Publishing – Page 26

We’re All Publishers Now

September 21, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

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 ]

Jason Epstein 2009 ROC Keynote

September 21, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

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

Scalability Bites Back

September 19, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

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 ]

The Maltese Falcon, by Robert Polito

September 16, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

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 ]

Publishing is for Professionals

September 11, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

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 ]

Quartet Press Follow-Up

September 10, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

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

All Things ISBN

September 10, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

[Since this post was originally published Bowker has changed their website, their marketing approach, and some of the business practices I objected to. Links which could not be updated have been removed and the text revised where necessary. — MB.]

I don’t know much about ISBN numbers (which is redundant, because the ‘N’ in ISBN stands for ‘number’), but I thought I knew their basic function, and I had some vague sense that I knew how they were doled out. Having hopped from link to link to here to here, however, I realized I was wrong about everything.

I don’t use ISBN’s* much at all, if ever. I’ve had a few friends request one from me regarding a book I mentioned, and I now know that’s the best way to make sure you end up with the same version of a book that someone else is talking about. It might not be the most recent version, but it will be the same, because ISBN’s are only given out once and never reissued.

But that little tidbit was only the first domino to fall in my head. I used to think that ISBN’s were given out in some way that was vaguely associated with the copyright process. Or maybe I thought it was in some way vaguely associated with getting a bar code. (Because it’s all so vague, I can’t remember.) [ Read more ]

Caught in the Middle

September 9, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

I don’t know anything about Quartet Press other than the fact that they announced today that they’re closing. And I mean nothing.

Reading the post about their closure, however, made me think of a similar note I’d read only a few days ago. This one was about Manifesto Games, a site/biz run by a friend in the interactive industry. The owner, Greg Costikyan, closed up shop in June, saying:

We did not achieve the critical mass of support by independent developers that we had initially envisioned (some of whom, bizarrely, viewed us as a competitor), though we appreciate the strong and enduring support we received from some. We always knew that the essential problem we were trying to solve was a marketing one, but we never figured out how to crack the marketing nut, at least with the minimal financial resources we had available.

Now, Greg knows more about the business side of the games business than I ever will, but I’m not sure that what hurt Manifesto was a marketing problem. And while I know nothing about Quartet Press or the reason for its demise, I’m struck by one way in which the two companies are similar. They were both third parties to the relationship that exists between content provider and content consumer. [ Read more ]

Taking Stock

September 9, 2009 By Mark 9 Comments

After three weeks of blogging and Site Seeing I definitely have a better handle on what’s happening out there, but I’ve also come to grips with the fact that I simply can’t keep track of it all. And that’s true even if I avail myself of all the latest tech, tech filters and social networks — which I would also have to spend a great deal of time reading about in order to achieve cutting-edge productivity.

(There’s a reason they call it the ‘cutting’ edge.)

In the end there’s too much to see and digest, let alone comment on, let alone act on. So it’s time to tighten the focus a bit, in anticipation of tightening it more in the future. Although this is an exclusionary process in some respects, I tend to think of it as irising in on something in the distance and pulling it into sharper focus. Simplification as zoom lens. Or sniper scope.

Traditional Publishing
I can’t really say the industry is dead, because it’s not dead. What I can say is that it’s broken, and I think everybody gets that. But I don’t think it’s simply broken relative to some newfangled process or advance (the internet), but rather that it’s inherently broken in ways that the internet is only now revealing. [ Read more ]

Digging In

September 8, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Many of the better bloggers out there are thoughtful people who also have the ability to slap multiple short, pithy posts and quirky links onto their sites over the course of each day. Unfortunately, that’s not me. In fact, the last time I took a cursory look at something was in high school when I was supposed to be studying algebra.

What I’m interested in, and what I hope you’re interested in, is depth. And I don’t just mean intellectual depth, in which everything is erudite and sophisticated and an allusion to something else that’s erudite and sophisticated. I’m talking about understanding things, and in particular, understanding the techniques and craft knowledge which allow for successful storytelling (by whatever criteria) in any medium. I’m completely, totally interested in that, but it’s not the kind of thing you can talk about in short posts or 140-character blurbs.

So on days like this, when I barely get a post up before the clock ticks to a new day, I hope you’ll forgive me. I’ve been burning through a massive amount of information in the past couple of weeks, trying to get up to speed on what’s happening in so many different and interesting storytelling arenas. It’s an amazing time, but I clearly need to sharpen my focus if only to keep from being swamped. More soon.

— Mark Barrett