To grow, publishers must either battle other publishers over market share or identify and serve new markets. Digital media are useful to publishers only insofar as they serve one of these aims. (A separate matter is using digital media to drive down costs and boost profits, but that is not growth in the defined sense.) Using digital media to redistribute market share may be costly and not lead to the expected gains, as a publisher's rivals are likely to use the very same tactics: anyone can publish for the iPhone and Android, anyone can get books onto the Kindle, anyone can set up a comprehensive XML workflow. But with market share battles there is no relief; it is an arms race, and a publisher can no more forego publishing in digital form than it can stop seeking new and creative authors. For a publisher pursuing growth, alas, it's new markets or nothing.
Links of the week August 17 2015 (34)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
24 August 2015
Which brings us to interstitial publishing, publishing between the cracks. (No, uh, wisecracks, please.) For a day filled with text messages and meetings and slathered over with email, one opportunity for publishers is to promote interstitial reading, reading that is done in the brief moments between other engagements, whether those claims on our attention are other media or simply the wiggle room in a schedule: the time spent waiting for a plane, a doctor, or for a meeting to begin. That%u2019s a huge number of minutes in any day; a good portion of our lives is wasted while we are waiting for the main course to arrive. This point was brought to mind by the frequent complaint of being stuck for an hour or more in an airport. What a great opportunity to pull out an iPhone and check mail, alerts, and Web sites! But a user in this situation could have been reading formally published material (formal here means "the kind of stuff you are willing to pay for" to slip between the interstices of the day. Trade publishers have begun to study this, and the Wall Street Journal dedicated a feature story to the emerging practice.
If Amazon continues this way, it is likely to resemble the mythical ouroboros...
The New York Times investigation of Amazon's white collar workforce culture reveals that the company may be on the road to its own eventual demise.
Way back in 2002 when I worked at Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/, I called a friend at Amazon on the phone at his or her desk and when they answered, they nearly had a heart attack. "People here know who you are, they know we are friends, you can never call me here," they told me in no uncertain terms. And whenever I visited Seattle, he or she was reluctant to meet me in person. They would eventually, but with reticence, and only at Elliott Bay Book Company during an author reading: something that would give them valid "cover" if they were seen to have been with me.
ONE of Scotland's leading authors has warned that most of the nation's writers are being left to struggle "below the breadline" because the publishing industry has declined so much.
Janice Galloway said mainstream publishers in the UK had become caught up in a "relentless profit machine" were now unwilling to take on risky or experimental work.
"It is all the wrong way around. Like most of life, the people with too much money have astonishing ranges of ways to keep it.
"Everything these days is down to profit. People don't count much. If you don't earn much nobody is that bothered about you.
"They (publishers) can make squillions from a book that will sell all around the world in 56 different translations.
It is hard to fault the monetary logic."
With the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. approaching, I expect the question regarding innovation in the publishing sphere to again be a hot topic of discussion. In previous years, I have noticed that ways to deliver content have mostly been put forward as examples of innovation, usually associated with audiovisual enhancements, magazine style apps, or unique digital protection measures. More recently, the focus has shifted a little toward addressing the acquisition process and the relationship with authors, and whether there shouldn't be a call or even incentive for creators to lead the innovation for the sake of industry as a whole.
But what this symbiotic relationship does is create a devil's circle, as the Germans say, with content being produced that has already been produced in a slightly different but easily recognizable form. When you operate in this circle, it is difficult to think outside the box or "break the loop." That applies to both publisher and content creator. Already we see transmedia-, niche- or short-form authors who want to try something different going off on their own, setting up shop and doing all the things they are obliged to undertake because publishers are focused on catering to the prevalent moods while keeping their imprint a recognizable and trustworthy one.
In his call for Your five-minute manifesto for FutureBook, The Bookseller editor Philip Jones wrote that part of the planning of our FutureBook Conference this year (4th December at The Mermaid) is "to take this recent history of the book business and reflect on the job still to do." To that end, he made a call for submissions: we want your manifesto for the future of the book business. Details of how to get it to us are below. Our first response comes from the author Diana Kimpton and it's a deft example of Jones' interest in "a series of ideas, proposals and/or rules to help the business evolve digitally, or change a current direction...challenge conventions, and lock horns with received wisdom." We're glad to present Kimpton's manifesto here and hope you'll consider sending us one. -- Porter Anderson
I get on well with my publisher. I have 100% control over my covers and my marketing. I choose my editor, and I decide my pricing strategy. Best of all, I keep all the profits. Does that sound unbelievable? It's not. My publisher is me.
Digital technology has made self-publishing a viable alternative to the traditional system, and it's not just for those who can't find a publisher. I'm one of an increasing number of authors who have abandoned the submission treadmill in favour of the freedom of producing our own books. And the more we do it, the more we learn about how publishing works and the more we realise that traditional deals are not author-friendly.
It's noticeable that the topics of discussion in my writers group have changed from "how to submit my manuscript" to "how to format an ebook". If that keeps happening, publishers will find their slush pile ceases to exist and so will their businesses. If they want to survive in this bright, new world, they need to improve their author-publisher relations, so here are a few suggestions on how to do it.
Change leads to anxiety, and there has been a lot of change in publishing in recent years. There is one trend, though, that is striking more fears in publishers' minds than any other. And that is the fear of data.
While sales data has been with us for a long time and is used extensively, there are now new kinds of data that are becoming available. Social media campaigns can reveal who clicked on a link. Email campaigns can be tracked for opens, forwards and reactions to calls to action. But the availability of reading data is probably causing more angst than any other because it strikes at the heart of publishing- everything from acquisition to editorial to marketing to author care.
One fear is that reading data will influence what gets published. This is a somewhat strange notion, as self-publishing has already removed almost any barrier to market, and more books than ever before are getting published. What the doubters really mean is that data could influence what the big publishing houses will publish in the future, such as more celebrity biographies, tales from YouTube stars and vampire novels.
The fear is that, in the future, worthy books of high literary quality will be shunned. Yet titles are getting acquired by editors even when sales data point toward the reality that they are never going to deliver a positive return. What those who have reservations about data fail to see, however, is that data will make it easier to find the audience that appreciates these books. Rather than support an expensive marketing campaign across mass retail, publishers can tailor their campaigns to the relevant audience by virtue of an improved understanding of who likes to read a certain kind of book. And just as important, publishers will also discover the optimal approach to reach that audience.
I'm only seconds into a digital copy of T.S. Eliot's famous ode to adolescence, The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, when my ears prickle uncomfortably. As I read-"Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky, / Like a patient etherised upon a table"-a soft rock track reminiscent of James Taylor begins to crescendo in the background. Eliot's arch observations are drowned out by the acoustic guitar and its upbeat melody.
For a dose of relief I turn to YouTube, where I find a copy of an old recording that features Eliot himself reading the text, sans soundtrack. The strange and charmed rhymes, the brooding hint of menace, the nasal timbre of literary elitism: At once, the poem is restored. By the time Eliot intones, "Time yet for a hundred visions and revisions," I'm engrossed in the text, lost to the world.
And so it's with a skeptical ear and eye that I return to Booktrack, which sells digital books that pair text with music and ambient sounds. Since its founding in 2010, Booktrack has grown its library of titles to 15,000 and raised $10 million from investors, including Silicon Valley kingmaker Peter Thiel. The success of audio book provider Audible, which sold to Amazon for $300 million, beckons.
Indeed, platforms like like Google Classroom are making it easier than ever before for teachers to experiment with digital tools and switch between apps during class. Clever, a San Francisco-based education startup that raised an additional $30 million last December, provides schools with a secure, universal login for the educational apps within its developer network. And this summer, Google Classroom paved the way for a similar user experience by making its functionality around student-teacher communication and assignment management available to approved developers. Companies like Booktrack benefit from those new platforms and integrations; teachers using both Google Classroom and Booktrack Classroom, for example, will be able to view and grade students' Booktrack homework alongside assignments completed in Google Docs or other apps.
17 August 2015
Yet with the coming of ebooks, the world of the physical book, read so many times that your imagination can "inhabit" individual pages, is dying. I'm not the only person in my circle who has stopped buying new books in anything other than digital form, and even the cherished books described above are now re-read, when I need to, on Kindle.
But what is the ebook doing to the way we read? And how, in turn, are the changes in the way millions of us read going to affect the way novelists write? This is not just a question for academics; you only have to look at people on a beach this summer to see how influential fiction remains, and how, if its narratives were to change radically, our self-conception might also change.
It's probably too soon to generalise but my guess is, if you scooped up every book - digital and analogue - being read on a typical Mediterranean beach, and cut out the absolute crap, you'd be left with three kinds of writing: first, "literary" novels with clearer plots and than their 20th century predecessors, less complex prose, fewer experiments with fragmented perception; second, popular novels with a high degree of writerly craft (making the edges of the first two categories hard to define); third, literary writing about reality - the confessional autobiography, the diary of a journalist, highly embroidered reportage about a legendary event.
Last fall, Andrew Vestal found himself rocking his baby daughter, Ada, back to sleep every morning between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. Cradling Ada in the crook of his arm, he discovered he could read his dimly-lit phone with one hand. That's how he read David Mitchell's 624-page science-fiction saga "The Bone Clocks."
Mr. Vestal's iPhone has offered him a way to squeeze in time for reading that he otherwise might have given up. He reads on lunch breaks. He even reads between meetings as he walks across Microsoft's Seattle campus, where he works as a program manager.
Since the release of the bigger, sharper iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last September, Apple has seen an increase in the number of people downloading books onto iPhones through its iBooks app. Some 45% of iBooks purchases are now downloaded onto iPhones, an Apple spokeswoman said. Before that, only 28% were downloaded onto phones, with most of the remainder downloaded onto iPads and a small percentage onto computers.
Amazon has also noted the development. Among all new customers using Kindles or the Kindle app, phone readers are by far the fastest-growing segment, an Amazon spokeswoman said, declining to disclose figures. Among those who use the Kindle app, more people now read books on the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus than on any other Apple device, even the popular iPad Mini, she said.
The BBC reports that Laxman Rao, "the most famous tea seller in the Indian capital, Delhi," has found notable success on Amazon as the author of 24 Hindi-language novels.
The son of a farmer, Rao left his village, located in the western state of Maharshtra, to move to Delhi in 1975 to "fulfill his dream of becoming a writer."
Rao worked various jobs - construction worker, dishwasher, paan and cigarette seller - before finally opening his tea stall, but never gave up on his dream of becoming a published author. Unfortunately, "all his meetings with publishers ended in disappointment as nobody was willing to bet their money on a book written by a roadside vendor."
Eventually Rao saved up enough money to be able to publish his first novel himself in 1979. He told the BBC's Anasuya Basu that "Publishers have a highbrow attitude towards people like us and want money to publish our work. I had no money to spare and, therefore, decided to start my own publishing house."
I can only speak for myself, but I do think when I was trying so hard to interact in a gazillion communities and find people to be my "platform," my writing did suffer, because I didn't have as much time to write. However, I also found some great writer friends who helped me grow as a writer, and who were awesome beta-readers/critique partners for my first book. So, like much in life, there's positive and negative in writer communities.
The Grand Community Of Writers - This one is less a single place, not even on the Web, than a new attitude enabled by digital. As long as it's possible for writers to be in touch with each other on the Internet, they're automatically part of an unprecedented capability. The "isolation of the author," almost mythic in its stony remove from "normal" life, simply no longer exists except during power outages and and your Internet service provider's flakier moments.
In fact, literature people can't help but feel reassured when they turn or swipe to the front matter of Breaking the Page and find not the copyright page (Meyers has put that at the back) but this quote from Virginia Woolf in "How Should One Read a Book?", a sublime essay set near the end of the 1932 The Second Common Reader.
Woolf also writes in that piece, "The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work." And authors today inhale an effluvium thick with influences, intended and unintended, as the digital dynamic wafts through the corridors of publishing and across the patios of the independents. After looking at possibilities and probabilities in terms of the book itself as an object increasingly destabilised - not to mention challenged by so many competing digital entertainments - 4 Meyers reaches the end of his book asking, "What do we gain? What do we lose? What is to be done?"
It used to be the case that only the lucky few dare to call themselves ‘authors.' Not any more. There has never been a better time to dust off that forgotten magnum opus you've had hidden in the bottom drawer for so many years.
In fact, with more than 20 books published every hour in the UK and the explosion in small independent publishers, we are now producing more books per head than any other country.
A YouGov poll in February this year found that "author" topped the list of dream jobs among Brits, ahead of musician, actor, lawyer and interior designer. But is it such a dream after all?
Monday 1st June
Just got off a Skype call with Janet, my publisher at Alliance Publishing Press. Apparently, in their office, I'm known as "The Wanker." Not any more, though, she assured me. Oh, well that's alright then. Yes, they like me now. Ever since we finally thrashed out that contract, wrangling over percentages and subsidiary rights in the faintest of hopes someone will actually make money out of this book. Was I being that difficult about it? Don't you think my agent would also be a wanker? If I had one, that is. I've almost had enough. I've read the book about forty times in the last two months. My mum's quite excited, though. And the few people I've told seem quite impressed that it's actually being published. Even if it is a tiny indie outfit. I'm their thirteenth publication. Good, honest prime number, thirteen, I keep telling myself.
Although the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two.'s modern incarnation as the world's largest trade fair for books began in 1949, its history goes back more than five hundred years. And indeed, up until the end of the 17th century (when it was eclipsed by Leipzig) it was considered the preeminent European book fair.
And one interesting fact that illustrates the fair's early importance is this: the 1622 catalog for the fair included the announcement of the publication of Shakespeare's First Folio.
The Shakespeare folio was announced to the trade in advance of its publication. The Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. was the publishing industry's largest event of the year, and in 1622, John Bill, printer to the King of England, issued an English translation of the Frankfurt catalogue as well as a list of books printed in English. It contained this modest announcement: 8 Playes, written by M. William Shakespeare, all in one volume, printed by Isaack Isaggard, in fol.2019 with an estimated publication date between April and October of 1622.