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The Empire Strikes Back

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Whatever else may be happening in the book business these days, it’s now clear that the publishing industry has decided to fight back on the fundamental issue of pricing its products. It’s also clear that this is a concerted effort, as against the general aimless flailing demonstrated over the previous six months.

After a protracted price decline took hold last fall and accelerated toward the holiday season, the core issue of product pricing came to a head at the end of January when Amazon pulled Macmillan’s titles from its site rather than agree to Macmillan’s demand that e-book prices be raised. (Amazon has an interest in keeping e-book prices low because it spurs demand for Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle.)

Despite Amazon’s large customer base and beloved-brand status, after only a few short hours people began excising Amazon’s dead links from the consumer loop and pointing those links to other sites carrying Macmillan’s products. Demonstrating once again the shallow loyalty of online associations, as well as the vast difference between hosting and controlling a social network, Amazon was also reminded that even though it is (or rather was; more on this in a moment) one of the publishing industry’s biggest wholesale customers, from the point of view of the end user it’s just another easily replaced retailer. (Because of its Kindle e-reader Amazon is also a direct competitor for publishing dollars, further weakening the publishing industry’s interest in supporting Amazon’s pricing decisions.)

Sufficiently humbled by the experience, Amazon relented, providing everyone an opportunity to draw the wrong conclusions about who won and who lost even though the jury is still out. The only issue that was settled was the question of who will be calling the shots on pricing. Whether those prices will be met or rejected by consumers remains undecided, and it remains the obvious basis on which other interested parties can attempt to compete.  [ Read more ]

Professionalism and Price

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In yesterday’s post I made the case for my own rejection of the free/freemium content-pricing model, as well as the celebrity-first marketing model that seems to be its genetic twin. In a nutshell, the idea of giving away content in order to get people to care about me so I can monetize affection on the back end is not what I’m interested in doing. Were I the kind of writer who also wants to be a celebrity I could see the utility and appeal of that approach, but I’m not that kind of person. There’s nothing in me that wants to be on stage in a spotlight, and there never has been.

This leaves me with two choices. If conventional wisdom is right, and celebrity is a critical component of any writer’s ability to make a living, then I need to quit writing and do something else. The only alternative is the contrarian view that content in and of itself still does have some value in the marketplace. Because I tend to come by contrariness honestly, that’s the path I intend to follow.

If I’m right and conventional wisdom is wrong, then I’m effectively buying the content-first model at a discount. Later, when everybody realizes that celebrity is simply another endlessly-available, valueless commodity that they will have to root, grunt, scratch, claw and eternally fight for, I can leverage resurgent interest in non-celebrity content (formerly known as ‘entertainment’ or ‘knowledge’) and make a killing. Or something like that.

Obviously, the trendy idea that information or content has no inherent value rests on the bedrock premise of the internet as an free and open information pipeline servicing a world-wide society of hackers, spammers, pirates, griefers and anonymous cranks, as well as sundry meeker citizens. And I have no problem with that. I don’t think the internet should be regulated, or that people should be forced to give up their anonymity in order to join ongoing cultural conversations. If quality really doesn’t matter any more simply because there’s so much quantity, I can live with that.

However…it’s hard not to notice that comments about the ubiquity of internet content often dovetail with comments about the general lack of quality, value, merit, meaning or worth in that same infinite stream of words and ideas. And here I’m not talking about the difficulty of finding the good stuff. Rather, I’m saying that most of the stuff that’s out there is just plain bad not by my measure, but by anyone’s measure.  [ Read more ]

Doctorow, Anderson and Godin, Oh My

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Six months ago, when I first opened up shop here at Ditchwalk, there was a riot brewing in the publishing marketplace. For all the back-and-forth about self-publishing versus traditional publishing, however, the rhetorical clash that eventually broke out last fall was never really an us-against-them-whoever-they-are revolution. Or if it was, it was only that for a few short weeks, until the industry forces manning the status-quo battlements got their mind around the fact that the internet wasn’t going to go away no matter how many ruby-slippered heel clicks they threw at the damned thing.

What really drove the chaos last fall is what drives chaos in any business. Suddenly, with only a fleeting decade’s warning, the book business didn’t now how to make a stable profit. The internet was the obvious scapegoat, at least until the recession took hold, at which point big names in the publishing business reassured the rabble that everything would be fine as soon as the recession was over.

Now, when a pricing plague strikes your village and the experts fail to stop the spread, and Aunt Sadie’s home recipes don’t work, and your prayers don’t save the people you love, there’s a natural tendency to latch on to anyone who comes by with a possible solution. Fortunately, the one thing you can always count on in such situations is that someone will come by.  [ Read more ]

Professionalism and Quality

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After my weekend ride I spent most of Sunday catching up on non-writing news. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t stopping thinking about professionalism and amateurism, and whether there was any useful distinction between the two. As noted in previous posts, the corporate book business insists that amateurs cannot produce works of commercial quality or literary merit because amateurs are inherently unqualified to do so. But is that right? Is professionalism — whatever that word means — an inherent arbiter of quality?

I found myself thinking about that question while I read a New York Times piece on Toyota’s implosion as a brand synonymous with quality. While I already knew about the problems with the Pruis and runaway acceleration, I wasn’t surprised to run across this as well:

It also said it had avoided an investigation into the Tacoma, a pickup whose undercarriage could be affected by rust. Toyota offered to repair or, in some cases, replace damaged Tacomas built from 1995 to 2004. Toyota also said it had saved millions of dollars by delaying federal safety rules affecting other models.

Years ago I made enough money on a screenplay gig to buy myself the first new vehicle I’d ever owned. I took a long time picking it out, paying particular attention to ratings for quality as well as my all-season needs in the (then) upper-Midwest. The vehicle I settled on was a Nissan Pathfinder, which served me faithfully for close to a decade.

At which point the frame disintegrated:

[ Read more ]

We’re All Amateurs Now

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I took a long ride on Metaphor (my imaginary horse) over the weekend, wandering more than aiming for anything in particular. On Saturday night we ended up in a little seaside town that would have been intolerable during tourist season, but was welcoming and sheltering in the windy gray of February.

After boarding Metaphor at the local stable just down the street from my hotel, I walked along the block-long main street, looking at the various storefronts and window displays. On the upwind leg I found the usual knick-knack shops and t-shirt shops, along with the local office of a national real estate brokerage, and the local office of a nationwide bank where you used to be able to borrow money to buy local real estate. On the downwind leg I surveyed the menus for fancy eateries — both promising to open again when people flew north for the summer — and one take-out joint that looked like it had died. There was a dentist’s office up a side alley, and a closed ice cream store that sold hand-packed and soft-serve, which seemed like both a commitment to customer service and a failure to commit at the same time.

And then I came across a gallery, and it was open.  [ Read more ]

Taking Stock: Ditchwalk at Six Months

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Six months ago I put up my first post on this blog. My goals at the time were pretty straightforward:

  • Re-establish an internet presence for myself as a writer. I had a professional web site for years that was devoted to my interactive work. I took it down when I stepped back from interactive in the middle of the 90’s. (Blog posts and documents from that site have been added to Ditchwalk, and can be located via the Archive and Docs tabs on the main nav.)
  • Investigate the (r)evolution taking place in publishing, how the self-publishing/online movement is impacting traditional publishing, and any opportunities this presents.
  • Get up to speed on the new wave of social networking tools. In a few short years, online forums and e-mail groups were out, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were in.
  • Get up to speed on new tech, including e-readers, online publishing sites, self-publishing service providers, and print-on-demand (POD) technology.
  • Get up to speed on issues facing writers and storytellers in this brave new world. (Google’s deal with the Authors Guild quickly caught my eye.)
  • Identify opinion leaders and stress-test their opinions.
  • Network with others who share any or all of these interests.

Six months later I feel good about what I’ve learned and accomplished. There’s more I want to do, and more I need to know, but today I feel as if I’m on the crest of the breaking publishing wave rather than paddling behind it.  [ Read more ]

Open-source .epub vs. Adobe .pdf

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Over the past few days I’ve been reading up on e-book file formats. I have a collection of short stories I want to publish, and I have a working understanding of the technology that readers will use to embrace that content, but until recently I haven’t worried too much about delivering content to that technology. (The main reason for my delay is simply the pace of change. Time spent trying to understand or master e-content technology six months ago would have put me at buggy-whip risk.)

As luck would have it, Mark Coker just released data about the file formats most in use on Smashwords, his e-publishing site. At the same time, Joel Friedlander pointed me to a useful video tutorial about formatting content using Adobe’s InDesign software, which seems to be the tool of choice for many people. From these two sources of information I was able to understand and easily navigate the first fork in the road on my own publishing journey.  [ Read more ]

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