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Personal Publishing, Micromarkets and Meaning

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Toward the end of last year, as a holiday gift, I put together a self-published book for my family. The manuscript was originally written by my grandmother (1910-2009) when she was in her eighties, and brings to life teenage trips she took to visit her eldest sister, who lived on a Wyoming homestead. To that original document were added photographs from the trips, a short page about the author, and a cover.

My grandmother originally intended her manuscript as a young-adult title. She submitted it to a few publishers, but after finding no interest she rewrote it as a more personal family memoir. In putting a book together based on that text I was conscious both of the work’s history and of her intent, but even more so of the responsibility of presenting her fairly and well. Fortunately, she did most of the heavy lifting with her own words.

What surprised me most about producing such a work was the impact the physical book had as an object when I finally held the first proof in my hands. The words had been around for decades, the pictures for decades more, but merging them into a book created something greater than the sum of its parts. And this feeling was shared by members of my family as well.

There is, obviously, something about a book as an object that confers a sense of importance about the contents. However that book came to be, and whatever the quality of the contents, at a bare minimum someone took the time and effort to assemble it — to create a new object from various pieces of source material. The result might be the functional equivalent of a scrapbook or personal journal, but the fact that it can be held and shelved alongside other tomes gives it a familiar, almost universal purpose and place that it would otherwise lack.

The question of an object’s worth — of a book’s worth — often devolves to critical and commercial assessment. At the same time, however, most people recognize that living a life dominated by (if not determined by) money and the artistic judgment of others leads to an inevitable corruption of self. If you can make a living pounding out words or creating images or raising and lowering hemlines that’s fine, but who are you when the crowds go away and you’re alone with your millions? (You may care about your money, but your money doesn’t care about you.)

To the great, brutish publishing industry this tiny little tome has no value of any kind. If traditional publishing cast even a glance my grandmother’s way it would do so only to sputter and spit about vanity publishing, as if I was trying to sneak past the industry’s desperate gatekeepers in order to make a buck or a name for myself without first coughing up whatever percentage they feel they deserve. But this simple book was not created to get around anyone or anything. It was created as an act of love, to honor someone who lived a full life and gave as much or more than she got.

I own a fair number of books, some of which I love for personal reasons and some of which I love because of the invaluable information they contain. My family is and always has been bookish. My grandmother probably read more books in a year than I read in a decade. But of all the books that have come through our collective lives, it would be hard to say that any of them are more meaningful to us now than this little self-published title that sprang from the hand of a woman who did so much for us all.

The fact that this book is a personal work aimed at a tiny micromarket says nothing about its inherent value and everything about how important self-publishing can be.

— Mark Barrett

Mediums and Mastery

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No matter how you find your way to storytelling, your own individual authorial journey begins with the stories you have been exposed to over the course of your life. This exposure inevitably affects and informs your initial efforts as you necessarily substitute mimicry for what will later become mastery. As you grow and develop as an author, and as your skills and interests broaden, you will leave these initial anchors and points of reference behind in order to explore new narrative territory. As you become more comfortable with different aspects of craft you may even probe the complex dynamics inherent in the interplay of art, craft and commerce. You may also decide to branch out and work in different storytelling mediums such as poetry, short fiction, long fiction, screenplays, stage plays and even interactive fiction.

At some point, if you keep pushing against your limitations, you will realize that stories exist apart from the specific mediums that allow us to document and relate fiction to others. We don’t need mediums to conceive of stories, we need mediums to express and communicate stories. This means that choosing the right medium is, in the end, simply another aspect of craft — albeit one that has unparalleled importance. As you grow in mastery you may even notice that many if not most of your earlier conceptions presumed a medium, and that in some cases that medium was not the best choice. (Not only can choosing the wrong medium dull the potential of a story, leading to a less-than-satisfying result, it can lead to still-born tales that never quite work no matter how many drafts or versions you write.)

Understanding the strengths and limitations of every medium you work in is critical. As I detailed in the previous post, what the world witnessed during the first three weeks of NFL football this year was the complete collapse of an entire medium into a narrative black hole. This self-inflicted debacle was both a chilling and comical lesson in the dangers of authorial hubris, and a cautionary tale for authors who believe they have absolute power.  [ Read more ]

Mediums and the Power of Rules

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Like stories, sports are not simply constrained by rules, they are defined by them. What we enjoy and take from sports after the fact is, for the most part, a narrative almost indistinguishable from fictional ones we create or are entertained by, but because sports usually play out in real time the rules are inevitably more obvious to the audience. In recognition of the importance of rules, sports almost always feature officials who are charged with enforcing those rules, albeit as inconspicuously as possible. Without officials, most sports would descend into chaos in short order — as still happens from time time.

I’ve noted previously that even a simple rule change can have a big effect on the narrative of a sport. Three years ago the National Basketball Association decided to officially adopt a rule that had been in practical use for years. This new rule gave players with the ball the right to take two full steps without dribbling — which, given the stride-length of many NBA players, effectively allowed them to go from the perimeter to the basket without putting the ball on the floor. This, in turn, has had a commensurate positive effect on scoring, which the audience enjoys.

This year the NBA instituted a new rule about so-called flopping — the intentional faking of a foul so as to cause officials to charge the opposing player with an infraction that player did not in fact commit. The new rule is designed to punish players who routinely flop, a move necessitated by the fact that flopping has eroded the integrity of the game and the authority of NBA officials. (Even though there are three officials covering each NBA game the players know those officials can’t see everything. Fans and the media, however, often have clear evidence of a flop, particularly when an instant replay is shown. No sport can survive that kind of routine and objective breakdown at the officiating level, as waning public interest in Major League Baseball’s arbitrary and often incompetent officiating continues to demonstrate.)

In the past year I also commented on the fact that the NFL had to change a few existing rules that were eroding the appeal of its product. Specifically, the time-honored tradition of allowing defensive players to physically cripple offensive players had to be revised because of new evidence that all those “great hits” were leading to things like “brain damage” and “slow, agonizing, premature death” after players retired. While these rule changes were made in part to minimize the amount of money the league will inevitably have to to pay for crippling and killing its own employees, the changes were also necessary to protect the audience from feeling queasy about enjoying what had become undeniable if not unconscionable brutality. Even in this example, however, where outside information (medical data) intruded on the sport, all it took to solve the problem and support the medium were simple changes in the rules.

Now, contrast the above examples with what the NFL did at the beginning of the 2012-2013 season, because what the league did then affected the medium of sports itself, yet nobody at the time had any inkling of what that portended. Let me repeat that. Despite decades of experience working in or covering professional sports, all of the people who caused the problem, and all of the people in the media who commented on the problem, had no understanding of what was happening even as events unfolded week by week.  [ Read more ]

Mediums and Authorial Control

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The rules that define any medium at any particular point in time may vary in complexity, but they are still binding. If the medium you’re playing around in is space travel, you should probably pay strict attention to the rules we call the laws of physics. On the other hand if the medium you’re playing around in is abstract sculpture, you can pretty much do anything you want as long as it ends up being a physical object — or, if your intended audience is purely intellectual or academic, some non-physical or negative-space meta-commentary on physical objects. If you try to present an action painting as sculpture, however, you’re probably going to get confused looks, if not some serious push-back.

The tendency over time is for all mediums to become more plastic. Rules that were previously assumed to be inviolate are challenged by artists and craftspeople who chafe at those limitations, until ultimately all non-essential rules are pared away to reveal the bedrock foundation of the medium itself. Like sculpture, a painting is defined today simply as any application of paint to canvas, board or wall. It doesn’t matter whether a painting is abstract or representational: all that matters is that the materials being used are paint or some paint equivalent, but that clearly wasn’t always the case. This creative freedom for painters was hard-won over centuries, with each subsequent school balking at restrictions imposed by those who came before, until, ultimately, all rules of what defines a painting were abandoned in favor of unbridled creativity.

And yet, as with sculpture, rules still apply no matter how plastic a medium becomes. If what you call a painting is in fact a pumpkin sitting in a field then you’re objectively wrong. You can do anything you want with paint, you can paint anything you want, or paint on anything you want, but without paint (or its equivalent) you don’t have a painting.

Compared to painting, storytelling as a medium — even in the rarefied air of experimental literature — is and will always remain constrained by complex rules. Some of these rules are a result of the way human brains take in and process narrative information. Some are cultural rules that define the meaning of objects and people and places before they are redefined or repurposed by authors. Some are logical rules having to do with time and place and order, which can only be broken when some plausible new rule (time travel, say) replaces the assumed rules so the reader does not become lost. And there are of course rules defined by language.

When authors say of literature that there are no rules, what they mean is that you can write about anything in any manner you see fit, as long as it pays off in the way you intend. If you see a literary objective and you need to break a specific rule to reach that goal you’re allowed to do it. What you’re not allowed to do is put ten thousand words in a blender, hit puree, and call that a story, or literature, or even a dictionary mash-up. If you do that with paint people may actually pay you for the result if you spew it on a canvas or sell it in gallon cans, but nobody is going to pay you for pureed words.

— Mark Barrett

Storytelling and the Power of Mediums

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I can’t tell you where my own impetus to author stories comes from. I know it’s there because I feel it, but I quit speculating about the cognitive roots long ago. Time ticks by and thoughts come to me, some of which I shape and express, but I don’t know where they originate, or even how they become coupled with sufficient desire and conviction that I choose to act on them. I’m glad this happens, but I don’t control it.

I do know that the idea of creating something from nothing has enormous appeal to me. I still remember being a very young boy and looking at a blank sheet of paper and a newly-sharpened number-two pencil and thinking to myself that what I was looking at was infinite possibility. With only those two things I could create something that would change the world or make people laugh or cry, and I’m still amazed by that.

But there’s another aspect to creation that can’t be overlooked, and that’s the issue of control. Very few people who menace a piece of paper with a pencil, or a canvas with a brush, or the world with a lens, do so with the intent of letting someone else control that process. Depending on the scale of the enterprise and the psychological make-up of the creator(s) the stakes may seem inconsequential or soul-destroying, but it’s axiomatic that in exchange for authority (if not also autonomy) each creator assumes responsibility for the final result. And that’s true even if chaos is your preferred method of creation.

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The Long View in Context

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Following up on the previous post, I think it’s worth taking a moment to consider where we are as a culture, and how we might evolve in the future relative to independent authorship and self-publishing.

The current explosion of interest in self-publishing is being driven by a number of factors, not all of them constant. I believe that as long as the internet exists, people will use it to reach out to each other without engaging the services of middlemen and gatekeepers. That goes for everything from private conversations to business — meaning, ultimately, that every attempt to mediate those direct connections will ultimately fail, if only to inevitably be reborn in some slick new guise. Whether we’re talking about sites like Facebook or device manufacturers like Apple, they’re all simply along for the ride, even as they purport to be driving the revolution.

What’s important to remember with regard to self-publishing is that what we are witnessing today is the explosive origin of what will be a future norm. As such there’s a built-in, pent-up demand for this new opportunity that simply won’t exist in the future. It’s not just kids or hipsters who are learning how to use the internet to do things like self-publish books, it’s everybody, all at once. In a generation or two, however, it really will be only the kids who need to be taught. Like young drivers they’ll learn at a developmentally appropriate age how to use the same self-publishing tools their older siblings, parents and grandparents have been using most of their lives.

Today there are clearly a lot of people who have always wanted to self-publish a book or two. Whether those books are collections of family recipes or deranged manifestos, until now these personal works have been financially and technologically beyond the reach of most would-be authors. This pent-up demand, again, crosses all generations, but over time — and perhaps a relatively short amount of time — that demand is going to be flushed out. Yes, there will be people who decide to pursue self-publication either as a hobby or avocation, but most would-be self-publishers will produce the titles they’ve always wanted and then stop. Or they’ll hang out a shingle and try to make a few bucks helping other independent authors realize their own pent-up dreams.

It’s also important to note that there’s a perfect convergence right now between the availability of self-publishing and the amount of time people have on their hands. If you crater the economy and drive millions of people into unemployment, they’re going to look around for something to do. If they’ve always wanted to self-publish a book they now have the time, and can probably afford to get it done. They may even have extra motivation to explore self-publishing as a means of making a buck or two when a couple of extra bucks would really be handy.

For these reasons, then, I think the current avalanche of demand for and interest in self-publishing will necessarily decrease — perhaps quite precipitously — as people find more time-consuming and remunerative pursuits, and as pent-up demand becomes satisfied over time. Which means those writers who are determined to take the long view, both in terms of future works and the value or present works, will almost certainly find themselves in a less-crowded market in the future. Which strikes me as a very good place to be.

— Mark Barrett

Revisiting the Book Review Problem

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A few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece on the inherently dubious business of paid book reviews. If you’re an independent author or are writing a book for any reason other than personal interest the article is a must-read, but not for the reasons you might think.

As anyone knows who’s ever tried to search the internet for the best spatula or best toaster, finding credible reviews on the internet is impossible. No amount of persistence and no set of keywords will ever produce what you’re looking for because keywords are the life blood of both search engines and the soulless, SEO-driven marketing weasels who exploit them. The only chance you have of getting an unbiased opinion about anything is to already know sources you trust, and to hope they’ve reviewed the product you’re interested in. For many products ConsumerReports provides that kind of objective, metric-driven coverage, but when it comes to books there’s little chance a title you’re considering will have been reviewed by someone who doesn’t have a personal axe to grind or who isn’t part of the publisher’s own extended marketing effort. Worse, if you’re an independent author there’s almost no chance that you’ll be able to have your book reviewed by a reviewer who has established their own credibility.

The internet workaround for this problem has been to allow customers to post reviews of products they’ve used. The practical result of this workaround in the book world is that authors and their friends and family salt and sock-puppet their own positive reviews when a book comes out, while competitors and griefers and put-upon students post scathing negative reviews about books they have often never read. The resulting noise can be sifted through endlessly or judged in the aggregate, but even then it tends only to reinforce whatever sense of the work the prospective customer already had.

As the article notes, almost all of the current paid-review options are not in fact reviews at all, but sponsorship and marketing. And consumers of reviews are not confused about this transactional relationship. In fact, whether you pay for a review or not, the default assumption by the public is and must be that your review is corrupt. And since it doesn’t matter how sincere a paid reviewer is, that consumer bias only corrupts the process that much faster, with the lion’s share of the paid-review business going to the most corrupt reviewers. (What authors are paying for when they buy a reviews is a positive review, and paid reviewers know this.) I have no doubt that the best of paid reviews are better than the worst, cleverly avoiding, for example, over-the-top claims of grandeur, but the goal is always the same: to help sell, rather than to independently judge.

Made almost comically explicit in the article is the idea that traditional arms-length reviewers do not have this credibility problem because they do not participate in the review process as adjuncts to marketing and sales. But that assertion is patently false. It’s true that the New York Times Review of Books doesn’t take checks or cash up front, but they certainly take phone calls from publishers, and it’s a fair bet that the people at the highest levels of the traditional publishing industry all know each other and how business is done. If the good friend of an editor writes a book it somehow ends up on the top of that editor’s stack. If a book is written by a despised peer the title somehow gets lost, or savaged by a hostile reviewer chosen for exactly that purpose. If there are humans involved, and money and power hanging in the balance, you can be certain that the process is inherently corrupt no matter how squeaky clean the press releases are.

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RPS Interviews Wolpaw and Kipnis

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If you’re curious about writing for interactive companies, check out this two part Rock, Paper, Scissors interview with Erik Wolpaw and Anna Kipnis: Part 1, Part 2. They’re both talented writers, and just as importantly both fortunate to work for companies that value writing. Unfortunately, even twenty years on, that is still the exception rather than the rule.

— Mark Barrett

E-book Price-Fixing Update

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A settlement has been approved in the federal government’s suit against Apple and five of the largest publishing companies, all of which were charged with colluding to fix the price of e-books:

For the next two years, the settling publishers may not agree to contracts with e-book retailers that restrict the retailer’s “discretion over e-book pricing,” the court said. For five years, the publishers are not allowed to make contracts with retailers that include a most-favored nation clause. “The time limits on these provisions suggest that they will not unduly dictate the ultimate contours of competition within the e-books industry as it develops over time,” Judge Cote wrote.

It’s not often that such obvious abuses are so quickly corrected by regulators. There is now no floor under the price of e-books, which means publishing will have to adapt and evolve that much faster, as opposed to conspiring against consumers.

To the extent that this seems to empower Amazon as a mass-market e-tailer, Amazon will ultimately face its own price pressures as content inevitably decreases in price. (Which may be why Amazon seems to be relying so heavily on advertising on its Kindle e-readers for revenue.)

Context and previous Ditchwalk commentary here. Additional cranky commentary here.

— Mark Barrett