Electric Alphabet

Sara Loyd, over at Pan Macmillan’s blog the digitalist, has posted the first instalment of what’s shaping up to be a superb essay on the future of publishing. Here’s an excerpt:

One of the key perception shifts that publishers need to make, then, is about the book as ‘product’. Whilst the book continues to be viewed as a definable object within covers, as a singular ‘unit’, publishers will continue to limit their role in its production and distribution, and this is a sure fire way for publishers to write themselves out of the future of content creation and dissemination. There are two areas of activity in the linear progression of a text between author and reader which have previously remained hidden to the reader: the development of the text itself; the writing and editing process, and the sales, marketing and distribution of the text. Readers have traditionally had no role in the former and only a limited role in the latter, through word of mouth recommendations or viral marketing. It is likely that today’s digital natives, who have become ‘prosumers’ (producer / consumers) with alarming speed and perhaps even more alarmingly different levels of proficiency, will expect a great deal more involvement in both of these areas of activity if they are to be engaged by texts. Witness two main stream examples, the Star Wars films and the Harry Potter books and films, both of which have developed massive prosumer (or ‘superfan’) followings, and both of which have seen conflict between the film companies and the fans that are creating content.

This segment has echoes of Sherman Young’s The Book is Dead, but also emphasises the fact that the nature of reading and writing as cultural activities are also changing and merging. Loyd points out that the obsessive focus of publishers (and the writing sector generally) on the “book as product” has led to digital strategies that are about turning a printed artefact into a device, such as an e-book, when in fact  there is already an established and pervasive culture of digital reading (and writing) that is constantly growing. This reading and writing is taking place on websites, blogs, mobile phones and other media.

I eagerly await the rest of this blog series!

I’ve had lots of conversations recently with emerging authors about promotion and marketing and how important it is to start building your platform within your communities of interest. Kassia Krozser over at  Booksquare says it much more eloquently than I could.

Here’s a quote:

All roles in entertainment media are changing, and authors, particularly, need to switch from a book-oriented focus to a career-oriented focus. This involves little things like updating your website betweenbooks (please, please, please don’t have two-year old content on your home page!). Blogging, if you’re so inclined. Writing articles that are read by your existing and future fan base. Using social media for good (as opposed to evil). Keeping your name in the game even when you’re not actively selling something, except your backlist.

This is the author as a business, as opposed to the writer as a creative being. Note the distinction. You’re wearing two hats. One might fit uncomfortably until you realize that marketing is your job. Marketing might be a distraction for a writer, but it’s essential if you’re an author.

Starting a blog is just a first step, and really if you’re not going to be committed to actually blogging, then there’s not much point in even doing that. What it’s really all about is immersing yourself in the overlapping social networks that swirl around your genre or chosen content or field of expertise. Thanks to the rise of online social media like Facebook, MySpace, wikis or, heck, even just ye olde message boards, this is both easy and cheap to do. What it requires is your time and interest in engaging with the people that are or will be your audience.

Via Maud Newton, I’ve just discovered Literature Map, a digital ‘tourist map’ of authors based on a self-adapting artificial intelligence engine that learns from the behaviour and preferences of users of the system. Type in an author name and it will display a map of other author names, spaced relative to your original selection. The closer two names are (graphically) the higher the likelihood that you’ll enjoy reading both authors. For instance, I typed in “Jeffrey Ford” and the two nearest authors displayed on the map were Jorge Luis Borges and Jonathan Safran Foer, a pretty fine trio of writers. Try it out, it’s fun!

According to this article, the Japanese government is to propose a tax on sales of iPods and other portable digital music players and digital hard disk recorders. The tax is a ‘copyright fee’ which will be distributed to record companies, songwriters and artists.

The best analogy I can think of for this quite loopy idea is charging a copyright fee to consumers who buy bookcases to house their books.

Why would any government want to penalise consumers for purchasing electronic devices that aid the distribution of content? The key to all creative industries is distribution. It’s the thing that lubricates the creative business model, especially for digital media. Writers, songwriters, and artists would be more, not less, restricted from making money from their copyright in systems where consumers are economically punished for owning the tools to access their products.

Text Publishing has just announced The Text Young Adult Prize, which according to their website “aims to discover more wonderful new books for Young Adult readers, by Australian and New Zealand writers.” The winner will receive $10,000 and a publishing contract with Text.

First let me say hooray! I love young adult fiction. I’m an avid reader of it, sometime writer of it and am excited by any mechanism which might lead to more of it from Australian authors.

However, this brings up something of a puzzle, one which I’ve been pondering for a little while now. Text is just the latest in a growing list of publishers who are using competitions to find publishable manuscripts. Last month Penguin launched their Penguin Most Wanted Crime Writing Competition, also with a publishing contract for the winner (although I note there’s no mention of any prize money or advance). Last year New Holland Publishers and the NSW Writers Centre teamed up to offer the Genre Fiction Award with, you guessed it, a contract for the winner (I find it odd that there’s no mention of this award on New Holland’s website). ABC Books have been running the ABC Fiction Award for two years now. Of course, the Vogel has been running for nearly 30 years but there’s still a marked acceleration of this kind of publisher-driven initiative.

I’m not against writing competitions with publishing contracts as prizes. Provided the terms are fair and don’t disadvantage entrants, they can be fabulous opportunities for emerging writers. But, really, what’s going on here? What’s the difference between running a competition and simply opening up for unsolicited submissions?

In the case of Text, I suspect this is a confident move to build a new list of YA titles. Since Text also are happy to accept unsolicited submissions the competition is an add on, a way for them to attract the kind of manuscripts they may not have been attracting until now (although, I if they simply asked for such submissions they’d be fairly swamped within a short time of doing so)

But there may be other reasons that are not such good news for writers. Firstly, running a competition may be a way of capping the advance or not paying an advance at all. The terms and conditions of the Penguin competition don’t mention anything about an advance. Neither does the New Holland Award and in both cases there’s no prize money offered. Are they expecting to negotiate an advance via the usual methods once a winner has been chosen, or are they hoping not to pay one at all? Of those competitions that do offer prize money, the publishers can factor in a finite advance up front and if the books goes on to be very successful they’ve got a higher likelihood of earning back their investment and going on to make a profit. It takes a lot of the risk out of the equation for the publisher. It’s true that first novel advances are paltry anyway, so a fixed prize money may be to a writer’s benefit, especially where the prize seems to be quite generous (or at least adequate) such as the $10,000 offered by Text and ABC. But if the winning author has a literary agent, what are the chances they’d have been able to negotiate something better?

Secondly, a competition may be a way of insisting upon a “standard” contract. Will competition winners have the opportunity to negotiate terms of the publishing contract or will they have to accept the only contract offered? This is critical whether authors are receiving prize money or not. For the competition to be fair, it’s important for authors to be able to negotiate on any contract terms, but particularly those relating to copyright, subsidiary rights and royalties, and also any options on future manuscripts. If the publishing contract is not negotiable as part of the competition, will authors have an opportunity to read them before deciding whether its in their interest to enter?

But apart from these considerations, I’m still puzzled as to why publishers would prefer to run a competition than accept unsolicited manuscripts. What’s the difference? Do they perceive a difference in the workload and administrative resources required? I note that Text has only allowed one month between the Young Adult Award closing date and the announcement of the winner at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Surely the publishers will not give entries any greater reading time or consideration than they would to manuscripts from the slush pile? Do they believe they’ll receive more targeted, relevant or higher quality submissions through awards and competitions?

And how should authors respond? On the one hand, it’s great news, particularly when publishers accept submissions (in whatever context) when previously they had been closed to them. On the other hand, is this a gradual erosion of (the very little) power authors have to control their publishing contracts? Not that I ascribe any sinister intent to publishers running competitions, but I question the collective impact it may have on the industry. On that score, only time will tell.

Generally, when new writing awards are announced there is much celebration and back-slapping about the creation of new opportunities for writers to become published. But it’s important to delve into the detail to make sure we’re not murdering our darlings.

When I was in senior high school I used to hang out at the State Library a lot of weekends. Ostensibly this was to do “research” on my modern history assignments, but in reality there was a pretty buzzy (if geeky) social scene happening there among teenagers. It warms the cockles, therefore, to see that Swansea Library in the UK is now running monthly singles nights.

It might seem a little dorky but in truth I think it’s really special. Before I met my husband (at the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne - most creative jibe wins a prize) I used to ponder the conundrum of how to meet prospective partners - since I’ve mostly worked in small teams, it was just a little incestuous considering work colleagues and there was no way I was hanging out in pubs and nightclubs. At the library at least there’s a higher likelihood you’ll meet a book lover and maybe even one who likes your fave genre! So don your pink button and head down to your local library, join a book club even, you never know who you might meet…

Sorry for my absence for the blogosphere lately, chickadees, I experienced a few health hiccups but am now back at the keyboard.

And while I was away those sneaky folk over at Amazon did a 180 on me. Here I was thinking how helpful and forward-thinking their services were for small presses and self-publishers. It turns out monopolistic and aggressive might have been better descriptors.

As first reported over at Writers Weekly Amazon are now insisting that Print on Demand (POD) books be printed by Booksurge (an Amazon-owned company) or they will not be offered for sale on Amazon’s website. POD publishers and small presses who are printing with other companies, Lightning Source for example, will have to shift their lists to Booksurge or have the “Buy” button taken off their amazon listings. According to Writers Weekly, Amazon representatives have admitted that eventually their desire is to carry only Booksurge printed POD titles.

Though egregious, I agree with Booksquare that this is hardly surprising. Vertical integration is a tried-and-tested method of increasing efficiency and hence profitability within industries, and for a mature company like Amazon this is a strategy that makes sense.

What I’m interested to see next is how publishers respond and whether they’ll be able to leverage any collective power to win changes. While this appears like agressive even bullying market behaviour on Amazon’s part, it seems unlikely that it is in breach of antitrust laws or competition legislation.

One of the biggest problems for small presses and self-publishers is distribution. Most small publishers in Australia cannot attract a distributor because their print runs are too small. Yet the economics of a higher print run in Australia don’t really work, the market size doesn’t warrant, for example, a print run of 1500 copies for a poetry collection or short story anthology. So small publishers do the hard slog of selling the book themselves, usually direct to market through their website, personal networks, literary events or through relationships with independent booksellers wherever they can.

This means two things: firstly, small publishers (or in this post I really mean micro publishers) must handle the physical process of distribution themselves, keeping boxes of books in their garage, handling invoicing, returns, etc. Secondly, they are usually restricted to a local market geographically (sometimes even within one state let alone one country) because they don’t have the resources to develop distributor relationships with retailers further afield and because customers start to pay prohibitive amounts for shipping.

What if these two things could be magically solved by a fulfillment service? Enter Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS).

As ReadWriteWeb reports:

FWS offers two APIs (application programming interfaces) - one inbound and one outbound. That means developers can now progromatically send physical goods to an Amazon warehouse (fulfillment center) and then have Amazon do the shipping of those goods out to customers when items are purchased through 3rd party sites. Amazon has offered other businesses access to its fulfillment infrastructure for some time through the Fulfillment by Amazon service, but today’s announcement means that the whole process will be automated. It’s a webservices world!

This could be an amazing opportunity for some publishers to expand their geographic markets and streamline their businesses. For example, a small Australian publisher could more cost-effectively offer books for sale to US and UK customers without those customers having to pay international shipping, and without the publisher having to handle the physical goods.

It’s not without its challenges. Firstly, a publisher may need to make a substantial investment to get a programmer to set up the web interface between their site and Amazon’s Fulfillment Service. And while the web APIs might be free, Amazon do charge for the physical storage of goods and shipping costs. But I would think this need not be any more expensive than a publisher would pay in percentage margin to a book distributor to perform exactly the same functions, and could well be a lot less.

Since small presses and self-publishers are usually working unpaid, they are limited in the time and energy they can devote to all the functions of publishing books. If they could alleviate even a portion of that workload through something like Amazon FWS they’d have more time and energy for marketing and promotion, lifting their overall productivity and, ultimately, book sales.

Harlequin are once more proving how ahead of the game they are in the digital space, compared with other publishers. Dear Author reports that they will be distributing Harlequin manga titles to mobile phones in the Japanese market.

Japanese audiences have already shown that they are interested in consuming narrative in text form on their phones. For those who missed the wide reporting of it, 5 of the 10 bestselling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally written and distributed on phones. Furthermore, this is an audience that are strong consumers of romance or content with strong romantic themes, and a lot of manga targeted at women has succeeded on this basis. Finally, the demand for mobile content in the Japanese phone market (like some other Asian markets) has boomed because of flexible phone plans which enable unlimited texts and access to a large menu of content.

This is bold and smart and I think it will pay off in spades for Harlequin.

Penguin UK have launched their much-anticipated We Tell Stories project.

This is a new locative storytelling project produced in collaboration with alternative reality gamers Six to Start. Six Penguin authors will publish new digital stories, inspired by six Penguin classics, over six weeks. The first, launched on Wednesday, is 21 Steps by Charles Cumming, inspired by the famous 39 Steps and set in Google maps. It’s interactive, fun and, as I’m discovering, a little addictive. Plus rumour has it there’s a mystery seventh story for users to discover somewhere on the site. Mmmmm… sticky content.

I love this project. It’s not a boring PDF of an out-of-print book. It’s a switched-on publisher genuinely embracing new forms of storytelling in a native digital context, but supported by a platform that enables them to promote their authors and books. I look forward to seeing how successful it is but I’m also a little chuffed since this is not far distant from two of the regional writing projects for new media we’re working on at QWC with the support of Arts Queensland.