My personal experience reflects this. I’ve worked in large organisations — FMCG corporates, international aid organisations and government — and I’ve worked in small ones — private consulting firms and small non-profits. In each case I’ve found that small enterprises outperform large ones when it comes to transformation. Smaller companies are faster to identify industry trends and respond to new business opportunities. They also punch above their weight on some forms of R&D, particularly business process innovation. Put simply, small companies are more fleet of foot.

But why?

We’re seeing a lot of reports come through about how small publishers are responding to trends and opportunities. MediaBistro and The Christian Science Monitor have both reported small publishers are leading the charge when it comes to digitization. In his article, “E-book revolution favors the agile“, Matthew Shaer said:

But it’s not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest. Instead, some of the most extensive restructuring efforts are being undertaken in the independent publishing world, traditionally a hotbed for innovation and experimentation.

Soft Skull Press, Canongate, Akashic are all good examples. Shaer also points out that publishing is emulating the music industry in this pattern and, I’d wager, other industries as well.

Again, I ask why?

The obvious reasons are the ones people usually point to. Smaller companies are like the canary in the coal mine. They are first to feel the effects of major shifts within an industry and may need to move faster to find solutions. On the other hand, small publishers also have an incentive to exploit technological efficiencies that might even up the playing field against big competitors.

Small size also helps with changing direction. This week Wheatland Press announced it is taking a publishing hiatus in 2009:

What this means is that I will publish no new books during 2009 (including Polyphony 7). I will continue to fill orders on existing titles and will keep those titles available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com … I will explore ways to put Wheatland Press on a firmer financial footing including, but not limited to, seeking external funding via arts councils, seeking partnerships with other presses, etc. I hope the break will allow me to return to a regular publishing schedule in 2010.

On one level this could be regarded as just another volley of bad news from a publisher affected by global economic conditions. But it’s worth noting that only a small publisher could make this kind of decision. HarperCollins and Random House can’t make the choice to stop publishing books for a year to sort out their business model and make necessary changes. They can cut costs through staff layoffs and tightening budgets, but their operational overheads are way too large to ever get off the treadmill of publishing hundreds of titles a year.

Underneath it all, though, the one thing that has the biggest impact on a company’s ability to transform is the one thing that almost never gets talked about in the publishing industry: organizational culture. Paul Biba of TeleRead, quoted in the Shaer article, hints at this but doesn’t quite nail it down:

“In general, I’d say the big publishers tend to be really dinosaurs, intrigued by e-books but afraid of them … [Younger readers] have grown up with a whole different way of looking at the world, and I don’t think many publishers understand this. They think people are just sitting down in leather chairs and reading hardcopy books.”

I’m not sure this is a fair characterization of publisher attitudes today, but I do think it alludes to a bigger problem that is stopping large publishers from embracing new opportunities.

Big trade publishers are fighting a losing battle against their own organizational cultures. The history of business is littered with examples of companies that couldn’t transition from one paradigm to the next, not because they couldn’t see the necessity, but because they couldn’t undertake the necessary internal change.

The larger a company is, the harder organisational change is to effect. The big trade publishers are now subsidiaries of the largest media companies in the world with thousands of employees, hundreds of offices and decades of crusted-on beliefs, traditions and systems. Small teams, by virtue of scale, can change their organisational culture quickly, sometimes through shifts in personnel, other times by the sheer force of personality from a charismatic leader. In any case, smaller teams tend to adopt a tenacious, can-do, try-anything culture because they have to.

Organisational culture is the bedrock of performance. This, more than any problem of physical infrastructure or technical or financial systems, makes big publishers slow to adapt. Too slow, I fear, to survive the speed of change within the cultural and economic ecology of which they are a part.

New experiments are popping up, such as HarperStudio, which could be the exception that proves the rule. Only by hiving itself off as a separate, entrepreneurial unit within HarperCollins, with its own small-team culture, has HarperStudio been able to achieve the clear-eyed perspective and momentum to try really different and new ways of publishing.

Paul Biba may have called it right by using the word “dinosaur.” After all, it was the small dinosaurs, with modern-day descendants still thriving, who made the successful adaptation that evolution requires. The big guys fell hard and fast and it’s increasingly rare to find any evidence of their impact on us at all.

Related Stories:

• Calling Out Risk-Averse Publishers
• Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?
• How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?

booktrade.info reports:

… the toolkit allows authors to customise their pages with a choice of backgrounds, fonts and colours. Authors can then select different types of content to add to their pages, such as profile or biography information, links to favourite sites, audio and video clips, book reviews, bibliographies, photo galleries, blogs and newsletters.

The web pages will be hosted on a community-based website called AuthorsPlace and once authors have created their web pages they can choose whether to interact with other authors on the site, or whether to use their pages as a standalone website.

There’s a couple of things worth discussing here. Firstly, a system that allows users to set up their own page and add content such as audio, video, images, etc. sounds awfully like a blog platform. If the goal is to put this power in the hands of your authors, why bother to build your own, possibly expensive, proprietary Web architecture instead of educating your authors to use WordPress, Movable Type or Blogger for themselves?

The obvious answer would be to control the platform. No matter how much customisation users can achieve with colours, fonts, images, etc., the pages will ultimately be constrained by the limitations of the platform. This could have both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, if Random House wants to drive attention to their authors’ Web sites they only have to concentrate on doing it for the one online community instead of dividing their efforts among titles or writers. If Random House gets good at SEO this could be a powerful benefit to RH authors. On the minus side, it would presumably be very costly to keep a platform like that up to date with relevant features. Why bother to invest in the software development cycle when other companies are doing it as their core business and a lot faster? Some, like The Lazarus Corporation, are even offering artist-tailored solutions free and open source.

Secondly, I’m interested in the idea of the AuthorsPlace, because alongside Authonomy, this is another example of a community where writers talk to other writers. I question the value of this to Random House and to its authors, at least in terms of book sales. Obviously there are a lot of benefits to writers who can be supported by professional communities of interest. But I think publishers’ efforts are best spent on assisting authors to connect with readers. That’s a much harder task. It means you have to understand and be good at search. You have to to stick with the conversation long after the book is launched. You have to be open about, and even encourage, sharing and spreadability of digital content, even when that content is the book. (See what Paulo Coelho thinks about that.)

Finally, all this raises the much broader question of how authors should be promoted online for best outcomes. I’m a firm believer that nobody can do this better than the author themselves, but what is the role of the publisher in online promotion of their authors and titles? How long can they realistically commit resources and energy to any one particular title or writer? Who controls the message? Given that, as Mac suggested in this post earlier this week, the shift is towards two-way conversation, it would seem that the best results will be achieved by authors who are genuinely prepared to put in the time to engage in that conversation.

What do you think authors should do to promote themselves online? How much should publishers get involved?

Related Stories:

• Kate Eltham: “Publisher as brand?”
• Web Publicity Grows Up, Learns the Value of Conversation
• Web Publicity + Free = A Fighting Chance
• What Authors Can Learn from Silicon Valley
• Responsibly Assuaging Author Concerns about File Sharing and “Piracy”