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Richard Nash and the Vision Thing

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I ran across an interview today with Richard Nash. If you meet any of the following criteria, you should read it:

  • You are a writer.
  • You are an editor.
  • You are a publisher.
  • You are a living organism.

As regular readers know, Richard is putting together a start-up called Cursor. I believe this venture is the right idea at the right time, and I hope Richard makes a go of it precisely because Cursor is not simply another publishing vanity. It is, rather, a proof-of-concept for a new, internet-age publishing model that emphasizes the reader-writer relationship.

That’s precisely why I’m here. Because I can write these words and you can read them without anybody else getting in the way or taking a cut or telling me I need to spice up my dialogue or throw in a torture scene or a vampire. And Richard Nash knows this:

The way I sort of think about this philosophically is that the reader pays a certain price for something. And everybody who takes a piece of that on route back to the author has to justify it. A lot of us have been failing to justify that big chunk of the reader’s money. It’s partly the reader’s money and partly the writer’s money. It’s the money the reader wants to give the writer for that experience. And typically, 10 to 15 percent of it actually makes it there.

The new reality is that writers do not need publishers in order to connect with readers. Publishers may be helpful in scaling up a writer’s readership, or in providing editing and publishing services, but they are no longer necessary intermediaries between writer and reader. And I know that’s true because this blog doesn’t have a publisher. Or rather, I’m the publisher.

This change is so great, so complete, that what everyone is looking for right now is a compass heading. Even if the destination is beyond the horizon, even if it’s going to be hell getting there, what everyone wants to know is that they’re at least on the right course. Maybe not the exact course, but headed in the right direction.

Richard Nash is headed in the right direction. You won’t agree with everything Richard says, but when you’re done reading the interview you’ll have a much better sense of where you are, and where you should be going.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: The Book Designer

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For the past six months or so I’ve been trying to learn everything I can about the publishing industry. A lot of that knowledge is political: it’s about business decisions that people are making in order to protect their interests, and how they’re leveraging others to achieve those goals.

There’s another kind of knowledge to the book business, however, and that’s the practical knowledge of how things are made. On the traditional side there’s book binding and printing; on the electronic cutting-edge there are document formats and presentation issues to confront. Because I know nothing about any of that, and because I need to know at least a minimal amount in order to make my work presentable in the literal sense, I’ve kept my eye out for useful sources of information.

Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer is one such site. Not only does Joel know a lot about how books are made, he makes that information available in language that anyone can understand. Straddling the transitional divide between print and online document preparation, Joel’s blog posts and site documents have already filled in a lot of blanks. And as I get ready to put together a collection of short stories for online publication and distribution, I find myself going to his site, and following his links, more and more.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Joe Konrath | JAKonrath.com

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When I first started trying to understand the tumult taking place in the publishing and self-publishing industries, one of the sites I ran across was a blog called A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. Written by author Joe Konrath, the site provides useful commentary on the transitions taking place in publishing, and how writers may profit from these changes. In the past I referenced several of Joe’s posts here and here, but today I want to encourage you to take both a closer look at the Newbie blog and a broader look at the JAKonrath.com empire.

If your writing platform equals your celebrity (and it does), there’s still the nagging question of how you become celebrated. Various authors have reversed the process entirely, building up a persona first, then capitalizing on it by writing a book, but that’s not what most authors are going to do. For most authors the question is more mundane: how do I let the world know where I am?

Part of the answer today is undoubtedly technological. Whether you choose to have a blog or a web site or both or more, that’s going to be part of your solution. It’s certainly a big part of what Joe is doing — as one click here will demonstrate — and that’s another reason to keep track of both the site and the blog. Someone is actually doing the stuff you may decide that you want to do, and they’re giving you a chance to learn by their example.

If you’d prefer a more hands-on approach to marketing, Joe’s also been down that road:

I was the guy who sent out 7000 letters to libraries, who visited over 2000 bookstores, who blog toured over 100 sites in a single month, who gathered 10,000+ names for his newsletter, who talked about social networking before anyone knew what Facebook was.

I think all of this has had a positive effect on my career. I’ve made some money. I’m still selling books.

I’m not advocating that you do any or all of that — I certainly won’t be — but that’s not the point. The point is that Joe Konrath doesn’t seem to be kidding around as an independent author, and there aren’t a lot of people you can say that about.

— Mark Barrett

Publishing is for Professionals

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It’s all well and good that people want to take advantage of the internet as a means of displaying their home-made arts and crafts, but as any veteran of any industry will tell you, there’s a big, big difference between being an amateur and meeting an industry’s standards of professionalism. For example, in the publishing industry professional authors and big-name publishing houses sift, vet, analyze, check, double-check, fact-check, double-fact-check and otherwise proof every single word on every single page. Editors scrutinize each line as to factual truth, house style, and grammatical validity, both as a service to readers and as a means of protecting the stature of the author’s and publisher’s names. To be sure, not everyone gets equal treatment, but as the price of a book goes up, you can bet more and more assets are thrown at the text to make sure it lives up to the names associated with it.

This is what it means to be professional, and it’s rightly why professionals look down on amateurs who think they know anything about publishing something important or good. For example, former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin recently published a memoir titled Going Rogue, for which HarperCollins paid her millions of dollars — which she in turn paid someone else a lot less money to actually write. Because publishing is a serious business, and because editors are serious people, and because the difference between amateur-hour and professionalism is always in the details, Going Rogue received the kind of professional, nitty-gritty scrutiny that your average amateur author (or fake author) could only dream of.

All of which, at first blush, would seem to make this gaffe surprising:

In her new book, “Going Rogue,” former vice presidential nominee attributes a quote to UCLA basketball coaching legend John Wooden.

The only problem is that he didn’t say it.

“Our land is everything to us…I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.”

It’s a nice quote, but it really doesn’t sound like something that Wooden would say. It was actually written by Native American activist John Wooden Legs in his essay “Back on the War Ponies.”

To the uninitiated it undoubtedly seems as if this kind of mistake undercuts the claim that professionals and amateurs are differentiated by the quality of their output. Unfortunately, this is the kind of uninformed opinion that defines amateurism.

It’s well known in the publishing industry that when a major publisher shells out millions of dollars in order to exploit the celebrity of a rapidly-burning cultural candle, it’s only doing so as a public service so it can steer some of the resulting revenue toward serious books by serious people. HarperCollins was really only patronizing Sarah Palin and her followers as a means of leveraging cash that could be used to fund the publication of cutting-edge literary fiction and nonfiction of cultural significance. What the amateur eye sees as hypocrisy, the professional understands as a savvy in-joke.

So remember: this kind of egregious, high-profile embarrassment does nothing to change the fact that you’re not worthy of professional status in the publishing industry. When you inevitably include a typo or a bad fact in something you ‘publish’ on the internet, you have defined yourself as a failure, a pretender, an amateur. And the publishing professionals will be the first ones to tell you so.

— Mark Barrett

Formatting Documents for e-Publishing

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I have a collection of short stories I would like to publish online. I’ve been working on cleaning them up for the past six months or so, and I’m now at the point where I need to confront a variety of technical questions. I know that a lot of people have already wrestled with these issues before me, so I’m asking for links/comments that will shorten my learning curve and prevent me from having to reinvent the wheel.

Questions:

  1. I write in Word, and that’s not going to change any time soon. My goal here is trying to develop a clean, clear work flow that makes the transition to any/all online publishing options as simple and painless as possible. (Including print-on-demand.) The first thing that (I think) I need to know is whether I should convert my original Word docs into another file format first (say, e-Pub, but that’s only an example), then change that internet-friendly file to meet the requirements of any particular publishing site/service, or whether I should only do so on a case-by case basis. What’s the right first step here?
  2. I need all the how-to links and advice I can get. I’m willing to read until my eyes bleed, but again, the goal is short-circuiting the learning curve. Who’s been down this road recently and written about it? Site-specific feedback is fine: I’d like to read about Smashwords author experiences, Amazon, etc.
  3. I know there are passionate views on both sides of the e-Pub file format issue. I’m not even sure what all the fuss is about, but I’m willing to learn. Who should I be reading? I like the idea of non-proprietary file formats. I know I’ll have to deal with Amazon’s proprietary format at some point, but I’m not eager to abet its dominance. Opinions? Links? Is this even worth wading into, or should I just stick with the practical issues related to getting my text ready?

Any and all feedback/links/comments appreciated.   [ Read more ]

A DRM Question Worth Asking

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Imposing technological solutions for Digital Rights Management (DRM) is, in theory, a viable way to stop the piracy of online content. In theory. In practice DRM presents a host of implementation problems and customer service headaches because legitimate content owners are punished or disadvantaged alongside thieves.

Because of the gap between current theory and practice, proponents and opponents of DRM attempt to dominate the DRM debate with apocalyptic rhetoric, political gamesmanship, and the kind of righteous indignation that is both an intellectual guilt trip and calculated lie at the same time. Neither side is really interested in what is practical or effective, or even in learning how pirated content is actually consumed by the end user.

The reason they are not interested is because they cannot sell the products they want to sell in a calm atmosphere. It takes fear of nuclear annihilation to sell both bomb shelters and bombs, so both sides in the DRM debate stoke the rhetorical fires and present their hard-line solutions as the truth, the light and the only way. All of which I’ve talked about here, here and here.

Still, it seems to me that there is one DRM question worth asking. Here’s how I referenced the issue in one of those previous posts:

Elsewhere in the clip, Mr. Doctorow makes a good point when he says that books will be copied and scanned regardless of the DRM that publishers employ. I agree. But that’s not necessarily saying something important. Scanned versions of books are almost inevitably going to be less clear than licensed e-books or even licensed digital copies. Yet even assuming someone cracks a DRM-protected book and makes it available for free, the book business has a kind of built-in protection against wanton piracy simply by nature of its content.

Music comes in small files. Movies are dumb — you just stare at them. Books, however, are big, and require active engagement over a long period of time in order to be consumed.

Maybe someone somewhere is downloading two hundred cracked e-books at a whack, then reading the first sentence of each in order to find a great read, but I think it’s unlikely. In fact, it’s unlikely that most pirated books are ever completely read, precisely because a book is relatively hard to digest. This means the ratio of thefts by end-users who intend to enjoy the content they steal to thefts by pirates who intend to profit from the content they steal may be lower in the book publishing industry than in any other medium. Which means the book publishing industry has more to gain by going after traffickers and less to gain by going after end-users than any other industry.

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Superbowl Sexism and Sports Narratives

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We watch sports for the same reason we watch movies. We like narratives. Movies (and books, and stage plays) are pre-designed: they are prepared for us, in order to induce the greatest amount of entertainment and emotional involvement. Sporting events play out in real time: the end result is not known in advance, and that creates its own kind of drama. You do not know what is going to happen when the curtain goes up on a game: you only hope that it will be great. (More on game and story here.)

Tonight’s game was a good game. It had a lot of narratives running through it, and in the end they played out as I would have liked as a storyteller. That’s not always the case, obviously, but that’s part of why we watch sports: it’s an act of faith. Sometimes we’re rewarded for believing, and sometimes our hearts are ripped out of our chests.

Going into the game the Colts’ quarterback, Peyton Manning, had ascended to god-like status on the wings of sporting pundits who know everything except how the game will actually turn out. And Manning played an excellent game. Unfortunately, everybody else on both teams played well, too, and as the game wore on Manning was not able to impose his will on the New Orleans Saints. When the Saints finally moved ahead late in the game, I said out loud that the only thing that would make the narrative complete would be if Manning threw an interception as he was trying to lead his team back for a tie — because the meta-narrative assumed that Manning would score the tying touchdown. When he did throw that interception, and it was returned for a touchdown, I could only shake my head. It’s not often, as a storyteller, that you get to see that kind of unscripted narrative play.

Apart from the game, however, I have to say that I was more than a little concerned with what can only be described as a parade of misogynistic, sexist commercials that played during the breaks. I know Superbowl commercials are supposed to be a big deal, and I know that advertising agencies pull out all the stops in an attempt to make their commercials talked about the next day. I fully expected, and got, a fair share of sex-driven commercials, but there also seemed to be a good deal of woman-bashing and wife-bashing aimed at what I can only presume to be a large demographic of stone-age male sitcom caricatures tuning into the game. Funny stuff if you’re a wife beater.

Then again, empowerment of women also seemed to be sadly lacking, and here of course I’m referring to Danica Patrick’s Go Daddy commercials. If you don’t know Danica Patrick, she’s a female race car driver of moderate talent, who, if she were male, you would never hear anything about as long as you lived. Because she is female, and TV-pretty, however, and more than willing to throw the cause of equality under the bus when there’s money to be made showing some skin, she’s decided to work her way up not by winning races, but by exploiting her physical appearance. Because it’s a TV world we live in, she’s of course having moderate success.

If I feel bad for anyone it’s the fans of the Indianapolis Colts. I don’t feel bad about this loss, but I feel bad for the way they were abused earlier in the year when the Colts’ ownership and coaches pulled the starting players off the field in the middle of a game, forfeiting a win. The Colts were undefeated at the time, the Colts’ fans had bought into the dream of an undefeated seasons, and yet the team’s ownership threw them overboard with as much concern as Danica Patrick gives to your daughters. The stated reason for throwing the game, it was said, was to limit the chance that someone on the team might get hurt, crippling the Colts’ chance of winning the Superbowl. Now that the team has lost the Superbowl, yet another narrative is complete because the Colts have not been rewarded for what they did — which, to my mind, was inexcusable.

Finally, a footnote. I won’t explain this fully, but somewhere tonight Brett Favre is laughing his ass off.

— Mark Barrett

On Being Smarter Than the Problem | Copyright

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Every once in a while I run across someone very smart who has become completely lost by intellectualizing out of all proportion to the issue at hand. In some cases this is intentional: the objective is to display dizzying mental agility, then perform some sleight of logical mind that allows the smart person to convince others that up is down. At other times the smart person has actually deceived themselves, losing the forest of reality for a theoretical tree that some other intellectual lifted a leg on.

I don’t think there’s anybody who has a higher ratio of smarts to brain cramps than Christopher Hitchens. I could read Hitchens all day, just to enjoy the flow of his language and the logic of his ideas, even as he launches many of those diatribes from premises I consider invalid, destined for conclusions I deem absurd. In the more duplicitous camp I think of none other than George Will, the humorless columnist who enjoys nothing more than turning his megawatt mind to the subjects of both politics and baseball, with equally dubious results.

I mention all this as preface to a post* a couple of days ago by Matthew Yglesias, who is a smart person. Regarding the effect of free (stolen/pirated) content on the record industry, Yeglesias writes:

But under conditions of perfect competition, the price of a song ought to be equal to the marginal cost of distributing a new copy of a song. Which is to say that the marginal cost ought to be $0.

It’s of course amazing to me that someone could write something like that and not recognize the obvious problem, which is that this paradigm allows for no costs associated with the creation of the music that is being distributed, nor any opportunity to recoup those costs — let alone turn a profit. Then again, this is what happens when smart people talk about things like intellectual property as if it simply exists inside the walls of a black corporate castle, rather than as something that someone — an artist or craftsperson — makes.

Obliquely recognizing the potential problem, Yglesias adds:

It is, of course, possible that at some point the digital music situation will start imperiling the ability of consumers to enjoy music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to prevent that from happening, and if it does come to pass we’ll need to think seriously about rejiggering things.

In reply, Sonny Bunch makes the obvious point in a post titled Piracy. Is. Stealing.:

No! False! The purpose of intellectual property law has very little to do with Matt Yglesias being able to enjoy a wide variety of new music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the intellectual property created by artists so they are rewarded for their efforts. The purpose of intellectual property law is to punish people who steal that which isn’t theirs.

Yglesias, in his reply to Bunch, again ignores the question of authorship, or even the existence of the artists and craftspeople who create content:

He’s being sarcastic, but that is, in fact, an absolutely insane idea. The point of intellectual property law is to benefit consumers, not producers.

Note that last word: “producers”. That’s not the same as: artists.

To the Matthew Yglesias’ of the world, no human being with a passion or a vision actually makes music or tells stories that they hope to sell as a product. That’s all done by corporations and copyright holders, who are just looking to make a buck. Admitting as much, Yglesias reaches for an analogy and comes up with…the pharmaceutical industry.

Does Bunch think it’s a terrible affront to the moral rights of pharma researchers that there are generically available drugs? Does he want to see ibuprofen and penicillin and measles vaccines taken off the market? That’s crazy.

The only thing crazy here is the inability of a very smart person like Matt Yglesias to wrap his mind around the idea that without copyright protection, there exists no object — no ibuprofen pill — for artists to sell. That’s how complicated it isn’t.

*Links from Andrew Sullivan’s blog yesterday. Additional comments today from Sulivan’s readers here. The Ditchwalk take on this issue, also posted three days ago, and reader comments, here.

— Mark Barrett

GBS Copyright Hijacking Attempt #2

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Yes, I’m against the (re)proposed Google Books Settlement with the Authors Guild. Which is why this seems like a bit of good news:

In another blow to Google’s plan to create a giant digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department on Thursday said that a class-action settlement between the company and groups representing authors and publishers had significant legal problems, even after recent revisions.

…

The department also indicated that the revised agreement, like its predecessor, appeared to run afoul of authors’ copyrights and was too broad in scope.

I say “a bit” because one never knows how these things are being staged. My hope is that the Justice Department is sincere in its objections, and not just covering its ass.

— Mark Barrett

What You Steal

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The Premise
A month ago I engaged in an interesting conversation with Luke Bergeron on his [now defunct] blog, about copyright law. My interest was prompted in large part by Luke’s incisive generational examination of the question of piracy.

Here’s how Luke initially framed the issue:

The real issue goes beyond digital piracy to copyright itself. Now, I don’t believe that digital file sharing, even of copyrighted materials, is theft. That’s probably a generational thing, but we’re gonna do our best to suss out as much meaning as possible. Keep in mind, this entry is a fluid conversation, so comment if you wanna participate.

So, theft seems to me like it is inherently defined by the taking of something from someone else, depriving them of it. Theft is a physical concept, based on a starvation economy, that there is a finite amount of resources to go around, and possessing resources means someone else will not possess them.

Last week I read a post on The Millions called Confessions of a Book Pirate. On the subject of piracy the confessor had this to say:

In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers.

Two days ago I read a post from Marian Schembari on Digital Book World, called
A Gen Y Reaction to Macmillan’s Piracy Plan. In her comprehensive rant, Marian had this to say about piracy:

I’m not condoning piracy (sort of), but if major publishers are only going to look at the “legal” side of things and spend precious time and money fighting the inevitable, they are going to crash and burn.

I’m poor, I understand technology, and I guarantee I can find any book online, for free, in 10 minutes or less. You can delete and sue all you want, but at the end of the day the internet is a wide and limitless place, meaning it’s a waste of time, money and energy to fight it.

In response to Marian’s post, Debbie Stier of HarperStudio/HarperCollins wrote a post on her company blog, congratulating Marian for stating her overall case regarding Macmillan, and for giving insight into the Gen Y perspective.

Here’s the bottom line for me — whether you agree or not with Marian Schembari’s views on piracy, she has given us a glimpse into the psyche of a Gen Y reader. I appreciate her honesty. I believe this is a gift. I think we should listen.

I agree with Debbie. We should listen. But then we should reply.  [ Read more ]