Connection with the audience is still publish 's goal, but not the Internet make it first to distribute and publish later?

Once in a while, someone will say something that 's so true, of course, and so unexpected that you' ll spend the rest of your life, about their effects. For me, such a truth "A publisher makes a work of the public, it connects to an audience and a work" and the person who is my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, senior editor at Tor Books, the largest science fiction publisher in the world.

I say for the first time Patrick that this is a decade or more ago, sometime after Google was founded, but before the huge powerhouse it was today. Patrick was talking about the role of publisher, and how they change as a result of the Internet. Once there, he said, something clicked for me: the Flatiron Building, the landmark skyscrapers in Manhattan that houses the gate and its parent company, Macmillan, mainly in three business areas.

The first is to identify jobs for which she believes there may be an audience reading slush (the uncharitable, but accurate term for unsolicited manuscripts), entertaining plots agents, and scouting for writers to ask.

Then there is the process of steps to prepare the work, so it is of interest that viewers are: editing, typesetting, editing, packaging and added art and design elements.

The third business is connecting the work to the audience: writing catalogue copy and distributing catalogues, despatching a salesforce to major retail and wholesale channels, soliciting testimonials, placing ads, soliciting reviews, touring authors, and these days, producing internet collateral from accompanying videos to online chats to full-blown game tie-ins.

The mergers and acquisitions craze and the boom-bust cycles of the 80s and 90s drove publishers, many of these features out-of-house, allowing manuscripts come into freelance through an acquisition editor, can be read by a corrective move get freelance editor, a cover of a freelance artist and published by professional journalists. These outsourcing revolution wasn 't easy, and there are many bumps and false starts along the way has been worked out as a publisher, such as freelancers in their workflow (it helped that many freelancers former employees who already understood how the things done were) to be integrated. Slowly but surely, publishers have delaminated, separates many of their vital functions and to reposition themselves as coordinators from many different vendors that serve the identification of the work, improving and making available of works by and for the audience.

In a world where the production of a work and get it in front of one audience member was hard, was the fact that a book was to be offered for sale to you in a serious environment, in and of itself, an important piece of publishing process. If a book is a business \ reaches 's shelf or a film reached a cinema' s screen or made a show in the cable distribution system, they knew they would be valuable enough to invest significant resources, not least a number of legal agreements and indemnities between the various parties in the supply chain. The fact that you knew a creative work was a vote in its favour. The fact that it was Available to them was a vote in his favor.

In part, this was the imprimatur of the creator and publisher and distributor and dealer, its reputation for the selection / production plants, can enjoy. But partly it was just the implicit understanding that no company would go to all the trouble of implementing the work in the way when it's pretty sure it was would recoup. So "publish" and "print" and "spread" everything is loosely synonymous.

Finally, it was impossible to imagine that a work could be distributed without printed, and printing things without their distribution was the exclusive responsibility of the sad "self-publishers" who had deceived "vanity press" in stumping up for thousands of copies of her memoirs, which would then in their basements always modern. But like the internal workings of the publishing house at the tail of the last century have been separated, in this century has seen a separation of selection, reproduction, processing and distribution. Any work on the Internet can 'distributed "are removed by using a search engine without ever elected or reproduced or prepared.

It 's true that the works chosen are best, best prepared and distributed at the best tend to reach a broad audience and / or find commercial success. You 're more of a video that \ watch' s well-shot, announced by a deep-pocketed pro, that the stamp bears a major studio, and this has placed an important distribution channel such as Lovefilm or Netflix or movie rental arrangement.

But it 's also true that manyWorks are on the Internet, without all these things considered. And sometimes they get in the correct order: an obscure work "discovered" from a blogger or a high-level tweeter goes viral and is seen by many - and so is first distributed and to second . Clay Shirky calls this "publish, then select" (as opposed to the old model, the \ was "select \ then publish"), but that 's not quite right. The work isn 't "published" to a force it connects with an audience.

Why does any of this matter? Because the point of a publisher is to connect creators and audiences. Partly, publishers do this by ignoring creators who have nothing to say to the audience whom they can reach.

Sometimes they do this through a review of the work in a way that they believe that it is better for the audience. Publishers earn way money from audiences, advertisers or other third parties, and they sometimes order all or part of the money to developers, but there are many traditional publishers who do not - the people, the Bibles put in hotel rooms, for example, or the major newspapers that have little or nothing to guest editorialists who paid for their coverage worth more than the per-word fee.

The Internet has a large number of new types of publishers, the works and the audience connect act created. This group essentially intosearch engines, then bloggers, curators and tweeter, and finally proposed algorithms (eg, Amazon 's "People who bought this also bought ..." recommendations; Reddit' s human electoral system; Netflix 's suggestion system).

In their own way, does any of these units to work on the public attention bolt throw. It 's not always money in the game, and if it is to distinguish the entity that the bulk of the money is used for each example. But production and distribution of money are no longer necessary to publish, in print or sales are. Collecting societies such as PRS collect money on behalf of the musical performers "publish" not \ to talk, now the people who can pay them and not do to publish a lot, like when a hot club, an obscure track is playing for his impossible to achieve, diluted customers.

Publishing - including film and music and game publishing - has always been primarily about the connection works and the audience, because without an audience, there 's no reason to improve a work, it is double them in order to to distribute or sell. But for the first time, it 's possible, "publish" without engaging with all other part of the process, and this is a strange and wonderful thing. It changes the balance of power between publishers and creators and investors - think of the musicians, who storms out of her label deal puts their own work online and is on Amazon or Magnatune or an influential MP3 bloggers who work for her fans to promote.

Critics and skeptics of the Internet characterize many of today's editors as a parasite. This is nothing new musicians and writers have movingly about labels and publishers of the time, but this time it 's often the labels, newspapers and other rights holders who believe they' re always the short side of the deal.

But to find new efficiencies as well as traditional publishers if they outsourced many of its key features that today has the duty of a publisher's signal into an independent function. "Publisher" exist everywhere, specialized and general purpose such as Google and the obscure blog that managed to show a link to the three people in the world who care about it. Anyone who has to have a future in a creative industry, to make peace with that fact.