A Road Less Traveled
Mick Rooney is the proprietor. The full title of his blogsite is POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing. I ran across it while chasing down links related to the previous post, and it certainly seems to be up-to-date on the titular subject matter.
And no, I’m not pointing to him because of the awesome ditch mention.
— Mark Barrett
This is the kind of thing I love learning, courtesy Maria Schneider at Editor Unleashed:
To be very honest, I never noticed any difference in quality between the various POD shops. Most of these services use Lightning Source to actually print the books.
Who knew? Lightning Source.
Update: very nice links page on the Lightning Source site, featuring a wide range of author resources and author-service companies.
— Mark Barrett
There’s a fair bit of notice being given today to a lawsuit in which a writer (Elaine Scott) is suing an online publisher (Scribd) for copyright infringement. The trend in the comments I’ve seen is to go after the writer on a number of fronts, but I’m not going to join the chorus.
If there is any single point of focus needed in the current back-and-forth about publishing it’s that an author’s copyright is law. Not old law, not antiquated law, not mushy law, not if-we-can’t-find-the-author-it’s-no-longer-law law, but law. As in it’s the law and no one else — no third party of any kind — is allowed to take away, restrict, modify or in any way lay claim to an author’s copyright without the author’s approval.
If we’re not willing to say that unambiguously, collectively and individually, then we’re not serious about writing as a profession. Because copyright law is the only thing that allows us to produce a product that can be sold. We don’t have mines full of physical ore to sell. We don’t have stands of timber we can cut down. We don’t have items that can be warehoused and protected under guard. We have intellectual property which only has value to us if the law says we have a right to control it. [ Read more ]
Over the past month I’ve discovered a number of reasons why I prefer to try to go it alone as a writer, and I’m confident I’ll be talking about them in the near future. Reading the following quote, however, made me realize that some of the reasons are more moral and ethical than they are practical:
While the distant past may not be germane, we do have to go back to the middle years of the twentieth century. At that time, publishing was certainly a business, as it is today, but it was a business that had accepted a low rate of return on investment, in exchange for the thrill (and it is a thrill) of being part of the cultural life of the country, and indeed, the world. But in the 1980s and 1990s, bigger publishers began gobbling up smaller publishers, and then multinational corporations swallowed up the bigger publishers. Suddenly these houses needed to service the debt involved in buyouts, on top of the relatively modest six-to-eight percent return on investment that Bennett Cerf and Alfred Knopf had once been happy to receive.
I think that’s right. I also think it explains why I feel the way I do about the publishing industry — like they’ve been making suckers out of me and everyone else. [ Read more ]
More than once during my life I’ve been involved in trying to solve a problem that never previously existed. In grappling with such issues I’ve managed to make a small contribution to the cause, which was both interesting to me as a process and satisfying as an end.
In turning my mind to the evolving (devolving?) world of publishing, I anticipated a similar opportunity, but as I noted indirectly in this post there really isn’t a lot that one person can do to affect the course of future events. [ Read more ]
If you don’t know who Jason Epstein is, don’t worry. As someone who’s playing catch-up on a whole host of publishing-related issues I didn’t recognize the name, but after reading his 2009 ROC keynote I probably won’t forget it in the near future. Here’s a sample:
The radically decentralized digital marketplace has already rendered traditional publishing infrastructure — warehouses, inventory, shipping, returns and so on redundant. Like American automobile manufacturers traditional publishers will persist in their traditional mode as long as they can, but they cannot indefinitely defend their institutions against disruptive technologies any more than the monks in their scriptoria could withstand the urgency of movable type.
Because we live in a socially-distracted and self-obsessed America, it’s already been forgotten that the entirety of the United States automobile industry crashed to earth and crumpled on impact like a crippled dirigible only a few short months ago. Though there were no flames, the collective balance sheet of one of America’s (and the world’s) mightiest industries bled so much red ink that it died on the operating table, only to be resurrected by the rather neat trick of selling off organs in order to keep the skin intact. That skin is now being paraded in a wave of commercials expressing deep interest in green technology, electric vehicles, and any other buzzword that might attract buyers and investors.
The publishing business will probably not fall as hard, but it will fall. Every half-step into the inevitable future that a given publishing CEO decides to take will rationalize the omission of the next ten necessary steps. But that’s what happens when you tie yourself to shareholder value instead of trite ideas like quality or customer service.
If you want to know what the future will look like, read Jason Epstein’s full speech. If you want to know where the opportunities are, read Jason Epstein’s full speech. It’s all in there, it’s going to happen, and I didn’t disagree with a word of it.
— Mark Barrett
One of the first comments posted on this site when it launched a month ago mentioned a book called The Black Swan. So I went to the library and checked out a copy, and I have to say that it’s an interesting read written by an interesting person who’s not shy about letting you know how interesting he is.
I agree with the basic premise: that there’s too much attention paid to meaningless detail, when the really important stuff is usually not indicated by measurable shifts in meaningless detail. Rather, it’s indicated by a one-off event that pretty much everyone seems not to have anticipated at all. (My own take on the heavy use of the bell curve — which the author rightly despises in so many instances — is that the bell curve is a useful indicator of markets and demographics. Since most of our lives and the meaning in and of our lives revolves around money, the bell curve is a useful device for both measuring how much we have and whose reserves we can most easily target.) [ Read more ]
True story.
Maybe a decade ago now I was browsing Amazon.com when I came across a book written by Dashiell Hammett and Somebody Else. Having studied detective fiction in college I knew that the actual credit was Dashiell Hammett and Nobody Else, so I sent a note to the Amazon elves asking for a correction. A day or two later the elves wrote back to say that the other person was actually the editor of the book, but because the work was not an anthology this other person should not have been included as an author. Shortly thereafter the listing was changed, and Hammett was again given sole credit for writing a book that he had written all by himself.
Which brings me to this:
And farther down the page:
Now, I don’t now who Robert Polito is, and I’m sure he is or was a wonderful person. But he didn’t co-write The Maltese Falcon. I’m not even sure what he actually did do to warrant mention (his contribution isn’t specified), but I am confident that none of the books in the title are books that he wrote or co-wrote. [ Read more ]
Full disclosure: I am by definition not qualified to have the opinions I am about to express. The book in question, Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, is a national bestseller. It says so right on the front cover. I don’t have any bestsellers to my name. The book was also published by Harvard Business Press. I didn’t go to Harvard.
At the library the other day I snagged a copy of a book called Groundswell. I think I grabbed it because of the zany hypo-glasses-like book cover, but I was grabbing a lot of books from the newly-acquired shelf that day, so I can’t be sure.
The authors of Groundswell are both employees of Forrester Research, about which I know almost nothing. I figured maybe it meant something useful in a data-driven way, so a couple of days ago I started reading. Turns out the ‘groundswell’ in the title is the internet + social networking + tech + the inability of the corporations to control their messaging + the author’s desire to identify, brand, trademark and exploit a cultural phenomenon. Not particularly earth-shattering stuff, but okay. [ Read more ]
Kassia Krozser, one of the principals of now-defunct Quartet Press, has a post up about how she spent her summer:
Here are some pain points to consider as you try to build a digital publishing business — this is an incomplete list, of course: ISBN madness (really, one ISBN for every format? the mind continues to boggle) and alternate product identifiers; formats, formats everywhere and not a hint of resolution; third party distributors, or, how do you get your books to retailers in the most efficient manner?; customer service (see: formats, devices, and all-around confusion); the challenges of getting your book to show up in retail outlets before release, particularly when you don’t have a corresponding print product; the imposition of DRM despite your stated preferences (really, who are the retailers protecting when they force DRM on the publisher?); pricing and consumer savvy.
As I said in my earlier note, I think being a third-party player (publisher) in the content-delivery business these days must be a nightmare. I also think this is exactly right:
So it’s easier to start from the bottom, figure out what it’s going to cost, and then build the model.
If the new publishing relationship is a direct connection from content creator to content consumer — and it is — then every additional layer added to that process is going to have to pay for itself. And the only way you can figure out how to do that profitably is to start with the absolute minimum cost to do X at quality Y and go from there.
Nothing else makes sense. Nothing else will work.
Read the whole post.
— Mark Barrett