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.

Writers in publishing houses have taken the editor for granted. Part of it may certainly be – as MCM suggests – due to the decreased investment editors have in writers, but I suspect a majority of traditionally published writers trust their publisher to bring quality to their work. More often than not such quality is attributed to book editors.

In the relationships between writers, editors and publishers, however, the balance of power seems to be shifting towards the writer.

Never before has the writer been presented with so many alternatives to the traditional publishing house. With the Internet, the iPad, and the increased competition from Apple v. Amazon, writers are now able to skip publishers entirely and deliver straight to the reader. It is likely that publishing in the future won’t be so much about publishing writers as it would be about empowering them.

With writers now able to write online – why, then, are editors still so important? The incorrect assumption to make here would be to say that the quality of writing in a post-publishing world would decline, and would happen due of a loss of editorship. But that assumption is merely that – baseless. There is nothing to suggest that editors would have to die along with publishers (if the publishers even die at all, which is unlikely) – rather, it is likely that writers will need editors all the more. To wit: here’s an example of an editor hiring a publisher. Absolutely impossible just a couple of years ago (not to mention crazy) but there it is, clear as day.

Craig Mod believes that editors will become increasingly important as writers become more empowered. I think this is true. But an interesting corollary to think about here is the changing nature of the editor. If the publishing equation has changed to favour the writer, then an editor’s loyalties will no longer lie with the publishing house they belong to, and instead change to favour the writer instead.

Why Writers Need Editors

Perhaps a more important question to answer is: do writers really need editors? Web fiction writer Lee L. Lowe turned to online publishing for the simple reason that she couldn’t stand being edited, and there’s something rather valid in that (another friend of mine told me recently that he was increasingly bitter at the way his publisher-appointed editor was treating his work … for ‘marketability’). If writers turn to the net because they can’t stand the nature of editing in a traditional publishing house, why would they want to hire an editor today?

The answer lies in the nature of writing. When you finish a book you’ve spent a year with, your first urge is to share it, almost immediately, with friends and family. This isn’t ideal, of course. Some of your friends know nothing about writing, and most won’t be able to give constructive feedback of any usable sort. (In fact many – my sister, for instance – will deliver judgment with a four word response: “Yes I liked it”.)

Writers tend to become wiser over time with whom to take their advice from. Most writers I know have a small group of friends and family they go to, after they’ve finished writing a piece. These people are the ones whose opinions they trust the most. Today – a portion of those people are likely to be Internet buddies, or writers clustered in small communities like this one.

When you hire an editor, what you’re essentially doing is that you’re paying for an extra pair of eyes. (A pair with good writerly instincts, of course.) And this is different from asking your writer friends for feedback. Hiring an editor is to force him or her to be on your team, to see you through the publication of your book. Stephen King once described writing as rowing a bathtub across the Atlantic, and what you’re doing, really, when you hire an editor is to invite someone else into your bathtub, some five hundred meters away from shore.

I’m not sure about you, but I think the monetary reimbursement is justified.

Editors of the Future

I suspect that the editors of the future will be exactly as MCM described, in the closing paragraphs of his post: smart, keen editors who still value quality and nurturing authors. The problem we might have, however, is for an easy way for writers to evaluate and choose good editors. There may be a technological solution to this (job boards for editors, anyone?) but by and large, I think this kink would work itself out, over time.

The more writers sufficiently capable of publishing on their own, the more demand for professional editing there would be. And you know what they say about necessity and the mother of all invention …

I look forward to the editors of the future. I hope you do, too.

I think there are two things that we need to talk about. First, the Kindle is screwed. There has been some debate on Twitter as to why and how Apple compares with Ye Olde Amazon, and the biggest argument against the iPad is that it has a backlit screen, and backlit screens suck for reading.

Now this is true. Backlit screens do suck for reading, and I know this because I own a aluminium Macbook, and the screen is terrible when I’m doing work under sunlight. But I don’t think it matters. Isa asks: Why would anyone want to read on an iPad? and that is, I think, a rather valid question.

It is also the wrong kind of question to ask. The correct question people should be asking isn’t “why would anyone want to read on an iPad?” but rather “why wouldn’t they?” Isa’s question assumes that the majority of buyers would be logical book-nerds – comparing e-readers on metrics such as heft, size, and screen quality, but that’s the wrong way of looking at things.

The right way of framing the question is to begin asking: who’s likely to buy the Kindle? Who’s likely to buy the iPad? What kind of people are they, and how are they different?

The Kindle is for readers – book nerds, but of a particular, non-technophobic kind. People like you and I. The iPad, on the other hand, appeals to just about anyone: rich geeks, early-adopters, technophobic aunts, families who’d like a secondary computer, kids who want a gaming device, your uncle Harry who loves reading in the toilet … the list goes on and on.

The iPad is a computer. The Kindle is an ebook reader. In this aspect, at least, the Kindle is outclassed. There are more people interested in buying the iPad than there are people interested in buying a Kindle.

And so the question isn’t – who wants to read on an iPad? – because that’s the wrong question to ask. The question you should be asking is rather – what, exactly, is going to prevent all these people from buying books and reading them? What’s going to prevent Johnny, say, whose parents buy him an iPad for Christmas to play games and surf the web on – and one day the new Harry Potter equivalent comes out – what’s going to prevent him from thinking: hey, the book’s cheaper on the iBook store, and I don’t have to go all the way downtown to buy it from a shop. What’s going to prevent Johnny from buying the book – literally flicking his thumb over a sheet of glass – and reading it on his iPad?

The answer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the truth of the matter is that Johnny’s probably going to buy other books for his iPad, and spend ridiculous amounts of time arranging them on his virtual bookshelf, simply because it’s a) cheaper, b) quicker, and c) it’s all just a thumb flick away.

And so now here’s a related question: given the audience of these two devices, who do you think the content producers – the publishers – are more interested in going to? The Kindle? Or the platform that is the iPad? The answer to that, of course, lies in the number of potential readers, which is related to the number of current users, and I’m willing to bet that there are far more potential readers on the iPad than the Kindle ever would have, given a year or so.

It isn’t clear, however, how Amazon would react to this news. John Gruber predicts that Amazon would jettison its Kindle arm to sell content through the iPad, because Amazon is a content company first and a product company second (and Apple the reverse). I’m not sure if this would happen, because I can imagine Amazon’s fears of being locked into a single store, but regardless of how you look at it, the Kindle’s days are numbered.

There is one last thing we should know, and this affects us more directly than any of the above predictions. It is this: the iPad uses the ePub format. The ebook format wars are effectively over. We’ve got a winner, folks, and that winner is ePub. Plan for that, because things might get pretty heated, pretty fast.

Trend #1: Writers In Control

Say you’re an author and that you want to get published. A couple years back, this would mean the usual gamut of things new authors all over the world have come to know and dread: you find an agent, the agent finds a publisher, and depending on the circumstances – the quality of book and nature of the market, say – a protracted game of cat-and-mouse begins. We all know this, of course. If you survive the initial negotiations, the publisher signs you on, wins himself a whole damn chunk of your book’s profits; and you in turn gain access to a global distribution network the publisher readily provides all its authors with.

Thing is, that’s not how it works today. Publishers used to have complete control over the distribution network, and the only way for writers to reach readers would be through a contract with a major publishing house. This was the value proposition that the publishers brought to the table – they connected writers with readers. It was a good value proposition. A fair one. It was also, however, the value proposition that the publishers no longer have today. New writers don’t need a publisher to reach readers; they may simply take their writing online. Publishers, on the other hand, have no easy way out of a low-margin business, and as such are beginning to do certain things that reflect this shift in power.

Three quick examples? Harper Collins hopes to capture new material from online writers with Authonomy; Harlequinn gets yelled at for releasing titles under a self-publishing model (never a good idea with an old-boy network); and – earlier this week – an editor hires a publisher to do his dirty work for him.

Trend #2: Separation of Bits from Atoms

Trick question: which business is a publisher engaged in? The business of atoms (bound books) or the business of bits (content)?

I used to believe that publishers dealt in both, but the problem with this idea is that the economics of the two are worlds apart from each other. Businesses that deal with atoms aren’t nearly as affected by the Internet as businesses that deal with bits. Conversely, businesses that ship bits (e.g: ebooks) are able to keep their costs down, while businesses dealing in atoms (paper books) need to pay for the logistics of handling merchandise – be it bicycle or warehouse or plane or ship. These two paradoxes come to a spectacular clash in today’s publishing world, where many publishers seem trapped between the costly bloat of their atoms and the low prices of their bits. This is probably why you hear so many of them arguing for higher ebook prices. They are eager for a new revenue stream, but they do not realize that they may need to jettison the bloat to focus on one or the other, but not both.

Trend #3: Alternative Value Propositions

So the publishers have lost their status as the only gateway to the readers. But really – when you think about it, that isn’t as bad as it sounds. There are other value propositions that publishers may bring to the table. Existing publishing houses have been designing and promoting books for a far longer time than writers ever have. So yes, the Internet has gone out and made things easier for writers to reach readers. But when it comes down to actual marketing, fact remains that writers are not particularly good at it. And when you’re talking about artwork, and getting good book covers for your book, publishers are particularly experienced in finding people to do just that. (At the very least, they know who to go to for artwork/typography, and unlike writers, they don’t settle for vomit-flavoured book covers).

Trend #4 Loyal Audiences

Seth Godin argued recently that book publishers needed to start thinking like magazine publishers. In simple terms: that publishers needed to create passionate audiences for themselves, in the sense that when readers buy books, they do so because the publisher logo on the spine tells them something about that book. I think Godin’s on to something with this idea. To back it up, the two book publishers who already are thinking like magazine publishers seem to be doing well for themselves – I’m talking, of course, about publishing houses McSweeneys’ and O’Reilly, both of whom have loyal audiences built around their brand. Compare this with most other publishing houses: you may come across a J, K. Rowling fan, but it’s unlikely to find a member of the Cult of Bloomsbury (who was first to publish the Harry Potter books). If publishers want to prevent themselves from being commodity businesses, this is one way to do it, even if it’s terribly difficult in today’s level of imprint-shrimprint saturation.

Lots Of Profitable, Small Publishers

So what do these trends mean? I believe they all point to a future of many small, profitable publishers, most of them operating online. My belief is that it’s no longer particularly difficult to create and run a digital publishing house. If you start small, and keep your costs low, you should be able to do fine even as the publishing industry behemoths crumble around you. Keep your business model light and centered on bits. Printing presses expensive? Outsource them to POD companies. Don’t know who to go to for cover art? Scour deviantArt and build relationships with the artists your writers like. Want to find and publish new, original fiction? Last time I checked, there’s a heck lot of web fiction out there. You only have to reach out to find them.

But those are the benefits to the publishers; the business owners. What of the writers? What benefits would they have of signing up, voluntarily, with a digital publishing house? Just off the top of my head – the digital publishers would have to show writers that they’re good sources of readers; that they provide invaluable support in editing; that they know a thing or two about design, and who to find and what to do when a book is dealing with a specific genre or audience. If I were to sum up the publisher value-proposition today, I would call it the Publisher Support Layer.

The Publisher Support Layer

The Publisher Support Layer is this idea of mine that publishers exist to enable writers. I must admit that this is a rather stunning reversal from how writers have been thinking about publishers, say, from just ten years ago. But let’s be realistic about it. The first thing a small publisher can do – particularly so if the publisher is a digital one – is to recognize that it is the writers who now hold the power. If the writers don’t like you, there’s nothing to prevent them from packing up their bags and leaving the building. With this kind of power, we have no choice but to rethink the writer-publisher relationship. Publishers exist to enable writers. Publishing a book is a tough thing; and so it is within the publishers’ best interest, once they have some good writers to work with, to do everything possible to make it easy for the writers to do the one thing they’re good at – write.

Because you know what? Writers like to write. They don’t like to promote. They don’t like spamming writing forums every couple of weeks to post links to their fiction. They don’t enjoy surfing webcomics to decide on ads, and they don’t enjoy cross-promoting their work through Twitter. (Okay maybe some do, but that’s beside the point.) The point is this – given a choice, I’m pretty sure any web fiction writer will tell you that the most enjoyable bits about writing web fiction is a) the writing, and b) the interaction with the readers. And that’s all that matters. My contention is that a digital publishing house will succeed if it recognizes this fact, that if it goes out of its way to act as a support layer for the writers; taking care of everything else but the writing and the interaction, the writers would be happy, and the publishing house would be able to exchange this value for a slice of the writer’s profits.

Here’s another way of looking at it: I’ve shown you four trends that are shaping the publishing industry as we know it. Taken to their extremes, we may conclude that:

1. The writers have power; publishers will need to compete with choice
2. Publishers should deal with atoms or bits, but not both
3. Publishers should offer writers things they cannot readily find on their own
4. Publishers – digital publishers in particular – must find their own readers

The unifying idea here is that, if you’re a digital publisher, you are only good for the things that the writers cannot themselves get, easily, online. Writers don’t have good designers; publishing houses do. Writers don’t really know how to market their work; publishing houses should do this for them. If you want to take the idea of indie-publishing a step further, you may even say that publishers should exist to connect writers with readers and designers, for a fee.

Now I’m not sure if this idea – this publisher support layer – makes sense when seen from the birds-eye view of the publishers in London and New York. I doubt it will. But if you’re talking about independent publishers – small, net-based publishers with little history and no traditions, then yes, this should be something that makes sense.

And of course that isn’t easy. In fact, there is absolutely no empirical evidence to show that this is even possible. I haven’t talked about finding readers, and I’ve absolutely no idea how the business model would look like. But the truth is that I’ve been thinking about these things for close to two years now, and I’m coming close to launching a digital publishing house as a proof of concept, early in 2010. I hope to prove it to you, the same way that I hope this idea won’t crash and burn. Till then, these are some of the ideas that I’ve had about digital publishing houses. I hope you’ve found something useful in them.

About four months ago I got an email from a writer asking if fluffy-seme would be interested in publishing her work. The timing couldn’t have been more wrong. Although fluffy-seme had been “publishing” for a few months, we’d only just decided to throw caution to the wind and just make it official and incorporate. We had started the pilot run of Hyperlocal (a scavenger hunt where players solve clues to collect pieces of an on-going story), and that program had just been featured in TimeOut New York under their 75 Things To Do Before Summer Ends cover story. The competitive environment of Hyperlocal turned out to be more competitive than I ever imagined it would be: clues were released at midnight and most of them were solved before 9am. On top of that, Split-Self had only just started publication and it needed a lot of tender love and care to help it find fans. On top of that I was also writing two other serials for a grand total of three serials at roughly 4,000 words each part … about 12,000 words a week.

Nevertheless, despite completely overcommitting myself … we were a publishing company and I was itching to start recruiting writers (mainly so that I did not have to write 12,000 words a week). So I said okay, send me something to look at.

What she sent me wasn’t going to win any Pulitzer’s, but it was serviceable and marketable. A little polishing and I could see it being a series that attracted an audience. There was just one problem…

“Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to pay writers right now.” I explained.

“Oh, that’s alright … you don’t have to pay me.”

At first I kind of assumed this was just naiveté, and so I explained to her that yes … in fact we do have to pay you. In order for us to publish you, you have to sign a contract giving us the right to reproduce your content and to profit from said content. You should never sign away those kind of rights without some compensation. So I suggested … “How about this? I can draw up a temporary three month contract at a low rate and then when it expires we’ll renegotiate.”

“Oh … no … really that’s okay, I really don’t feel comfortable getting paid for my work. It’s not that good.”

Negotiations actually stalled and inevitably fell apart over this unbelievable problem: she really didn’t want me to pay her for her writing.

Because to me when you’re selling something: $$ > $ and $ > free I assumed that this encounter was merely an anomaly … instead it foreshadowed the hair pulling frustration that was to come in October when fluffy-seme opened up for submissions and went about trying to recruit writers. Nearly every single time I started negotiations with a writer discussions would come to a dead stop as soon as the fact that I actually intended to pay them became clear. Once I spelled that out one of two things would happen: either the writer would suddenly have a crisis of confidence like the encounter described above, or the exact opposite, the writer would turn around and declare (some more subtly than others) that since I was willing to pay, then maybe a BETTER publishing company would also be willing to pay. Or better yet, maybe the author could go out on their own and get to keep 100% of the profits.

Writers Need Publishers

Writing is a scary thing. Not only are you putting yourself out there emotionally, but you have to deal with all manner of scams and publishing predators looking to sell your dream back to you at a hefty profit. One of the reasons why I started fluffy-seme’s corporate site was to show prospective writers the way we do business and make them more comfortable. You can read all about our advertising strategies, our values, our business plan, the contracts we put writers on, even look at traffic and growth reports. When I started fluffy-seme I expected writers to be skeptical, I was prepared for that. I never expected to be caught up in a cultural rebellion against the concept of a publishing house. And by in large that is the problem: everyone wants to go it alone. There was one writer I spoke to who sincerely thought he had a shot with a major traditional publisher (and who knows, maybe he still does) but everyone else wanted to go it alone. They were convinced that despite the thousands of self-publishers and web literati that have come before them, they will succeed and get their story out there to hundreds/thousands of readers without a publisher watching their back. fluffy-seme, as a digital publishing company, was not seen as a legitimate publishing option not because writers thought we were an elaborate scam but because they believed that everything a digital publisher can provide, they can get just as easily on their own.

Quality Does Not Matter

I had a very (thankfully) short career in the traditional book industry when I got out of college and one of the things I learned before I ran screaming from that world was: quality does not matter. Every writer on the face of the Earth seems to believe that their work will become popular because it is well written. Every writer also seems to wander through writing groups, scribbling corrections and edits so that they can ‘make the reader want to read more’ as if readers who have no interest in Civil War epics are suddenly going to want to read your Civil War epic because the writing is pretty.

It’s nice to think that people are really that open minded, but sadly that is not how books get bought or sold. The vast majority of people look to buy books that reflect their existing interests and world views. The only thing that you as a writer can do to convince someone to read something they’re not usually interested in is reframe the blurb so that appears to be something they ARE interested in. This is why the publishing industry gives us totally absurd cover quotes like: “It’s The Hunt for Red October meets Free Willy!”

The reason why writers cannot rely on the strength of their writing is simple: unlike music or TV or movies, reading is not a passive activity. You cannot just zone out, listen/watch and find yourself enjoying it. Reading is actually quite a lot of work neurologically. Even books on tape require focus and attention to “read”. All that work requires a commitment of time and effort from the reader and even if your writing is beautiful and your characters fascinating … if the story isn’t about something that interests the reader already they’re not going to keep reading.

Strength in Numbers

There is one exception to this and that is having established a familiarity and rapport with an existing audience. One of Haruki Murakami’s more recent works involves a guy who murdered cats … I can’t imagine the market for that is very large, yet it was a run away bestseller because it was Haruki Murakami. (It was also good, but again that’s irrelevant. If Kafka on the Shore was written by Harry Kim– first time writer– doubtful it would have had the same success)

It takes a long time to build that kind of trust with a large reader base and that’s the real strength of the publishing company and what an author really gives up by going alone. Publishing companies are businesses designed to make connections with readers both directly and with intermediaries (book reviewers, bookstores, etc) for the purpose of selling stories. Publishers keep the connection open with the reader even when the writer is on a break from writing. By going alone you only maintain that connection with your readers for as long as you are producing content.

More importantly, publishers pull resources that individuals do not have access to on their own.

Today’s writers, particularly the ones who are internet savvy seem to resent that fact, as if the publishers have access to these resources because the industry is snobby, elitist and unfair. Well, the industry is snobby, elitist, and unfair, but that’s not why publishing companies have better access to resources. It’s a basic economics principle at play: economies of scale. Economies of scale means that in an industrialized modern economy things are cheaper in bulk. In other words a company that manufactures frying pans will pay more per frying pan if they produce 20 than they would if they produced 20,000. How does this apply to publishing? Even with online publishing, POD, eBooks and a number of other services that have made getting the story out there dirt cheap, writers still require a variety of services to make their book a success: editing, design, promotion, more promotion, still MORE promotion. A publisher with a whole stable of writers can buy these services in bulk for dirt cheap. Editors can be paid a salary instead of by word, and just about every advertising department major or minor offers deep discounts the more you buy.

As an individual writer you pay out the nose because all you have is YOUR BOOK. You may write another book … or you may have only one in you. You’re in no position to offer service providers even the promise of more orders that might encourage a discount. All you have is yourself.

Give Up Some of Your Rights

By now you may be thinking ‘okay but I can get a few other writers together to pool resources and still be independent’ and yes, absolutely, you can do this. And probably some writers will find a modest amount of success in doing just that, but there are also pitfalls to consider. An informal arrangement like that often offers neither the group nor the individual writers any legal protections. I’m not just talking intellectual property here either. Imagine this situation: three writers throw in $100 dollars each for an advertising campaign and because it’s hard to advertise three books at once they pull together a little site for their group, give it a name and a brand identity and start promoting. Two of these writers see sales and make money as a result of the advertising, one does not. Does the unfortunate writer have claim to the profits of the other two?

Another wonderful advantage to publishing companies is that the roles, responsibilities, and obligations of everyone are clearly defined and spelled out in contracts. You give the publisher the right to distribute your content in exchange for an agreed upon sum. Both your claim on the profits and the publisher’s claim on your work are clearly spelled out. The above situation is not so clear and unless there was a partnership agreement drawn up before the adventure began saying otherwise, the writer without sales could argue that the profits from the other two should be split evenly as return on their joint business venture.

And this is where webfiction has come to: no one can reach a large enough audience alone. Cross promotion is an obvious and necessary next step that will benefit everyone, but it can’t be done without capital (read: $$$) and that can’t be done without agreements that make it clear who’s putting up the capital and what they’re getting in return, that requires publishing houses. Webfiction writers have understood this need for a while, but they implicitly hand off this responsibility to sites like WFG and weblit.us, and they offer the owners of these sites nothing in return. As amazing as both are, without a commitment of serious capital to promoting the webfiction brand, their effectiveness at opening up the wide wonderful world of webfiction to new readers is limited. And why should anyone be expected to pony up large sums of cash without any claim to the profits from that result from those actions?

As fun as it is for everyone to set up their own private sites to distribute their work, if webfiction is going to thrive as a storytelling medium it cannot remain a self-publishing model where everyone goes alone. And while other models could be developed the one that handles the challenge most efficiently is the one we already have where the writer signs over some rights in exchange for services and $$ … a publishing company.

Isa tweets at IsaKft, and maintains a business blog chronicling her adventures as a digital publisher on Campaign for fluffy-seme. Her super-power is her business sense, and she plans to some day rule the world.

A Recap

Novelr’s been around for some time now, and in that time we’ve learnt quite a few things together. Let’s start off with a couple of things that we do know about presenting online fiction. Peel off that scalp and think back: what have we learnt together, exactly?

One of the first things we’ve got to remember is that reading online is crucially divided into two distinct stages. These stages exist in the offline, paper-book world as well, but they’re not as critical for the writer as they are on the Internet. The first stage is called the browsing stage. During this stage a potential reader skims content to determine if the work is worth reading or no. It isn’t just the opening text that the reader takes into account – in the browsing stage, it is everything from the subject matter to the included pictures to the size of the font to the weight of the book in the hands that goes into a reader’s evaluation. If the reader thinks the text is promising, he or she then moves into the second stage, the reading stage. You and I should know this – if you are a book lover, like I am, then you will recognize this stage as the one where you forget about the sun and the ocean and so get sunburnt with a shadow-image of a book burnt into your chest. The reading stage calls for complete attention on the text. Everything else – links, ads, sidebar text – are superfluous to the reading experience, and they fall to the periphery of a reader’s vision.

The second thing on presenting online fiction that we must remember is what I call the Picture Book Effect: credibility and perception of online content is shaped by the design/format in which that content is presented. In simpler terms: your readers judge your work by the visual cues you have on your site. There are deliberate differences between the New York Times and a celebrity gossip blog. Both appeal to different demographics, and so both have different visual cues. One is designed to be credible, the other is designed to be kinky. One is black and white, the other shocking pink. How readers view your site depends as much on the design of said site as it does on the text you have provided them with.

The third thing that we must recall are the basic principles of readable design. Large fonts, good contrast, clear colours. An intuitive site structure. What exactly these elements are and how you apply them is beyond the scope of this article – go read some of the previous Novelr posts on the topic, or pay a visit to the pros.

So what have we learnt? We have learnt that an ideal fiction format is designed around a browsing stage and a reading stage. We have learnt that the site must have a coherent visual identity, one that should – ideally, at least – complement the fiction. And thirdly, lastly, we have learnt that the site must be readable.

The Online Fiction Format

So what should an online fiction format look like? What elements should we include with it? In this we are faced with a complex task, and so it would be helpful to begin first by talking about what we wouldn’t need to include with the online fiction format.

The first thing we have no need to include is forcefully-readable text. This is simply pragmatic: it makes no sense to limit authors to one font over another, or to ban them from using font sizes below a certain cutoff-point. Neither can we stop writers from using electric pink or neon green in their prose. Most of us already know how to display our fiction in a readable manner. The ones who don’t will quickly learn from the lack of happy readers.

We don’t have to create distinct visual identities for each work. We also don’t have to adjust for all possible forms of presentation. Some writers will want innovative, highly experimental forms in which to present their fiction; this format does not serve them. It simple cannot: no format will attract or hold the interest of such mavericks for very long. This particular format will be for the majority of authors out there: the ones who want to write and who do not wish to worry too much about the underlying mechanics of code and presentation.

And so what should this format be like? At its most basic level, it should have two things:

• It should be built to accommodate the two states: browsing and reading
• It should be easy to customize, both visually and practically

We shall deal with these two elements in order.

The Reader Conversion

We have learnt earlier that there are two states for the online reader: the browsing stage and the reading stage. How can a presentation style be built around these two reading patterns? The answer is simple, but consists of two parts: we would need, first of all, to build two distinct screens for the prospective reader, that is consistent throughout the entire work/format. Secondly, those two screens would need to fulfill all that the reader would want in both stages of the reading process. I’m not going to say that this is dead easy (the second part, in particular, isn’t), but the base idea isn’t particularly complicated: at the browsing stage, give the reader a splash page. At the reading stage, give the reader text. Got that? Good. Now a little more detail:

The Browsing Stage

At the browsing stage, give the reader enough scannable information to make the decision to leave or to read. This sounds simple, but it isn’t: what you’re really trying to do is to convince the reader to choose the latter and not the former. There is a limit to this, of course – if your fiction is about vampire rabbits, and I am not interested in vampire rabbits, then there is very little you can do to make me choose to read your work. The trick is to get the readers that are open to vampire rabbit stories to make the conversion from browse to read.

I have no time to analyse the elements of a good, compelling splash page here in this article. I suspect that it would involve a fair deal of experimentation on my part, and a fair bit of patience on yours. But my case is that an online fiction format should provide writers with the tools to make a splashpage (and not just an about page) and that the splashpage should allow easy placement of a blurb, some links (latest chapter/first chapter etc), and some choice words from a selection of positive-ish reviews. For your perusal, some of the best I have seen so far:

Winter Rain, by Chris Poirier (yes, that same god behind Web Fiction Guide)

A Timely Raven by Amber Simmons

Beasts of New York by Jon Evans

Getting Real by 37signals

… and Speak Human by Eric Karjaluoto.

This last one isn’t actually a splashpage for an existing book, but a promo site for a pre-release non-fiction title. I’m including it to make a point that the online fiction format should be able to have writers adapt their splashpage from site-intro to preview, and that this may work, too, regardless of whether it is fiction or non-fiction the format needs to handle.

The Reading Stage

And so that covers the browse stage. For the read stage, however, the online fiction format should be crafted so as to limit distractions from the reading experience. This is a complete opposite to the browse stage’s objective of providing as much scannable information as possible. In the read stage, you want to remove as many scannable elements as you can, for this detracts from the readers’ concentration on the prose.  What this means, practically, is a limitation on the number of sidebars possible. No sidebar is good, one sidebar is the maximum allowed. (I’m tempted to make exceptions for thrillers and David Wellington, but then again this is a fiction format and it has to be general and simple all through. Sigh.) MCM’s novels have the read stage screens perfected (image below), and so have 37signals with their book Getting Real (here’s an example of a chapter).

The basic rules for a good read stage screen is this: navigation before the text, stuff after the text, no distractions in-between. Things like exhortations to donate or to buy the book may be included after the end of the chapter, at the bottom of the page, or you may choose to place those pages on a separate screen at the very end of the novel. That’s up to you. A basic fiction format should, at least – I believe, have this underlying structure.

Flexibility And The Fiction Format

Now that we’ve dealt with the browse/read design philosophy, let us turn to the idea that the online fiction format should be easy to customize, both visually and practically.

When I say visually, I mean that the design must be simple enough to allow all kinds of writers to use it and adapt it for their own, distinct, purposes. This is not easy to achieve, for it takes a certain amount of ability as a designer to create themes that are universally applicable. The only example I can think of, at the moment, is the Minima theme of the Blogger platform, originally designed by Douglas Bowman in 2004. It is used by hundreds of blogs worldwide: all similar, yet never the same.

When I say that the format should be easy to customize practically, I mean that whatever format it is should be easy for any writer to turn into their own. Minima’s beauty is that it can be completely changed by just adding an image header and a background image to whatever blog it is that you have. The online fiction format should have this ability, too. I am not yet a good programmer, but I believe that it is possible to integrate this functionality to the backend of the fiction format theme/system: optional fields to upload and modify the header/background image of the site you’re using it on.

Conclusion

If you’ve been following closely, you’ll realize that any and all of these elements can be applied to the existing content platforms of the web. It is true that the suggestions I have offered here can simply be implemented with a theme; in fact, if I felt like it I really could go out right now to whip one up for the Blogger platform. But this is merely one aspect of the online fiction format, and there have been countless other suggestions besides. MCM has already suggested e-commerce integration, Jim Zoetewey suggests built-in ebook conversion ability (such as a one-click conversion of chapters into PDFs or ePub files). There’s no reason all these and more can’t be integrated into the online fiction format; in fact, some of us have already taken the first few steps in these particular directions. These are my suggestions, I’m sure you have many more. Over to you.

The Internet provides a great opportunity for writers to meet up, and start working together. And the collective format offers some great economies of scale to writers – especially when it comes to marketing, where each person’s efforts benefit everyone (if you focus, as we think of it at Year Zero Writers, on replicable not duplicable activity). But it’s easy to think of collectives as a short cut. Aside from the whole question of how you get large numbers of independent-minded people who’ve never met to pull together, you need to make sure you have a niche.

One of the main points of having a collective is to create a single identity for you all. Rather, to allow you all to be who you are, but to let readers know that if they like one of your books, they will probably like the others as well. Your books need to appeal to the same market. And readers need to know that.

That’s easy when you’re writing non-fiction. If your books are “Orchid-growing in Queensland”, “Orchid Houses of new Zealand”, “1001 Orchids”, readers will soon get the hang of what you’re about.

With fiction it’s harder. You effectively have to create an imprint – something like Mills and Boon or Black Lace.

For the writers of Year Zero this was a real problem. The point about imprints like this is they come with strict rules of style, content, and format. And the thing that had driven us together in the forums of Authonomy and The Book Shed was our frustration at the editorial strictures the publishing industry put on writers. We wanted a place where we could be free of all that.

It was also clear, looking at our books, that there WAS a common thread. Whatever we wrote, we wrote it for an audience that didn’t want to be told what to think, that wasn’t frightened of a challenge, that wanted to look at the world in new ways. If we have a demographic it’s what we’d call “urban indie”.

So we had this anti-establishment readership, and we had a bunch of books we refused to edit to “be commercial” (a very different thing from refusing to edit them – some of our books have been edited to death: the point is we did it the way WE wanted to). And we had an angry, group mentality, and an almost political approach to the publishing industry.

So the answer was obvious. We needed a manifesto. THAT is our “imprint”, our rallying call, and the thing that draws our readers in. And it’s a very simple one – restoring the direct conversation between reader and writer. “Uncut prose” unsullied by arbiters of taste. It’s about a reader-writer relationship that’s mature enough to do without a chaperone.

So for us the manifesto has tied everything together. It’s given us focus; it differentiates our work from the mainstream and lets readers know what to expect; it makes a virtue of what some would see as a defect; and it’s the building block of a very simple strategy.

1. Attract readers to us with our manifesto
2. Make our work free in e-format so people can get to know us once we have their attention – from Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair, the sampler featuring original prose from 13 of us to the full versions of our novels
3. Deliver the best books we possibly can to keep readers once they’re interested

So my advice if you’re looking at starting a collective and you can’t think what your niche is. Ask yourself what it is you all have in common – no matter how obscure or angry or negative that might seem to be. And make it your unifying strength, your rallying call.

Dan Holloway is co-founder of Year Zero Writers, a regular blogger on independent culture, and organiser of the Free-e-day festival. The first three novels form Year Zero Writers are: Benny Platonov by Oli Johns, Glimpses of a Floating World by Larry Harrison, and Songs from the Other Side of the Wall by Dan Holloway.

In the future of writing there are many websites. All the writers have one, like a new toy, or a fountain pen. They are easy to navigate, easy to read, nothing like the vacuous crap you sometimes find in the back-bowels of the present Internet. All the books are digital in this future, and all the books are published online (for free! – depending on author, the grouchy ones refuse, and so have less readers, and that serves them right -) or you can choose to buy them in Kindle/iPhone/pdf format. Some of these websites – design, tech and all, are run by the publishing houses. It doesn’t matter. The platform is intuitive and simple, and very transparent: new writers can set it up without reading even one line of code; they choose from a choice selection of basic web-fiction themes, all optimized to provide a unified, satisfying reading experience, and then they write. By golly they write! Gone are the days of the steep learning curve, the lonely writer piecing together the technology for publishing; gone is the code. There is no need for code, not in the future of writing. Everything is drag-and-drop. The barrier to entry for fiction publishing is effectively zero, the writer weeps for joy!

There are reader-centered communities in this future: review sites, filter sites; the interaction is instantaneous and warm and really neat. You can choose to chat about your favourite author (link to site included in discussion), and/or when you tire of conversation, you head over to the filter sites to choose from a list of editor’s picks. Everyone has a favourite. A favourite site; a favourite reviewer. You choose from the latest recommendations, and then you curl up in a corner of your sofa to read: laptop on pillow, head on hand. The hours go by. If it gets uncomfortable, and you have to go, you purchase the book for your phone and you grab the phone as you leave: for reading in the train.

Still later, you buy the book. The papers are crisp and fresh, and they smell good right out of the envelope, exactly like the old books of yore, of before Black Thursday – the publishing houses have converted the old printing presses into POD facilities. They’re very efficient now. Less paper is wasted. You customize the cover for your bookshelf – all your books look exactly the way you want them to, different covers, but embossed black spines. When you want to recommend a book, you shoot an email to your friends, or poke them in TheBigOnlineReadingRoom.com, and they say oh thank you we’ll see it later and they are happy because you send them books they like. Then you poke the author and write him/her a short note: thank you for that, it made my week so much better, and the author pokes you back, tells you that you’re welcomed, dear, it’s been a pleasure. And literacy programs are so much cheaper in the future of writing, your daughter buys all her books online, chooses her most loved ones for print, reads the rest on her phone, her PSP, her Kindle. One day, she tells you, she wants to be an author. And you smile now, you bring her to a computer, and you show her how.

I don’t like this, of course, though I don’t think Anderson’s got any say in the matter: he blogged recently to confess that he’s limited by the way global book-rights work, and that there’s nothing he can do about it at the moment. Here’s a thought, though: why not publish the digital versions of Free under a Creative Commons license, distribute that through as many publisher-sanctioned channels as possible, and then reap the benefits this liberalization would bring to both him and his publisher? I cannot answer that question, nor can I profess to know the minds of the publishing people behind Hyperion … but it’s worked for several books published by (now defunct) The Friday Project, and I’m sure it can work for Free.

But … Why Publisher Sanctioned?

Notice that I suggested publisher sanctioned channels of distribution, and not JUST channels of distribution. This slight distinction brings us to the topic of today’s post, which is, namely: if you make something free, and you allow users access to downloaded copies of your work, should you encourage file sharing between users and prospective new readers? Should you mind, even if you’re not in this for the money?

The short answer to that is yes, you should; but the long answer is no, you shouldn’t. And I think it’s pretty obvious, what I’m going to tell you today, but the right answer to the above question also depends on why you’re writing and publishing on the Internet. Let’s begin with the basics: the first thing that springs to mind when we’re talking about file sharing is piracy, and recently Gavin Williams and John/RavenProject had a discussion on Novelr about whether sharing an already free file was considered piracy.

I didn’t have a good answer back then, but I do have one now – and the answer is yes. Let’s face it: why are things free on the Internet? Things are free on the Internet because people expect things to be free, and because they expect things to be free you get more eyeballs whenever you meet this expectation. This is a remarkably old economic truth, to be honest: people are attracted to free things regardless of whether you’re talking about baubles or condoms, and free things on the Internet are, quite frankly, irresistible. (I’ve lost track of the number of ebooks I’ve downloaded as a direct result of the writer making it a limited-time offer, so go figure).

But the thing about offering free products is that you’re not really expecting zero returns. Free downloads earn you human attention, and human attention is the real currency of the Internet. You may not consider it particularly valuable, nor may you consider it particularly helpful when the landlord comes knocking for the rent, but publishers and independent content producers would do well to sit up and take notice of this untapped resource – human attention usually leads to community, and community in turn leads to a captive audience … always a good thing to have on hand if and when you finally decide to monetize your online efforts.

If you’re a one-man show it would make sense to distribute things for free and remain ambivalent to torrenting/filesharing amongst your users. You will, after all, gain hopeful readers. But if you’re a publisher, or if you’re in this for the long-run – serious no shit I want to make money kinda long run – then controlling your free distribution matters as much as making your products free in the first place. File sharing builds no community. Stay away from it.

The ebook format fiasco is sometimes called ‘the tower of eBabel’, and for good reason: there are too many of them. But because we deal in digital fiction, and because ebooks are fast becoming viable models of distribution, we need to consider the sticky question of which ebook format, and why. This post attempts to answer that question. (Note that this is quite difficult to answer without looking into the future, simply because it is unclear if there’s ever going to be a victor in the ebook format wars. But I’ll get back to that in a bit.)

Context

E-book formats are no longer created from scratch. In most cases, the ebook maker – regardless of whether it’s a vendor or an open-source project – will decide to adapt and use an existing format, or to have some underlying programming language to make coding the format easier. Today, that language is often XML, or eXtensible Markup Language. Before we talk about the various ebook formats in proper, it’ll be good to talk a little about XML, and why it’s so popular as an underlying language.

The answer to that lies in XML’s name. ‘Markup’ and ‘Language’ are pretty self-explanatory; it tells us that XML is a programming language that consists primarily of markup tags, much like HTML.^[1] In fact, an XML document looks pretty much like any HTML page, the only difference being that XML is powerful enough to define and shape other languages ^[2]. But unlike HTML, XML is extensible. This means that XML allows you to define and create your own tags. For example, if I were an e-book-format creator, I can easily create and define <title> as a tag describing the title of an e-book. <title> doesn’t actually exist in XML. However, because XML is extensible, I can create what is effectively a whole new platform for my e-book format, and it’ll contain <title>, and whatever other tags I see fit to use. All I have to do is to define them, so that my ebook reader will understand which bits are which, and treat those sections accordingly.

You can tell that XML is useful precisely for this flexibility of form and function. The language is now used for many, many things – sometimes even as the foundation for web services to send requests and responses, behind the scenes, server-to-server. And if you take a look now at even the simplest of RSS feeds, you’ll find a language that is defined – and made possible – through XML.

Most of the major ebook formats today are all built upon some foundation of XML. The ePub format, widely tipped to become wide-spread, is built on a strong XML base. The Amazon Kindle format is built on a modified version of the Mobipocket ebook platform, which is in turn built on XHTML (with a dash of javascript/frame support). So is the format used by the new Sony Reader, though that’s known as the Sony BBeB. The conclusion you can take away from this is that sooner or later, XML will become a major part of your workflow regardless of which ebook format ends up as the eventual winner of eBabel. There’s no running away from it. The good news is, however, that XML is a remarkably convertible format. It’s going to be easier and easier to work with as most major software vendors make the jump to XML-based files; case in point: Microsoft Word’s new docx format is built on XML, and it’s not very hard to convert XML to other formats – say, PDFs, or HTML, or an XML-based ebook format of your choice.

The e-book Formats

So let’s get started. The following are the e-book formats in use today, ones that I believe still have a fighting chance of becoming the format of the known universe.

1. Amazon Kindle’s AZW. The Kindle uses Amazon’s proprietary AZW format, but can read unprotected Mobipocket e-books, HTML, Word documents and plain text (.txt) files. You convert to AZW using Amazon’s online Digital Text Platform, and you format your e-book using rudimentary HTML. AZW supports DRM (unfortunately) and is built around the Mobipocket format – though, confusingly, DRM-protected Mobipocket files cannot be read on the Kindle, because they’re not exactly one and the same. Is it worth it? Publishing your work in the AZW format grants you immediate access to the Amazon online store, where a number of online writers have been making a decent sum selling their work … some of which have been regularly hitting the top 10 bestseller lists for Kindle e-books. So … yes, it’s worth it.

2. Sony Reader’s BBeB, which stands for Broadband eBooks, is perplexing: Sony does not offer any tools to convert to the format, making the Sony Reader a closed medium to all but the biggest of publishers. In fact, the only way to publish for the Reader is via RTF or PDF … but XML to PDF conversions aren’t solid, not at the moment, and RTF limits your formatting options (it’s hardly better than a .txt file, to be honest). And there is at least one unofficial converter to BBeB, but Sony’s lack of support for writer releases is discouraging at best. Is it worth it? No.

3. Mobipocket (also known as mobi). The Mobipocket format was originally created by Mobipocket SA, a French company, in 2000, which was then bought over by Amazon in 2005. It’s been around for quite a bit, and it’s probably the only ebook-ish format at the moment that can claim full multi-platform compatibility. It runs on just about everything: the Kindle, the Palm OS, Symbian, Windows, Mac, and on the iPhone (the Stanza reader allows you to read Mobi books, though it was recently bought over by Amazon and is now in a vague sort of flux). It is, however, not very popular, and there doesn’t seem to be a captive audience or a community built around the format. A quick snoop around the official Mobipocket site confirms this. Why? I’m not sure, not at the moment (and I’m still looking for proper mobi-related numbers) – but a surprising amount of traditional publishers offer their ebooks in a mobi format. Is it worth it? This is hard to say. On one hand, the Mobipocket software suite is completely free, and it’s old enough to make conversion and formatting very easy on the writer. But the truth is that it’s not an exciting format to talk about, and this lack of excitement can probably be attributed to a lack of Mobipocket users … even with free software for just about every platform. And if you’re not likely to get serious ebook readers on Mobipocket (and you can’t sell mobi ebooks on Amazon for Kindle, anyway), then I guess it’s not worth it to spend so much time and energy on a format not many people would use in the first place.

4. ePub originally started off as the OEB (Open eBook) initiative. ePub is currently tipped to be the next big ebook format, if only because it’s backed by a loose consortium of publishers, writers, and programmers, who are tied together in the IDPF, or what is known as a ’stardards and trade organization for the digital publishing industry’. As mentioned earlier in this article, ePub is built on XML, and so the IDPF leaders are currently trying to push it as a distribution standard for e-books. This means a couple of very interesting things. If the ePub people have their way, publishers will no longer have to produce e-books in different formats for different e-book vendors; they publish in just ePub, and demand that everyone else (say, Amazon) convert ePub to their own proprietary format. And it’s really simple to do that, primarily because ePub’s built on a nearly 100% XML base – itself a highly convertible format. Is it worth it? As of late 2008 Sony announced that their reader would now support the ePub format, and publishers (or at least, the ones who have vested interest in a digital book future) have been relatively supportive of ePub over others. If the IDPF people get their way and ePub becomes the industry standard (or even if it becomes just a distribution standard), ePub would well be worth it. I’m fairly optimistic that ePub will win – at the very least, I want it to win – but the road to that future is far from clear-cut: Amazon has yet to announce any plans about ePub compatibility. They’re the one major player who’s yet to come around to ePub, and for what it’s worth – I think that it’s going to take a bit of time, some elbow grease, and a lot of arm wrestling to get them to see things from the publisher’s point of view. But give it time. It should happen … eventually.

5. Adobe’s PDF format is probably the most known amongst the e-book formats I’ve discussed so far^[3]. There’s not much to talk about: PDFs are simple, familiar, and easy to use regardless of medium, plus they’ve been around long enough for everyone to know, more or less, what a pdf file looks like. And because the PDF format is so old, it’s not likely that you’ll ever meet anyone with a computer that can’t read the PDF file format. Is it worth it? Hell, yes.

The Format That Wins

I want to make a case here that the primary ebook format we’re going to work with is probably going to be whichever ebook format wins on the iPhone. The Apple developer conference, WWDC, happened not very long ago, and several very interesting things became clear during that conference, most of it worrying news to the rest of the mobile phone industry, but good news for the rest of us. Here’s what Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has to say:

On the whole, there was a palpable sense that the iPhone is a peer to the Mac in Apple’s eyes. This isn’t about counting how many sessions were devoted to each. Nor is it an indication that the Mac as a platform is slowing. Quite the opposite in fact — Apple is selling more Macs than ever, and, knock on wood, there’s a strong consensus amongst developers that Snow Leopard is going to be the best release of Mac OS X yet. It’s simply that for however fast the Mac is growing, the iPhone is growing far faster.

But the two platforms are symbiotically intertwined. The Monday schedule at WWDC is static. In the morning comes the keynote, which the press attends and where all public announcements are made. After lunch, though, there comes what is effectively a second keynote, this time with material aimed squarely at developers. A technical keynote, as compared to the morning’s marketing keynote, if you will. This technical keynote has for as long as I can remember been titled “Mac OS X State of the Union”. This year the title changed to “Core OS State of the Union”.

Hence the symbiosis: Apple now has two full-fledged developer platforms, Mac OS X and iPhone OS, derived from one core system. Neither felt more important than the other this year at WWDC, which is remarkable considering that one of them hadn’t even shipped two years ago.

But look at their vectors — their relative rates of growth — and ponder how much longer until WWDC begins to feel like an iPhone developer conference with a Mac developer track. My answer: next year. In other words, I think it will have taken just three years for the iPhone to supplant the Mac as Apple’s primary platform. By 2011 it will be obvious.

It’s simply a matter of users. During Phil Schiller’s keynote, he showed a graph of the “OS X” user base over time, with steady growth over the first part of this decade followed by a sharp jump from 25 to 75 million over the past two years. This figure was widely mis-cited, however, as showing growth in “Mac OS X” users. It did not. The graph said “OS X”, not “Mac OS X”, and what Apple meant to show were the combined number of users of Mac OS X and iPhone OS. It was a very misleading and poorly-designed chart.

This doesn’t prove anything on its own, but stick with me for a bit. I’ve been seeing several articles arguing the point that AT&T isn’t providing immediate MMS and tethering support due to fear that their network would crash the very instant a million or so iPhone users decide to connect their devices. And I’ve noticed that the iPhone is itself a remarkably tactile platform, one perfect for reading books, and that we’ve already seen a number of apps showing us just that: that reading, and reading on your iPhone, is one hell of a revelatory experience. We’ve also been hearing rumours of an Apple tablet, with all the touchy goodness associated with their current multi-touch technology, and having that released in the not-too-distant-future would mean bringing the tactile interface to a fully-fledged operating system. And that, lastly, all those people connecting to an online network on such a small device will be a community of captive, fanatical users limited by the processing capabilities of their phones, but not by their phone’s features … making the iPhone all at once better than any ebook reader out there (cough the Kindle cough) but also perfect for reading text on the go.

But all of the above are small, fragmented pieces of information, hardly worth talking about, individually. It’s when you look at them from a broader perspective that things begin to become a lot more exciting, particularly from a digital-fiction point-of-view. Allow me to pull it all together for you: Apple sees the iPhone as a peer to their traditional Mac platform; the iPhone is a superior tactile device perfect for on-screen reading; the iPhone has a fanatical userbase that is connected to the Internet, one that downloads and consumes content through the iPhone itself; and Apple is a master at enabling 3rd-party (software) innovation. Put two and two together and you’d realize that this platform is ready for just the right ebook app^[4] to come along, and whichever one it is – be it Amazon’s Kindle app, or an Eucalyptus-type reader, or even one that we’ve never heard about – whichever one that is, that app will be the turning point that defines our industry. Want to know which format you should end up supporting? Watch the iPhone, and watch it closely.

____________________________________________________
^1. HTML isn’t really a programming language, but XML resembles it in the sense that both have very simple opening and closing tags as a foundation, like, say: <head></head> or <blockquote></blockquote> ↩

^2. Don’t worry too much about how XML works with other languages – that bit’s not relevent to this article ↩

^3. Though I must note here that the PDF is really more of a document format, not an ebook one. ↩

^4. This is dependent on one more factor: the app must have seamless integration with an online store, which in turn must be stocked with a good collection of ebook titles. In this aspect, at least, Amazon seems to have a clear lead, but no more so than if Apple decides to enter the ebook market themselves. If they do, or if some publishers decide to take things into their own hands and cobble together an online store/app combination, then I’m willing to bet that things will get very interesting, very fast. ↩

These startups do not complain, because it is from Y-Combinator that they get their seed money. More importantly, it is from YC that they get their business education.

But let’s face the truth: life sucks when you’re a startup. Your primary need in the first stage of a startup life-cycle is money – and just enough of it to survive. If we look at this from an economic perspective, we would say that the balance of power lies on the side of the investor, particularly in investor-startup relationships. You are at their mercy. You pace nervously outside VC offices. Your worst fear is to fumble your Keynote presentation in front of a bread-faced panel of execs and you pray hourly that they agree to invest in you. 

Strange, then, that Paul Graham and Y-Combinator think otherwise. YC only offers $5000 per founder for the three month period, though they do provide many other intangible benefits (like contacts, and protection, and legal advice) for the young founders they take under their wing. And what do they get in return? The answer may surprise you: 2-10% (usually 6) of  a startup’s stock. Which isn’t much. In fact, that’s a little like getting paid feathers for a day’s work at the chicken farm, because 6 out 10 of those startups die silent deaths in the years that follow. But the people at YC thinks it’s a good trade:

Why are we so flexible? Not (just) because we’re nice people. We realize that, as it gets cheaper to start a company, the balance of power is shifting from investors to hackers. We think the way of the future is simply to offer hackers the best possible deal.

The truth about starting companies today is that things have changed. The Internet, for reasons best explained in another article, is driving startup costs down. It takes far less to implement an idea than it used to be, 4-5 years ago, and with that comes a couple of implications that Graham himself explains in an essay on his site. But this is common knowledge: most of you do know this, especially if you’ve been following even a small amount of businesses online. It is the rule, not the exception, and the same factors that are now driving costs down for these startups enabled a small company in the summer of 1995 to take on the big boys of the publishing industry, and win – turning its financial-analyst-founder rich in the process. That company, along with its founder Jeff Bezos, was Amazon.com.

The Amazon Blog-Publishing Service

Novelr reader Jan Oda alerted me recently to the outcry against Amazon for its Kindle blog-publishing service.^[1] Most of those critics were themselves writers, or publishers, or book industry watchers who had enough foresight (or nerdery – and I mean this in a good way) to read the Amazon vendor terms and conditions. And they didn’t like what they saw. 

In summary, the main arguments against the Kindle blog-publishing service are that

• The terms and conditions allow Amazon a ‘nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide right and license to distribute Publications as described in this Agreement’.
• Bloggers only get 30% of the revenue.
• Amazon sucks, for multiple reasons (i.e.: they’re big, they’re evil, they’ve got a nasty history, #amazonfail)

These arguments, and their writers (see: Eoin Purcell’s spot-on coverage) highlight a major problem with the initiative: Amazon seems to have forgotten how the power distribution falls in today’s digital economy. If even startup companies - traditionally at the shallow end of the bargaining pool – are finding themselves with more breathing room around deal makers … then independent writers, and musicians, and poets who do not even face the cost issues that startups do are at the opposite end of that spectrum … in the deep. The power to decide and dictate the terms of a business relationship fall heavily to them. Bloggers don’t need Amazon; conversely: Amazon, too, need not offer blog content. They can simply limit the Kindle’s marketplace to distraught publishers, where they have the power to set and decide who gets paid what, and how. They’re much like Apple and the iTunes store in that context, with but one big difference.

Waiting for a User Complaint

It’s funny that I’ve yet to see any complaint coming from a Kindle reader, amid all the commentary and noise you get from writers and publishers circa post-service-release. Where, I wonder, are the user complaints, or the unhappy tweets? Amazon’s got a stupid idea – I’m never going to read a blog through my Kindle! … we don’t see any of those now, do we? The complaints we do see today are primarily from the writers because these are the customers – or at least the potential customers – most affected by Amazon’s offering. I doubt many Kindle users would register and purchase blog-subscriptions, when they can get it for free, from, say their web browser. Amazon may have been aiming to increase Kindle usefulness, but by and large the Kindle is not a multimedia device – it’s an ebook reader, and any attempt on Amazon’s end to increase cross-medium usefulness is akin to adding extra fins to an already quick goldfish. This is the difference between the Kindle and the iPod: the iPod has a gigantic userbase loyal to the iTunes store; the Kindle does not. Their monopoly is built around the fact that they’re the largest online retailer for books, a fact that can change at the drop of a hat should another clever, competitive hardware/software company enter the market.

The crux of this issue is that this should not matter, or at least, not yet. The Kindle is hardly an alternate reading platform to the Internet, not when it comes to blogs. More importantly, the ebook market as we know it today is far too fractured for the Kindle to make any huge impact on the way blog fiction is consumed (if at all). The Kindle, is, after all, not even offered in the UK. Whatver screw-ups Amazon make with regard to the Kindle are just going to hinder them as the ebook market explodes around us; what remains to be seen is whether or not Amazon can remember the very principles that brought it to where it stands today. Will they remember the law of the Internet, the law of falling costs and the implications that result from these factors?

Y-Combinator remembers. This year they’re celebrating the recession by expanding their intake to 60 startups, as opposed to the usual 40. Paul Graham has his head screwed on right, and it shows in Y-Combinator and the results they’ve been delivering for the past 4, 5 years. Amazon was once a startup, taking on the world. The question here is: will they remember? I sure hope they will.

^1.To recap, this service allows bloggers – or in our case, blookers – to publish their content directly to the Kindle platform, in the shape of a blog subscription. ↩

… and ended up buying a copy.

Something strange happened then and there. August got me - a person diametrically opposed to the idea of partial previews – to plonk down cash for a 23 page short story. This doesn’t make any sense, not from what we know of the indie online-fiction marketplace. I argued two weeks ago that selling fiction in small, bite-sized pieces did not work online, simply because much of the digital commerce that happens today rely on goodwill and trust between user and creator. In the comments to that same post Pete Tzinsky added the observation that reading fiction demands a significant emotional investment from the reader, and that most people aren’t prepared to make such an investment for an ending they might not even like. Readers don’t want to pay money for short epistolary updates, and even if they do, they certainly won’t pay money to an unknown scribe writing away in the dark corners of the Internet.

And yet … despite all that, despite even the fact that I hated having an ending held from me – John August got my money. And I loved him for it.

Why?

There are two differences between my prior argument and what happened with John August. The first was that August’s The Variant was just 23 pages long – the length of a typical New Yorker essay. I was indeed making an emotional investment, but it was considerably less than that of a novel. More importantly, this kind of length enabled me to anticipate the quality of the ending, and in that regard August completely bowed me over. The Variant is a brilliant short story. It is well written, beautifully executed, and entirely suited to on-screen reading. That last comment may not sound like a big compliment … but it is - within the first 13 pargraphs there are two meaty hooks cleverly written so as to compel you to continue reading, to find out what happens next. This is writing tailor-made for the flat screen monitor: fast, frenetic and full of unanswered curiousities, with the promise of answers lying tantalizingly beyond the horizon (or, in this case, the Paypal purchase). John August is one heck of a smart writer, with a deft gift for the grip and the run.

The 2nd difference was that The Variant was cheap. More than cheap, it was easy to buy. Consider: if you were a US citizen your entire transaction experience would be one-click on your iPhone, and in my case it took me less than a minute to have the pdf file delivered to my computer. I finished the story feeling satisfied with my purchase – The Variant was well worth the $.99 I chose to spend on it.

So what can we take away from this particular episode? First, that fiction previews can work, but only under two conditions:

1. The work must be short
2. The work must be appropriately priced

Second, that setting up shop by a steady stream of potential readers could be the best way of leveraging the Long Tail to your advantage. This is, after all, a textbook case of obscure writer finding a (paying) audience through the Internet. And that’s no small thing indeed.

So are there drawbacks to this business model? Sure they are. 99 cents for a short story is too little to live on, and I doubt many writers are willing to hop onto this bandwagon for so low a work/pay ratio. But it’s a start, and not a bad one … the only thing left to prove my last posts right would be for some Variant-loving kid to go upload a copy to a torrent site, and have everyone read that for free.

The New York Times’s got a funny little article about ebook pirating, published 11th May and online long enough to have garnered a respectable amount of blogosphere reactions. Of the authors interviewed for the article I like Stephen King’s the most, who says (in particularly King-ian fashion):

“The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys (…) and to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.”

You gotta love Mr. King for something like that. His comment underscores a bigger debate that’s beginning to pick up, particularly over the past two weeks: people are sitting up and talking about ebook piracy, especially now that ebooks have become viable merchandise. Reactions differ according to group: most traditionally-published authors see piracy as a threat; newer, younger authors (like old-time blogger Cory Doctorow) think that obscurity is a bigger problem. 

There are better people than me out there who are thinking and grappling with this issue, so let’s take a quick look at who’s saying what in the wild web before we go on:

1. Readers apparently revolted against David Baldacci’s latest novel, after Amazon announced that it would charge $15.00 for the digital version. Reason for the revolt? They thought it was too expensive. Most people, apparently, think that since you no longer need to spend money on printing, marketing, and distributing ebooks you can afford to sell them at cheaper prices. Some publishers are now worried that these reader expectations will ruin them; the others believe that making ebooks cheap will increase the number of purchases, therefore enabling publishers to continue making reasonable money. 

2. So what happens if publishers refuse to lower their prices? The Freakonomics people weigh in: 

When digital music fans were confronted with this problem, they just made illegal copies. If Amazon keeps prices above $10, might we soon see a spate of e-book piracy? Or perhaps people simply don’t care enough about books to steal them.

3. Textbook author Peter Wayner confesses in a Nytimes blog post that he’s not sure what he should do, after discovering a pirated copy of one of his books online. He also talked about the issue in his personal blog, where he appears bemused by the whole episode. What I find particularly interesting here isn’t the post itself … it’s the reader reactions to Wayner’s predicament. Here are some choice responses:

“It’s not piracy. It’s re-tweeting.” -DH94114

“Sorry you feel the need to be paid for your ideas. I write poems and share them all the time, like most every poet I’ve known, with little hope or expectation of payment.” – Jed Brandt

Why not stop calling these people ‘pirates’? There’s nothing romantic about them — they are just thieves. – SB

“Personally, I am happy to pay for music and books, or if not I don’t buy them. I like that the Beatles sold enough records to stop performing and produce work like “Sgt Pepper’s.” I like reading books that clearly took a long time to write. I like The New York Times. Yes, we need a new revenue model. But only because technology and greed have made it newly easy to steal with low likelihood of prosecution, not because there’s been some marvelous and freeing change in the philosophy of information.” – Josh

Piracy Makes Sense … And It Can’t Be Killed

Digital piracy is as old as the Internet itself, and I’m pretty certain we’ve all come across piracy in some form or another in all the time we’ve spent online. If you’re like me, you’ve probably touched or used something counterfeit in your life, at least once – whether it’s a cracked copy of Halo or a bootlegged version of Word, or even a burnt CD of favourite songs passed from friend to friend. The truth about piracy is that we’ve all grown used to it. We may not agree with it, and we may not download illegal copies of books, movies or music. But most of us do recognize that pirated work is but a Google search away, and so we carry out our Internet activities around this the same way pedestrians on their way to work may avert their eyes from the homeless inebriate sleeping on a bench by the coffee shop.

I believe that it is wrong to steal, particularly when the work you’re stealing is the result of so much effort by the author concerned. But while I think that, I also believe that piracy is not preventable; and that it cannot be stopped. I say that any effort to destroy piracy on the Internet is doomed to failure simply because piracy – on the Internet, at least - makes so much sense. And so it does – to the students and the USENET users; to the fans and the media bloggers – piracy is a way of life. It is a logical end-point of the democracy and the anonymity of the web, two things that today’s Internet citizenry have grown up with. I believe that it’s not so much a result of human failure as it is a result of the systems that power the web: systems that just coincidentally fit the requirements for a good pirating operation to a tee. Stopping piracy would mean changing the very way the Internet works – which is absolutely crazy, not to mention entirely impossible. Till that (or some external change) happens we’ll have to live with semi-anonymous downloaders, with torrent files, and with an ubiquitous network of USENET servers.

But living with piracy isn’t as bad as you might suppose. Let’s indulge in a thought experiment: suppose we have to prove that piracy is a bad thing, but instead of making it a matter of ownership and principle, let us say that piracy is only bad if there is a proven harm effect. So then the next question to ask would be: what percentage of sales is lost to piracy? This is the only quantifiable measurement that hurts producers, frankly, and it is unfortunate that this very measurement is impossibly difficult to record. A certain portion of book/album sales may well be lost to piracy, but over time these lost sales usually contribute to something equally important in the online sphere – human attention. People who might not have otherwise heard of you would now be able to sample your work, if only through the bootlegged copies of your work floating around the Internet, and there’s a possibility that a portion of them later become fans and evangelists.^[1] Similarly, people who are happy to ’steal’ from you are likely to be equally happy with buying t-shirts and attending concerts and helping out with financial contributions over the same period of time … all this resulting in you eventually making money from your work.

The proactive approach to piracy

Piracy isn’t all bad. Quite a number of people in more matured online marketplaces (i.e., software and music) have survived and profited in an environment that favours piracy. The first step to dealing with it – as an online writer – is to take piracy as a given. If you’re producing content on the Internet, expect some piracy, particularly so if you’re good. The second step, however, is harder: you’ll have to walk a fine line between what you’re willing to give away and what you’d like your readers to pay for. How you communicate this is tricky. Let’ s take a look at two examples (both of which have appeared on Novelr before):

Johnathan Coulton, the web musician, is up-front about piracy: on his site, above his store, is the following note:

Lots of (music) is freely available depending on how technical you are – you can get all of it for free if you really try. But please remember I do make a living this way, so you like what you hear I’d certainly appreciate you throwing a little payment or donation my way. If you can’t afford it, for goodness sake please send copies of everything to all of your friends.

He also has a ‘Already Stole It?’ subheader above his mp3 page, which says:

No problem. If you’d like to donate some cash, you can do so through Amazon or Paypal. Or for something slightly more fun, purchase a robot, monkey or banana that will be displayed here with your message.

The second example I’d like to talk about is that of Panic, the makers of ’shockingly good Mac software’. They’ve been doing it for the good part of 10 years now, and the best way they’ve found to tackle piracy has been to pop up a gentle reminder whenever a user enters a pirated product code, explaining to them that a) their code is from a pirated source, and b) Panic is a small, independent company, and it’d help them very much if you head over to the site and purchase one of your own. 

Most of the time, they say, the user does just that.

^1.Incidentally, some forward-thinking publishers have learnt to boost book sales by releasing a digital version for free, online. These promotions only happen for select titles, however, and for select periods (plus they’re usually for genre fiction and genre fiction only). The logic is that people getting free books online will buy paper versions because paper is more preferable (they last longer, they don’t suffer from battery issues and they’re easier to read). And indeed this has proven to be true, at least for the time being. ↩

First, however: I’d like to point out that the Vook concept sounds vaguely similar to that of the Sophie project (first covered here and here) – which was originally conceived and produced by the fine people over at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Note the difference: Sophie is currently being developed by a private contractor for the University of South Carolina; Vook is a startup by entrepreneur Bradley Inman. 

There are two reasons why I think Sophie makes sense, and Vook does not. The first is that of reach. Sophie was originally made for educational purposes, with the idea that students in developing countries would be able to benefit from multimedia ‘books’ in easily transferrable, non-OS-specific form. Vook, on the other hand, appears to be aimed at a completely different audience – the about page on the admittedly snazzy Vook site tells us that ‘Authors and Publishers will directly benefit from this new distribution platform’, and that they aim to do everything from ‘creating new sources of revenue’ to providing a ‘turnkey media solution’. (A solution to what they don’t say, though we can assume that it’ll be to the current problems the publishing industry’s got at their doorsteps.)

The chief difference between the two is that the multimedia approach to ebook design only makes sense when you’re talking about education. I won’t mind my kids learning from Sophie ebooks in the future, probably because I think it’s pretty cool to watch a video on polar bears right after you’ve read a bit of text on the North Pole. But Vook is a commercial format, and it’ll be a hard sell convincing book buyers that they have to purchase a multi-sensory product as opposed to their traditional formatted text ebook. I don’t intend to watch video when I’m reading, the same way I don’t like listening to music when I’m curled up with a good non-fiction volume. And even if Vook says it’ll be just like reading blogs (and watching/listening to video/podcasts on said blogs), there is the added problem of perception associated with the ebook tag. Vook will have to single-handedly change the way the world sees digital books for the format to work, and that’s no small task for any company, even one as ambitious and as well-funded as this one appears to be.

The topic of funding brings us to the second problem with Vook: they are, in the end, trying to make money from this. Now leaving aside the obvious question of business model, let’s ask ourselves: how many publishers are willing to opt in to this format, dispensing in the process the traditional way they format and sell ebooks?^[1] There aren’t likely to be many, I’d say. The one thing that Sophie has got going for it that Vook doesn’t is that Sophie doesn’t rely on commercial success to last – all they need is mainstream acceptance in educational programs a couple of years down the road – like, say, the One Notebook per Child initiative, and they’re good to go. Vook, on the other hand, would require a user-base and a marketplace for them to be sustainable in the long run, and while they fashion themselves to be the answer to the book-future, I’d rather think that Sophie has a better chance of being the format of choice for multimedia ebooks and for the publishing world at large.

In the end, what I’m trying to say here is that the amount of innovation in the current ebook market is exciting on a good day and crazy on a bad one. But whenever a new startup, like Vook, comes along and announces that the way forward is to combine video and music and whatever into the ebook format … I tend to get skeptical. I think the future of the book is tied to the future of written literature. And I’m inclined to believe that both futures depend largely on the way text is treated today – on the Internet, in our cellphones, and within our ebook readers.

^1. i.e.: make digital copies of existing paper books, package them and then sell them to users who want multiple novels in their cellphone, mobile device, etc. ↩

Before the Internet, software companies plied their wares through brick-and-mortar stores, in handy little diskette drives the size of folded pocket-handkerchiefs. It was a smaller industry, back then - Microsoft was still getting a start in IBM’s god-forsaken armpit, Apple had yet to discover the GUI, and almost everyone was working with a command line interface. It was also a simpler time. It wasn’t too hard for a well-placed, lone programmer to whip up some fancy app and pass it on – via diskettes, perhaps, with a healthy dose of door-to-door spit – and land himself a nice contract at some new-fangled, pre-bubble Valley startup. And that was, for a few years, enough to live by.

But then time passed. The little software companies consolidated, grew bigger, and swallowed up all the lone hobby programmers. It was harder to find individuals writing software and passing around diskette drives – it was much easier, in fact, to buy software from the big companies, with their cubicles and identical workstations and well-oiled distribution channels. So when the Internet came along, and the individual hobby programmers came out of the woodwork to begin selling their software, just like old times, they found themselves going up against huge, established companies – giants like Microsoft and Adobe and Macromedia, with their advertising budgets and their PR people and their customer support floors, all of which – if the prospective hobby programmer stopped long enough to swallow – amounted to overwhelming, mind-boggling competition. You wouldn’t have liked the odds if you were an outside spectator when that happened, and I know that had I been a hobbyist, I would have thought twice before leaving my desk job to write code for myself.

But then something interesting happened. The hobby programmers didn’t die out. The small software companies – startups in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble – took to the Internet like so many ducks to water. They launched little websites, bought modest amounts of office space, and began competing with the corporations. And they did well.

Software and Books

It doesn’t take a genius, really, to see the parallels between the scenario I just described and what we’re trying to do here, with publishing our stories independently, and on the Interent. The small-time software writer had to compete against well-established,  financially richer competitors, in a market that didn’t make any disctinctions between geographical boundaries. Also, software and books are similar products, particularly in the context of the Internet – both are propietary, both suffer from piracy, both come from companies with a long history in marketing and distribution know-how. And so, assuming that the giants of both fields are going to start-off with an advantage, how do small content producers compete, survive, and eventually get ahead?

Before we go into specifics, let’s talk about the current bevy of independent software developers. I’m not sure what you call them – but for some time now I’ve been noticing these little sites, some of them powered by a 1 man team – selling software, primarily for the Mac. I suppose you can consider them boutique shops. Tuck away into little corners, with a bonsai next to the cash register and the velvet curtains; with only one or two kinds of product sitting on the shelves. They’re small, very focused, and they usually have cool, clever names like Panic or 2d boy or Potion Factory.

They’re also usually well designed. I don’t know if there’s a correlation between their aesthetics and their popularity, but most of the small software companies I’ve seen sell their software in very well-packaged, beautifully constructed sites. In a way, it makes sense – their main (and possibly only) selling point is the web, and it’s within their best interests to make sure you come away with a favourable first impression. 

The second thing you’ll notice about these little software producers is the kind of products they sell. They’re useful, and they come with snazzy icons, but you’ll realize that not many challenge the bigwigs in their own fields. Nobody has challenged Word, the same way nobody has really challenged Photoshop. They’re smart, in this aspect – beat the big companies in the little niche areas they don’t care about … business isn’t a zero sum game, after all. Ironically enough, there are app makers out there who are putting out e-books in the iPhone and the iPod Touch – for instance, see: Benjamin Button and the Classics App.

But I think the most surprising thing about these little software producers are that some of them are really, really successful. I think the one thing we can all take away from this is the inherent flexibility of the Internet’s marketplace. As long as your distribution channel is online, and you’re putting out reasonably good stuff, then you’re certain to enjoy the benefits of the Long Tail – people will find you, people will pay you attention, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll make enough to buy a whole new HQ of your own.

The Ecologist Model Of Seeing The Future

To answer the question of why these little software companies matter to us, I turn to notable writer and speaker Steven Berlin Johnson, who gave a talk recently about the future of news (and newspapers) at South By Southwest. In it, he presented an idea that I now find myself constantly going to bed with. He says, and I quote:

… I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.

That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change.

Now let’s be clear on the distinctions, shall we? Johnson was talking about journalism – something completely different from book publishing – and he was looking through a prism of the current Tech sector. But if we append that idea, and we bend it to fit the current shift in book publishing, I think we’ll find it to be a first indicator of how a mature digital publishing industry would look like. On one hand you can have beautiful, standalone sites by independent writers, and on the other you have collective, publisher-managed projects, like the Tor supersite and Authonomy. 

In the end what I’m trying to say is that it’ll do for us to sometimes think like a small software producer. Face it: they’re making a name for themselves, by leveraging the Internet’s (small) economies of scale, by targeting areas the bigwigs don’t care for, and by presenting themselves in very careful, very beautiful packages. If they can establish themselves in an industry that is mostly known for their behemoths, and if we take this to be an indicator of how a mature digital book-future would look like, then I suppose that we can, too.

I’ve spent the last couple of posts at Novelr speculating on the future of web fiction – which as an activity, I must admit, was very fun to do. But it wasn’t a very useful one for the writers who read this blog. The essential questions remain unanswered: what do you do when the publishers finally wake up to the Internet? What can you do to prepare for a digital book future? 

Before I go into specifics, understand that you should take this article with a pinch of salt. These are steps that I believe aren’t too far off, and ones that I think can go a long way in preparing your writing for a more vigorous, more competitive online fiction sphere. On the flip side, however, I may also be completely wrong, and I’m obliged to warn you now that while this is a post that deals with practical steps, it’s also a post that deals with uncertainties. It is a first attempt in telling you what to do to get ahead in a place that doesn’t exist yet. If I’m wrong – and there’s a good chance that I am – then I suppose we can meet up 10 years from now and laugh at my stupidity. 

A Summary

Before we begin it’ll do to recap what exactly it is we’re preparing for. I’ve talked about this in the past, but for those of you who don’t have the time to dig into Novelr’s archives:

1. Publishers are exploring digital alternatives to books, and are currently figuring out how to distribute, market, and deliver them to the consumer. They’re forced to do so by the current recession, which is hitting the people in the publishing industry harder than most.
2. Printed books will not go away, but they’ll be staying on as ‘bespoke, art-directed paper packages’ – the top of a piramid of consumed fiction.
3. Self publishing, and by extension self-funded writing efforts like blooks and web fiction are going to become ‘tryouts’ for publishing houses. Publishers will look closely at the comments surrounding a self-published piece, and if it’s mostly good, and they think they can sell it, they then pick it up and sign-on the author for a traditional book deal. Haper Collins’s has tried to centralize these efforts – they’ve started a website called Authonomy and are hoping unpublished writers come to them with their manuscripts.
4. Writers will flock to the Internet in the sudden realization that there’re more ways to get published than just the agency/slush pile. We will be swamped with online manuscripts. Readers will go to certain filter sites, or perhaps stores, to find good things to read online.
5. Or not. They may want to put these stories in iPhones, Kindles, or one of the many portable device options poppig up today. They will want to read, and they will want to read away from the computer.

I’m not sure of the degree to which these predictions will come true, but for the sake of this article we’ll pretend that it’s a future we’ll have to prepare for. Which leads us to the focus of this piece: what can we do, now, to prepare for it?

Blogs Are Dead

I will be approaching this article with one assumption in mind: that blogs, as a form of presenting fiction, have failed. Which is rather ironic, considering the amount of fiction blogs I’m reading today, both for pleasure and for work (I have an obligation to review for WFG); and also ironic because my usage of the term ‘blook’ may have to be revised, and for good. But I believe we’re looking at a future where blogs aren’t going to be the main form of Internet fiction consumption, and here’s why.

The first thing we have to think about is the nature of the blog. Blogs are time-intensive things, and they require constant and consistent updating to be of any attraction to the reader. I once spoke of this as a good thing: that blogs force writers to perform on-the-fly writing, and I still do believe that the form has some unparelled attractions, attractions that cannot be found in books or even in writing magazines. But let’s ask ourselves a question: if we accept that publishers are moving onto the Internet, and we accept that they’re going to be finding the best ways to present fiction online, then what are the odds that blogs will be their medium of choice? What are the odds that of the majority of novels put on the Internet would be in blog form, and that the readers will be most used to consuming their online fiction via blogs? Not much, I’d expect – publishers aren’t going to invest so much of their time and energy into a medium that requires just that – lots of time and energy. And to back that up – take a look at the experiments we’ve seen conducted by the big wigs – how many of them are in blog form? We Tell Stories and The Golden Notebook and Tor.com are all beautifully designed websites; websites designed with only one purpose in mind: to be read.^[1]

That is not to say that blogs are not designed to be read. But we have to admit that we’re facing a structural problem when we try to tell stories with blogs – there is a wealth of information we have to design around, and most writers don’t bother to design at all. Many of a blog’s original features were not built with storytelling in mind. When I see things like reverse-chronological archives and trackbacks and comments I think of diary writing and community, not books and paper. And while some of these blog features can be adapted to storytelling, most of them remain deadweight; obstacles that get in the way of the actual jumping into the story that we want readers to experience.

On a side note, I wonder if this is one of the reasons why online fiction has taken so long to get off the ground. A reader comes to a blog with a set of expectations in mind, expectations that they have to overcome when they’re dealing with a serialized fiction blog (not so with short stories, or flash fiction – for these, blogs are extremely well suited as a presentation form). Note that online comics are not posted in the blog format, they’re presented in specially designed websites that are built around the expected interaction between reader and comic. There are no deadweights; no obstacles. No unnecessary fluff.

The bottom line here is that readers will eventually get used to a form of digital prose presentation, and that form will probably not be blogs. And that leads us to the next question – what to change into?

Novel Plus, not Blog Plus

Here we enter rather sketchy territory. The idea of Novel Plus (or Novel+, if you prefer) was first mentioned to me in conversation by James Smythe, who completed a PhD thesis on online fiction two years ago. I think James makes a point when he says publishers will eventually have to move into cross-platform publishing, and Novel+ is his name for it. What it is, really, is this: imagine buying a book, and then finding inside a little card granting you access to free digital downloads – ebooks, podcasts, inside areas of the writer’s site, perhaps. Now I’m not sure how much of this will come true, and the specifics are all still up in the air, but these are ideas that I believe are really cool and (I hope) will be inevitable. 

So what can you do? Quite a lot, actually.

A Suggestion List (Don’t We All Just Love ‘Em?)

1. Don’t kill your blog; split it up. Chris Al-Aswad (a.k.a. Lethe Bashar) wrote sometime ago that you should keep two blogs for your web novel: one to contain the work in progress, and another to present the completed work. It’s a fantastic article, and I think you should  check it out because Chris provides several examples of his own fiction where he has applied this split. But I’d like to make an adjustment to that suggestion: keep your ongoing blook the same way a writer would keep a manusript (or a moleskin notebook, for that matter), but present the completed portions of your story in a strong, beautifully-designed, visually-oriented ‘front-end’. A good example of this ‘front-end’ idea is The Golden Notebook project – it’s not a blog, for starters, so I suggest you take a look at the home page to see how the designers have incorporated book, forum and blog into an easily understandable package. 

2. Go cross platform. The future of the novel won’t be about the computer screen. It’ll be about the mobile phone, the Kindle, the Sony Reader, as well as a few other formats that I’m sure will pop up sooner or later. Your job as an independent writer will be to provide readers with a multi-platform selection of your works: pdf files, paper book, websites, yes; but also Kindle format, .mobi and phone-optimized sites. I’ll be keeping tabs on up and coming formats here on Novelr, and I’ll recommend them if I think they’re worth your time. But by and large you’ll be the ones putting the platforms together – get my self-published book on Lulu, email me the invoice and I’ll send you something cool? The applications are endless. I’m expecting a future where publishers will provide multiple formats for purchase – maybe the full text will be available online and for free, but other take-away-to-read formats will need to be paid for. And this is a business model you can emulate as well.

3. Polish, polish, polish. An as-yet-unmentioned condition about presenting your work on a ‘front-end’ site is the amount of polish you’ll have to put into it before launching anything. No grammatical errors; no revisions. You are presenting your work on multiple platforms, after all – if you make a change you’re going to have to answer to the readers who’ve already downloaded your ebooks and paid for your self-published paper versions. It’s a stage not everyone has reached, but one that you’ll eventually get to. Prepare for that eventuality.

Looking Forward

Now you’re probably asking why should you do this, and what’s in it for you. And that answer, I believe, hinges on why you’re writing online fiction in the first place. If you see this as your ticket to the publishing industry, then you should change – and change soon - because all indicators point to publishers sourcing material from the self-published pool. This is your chance to stand-out, at a time when nobody else is doing anything about the digital shift. But on the other hand: if you’re writing online fiction for fun, or if you’re writing to escape the editorial confinements of the traditional book-world, then you’re not likely to want to change so fast. And that’s fine too, as long as you realize when and what new formats are available to you in the future.

^1.N.B. I’m talking about the blog format here – the one where posts are presented in reverse chronological order, with sidebar, widgets, etc. I still believe that the blogging engine is the only viable publishing tool available for writers at the moment, though however they present their fiction, it better not look like a traditional blog.↩

[Update]: I’ve edited the sections where it seems that I’m linking the current lack of online fiction interest to the blog format. Chris Poirier is right – the sections exploring the causal relationship between the two were too strongly worded.