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The Internet as Relief Valve

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Dan Wagstaff had an excellent post up over the weekend at CasualOptimist. Here’s the crux:

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

I encourage you to read the post. It’s a summary of things that have been and are being tried to in order to gain a toehold in the new publishing reality, but — as Dan points out — it’s also a reminder that the basic problem is not one of process but product. What is it that is the publishing industry should be selling?

In the comments to the post, I wrote this:

…if the industry needs to contract on the basis of content alone (ignoring other obvious reasons driving a coming contraction) — it seems to me that the internet is a useful mechanism by which that contraction can be managed, as opposed to happening at a more precipitous rate.

I think it’s clear that corporate publishing cannot continue in its present form. It’s top-heavy and badly listing, and sooner or later economic pressures are going to take their toll. Thinking about this over the weekend, it seems to me that even as the internet is the instigator of many of publishing’s woes, it’s also a relief valve of sorts in that it allows publishers to connect readers with content, while at the same time being more (appropriately) selective about which content is turned into physical books. (Note how completely this distinction seems to be lost in the current publishing dialogue at the corporate level, while it is at the heart of discussions at the authorial level.)  [ Read more ]

TYOTE

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The title of this post is the working-title acronym for my collection of short stories. I’m 99% sure the title is the one I’ll be going with, but until I’m 100% sure this is what I’m calling it.

It’s been interesting getting the stories in shape. I’ve pushed myself to make the stories good, and been pushed to do more by the finality of the act of publication — even if I’m only self-publishing them in digital form. Nobody wants to make an idiot out of themselves.

I’m pretty close to being able to put the stories up on Smashwords. I’ve worked through the formatting style guide, and I have a working comp for the cover art. I just need to do a final version of everything and a final read-through of the text and I think that’s it. (I’ll have more to say about the various steps in the process when I’m reasonably confident I didn’t mess things up.)

What I can say so far is that the impending act of publication has helped improve my work. Because I’m taking it seriously, that seriousness is producing benefits I hadn’t imagined. I’m not new to turning in final drafts of fictional copy, or scripts that will be produced by others, but this is a more solitary process, and I’m glad to find that it is not without rewards.

Even as I am starting to see the larger self-publishing movement as a fad or balloon that will inevitably go bust, I’m also utterly convinced that the internet as a distribution and publication platform is for real. I can put these stories where others can find them, and I don’t have to ask permission to do that.

As small as the collection is, and as limited as the economic upside might be, it feels like a big deal. Regardless of the outcome, I’m glad I’m doing this.

— Mark Barrett

The Successful Publisher

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I’ve been thinking about the previous post, and it seems to me the same advice holds for anyone looking to get into publishing — whether as a self-published author, or as a publisher of other people’s works on any scale. If you don’t define success yourself, the miserable soulless scorekeepers are going to define it by how much money you’re making, or whether or not you’re still in business.

The recent dissolution of HarperStudio is not simply a case in point, it’s a case that demonstrates the utterly bankrupt way the miserable soulless scorekeepers go about their business. What happened at HarperStudio, as far as I can tell, is that the guy who ran the place — Bob Miller — decided to go do something else. In a corporate context that’s the equivalent of leaving your wallet on the street, because there are always other factions in a corporation that want to play with the money in your budget. But is that the same thing as failing?

Seriously: how many people inside HarperCollins were rooting for HarperStudio, and how many were hoping it would fail? If you worked for the mothership, did you really want someone proving that a stripped-down version of what you were doing could actually work? Or did you want it to blow up, with or without your own finger on the trigger? I have no idea if Bob Miller was a hampered visionary or bumbling idiot, but that’s really the point. Does anyone know what was happening behind the scenes? Does anyone know what the money flow was like, and how HarperStudio’s subsidiary status with HarperCollins affected its ability to be successful?

What if Bob Miller had not decided to leave HarperStudio? What if he was still there, doing his job, but the company was badly in the red? Would that be a success story? Better yet, what if he was still doing his job, but he was embezzling money from the company and cheating authors at the same time? From the outside it would look like he was still in business, and thus not a failure — at least until he got caught. Is HarperStudio a failure because it tried to play fair? Are vanity presses that prey on naive customers demonstrating a better business model? (I’ll leave you to guess what the miserable soulless scorekeepers think.)

And what about the absurdity in all this? Anyone who thinks that HarperStudio failed in an objective sense has to reconcile that view with a larger context in which publishing is a wounded, dying animal that has little chance of continuing in its current form. If you really want to say that HarperStudio failed, isn’t the entire industry failing by that score? How many other companies are being held together by their leadership, while the bottom line bleeds out through an artery shredded by the internet? Isn’t there general agreement even now that the big publishers are playing for time in their dealings with Apple and Amazon, and their imposition of the agency model? Is there anyone who can point to a model that’s going to be an unbridled success a year from now? Five years? Ten? Are you shaking your head?

Publishers at every level need to define why they’re doing what they’re doing. Leaving that task to the miserable soulless scorekeepers will always result in the inevitable charge that you’re a failure, because that’s the point of keeping score. If you care about books or writers or publishing, defining that passion will prevent others from defining it for you. You won’t ever be able to get them to admit it, of course, but that’s not the goal. The goal is saving your sanity, if not your soul.

— Mark Barrett

The Successful Author

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When it comes to publishing in the modern age, I don’t think people care much about anything other than sales. As an author you can write something great, but if it doesn’t sell like hotcakes the miserable soulless scorekeepers in the publishing industry will say what the miserable soulless scorekeepers in every industry say: that you failed.

Because primacy of sales is not implicit in the word author, however, qualifiers become necessary. You can only be a successful author if you sell lots of books, or otherwise generate serious revenue in the form of t-shirt sales, film rights, speech-circuit fees, etc. It doesn’t matter if you generate all these sales by lying about yourself or duping your readers. The only thing that matters is the money.

If you write a book that is only read by world leaders, who take your words and change the planet with them, you will not be called successful. You might be described as influential, and the fact of your influence might drive future sales or offers to speak in front of go-go executives, but until the money rolls in you will never be described as a success. Not even if you save a million lives.

If you do not sell a lot of books but you receive critical acclaim then you can call yourself a critically-acclaimed author, or an award-winning author, but you cannot call yourself a successful author. Unless of course you were aiming for critical success all along, in which case you can pull a fast one and present yourself as a successful, critically-acclaimed author, thereby implying that you sold more books than you actually did.

If you are neither critically-acclaimed nor generating sales, then you can call yourself an author as long as you A) have written at least one book, and B) are working on another book, even if it’s only in your head. If you stop at any point, however, you become a failed author because you failed to achieve critical acclaim or financial success. In the writing business there is nothing worse than being a failed author. Except being a miserable soulless scorekeeper.

The antidote to all this, of course, is defining success for yourself. And I don’t mean that as a trite observation. Rather, I mean you should have an actual conversation with yourself about this issue and define why you’re writing and what it is you hope to give and gain by linking words together.

You don’t have to tell anyone what your definition is, and you can change it any time you want. What’s critical is simply that you know the answer yourself. Because if you don’t, the miserable soulless scorekeepers will gladly define success for you.

— Mark Barrett

Randy Cohen: Ethical Fail

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When the New York Times says it’s okay to steal content, you know it’s not going to be a good day. Before this afternoon I’d never heard of Randy Cohen, who apparently writes a column called The Ethicist for the NYT Magazine section. After today I have to question his qualifications for passing judgment on ethical behavior.

Here are the first three graphs of today’s column, in which he responds to a reader’s question. (Am I copying and pasting too much of the NYT’s content? Or am I allowed to do so because I already paid for that ethical right when the NYT subjected my eyeballs to their online ads?)

I bought an e-reader for travel and was eager to begin “Under the Dome,” the new Stephen King novel. Unfortunately, the electronic version was not yet available. The publisher apparently withheld it to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y.

An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical. Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.

Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

What Mr. Cohen is arguing is not simply that you have a right to make a back-up copy of content already purchased, you also have the right to port purchased content to any other medium you choose — and to have others aid you in doing so, even if by doing so you or they also profit, and even if by doing so you or they profit at the expense of the legal copyright holders of that content.  [ Read more ]

Weekend Reads

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There is much I want to post about, but between working on my short stories and other projects I’m running short on time this week. Rather than leave a blank spot on the web, I’m going to attempt to fill that aching void with links to articles of interest.

More original Ditchwalk content will be coming soon to a screen near you. And it won’t require flash! Until then…

  • Only Branding Can Save the ebook Industry

    Jay Garmon at The New Sleekness throws down on an important question: how do publishers make themselves relevant in the digital age? I’m not sure I buy all of his arguments, and I’m somewhat convinced that a publisher’s branding is of little or no interest to consumers. (I’m entirely convinced that branding has itself been distorted beyond all meaning. Next time you visit your doctor — whether to fight the onslaught of aging or to set a broken leg — you will quite likely be told that the cure is good branding.)

    Garmon raises good questions, though, and they’re questions any author should be aware of. Publishing and self-publishing are not stable businesses, which means there is a good deal more risk baked into these activities than other things you might do with your time and money. Consider yourself warned.

  • Do I need the middle?

    Brian O’Leary at Magellan Media Partners picks up on Garmon’s post to make a related point:

    If the average e-book sells for $10 with a royalty of 25% of net, the average author earns about $1,900 a year. If that same author strikes an agency deal with Amazon … well, she or he need sell fewer than 300 units to break even.

    As I’ve noted before, the big question for mainstream publishers these days is deciding who their customers are. Back in the day (say, five years ago), publishing’s customers were retailers — both online and brick-and-mortar. Now that the internet has broken publishing’s lock on distribution and production, product is bypassing the old checkpoints and being sold to readers directly. Should publishers make readers their new customers? Authors? All of the above? Where’s the life-sustaining return on investment?

    O’Leary reverses the argument and asks why authors should care about publishers. And by the way: you should be reading Brian O’Leary regularly.

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Acronyms From XHTMLHELL

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For my own reference, as well as that of readers who are in the same boat, I pulled together the following links to help make sense of the alphabet soup inherent in self-publishing solutions. My objective is simply to provide a single post that will replace the repeated searches I’ve been running whenever I can’t remember how XML is different from HTML is different from XHTML.

  • Brian O’Leary, in a post titled Alphabet Soup, tackles the issue head on. If you get confused by XML, HTML and XHTML, this is the post for you.
  • In a post titled Web Standards for E-books, Joe Clark dives deeper. There’s a lot here and I’m not sure I understand or agree with all of it, but it definitely wrestles with the issues I’m wrestling with.
  • Gizmodo leads with a tabloid headline: Giz Explains: How You’re Gonna Get Screwed By Ebook Formats. Despite the hype the article is still worth a read, in large part because it projects all these tech issues onto the current marketplace. Again, I’m not sure I agree with the conclusions, but the article frames the right debates.
  • Jedisaber has an .epub eBooks Tutorial that I found extremely helpful. It includes a list of tools, with commentary about same, as well as many other useful bits of information. If you’re thinking of creating an ePub file, this is the place to start.

As suggested in a recent post, it’s always a good idea to look for work flow examples that you can copy or emulate. You may not agree with all of the other person’s choices, or need to follow their examples word for word, but anything is better than reinventing the wheel.

Where the rubber meets the road for me in all this jargon is getting my content distributed. I am concerned about embarking down a technological path that either dies out or takes my content hostage. I don’t want to have to keep changing native file formats, or create new documents for new services or sites that use proprietary tools as a means of also holding customers hostage. I’m interested in flexibility and utility and portability, and I’m constantly judging tech solutions by those criteria.

Update: Keith Fahlgren has a post about ePub and CSS that’s worth reading, if only to give you an idea of what’s coming in terms of compatibility issues. In the comments to the thread, Liz Castro says, “It’s browser wars all over again,” and I fear she may be right. My one hope is that the maturity and deep pockets of many of the market players will keep the insanity to a minimum.

— Mark Barrett

The iPad and Me

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Whatever you think about Apple and its products, it’s hard to deny that their marketing machine does an excellent job projecting the company as both a technological leader and cultural trend-setter. The latest gizmo to get the full Apple-hype treatment is the iPad, which has been variously described as everything from the greatest invention since sliced bread to the greatest invention of all time.

As a piece of technology, I don’t have an opinion about the iPad. It lies outside my interests, and there’s no scenario in which I see myself needing one or buying one.

What’s most interesting to me about the iPad is how the book business has both embraced and distanced itself from the device, as if it’s critical to publishing’s aims. To the extent that the iPad creates pretty portable pictures, I can see how that might serve the aims of an art book, but when it comes to text I see no inherent advantage in the iPad over any other e-reading device.

More to the point, as a content creator I see the iPad as essentially meaningless. The works I create are almost completely described by text (no images, little formatting), and my goal for that content is to make it device independent. Because the ePub and PDF file formats already allow me to do that, the existence or non-existence of the iPad (and any other similar device) is a non-issue for me.

I’m not waiting for the iPad to make my work viable, portable, deliverable or readable. If it sells like hotcakes, great. If it doesn’t, great. Apple’s market share is nothing I care about, and the same goes for Amazon, Sony, and anybody else who intends to enter the e-reader marketplace. I’m taking my content directly to readers one way or the other, and nobody’s going to get in the way of that. Anyone who tries to do so by controlling the technology will be undermined by the competition. Anyone who tries to do so by controlling the market will be side-stepped and cut down by the internet.

— Mark Barrett

Five Days

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Catherine Ryan Howard of Catherine, Caffeinated fame put up a nice series last week titled Five Days to a Self-Published Book. The five days are metaphorical, but if you’re just now looking at the daunting task of creating your own content that’s probably a relief.

The full series can be found here.

Update: The series references CreateSpace, but I’m not recommending it on that basis. Rather, I think it’s an excellent work flow example to follow, and I believe it was intended as such. (On the subject of CreateSpace, Lulu and POD, see also this recent comment from Joel Friendlander.)

Later Update: Mick Rooney has an interesting post up about Lulu. I asked Mick a few follow-up questions in the comments, and I found his answers illuminating. Anyone considering Lulu.com for self-publishing should give his post a read.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Levi Montgomery

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What do I value most in a web site? Honesty.

When you go to a commercial site (Apple, say), you know going in that everything you see and read was massaged by corporate drones to fit a corporate theme aimed at corporate profits. Whether you buy into the theme or not, it’s all a lie. It might even be a fun lie, like Disneyland, but it’s still aimed at your wallet.

This tendency infects almost everything, particularly in the U.S., because we’re a business culture. Whether you’re a top-flight CEO or a sole-proprietor, who people think you are and how they respond to that image will probably determine whether you get to eat or not. (Okay, maybe not so much with the CEO.) It’s not objectively wrong to put your best foot, face, cheek or assets forward — although how you go about doing so may say more about who you are than you intended to reveal.

All of which is preamble to introducing you to Levi Montgomery. Over the past six months, in reading Levi’s blog posts, I haven’t had a single moment where I thought Levi was shading his opinion for later advantage. Granted, that’s easy enough to do if you’re just shooting your mouth off, and there’s no shortage of such people on the web.

But here’s the thing. Levi’s involved. He’s part of Self-Publishing Review, he recently pointed me to and recommended The Self-Publishing Review (which allowed me to find HPRW again), and he’s walking the walk himself as a writer.

I don’t always agree with his reactions and opinions, nor he I’m sure with mine, but the thing is, he meets a critical bar. He rationally explains his opinions, instead of blithely assuming that anybody who doesn’t ‘get it’ is a dweeb. Take his decision to remove his work from Smashwords, including his view that the PDF file-type should be the e-reader standard. I disagree, but then I also know that Levi is interested in retaining more control over the look and feel of his work than I am. (I’m crazy big into transparency as an aspect of craft.)

There just aren’t a lot of people who say what they think and explain what they mean. Levi Montgomery is one of those voices. Add to that the fact that he’s not sitting on the self-publishing sidelines, and you’ll understand why I consider him a must-read.

— Mark Barrett