I’m working on a presentation on Slow Publishing, in which I will outline these ideas in more detail, and will post it here soon and it will be available as a slideshare as well.

To read Dan Blank’s complete post, visit his site, We Grow Media, and subscribe to his blog.  And thanks Dan for permission to quote you.

If a bookstore is a center for reading, why not carry as many different types of readers as possible?  Some may be difficult for small retailers to carry.  It’s not easy to become an Apple reseller and for that matter, maybe Amazon would not allow indies to sell their devices directly, forcing booksellers to buy their products from wholesalers instead at lower margins.  But why not try?  

Barnes & Noble will soon be providing Nooks and ebooks to the Waterstones chain in England.  Why not to independent booksellers in the US too?  

Granted, e-reading devices and ebook delivery platforms require significant investment. Maybe booksellers will need to form a marketing co-op (ala the national hardware brands like Ace) and use their combined buying power to build and support a deal with Kobo or B&N.  Or all devices, as I have suggested here.  Selling just through Google e-books without devices just may not satisfy customers or provide bookstores with enough clout in the emerging digital landscape.  In the end, bookstores need to become alot more digital friendly, and it’s almost past time for this to happen.  Most readers want a healthy book marketplace, with a variety of buying choices.  Co-opetition is one way for independent booksellers to secure their future.  Embracing a broader view of the retail digital marketplace and contributing to its shape may be the only way for independents to retain a meaningful role as community based bookstores.

David Wilk
February 28, 2012

(thanks to Phil Turner for editorial input)


Soon after the first horseless carriages hit the roads, inventors in garages and barns all over America (and the world) were building their own versions of motorized transport.  We saw cars that ran on steam, electricity, and gas, cars with six wheels, cars steered by tillers, engines in front, middle and back, one cylinder, two cylinders and many more variations on what motorized vehicles could and would be.  Some worked, some didn’t, but as time went on, inventors, manufacturers and retailers all learned what really worked for drivers and passengers, who literally drove the technology into use.

We are seeing the same sort of innovation in reading devices and content now.  We will soon learn what works and what doesn’t, and we can be certain of experiencing many aha moments as the future unfolds.  And just as many, or more, deadends, good ideas that fail, great technology that simply does not delight and thrill the user.

From the writers’ and readers’ perspective, what we are creating are Digital Reading Experiences on Digital Reading Platforms and Devices.  But no one wants to say “how’s that new Digital Reading Device you bought the other day?”

Maybe until a perfect new term like “blog” is coined by someone, we’ll be stuck with “e-book” even as the range of what is possible to be written, made, displayed, read and consumed expands exponentially.  And maybe what we will call these objects and experiences does not really matter as long as they are great at what they do.

Meanwhile, pass me that DRD would you?

David Wilk
February 1, 2012

Everyone know that the Internet has changed the way business works.   This is especially true when it comes to marketing.  Traditional “megaphone” marketing simply does not work anymore, and this is especially true for books.   For one thing, authors can’t be heard above the din of all the product and service marketers with huge budgets.  And for another, most consumers are just plain turned off by the constant stream of empty marketing promises and gimmicks.

Instead of thinking about  “marketing” our books, we should be figuring out how we can be “connecting” with our readers.   This means: communicating your ideas to a community of readers that will be interested in what you have to say once they find out your book exists.  It also means connecting you as a writer to readers who want to know what you are doing next.  Connecting to communities means a creating a two-way conversation, engaging with people in conversations, about a cultural activity they really care about.

This is not the kind of marketing that tries to be as loud as possible to cut through the background noise of modern life or that follows information theory and tries to get its message across so many times that the reader will finally pay attention.

Books are special.  Sure they are products, but they need special handling because we are trying to convince people to give us some of their valuable time to read them.   It’s important to remember that in the modern world most people are trying to make sure they will have more money tomorrow than they have today – our growing economy is intended to create abundance.  However, it’s not money, but time that is ultimately our most precious commodity because in the money economy we all know that no matter how much money we are accumulating, time is never going to be increasing for us.  We have less of it every day.

So when we give our time and attention to a book, we are engaging in a truly powerful exchange between reader and writer, an exchange that writers and publishers must honor and cherish.  That’s why we need to nurture the relationships between readers and writers, and why shouting from the rooftop that “I have a book here I want you to read” makes no sense at all.  Nobody likes being shouted at, therefore it makes sense that they will be much less likely to sample your book than they would have been if they had learned about it through a more subtle approach.

So let’s not talk about a “Marketing Plan” for your book.  Let’s think about how to create a “Connecting Plan.”  We all know that when we walk into a room full of interesting people, the best way to engage with them is not to start talking about ourselves, but to look them in the eye and ask them questions that can be the beginning of a real connection between us.

Creating meaningful relationships almost always begins with an introduction and a genuine interest in the person to whom you are talking. Real engagement almost always happens one person at a time.

Whether you are speaking to one person or making a presentation to a large crowd, you should always try to find ways to engage with your audience, to become “one of them,” a person who can be trusted and to whom people can relate.

And of course it is critical to know your audience before you even start to talk to them.  A “Connecting Plan” must begin with research and with questions about the audience for your  books.  Only when you know to whom you are talking are you able to say things that will attract people, engage them, and allow them to care deeply about what you are saying to them, and ultimately, about the books you would like them to read.

Write me at david@booktrix.com, and I will send you a comparison chart between the “old” megaphone-style marketing plan for a book and a “new” connecting plan we would undertake today.

David Wilk, October 2011
Comments and additional suggestions are always welcome!
Thanks to Lou Aronica and Betty Sargent for comments and editorial assistance on this essay (though any mistakes or mis-statements are mine alone).

The details: This amusing educational app is based on a best-selling book that promises to teach kids how to memorize the U.S. presidents in 20 minutes. Colorful cartoon videos bring alive the book’s wacky mnemonic memorization devices (for example, a washing machine stands for George Washington), while chronological mini-biographies of each president keep kids grounded in facts, and interactive quizzes help ensure full comprehension.

The ebook includes more than 30 minutes of video, interactive how-to diagrams, and a way to navigate that lets kids either just run through the cartoon mnemonics, dive into historical detail about the U.S. presidents, or alternate between both with one touch.

Next up is the ehanced ebook version of the companion volume, Yo, Sacramento! which naturally features our fifty states and capitals, but in the ebook version, adds an video that shows America becoming a country, state by state.

There is a tremendous amount of creativity brewing as people learn to use the new capabilities that ebooks allow us.  I’ve said before that we are just at the early stages, but books like Yo, Millard Fillmore! and Yo, Sacramento! are going to demonstrate a new path to the future for readers of all ages.  And will make it fun too.

Visit the YoLearnAlot website for more about the ebooks,and don’t forget the print book versions too - no color and no moving parts, but still alot of fun and great gifts, Yo,Millard Fillmore! and Yo, Sacramento!

It’s a fairly ridiculous scenario—right?

And yet that’s what many authors are doing every day by investing incredibly valuable writing time on what might turn out to just be tomorrow’s MySpace—Facebook and Twitter.

We’re doing it because we’re anxious and desperate to sell our books and to keep our sales high enough to keep our careers viable.

We’re doing it because so many of our fellow writers are doing it.

And (in many cases) we’re doing it only because our publishers are encouraging us to.

In fact many publishers are sending us cheat sheets on how to do it better. Some are even suggesting it’s the only marketing worth doing. They are telling us this is the new way to get people to hear about our books.
And it does work at some level. But what is that level? What will it actually get us? And what happens to our creativity when it gets sucked up by Facebook and Twitter?
And does taking on this much more of the of the marketing burden really help publishers in the long run? Wouldn’t they be best served proving their power—not empowering us?
Even if Facebook and Twitter are wonder tools in the right hands—how many of us can be Neil Gaiman or Jennifer Weiner? How many of us are really clever in 140 characters including spaces? How many of us are great at posting enchanting, provocative posts at Facebook? Just because we can tell a story doesn’t mean we can chat.

Maybe even more important is that all those people who like us or friend us or follow us are not people whose email addresses we own—not people we can be certain we can contact in the future.
For one thing the way feeds work—how many people read backwards at social media sites? How easy is it to miss a post? But even more important, Facebook and Twitter own their sites and the information on them.
They can wipe any one of us out in a second and we lose all those fans and friends. (MySpace used to do this repeatedly.)

This is not a post about whether or not to have fun on Facebook and Twitter. Nor is it about the value of networking with your peers or people in your industry.

This is about the questions I hear over and over from writers and that I ask myself over and over:
How worthwhile is it for a writer to invest time in social media for marketing purposes, and how much time?
Should we torture ourselves to do it if it isn’t in our DNA?
Does it really work?

Do the authors held up as examples rely on social networking as much as we think? Don’t most of those big names also have big support from their publishers too as well as dedicated publicists and serious marketing campaigns?
Are our publishers right in pushing us to get out there and get strangers to like our Facebook pages and follow us on Twitter?

Is it a marketing solution?

Or is this a temporary fix to the problem our industry really needs to solve—the real and vital and urgent problem of discovery—of coming up with new and meaningful ways for readers to find new books?

Is the Social Net Working?

There is no debate that social media is a great tool for networking with others in our industry. It can lead to friendships, support, and serendipitous connections with reviewers, agents, reporters, or editors.
There’s no debate that social media gives fans access to us. Of course it does. When it works there’s nothing like it. One Tweet can be heard ‘round the world if the right people retweet it and the right people notice it on their feeds.
And there’s no debate that some readers will discover us via Twitter and Facebook or whatever tomorrow’s next new great social network turns out to be.

The issue each of us has to address is, what is the return on the effort we are making? Or as author James Scott Bell calls it—the ROE.
Is the time we are investing in social networking worth the effort? Is the pressure we’re feeling to do it reasonable? How much of a toll is it taking on our work? After all, it is writing, and many writers have told me that after tweeting and posting on FB for two hours a day—they don’t have as much to say on the page. (I know I don’t.)

So are we actually doing ourselves and our work a service? (There are inevitably going to be readers who get turned off when they find out what we’re really like. Sometimes mystery works in a writer’s favor.)
Would we be better off spending most of our time writing another book and hiring people to do PR and marketing and blog tours for us?

Well if you look at the stats we might be.

How Do People Discover Books?
Codex, one of the leaders in book audience research, has done over a quarter million book reader studies—the most recent, which was based on 8,224 surveys and completed in February, was recently presented to hundreds of industry professionals and is very much worth noting.

When it comes to discovering books—the majority (81%) of book buyers said they first learned about the book they bought last from more traditional means—like browsing in bookstores, personal recommendations from people who had read the book, email announcements, reading groups, prior book information, news, interviews and reviews, advertisements and other related sources.

The remaining 19% learned about the book they bought last from online sources like e-book stores, blogs, reader reviews, author websites, advertisements and other book related websites.
Of that group, only 1.2% learned about their last book bought from social networks like Facebook or Twitter, or online video like book trailers.

The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data
Whenever this to-be-a-social-animal-or-not issue comes up with writers, someone always mentions an instance of a writer who got a huge boost via another writer posting about her at Facebook.
Or someone recalls the five fans who wrote to say they bought a book because of an excerpt posted to Facebook.

But an anecdote is not data.

Of course there are people who will find us and read us and buy us because of our online efforts. And if you ask ten writers about the value of these efforts you will get ten anecdotes.
One writer told me "I was just about to get off of Twitter when I got a DM that said, ‘I discovered your books on Twitter and I love them.’ Sigh."

The question isn’t—does it work? Instead it’s—does it work well enough for the time it takes? Are we seeing a worthwhile ROE for the time we spend on Twitter or Facebook?

Is it worth it to spend two hours a day to reach two new readers? How about four? How about 10?

Or is it a better ROE to take those two hours and write your next book? Or pen a few short stories you can give away or give to your publisher to use in marketing efforts—or hell—even sell online for a buck a piece?
Many people believe the very best way to grow your career is to write your career. And to keep writing it until you write into the tipping point where you have a shelf of great books and critical mass.
No one buys a book they never heard of—but at the same time no one buys a book without picking it up and reading a few pages—on- or off-line—and falling in love.

Even if you have 10,000 people like your Facebook page—they still aren’t going to buy the book you’re shouting about unless they love that excerpt you posted, or that the online bookstore offers, or that they read standing in the aisles.

WWCDD?

What would Charles Dickens do? Or Hemingway? Or Agatha Christie? Or any author you admire? No one knows. That was then. This is now. And the question is: what should you do now?
•    Grow your newsletter list.
•    Guest blog at meaningful places.
•    Put up excerpts and short stories as often as you can.
•    Hire someone to do marketing and, if warranted, PR.

You can do most of the things on your own that the studies show work best or hire someone to help you: blog tours, newsletter promotion, getting excerpts up at blogs and websites, online media, online ads (online ads even at Facebook are cost effective.)

If you do hire someone, long term they will free up your time and you can write that next book or short story and make the money back tenfold. Or you can continue to spend time meeting readers and growing your fan base at social media sites. But without the painful live or die pressure.

I’m not saying suggesting there is nothing to be gained from Facebook and Twitter and other venues like them. There is.

If you want to Facebook and Tweet, have at it and have fun.

But do it because you want to.

Do it because you believe in the ROE.

But don’t feel panicked or guilty if you decide you’ve been hurting your career and wasting time without getting enough in return.

No matter what you do, don’t let anyone—not your agent or publisher or best friend—make you feel that to grow your career engaging in social media is the end-all-be-all key to success. If it was, we wouldn’t need anecdotes… we’d all have data.

M.J. Rose, is the international bestselling author of 11 novels;Lip Service, In Fidelity, Flesh Tones, Sheet Music, Lying in Bed, The Halo Effect, The Delilah Complex, The Venus Fix,The Reincarnationist, The Memorist and The Hypnotist.

Rose is also the co-author with Angela Adair Hoy of How to Publish and Promote Online, and with Doug Clegg of Buzz Your Book.

She is a founding member and board member of International Thriller Writers and the founder of the first marketing company for authors: AuthorBuzz.com. She runs two outstanding blogs; Buzz, Balls & Hype and Backstory.

This is not to say that the overall context of the changing book industry was not working against them.  Borders, along with literally thousands of independent bookstores, faced an uphill battle trying to cope with a rapidly changing book economy and many other macro economic and social changes over the past dozen years.  It’s literally true that only the strong, agile, intelligent and sometimes lucky ones survive in times like this.

And of course, every challenge presents opportunities for innovative and intelligent players to rise to the occasion.  Don Linn has a new post at Bait ‘n’ Beer (Let’s Get it on Indie Booksellers) challenging independent booksellers and entrepreneurs to fill some of the voids left by the closing of so many Borders stores in communities that have supported profitable stores for years.  I wish I could believe that this will happen, but I agree that there are plenty of ways that independent bookselling could be remade (and should be - a new localism would be a powerful rebuilder of community and integration in the face of alienation, displacement, and the disappointments that globalization and mass corporatization of America has brought us).  My own approach would be to create bookstores based on the principles we have seen in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).  

So farewell Borders and here’s hoping we can learn from your mistakes.

In part one of his essay, Don lays out what he considers some of the key foibles going around the industry today - as he says, "a number of sexy topics, many of which, I would argue, are tangential to the success of most publishers."  These topics include: devices, enhanced books, one-offs and anecdata (a great term for generalizing from too little information, what I like to call "the focus group of one - me" - very common in publishing), Transmedia is the next big thing and "We need to be like gaming companies", Amazon is the villain, and do lots of experimenting and fail forward fast.

In part two, Don turns to what he calls a "handful of things that are critical for us to be figuring out." These are all important (and impossible to argue against): discovery, workflow and content management, solving the supply chain/distribution conundrum, rights/rights/rights, hitting all the channels, and business models, financial managment, and capital formation (which might well have been first and foremost).

I am sure many of us can come up with additions to these lists.  We certainly agree on many things, including the emerging future of "books in browsers."  For myself, I’d at least add paying attention to what customers want and really need to his list of "things that are critical for us to be figuring out."  And that deeply affects how I think about some of the things Don might consider to be foibles - there are so many really dedicated readers buying large quantities of books today, who are themselves deeply engaged in the devices they now use to read, and many of them are exploring reading as it develops in newly enhanced ways through technology and especially through the social graph. 

Where "enhanced" books reflect only shallow thinking about readers and their engagement with digital forms, I agree completely with Don.  But writers, publishers and technologists who pay close attention to the reading experience and use technology and social media to creatively extend that experience, or literally create experiences that move people in ways that were not possible in other forms are in fact, doing "things that are critical for us to be figuring out" also.

I am really grateful to Don Linn for writing this essay, and urge you to read both parts, think about what he says, and let me know your own thoughts on this subject.  You might also be interested in an interview discussion about the future of publishing that I had with Don about a year ago, posted as one of my Publishing Talks podcast series at WritersCast.

Samuel Johnson: the 18th century equivalent of a Googlebot.    He read his way through the library of texts available in his era and tore them apart, endlessly sub-dividing and compartmentalizing in order to determine the meaning and value of each word relative to any number of contingencies.  His dictionary is primarily known for its brilliant use of quotations to define words in context.  For example, he found, in his textual survey, 58 senses of the word ‘take’: to apprehend, to steal, to appropriate, a percentage of profit etc.  Each of these senses is illustrated by a quotation.

I will spare our readers a detailed comparison of the similarities between Johnson’s methodology and the LSA & LDA systems that Google’s Algorithm employs toward a similar goal (that is, ‘to develop a functional linguistic omniscience in order to anticipate the way that people use words and why).  Suffice it to say that the similarities between Johnson’s methodology and Google’s are many and the resonances are striking.

 
Johnson was a kind of demiurge.  Tourettic, obese, blind in one-eye, deaf-in-one ear, prolific beyond all normal human limitations, he both appeared and behaved like more like a level 5 hurricane, than like just another ‘literary fellow.’ Similar to the way that Google seems ‘super-human,’ so did Samuel Johnson.  The conversation, recorded in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, is evocative of the way in which Johnson often came off sounding like a force of nature:
Dr. Adams found him one day busy at is Dictionary, when the following dialogue ensued...


ADAMS: This is a great work, Sir. How are you to get all the etymologies?  


JOHNSON: Why, Sir, here is a shelf with Junius and Skinner… 


ADAMS: But, Sir, how can you do this in three years?


JOHNSON: Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years. 


ADAMS: But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary.


JOHNSON: Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman. 
…With so much ease and pleasantry could he talk of that prodigious labour which he had undertaken to execute.  (64)

I could write a book or at least a series of posts on what today’s SEO’s and content-managers today could learn from Samuel Johnson as a model and an inspiration.  
For today’s post, I will confine myself to one aspect of his praxis: he wrote for money.

 
Money was both carrot and stick for Johnson.  He was always in debt, and always shooting to clear a high bar, always living above his means, and lay the groundwork to pay off the people who were capitalizing him.  He was one of the first writers to succeed spectularly according to this model.   ‘The Muse’ was just a cameo character in his career.  Reading Johnson’s work is like looking at a snapshot of the moment that literary production shifted from the patronage model (where writers wrote for patrons) to the free-market model (where writers wrote for a large, and not necessarily aristocratic literary public).   The excerpts of his life work appearing in Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ are a litany of solicitations and submissions.  Quotations from letters where he’s quibbling and cajoling with his publisher’s greatly outnumber quotations from his actual work, a proportion which accurately reflects the nuts and bolts of his actual life and ‘literary production.’   Contemplating the cost and agonizingly slow speed of domestic shipping in England in the early 18th century is enough to turn the stomach of any modern day blogger, yet—by all appearances—it hardly slowed Johnson down.  Apparently he got a good rhythm going and kept it going with great time-management skills.

Here is a quotation from his letter to Mr. Cave, whom he is begging to publish ‘London,’ which became a wildfire commercial success for the aforementioned Cave:
“I do not doubt but you will look over this poem with another eye, and reward it in a different manner, from a mercenary bookseller, who counts the lines he is to purchase, and considers nothing but the bulk”(38).  
The exception here proves the rule.  For the most part Johnson wrote according to the specs of ‘the mercenary bookseller, who counts the lines he is to purchase and considers nothing but the bulk.’  And yet, Boswell is always remarking that, ‘thankfully’ Johnson was never able to get ahead financially: otherwise he would never have produced so many great works.  
As Boswell writes:
In 1756 Johnson found that the great fame of his Dictionary had not set him about the necessity of “making provisions for the day that was passing over him.” No royal or noble patron extended a munificent hand to give independence to the man who had conferred stability on the language of his country. We may feel indignant that there should have been such unworthy neglect; but we must, at the same time, congratulate ourselves, when we consider, that to this very neglect, operating to rouse the natural indolence of his constitution, we owe many valuable productions, which otherwise, perhaps, might never have appeared.(108)  

While the specs have changed, the rules remain more or less the same.  We’ve all got to figure out a way to make a living by our pens or our keyboards. Without a gun to our heads, most of us wouldn’t be able to muster the energy to produce our best works.    

All references from Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson.  1791.  Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. 1946.

Thomas Doane is a freelance writer, blogging at gospel(s)

and a consultant, with expertise in shipping services.

The Apple Company was all over NPR this morning.  The network’s "Market Place" show – in its usual role as cheerleader for Wall Street – was hyping Apple to the max. Quarterly earnings dazzled! Sales of iPhones were way up in China! Apple was now the most successful tech company in the world! Then the show switched to a piece on Google. Rah Rah!
     All this dazzlement is very much on the minds of those of us who affect to make a living at what used to be known as literature. Its enabling mechanism, what used to be known as trade publishing, is in turmoil. Publishers don’t know how to make a buck manufacturing books with paper pages now that these marvelous new e-book devices are spreading through the reading public. These days, a young subway straphanger can carry a veritable library on a thin electronic tablet the size of an hors d’oeuvre plate. You can read the Michelin Guide to Barcelona on your phone… the complete works of Herman Melville (or, more likely, J.K. Rowling) on your iPod Nano.
     I had one of my frequent epiphanies a couple of weeks ago about all this while walking around NYU in lower Manhattan. The streets were full of kids yakking into their cell phones. In the lobby-lounge of a classroom building I entered, students sat in groups with open laptops, pizza slices in one hand, punching keystrokes with the other, while gabbing with their chums. It was all very of-the-moment.
     My epiphany was one of those multiple-stagers. First, I realized, these were kids from some of the wealthiest families in America. NYU costs over fifty grand a year and if your kid is living in an off-campus apartment, well…. So, of course, they came to school fully equipped with the armamentarium of high tech – computers, tablets, kindles, phones. It also occurred to me that however cushy their childhoods had been, and however posh their college careers, they’d be graduating into an economic clusterfuck that might furnish far less in the way of amenities than what they were used to.
     What if, five years from now, some of them were out on their own, having to use the same ratty laptop, kindle, and iPhone because they had not found a job that paid them enough to get new ones, or because their daddies had lost all their money in commodities markets. What if, for one reason or another, they were unable to even change out the batteries in these devices? In short, maybe what I was seeing at NYU was the high tide of a social phenomenon which, due to the heuristic nature of human cognitive processing, had temporarily established itself as “normal.” An awful lot of people, from the producers of NPR’s “Market Place” to grungy college-age intellectuals assume that this “normal” will continue indefinitely – only with more dazzling innovations to come.
    Then, stage two came to me (after all, I have been thinking about these matters, and writing old fashioned books and trendy new blogs about them for more than a decade). What if the electricity supply isn’t as reliable in years to come as it is now? Most Americans never think about this. The facts are: 1.) America’s fossil fuel resource supply is much more constrained than either Barack Obama or the Chesapeake Energy Company lets on (including the much-hyped shale gas bonanza); and 2.) America’s electric grid infrastructure is much more decrepit than the average citizen is aware of. Put those two things together and the prospect is that we may not have the sort of 24/7 electric service that has defined absolute baseline normality for us for generations – in the sense that nobody in the USA walks into a room and wonders whether the light switch will work.
     There is, of course, a vast fantasy-land of wishful thinking these days about how alt.energy will redeem us from the fate I suggest: a much more austere future. I assert that we will be hugely disappointed by what alt.energy might do for us, and most particularly it will not allow us to run the “normal” furnishings of American life in the way we’re currently running them. It may turn out to be the case that the NYU streetscape of high-tech dazzlement was an ephemeral moment in history. A similar case, by they way, can be made for the global economy, a set of economic relations which have been hyped as permanent, but which will prove to be only one short phase of the human saga.
      At the moment however, there is no denying that the book industry is going batshit over all this confounding new e-reader technology, and that authors (i.e. writers with track-records for producing saleable books), are scrambling to figure out how to get their stuff before the public in some form other than “for free.” Human ingenuity is working this out as we speak. I, myself, have entered into several experimental work-arounds lately. For instance, last year I published a Christmas novella in partnership with a Vermont bookstore which owned a print-on-demand machine. I lost a little money on the deal when you figure in proof-reading costs and cover art and ISBN-number applications and such. But the darn thing did sell some, and recouped some expenses, and may earn out its investment next Christmas. I also sold a stage-play script off my website in the form of a downloadable pdf file for five bucks. We sold quite a few of them. Cost: next-to-zero.
     But now I face the quandary of what to do about my major efforts – the things formerly conceived to be “books” – in the years ahead. I don’t have a clue what the publishing arrangements will be for these things. I’m also rather serenely convinced that the economic clusterfuck I mentioned above is already underway and might easily result in the widespread impoverishment of the American public, which could affect their leisure time habits.
      Some things are likely not to change going forward. Human beings need stories, narratives, instructions to help them cope with reality, even to make it pleasurable to be alive. I doubt that will change. We evolved from creatures who jabbered to each other for tens of thousands of years, and we can always tell stories if no glowing tablet is available. Plus, there are currently in existence at least a million books, many of them quite all right, and some of them printed on paper that might actually last a century. I do believe that the period of difficulty we face – which I called The Long Emergency in a recent book of that name – may lead to a “time out” from technological advances. Frankly, I think we need it if we’re going to avoid destroying our only planet. I can’t say how long it might last.
      In the meantime, the airwaves are a’buzz with all this news about the continuing cavalcade of electronic miracles. Enjoy it while you can, and work around it as you must - and in five years check back and see how we’re doing with it all.

Jim Kunstler is the author of the aforementioned The Long Emergency, which I highly recommend to anyone who will listen.  I even have a few copies in my basement that are signed by the author, and for the first three people who send me a padded mailer with five bucks for postage, I will send out a copy of the book gratis.  Other recent books I recommend to all are two terrific futurist novels World Made by Hand and The Witch of Hebron.   Kunstler’s own website features his excellent and entertaining blog Clusterfuck Nation: commentary on the flux of events.  You can listen to my interview with Jim Kunstler at Writerscast.

(Supply and demand determine a product’s equilibrium price and quantity. Graph courtesy of Prof. Daniel Richards. Background image courtesy of Ken Hammond, U.S. Department of Agriculture.)

But I will argue that traditional publishers are missing the market opportunity created by the e-book revolution when they fail to create a significant price benefit for their e-books.  Publishing digitally is in fact less expensive than publishing print books.  This does not mean that every book should be digital only – readers have proved over and over again that they will buy print books when they feel the need to have a visible “souvenir” of their reading experience, a book in physical form, and many readers are willing to pay a premium for this version.

Just as equally, consumers have made clear that if books are inexpensive, they will buy and read more of them, taking on more risk and rewarding publishers and authors they like with a full measure of loyalty and commitment.

I think this means that publishers should now be thinking hard about ways they can reduce ebook prices and increase readership.  Publishers who are willing to reduce prices will create a real “ebook revolution.”  We can do this by pricing our ebooks low enough to broaden the market for books and reading, while our consumers reward us with higher sales and the kind of support and commitment that other media would be thrilled to have.

Authors also need to recognize that this strategy is in their best interests.  With ever more writers seeking readers, it makes sense to use price to gain attention, as Amanda Hocking and C.A. Konrath and many others have bravely demonstrated.  Now that we live in an attention economy, creatives in every media form need discovery and consumers’ time and attention even more than they need money from sales (in the attention economy, money follows where attention leads – and that is the subject of my next post on digital publishing).

I’d like to point out that my friend, the much admired Mike Shatzkin, has posted a new piece called “Ebooks are making me recall the history of mass-market publishing” which is more detailed and grounded in historical detail than what I have written here, and I recommend reading Mike’s piece for further confirmation of my views.  Thanks also to Lou Aronica of The Fiction Studio for suggesting the original mass market paperback as the best way to think about ebooks today.

But even as the culture changes, and the forms of distribution are altered, certain underlying principles remain.  I had the pleasure of listening to Tim O’Reilly speak at a publishing gathering recently.  His message to publishers was overtly to "do something that lights you up."  For most publishers, this means identifying great writing that really turns you on, working to make it ready for an audience (editing and presentation), connecting the work to readers.  Those are the essential activities of a publisher (as I have said before here, we need to remember that the root meaning of "publishing" is "to make public", which is a tremendous responsibility the publisher has to the creator).  Adhering to the basic principles of what it means "to publish" is a pretty great way to go forward into the future.

My good friend Lou Aronica has been an editor and a publisher for many years, and is now also a successful published writer.  He has just announced the launch of a new business model he is calling The Fiction Studio Imprint.  Here is some of what he has to say about this new venture: 

The Fiction Studio imprint will be the home for very good writers who have as yet to win the lottery. It is an invitation-only publishing program – I consider no submissions – for writers whose work I love who have decided to try a different path to publishing success. Fiction Studio will publish these books in both paperback and e-book formats (there will be the occasional hardcover as well), the writers will have a huge level of equity in their publications, and because of this, they will participate in their publications at their highest possible level.

I am putting a premium on professionalism with this imprint. The books will look great and they will have extremely high editorial values. While I learned a long time ago that readers don’t care about imprints (no one goes out looking for a Viking book, for instance), I want the Fiction Studio imprint to tell readers that they can rely on the quality of the work. Everyone associated with the program – from the editors to the copyeditors to the cover designers to the marketing and publicity people – have many years of experience at major publishing houses. 

The very first book in this program is my own novel, Blue, which you can read about here. In fact, the Fiction Studio imprint arose from my deciding that I wanted to create a new way to publish my own fiction. After researching a number of options (including the option of making a deal with another publisher), I landed upon the structure that will serve as the business model for the imprint. While one could argue that launching a publishing program with one’s own book is a tad narcissistic, I’m doing it because I believe completely in the approach the Fiction Studio imprint offers and I want everyone to know that I’m so committed to it that I’m willing to put into the program a novel I worked on for years and which is closer to my heart than any fiction writing I’ve ever done.

I’ll be watching Lou’s new program closely - I think it will be an important and valuable experiment, one of many of course, that will help to redefine publishing in the modern era.