You know that book publishing is in a moment of crisis when the big New York publishers start talking about cutting back on their glam literary lunches. Yet just the other day Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper, was quoted in the New York Times musing about"whether it's absolutely essential to have a lunch here or there."

Sure enough, recently Houghton Mifflin suspended acquisitions, laid off staff, and saw its publisher resign. Thomas Nelson cut 20 percent of its workforce. Random House announced a major reorganization. Penguin imposed a salary freeze on many of its workers. Borders cut hundreds of corporate jobs. Barnes & Noble reported multimillion dollar losses. And the president and CEO of Simon & Schuster warned that worse could lie ahead.

Digital media advocate Steve Rubel went so far as to declare that print itself is in its death throes, and he predicted that print media will be extinct by 2014.

That's not going to happen. Printed books are a proven technology. A commercial book trade has existed at least since the first century of the common era. The earliest existing dated book, from 868, is still usable, while digital documents from just twenty years ago can barely be deciphered today.

Still, it is clear that the book publishing industry needs to make adjustments to respond to the rise and digital media and the fall of the economy. In many ways, independent publishers are better prepared for this transition than are the large corporate houses. So let's look at five lessons smaller publishers can offer their bloated rivals.

1. Streamline your operation for maximum efficiency

Small publishers have always played on an unlevel field. The corporations that control most of publishing also own means of distributing and publicizing their titles. (The largest book publishing companies are owned by Bertlesman, News Corp, Time Warner, Disney, and Viacom, who also own countless newspapers, radio stations, and magazines.) As a result, the smaller publishers have become lean and efficient, eliminating many of the redundancies of the larger organizations.

Right now I am reading a book by David Silverman called Typo: The Last American Typesetter; Or, How I Made and Lost $4 Million (An Entrepreneur's Education) (Soft Skull, 2007). In it Silverman describes the way a huge typesetting organization handled a job: "Each book required a job estimator, a customer-service person, a setup person, a keyboarding manager, outside keyboarders, one or more typesetters, and art specialist, a 'proofer' (it took me a while to figure out this was the person who ran the laser print), one or more quality-control people, a system-setup person (a whole position to set up file folders on the system), a technology specialist for when things went wrong (they always went wrong), a production supervistor, a plant manager, a shipping clerk, and a billet.... There had to be a better way."

There is a better way. Using software like Quark and InDesign, a small team of employees with flexible job descriptions can produce books for a fraction of what it costs large organizations with entrenched redundancies of operation. But beware -- such software enables an ignorant designer or typesetter to do serious damage. Small publishers should consult books like Robert Brindghurst's The Elements of Typographic Style in order to learn the basics of sound book design.)

2. Publish books you believe in

I'm currently a reader for the Northern California Book Reviewers 2008 Translation Award. There is a strong group of excellent translations contending for this award. Who are the publishers of these books? They are City Lights, Dalkey Archive, Green Integer, Kaya, Melville House, Milkweed, New Directions, North Atlantic, Omnidawn, Wesleyan, Whereabouts, and Yale. They are all independents and university presses -- not a single corporate publisher is represented!

It wasn't always that way. Alfred A. Knopf built the publishing house that bears his name by publishing books in translation. But today Knopf has turned its back on that tradition and publishes fewer translations than some publishers whose employees number in single digits. High-quality literary translations might not offer the quick profits than a little picture book about cats might bring in (I know an editor at a larger house who calls himself their token editor "for books with words"), but once independent publishers find the market for their unique type of publishing, so long as they are putting out excellent books they are likely to develop a solid base that will see them through the ups and downs of the marketplace.

3. Develop the backlist

Books like this are seldom designed to capitalize on a passing fad or a blip of celebrity gossip -- they are books that are likely to remain pertinent for many years. Because bookstore-oriented publishing is so frontlist-loaded, it is difficult to get big numbers out of the backlist using traditional channels of marketing and distribution. Collectively, however, backlist books can produce a steady stream of sales that can level out the up-and-down curves created by orders and returns of frontlist titles.

With frontlist publishing you are only as good as your current book, and for the most part you are not building a foundation for the future. Backlist publishing, on the other hand, helps to sustain a press when new titles fail to meet expectations. New techniques of small-run printing make building a backlist more economically feasible than it was in the past, when larger numbers needed to be printed in order to reduce unit costs. Some backlist books can even be kept on a publisher's list through print on demand.

4. Build your personal network

One of the reasons that book publishing has been particularly vulnerable to the economic downturn is that it has been slow to let go of antiquated models of operation. In the past, a title was announced and bound galleys were sent to hundreds of book reviewers. The reviews created demand for books, which were picked up by a large network of independent bookstores. To encourage the stores to give shelf space to the books, publishers offered them more or less on consignment. Early readers further built demand through word of mouth. Bookstore buyers noted the interest and reordered the title, and healthy sales resulted.

Hardly any of this structure still exists in the same way. Newspapers have been folding and cutting book reviews -- there are only a few major book review sections left. Independent bookstores are a much smaller segment of the market than they used to be. Books stay on shelves for shorter periods of time, so that word-of-mouth has less opportunity to be effective. Book reorders are less likely to be made by knowledgable staff who have interacted with customers than by automated computer inventories that may fail to pick up on reader enthusiasm. Books are often sent to the wrong stores, only to be sent back to publishers as returns or hurts -- it's said that today only UPS makes much money from book publishing.

Most smaller publishers have identified a particular niche, an area of publishing in which they are passionate and knowledgable. This enables them to find alternative ways of finding and introducing themselves to the primary market for their area. The internet offers many opportunities for social networking that publishers would be wise to take advantage of.

Consider the success of the Obama presidential campaign, with its focused approach to marketing. Robert Niles of the Knight Digital Media Center has observed that "Republicans mocked Obama's experience as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago. But Obama's community organizing skills defined his campaign. ... [T]his will be the new roadmap for election campaigns: do not rely on ads and news coverage to convince people to vote your way on election day. Instead, recruit volunteers throughout your community and use the power of their personal relationships to build a network of loyal supporters that expresses its support through publishing, demonstrating, organizing, recruiting and, ultimately, voting. Then send those volunteers into new communities, to build new personal relationships that can extend your campaign into fresh territory."

Publishers should consider this model and see if similar opportunities for building networks of support exist in their areas of publication.

5. Think about the book as an object

Finally, it is important to remember than digital publishing is faster and in some respects more flexible and convenient than print publishing, and it routinely reaches much larger audiences. Purely as a means of delivering words to readers, print cannot compete with online alternatives. Larger publishers have been trying to reduce the expense side of their finances by lowering the quality of production, for example by printing on paper that is barely distinguishable from newsprint and probably has about the same life expectancy.

I believe this is a mistake. One great thing the book has going for it is its aesthetic quality, which far surpasses that of digital publishing. A well made book is a treat for the hand and the eye.

Independent publishing is never going to be an easy business. But as long as independent publishers do not lose sight of the goal of making the best books they can in the best way that they can, their books will continue to find readers.

Posted by: Tom Christensen