m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Bad News is Good News

I Should Be Writing has some links about Black Wednesday, the day Houghton-Mifflin stopped buying books. Pyr-o-mania and John Scalzi recommend fighting the recession with a book shopping spree. Dean Wesley Smith reminds us that for the publishing industry, bad news is good news:

The common knowledge is that publishing is recession proof, and in a general way, I tend to believe that. When it costs a couple with kids over $100 bucks to go to a movie and a cheap meal, the price of a book looks really cheap for the same amount of entertainment. So I tend to buy into this common knowledge for the most part.

But this industry, because we are corporate, will have cutbacks and layoffs and list cuts and such. But not that much in comparison to most areas of the corporate world. And since the business moves at the speed of a glacier, most authors won’t even notice unless it hits them directly in some fashion or another.