50 Years of Publishing: Where to go from here?

Shirrel Rhoades knows better than anyone that the publishing industry is not at all what it used to be.

The former executive vice president of Marvel Entertainment, Rhoades is now the co-founder of Absolutely Amazing eBooks, a virtual publishing company.

“Publishing has changed radically over the past 50 years,” Rhoades says. “It’s undergone a great transition that it hasn’t quite found its answer to yet.”

In the “old days,” as Rhoades refers to them, there were mom-and-pop bookstores on every corner. Then along came the superstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, which put the smaller stores out of business. By the time Amazon.com arrived, physical bookstores were a thing of the past.

“The old economic model doesn’t work anymore,” Rhoades explains. “It used to be that the big publishers would pay an author an advance, pay the editors, market and print the book, and ship the books to bookstores. And bookstores eventually returned what they didn’t sell.”

Amazon solved this problem by popularizing cheap eBooks. In order to survive in this new technological world, Rhoades had to adapt.

“Here I was. I grew up in the ink-and-paper world; I love books. I love the touch, the smell — I have an attic full of books,” he says. “Even though I spent 50 years publishing ink and paper, I decided to make my own publishing company that was totally in cyber space. We could publish books without ever physically touching them.”

Absolutely Amazing eBooks is a hybrid between Amazon and traditional publishers. It charges no fees and pays authors higher royalties. Authors also receive 30 percent of all revenue on eBooks and 20 percent of paper back sales. What’s more, it is founded on the principal of selling good books for no more than $3.99, putting traditional publishers out of business.

“We don’t require anybody to have an agent,” Rhoades says. “Some of our people make reasonably good money, some of them make hardly anything; it’s hard to tell why a book sells. The world’s changed a lot.”

Unlike traditional publishing, which fluctuates a lot, the eBook market is fairly steady and reliable. Rhoades’ company publishes about 150 books per year and has now expanded into audio books and video-streaming. In addition, all employees are paid solely on profit.

 Through his experience in the realm of media and publishing, Rhoades has learned that at least one thing has not changed: basic writing skills are still at the heart of success.

“Even if you’re going to be a publisher, you need to know something about the art of writing,” he says. “The biggest complaint I have about most of my writers is that they don’t know a thing about punctuation. There’s no better way to learn that than to write. Just do it.”

One thing that has changed is the social dynamic between publishers. Gone are the days when New York publishers would gather for daily martini lunches. Rhoades misses this aspect of publishing, but he admits he’s much happier working from his home in Key West, Florida.

“We took what was just a nub of an idea and said, ‘How can we get ahead of the curve and become what we think the industry will someday be?’” Rhoads says. “All of the things that I was trained to do have changed; a lot of people just couldn’t change with it, or didn’t want to change with it.”