Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

Writing 911! 5 Tips to Breathe New Life into Your Writing

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This post, by Karen Swim, originally appeared as a guest post on the Confident Writing site on 5/15/09.

Whether you write as part of your profession, or as a hobby there may come a time when your writing feels flat and lifeless.

You put the words on the page and they seem dead on arrival.

You are all out of ideas and procrastinating because you are bored and certain your readers will be too. For those “must do” writing tasks, you may get it done and the mechanics are all there but the magic is decidedly missing.

Don’t worry, you can rescue your writing from the valley of dry bones with these 5 tips guaranteed to breathe new life into your writing.

1. Adopt the tone of a character from a novel, television or even your own family (we all have “characters” in our family).

I love writing following a Grey’s Anatomy episode. The writing has a fast pace and upbeat rhythm. That rhythm extends to the writers blog, which is updated weekly by the lead writer of the episode.

I mirror their lead and write “in character” following an episode. The technique allows me to uncover a lighter tone, stretch my writing muscles in a different way, and inject my business writing with new life.

2. The mind is a wondrous thing, and engaging another part of the brain seems to allow just enough breathing room to unlock your creativity.

If you have to write a report, write a haiku instead.

Try writing the opposite of what you need to do or challenge your brain with a non-writing task such as a computer game, or puzzle.

Even 15 minutes of a different activity can be just enough to allow your mind to shift and release a fresh perspective.

Read the rest of the post, including tips 3 – 5, at Confident Writing.

Bowker Reports U.S. Book Production Declines 3% in 2008, But "On Demand" Publishing More Than Doubles

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Traditional publishing faces pivotal year of retrenching, while emergence of new technologies leads to soaring growth in short-run book publishing

New Providence, NJ – May 19, 2009 – Bowker, the global leader in bibliographic information management solutions, today released statistics on U.S. book publishing for 2008, compiled from its Books In Print® database.  Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2008 decreased by 3.2%, with 275,232 new titles and editions, down from the 284,370 that were published in 2007.

Despite this decline in traditional book publishing, there was another extraordinary year of growth in the reported number of “On Demand” and short-run books produced in 2008.  Bowker projects that 285, 394 On Demand books were produced last year, a staggering 132% increase over last year’s final total of 123,276 titles.  This is the second consecutive year of triple-digit growth in the On Demand segment, which in 2008 was 462% above levels seen as recently as 2006.

“Our statistics for 2008 benchmark an historic development in the U.S. book publishing industry as we crossed a point last year in which On Demand and short-run books exceeded the number of traditional books entering the marketplace,” said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publisher services for New Providence, N.J.-based Bowker.  “It remains to be seen how this trend will unfold in the coming years before we know if we just experienced a watershed year in the book publishing industry, fueled by the changing dynamics of the marketplace and the proliferation of sophisticated publishing technologies, or an anomaly that caused the major industry trade publishers to retrench.”

(Editor’s Note: Members of the news media who are interested in obtaining statistics from Bowker for specific industry categories are invited to email Daryn Teague, Bowker’s public relations consultant, at dteague@teaguecommunications.com.

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“The statistics from last year are not just an indicator that the industry had a decline in new titles coming to the market, but they’re also a reflection of how publishers are getting smarter and more strategic about the specific kinds of books they’re choosing to publish,” explained Gallagher.  “If you look beyond the numbers, you begin to see that 2008 was a pivotal year that benchmarks the changing face of publishing.”

Among the major publishing categories, the big winners last year were Education and Business, two categories that might suggest publishers were seeking to give consumers more resources for success amidst a very tough job environment.  There were 9,510 new education titles introduced in the U.S. in 2008, up 33% from the prior year, and 8,838 new business titles, an increase of 14% over 2007 levels.

By contrast, the big category losers in 2008 were Travel and Fiction, two categories in which publishers clearly saw less demand during a deep recession in the U.S.  There were 4,817 new travel books introduced last year, down 15% from the year before, and 47,541 new fiction titles, a drop of 11% from 2007.  Moreover, the Religion category dropped again last year, with 14% fewer titles introduced in the U.S., and that once reliable engine of growth for publishers is now well off its peak year of 2004.

According to Gallagher, the Bowker data reveals that the top five categories for U.S. book production in 2008 were:

1.    Fiction (47,541 new titles)
2.    Juveniles (29,438)
3.    Sociology/Economics (24,423)
4.    Religion (16,847)
5.    Science (13,555)

DOWNLOAD THE FULL STATISTICS REPORT HERE (PDF, 12KB)

Methodology
The book production figures in this news release are based on year-to-date data from U.S. publishers and include traditional print as well as on demand titles.  Audiobooks and E-books are excluded.  If changes in industry estimates occur, they will be reflected in a later published report. Books In Print data represents input from more than 75,000 publishers in the U.S. The data is sent to Bowker in electronic files, and via BowkerLink, Bowker’s password protected Web-based tool, which enables publishers to update and add their own data.

Books In Print is the only bibliographic database with more than 8 million U.S. book, audiobook and video titles.  It is widely regarded throughout the publishing industry as the most authoritative and comprehensive source of bibliographic data available worldwide, and has been a trusted source of data in North America for more than 50 years.

About Bowker
Bowker is the world’s leading source for bibliographic information. The company provides searching, analytical, promotional, and ordering services to publishers, booksellers, libraries, and patrons through national and international brands, including: Books In Print®, Global Books In Print®, Syndetic Solutions™, Pubnet®, PubEasy®, PubTrack™, AquaBrowser®, and more. In the U.S., Australia and Puerto Rico, Bowker is also the exclusive ISBN and SAN Agency and a DOI registration agency for the publishing industry. Bowker is headquartered in New Providence, New Jersey, with operations in East Grinstead, England, and Melbourne, Australia. For more company details, please visit www.Bowker.com.

Publetariat Editor’s Note: this story is a reprint of a Bowker press release.

Books Born Digital: The emerging phenomenon of books published first in digital format

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This article, from Lance Eaton, originally appeared on the Library Journal site on 5/15/09. 

It used to be that a book was published first as a hardcover, then as a lower-cost paperback. With increasingly tech-savvy consumers demanding instantaneous access to content in various formats, that publishing protocol has in the last decade changed to one in which the book in codex form often remains the focus, but digital “extras” like audio excerpts and e-chapters act as enticements toward the purchase of the hard copy. More recently, a new phenomenon has emerged, one in which a title comes first in digital form and then—if at all—in physical form.

It’s not so much a buffet-style approach to content as it is a dishing out of select content at select times and, often, at discounted prices. Though it’s still too early to assess the upshot of “digital firsts”/digital exclusives for authors, publishers, distributors, librarians, retailers, and—most important—consumers, three popular approaches dominate for serving up digital content in this manner.

Digital appetizers 

To promote the simultaneous September 2008 release of Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded in print, audio, and ebook formats, Macmillan Audio offered listeners a 40-minute downloadable audio preview along with a free audio download of his 2005 book, The World Is Flat. These prepublication digital giveaways, says Macmillan Audio publicist Liz Noland, “allowed us to save costs on printing and also focus our marketing and distribution of the free download on a more targeted audience.”

Similarly, in May 2008, Random House and Del Rey copromoted the concurrent print/audio/ebook release of the final entry in the nine-part “Star Wars: The Legacy of the Force” series, making available the first series entry as free audiobook and ebook downloads.

And building up to the November 2008 release of Stephen King’s Just After Sunset, Scribner partnered with Marvel Comics, CBS Mobile, and Simon & Schuster Audio to adapt “N.,” a previously unpublished story from the anthology, into a series of animated “webisodes” that viewers could purchase through iTunes and Amazon or download onto their cell phones.

In addition to helping to promote multiformat hardcopy releases, digital firsts can also help to bridge the gap between a book’s hardcover print and audiobook CD publications. In 2007, for example, Griffin: St. Martin’s published simultaneous hardcover print and ebook editions of Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key. When the book made the New York Times best sellers list, that certainly spelled a boon for any of its future iterations, but momentum was bound to be lost in the eight-month lag between the September 2008 publication of the paperback and the May 2009 release of the audiobook CD by Macmillan Audio. So, before putting out the audiobook on CD, Macmillan Audio released Sarah’s Key as a digital audiobook, in December 2008. According to Noland, that helped the publisher to capitalize on the book’s original hardcopy sales and ride the wave of its critical success.

Digital sides

Another approach publishers are taking with digital releases is bundling multiple formats together at reduced cost. Thomas Nelson recently launched its NelsonFree program, wherein consumers can purchase a title as a physical book, a digital audiobook, and an ebook—all for the combined price of a hardcover. The first two NelsonFree titles—Scott McKain’s Collapse of Distinction and Michael Franzese’s I’ll Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse—were released in late March; another ten will follow through the end of 2009 (check news.thomasnelson.com for updates). As Joel Miller, publisher of Thomas Nelson’s business and culture division, explained in announcing the launch, “The book is, in a sense, trapped by its format. And so is the consumer—locked into choosing one format over another or shelling out scarce funds for the same book in different wrappers.”

Since 2008, Tantor Media has been offering free PDF ebooks with its MP3-CD audiobooks as part of its Audio & eBook Classics line, and Disney has been packaging standard DVDs and Blu-ray discs together with digital copies. (According to Variety, Fox, MGM, and Lionsgate will shortly also be selling these DVD/Blu-ray/digital combo packs.)

Perhaps their thinking is influenced by the nearly doubled sales of vinyl LPs in 2007 after independent music labels like Sub Pop and Matador packaged LPs with MP3 download codes, proving that bundled digital content could help spur sales of older formats.

Read the rest of the article on the Library Journal site.

Jacket Copy Sells Books, So Make It Good.

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This article originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Publishing Trends.

Would you rather read a “splendid, funny, lyrical book about family, truth, memory, and the resilience of love” or a “powerful novel” about “the strength of love and loss, the searing ramifications of war, and the mysterious, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us”?

A “poignant celebration of the potency of familial love” or “a luminous, provocative, and ultimately redemptive look at how even mothers and daughters with the best intentions can be blind to the harm they do to one another”? More importantly, which would you rather buy?

If any of the above sounds familiar, it’s probably not because you’ve read the book described, but rather because you’ve written more than a few pieces of jacket copy of your own. How important are those little paragraphs on the inside flap of the book’s jacket, and does it really matter what they say? We wanted to find out, so we did what anybody in our situation would do and commissioned a large nationwide study of book shoppers to answer our questions. Well, the Codex Group, whom we worked with on our author website study, were the ones who actually did the study, but CEO Peter Hildick-Smith generously allowed us to tag along and even include titles of our choosing in the survey.

Codex’s Early Read Book Preview measures book and author sales potential based on book shopper purchase interest. The company regularly conducts online polls of book consumers across major fiction and nonfiction book categories. The preview measures their spontaneous “shopping response” to 50 books equally divided between current New York Times bestsellers and titles in development. The jacket copy study took place from March 30 through April 4 and surveyed 7,065 book shoppers nationwide, including 2,362 literary fiction and 1,308 women’s fiction buyers.

The job of writing jacket copy shouldn’t be foisted off on editorial assistants—it is the second most important book purchase factor (after favorite author). “I was heartened to see how much emphasis readers seem to place on real information and details about the story itself,” says Mitch Hoffman, Executive Editor at Grand Central Publishing. Hoffman helped Hildick-Smith with this survey, and the jacket copy for Grand Central’s First Family by David Baldacci scored higher than any other title in the study. “Certainly all these other pieces of ephemera, reviews, bestsellers, endorsement information, they always find that helpful, but the story is the thing. That reinforces an idea I always wanted to believe, that even in the middle of everything else we do, the book is the thing.”

Flap copy is especially important for fiction. And title and cover impact are closely related to the impact of jacket copy. If the flap copy defies the expectation created by the cover and title—if, for instance, the cover of the book leads the reader to expect a thriller but the flap copy identifies it as horror—readers are less likely to buy it.

Read the rest of the article on Publishing Trends.

Interview With Lulu Book Review Founder Shannon Yarbrough

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Shannon Yarbrough is the founder and lead reviewer of The Lulu Book Review website. The Lulu Book Review site is dedicated to reviews of self-published books published via Lulu, but as Shannon reveals in this interview, changes are in the works to allow titles from Wordclay and CreateSpace as well.

P: When did you first become interested in self-publishing, and why?

SY: In 2000, I became an assistant manager for a bookstore.  My love of books spanned back to my childhood, but this was when I first began to formally learn about the book industry itself. 

A local author came in one day to introduce himself and to promote his book. I also had a love of writing and dreamed of being an author myself, so I spoke to him and asked if he’d be interested in doing a book signing. Since I was also in charge of a book club at the store, we ended up reading his book and having a nice long discussion between him and the group. He signed a copy of his book to me as follows: “This is the best feeling in the world and I owe it all to you.  I can’t wait till you’re signing copies of your own book one day and I’m eagerly standing in line for my copy.”

I asked the author more about the publishing process after the event, and he told me he self-published his book. He used Xlibris. I knew nothing about the world of self-publishing then, but I quickly learned. Three years later in 2003, I self-published my own first book with Xlibris. So, my knowledge of self-publishing grew from there.

P: You currently have three books in print with Lulu; what would you say are the pros and cons of publishing through Lulu?

SY: There are many pros to Lulu. I first discovered Lulu in 2006 and was immediately impressed with their speed and pricing. In one night, within a few hours, I had a 2nd edition of my Xlibris book for sale on Lulu with a new cover and at half the price of the original. I fell in love with their community forums where I connected with other authors like myself, and I spent hours perusing the online book store and reading new authors.

The first book I published originally with Lulu was a collection of my poetry which I put together with images as a gift to some family members. I thought the printing quality and time it took to print and ship was great. I also liked the ability to publish both a hardcover and paperback edition cheaply. The ability to make changes quickly with no financial investment was nice too. In 2008, I purchased an ISBN for my third book with Lulu for just $99.00. This was a big savings compared to the Xlibris investment I made in 2003, even though I had to do all the work myself when publishing with Lulu.

I think the cons vary by project and by author. Some that I have experienced were printing problems. Two orders of my 2008 book arrived with the same damages months apart, tears to the spine and glue smudges on the cover. Although Lulu sent replacements to me, I had problems getting a response from their customer service department the second time because by then, they had discontinued their online chat support. I’ve heard from other authors that response time via email has taken as long as 25 days. Cuts in their staff are probably the issue here. When they had chat support, it was hit or miss for me. Sometimes, they were very helpful and sometimes they were no help at all. The rise of shipping expenses has been a huge issue lately with many Lulu authors, especially international ones. 

I, myself, have also not been impressed with the “Published by Lulu” feature. This was free for a while and gave you an ISBN and listed Lulu as the publisher. It took months to get the book loaded to Amazon, only to have it listed as out of print. I think a lot of this had to do with the whole Booksurge ordeal that took place last year, and Lulu has not been completely forthright with information about how they were affected and how it affects these books.

The recent purchase of poetry.com has given them some bad press because of the stigma attached to the business that was running it before.  Lulu is also now offering expensive publishing packages like the other subsidy publishers, so they’ve lost a bit of their DIY appeal for me. 

P: You are the founder and administrator of The Lulu Book Review. Can you explain what the site is all about, and why you decided to launch it?

SY: The LLBR was created in Spring 2008 as a book review blog strictly for Lulu authors.  I had been querying agents and small publishing companies with my most recent book and casually documenting my experiences (and rejections) on my personal blog. 

In March, I decided to use Lulu to publish the book myself and wanted to document that experience as well. In searching the Lulu forums for information one day, I kept coming across pleas for reviews. When I clicked on those authors’ books though, no reviews had been posted on their pages. I thought that was so depressing that Lulu authors couldn’t even get their own peers to read their books. And so out of that thought, the Lulu Book Review was formed along with my POD Diary where I documented my own publishing experience as a reference for other authors.

Since then, three other reviewers have joined me.  The blog has been solely devoted to Lulu authors and to reviewing Lulu books, but has become a great reference for self-published authors in general.  We also cross-post our reviews to both Lulu.com and to Amazon.com for the author. 

P: Conventional wisdom states that the majority of self-published books are badly written and poorly formatted. Has this been your experience as a reviewer?

SY: I would honestly say it’s about 50/50. In the beginning, for the most part, books we chose to review were based solely on the opinion of what the reviewer wanted to read and if the preview on Lulu sparked their interest. Then, we started seeing recurring problems that kept turning us off as well. So last November, we posted a list of common mistakes that we often found in Lulu books and sort of adopted that as a set of rules for books we are considering for review.

Formatting and spelling are the usual mistakes we see. Those things don’t necessarily mean the story itself is bad, but it’s hard to devote time to a book when the author hasn’t done their homework when it comes to presentation. Typically, we might give something a chance from the start if we like the preview, despite the basic problems we see, but we usually take into consideration that if we’d give the book anything less than three out of five stars on an Amazon.com review, then we bow out and choose not to review it at all. After all, we want the feel of our reviews to be a positive experience for not just the author, but for our readers as well. Self-publishing gets enough bad reviews on its own as an industry so we don’t want to add to that. 

P: Some authors, indie and mainstream alike, are reluctant to post negative book reviews, either out of professional courtesy or fear of retaliation. As an indie author yourself and a booster of the movement, when wearing your "reviewer’s hat," do you ever feel compelled to soften your criticisms when reviewing other indie authors’ work? Have you ever opted not to post a negative review?

SY: We never soften the blows because we don’t really have to. Like I said, when reviewing our policy is that if we start reading a book that has too many grammatical or spelling errors, or is poorly formatted, or we feel that we’d rate it three stars or less out of five, then we don’t review it at all.  This is not because we fear retaliation or are worried about the response we might get.  It’s simply because, like most indie reviewers on the web, our goal is to promote reading and to promote authors who have put serious effort into making their book the best possible.

So, we always opt not to post a negative review because we don’t write them, and we are honest with the author when we tell them why we’re choosing not to review them.  Our reviewers have also been willing to give some helpful tips and suggestions to the author when time allows.

P: The Lulu Book Review offers reviews of Lulu-published books only; do you have any plans to launch any similar sites to review other self-published books?

SY: There are no plans to launch additional sites, but as of June 1st we are branching out to include CreateSpace and WordClay authors. The site, domain, and our name will also be getting a face lift. This was a group decision because all of our reviewers share the same opinions and philosophies about self-publishing. We like what we are doing and we want to reach out to more indie authors.

P: How can authors of Lulu-published books submit their works to you for review?

SY: Authors should visit the blog and post a query on our Pick Me! Tab. They should link to their book and tell us a little about it and tell us why we should review it. We also accept email queries currently at lulubookreview@gmail.com. 

Shannon Yarbrough is the author of two self-published books, The Other Side of What published with Xlibris in 2003, and Stealing Wishes published with Lulu in 2008. He is also the creator and lead reviewer of The Lulu Book Review.

 

The Financial Sanity of Self-Publishing

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I would like to point out one very important benefit self publishing has over trad publishing.  I have a NY pubbed friend who has had over 20 books published, but currently only a very few of them are in print.  Unless you are famous, your entire backllist doesn’t stay in print, and that is continual lost money. 

When you have 20 books under your belt, and less than 5 of them are currently earning you money, that’s not fiscally sound.  In fact, it keeps you on an endless treadmill, especially if you don’t break out of the midlist.

Whereas you might have had a repeat customer multiplied many times over . . . with trad publishing, the only option is for many of  your books to be read via used bookstore or library, where you the author, doesn’t see a penny.  So who is writing for free here?

Whlie a publishing house has the option of bringing a book back into trade paperback with print-on-demand technology, or ebook, many publishers simply can’t be arsed to do it, because they’re focused on the big dogs making them money.  If you simply insist on trad publishing, it would behoove you to get something in your contract that insists your books will remain available in print-on-demand format and ebook, and that you’ll be compensated fairly for those sales.  Otherwise your average publisher is going to sit on your rights for about seven years while you’re not making money.

By contrast, say you’re an indie author and you put out one book a year.  In ten years of hard work writing, producing, and marketing your work, you have not just a couple of books in print, but 10 books in print.  If you do it the most fiscally sound way (i.e. Lightning Source for your POD, not Lulu or Authorhouse), then you are making 4-5 times per book what you would from a trad publisher (minus expenses, which you’ll hopefully have learned to streamline in a halfway savvy way.)

What this means is…  If I had ten books out, and was selling several hundred copies a month of each of them, I would be making six figures in a year.  Now is it reasonable to expect most self published authors can do this?  No.  Many writers just are not very savvy and never will be.  But is it unreasonable to think this is possible for any self-pubbed author who is both business/marketing savvy and talented?  I don’t think it is.

Either way though, I’d rather make a bet on myself and building something that truly belongs to me, rather than make a bet on a publishing house, who could tie up my rights for a very long time, while giving me precious little for it.

When trad publishers rarely have the resources to put a lot of marketing push behind most books, I have to ask myself…in the days of social networking and the internet, is the ego-gratification of being "traditionally vetted",having  a NY editor, and a NY designer really financially worth the expense to me, of losing that much per-book revenue?

For me, the price is too high to trad publish.  Would I change my tune if a big publisher offered me a big contract?  Possibly so, but then the game would be very much changed, wouldn’t it?  Your average trad published author isn’t "getting" big contracts., nor are many of them getting big contracts over time.  There is a reason seasoned writers lament being stuck on the midlist and keep dreaming of "breaking out."  It’s not because big contracts down the road are standard procedure for most authors.

I hear all the time from trad published authors when explaining their pittance of an advance that a writer’s career is built over several books.  Yet many of these same writers turn around and attack self-publishing because of what they see as short term cost/benefits.  Why does it make sense to say a trad published author’s career is built over several books, but a self-pubbed author’s career isn’t?

Further, there is nothing in the publishing rulebook that says you can’t self-publish some books while seeking trad publication for others.  I believe trad publishing is scared on every level of us.  They’ll deny it up and down.  They’ll mock us and make jokes…   But this is the author indie movement, much like what has swept through filmmaking and music already.

Be proud of what you are and what you’re creating. You’ll learn as you go, you’ll get better as you go, and you’re building equity a trad published author can’t hope to touch unless they’re famous.

And who wants to lay odds on that one?  Talk about unrealistic expectations.

On the Demise of Publishing, Reading, and Everything Else

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This article, from the editors of The Quarterly Conversation, originally appeared on that site in their issue #15.

Books are commodities, and as we head into the sharpest economic downturn since 1982—indeed, quite possibly since 1932—publishers are feeling the pain.

The reactions of many of the industry leaders do not instill confidence: in just one example, albeit a flagrant one, Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt declared an acquisition freeze, only to make an abrupt 180 degree turn when the move resulted in widespread shock. (In a much less publicized but arguably worse move, HMH also unceremoniously showed the door to legendary 79-year-old editor Drenka Willen, who oversaw the acquisition of an almost impossibly good backlist, the likes of Calvino, Grass, Eco, and Saramago; the publisher has since allowed her back, presumably so that she can resign with a measure of dignity.)

The troubles of the big houses are making headlines, but it’s unclear whether their answer isn’t, like the 36 head-sanded Senate Republicans who voted to scrap Barack Obama’s stimulus bill for one made entirely of tax cuts, more of the same. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Anita Elberse, who previously proclaimed that Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory was so much backwash in the wake of blockbuster books, argued that tough economic times will make the blockbuster publishing model even more alluring and successful than ever. She stated that in the past the blockbuster strategy has “worked wonders,” and that it makes more economic sense to make a few high-stakes bets than to spread money among a number of low-payoff books.

Of course, one might point to the many large advances paid out to authors who have flopped, as well as the glut of celebrity memoirs finding a second life as home insulation, and conclude that Elberse is speaking from the decks of the Titanic. As opined Richard Nash, the editorial director of plucky independent press Soft Skull, “she’s only looked at the corporate model and developed theories about what works on their system. Which is self-fulfilling, since their system is designed to work that model. It’s really quite dense. Almost hare-brained.”

Nash might be onto something. Amid chaos and layoffs among the large New York publishing houses, Nash reported that 2008 was a banner year for his press. So have numerous other indie and small publishers, including Margo Baldwin, whose Chelsea Green Publishing specializes in sustainable living titles, just the thing for hard times. In a recent interview Baldwin predicted large-scale changes for the publishing, nothing short of a general reinvention of the industry, and she isn’t alone.

Beyond indie publishers, who might be seen to have a vested interest in predicting the demise of corporate publishing at large, Gideon Lewis-Krause, who was sent off by Harper’s magazine to report on the Frankfurt Book Fair, intimated in the resulting essay that the kind of ego-ridden system that recently gave Richard Ford $3 million for 3 books is on the way out. Although Lewis-Krause was somewhat coy in his critique of corporate publishing, it didn’t take the closest of readers to sense his disdain for the publishing houses that have been agglomerated into billionaires’ media empires, and his eagerness to see their business model disintegrate.

Read the rest of the article on The Quarterly Conversation.  

#Authorfail: Hubris, Not Bad Writing Or Design, Sinks Most Self-Published Nonfiction

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I recently completed a stint of judging nonfiction, indie books for The Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Popular lore holds that most self-published books are of poor quality, both in terms of layout/design and writing, but that was not my experience with these books.

Most of the books had very attractive and professional-looking covers, and many of them had excellent illustrations and interior layout details (i.e., sidebars, recurring graphic elements) as well. While a quarter of the books could’ve done with a thorough edit to ‘trim the fat’, none of the books were so flawed in terms of mechanics as to make them difficult, or even just unpleasant, to read—and I’m somewhat of a stickler for spelling and grammar.

Nevertheless, fewer than half of the books in my allotment seemed worthy of publication and sale to the public, and some clear patterns emerged. In this series of blog posts, I’ll discuss my findings.

Because I am not allowed to disclose the titles of the books I judged, nor the specific category(ies), I’ve changed identifying details of the books in the following examples. (All book titles given below are fabricated, and are not meant to reference any real books)

Experience Doesn’t Always Equal Expertise

A tax attorney who’s struggled with her weight for years finds she’s somehow managed to lose fifteen pounds in one month. On reflection she realizes she’s been eating a lot of hazelnuts lately. Her internet research shows nuts are often encouraged as part of a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, and she finds some studies that report hazelnuts have antioxidant properties. BOOM! The Hazelnut Crash Diet book is born.

A computer programmer’s YouTube parody of a celebrity is brought to the attention of the celebrity, who mentions it on a late-night talk show. The clip goes viral in a matter of hours. In the morning, the man learns what happened and finds he has several interview requests from the media…BOOM! How YouTube Can Make You Famous is born.

A caregiver in a nursing home notices the elderly in her care seem more responsive and alert when she plays music over the facility’s public address system. BOOM! Using Music To Beat Alzheimer’s Disease is born.  

The tendency of so many authors to base an entire book or belief system on false correlations, or even mere coincidence, was astonishing to me, as was their complete lack of awareness that their ability to formulate a possible cause-and-effect relationship does not make that relationship valid, nor make them experts in either the cause or the effect.

There are many possible explanations for the first woman’s weight loss, but based on little more than intuition she’s concluded that hazelnuts were the key to her success. She’s not remotely qualified to design a safe and effective diet plan, yet here she is, promoting her hazelnut diet as a surefire, safe solution for anyone wishing to lose weight quickly.

If the YouTube guy had come up with a successful strategy to get the celebrity’s attention or the late-night talk show mention, that would be worthy of sharing with the world. In this case, he simply had an incredible stroke of luck that occurred entirely outside his control or even immediate awareness. Yet here he is, claiming he can show anyone how to recreate the same outcome.

The fact that the nursing home residents perked up when they heard music is no indication of music’s efficacy in staving off Alzheimer’s, and the caregiver’s only knowledge of Alzheimer’s comes from a continuing education class she once took and her observations of the elderly in her care. Yet here she is, claiming to have found a cure for a disease that whole armies of researchers and billions of dollars have yet to crack.

Books like the diet book and the Alzheimer’s book were particularly worrying to me because they can affect the health of others. Where very challenging ailments like Alzheimer’s are concerned, sufferers and those who care about them are often desperate enough to try anything that could possibly work. While exposing Alzheimer’s sufferers to music certainly won’t harm them, sufferers or caregivers might choose “music therapy” over other, better treatment options.

One of the books actually encouraged readers to use spoken mantras to treat a common physical ailment for which numerous safe, proven treatments already exist. Furthermore, the ailment was one of those things that’s not usually serious, but can develop into something serious if it’s not watched closely. By the time a caregiver employing the mantra method realizes the mantra isn’t working, the ailment may have progressed to the point that aggressive and risky medical treatments are required. I was dumbfounded by the author’s irresponsibility.

I understand there’s such a thing as alternative medicine, and I can also believe that laypeople and amateurs sometimes make discoveries that have evaded professionals and academics. However, I’m not going to take one person’s word for it that she’s discovered a new avenue in healthcare or nutrition based on her personal experiences alone—especially when she has no significant background or training in the subject of her book. Background and training are the things that allow a person to tell the difference between a genuine result or discovery and a wrong conclusion.

Many of the authors seemed to think their own, untrained, non-professional interpretations of others’ academic and scientific studies constitutes “independent confirmation”. It doesn’t. I am an animal lover and even spent a number of years studying Veterinary Science and working as a Veterinary Technician while in college. Even so, that past experience and bit of education doesn’t give me all the knowledge and background I’d need to accurately interpret the statistics reported in veterinary studies conducted by actual veterinarians and scientists. 

There are very good reasons why doctors, lawyers, physical therapists, nutritionists, accountants, etc. are required to complete years of education and training before being licensed to practice. Judging by the lengthy disclaimers I saw at the front of several books, the authors knew this, yet still deemed themselves capable of going toe-to-toe with the professionals. The disclaimers variously advised readers that nothing in the book should be construed as professional advice, that the reader shouldn’t rely on the information provided in the book when making medical, legal or financial decisions, and in one case, went so far as to say the reader shouldn’t rely on the book’s content as a reliable source of information on the subject matter of the book.

A book that needs a disclaimer like that is a book that never should’ve been written, and should definitely not be offered for sale to the public.

 

This is a cross-posting of an entry that originally appeared on my Indie Author blog on 4/17/09. Follow these links to read parts two, three and four in the series.

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April L. Hamilton is an author and the founder of Publetariat.

How to Squeeze Writing Inspiration from Every Experience

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This article, by Mary Jaksch, originally appeared on Write To Done on 3/9/09.

Do you have days where you sit in front of  an empty page  – and find nothing, absolutely nothing you could write about? I used to. But now I’ve learned to squeeze inspiration from every experience.

What, every experience? Yes, I know it sounds a tall order. Read on to see how it works.

The secret of creativity

First of all we need to determine what triggers creativity. It’s quite simple:

Creative innovation happens through communication between regions of the brain that are not usually connected. (You can read more about that here).

Let’s imagine that you want to write an article about social media. Your page is empty and your brain is on slow-go. Then you start making a list of points you want to cover:

Twitter
connections
viral news
Stumbleupon

Does this list inspire you? Does is trigger ideas in your brain? Well, not in my brain! At this point I still can’t find any theme connected to social media that I might want to write about.

Now let’s take a different tack in order to kick-start creativity: we’ll choose an unrelated idea and hold it up against our theme ‘social media’. What we’re doing at that moment is to connect two different areas in the brain.

Let’s say that the word we choose to connect with ‘social media’ is ‘potato’. Wacky, eh?

Just pause for a moment and see what your brain comes up with when you connect ‘social media’ and ‘potato’.

Here is what happens in my brain when I connect the two concepts:

  • Potatoes grow underground and you can’t see them from above / You can’t understand social media by looking in from the outside.
     
  • You only get to see the size of the  harvest when you dig up your potatoes/ It takes a time to see the result of ongoing social media cultivation
     
  • Potatoes are a staple diet/ Your communication on social media allows people to get to know the ‘ordinary’ you.
     
  • There are endless recipes to cook potatoes/ Each social media has its own style and you need to adapt to it

Ok – that was just a five minute harvest of ideas to illustrate how creativity works. Even though I didn’t come up with any brilliant mind flashes, what I did get was four different themes for an article. So, if you were to connect ‘social media’ with twenty different unrelated things, such as door handles, cats, rain, hunger, rainforest, or … you name it, you would end up with 100 ideas for articles about social media. That’s better than none, isn’t it?

Read the rest of the article on Write To Done.

EVOLVE

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EVOLVE

by Absolutely*Kate

 

We are given the shadows and the light, both equidistant to themselves. It’s not choosing either. It’s finding out both are of equal sum of significant value. Mirrors and illusion give way to trust and inner-know. As nature abhors vacuum, lessons vortex in – the more we open, the more they flow. Evolve spins eons in a day.

 

PUBLISHED ON SIX SENTENCES

 

~ Absolutely*Kate believes in believers,
befitting a prolifically creative person, vibrantly alive and well.

Writer, Promoter, Publishing-Designer at the confluence of two rivers
in Connecticut’s smallest city of renown, she is director/founder of
Art & Pride’s RiverView Studios where books are underway
 and creative collaborations are having their encouraged say.

http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/2009/02/evolve.html

Copyright © 2009 ABSOLUTELY*KATE. All Rights Reserved.

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Read more: "absolutely-kate’s posterous – Home" –

Tone Deaf Publishers Need Savvy Writers

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This is a cross-posting of a piece that originally appeared on Loudpoet.

Counting on the laziness of the author and their lack of enthusiasm for self-promotion isn’t the best business model. Just look around. Many of today’s self-published books are hard to [distinguish] from their counterpart coming out of a major NYC publishing house. As self-publishing matures and begins to mirror professional publishing, the lines between the two blur and the need for a traditional book publisher becomes less necessary.

–Bill Nienhuis, An Author’s Perspective on the Book Publishing Industry

I attended the first day of The New York Center for Independent Publishing’s New York Round Table Writers’ Conference last Friday, and even before I arrived I was struck by the lack of Twitter chatter leading up to the event and throughout the morning of the first day. It was notable not because Twitter is the new shiny, but because the book publishing industry has definitely embraced it and there are a ton of smart industry professionals, independent pundits, and published and aspiring writers using it to network, share information, and opine about the future of the industry.

I arrived after lunch, in time for Lee Woodruff’s keynote speech, and took a seat at the back of the massive Library of the General Society of the Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York (NYCIP’s parent organization) — a massive, old room lined with bookshelves that is almost literally weighed down by its history. I was immediately struck by the interesting dichotomy as Woodruff mentioned Twitter, marketing and the viability of self-publishing within the first 5 minutes, and later noted the craziness of her first book, ironically titled In An Instant, taking nine months to be published after she’d submitted the finished manuscript.

Following Woodruff’s engaging presentation, I attended the Fiction Editors: Champions of the Story panel, featuring “an inside look and advice from editors of major publishing houses,” and that’s when the wheels completely fell off the thing.

I tweeted some of my gut reactions on the spot:

# 14:21 #nycwc Fiction editors explaining job, seem like an endangered species. Why not become agents or indie pubs? Can’t be job security.
# 14:44 #nycwc Somewhat surprised by the NY-centric, status quo opinions about the publishing process being offered by these editors.
# 15:09 #nycwc Funny: low odds for getting trad. published are the norm, but successful self-pub is dismissed as being rare and magical.

The editors themselves, each representing a major publisher and primarily focused on literary and/or commercial fiction, were a smart, lively bunch who clearly loved the core of their job — reading, discovering and championing great books — noting that they often did most of that outside of the office, after hours and on weekends. Most of their workday, though, is apparently spent navigating the bureaucracy and red tape of corporate publishing, doing everything but reading and editing manuscripts in service to what all agreed was roughly a two-year process from acceptance to publication of a book.

Each of the editors only read agented manuscripts — one noting she’d received over 500 last year, of which she’d only bought eight — but had little advice to offer the writers in attendance on how to get an agent who is good enough to get their manuscript in front of them. They also had difficulty clearly explaining what the difference was between their own job and an agent’s beyond ensuring their publisher’s contract doesn’t screw them over, noting that agents tend to do a lot of editing themselves these days to get a manuscript in tip-top shape, but that writers shouldn’t pay them for that service nor pay a freelance editor to do the same.

In response to a question about lessons they’d learned from the failure of a book to sell as well as expected — something that was acknowledged several times as being the norm not the exception — one offered an example of an unnamed book that the stars had seemingly all aligned for: it was a great book the editor loved, that their publisher believed was going to be a hit, that got great reviews from all of the major mainstream outlets… and it flopped.

In the final bit of unacknowledged irony, one of them briefly noted that examples of successful self-publishing were rare and magical.

The panel I was participating on — The Technofile: Online Writing and Blogging, “Popular online literary website writers and bloggers come together to discuss the online writing outlet.” — followed theirs after a short break, and offered an interesting contrast as three of us were about as deeply embedded in digital publishing as you can get: Roy Sekoff of the Huffington Post, moderator; Pamela Skillings of About.com; and Rebecca Fox of MediaBistro. I was billed as representing Spindle, which was nice, but I noted that my presence on the panel actually came about from having worked with Writer’s Digest for a year-and-half and being heavily involved in pushing their website forward and getting them to embrace their position of leadership by acknowledging the rise of self-publishing as a viable option and teaching writers how to do it the right way.

# 17:40 #nycwc Blogging panel was fun and lively. Sekoff kept things interesting; Fox and Skillings offered great insights. Lot of fun.
# 17:43 #nycwc Writers need to understand they’re marketing themselves, not their books; publishers won’t do it for them. Take a long-term view.
# 17:59 #nycwc Authors using Twitter article by @mariaschneider I referenced during blog panel: http://bit.ly/13RVz1

Sekoff ran a great, lively panel and we all offered some practical and personal insights into the opportunities the shifts in the industry have opened up for writers who are savvy about marketing themselves and establishing that holy grail of publishers and writers alike: a platform.

After offering our individual takes on a variety of topics and looking into our crystal balls to speculate on where things were going — a unanimous vision of increased disintermediation and the power of writers to control their own careers — we took questions and what was most notable was that the majority in attendance were not terribly marketing savvy and something as simple as setting up a blog struck many of them as being a significant challenge. A few didn’t see the value of it at all, missing the forest for the trees, seemingly still believing that a writer’s only job is to write.

Earlier, Woodruff had been asked how writers without PR experience and media connections — as she’d acknowledged having had and working to her full advantage — can promote themselves, and she noted that social networking had leveled the playing field online and that writers have to get comfortable using it and marketing themselves.

With the continuing deterioration of traditional distribution channels; the shifting of editing and marketing responsibilities to agents and writers; and the availability of numerous resources to empower a writer to reach their audience directly and profitably, Niehuis’ aforementioned point is worth reframing: “Counting on the laziness of major publishing houses and their lack of enthusiasm for marketing isn’t the best business model for writers, aspiring nor established.”

Publishers need writers to stay in business, but the reverse isn’t necessarily true.

Here’s a handful of key resources for any writer looking to take full control of their careers:

  • There Are No Rules: Savvy advice and information on the business of publishing from Writer’s Digest Publisher & Editorial Director, Jane Friedman
  • Editor Unleashed: More savvy advice and information on the business of publishing and craft of writing from former Writer’s Digest editor, Maria Schneider
  • Get Known Before the Book Deal: Writer Mama Christina Katz offers tips and advice for success in the world of publishing.
  • Publetariat: An online community and news hub built specifically for indie authors and small, independent imprints.
  • GalleyCat: MediaBistro’s publishing industry blog is a daily must-read for all writers.
  • The Reality of a Times Bestseller: NY Times Bestseller Lynn Viehl offers the numbers behind her best-selling book, Twilight Fall.
  • The Fine Print of Self Publishing: The Contracts & Services of 45 Self-Publishing Companies Analyzed Ranked & Exposed
  • WordPress.com: Starting a blog takes 5-10 minutes, and WordPress is my preferred platform.

NOTE: This isn’t about traditional publishing vs. self-publishing; that’s a very individual decision that can’t be generalized as each offers advantages and disadvantages that will be perceived differently according to context. No matter which route a writer chooses, though, the ultimate responsibility for their success or failure will fall to them, and to think otherwise increases the odds of failure.

Parting Thoughts: The State Of Publishing

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This post, by David Hewson, originally appeared on his blog on 4/18/09.

Sitting here in the comfy Virgin Lounge in SFO with a few hours to spare I thought I’d set down a few thoughts about these last two weeks on the road in the US. Coming to America is always an enjoyable, thought-provoking process, and this trip was both of those, more so than usual if I’m honest. So I’ll try set down my thoughts about what I’ve seen and heard here, and a few things I’ve learned.

Here goes: is publishing doomed?

 

Like most provocative questions this one isn’t as simple as it first appears. Lots of people are feeling pain at the moment. What we sometimes fail to appreciate is that they’re different kinds of pain. Publishers are watching a market that’s been comprehensible and relatively capable of control for decades fragment and fall from their grasp. Big retailers are suffering from falling sales and the dead weight of overhead that comes from running vast operations, as well as competition from lower cost operations on the web, Amazon in particular. Small, individual booksellers find themselves squeezed because they can’t compete on price and they face falling sales and rising costs too.

And authors? Well, to be honest we’re probably in the best – or rather least horrible – position of all. Forget books, I’m a story teller first and foremost and my work appears in a variety of forms, in print, in audio, on ebooks, a few more too maybe in the years to come. The real question is this: is storytelling doomed?

I think we all know the answer to that: clearly not. We have stories coming as us from all angles these days, even as downloads to our iPhones. As a Hollywood producer I talked to put it: the appetite for content is booming, what’s happening is that the 20th century models for meeting it don’t seem to match what a 21st century audience demands. Why should they? The 20th century didn’t have Kindle or Audible or Amazon. It’s different out there.

I’m not qualified to offer advice to publishers or big book companies even if I had something useful to say. So let me focus on whatI know and love: writing. Authors are, I think, on the brink of a new and exciting age. We will no longer be confined by the schedules and norms of the print industry. Those literary forms that once seemed so hard to get published – novellas and short stories – suddenly make sense because they match the instant release of digital. Backlists become resources to be revived, not lost titles that never again see the light of day. And there will, I’m sure, be new types of media and opportunities created in the years to come too.

The bad news? The days of big advances, cushy contracts and big safety nets are gone for good. Writing is back to being the scary, exciting business it always was. If you want to make it a career you’re going to have to work hard, take risks and have a very thick skin. Welcome to the real world. This is not a get-rich-quick business or one that can be judged on sales or financial terms alone. If it were then any number of great writers, from Poe to Herman Melville, would have to be reclassified as failures. Ridiculous, don’t you think? If you want to make money and be a celebrity learn to play guitar. Books aren’t like that.

Read the rest of the post on David Hewson’s blog.

5 reasons having a ‘day job’ helps your writing

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 This was originally posted at The Creative Penn blog on 2 May 2009.  

Many writers dream of making a fulltime living from their books. The life of the career author is surely a whirl of book festivals, interviews and closeted months in French literary haunts penning marvellous literature. Who wouldn’t want that!

Some of my (many) bookshelves

Some of my (many) bookshelves

But the reality is that very few authors make a fulltime living from their books. 

It has been said anecdotally that the average Australian author makes AU$3000 per year (less than US$2000).

An American author who sold over 75,000 copies and made the Times Bestseller list shows a net income of $0 from her books.

Most writers make money from other jobs – freelance writing, teaching or a day job completely unrelated to their writing.

Here are 5 reasons why having a day job helps your writing.

1.       Provides (much-needed) income. Let’s face it, we need the money the day job brings! It may not be glamorous but the job is necessary to support ourselves and our families. It is also handy to have enough money to be able to buy the books we need, or to go to the writing conferences or events that help us in our work.

2.       Gives you the urgency to write when you do have time. There is a myth of creativity that if you could only have 6 months off work and write fulltime, then you would write that award-winning novel. It’s not true! When you have all the time in the world, you do far less than if you are under a deadline. The day job squashes your writing time into the hours you can spare – lunch hours, commuting time, hours when you would have watched TV, after the kids have gone to bed. Don’t wait until you have all the time in the world as that time may never come. Take advantage of where you are now and get writing!

3.       Provides material to incorporate into your writing. We all write about what is around us. If you write fiction, then your work can provide aspects of characters, snatches of conversation, scenarios, geographical realism. If you write non-fiction, then your work may turn into a book, or you may write to solve the problems of your workplace. Stephen King is a master of the ‘real’ character. His books are full of people that you would recognise at work. Where do you think he got his inspiration? The years of fulltime work to support his family whilst writing at night.

4.       Keeps you grounded in the real world. Writing can be held up as an other-worldly experience. The creative genius works alone in the wooden attic, surrounded by books and little else. Again, this is a myth perpetuated perhaps by literati but is not the real world. Real authors have jobs, families and problems like everyone else. Being a writer doesn’t make you more important than other people. Having a job like everyone else keeps you grounded.

5.       Enables you to write what you want to. If you have a day job that is not related to writing, then you have the freedom to write on your own agenda after your work is done. This creative freedom is liberating! You can write that poetry burning in your heart, or the sci-fi thriller, the business book, the erotica. You can write whatever you want to, so your creativity is focussed on your own writing goals.

The day may come when you are a fulltime author making millions from your words – until then, be grateful for the day job and make the most of the time you have now.  

 

A Publishing Person Self-Publishes

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This post, by Kent Anderson, originally appeared on the Self-Publishing Review site on 5/4/09.

I’ve always been a publishing person, from the time I spent studying copyright pages in books around age 8 to creating what still look like sophisticated magazines as an adolescent using only a typewriter, pen and ink drawings, and Scotch tape, then photocopying the resulting layouts. I’ve worked in bookstores, typeset professionally, written for newspapers, compiled indexes (or indices if you so prefer), launched titles, designed and created reference works, redesigned magazines and journals, created web sites, and done a myriad other things in the realm of publishing.

And now, I’ve self-published my first novel.

I didn’t self-publish because the publishing process confuses, baffles, or overwhelms me. I don’t need a publisher to figure out discounting, rights retention, royalties, or the mechanics of publishing. I did it precisely because I understand the traditional publishing process, and I didn’t want it or need it. Not for a work of fiction, at any rate.

I’d been trying to write fiction off and on ever since high school, but university, work, family, and other interests made the efforts sporadic at best. A couple of years ago, I began writing yet another novel. Very quickly, I discovered the characters, plot devices, and time I needed for the work to really flow. Finally, in 2008, I finished my first complete novel, a mystery-thriller entitled, Spam & Eggs: A Johnny Denovo Mystery, which was published in February 2009 under the pen name Andrew Kent.

Because I liked the book so much, I decided to try the traditional publishing route for a few weeks to see if I could make a quick score, all the while lining everything up to begin self-publishing. It only took a little more evidence for me to decide to self-publish exclusively:

  1. There’s not much money in traditional publishing. Traditional publishing inserts layers of people between you and the customer, and each layer wants a cut. By the time you get your share, it’s a percentage of a percentage. And as far as having a bestseller or blockbuster goes, publishing through a major publisher increases your chances only slightly, by as little as 2%.

     

  2. Wanting a traditional publisher’s acceptance is probably even more vanity-driven than self-publishing (“Look at me! Harcourt accepted my manuscript!”). In fact, after separating the author from the commercial realities, vanity is largely the only thing left. Self-publishing is about really engaging the audience. There’s less vanity when you have skin in the game.

     

  3. Email has accelerated the submission and rejection game so much that neither agents nor authors are getting a true read on commercial opportunities this way. And, too often they’re looking for “the next [fill in the blank].”

     

  4. Even with a faster query process, it takes too long to get published through a traditional publisher. Authors have to wait anywhere from 2-7 years from an agent accepting them as a client to the publication of a first book — assuming a book emerges at all.

     

  5. New authors in this economy are low on the totem pole, especially for fiction titles. Agents and publishers want to bet on thoroughbreds. Few want to raise ponies.

     

  6. Old-fashioned consignment publishing is struggling. The economy has everyone in big, highly leveraged businesses (like consignment publishers) running scared.

     

  7. Amazon.com is the 700-pound gorilla in book sales these days. If it isn’t on Amazon, it has no commercial potential. Bookstores are only a piece of the puzzle.

     

  8. Even if a commercial publisher picks up your book, you’re still a small fish in a vast ocean, and the chances of success rest largely with you, yet with little chance of commensurate reward. And you close off important options a self-published author retains.

     

Read the rest of the post on the Self-Publishing Review.

Kent Anderson works in scholarly publishing, runs the blog The Scholarly Kitchen, and writes the Johnny Denovo Mysteries under the pen name Andrew Kent.

The Future of Book Publishing (Maybe)

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This piece, by David Nygren, originally appeared on his The Urban Elitist site on 12/08/08.

There are many people and blogs doing an obsessively thorough job thinking about and writing about the effects of e-books on publishing, so I’m not going to try to recreate their work.  But my recent posts on the Google Book Search controversy and the Amazon Kindle have gotten me thinking about what the book publishing world might look like in the not-too-distant future.  More specifically, I’ve been wondering if and how writers will get published and make money under whatever new model takes hold.

I suppose I’ll be making some predictions here, but this is more of [an] attempt to envision a viable future of book publishing that is better, although not perfect:

Print Is Dead Shrinking:  Some people think that true readers will always prefer a bound paper copy to hold, smell, fondle (the descriptive terms tend to get kind of gross).  These people are wrong.  Some others think that print books are dead, that they’re just going to go away.  These people are also wrong, I believe.

For now, for most people, print is to read, and electronic is to search and browse and discover.  But this will soon change.  E-book reader technology is at the point where it would be acceptable to most people.  All that is necessary is for the price of readers to come down (or perhaps they could be provided for free in return for an annual subscription to content) and for their use to permeate the culture (see my Amazon Kindle idea).  If the cost-savings and convenience are there, we might not have to wait for a generation or two to die off to get to this point.  It could happen nearly as quickly as digital music came to dominate, though I suspect it won’t happen quite that fast since the benefits are not as great for end users.

But print will still have its place, as it should.  Any person or organization that takes archiving seriously will see the value of print.  Yes, it can burn, drown, etc., but on acid-free paper a book’s perpetuity is almost certainly more assured than if it is simply data on server, hard drive or disc.  Apart from the conscious archivists, people may well continue to desire print copies of books that are meaningful to them.  Since no additional equipment is necessary, as with musical recordings on vinyl, and since people like to collect physical things, there will still be a market for print books.  We will have to pay more for them, however, and most books will printed on demand, so don’t expect to see stacks of every new title lying around in bookshops.

The print-on-demand copies, I’m guessing, will have kind of a generic look and feel to them, so I bet there will also be a small but significant market for beautifully printed, bound and designed books.  Again, expect to pay for it.

In summary, there will be more than one medium, but print will lose its dominance.

Mega Publishing Conglomerates Go Bye-Bye: Or at least they will look very different than they do today.  Their scale is not sustainable.  The partial implosion we saw in the publishing industry last week was just the beginning.  The profit margins that will come from publishing will not be great enough to satisfy shareholders who expect revenue growth of 7%+ annually.  No can do.

But there will still be major publishing houses that handle the superstars, the sure (as you can get) bets.  That is what they do best, after all.  But for the vast majority of readers, the big houses will not longer be the gatekeepers.  Good.

Everyone Will Be Published: Or at least anyone who wants to will easily be able to publish an e-book, just as anyone can now be published on a blog.  It will be no big deal, but also will not carry the stigma of self-publishing a print book.   Apart from writing content that people will want to read, the trick will be to get the book noticed and purchased and read.  So how might this happen?

Publishers and Authors Will Be Business Partners: It’s supposed to be that way now, but the relationship is rarely one of equals.  As Kassia Krozser wrote earlier this week at Booksquare, small independent publishers will rise from the ashes.  Each publisher will have a niche and a community of readers to whom it will know exactly how to market (yes, this is fantasy).  If they didn’t, authors would have no use for them since they will be able to publish an e-book themselves.  Tom Masters at Future Perfect Publishing has some interesting ideas about how authors and publishers might work together in this way.

Read the rest of the article on The Urban Elitist.