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Yesterday I was with a local writer/musician (interview forthcoming next week) whose first book just hit the shelves. It’s self-published, and when the author sat down at the table in our organic, cage-free coffee shop, the first thing the she mentioned was how she was still trying to figure out how to market it. As a fairly established rapper with a fairly prominent clique (I don’t know why I’m reducing my proper nouns to hyperlinks, but I’ve made my choice and I’m sticking with it at least until the end of the paragraph), she said understands how to create hype around a CD release, but a book is another cookie. She’s doing the consignment thing here, and some stuff here as well, and cross-promoting it on her hip-hop crew’s website. But does all this amount to a buzz?

Later in the conversation, she said – and this will be part of a discussion she’s having with Kerri Miller sometime in early February – she thinks that what’s happened to the music industry, in terms of decentralization and the positive effect that’s had on independent artists, will have to happen, and maybe is happening in the book industry. I’m not sure I disagreed, or disagree, but I said and I say that I think it’ll be much harder for authors than musicians, because while rock bands and rappers can build up local followings and communities and create hype for themselves by playing shows, there’s not really a literary equivalent. What can we do – blog? Yeah, Stuff White People Like is pretty entertaining, but I don’t see a young Toni Morrison getting her start with a blog.

And then this article was forwarded to me. From The Economist, the writer Daniel Hall predicts that no music act will ever achieve the cultural impact The Beatles once had, while out of the other side of his mouth he says that it’s inevitable that there will soon be a book more popular than the Harry Potter series. All because of web-related technology:

Our cultural consumption exists on a spectrum from "individual" to "collective". Technology has shifted the balance for both books and music. Digital distribution and the iPod have made music consumption much more individualistic, while the internet and global branding have made book consumption increasingly collective.

Four decades ago, Hall argues, the music industry was a sort of winner-take-all game; whatever was on the radio was what would be bought. Now that’s not so much the case. But the book world, he says, is adopting this all-or-nothing model, with the already-best-selling books being promoted and discounted in major bookstores, thus giving them even more exposure, while the lesser known titles become even more obscure.

What’s sad is that Hall’s seems to be the best-case scenario. That is, the presumption that ten years from now there will be any best-selling book, let alone one that’s more popular than Harry Potter, strikes me as optimistic. Okay, I’m being a bit fatalistic there, but I fail to see the herd mentality that Hall is positing, at least as it relates to books.

My prediction? Like big music labels, the power and clout of big publishing houses will continue to diminish, while the prestige and baseline talent at individual presses like Graywolf will rise. Eventually the power exerted by each will be equal. This is an easy prediction to make; it’s already happening. Then some form of parity will manifest itself, and at least every published author will be on equal footing (equally screwed).

Once this process is complete, the marketing departments will still have to get their shit together. I still say no one knows how to market a book, and neither do I. Graywolf struck gold a couple weeks ago when one of their poets was chosen to read at Obama’s inauguration. Probably this has been the best marketing opportunity any book has received in the last two decades. (Word is they printed off 100,000 copies of her book.) You can’t stick a poem - let alone a short story or novel - in a car commercial or movie soundtrack like you can a song.

Basically, I think there’s one shot left: Get Playboy to re-hire their fiction editor, and have special weekly web editions where prose is written on the models’ naked bodies. People will call it innovative. It’ll be great. I'm checking out their website now, just in case.