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Self-publishing Revolution Update

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No surprises, plenty of confirmation:

Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.

Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

As regular readers know I’m no fan of Amazon. But if the choice is between a provider who charges up-front fees for a-la-carte services and an industry that demands editorial control while banking unsubstantiated percentages, I’ll have to go with the former.

It’s also worth noting, again, how intimately related the industry’s gatekeeping practices and economic stability were. Controlling access to publication and stigmatizing self-published writers created an industry that could dictate terms like a price-fixing cartel. At least until the entire question of self-publishing was revealed to be an industry-perpetuated fraud.  [ Read more ]

Ditchwalk at Year Two

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Another year has come and gone here at Ditchwalk. For the second straight year any personal predictions I might have made last August have been completely voided by the intervening 365 days. Takeaway: don’t think too far ahead.

The most interesting thing about the past year, from my own myopic point of view as well as the point of view of the greater storytelling universe, is that self-publishing is no longer seen as even a lifestyle choice. Established/commercial pipelines will always exist, but the indy storytelling spirit is now fully legitimized across all mediums.

I can’t think of a better turn of events. Anything that liberates and validates writing is a good thing. We can worry about the ocean of work that’s being produced after we empower everyone who wants to write.

Speaking of which, I think the biggest problem facing publishing at all levels today is the problem of sifting, curating and reviewing content. I’ve looked far and wide for an appropriate place to submit my collection of short stories for objective review, but have essentially come up empty. Yet I’m not surprised. If the value of most stories — as determined by demand — is zero, then making a living as an independent reviewer is going to be economically impossible.

Unless you’re a part of the traditional New York publishing pipeline there’s little money in writing reviews no matter how you approach the task. Which of course leads to ugly practices like ‘paid reviews’ and ‘promoted reviews’ and every other form of marketing fraud you can imagine.

I don’t have a solution here. Reviewing demands credibility — along with considerable craft knowledge — and there just doesn’t seem to be any money in being credible these days. Better to whore yourself out as a celebrity and cry all the way to the bank.

How all this affects future plans is a bit schitzy. On one hand I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing a month from now, let alone six months or a year. On the other hand I no longer concern myself with trying to fit my ideas into a market or medium. Provided I can eke out a minimal level of subsistence I feel completely free to write what I want to write.

As to output, I hope to be considerably more productive. A Neil Rorke novel, a non-fiction book, and maybe a screenplay or two, along with blogging here and at NeilRorke.com.

I’d also like to end up some place where I can plug my electric guitar in for the first time in seven years. I think I write better when I pick at small metal wires that make loud, screechy noises.

Year One post here. Six-month post here. Inaugural post here. Food for thought here.

— Mark Barrett

E-books Outselling Print On Amazon

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It was inevitable, but the speed of the transition is impressive:

In July 2010, Amazon announced that sales of electronic books for its Kindle e-book reader surpassed sales of hardcover books on the site. Six months later, sales of Kindle books surpassed that of paperbacks. Now, customers are downloading Kindle books more than hardcovers and paperbacks combined.

Having built their businesses on the production and distribution of physical books, traditional (legacy) publishers are in big trouble. The cash crop of seasonal, celebrity and cyclical titles that annually supported publishing’s administrative and production overhead is rapidly disappearing. The same information is either readily available for free on the internet, or more quickly and easily produced as an e-book or subscription service. Customers can still get what they want, but publisher are no longer critical to that process.

Attempts by publishers to control (if not fix) the price of e-books have also failed. Even with a lower cost of production, e-books must still provide revenue that offsets the loss of print sales or publishers will necessarily have to reduce those costs — including employment costs devoted to print. Whether Amazon’s numbers are consistent with other retail channels, the trend seems clear: the profitability of e-books will determine the viability of any publisher going forward. (There are probably very real implications for the paper industry as well. Adjust your portfolio accordingly.)

The good news is that content and books as valued objects are not under siege. If anything, many of the books previously sold in physical form and now sold in digital form had little or no value as objects — and probably little or no value after a year on the shelves. Clearing big-box stores of titles that existed only by virtue of a constricted distribution channel obviously means adjustment, but I see no downside for the reader. Physical books will still be available, and probably in better-quality editions. It may also be that independent bookstores will thrive because of their smaller footprint and more intimate knowledge of local reading habits.

Update: The New York Times has more here.

The Ditchwalk Self-Publishing Scale

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Independent authors believe every self-publisher is a revolutionary. Gatekeepers in traditional publishing think self-publishers are losers, at least until those same losers use their self-publishing success to humbly petition for a book deal. Vanity publishers insist all self-publishers are overlooked geniuses, and happily back up that assertion with high-priced services and promises they never intend to keep.

All of these definitions are unhelpful at best, self-serving at worst. In order to talk about self-publishing with any legitimacy we need a way to differentiate among self-publishers that is meaningful and objective. For that reason I created the Ditchwalk Self-Publishing Scale, which uses rising levels of production complexity to categorize self-published authors.  [ Read more ]

E-Book Library Loans for Kindle

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Kindle users have been kind’a-sort’a able to loan e-books to each other for a while. Today Amazon announced that the Kindle is making a bigger leap in the near future:

Amazon said the library books will be available on the Kindle “later this year,” but the company did not specify a launch date. The free e-books will be available though Kindle apps on smartphones and on the Kindle e-reader device, which can download books over Wi-Fi or 3G internet connections.

The service will work only in the United States.

I’m not sure why the reporter used the word ‘free’ to describe the financial impact of taking out a library book, unless it was to clarify the terms of such a transaction for those who have never had a library card. In any case, the basics of the deal strike me as almost banal in the way they replicate the loaning of physical books. (Libraries will purchase and loan limited copies. Copies loaned out will not be available until returned.)

The one glitch I can imagine is allowing loans via the internet. Libraries have always required that patrons present themselves physically, with allowances made in some municipalities for the physically disabled. Allowing people to download content from anywhere is obviously problematic, but can be mitigated to a great degree by only allowing people who qualify for local membership (meaning they reside in the library’s district) to access content from that library’s site.

How long will it take for somebody to download and pirate/market content from a library system? Well, I have to believe that’s already been done, and will be done again. (If I understand the piracy argument correctly, everything’s already on the web anyway, so why would pirates bother — unless they like the clean, device-ready formatting.)

Interesting times.

— Mark Barrett

The Adman Cometh

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If advertising was a villain, it would be a Terminator:

It’s no surprise then that ads have come to the Kindle. The good news — relatively speaking — is that you can save a few bucks by purchasing an ad-enabled machine:

Although the hardware is identical to the standard $139 Kindle, the new Kindle with “Special Offers” will feature advertisements and deals as its screen saver and on the bottom of its home screen. But for that added distraction, the company will take $25 off the price—dropping it to $114.

If ads on the Kindle are inevitable — and they are, as are ads on every imaginable surface and device — I think this is a smart way to introduce them. Rather than inject ads into every Kindle, thereby infuriating all those nice people who helped make the Kindle a success, Amazon is giving the customer a choice and motivating that choice with savings.

  [ Read more ]

The Website Platform Advantage

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While writing my Platform Evolution post I gave some thought to commenting on an excellent Infographic about content farms. No sooner did I decide against it than I ran across this excellent post on Publishing Trends about content farms. Then, a day later, a good friend sent me an unbidden and timely link to a post on Making Light, which, among other things, talks about — wait for it! — content farms.

If you’re not familiar with content farms you can get a quick overview here. As a writer, what concerns me most about content farms is that they are to writing and publishing what Ebola is to the human body. If I was an astrophysicist I would also add that content farms are to information and knowledge what solar storms are to communications. And if I was a logician I would say that content farms are to accuracy and reliability what tsunamis are to fishing villages.

Which is to say that everything about content farms is bad, but not equally bad. The worst aspect of content farms is not that they’re the new frontier for spammers and swindlers, it’s that producing so much crap at such an incredible rate renders every single aggregating and filtering mechanism useless.

Google as a search engine for retail products and reviews has been beyond broken for years. (Try searching for “best _____”, where the blank is any product you’re interested in.) Amazon is currently the default search for products, but it’s starting to fall apart as well. (Am I looking at the latest version of the CD/DVD/book I want to order? Is it new or used? Does it ship free or for a fee? Is it shipping from Amazon or some fly-by-night third-party reseller?) And of course the idea that all that ballyhooed user-generated social-media content is pretty much crap is also nothing new.

What content farms do that’s new is automate the production of internet crap by exploiting free labor and making liberal use of other people’s content in a plausibly deniable way. For independent writers trying to attract attention, fighting through the noise pollution generated by content farms may seem impossible, and all the more so as content farms begin to pollute e-book retailers like Amazon. The antidote to this virulent hemorrhage of obfuscating web text may seem to be a gated social networking community, but I think the opposite is true.  [ Read more ]

The Book as Burden

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Hilarious:

This is going to sound incredibly lazy, like someone who gets in their car to drive a few blocks rather than walk, but the physicality of the book, having to hold it open then lift and turn each page, was a lot more exhausting than I remembered. All of that holding and lifting and turning distracted me from the act of reading, took me out of the story if you will. A few pages into it I gave up, logged in to Amazon, and bought the Kindle book.

I agree that the revolution has already taken place. But I still think books will always have their place.

— Mark Barrett

Alone in the Wild

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I happened on a documentary yesterday on the National Geographic channel that I feel compelled to recommend. Called Alone in the Wild, it documents Ed Wardle’s attempt to spend ninety solitary days in the Yukon wilderness. Putting the challenge in context, Wardle has twice summited Everest. (You can see a page about the show here. I haven’t been able to locate a DVD, and the documentary doesn’t seem to be available on Netflix.)

If the title or subject matter evokes anything for you it will probably be the similar story of Christopher McCandless, whose fatal journey Into the Wild was turned into a book and subsequent movie. By absurd chance I happened to read the original magazine article about McCandless when it first came out in 1993, and my reaction then is the same as my reaction now: I’m not surprised that someone who knew little or nothing about surviving in the wilderness died after only cursory study and inadequate planning.

I want to stress that I take no satisfaction in the fact that McCandless died. The arrogance and ignorance he displayed is the flip side of adventurism and daring, and had he lived he might have profited from the experience both personally and financially. I do think, though, that there is a human tendency to perceive conception as the greatest obstacle to attainment. It’s not the doing that’s the hard part, it’s thinking of something to do that takes real ingenuity.

Over the course of my life I’ve come to believe that this is exactly backwards. In the storytelling world it doesn’t take long to realize that great ideas really are a dime a dozen — or a gross. It’s execution over the long haul, draft after draft, and the realization of detail in the final polish that makes any idea shine. But that’s not fun to contemplate because it presupposes a life of hard work and apprenticeship, when what everybody wants to do is fall out of bed and land on fame and fortune.  [ Read more ]

Platform Evolution

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Here’s a graph from my Twitter Quitter post:

A basic premise of independent authorship is that authors should establish their own platform in order to reach out to readers and potential customers. I believe in that premise. What constitutes a platform, however, remains undefined.

Implicit in the idea of an author’s platform is the creation of an online presence. Because the internet has become commonplace it’s easy to forget that an independent platform for individual artists would be impossible without it. (Prior to the internet an artist’s platform was limited by geography. Bands were limited not by their music but by their touring range.) While the advantages and opportunities provided by the internet are astounding relative to the pre-internet age, the internet is still a communications medium devised by human beings, with inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding how the internet works in a business context is an ongoing process. Two days ago the New York Times put up a paywall, attempting for the second time to derive revenue from its own online platform. (The first attempt failed.) That one of the most prominent newspapers in the world is still struggling to monetize content despite almost unparalleled visibility and economic muscle is a reminder to everyone that the platform question has not been answered.

Depending on your perspective, the tendency of the human mind to cherry pick information can be seen as either a bug or a feature. In the context of online platforms, it’s easy to see successes like iTunes as indicative of potential and promise when it’s actually the result of a unique set of circumstances. Finding gold in a stream may spark a gold rush, but only a few people will stake claims that literally pan out. The internet is no different. As I noted in a post about the future of publishing:

In return for making distribution almost effortless and almost free, the internet promises nothing. No revenue. No readers. Nothing.

Possibilities are not promises. Possibilities are chances, which is why I always say that writing for profit is gambling — and gambling against terrible odds. Determining what your online platform should be, and how much time you should devote to that platform, is an important part of nudging the odds in your favor.  [ Read more ]