered the basics of sending press releases to their email list. I literally begged them to spam me however they wanted and they replied, “erm, what?”

I now doubt any UK publishers even have an email list. If publishers are missing the online marketing basics, what else are they getting wrong?

Quite how UK publishing has escaped this fate amazes me. they say that the book market is shrinking but I am inclined to think that what is shrinking is the market share of stale publishing houses.

How to disrupt UK publishing

I suspect that all an entrepreneur would need to take over would be some serious spending money, a few people with overpriced Apple products on their desk, and the slightest idea how modern technology works. The Apple products would most like be your replacement (final) typesetters because digital printing has been a thing for a long time. Chances are your copy editors may be the same as your typesetters. Assuming you pay a large enough salary to get editors who studied design.

If you want cheaper hardware costs, get some AMD based computers and run Linux. You’ll have a devil of a time finding editing staff to use them but the staff you get will be able to do pretty much everything.

With digital typesetting, directly from FTP or emailed manuscripts you can have the computer check for things like obvious grammar mistakes and funky spellings. Something authors have been doing for the last twenty years. Not only that but the entire workflow from editor to printer can be monitored or even carried out on a laptop while sipping gin and tonic by the pool.

You could have a query-able back catalogue with actual actionable data on sales, demand, and profit margin. If a genre is selling well, order a bigger print run with a few keystrokes. Not so sure about a new author, smaller print run and a quicker second edition. All that from your phone while you wait for your dinner.

Play Amazon at their own game

What’s that you say, you lack the distribution chain of the old school publishers? By-pass them entirely and sell directly to the public. The chain stores can either come to you cap-in-hand or miss out entirely. Meanwhile, the whole indi-bookshop sub-culture can have you as their new champion.

With digital type-setting you can play Amazon at their own game with ebooks editions. Not to mention that text-to-voice is almost at the point where a decent investment now could have every last book as an audiobook on day one.

Amazon may once have been a nimble and disruptive force in book sales but that time is past. A nimble new start up could be taking Amazon to the cleaners or at least making them a little bit worried.

It would cost the same to have a valid relationship with independent bookshops as big chains because with this new-fangled Internet thing and computers, that sort of thing scales for free.

Or what about this: Silent time is wasted capacity. Use your digital publishing process to support a print on demand service that runs on your spare capacity. Now you have an entire secondary business supporting self-publishers.

Amazon can do it. Why not you?

You would not even need to be that good

the current state of UK publishing is such that I imagine you would not even need to be all that good. Just less stale than the current competition.

I can tell you this for free. Blogs like this one who are hungry for UK publishing news will talk about you no end. After all, the rest of the industry barely knows how to put upcoming titles in anything like a coherent usable format. My experiment in trying to get publishers to spam me showed me that much.

In any other industry, I would be drowning in promotional emails and press releases. Why else would I write about how authors can promote themselves? It is because the publishers are clueless.

You could probably get away with having a blog and an email list. That would be more than I find most of time at present.

If you know of a publisher that is doing better than I describe, please for the love all that is good, tell me about them. Otherwise, I suggest you sign up with Author Buzz UK and join us in building a network that authors can use to do what UK publishers are to old and slow to do. We’re free and, while far from perfect, we actually have a clue or two.