The Old Wheel

“The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.” – Sherlock Holmes

When I left publishing in 2016, a large part of my reasoning for the pivot was because I thought, after twenty years of shouting, cajoling, sweet-talking, and consulting about metadata, I didn’t have any new problems to solve. Surely, thanks to BISG, a slew of consultants, approximately a billion workshops…the industry had got the message by now!

The answer is yes. And no.

Many of the colleagues I was preaching to have retired. A whole new crop of production editors, marketers, engineers, and interns come into the publishing arena every year, and after a while, there’s a kind of entropy that happens. It’s not so much that people forget – it’s that they’re so bogged down in the day-to-day demands of their jobs, they just can’t spare a thought for metadata strategy. And without the guidance of those who came before them, they don’t see that strategy’s overriding importance.

Part of the reason for this is conferences. Or, rather, the lack thereof.

The book industry had many conferences that provided educational opportunities:

• Book Expo America (BEA)
• O’Reilly’s Tools of Change
• Digital Book World
• Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Leadership Summit
• Publishers Association of the West (PubWest) annual conference
• Independent Book Publishers Association (IPBA) Publishing University
• Book Industry Study Group (BISG) annual meeting
• Frankfurt Book Fair Supply Chain Meeting
• London Book Fair

The first three of these don’t exist anymore – the normalization of ebooks into publishing workflows and dwindling attendance pretty much killed them (among other reasons). And then came COVID in 2020 – which introduced a virtual element to the remaining programs that continues today. What that means is that in-person attendance (and in-person attention) isn’t what it was.

I’m not bewailing the loss of the “good old days,” I’m just saying that the industry has had several seismic shifts – not just COVID, but the absolute domination of audiobooks, the widespread hunger for comics, and the ever-increasing glut of content that a reader has to wade through to find what they want.

And these shifts mean that it’s difficult to find opportunities to talk about the one thing that could HELP a reader find what they want. Talking in person is far more effective than a Zoom call.

I don’t know what the answer is. I know we’re not going back to the days of near-constant business travel. But it really strikes me as I revisit the landscape that there’s still a need for these kinds of conversations – a generation learned some really good lessons, but as they leave for retirement, a new generation needs to learn not just the same lessons, but updated ones to address the shifts that we’re seeing in the market.