The gist of the talk is in this graph:

(Point: that whole industries do just fine without Intellectual Property protection.)

Now, I do question one of the assumptions behind this: while it is true that fashion, food and furniture cannot be copyrighted, and that these industries are still highly innovative, we should also remember that they are more necessary than music, films, and books. Gross sales is an oversimplification of the effects of copyright: certainly more people would buy clothes than they would books!

But, that said, her primary example holds true. High fashion is indeed still very lucrative (and creative!) without IP protection. Would publishing be in a similar environment if books were not copyrightable? It doesn’t take much to imagine a world in which fan-fiction is sanctioned, where riffing on the books you love is a norm.

So here’s a thought experiment: if for one year all copyright were to be revoked (or demoted to a Creative Commons-like attribution-only license) would innovation increase worldwide, or would the opposite happen? Would this be good for society?

Writers like Nicholas Carr have argued that our digital culture values mashups over source material. I disagree with that (I believe both are equally valued, and equally valuable, though we should perhaps leave that argument for another day); I suspect that the world would benefit as the rate of innovation increases in response to these freedoms.

What I’m not certain about is how this would affect the creators. Would they benefit, if at all? Or would the benefits only show themselves after the industry has had to make do without copyright, like how the fashion industry has had to do?

I will admit, though: a future where Pride and Prejudice and Zombies can then be combined with Twilight and Buffy The Vampire Slayer sounds like a very fun world indeed.

Devices

The first reason for publishing’s comparatively slow change is obvious: there were no good reading devices before Amazon got into the hardware business. It won’t be much of an exaggeration to say that the Kindle singlehandedly jumpstarted the ebook industry — it showed, amongst other things, what was possible given E Ink technology and a persistent link to a rich ebook store. In the meantime, the music industry had a bunch of companies building mp3 players, long before Apple entered that market with the iPod. Innovation was certainly not lacking in music.

(There’s a remarkable story here, if you’re interested in such things. Amazon really struggled to build the first Kindle. Businessweek reports:

The effort to develop the first Kindle ended up taking more than three years. Nearly everything went wrong. The black-and-white displays from E Ink, an offshoot of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab that makes screens resembling the printed page and requiring very little power, would look good for one month and then degrade alarmingly. Qualcomm, which was set to provide the wireless chips, was sued by a competitor, Broadcom, and for months was enjoined by a judge from selling its wares in the U.S. The Lab126 team repeatedly urged Bezos to make their project easier by considering a Wi-Fi-only connection for the Kindle. He rejected the idea, constantly suggesting new ones for complicated features, like the notion that customers’ annotations of books should be backed up on Amazon’s servers.

Looking back, it’s remarkable that Amazon — a retail company — even considered making the leap into hardware. Writers have a lot to thank Amazon for.)

Industry attraction

The lack of innovation in E-Reading devices is symptomatic of a larger fact: that music, as an industry, is more attractive than publishing. Dalton Caldwell of music startup imeem has said that people keep trying to do music startups because they love music. In comparison, publishing startups are few and far between.

Now I’m not saying that it’s easy to innovate in the music industry today. In fact, Caldwell’s speech is an argument against doing music startups, given the industry’s love of lawsuits. What I am saying is that the lawsuits are a result of the early innovations that so quickly changed the music industry.

We don’t know if publishers would turn to lawsuits in response to increasing levels of ebook piracy. I’m inclined to think not: a good side-effect of publishing’s comparatively slow change is that publishers have more time to cope with the disruption.

Ebook Formats

But a third reason is that of formats. This seems clear to me only in retrospect, after the Tower of eBabel fiasco during the dot-com boom, and more recently, working on ebook conversion software for the past year. In music, mp3 won the format wars a long time ago. In publishing, the format wars are far from over.

Amazon is the hold-out here: they refuse to use EPUB, the format everyone else is using. Why they choose to do so is mind-boggling to me — AZW is based on mobi, which in turn is an old, clunky format that ought to be retired. The EPUB3 spec, for instance, defines many new features important for the future of ebooks (examples include multimedia embedding and interactive scripting), features that AZW will struggle to include.

In fact, I wonder if music piracy owed much of its growth to the .mp3 format. If you run a cursory search for pirated ebooks on Google today, you will still find an unwieldy number of formats: PDF, EPUB, mobi and a few obscure others. These confusing choices may explain why publishers feel less threatened by ebook piracy, especially when compared to labels. At any rate, a large number of ebook formats make it hard for both consumers and publishers — in particular it makes it difficult to build a good digital publishing workflow. Could the lack of a winning format be a cause of the slow shift to ebooks? I should think so.

Beyond the ongoing clash between EPUB and mobi, however, a host of other questions have yet to be answered. What is the best way to store metadata across these formats? What’s the right way to do annotations? (This is called marginalia by the industry, but I’ll talk about that in some other post). And what of the networked book – how would that look like?

In some ways, ebooks present us with a set of difficult problems that the digital music pioneers did not need to solve. And solving them would be an ongoing challenge for publishers and hardware-makers alike.

I find the music industry a curious phenomenon — so many parallels, and yet so different when you examine the challenges ahead. But of the above three obstacles, only ebook formats remain an unknown variable. Amazon’s relentless innovation with the Kindles, and the increasing excitement amongst authors and agents almost guarantee growth in the coming months.

Summary: Watch The Formats

Writing this makes me realize that the factor we should all be watching out for is the future format of publishing. And I don’t mean EPUB vs mobi — I mean the various additional structures that we would have to build in response to publishing’s problems (that list of questions that I outlined above).

I think this is clear: if tomorrow Amazon were to release an updated AZW, one with support for animations, music, and video; or if next year the EPUB3 working group were to announce a new method for hosting and linking to an ebook, our entire approach to writing and selling these books would have to change. (I’m being random with my examples here, it’s just as likely that successful networked books would come from a startup of some sort, or perhaps from some iPad-related innovation.)

New formats and new structures mean new ways to discover, create, and sell ebooks. This is the one variable most likely to change in the near future, and it is — I think — the most likely to influence the shape of publishing. Format problems are what makes publishing most different from music. They have the potential to change the very way books are written.

I look forward to building (as well as finding out!) what these future structures would be.

Update: Adam Gurri and Kevin Kurz have both pointed out in the comments that content creation is another factor: it’s much easier to rip music from CDs than it is to digitize books. I’ve no idea how I missed that.

No question: there’s a revolution going on here.—Barry Eisler

Best-selling spy novelist Barry Eisler and successful thriller novelist and self-publishing advocate Joe Konrath’s ebook Be the Monkey is a sprawling discussion as recorded on GoogleDocs; a loud cheer for what they call “indie-publishing”, and an autopsy of the publishing industry as it transitions from a paper-based model to one dominated by digital texts.

Indie-publishing is an umbrella title for everything from self-publishing to new publishing companies working outside the model established by the “Big 6/Legacy” institutions that have dominated the industry for decades, and how that may be coming to an end.

In the part one, the authors pivot off Eisler’s announcement that he passed on a half-a-million dollar advance from a big name publisher in favor of self publishing, claiming he made the decision for monetary as well as creative reasons, and was inspired in part by Konrath’s move away the world of legacy publishing and his proselytizing to other writers to make the same choice.

Konrath and Eisler argue that the paper book is now on the road to becoming a “niche market,” and writers and readers will be better off in the new world of the ebook. It is a convincing theory, one reinforced by Amazon’s announcement that in 2010 the company sold more books for the Kindle ereader than paper copies, along with the popularity of the Kindle, the Nook and the iPad, a point Eisler highlights early on. This means that writers will make more money while readers will pay less and enjoy access to a wider range of content. The numbers used to support the claim are pretty convincing:

Joe: …the 25% royalty on ebooks [legacy publishers] offer is actually 14.9% after everyone gets their cut. 14.9% on a price the publisher sets.

Barry: …a 25% royalty on the net revenue produced by an ebook equals 17.5% of the retail price after Amazon takes its 30% cut, and 14.9% after the agents takes 15% of the 17.5%.

Think of it this way: by publishing a novel or story collection as an ebook on Smashwords or B&N or Amazon, the author retains 70% of the profit from the sales of his or her work. That is a margin too wide to ignore, or as Konrath puts it, “…in the long run a 70% royalty wins.”

The benefits of circumventing the legacy publishers don’t stop there. From the shortened time between when a book is finished to when it reaches the market, to the unprecedented level of creative control, plus a healthy—and growing—list of the indie-published authors enjoying healthy sales, Be the Monkey does, at times, make a very convincing case for going it alone.

Or as alone as possible. In some of the most informative and forward-thinking sections of the discussion, Konrath and Eisler muse on what the digital revolution in book-making will mean for the industry at large, beyond the realm of writers and readers.  They refuse to glorify or gloss over the substantial workload an author is shouldering by avoiding legacy route. The self-published author assumes the role of writer, editor, and copyeditor. They become responsible for cover art, front and back cover copy, the writer’s biography, formatting text, marketing and promotion…the list goes on.  Konrath believes this space may be filled by what he calls “E-stributors…a combination of publisher and manager…” that will take over these tasks for a one-time fee or a percentage of the book’s profits, leaving the author to concentrate on what is his most important job: writing.

When I used the word “sprawling” to describe Be the Monkey, understand that what Eisler and Konrath have written isn’t an actual book; it is a series of conversations recorded over a long stretch of time that covered a wide swath of subjects.

The tangents are many, as happens in any discussion between two people comfortable with each other. In Part One there is the back and forth about over Youtube video of a monkey raping a frog and long diatribes regarding the messy, self-defeating nature of the Big 6/Legacy publishers.  This is understandable; familiarity breeds contempt, and we all bitch about work, especially when our bitching turns out to be right.

Parts Two suffers from bad pacing, but is just as informative as the first section. Most of discussion focuses on the decision by mega-successful indie-author Amanda Hocking to sign a contract with St. Martin’s Press for a four-book series, her first foray into paper publication. Much space is also spent elaborating on pricing and how more cheaply priced books lead to increased sales and more profit, and on what the relationship between writers and theoretical “E-stributors”  might develop into. The section becomes bogged down by Eisler and Konrath answering critics of claims made and analogies used in Part One.

Part Three is even slower than Two. The separate deals Eisler and Konrath struck with Amazon’s new publishing imprint and defending these decisions, Eisler’s in particular since Konrath continues to self-publish. To their credit, the authors make a legitimate point about signing the best deal being most important, and working with a publisher who understands the what direction the industry is heading and drafts contracts accordingly. It is an educating insight into the shifting sands of the publishing industry, and the future of brick and mortar bookstores, but not all that entertaining or engaging.  A real opportunity was lost in not expanding the second to last section, “Next Steps in the Evolution of Ebooks.” Digital storytelling is in its infancy; discussing the exciting work being done and the innovations that have the potential to alter how we tell and receive textual narratives is a subject worth exploration by authors like Konrath and Eisler.

Because Be the Monkey is a transcript of a live conversation, assembled to be sold and shared quickly, it is unfair to judge Be the Monkey by the standards I would usually apply to a normal work of non-fiction. As a text it suffers from being uneven and discursive, but it serves as a useful primer to the state of publishing at exists today, and offers some tantalizing peeks at what may be coming down the road. Maybe readers would have benefitted from a transcript edited and crafted into a series of essays with smoother narrative flow. but Eisler and Konrath deserve credit for the willingness to spread the word to other writers and readers, and anyone else who is interested, that change is here for the future of books and storytelling, and there is no choice but to embrace it.

Tim O’Reilly said recently that he believed a small group of successful indie writers will soon create their own publishing outfits. He has some authority on the matter: O’Reilly, after all, started out as a self-publisher, before he began doing it for other people. Today, O’Reilly Media, Inc is a multi-million dollar publishing outfit, one of the few successfully adapting to a digital shift.

I think this makes sense, and I’m not going to spend too much time on the obvious advantages:

1) Successful independent writers have ‘been there and done that’. If you were a writer you would probably be attracted to the idea of having an accomplished indie writer (say, J.A. Konrath?) help you with your ebook. Think: is it a good trade to give away the difficulties of designing, marketing, and selling your ebook to indie-writers who are well-experienced in the matter? They get to take a small cut of your ebook sales, you get to focus on writing. I think it’s a good trade.

2) The margins for a small, writer-as-publisher startup makes a lot of sense. You’re not likely to make much per book, but thanks to the economics of the digital bookstore, you are likely to make a sizable amount — so long as you gather a small team of editors and designers, and focus on releasing as many ebooks as possible. The long tail of digital economics would ensure that you’ll make money for about as long as your ebooks are online (which can be forever, if they’re on the Kindle store).

We’re already seeing several web fiction writers turn to publishing. Last week I linked to Alexandra Erin’s new outfit, LitSnacks. This week I spent some time browsing through web fiction author MCM’s catalog, over at his 1889.ca website. He’s lent his ebook and design expertise to a small (but growing!) number of authors, under the 1889 Labs label.

We’ll soon see more of these publishers, I bet. And — yes — these outfits will still be in the margins of the publishing industry. But they will be profitable, and they will grow as the market grows.

Writing this article has made me realize that there are really two barriers to publishing at the moment: one bit of it is technological, which we’re trying to solve with the software we’re writing at Pandamian; the other bit is process — the very human effort of taking a book from manuscript to market. These small publishing outfits are likely to be the solution to the process problem, and I look forward to seeing how they solve the intricacies of editing, design, and ebook production in a low-margin, high-output context.

Note: I’d love to hear from you, if you are (or you know of) a writer-turned-publisher. Just leave a link to your outfit in the comments, and I’ll include you in a roundup post next week.

I was wrong, of course.

The lesson I learnt here is that one technology very rarely replaces another – or, as David Pogue calls it: “things don’t replace things, they just splinter”. Even if cannibalization happens, it takes years before you see no more of one technology: television didn’t kill radio, and mp3s didn’t kill CDs (or at least, not yet) – and so the iPad won’t kill the Kindle.

But I was wrong about another thing: the iPad is a different device altogether. See, for instance, this Kindle ad:

The value proposition is clear: the Kindle is cheap, readable under sunlight, and light enough to hold in one hand. None of which describes the iPad.

Now, I’m not saying that people won’t read on the iPad. I spent my last holiday reading five books and two web fiction serials on one, taking notes on the reading experience as I went along. The iPad is great on a sofa – and is even better when you’re using it to read what you would otherwise read on a computer screen. But it’s no paperback – and you can’t use it on trains or in parks or on beaches the same way you would a Kindle.

Yipeng, one of the co-founders at Pandamian, is known to call his Kindle ‘shitty’. (He’s in charge of .mobi conversion, if you’re wondering, because he owns one: see above). And yet he’s read a ton of books on it, and downloads still more to load onto the device. The reason? The Kindle is meant for reading, and reading alone. No distractions. No web surfing. No addictive pig-killing games.

With speculation of a free Kindle to be released later this year, it’s now rather clear as to why the Kindle is built the way it is – cheap and plasticky, with a user interface that kind-of sucks. It doesn’t need to be amazing. It just needs to be good enough for book nerds – like me – who’re sick of lugging heavy paperbacks around.

(Incidentally, I find it interesting as to what the Kindle gets right – typography on the Kindle screen is gorgeous, and the fact that it’s got battery life of close to a month helps when you’re bringing it with you on a long-haul flight. Plus – and this is obvious – the Kindle store has all the might of Amazon behind it).

I’m not sure what the future of ebook reading is, but – seeing as Apple appears to be relatively disinterested in eBooks – I’m fairly confident that the Kindle, the Nook (and other devices like them, no matter how horrendously constructed) would be a big part of it.

Atwood offers no answers to the problems of publishing. But she does paint a clear picture of the tensions that many authors face in today’s publishing industry (traditionally published or otherwise). My favourite part is this bit (at 8:32) about a dead moose and a dead author:

… helpful industry hint: never eliminate your primary source. This is an example from biology. It is a dead moose. Every dead moose maintains the food chain for at least thirty other life-forms. I’ve drawn here only a few of them.

This is a dead author.

The author is a primary source. Everything else in the world of publishing depends on authors. They don’t have to be dead, but dead ones are particularly lucrative.

It gets better. Go watch it.

These people then extrapolate that complaint to the quality of indie books in general, and how the future of publishing is doomed if we – as publishers, or authors – cannot maintain proper quality control. It’s an old argument, and I’ve heard it countless times before.

Now, it may be true that Hocking is a so-so writer. I’m not going to go there – the writers who read this blog are likely to be better qualified to make that call. But even if we say that her quality of writing is average, we have to accept that that is exactly the point – Hocking’s work is good enough, and good enough is how disruption happens.

Record labels in the music industry weren’t displaced by better technology – they was displaced by lower quality, relatively low-res mp3s. As were the video-rental industry, and the newspaper industry. Youtube videos – while entertaining, cannot possibly compare to a properly produced movie. And yet millions of people tune in every day to short videos and low quality movie torrents uploaded to the Internet.

It’s tempting to see this and conclude that people don’t care about quality – or that they don’t mind stealing work for private consumption. But that isn’t necessarily true. People do care about quality. And, given the right context, people can and will pay for digital content.

All we’re seeing here is the net effect of new technology being used to give people something they want but couldn’t previously get. People live with low quality mp3s because we want a painless way to own individual songs. And they live with low-quality Youtube videos because they’re short, sweet, and painless to procure. (Indeed, the main value proposition of the Internet seems to be that it makes things painless, to the point where consumption becomes casual).

But there are two sides to that equation. Where one part is the Internet giving people things that they wanted but couldn’t previously get, the other part is that it’s new technology that we’re talking about. The fact that it’s new technology being used almost always means that the early adopters would be lower in quality when compared to the incumbents. It took television a couple of years before it became the polished industry that it is today; so it will be a number of years before digital-only record labels and newspapers and publishers reorient their operations to reflect the new dynamics of the web.

People are buying Amanda Hocking ebooks because they’re cheap, they’re easy, and they’re good enough to read. And that’s the metric that matters, really, because that’s how disruption works: it almost always begins with ‘good enough.‘

Amanda Hocking is 26^* years old. She has 9 self-published books to her name, and sells 100,000+ copies of those ebooks per month. She has never been traditionally published. This is her blog. And it’s no stretch to say – at $3 per book¹/70% per sale for the Kindle store – that she makes a lot of money from her monthly book sales. (Perhaps more importantly: a publisher on the private Reading2.0 mailing list has said, to effect: there is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all on her own.)

And that is stunning news.

Kindle Store Economics

Why this is happening, and how it can happen, is a question that’s been explored by other indie writers experimenting with sales on the Kindle store. J.A.Konrath is arguably the best authority on this, and the logic goes roughly as follows:

If you’re an indie writer, you get to sell books at a price way, way lower than what a Traditional Publisher can sell at. And yet you make more money, because your only costs are to an ebook and cover art designer (whereas the traditional publisher has to support a legacy system, plus the traditionally published author gets a 30% cut, while you get 70%).

In the meantime, readers are more inclined to buy your stories, even if you’re an unknown author, simply because your book prices are cheaper. So you get high sales, low ebook prices, but high revenue once you’ve hit sufficient scale. And the best thing is that it’s infinitely scalable: your ebooks are out there, getting sales every single day. No shelf-space, no print runs to worry about.

You’re making a killing, and are able to compete with traditional publishers at their own game.

Well, in the context of an ebook store, that is.

The oft-repeated argument that people use w/r/t Konrath is that he was a traditionally published author before moving to the Kindle store. But Hocking and her peers, who have never been published the traditional route before (who were inspired by Konrath’s exploits, and who are now selling way more than Konrath ever has) are together invalidating that argument. You don’t have to be traditionally published to sell a lot of ebooks, and you don’t have to be A-List famous, either. Take this monthly sales list of top Kindle indie authors, for instance:

Blake Crouch – 2500+
Nathan Lowell – 2500+
Beth Orsoff – 2500+
Sandra Edwards – 2500+
Vianka Van Bokkem - 2500+
Maria Hooley – 2500+
C.S. Marks – 2500+
Lee Goldberg – 2500+
Lexi Revellian – 4000+
Zoe Winters – 4000+
Aaron Patterson – 4000+
Bella Andre – 5000+
Imogen Rose – 5000+
Ellen Fisher – 5000+
Tina Folsom – 5000+
Terri Reid – 5000+
David Dalglish – 5000+
Scott Nicholson – 10,000+
J.A. Konrath 10,000+
Victorine Lieske – 10,000+
L.J. Sellers – 10,000+
Michael R. Sullivan – 10,000+
H.P. Mallory – 20,000+
Selena Kitt – 20,000+
Stephen Leather – 40,000+
Amanda Hocking – 100,000+

Those numbers you see? They’re monthly sales figures taken from the December 2010 listings on the Kindle store. And of the list, only six have had previous print deals with major publishers. Some mental arithmetic to do: average price of those ebooks are between $3-$5^*. Amazon takes a 30% cut. How much are these authors making, per month?

And What Does This Mean for Web Fiction?

A number of web fiction authors are now moving/releasing their work exclusively on the Kindle ebook store. Zoe Whitten, for instance, recently took down four of her novels: all of which were formerly open, web fiction pieces. (I particularly enjoyed Zombie Punter, and I wrote her a glowing review for it, but that’s a story for another day).

I think several things would happen over the course of the year, the majority of which are obvious responses to this gold-mine of indie publishing. More web fiction writers would move their work to the Kindle store (if they haven’t already). Some of these serials would be taken off the open web; others would be left online, but with new work released to the store for the foreseeable future.

It’s likely that the web fiction writers of the future would treat web fiction as this thing you do when you’re writing a novel – it’s fun, dynamic, and very fulfilling, but when the novel’s done you close off the web fiction site and turn that into a landing page for your ebook. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s going to be a change for the community.

The good news is that writers can now make a significant amount of money, if they’re hardworking enough, and smart enough, to take advantage of the digital tools available to them. The bad news is that … well, things would be different in the not-too-distant future. And maybe different in a bad way. But that goes without saying, and whether it’s good, or bad, or just different, we really can’t know tell things would turn out.

I, for one, am optimistic, and I think we can do cool things with this trend. But let’s wait and see.

Update: USA Today reports that her sales have exceeded 450k for the month of January 2011 alone.

¹ Three of her full-length ebook novels are priced at $0.99.

^* Correction appended: ebooks by these authors are between $3-$5, not $8-$9 as previously claimed. The $8-$9 price are the prices of their self-published paperback books. Also, Amanda’s age is 26, not 27.

I have never seen so many iPads in one room before in my life.

It was like walking into an Apple store, except the business casual gurus at the podium were not Steve Jobs but representatives from the various factions of digital publishing. I don’t know if tech can save publishing, but looking around the room as the speaker blathers on about ePub3 I can guess what the professionals think.

O’Reilly’s annual Tools of Change conference is all about pushing the boundaries of publishing and applying innovation to tired paradigms and business models. It sounds exciting and certainly many aspects of it were exciting. The Startup Showcase was a room full of interesting ideas (including mine!) for every facet of publishing: community lead storytelling, ultimate dictionaries, digital ‘DVD extras’ for books … there was no shortage of innovation on hand.

But other aspects of the conference were more telling. For example, I arrived at Data-driven Marketing and Product Development eager to pick up some new tricks only to find myself sitting in Design Process 101. I sat through a ten minute explanation of iterative design basics that have been around since the 80ties, while a fascinated audience of publishers took careful notes on their iPads, before I left.

Seriously? Are the leaders of publishing so far behind that methodology that was ground breaking when cellphones were the size of tissue boxes is news?

Moving down the hall I slipped into Can You Afford Not to Consider Accessible Publishing Practices? That I misunderstood what was meant by ‘accessible publishing’ was a happy accident, because this was probably the best lecture I saw. Dave Gunn broke down the technology that is making access to publications for the disabled cheaper and easy to pull off, but what stood out for me was the point he made about how the futuristic tech of today is built on tools originally designed for the disabled. Computers can analyze movies because of Closed Captioning, cars can respond to voice commands because of recognition software, inventions that track eye movement are bringing us closer to machines that we can control with our minds. This was what I came here for. This was really interesting stuff.

This was also the least attended of all the panels and workshops I saw. There were maybe forty of us in a room arranged to hold two hundred.

There’s an old joke about the first web bubble and the death of the business method patent. Once a relatively obscure legal structure, business method patents surged when entrepreneurs found they could use them to patent completely normal transactions simply by adding ‘on the internet’ to the description.

This is a shopping cart … on the internet.
This is credit card processing … on the internet!

Eventually these patents proved unenforceable– and therefore a colossal waste of money– because there’s nothing really innovative about doing what you’ve always done just ON THE INTERNET.

Sometimes when I look at what the experts are calling the future of publishing I feel like it’s business method patents all over again. Most of the talk from publishers is ‘how can we use this tech to continue doing what we’ve always done, to bring back the good old days?’ Very little talk about how tech can be used to cast light on the inefficiencies that brought us the bad old days to begin with. Very little talk about how tech can be used to minimize waste, increase accountability and sell books smarter.

Over lunch I met Rick, an IT guy for a big name publisher. He ranted to anyone who would listen about the critical flaws in accountability at his own company. Books are judged based on units out the door, shipped to the Walmarts and Barnes and Nobles of the world. By the time the real sale figures have come in and actual profits or losses realized the congratulations and bonuses have already been issued and the editorial staff is working on other projects. The people who put out books that lose money never receive any feedback, never learn from their mistakes the way they could. It’s inefficiencies like this that are driving publishers out of business. Precisely the types of problems that tech can solve. Today.

I suppose none of this should come as a surprise. First rule about technology is that technology does not change behavior, technology only makes existing behaviors faster and easier. A colleague of mine is one of those great idea people, always telling me about a new gadget that’s going to make him organized enough to execute. It never happens because there’s nothing about a gadget that can change his attitudes or the way he sees the world, which is the root of the behavior. That’s what technology is: not a change maker, merely an accelerant.

The tools to change publishing are already here– most of them have been here for two decades– but can publishers learn to appreciate them? Or will I come back to a much smaller TOCcon 2031 and find myself sneaking out of a workshop called OMG There’s This Real Time Sales Tracking Thing, Did You Know????

IsaKft runs fluffy-seme, writes The Freelancers (amongst other things!) and may be found on Twitter as @IsaKft.

Hi, my name is Eli and I’m here to talk to you about what we’re doing at Pandamian. More importantly, I want to give you an idea – or some intuition, perhaps, about the problem space in which Pandamian exists.

But before that, two things:

First, there was quite a bit of talk at BiB yesterday about how young people don’t care about their privacy. Well, I am a young person – possibly the youngest person in this room – and I care so much about my privacy that I’m speaking to you under a pseudonym. So … make of that what you will!

Second, I promised my folks back home that I’d thank the people who made it possible for me to be here. I am a second year Computer Science student at the National University of Singapore, and that means that I am on a student budget. The only reason I can be here is because of the kindness of a couple of people. So I’d like to thank Brewster Kahle, who kindly subsidized part of my flight. And my school, the School of Computing. And last, but not least, the awesome, awesome people over at the Singaporean Hackerspace, who donated to my trip – you can see their logo behind me – I promised that I’d wear their shirt and do this before my talk.

Anyway, back to what I want to speak to you about. I don’t have much time to do this, so I’m going to split my talk into three bits. First, I want to talk about the problem space to which Pandamian is a solution. Then I’ll spend 2-3 minutes on Pandamian – just a little while; I promise you that it won’t be a plug. Last, I want to talk about why I think it’s important to do what Pandamian is currently doing. And why I think more people should do it.

Web Fiction

So here’s the context: I’m coming from this place called web fiction. What web fiction is is that it’s this simple idea – not a particularly new idea, because I know a group of writers who’ve been doing this since 1997. Also not a particularly original idea. But it is a simple idea, and that idea is that you take some fiction – a novel, for instance, and you put that online. You post one chapter a week, there are reader comments, and all this happens on a blog-like website, or a blog-powered website, or – if the writer is not a particularly good programmer or designer, which is very often – sometimes on an actual blog. Which can be bad.

Where I come from in this space is that I wrote a web fiction thing 5 years ago. And at the end of that year I realized that I really didn’t know what I was doing. Nobody knew what they were doing. There were no ‘best practices’.

And there are several interesting problems there. For instance: what’s the best way to design fiction in the browser, when the browser is an inherently distractive container? Also: where do you find readers? How should you talk to readers? How long should your chapters be? How many times a week should you update your story? These are all interesting questions, and nobody knew how to answer them.

So what I did was I started this blog called Novelr, and what Novelr does is that it collates and kind of collects the best ideas as solutions to these problems. And we’ve got four years worth of experience now on how to do this – we know, more or less, what works or doesn’t work when you’re presenting fiction on a webpage, in this interactive web format.

And it’s not just me. I sometimes do experiments myself, but these ideas aren’t just from me. Sometime over the last four years of Novelr’s existence a community of writers condensed around the blog. So now I approach these writers whenever they discover a new technique, or hack, or trick to write better web fiction, and I ask them to share it with the rest of the community. Or they come to me and say: ‘I’ve discovered this, I want to share it with everyone, may I do a guest post?’ Which is cool.

But now we come to an interesting question we must ask, don’t we? Why do these people do web fiction?

You have to remember that when I said web fiction a minute ago, most of you were probably thinking about fan fiction. Which is a stigma, and is possibly the standard of rubbish in the publishing industry. And there’s also the fact that – for the longest time – publishers would not publish anything that’s available for free on the Internet. Dominique tells me this is no longer true, but for the longest time this was the policy, and the conventional wisdom was that if you were serious about your work you wouldn’t put anything, at all, online.

So there must be some compelling reason to have these writers do web fiction. Because it would seem as if doing web fiction was equivalent to shooting their career in the proverbial foot. And the web fiction community has been growing in the past four years. And the rate of that growth has been increasing. So … why?

It turns out that a member of the community did a survey two or three months ago, and it confirmed several suspicions I had about why these writers were doing what they were doing.

There are two primary reasons to do web fiction.

The first reason is that these writers are … well, writers. They love writing. They’re already writing anyway. And it’s likely that they have paper manuscripts in their drawers, or cupboards, gathering dust, as they do what they love. What putting their fiction on the Internet does for them is that it gives them an external motivation to keep writing. I’m not sure about you, but I find that when I blog, I write more consistently and more often than if I were to write an essay on paper to figure things out. And as it is true for me, and for bloggers, so it is true for these writers.

The second reason is the more important one. What these writers experience – well I want you to imagine this. Imagine that you’re a writer, and you’ve just finished writing a chapter and you put that online. Now what happens is that a couple of hours after this – if your web fiction is good; or if it’s one of the more established ones – you get readers arguing in your comments. And they say things like: “Oh, I don’t like this character!” or “Oh, I don’t like that character” or “Oh I think this character is going to backstab that character!” and so on so forth.

Now this is incredibly fulfilling for a writer to have. Powerfully fulfilling. I’ve had traditionally published writers come to me for advice on how to do this, and I point them to multiple sources, and they tell me: “Oh no, I’m just doing this for a hobby.” And then, a couple of months later, I go to their blogs or they email me, saying “Oh my God. Oh my God. I can’t imagine doing this any other way now. Why didn’t I do this earlier?!”

And I’ve also had writers – and there are many in the web fiction community – who started this web fiction thing because they wanted to get published; they were aspiring authors. And now they no longer want to get published. Because they’re having these amazing, joyous, fulfilling writing experiences.

Now this is an indicator that writers don’t really want to get published. What they really want is these amazing, fulfilling reader interactions. The kind of interaction that’s similar to: you’re a writer, and you’re walking down a street, and a reader comes up to you and says: “Oh my God, I just read your book yesterday, it was amazing! It changed my life! Thank you!” – that’s what writers really want. And for the longest time getting published – traditionally – was a means to that end. If you give writers an alternative to this that is less painful, simpler, instantly gratifying – by gum, they will jump on it.

This is also, perhaps, a signal that web fiction – or whatever it’s going to be called – will be a significant part of the book future.

Now there’s another question to ask. If the reasons for doing web fiction are so compelling, why aren’t more writers doing it, as opposed to eBooks and such?

I have two suspicions as to why. No data here – just suspicions. The first is that eBooks are big today because of what Apple’s doing and what Amazon’s doing. So there’s a lot of attention there and that’s where writers are turning to. That’s just good PR.

But the second reason is: this technology is hard. It’s hard! Most writers are terrible programmers, terrible designers. And over the past two years, as the community’s rate of growth has increased, I began to grow sick of writers contacting me to complain, or to ask for technical help to design their blogs, their sites, to make them readable and ready for web fiction and such. I began to grow tired of being tech support.

So that’s how Pandamian got started. I’m doing it with two friends – Joash and Yipeng, and we’ve been doing it for half a year now, though we wrote code for maybe the last three months.

Pandamian

What Pandamian is is that it’s a WordPress.com for writers. It’s a CMS, just a CMS, but the design is done; the backend interface is simple. Essentially everything we’ve learnt over the past four years on how to make fiction readable in the browser will be incorporated into the design.

And the eventual aim for what we want is to have one-click ebook conversion to any ebook format you want; one-click ‘create an ebook store to sell books on your site’; one-click push to ebook distribution channels like the Kindle store or Smashwords, or whatever.

We really want to make this simple. And by simple I mean that not only can some 16 year old kid can use this, but also my 60 year old grandfather, if he so decides to write his memoir.

That means a couple of things. Plugins? … no. WordPress? … no. My grandfather is not going to understand WordPress’s interface. There are too many elements. Most of them aren’t needed, and it’s terribly confusing. When you log into Pandamian the first thing you see is this:

And that’s it. It’s WRITE, REVISE, RESPOND, CUSTOMIZE (and SETTINGS) and as we add features we’re going to slot it all into this. I’m sorry I can’t show you the software right now; I don’t have enough time.

So that’s Pandamian. But now I want to go into the last bit of my talk.

Make Technology Boring

Why are we so interested in making things simple? Why are we so passionate about making things simple? That’s an important question to ask.

What I believe in – and this is the crux of my talk; this is the idea that I really want to push here – what I believe is that you can only change the world if the technology is boring.

Take blogging, for instance. Blogging has changed the way we read news, it has changed the way we share ideas and opinions. But blogging the social phenomenon only happened when blogging the technology became boring, and trivial.

It is trivial today to create a blog – you go to Blogger.com or WordPress.com and you can get a blog up and running in a couple of seconds. It is equally trivial to subscribe to a blog, or to create an RSS feed from a set of blog posts. This wasn’t always true. In the early days of the Internet you had to be able to program – to write CGI scripts – if you wanted to create a dynamic website. And the permutations of blogs that exist today only happened when blogging – the technology – became boring.

And so it is with publishing. It is not easy to publish a book, online, today. It is not easy to do up an ePub. We’ve had lots of talk about new standards and such at BiB over the past day or so. But that’s useless to a 60 year old grandpa. He can’t use it because it’s too hard to use, even if it’s easy and boring for us programmers to do. But if we can make the technology to publish boring enough that anyone can write digitally, cool things will happen. Which is kind of what we’re doing at Pandamian: on one level we’re working to solve these pain points that Novelr’s community currently has. But on another level we’re trying to make the technology boring.

The end goal, of course, is to make writing online the first option for writers looking to get published. No longer is it: write, push to agent, look for publishers. No. This shouldn’t be the way to do things. It should be: write online, get a reader base around your fiction, experience this amazing, fulfilling writing experience, and then look for agent, look for publisher.

Because if that happens, and writing online becomes the norm; the first step to getting published, then all sorts of cool things can and will happen. Really I think two things will happen.

First, we’d enable the creation of newer, cooler publishing startups. Think about Twitter. Twitter as we know it today was only possible when blogging became widespread. Without blogging we wouldn’t have that model of thinking about updates that Twitter currently has; that Twitter has borrowed. And now imagine the kinds of publishing startups that will be possible if and when writing online becomes a norm.

Second, if you have writers opting to move online as a first choice, rather than as an alternative – you will enable publishers to do cool things. And by that I mean you’ll force publishers to do cool things. And I plan to do this. In fact I was probably invited to speak here on the basis of an essay I wrote, with the weird title: ‘To Change Publishing, Make Publishers Obsolete.’

What I mean by that is – when what you’re doing becomes a threat to their model, publishers would be forced to innovate in this space. To their eventual benefit, I think.

So what are some of the things publishers can do? I have several ideas. Maybe publishers may now choose which authors to publish from online filters. Either they build the filters or some third party builds the filters, but if the majority of writing is online – that’s just data, right? You can now figure out which are the most popular series, what geographical locations are certain kinds of content popular, which market segment of your audience and so on – and use that to decide which author to publish. Which is better than the arbitrary process of publishing writers from agent submissions and backwater channels.

Maybe – just maybe – you can have aggregated notes, or shared reading experiences. Because all this is in HTML, right? And it’s networked, and open. And that makes these kinds of things possible.

And maybe citations in the future will be possible – and you can link not only to an actual page, but also to actual paragraphs. Because this is a website, and it’s just HTML and anchor text.

And these are not just my ideas, by the way. These are originally Craig Mod’s ideas – and he’s sitting over there. And that thing about filters? Richard Nash is doing a filter; Cursor is essentially a filter.

Of course, some of these ideas are all pie-in-the-sky. But my point isn’t that these ideas will happen, it is that it’s only possible if we make the technology boring.

So where does this leave us? I’ll tell you where this leaves me. For the longest time we were thinking about what is it exactly that we do at Pandamian. We called ourselves a ‘Digital Publishing House.’ I realized on the way here that we’re not a digital publishing house. We’re not publishing anyone, per se. And if you’ve read the title of this talk, or if you have my card (and the tagline there – ‘Writers are The New Publishers’) you’ll see that this is true. We’re not a digital publishing house. We’re a publishing support layer. We make the technology boring, so that writers – and maybe publishers, if they want it – can take part in this shift to the web.

I should close now. And I’ll close by saying that: I am young. My two co-founders, Yipeng – from Computer Science, and Joash, our Business guy: they’re 2, 3 years older than I am. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

Am I scared? Yes, I am. I’ve seen the statistics, I know that 9 out of 10 startups will fail. But I’m sick and tired of waiting for a big company to come and change this, to come and solve these pain points. I’ve been waiting for a very long time.

And so this is probably what I’m going to do for the next couple of years. We’ll have to work hard on it for quite a bit. I want to make the technology boring, and to perhaps – in this manner – change the world. Thank you very much.

Over 10 millions readers and writers visit Wattpad every month, spending half an hour each visit with an average of two visits a day. Like the viral videos that dominate the YouTube homepage, many writers can claim outstanding success with millions of reads and thousands of comments from fans who use Wattpad to find new works to read.

Where Wattpad has shown to be very different from YouTube is in the community-minded nature of the site. A reader comments on a story once every seven seconds on Wattpad, and writers and readers engage in discussions, provide feedback and recommend other works on the site.

There’s an App for That

One of the most common ways people find Wattpad is through their mobile phones. Wattpad is consistently among the top eReader apps in the Apple Store and BlackBerry App World. For authors who want their fiction to reach a mobile audience, Wattpad is available on over 1,000 different mobile devices and eReaders and provides a direct connection with reader.

Mobile is a large area of focus for Wattpad: we see thousands of our apps downloaded everyday and we are continuing to add more and more of the social features that are native to the website. Wattpad is not just a way to read and discover or a spot to upload fiction and poetry, but a platform that bridges both and enables authors to connect with readers in online space.

Who Uses Wattpad

The demography of Wattpad users has changed so much in the past twelve months. From a core group of young adults, we now see mature and experienced authors joining the site. The majority of members are from English speaking countries; the United States, UK, Canada and Australia and English remains the dominant language found on the site. Wattpad also sees a sizable number of readers from Asia and South America and we receive emails everyday from readers who say that Wattpad has helped their ESL skills tremendously.

Since partnering with self-publishing companies; Lulu, Smashwords, and Bubok, our presence in this community of authors has grown considerably. During the summer, we launched a program specifically for self-published writers and have opened a writing contest with literary magazine Shelf Unbound to provide self-published authors on Wattpad an opportunity for additional exposure. There is so much great fiction being self-published, but the struggle is to find readers to enjoy it. Wattpad has been able to fill an important role this way.

Wattpad Readers and Reading Online

Many times, when I talk to writers new to web fiction about using Wattpad’s social networking platform and posting their work to encourage word of mouth advertising, I find a major concern is ensuring a return on investment. If you know that you can get paid to write, it can be difficult to rationalize doing any type of writing, even casual conversations, for free.

What is important to remember and so interesting about web fiction is that online readers are also investing their time – to read what an author has written, comment, respond, and, if they like it, to recommend the work. Interacting with reading communities is a way to give back to readers while also growing a fan base and developing author loyalty.

The dynamic between readers and writers continues to change and adapt as more and more authors consider making their work electronically available. Wattpad’s place in this relationship is two fold: to host what connects both sides; namely, the literature itself and to foster online interaction between readers and writers. This second function is crucial to building the success and awareness of online authors and will continue to transform how  and what we read in the digital age.

Nina Lassam has her dream job working in the Marketing Department at Wattpad. She also blogs for The Huffington Post where she writes about the changing nature of eBooks and the value of social networking for authors. You can follow her on twitter at @wattpad

Inventing the printing press was not the same thing as inventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready to follow Gutenberg’s example, opening presses across Europe. But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particular need to buy books. The books they knew, manuscript texts, were valuable items and were copied to order. The habit of spending money to read something a printer had decided to publish was an alien one.

Go read the article in its entirety – it’s well worth it, because there are strong parallels to the current, digital age of print.

I’d like to point out several interesting bits from the piece: Andrew Pettegree, Professor of Modern History at St. Andrews, found that the earliest printers made more money selling almanacs, and calendars, and municipal announcements than they did selling books. The very idea of buying a book off a shelf was alien to a public used to thinking of books as these expensive, made-to-order goods! And that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And even cooler: it took the first generation of publishers 10 years to figure out how to make money off this new technology. No wonder it’s taking time to figure out how to sell digital things, today.

(Digression: it’s hard to imagine people being confused by the book; perhaps they wondered at the invention of ‘turning the page’? And I can’t help but grin at that – it reminds me of this crazy skit.)

This is all exciting, of course. But what really strikes me is how chaotic it all seemed. Nobody knew what to do with the book, and so the current model of publishing – as a solution to the distribution of ideas and stories and such – wasn’t the result of deliberate creation at all. It was a gradual evolution of a reading public, and a bunch of publishers that sort-of, well, accidentally created that group. And that seems obvious now, with Pettegree’s research complete, but the degree of randomness is still very surprising to me.

I suppose I should stop turning up my nose at multimedian books, even if most current attempts really do suck. If what we have today arose out of total chaos, then it doesn’t seem too far off to suggest that the chaos today is a good thing. A sign of a working industry in the horizon, perhaps.

Anyway, I’m acting all confused and rambly now, so I’ll just leave you with this awesome concept video from IDEO:

They say it’s all about the details; the minutiae, the flecks of paint, the beads of sweat, the congealed Chupa Chups sticks, the smiles, the snarls and the occasional gleam – and you know what – ‘they’ were right.

The small things have always intrigued me. That’s not to say I don’t dig Space Odyssey 2001 or The Vidiot from UHF, but everyday humanity is something I’ve always cherished. It might have something to do with my background: not having much money, I spent more time staring at Lego catalogues than piecing together choke-sized blocks for spaceships.

And sure, it might not be trendy to be interested in the small and everyday when Sexagenarian in the City and Warepires are ruling the popular mindset, but the way I look at it, it’s now more important than ever to look at the everyday, to assess where we are, where we’ve been and where we are headed.

So these were the thoughts that spun around my head some 12 months ago; thoughts of how being a writer in a City of Literature didn’t automatically make my writing appear in the city. Thoughts wanting more people to read my work, wanting more support as a writer, and wanting to feel more connected with my fellow Melbournians, and so the framework for MyStory began.

In essence I was interested in location based stories.

I started by looking at different ways to combine the surging uptake in smartphones, mobile internet and the human desire to be told stories one-on-one. I wanted people to reconsider spaces they might have already walked down a thousand times before, or take a chance and venture down somewhere new. I wanted to peel back some of the layers, and perhaps even pre-conceptions about some of these spaces, while spinning tales that were true and truish. All this meant creating an interactive database where writing could be easily accessed in a form that made the most of mobile technologies, but also didn’t exclude people without smartphones or laptops. And I wanted to take it a step further, so that people with vision impairments could also access the content.

Then came the realities.

I knew that people weren’t going to stand and experience a story for a huge amount of time, even if they did happen to love the space they were in. The spaces were always going to be dynamic. This dynamism would obviously affect the experience of the literature; if the spaces were too loud or too busy, raining or sunny, busy or quiet, dark or midday bright; it was all going to impact the interpretation of MyStory.

So the short stories became bite-sized tales of 600 to 1200 words that touched on the raw elements of each of the sites to give the stories grounding. This format meant that people didn’t need to commit hours of their life to engage with MyStory, and by having each of the sites no more than five minutes walk apart, audiences could easily skip from one site to another, or even from one tour to another, if they didn’t connect with that particular writer’s style. Fiction or non-fiction, self contained stories, or larger pieces split up over several sites; these were the options I toyed with, trying to find a balance between the most immersive experience and not being too prescriptive to my guest authors.

Then it was the small matter of finding these guest authors.

Authors who not only had a high profile and would say yes, but had a synergy of styles between the four of us. It would also be handy that my own work would stand up alongside theirs. So I managed to coax one of Australia’s most well known larrikin of an author in Barry Dickins, Cate Kennedy and her award-winning ways, and Tony Birch and his street sensibility, to hopefully complement my own love for the small importants, to make a series of stories that would touch on the humanity of places.

And then along came the 2010 Laneway Commissions.

The City of Melbourne have offered these commissions for the past seven years, and a nagging voice inside my head kept muttering that even though they had never commissioned a solely digital piece, let alone one heavily relying on text, it was worth the shot in applying.

The City of Melbourne seemed to dig it.

And so MyStory was born.

So six days a week for the past six months have been spent midwifing a website, a smartphone version of the site, and a soon to be released iPhone App, that will hopefully combine to connect people to stories and place and people to literature in general.

The plan now is to try and expand MyStory to include more stories of Melbourne, and even grow across more cities, engaging truly diverse audiences with stories of all kinds. So come and have a look and spread the word, and by all means send me an email via the website to let me know what you think.

Happy listening, reading and exploring.

Matt Blackwood writes MyStory with Barry Dickins, Tony Birch and Cate Kennedy. MyStory features audio, writing, and multimedian, location-based stories by the four. Get MyStory on your smartphone here, or begin listening to it on your computer today.

Kickstarter’s core idea is simple: you post a creative project to their site, put up a description (and very often: a video), and then you set a series of pledge levels that show to the right of your project page. These levels indicate what backers get in return for specific amounts of money. For instance, this book project promises an autographed copy for $20, an 8×10 print (and book!) for $30, and an acknowledgment (plus doodle and print and book!) for $100.

The genius here is that these pledges happen before your book’s published, with absolutely no risk for all involved. Your book will be funded by the usual crowd of backers: mostly your readers, some fans and perhaps several Kickstarter community members. And if you can’t raise the minimum, your project closes, the page disappears, and nobody need pay up.

There have been a number of striking book projects done through Kickstarter. Craig Mod, for instance, has published a run of handcrafted, silkscreened books with Kickstarter fundraising; Robin Sloan (of Snarkmarket fame), managed to get $13,942 to fund the writing of a novel. From his project page:

I’m writing a book: a detective story set halfway between San Francisco and the internet. And the more people who reserve a copy, the better each one will be!

I’m beginning to think that Kickstarter (and websites like it, that I assume will appear in the future) are going to play a prominent role in independent publishing – maybe in one or two years, but certainly for a long time to come. And how can they not? It makes perfect economic sense for both reader and writer. If a writer has to earn the privilege of getting paid for his work, then this model delights in that exchange, and rewards the avid reader. (Imagine: being able to chip in, for your favourite author! How fulfilling! How incredible!)

But I also find it very cool – the very idea that you can help support your favourite writers as they produce and publish good books – books you already love, because you’re reading them online. This idea is wonderful, I think, and brilliant, and so befitting of the kind of closeness the Internet is able to afford its readers; its writers.

Digression: there’s actually a space right now for a service that enables closer reader-writer relationships – the kind of relationships that encourage a ‘you fund me, I’ll make good books for you’ ethos. Current solutions are good, but things can be, and will be, much better, given the right technical backbone. My bet is that Kickstarter has the seed of this in its model. All that remains is to think about this and tease it out a little.

I’ll be looking for a few Kickstarter authors to come write on Novelr in the future – in particular the ones who have successfully funded the publication (and sometimes even the writing) of their books. In the meantime, I’d recommend that you consider Kickstarter for funding. And maybe not for large, $10,000 runs, but it seems perfectly fair to begin with a small print of carefully-bound books, shipped to a loyal pool of delighted readers.

Oh, and a random thought: perhaps – as more web fiction writers stumble onto the idea of publishing with Kickstarter, we’ll begin to see an increasing number of links on Novelr to their respective project pages. Which I look forward to, and – I suppose – can only be a good thing.

I was walking back from campus the other day with Yipeng (who’s the technical lead for Pandamian, by the way, and is generally sharp about such things) and he asked me: “Is there any way to make money from … this web fiction thing?”

I paused for a bit, thinking about where to begin. “Well, yes and no.” I said, “There are some ideas floating around. One of them is to release the book for free, in web form, and sell the ebook and dead-tree versions.” – a pause as I think – “And perhaps another one is to sell merchandise around the book. Or sell signings and book tours.” – another pause – “The truth is that we don’t know.”

And we still don’t. Digital content is a chaotic, uncomfortable business to be in. Most working business models in this space have yet to be discovered, and the ones that do work are these odd, vertical stacks that few companies may tap into (e.g.: the iTunes store, and now maybe the Kindle/iBookstore – both with their own devices). Newspapers are feeling the worse of it, but books and music aren’t that far behind.

But I wonder now: suppose the majority of digital, for-entertainment writing is impossible to monetize? Or that – if it were monetizable, the money would go to a small circle of skilled/lucky authors, sitting atop a food chain of other less-profitable, digital writers?

I’m kidding myself, of course – such a future is likely to be inevitable. In all areas of human effort there will be a small number of successful/lucky people, a small number of very unlucky people, and a vast majority of what I shall call – for want of a better term – middleness. Digital publishing seems unlikely to escape the bell-curve that governs everything else.

What interests me is this idea that the bell-curve in publishing, so far, has existed because of the shape of the traditional publishing industry. In other words, the authors that get promoted to the top depend on which authors the publishing houses like the best. This is not true for all cases, and there are market forces to think about, but it is certainly true for many. In digital publishing there are fewer barriers-to-entry for the prospective author. In this version of a bookfuture – what factors determine the kinds of authors that get to the top?

I can hazard only a few guesses. The most successful authors are likely to be the ones who can best create and manage large communities. How they’ll do that is unclear to me, but it’s likely that the author will have some way of gathering his or her audience. It’s also likely that this way would be tied to or enabled by a publishing company.

I’ll also take a stab at it and say that the publishing houses of the future would endorse certain digital writers over others. The good news is that it’s easier to pick the winners in a flat market like the Internet. The bad news is that publisher-support would probably remain the defining factor for whether an author makes it to the big-time. And without such leverage, the rest of the writers would still be left without any way to make significant money from their work.

This isn’t a bad thing, really. Writer V. J. Chambers left a comment in an earlier Novelr post that struck me as true:

… I want to scream at people, “Getting paid for making art is not a right. It is a privilege.”

I’m beginning to think that this is the right way of looking at things. If you’re a writer, and you publish good stuff online, and you get paid huge sums of money for it, you’re a lucky (nay, privileged) person indeed. And if you’re not – so what? You’re still doing what you love. Maybe the money’s just enough to cover your server costs. Maybe it’s enough to buy you an occasional t-shirt. It shouldn’t matter, because that isn’t as bad as it sounds.

Richard Nash argued that publishing is a ‘small industry sitting atop a huge hobby’. If we take that hobby to be writing, then what you have in the Internet is a tool that enables you to find people who love your writing, and who would love to talk about it with you. Never before in the history of publishing has this level of interaction been so attainable. And as a writer, I find this idea to be incredibly fulfilling.

If not being able to make money means I can talk to more readers … well maybe that’s not such a bad trade-off after all.

Wired editor Chris Anderson calls this the “best speech (he’s) ever seen on book publishing”. My eyebrows went up at that, and so I sat down for a listen. Anderson was right. Here are the best ideas from that speech; or at least, the ones that struck me as most surprising.

“We are a small industry sitting atop a huge hobby”

I’m not sure if Nash means reading, the hobby, or writing, the hobby (I suspect the latter), but I’d never thought of the publishing industry like this. An implication: publishing may become a hobby, just like how reading is part of the writing hobby, or computers are part of the programming hobby. A little far-fetched, I know, but something to keep in mind.

“(Writers) are not happy about being published. They want to connect. (…) They don’t write to stay alone. They write stuff so they can get out and connect with people who read their stuff.

We’ve known this for some time, of course. My contention is that writers want two things the most: a) to write, and b) to talk to readers. Anecdotal evidence suggests this to be true – Keren Wehrstein has a lovely guest post up over at Becka’s writing blog, where she talks about her shift from being a traditionally published writer to a online one:

When I first decided to do this, I emailed Alexandra Erin to pick her brain. She told me that she thought the biggest adjustment for me, switching from traditional to online publishing, would be dealing with immediate feedback in comments, and that it might be tough. My feeling was—are you kidding? That would be like nirvana! I did have a little trepidation—the net abounds with trolls, for one thing—but mostly felt I’d enjoy getting immediate comments.

The social component of people responding to your fiction, online (or anything of yours that is online, really) is incredibly addictive. Think of Facebook, and how much a timesuck that is.

“We’re in the writer-reader connection business. If our supply chain doesn’t do it (connect writers and readers well) we should abandon it.”

I found Nash’s articulation of the ‘publishing problem’ very elegant. My assertion – that publishing is a solution to the problem of distribution – seems obfuscated in comparison.

“Currently, publishing has products in the $10 – $30 price range. What about below $10? We have no products there. Or what about above $30? Say: $100? What products do we have there? Like perhaps a meeting with an author? We’ve not met all the demand at all the price points we might have possibly met.

This applies to big-name publishers, of course, but the idea that there are price points on the demand curve that are not yet addressed is worth looking into.

“The 20th century was about supply management. The 21st century is about demand management. You have to own the community.”

Nash’s thesis is that publishers no longer need to manage the supply side of things – there is more content now than at any other point in time in the history of publishing. He contends that publishers now have to ‘manage demand’. That they have to find, and build audiences, or at least create digital systems where communities of readers get to pick what books they’d like to see published.

“The absence of audio and video in long form text is a feature, not a bug.”

This is something I’ve been saying for a bit, but never have I seen it expressed so … succinctly. Nash has a real talent for ideas like this – I’m keeping an eye on him, and I think you should, too.

The second system is web fiction. You upload a text on what is likely the most open, distributable format available: a website. You make purchasable editions (ebooks, POD paper versions) available to readers. You design your own online presence, craft your own books, and in turn you get loyal readers you can talk to, get to know; readers who will support you and may become benefactors of your work.

These two systems are currently competing for writer mindshare. Just as VHS fought for mindshare with Betamax, and SLRs and rangefinders fought for photographer adoption in the 90s, so is web fiction fighting for mindshare with eBooks. And web fiction is currently losing.

I believe this is bad for all of us.

How is Web Fiction Losing?

A cursory glance of the blogosphere suggests that most writers think the ebook/digital-bookstore/electronic-reader ecosystem to be the shape of the bookfuture. It’s easy to see how they may think this: that particular vision isn’t very different from the current paper-book/phsyical-bookstore/home-bookshelf manner of reading that we all know and love.

The truth is that independent writers today don’t think of posting their book in website form. They think instead of creating a pdf and uploading that to Smashwords, and then perhaps opening a writer blog and building a following around that. (A quick comparison: Smashwords has 15360 listings; Web Fiction Guide: 754). Web fiction is not an obvious choice for the new writer. Nor is it, currently, the default manner of thinking about digital publishing.

Now I must note that the web fiction model is compatible with the ebook one – you may both have your book on a website and sell that same book through ebook stores (e.g.: Amazon, Smashwords) at the same time. But what it also means is that more writers are likely to plug their books into the Kindle store, instead of starting their own web-based books.

Why this happens is simple: it’s easier, for one. Uploading to the Kindle store and waiting for the money to come in takes far less energy than setting up your own blog, designing your own book, and building your own audience. There is a technological barrier to web fiction that we have not yet overcome. The other bit of it is that it’s easier to understand the idea of a ‘digital bookstore’; as I’ve mentioned above, it’s not very different from what we have in the real world.

So then – why is this bad? Why is web fiction so important, if the ebook model works?

Pros and Cons

I’m going to go on a tangent for a bit here (forgive me this!) and run through the pros/cons of web fiction before I tackle that question proper. I think the context is important.

The advantages for web fiction are fairly obvious. Off the top of my head: you get to watch a book take shape, right in front of your eyes – week in, week out. You get to talk to the author while you’re reading, via book comments and Twitter. You get to be part of this crazy, rabid, fanboyish group of fellow readers who await the weekly update with barbed club in hand and then afterward gather together in the comments to speculate on plot development like Potter-maniacs on the eve of a book launch.

For many writers currently engaged in web fiction – writers who want most to write and to talk to fans – this is enough. And so web fiction is satisfying in a way that pushing your content via Kindle is not: you gain a following, a community of loyal readers.

The problem with this is that the model for web fiction isn’t working out. MCM wrote recently of how he has given up on relying on donations in the weblit sphere:

(…) But just looking at the numbers, and getting a sense they seem to hold true across the board, I think there’s at least a subtle trend towards NOT supporting weblit authors. Not in a vindictive way, but in a “I just can’t, right now” sort of way. And if enough people feel that way, weblit authors are looking at tough decisions about how to proceed.

And herein lies the danger, I think, for the weblit community: Kindle is easy for writers to use. It’s a massive crapshoot, but if you get a reader, you get a sale. Self-publishing used to require proofs and shipping and all that jazz, but now it’s just “upload a file and wait.” It’s like weblit, only with a searchable catalogue. And if the numbers in “free to access and depend on donations” continue the way they’re going, I think we’ll see a massive shift away from true weblit, into something akin to serialized e-book publishing.

These are the disadvantages, ones I suspect are crippling the medium: 1) there is no possibility of an impulse buy with the web fiction model. 2) There will be no reader cross-hopping between works, based on store recommendations. Those two things are possible only within the store model, and right now this means that there is a lack of attention (and therefore money) going to web fiction. And a withdrawal from web fiction would be a bad thing indeed.

More than mere melancholy

I should pause here to note that I’m very much involved in web fiction, having put together the first bits of the current community, and so may be the wrong person to be writing about this. I may also be completely mistaken – having spent the last three months programming under the proverbial rock.

But I firmly believe in this: if the primary model for digital publishing turns out to be the ebook one, we would have lost more than fond memories. We would have lost a brighter bookfuture.

Bookfuturist and blogger Craig Mod has argued that there is a great need for an open, web-based format for books. He thinks, as I do, that such a format makes for richer reading experiences. Mod says, in The Cornerstone of Digital Books:

(…) when a blogger — and Infinite Jest fanatic — wants to point out something he or she loves in the book, and that book has a digital edition, is it not mad that the digital text isn’t ‘publicly’ referable?

Openness is a big part of the discussion behind books in HTML5. Not openness in terms of ‘free’ books, but openness as books being free from the referenceability prisons of eReaders. Which is not to say that applications like Kindle or iBooks shouldn’t exist, or that the only way to do books is in HTML. But, one might go so far as to say that having a strong HTML based, publicly referable edition of a book is the cornerstone of a strong digital edition. (emphasis added)

The problem with this, of course, is that there are no natural forces acting to create such a ‘strong, HTML based, publicly referable edition’ of a book. Publishers are busy squabbling over ebook prices; writers seem perfectly happy with the mere ebook upload. They don’t really know what they’re missing – the fulfillment from writing to a live audience; the depth of the reading experience made possible only through the web, something that we as web fiction readers have had the luck to experience over the past couple of years.

This last point is one that I keep going back to, in my head. The reading experience with the ebook is solitary at best. It is no different from the reading of a paper-bound book – and I think its evolution will be limited by this. A web based book-future has more possibilities: imagine a central, online version of the book where your annotations appear as you read. The online version shows where you mark pages for quotes, or highlight specific passages for ideas that leap out at you. Now imagine what it would be like if you had access to everyone else’s annotations. What a difference that could make – to bibliographic knowledge, to literature!

Possibly the only way to force this change on them is to make it easy enough for writers to consider the weblit path. Part of it lies in making the technology of publishing a book online (hacking the blog software, designing the text) normal and boring. The other part lies in getting the word out. I am working on the former, and am thinking of the latter. There is much to do.

At the moment, plenty of people still pay for media content. Those reasons will evaporate. Let’s consider books. Most people still prefer old-timey tree-based books, but the Kindle and other ebook readers are eating into that preference quickly. I haven’t yet heard of anyone buying a Kindle and later returning to a preference for regular paper books. It appears to be a one way ride. The Kindle, and similar devices, are designed for buying legal copies of books, which is a doomed attempt to forestall the inevitability of all media content becoming free.

I’m not sure why this notion makes me so uncomfortable. It could be because I’m supportive of writers making money off of their content, or it could be because I’m also building something that may go that way.

My immediate, almost visceral reaction to this is to argue that there is value in commercially-created content. I think of software when I make this argument: free, open-source software has existed for years, and yet consumers have historically opted to buy closed-source products over free, open source ones (e.g: the iPad, and the variant of OSX that runs on it).

But that doesn’t make sense. Software isn’t exactly the kind of content we’re talking about – people don’t need a book or a game or a song the same way they need Microsoft Office. And I suspect open-source software isn’t as widely adopted simply because its creators (i.e.: bored geeks) don’t spend enough time optimizing for non-geek users. So this is one argument that’s fairly easy to discredit.

But then where does this leave us? It leaves me with my original discomfort, certainly. It is true lately that content is a bad business to be in, and whatever business models there are that are working are vastly different from merely ‘selling’ content. iTunes works, but then they’re not really a store – some have described it as a tollbooth; a gateway that charges you at a rate below your threshold of attention. And even if that were not true, iTunes still sells its albums at a price-point lower than albums were sold pre-Internet. If we extrapolate this, we’d probably have to accept Adams’s theory as the logical end-point for the value of content.

I’m still not sure if he’s right, because the argument sounds a little odd to me. And I can’t figure that out. It’s simple, but is it too simplistic? I’d like your help here. What do you think?

PS: Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been spending the last three weeks programming (and all the learning that goes with that) for Pandamian. This post is my way of easing out of code and into the text editor – updates are forthcoming, I assure you.

There’s an enlightening quote in the New Yorker article published yesterday, where Madeline McIntosh of Random House says:

“I think we, as an industry, do a lot of talking,” she said of publishers. “We expect to have open dialogue. It’s a culture of lunches. Amazon doesn’t play in that culture.” It has “an incredible discipline of answering questions by looking at the math, looking at the numbers, looking at the data. . . . That’s a pretty big culture clash with the word-and-persuasion-driven lunch culture, the author-oriented culture.”

More tellingly – Markus Dohle, the chairman and CEO of Random House, thinks “the digital transition will take five to seven years“. He believes that the argument over the iBookstore is rushed, and unneeded; accordingly, Random House is the only one of the ‘big-six’ publishers who has not signed up with the iBookstore.

The problem with publishing today seems to be that there’s not enough impetus for publishers to change. And this is rather perplexing. The way forward for publishing appears to be clear, if people like MCM and Mark Barrett and Michael Stackpole are to be believed. Go online, stay digital, jettison your legacy printing systems, and build good digital filters for popular content. More importantly: create publishing brands readers can identify with – the same way readers now cluster around authors as brand names.

But this has yet to happen. Despite all this common-sense advice, despite the many publishing roundtables and conferences that have happened recently, publishers appear to be more interested in squabbling over eBook prices than in investing for long-term change. I’ve waited four years for some of these changes to happen, and none have yet materialized. In the meantime – articles like the ones I’ve linked to above have begun appearing at increasing frequencies. Why has the publishing industry failed to act? What has gone wrong? Can no publisher see what these writers currently do?

It occurred to me recently that the problem may be deeper than just these surface recommendations. Suppose publishers are institutionally incapable of changing? All these articles by well-meaning, far-seeing writers would be of little use, because they do not address a deeper, more fundamental problem: that publishers simply cannot change, and will remain the way they are until they die, or something bigger comes their way. Are there reasons for this? I believe there are. But the answers to these questions – and what to do about them – aren’t particularly comfortable ones to answer.

The Shirky Principle

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” – Clay Shirky

Shirky is right. What the publishing industry really is – if we step back to look at it long enough – is that it is a highly inefficient solution to a real problem. Publishing houses print thousands of copies of a book in the hopes that enough people would see it in bookstores and few would like it enough to buy it. In her paper Paper Houses, writer Diana Kimball points out that many of the artifices of the publishing industry grew out of a need to justify the massive cost of such inefficiency. Publishers, after all, take great care to bet only on books they think bookstores might stock; bookstores, in turn, chose only books they think might sell (given limited shelf space). Speciality institutions like the book review, the role of the editor and the speciality of creating cover art all arose from such bookstore-ish needs.

Grossly inefficient platforms don’t come fully-formed, however. They grow as specialized solutions to complex problems. What problem does the publishing industry attempt to solve? If we think about it for a bit, we’d realize publishing arose as a solution to the problem of distribution – in this particular case, the problem of distributing stories and ideas. People needed a good way to share knowledge and (to a lesser extent) stories; for a very long time publishing was the best solution to that need.

That has changed. We no longer need the publishing industry as a solution to our distribution problems: books now compete with blogs for the dissemination of ideas, and fiction – to a lesser extent – currently compete with digital fiction. Even if such digital distribution channels cease to exist, technologies like printing-on-demand publishing and the Amazon store make publishing far more efficient than the traditional publishers would care to admit.

Applied to publishing, the Shirky principle says this: traditional publishers are a solution to a vanishing problem. They are becoming obsolete, but not quickly enough. And they refuse to change because they are attempting to preserve the problem to which they are a solution. This is why Markus Dohle, CEO of Random House thinks ‘the digital shift will take five to seven years’; it is also why publishers have been so slow to do anything other than bicker over eBook prices.

Solutions at the margins

Kevin Kelly, in formalizing the Shirky principle, also references an interesting idea from Clay Christensen on innovation and change. Christensen demonstrates that disruptive technologies always arise from the margins of an industry, where they start out as ‘insignificant or toy solutions’. He writes:

Honda’s hobbyist electric bicycles were no threat to the big four automobile companies, until electric bikes become motorcycles and motorcycles became small efficient cars. Cheap crumby dot matrix printers were no threat to big offset printing companies until dot matrix became inkjet printers and injects became the HP Indigo 5000 on-demand printers. In each case, the solutions were marginal, barely working, at first, and therefore ignored.

At Novelr, we have been sitting on a toy solution to the publishing industry’s problem. This toy solution is web fiction.

Is web fiction really a toylike solution? I believe it is. Writers treat web fiction as a hobby more than a job at the moment, but this can and should change.

Some writers believe that ‘indie publishing’ is the answer to the future of publishing. But if we accept the Internet is the best way for writers to sell directly to readers, then we must also accept that web fiction is the most logical way to do so. It is far more effective for writers to sell to a community of readers through their websites, as opposed to a disconnected store like Smashwords. Indeed, experience has shown us that readers are more likely to buy eBooks that are also available on the web, and the major innovations in the eBook space will be largely related – I believe – to the way authors do their websites. Web fiction writer MCM sells books by building a following around his weekly chapter updates (a model he calls ‘Serial+’) – if readers want to read ahead, they pay to download the full book. Serial+ is merely one innovation of the many I’ve seen the past four years; many more, I’m sure, will come to be.

Authors selling directly to readers undermines the publishing industry, of course. But this is inevitable – history has shown us that efficient solutions win out over inefficient ones, and publishers are unable to respond to reader needs as quickly or as comprehensively as a market of independent, passionate writers.

Are there ways to bolster the efficiency of the traditional publishing model? I don’t think so. Publishers are really set up to respond to bookstores. This used to be okay, because for the past hundred years the bookstore has been the sole gatekeeper to the reader. But no matter how efficient the bookstore, or how innovative the publisher, both can never be as efficient as a direct writer-to-reader relationship. And this change will only be a good thing.

A publishing industry set up to efficiently connect writers to readers is a far better thing than one that isn’t. It is, however, a very different industry from the one we have today. Some people will lose their jobs. Others will change theirs to suit the evolving nature of the publishing world. Just as the specialized apparatus of the book reviewer, the editor, and the cover designer arose from the old publishing industry, so will new kinds of jobs arise from the new one.

The Road Ahead

It is important to ask here: how quickly will this future arrive? I began making predictions on the new digital future shortly over a year ago, but not much has changed since then. I suppose there are two ways of answering this question – the first is to ask: how much do we want this future? If most traditional publishers currently do not want to change, then s second question comes to mind: what would it take to force them to change?

While the second question is more important, it would do to consider the first as well. Is an efficient publishing industry a desirable publishing industry? I’d like to suggest that it is. We will waste less paper, for one. Too many trees are currently being killed for the gross inefficiencies of the traditional publishing model. But this is obvious. Less obvious are other benefits, like bigger margins for the publishers, bigger profits for writers, and perhaps other art-related changes to the nature of our reading mediums.

Will publishers respond to such incentives? I do not think they will. Change is painful, especially when such pain is of the existential kind – if we do shift to this new model of publishing, current houses will have to find new problems to be solutions to. This means a few years of soul-searching and layoffs. Not something you’d imagine lunching publishers to be able to do.

The only way to make publishers change is to force them to do so, and the best way to force them is to render them obsolete. Publishers currently control the distribution chain between the reader and the writer, and so – if we are to do this – the fastest way to make them obsolete is to empower the writers. To give them the keys to the distribution chain, and to see what they do with it.

This is the first of a series of essays I’m writing to figure out what we’re doing at Pandamian. In the meantime, you may follow us on Twitter here.

Early in autumn, in the year 2000, members of the American Printing History Association gathered at the Rochester Institute of Technology to consider the precipice between centuries. The conference: “On the Digital Brink.” Among the figures invited to address the assembly, Robert Bringhurst stood apart. As a typographer and poet, Bringhurst was intimately acquainted with the forms words take, and the ache that accompanies shepherding one’s own work toward print. Asked to issue an epitaph for the twentieth-century book, Bringhurst approached its apparent demise with caution; sensible, for at the turn of the twenty-first century, the book in its familiar form retained a certain indeterminate allure.

On a Friday evening in October, Bringhurst issued a forecast. “The book,” he first said, “is poised to move, in the coming century, from its familiar paper house to a kind of handheld movie screen.” But, he continued, “I assure you that I see no reason to be worried by any of this. For while it does look to me like a part of our future, I expect that part to be short-lived. Wherever human beings live their own lives instead of somebody else’s, stories form in their hearts and in their heads.” Finally: “stories and people nourish each other. Where that occurs are the seeds of the book, some of which are certain to sprout.” Expressing sympathy for the impulse to publish while remaining vague about what form that impulse would come to inhabit in the future, Bringhurst drew his epitaph to a close. Stories, he suggested, were going nowhere. But nowhere did he promise that the houses they inhabit would not change.

Tradition

In 2005, a scandal broke. At issue was the definition of “tradition”; the controversy involved a print-on-demand publishing outfit called PublishAmerica, a mass of frustrated authors, and the troubled state of the novel in a digital age. PublishAmerica, The Washington Post reported, had lured authors to sign over rights to their manuscripts with the assurance that their work would be produced by a “traditional” publishing house. PublishAmerica identified itself as “traditional” to distinguish itself from vanity presses, which—historically—charged authors for the privilege of seeing their work in print, rather than paying authors for the privilege of publishing it.

PublishAmerica did not charge, but it barely paid, either; worst of all, authors who believed they were legitimizing their work quickly discovered that they had instead condemned their manuscripts to collective disdain. When one PublishAmerica author stopped by a local bookstore to schedule a book-signing, “an assistant manager checked her computer, ‘looked at [the author] and said, “That’s POD,”’” a compact and often derisive acronym for print-on-demand. The author was told that the bookstore did not do signings for POD authors. She was devastated.

Technology complicates tradition. The publishing industry as it existed in the twentieth century was a masterpiece of systematized inefficiency. Publishing houses routinely printed thousands of copies of a book so that enough people would see it that a few might choose to buy or read it. The enterprise was, of necessity, surrounded by an ecosystem of quality control and promotion devoted to recouping the massive cost of that inefficiency. This ecosystem included the apparatus of the book review, the role of the editor, and the specialty of creating cover art. Bookstores, given limited shelf real estate, carefully chose which books to stock; publishers, given the tremendous cost of publishing a volume in quantities that would enable certain economies of scale, took great care to bet only on books they thought bookstores might stock. The advent of online merchants such as Amazon.com altered the equation slightly, offering a new outlet for books unconstrained by the limitations of physical display space. The ease of desktop publishing, and the undeniable efficiency of print-on-demand technology at managing supply and demand, hold the potential to alter the equation further.

Yet norms of approbation and evaluation are stuck clinging to a bygone matrix of scarcity, in which only books mass produced on paper at the expense of a third party have a shot at fair consideration. For many, though, the paper book as a recognizable end-product of this process remains the tangible goal they strive toward. Persuaded by outfits such as PublishAmerica that their dreams are within reach—wanting to believe that norms can change, that the long tail exists, and that meritocratic success is possible—some sign away the rights to their work, convinced that they will be happy just to feel the heft of their words on paper. “People who just want a book to hold in their hands, who don’t care about having a career as an author, do okay with PublishAmerica,” commented A.C. Crispin, the chair of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Committee on Writing Scams. But “for many, ‘after a while, they realize that what they really wanted was to be read.’’

Approbation

Particularly for novelists and memoirists, who pour their imagined worlds and private memories into volumes that they then nervously expose to appraisal, just seeing their work “in print” falls short of the fantasy they held close: that people might enter those worlds by choice, and pay for the privilege, thereby validating the creative mind that constructed them.

For writers, technology-enabled shades of gray in the publishing industry have proven dangerous, seductive, destabilizing, because: for them, paper artifacts have long been the mark of success.

The dream of becoming a “published author” is haunting. Becoming one, for most of the twentieth century, was a worthy goal because it was incredibly difficult to achieve. To achieve it meant conquering all of the obstacles put in place by the publishing industry to keep unmarketable or uninspired texts from reaching bookstore shelves. In a sense, it meant winning—over other manuscripts and other authors, but also over one’s own self-doubt. It did not, of course, always or even often translate to riches. But to become a published author at least meant that someone else believed in a work enough to bet on its success.

As paper-based business models confront the digital age, the function of the physical book shifts and mutates. Meanwhile, the familiar bundling of validation, distribution, and promotion afforded by advance-paying mass-production publishers becomes even more of an elusive and alluring goal through its comprehensive authentication of the authorial voice. Self-publishing, by violating these standards through the vehicle of a potentially identical physical product, illuminates their presence and challenges their endurance.

Expectations

Self-publishing outfits transgress publishing industry norms on a number of fronts, complicating the assumptions of quantity as an assurance of quality, production values as a competitive necessity, and business models in which publishers assume the financial risk of printing a book. The disjunction between what self-publishing authors think they are accessing and what they are in fact accessing shows that the physical book carries with it certain powerful expectations that can be easily disappointed.

The significance of paper books is further complicated by the explosion in online publishing over the past ten years. In an age when anyone can, and most people do, instantly publish their thoughts in one form or another on a near-daily basis, the paper book has come to represent not only an antithesis to unpublished manuscripts lying in desk drawers, but an antidote to the flimsy ephemerality of thoughts beamed up into the digital ether, as well. Paper, in any form, is in fact an increasingly inefficient medium for the transmission of information, especially up-to-the-minute information. Books, then, must provide something better than up-to-the-minute information, or at least something different: cohesively imagined worlds, strong narrative, well-considered characters, immaculate copy-editing, readability, portability, and mastery of the long form.

Most of all, books offer the promise of durability; there remains something unsatisfying about purely weightless words. “Weren’t writers supposed to be bypassing publishing houses and dead-tree technology by now?” asked Paula Span in The Washington Post. “Shouldn’t the industry have evolved to something other than the book as Gutenberg knew it? Somehow, though,” she answered, “writers’ most potent fantasies still involve pages between covers, not e-books and blogs.”

When asked why this might be so, Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors’ Guild, suggested that “the immortality of the book, the permanence of the book draws people in.” Though the paper of books may be fragile, the objects themselves have a habit of sticking around—resurfacing at opportune times, persisting as reminders of the words within. For aspiring authors, the tenacity of that finished product is appealing and comforting: unlike screens, which start each day anew, paper cannot so easily forget the words it holds.

Ironically, appropriately, the same technology that enables words to be published weightlessly allows them to be published physically at will. Armed with print-on-demand technology, self-publishing outfits can flourish. All offer to transform digital files into bound volumes; they differ mainly on the degree to which they prey on aspiring authors’ dreams. Blurb, for instance, makes few promises; PublishAmerica implies many, without guaranteeing any. Yet each, operating on the premise of print-on-demand, manages the eternal problem of matching supply to demand by literally supplying only the books that are demanded, printing each volume only once it is ordered online. In so doing, the services violate another twentieth-century publishing norm: mass production as quality insurance.

Mass Production

Books constitute one of the few arenas of art where mass production enhances value rather than diluting it. The words within are uniquely affirmed by the magnitude of their reproduction. Recorded music provides perhaps the closest analogy; and yet songs, like paintings and unlike novels, can be fully enjoyed just by being in their presence. (Standing in front of a portrait at the museum; swaying to a rock song at a concert or in a dorm room.)

Henry Baum, editor of Selfpublishingreview.com, has written that “it takes all of two minutes to listen to a song, as opposed to investing real time in reading a book.” Furthermore, “writers can’t sell out a rock club the way an unsigned band can.” Because the worlds inside books are so interior, and require attention rather than simple ambient presence to access, the best guarantee a potential reader has of quality is the confidence with which a publisher invested in that interior world. For according to the business model of publishers such as Random House or Simon & Schuster, a book could never be published without being read by a number of discerning individuals. The risk would simply be too great. And so a book’s presence in bookstores assures potential readers (and purchasers) that they are about to invest in a collection of worthwhile words.

The problem with self-published books, for authors and for potential readers, is that the physical book no longer signifies that anyone has read it. In fact, the physical fact of a self-published book is far more likely to signify that astonishingly few people have read it.

This is not a tautology of the form. Rather, it is a pattern that affects the reputation of the entire enterprise. The very exclusivity of traditional publishing houses means that their approval retains substantial meaning; moreover, it commands at least some respect. Since the rubric for success as an author is part of popular culture, “published authors” do not have to advocate for themselves in social situations to the extent that “freelance writers” often do. Social status is so often simply a function of whether or not strangers are impressed.

Promotion

For authors, though, the true mark of success is whether or not strangers read their work. One of the major disappointments cited by authors who have self-published is the failure of their work to filter out beyond their personal social networks. In the self-publishing universe, according to Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio, “the overwhelming majority of sales are to the friends and family of the authors.”

A 2002 article in The New York Times noted that “unless authors make extraordinary promotional efforts on their own, most print-on-demand titles typically sell just a few hundred copies.” Most book-buyers do not walk into bookstores, or embark upon browsing through Amazon.com, thinking about metrics of approbation and the business models of various publishing houses. They are looking for something to read.

Without paper copies of a book inundating physical stores and crowding their shelves, countless opportunities for real-world serendipity are lost. It is almost impossible to accidentally collide with a print-on-demand book, because the book would first have to be demanded. For all its astounding resource inefficiency, the publishing industry’s system of mass production is quite expert at populating shelves in enticing ways. Without admission to that physical matrix, self-published books lose out on the production of consumer desire—a production process that is mimicked, not subverted, on sites such as Amazon.com.

The supreme downfall of self-publishing, though, might be its reliance on the self. Untested authors, when they are desperate for approval, long to be discovered—to be spontaneously recognized by a respected stranger as having talent, promise, value. They ache to be believed in. Friends and family, while supportive, lack the capacity for the kind of recognition that these authors desire, for they are already invested in the person behind the words. To be recognized for words alone is a pure, unimpeachable form of affirmation.

Marketing oneself can be painful and humiliating; marketing one’s words, exposed for all to see, can be even more difficult. Without external affirmation, all confidence feels like vanity. For most self-published books, The New York Times mentioned, “marketing…is up to the author, which is one reason why most do not sell.” Furthermore, “too often, writers who use print-on-demand services do not put enough energy or money into their efforts, expecting that somehow their work will become known.” People who gravitate toward print-on-demand, a self-published author added, “are very frequently planning to fail.”

A crisis of self-confidence can undercut a book’s success completely. Longing to be discovered, authors balk at producing serendipity for themselves. “With the availability of print-on-demand services,” the Times concluded, “the issue is no longer whether one can get a book in print but only whether anyone will notice.”

On the digital brink, would-be authors face the dissolution of publication as a unified goal, and thus a disruption of the meaning of paper books as unified products of that system. As familiar business models for selling fictional words fall apart, the book’s role as signifier alternately deteriorates and stiffens. Yet, in spite of everything, “people keep on hankering to write and publish books,” Bringhurst reflected. “It seems to be the way we are. People keep on wanting to make love in spite of overpopulation and wanting to write books in spite of overpublication.” The way we are, and what we long to become: one who leaves to the world something worth believing in.

Diana Kimball lives in San Francisco and works in technology. She writes at http://dianakimball.com and collects thoughts at @dianakimball. In general, she is an enthusiast. “Paper Houses” was first published as a blog post based on a research paper, in May 2009.