It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that following the departure of founder and publisher Bob Miller to Workman Publishing last month, HarperCollins imprint HarperStudio is going to close after just 2 years in business.

As a publisher, HarperStudio garnered a remarkable amount of media attention for offering authors lower advances in exchange for a greater share of profits, their plans to sell book to booksellers on a non-returnable basis, and an early and comprehensive embrace of social media.

There was, however, a general feeling — particularly within the industry itself — that despite (or because of) their marketing-savvy, the imprint didn’t quite live up to the hype (even if not everyone felt quite as strongly about it as Dennis Johnson).

In the end they unable to keep author advances down, or their books non-returnable. Yet, as writer Mark Barrett who blogs at Ditchwalk notes, these problems are hardly unique to HarperStudio and, in a sense, their failure is a collective one for publishing.

Perhaps we simply expected (or hoped for) too much?

Nevertheless, I was disappointed by HarperStudio for the more basic reason that their books always seemed to be less innovative than the company itself. When people talked about HarperStudio it was rarely about what they actually published. The books were — for all their audacious marketing — eminently forgettable. They were kind of things that traditional small-to-medium sized trade publishers have a tendency to churn out with alarming regularity (with perhaps the notable exception of Crush It! for which HarperStudio reputedly paid a rather large advance), and it was never clear to me who their core readership was intended to be. Their innovations seemed to do little to improve the kind of books being the published.

In this sense, HarperStudio’s closure has echoes of Quartet Press.

Like many people, I had unrealistically high expectations for Quartet, and I still admire the fact that the people involved put their money where their mouths were (and mostly still are). But my heart sank when it became clear that for all their innovative plans for e-books, they launched with nothing ready to publish. The eventual announcement that they would be publishing romance fiction meant that, unlike HarperStudio, they at least planned to publish to a recognised (and potentially profitable) niche, but somehow this felt like an afterthought. The digital medium was more important than the message.

I was reminded of all this by Brett Sandusky‘s recent announcement that his project Publishr is soliciting for material to publish:

Publishr is proud to announce a new project: Publishr will bring an eBook, which has yet to be created, to market. We will do this in an atmosphere of complete transparency.

Publishr currently seeks proposals from motivated authors (particularly those with works of unpublished fiction and narrative non-fiction) as well as support from contributors who are interested in innovation and building a superior native-digital eBook product or suite of products that will be sold in the real world.

In many ways this is great idea, and there are definitely lessons to be learnt from this kind of experimentation. But Publishr seems to be following in the footsteps of HarperStudio and Quartet (albeit on a smaller scale). Based on the erroneous belief that there is a large reservoir of quality material that can be easily and quickly tapped, the focus is on revolutionizing how to publish rather than what or who to publish.

There is, of course, wisdom to innovating the process rather than the product. Toyota’s success was built on innovative factories, not innovative and original products (at least until the Prius came along). And yet the Toyota process was geared (again until recently) to producing certain kinds of consistently good, inexpensive cars (which, I would guess, was all the consumer actually cared about).

My point is not that we should not stop experimenting with new author contracts, transparency, formats, trade terms, or marketing — we need to try new things and be allowed to fail. But this should not come at the expense of consistently good, interesting (and inexpensive) books.

Perhaps a model for start-ups is to be found in James Bridle’s modestly immodest print-on-demand publishing effort Bookkake. Although Bookkake is not publishing new material (and who knows whether it is making money), it seems a more sustainable kind of venture, not least because James has published books that he cares about. They have an sense of coherence and quality that one might expect from a successful small press.

Another alternative is demonstrated by Toronto small press ChiZine Publications (CZP) who established a ‘dark genre’ webzine long before they moved into print. Founders Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi knew what the kind of stories they liked — “weird, subtle, surreal, disturbing dark fiction and fantasy” — and built a community around it. The books (available in multiple formats) came later.

The CZP story in particular seems to be the polar opposite of HarperStudio, Quartet, and Publishr. CZP was launched because they had stories they wanted to publish, not because they wanted to ‘fix’ the system. I’m not saying that improving the process isn’t important, it’s just that we need to find new, interesting, consistently good content as well — meaningful stuff that matters (if only to us). If we don’t, the new books will just be glowing versions of the old books (with better PR)… Plus ça change…