Perpetual projects and daily obsessions.
Hey, any of you folks remember those Storyballs we write all the time?
Well, someone figured out how to take the Fun Thing and turn it into the The Fun Thing Where You Get Paid.
Collaborative Creative Writing Community – StoryMash.
Go. Check it out. I’m going to.
Last week, I was interviewed by April over at Publetariat about the story I’m telling via Twitter. As one of the central touchstones for the indie publishing movement, she thought the whole idea of creating a story via Twitter — something that would really never transfer to paper in its original format — was interesting, and that’s where our conversation kind of started.
The interview went on for a bit, so it had to be broken into a couple parts, but part one is over here: Twitter As A New Medium In Authorship.
Because it went on a while (and because I’m unforgivably verbose when I get going) some bits had to be left on the cutting room floor, but I’m really happy with the thing as a whole, even if the transitions from one question to the next are a little herky-jerky, due to the necessities of editing.
One piece that makes me sound nearly intelligent:
I think it’s long past time that writers look at new mediums for their work. Paper is just a medium, and as our world (and the smaller publishing world within it) changes, it makes sense for writers to take a look at the tools around us and see if there aren’t some that we overlooked. Artists and sculptors do this sort of thing all the time; “Maybe I can paint on this building, maybe I can make something out of this old car… wait, even better: maybe I can paint on this building with this old car! Genius!” Tom Waits likes to go into hardware stores with a mallet and see what kind of sounds he can find.
What do storytellers use? Spoken words… and paper. That’s it. Very recently, people have considered the still hotly-contested idea of taking the-thing-that’s-on-the-paper and reproducing that exact same thing electronically, and that’s fine, but that isn’t storytelling intrinsically designed for the electronic medium – I mean so intrinsically designed for that medium that it doesn’t actually translate well back to paper or spoken words.
Maybe this story about Finnras is that kind of non-transferable thing – if so, I’m comfortable with that. It’s fun for me and for the people reading it.
The following sentence, which was cut for good reasons, but which I like: “People are trying to take things that were built in/for an electronic medium and force it ‘back’ into a paper format. I’m starting to think ‘maybe you can’t always do that, and maybe that’s okay.'”
Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and got me thinking about things which, frankly, I usually don’t. Parts 2 and 3 go up next week.
Piracy and changing distribution schema will not kill the publishing industry. Shortsighted infrastructure-protection on the part of publishing houses will.
So speaks Susan Piver in an article in which she implores publishers not to make all the same mistakes as the music biz.
What offed the music business—and what the publishing industry is facing—is a corporate structure built to churn out hits […]. Rather than developing artists, exploiting regional marketplaces, and building financial models that can support a mid-range list, both industries sold […] out to entertainment at the expense of art and expression. Both are in the business of selling many copies of a few items, not a few copies of many items—the kind of product that can be shot out of a cannon, dominate the retail market, and then basically disappear—because anything else is simply too complicated for a similarly bulked up corporate retail environment to track. The appearance of downloads and file sharing could almost be seen as a desperate measure on the part of consumers to listen and read in an un-mandated manner.
Figuring out how to change the way bookselling works — to adapt it to the way that consumers clearly want it to work — that is the thing that publishers need to work on. Not the best way to embed DRM in ebooks and audiobooks (hint: there is no best way – the very best DRM is stuff you’re borrowing from the music industry – stuff that was already hacked two days before it was ever released). Not teacup-sized storms over Kindle2 text-to-speech capability. Those are the sorts of things that the recording industry has gotten their privates in a twist over for the last decade, and look where it’s gotten them. More to the point; look where it hasn’t.
My guess is that in 2-5 years we’ll see a publishing industry that looks like the music business does today: Super-downsized major companies selling a product line aimed at an older demographic and a jillion new companies creating the next generation of publishers, retailers, and readers. Just like in the music business, some in publishing will be mourning the death of the business while others will be wildly excited because all they see is opportunity.
Personally, I don’t think it’s going to take that long; I think it’s happening right now. There are lots of ’boutique’ (read: “small, specialized”) literary agencies out there — the technology exists today that will allow the proliferation of boutique publishers (I emphasize ‘proliferation’, because they already exist in small numbers).
You know what has recently excited me as a reader and a creator?
And if one stops by to thank me for a link, and another sends me a private message with a link to Susan Piver’s article so that I can rant about the publishing industry when maybe it’s not very easy for them to do so, and a third wants to interview me about the flash-fiction I’m writing on Twitter, and a fourth sends me a “You can do eeet!” when I bitch about another round of revisions on Hidden Things…
That’s a community; the place where writing started, and where it’s coming back to – despite the ‘industry’s’ best/worst efforts.
I’m not prognosticating, guys. Look around; you can watch it happening.
Read an E-Book Week – Environmental Impact of E-books.
Lots of research with inconclusive results — still, interesting read, and a fine kick off to Read an E-book Week.
Here’s a little story for you.
A few years ago, I found out a friend of mine had written a book. A real-life book!
I was going to meet this person face to face, so I bought their book off Amazon, squirreled it away in my bookshelf, and when we met, I asked them to sign it.
The thing that was odd to me at the time was that this person seemed — almost embarrassed by my grinning enthusiasm. When I asked, they finally said “I just did it through a vanity press – it’s not from a real publisher.”, or words to that effect.
Now, to be fair, they work in publishing, so that sort of thing mattered significantly to them. (I shouldn’t use the past tense — I’m sure it still matters.) But me? I’m basically a consumer; I don’t know the publishing industry – I only know reading.
I’m closer to the publishing world than I used to be — married into it, you might say — but even so, I hardly ever hear the term ‘vanity press’ anymore, at least not in reference to reputable businesses like lulu.com. That’s partly because of the indie gaming industry and how it works, but also because I think people are starting to feel a shift coming in the traditional publishing world. Either way, I tend to look at the whole thing from the point of view of an outsider, and this is what I see with my outsider eyes:
Only people in publishing care how a book is published. The “POD” label is invisible to the consumer; they’re just looking for a good book.
This is a true statement. I know it, because I’ve been the consumer who bought a book and didn’t know (or care) that it was from a POD press until someone told me. It just doesn’t matter.
Is it a good or a bad book? That matters. Publishers, editors, and agents provide a filtration system that helps improve the quality of the products they (eventually) produce; it’s fair to say that the traditional publishing method filters out a lot of crap.
But it’s not the only way such things can happen.
Over on the Writers Digest website, someone named Jane writes a series called There Are No Rules.
Her most recent post is “My Big Rant on Self-Publishing”. It starts out like this:
I can’t tell you how tired I am of hearing people bash self-publishing. The things I hear usually fall into two categories:
- Most self-published books aren’t quality
- Some self-publishing services are unethical
If you agree with one of the above statements, let me lay it out real clear for you: The landscape is changing, and if you haven’t noticed, you’re behind the times.
Now, before you dismiss this as yet-another rant from yet-another scheming self-publishing ne’er-do-well, I should point out that this particular “Jane” is Jane Friedman. Jane Friedman was the President and Chief Executive Officer of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, one of the world’s leading English-language publishers, for eleven years. She came to HarperCollins from Random House, where she was the Executive Vice President of Random House, Inc., Executive Vice President of the Knopf Publishing Group, Publisher of Vintage Books, and founder and President of Random House Audio Publishing.
It’s fair to say she knows a few things about the publishing industry as it exists today. When someone like that talks about what’s true about publishing today, I feel fairly safe believing them.
In her post, she writes:
- Distribution models are changing. With advancements in technology, and the power now within an average writer’s hands, it’s not necessary to have physical bookstore distribution to achieve success.
- Traditional publishers now rely on authors to do the marketing and promotion.
- Communities will decide what books are worthwhile.
And I think “this sounds really familiar to me. Where have I seen this before?”
Oh yeah: the indie game industry.
Once upon a time, there were about a half-dozen major game companies who published their games, and about the only way you could ‘make it’ in the industry was by writing for those games and getting published by those companies. You might see the rare, rare bird out there — some guy who’d written his own game that got a little bit of play in his local cons and had some support, but that was damned uncommon, and the products that the guy turned out were obviously substandard to the quality of the products produced by the big boys.
Then came the internet. With it (and usenet) you had a flurry of homebrew games and creations that actually got farther than your home. Some of the early and long-time successes from that time were games like FUDGE (with a still-bustling community almost two decades after it showed up on usenet, and at least two major spinoff games that have themselves created spinoffs), RISUS, and Sorcerer (notable for not being in all-caps, I guess).
Still most of these internet-distributed games were just that – internet distributed. Nothing but bits and bytes. There was no final product; no book to hold in your hand.
Then the guy behind Sorcerer (who I believe had experience in publishing through his academic background) printed real live copies of the ‘final’ version of his game. High-quality copies. Copies that were easily as good as any other book you’d see in your local gaming store. That the game itself was good was more important, but the big deal was “holy crap, someone outside the Big Boys made a book, and sold it, and made it work, and has a big group of people playing it and reading it. HOW CAN WE DO THIS?
And the answer at the time was “well, you can’t – not easily – but it can be done, and until then, you can sell PDFs of your games for cheap.”
And then, very slowly (to the indie gaming industry, that is — where lifespans are measured in dog-years and evolution occurs at a rate not seen outside a mad scientist’s lab in the basement of a nuclear reactor), the self-publishing industry started to catch up to what the indie game designers wanted to do, and they could make their own games and print them and SELL THEM TO PEOPLE OH MY GOD.
There was a glut of publication, let me tell you.
Maybe one in every ten games that came out were good. The rest were crap and died a quick, possibly painful, and justified death. There was a lot of recrimination on the boards that supported the indie-game publishing effort (indie-rpgs.com and story-games.com), along the lines of “why did you release this when it wasn’t more than half-baked?” and “we need some quality control up in here, or we’re going to become a laughingstock”.
And that has happened, and the products you can get today are better and better – the crap-to-quality ratio moving into a favorable zone with every day.
Here’s what it looks like today:
That’s where indie publishing is going. That’s where (and how) it will succeed.
Does such a community already exist? Maybe. Publetariat has a forum. I plan to check it out. Maybe it already is what it needs to be.
Maybe it can evolve.
My Twitter page is drowning under a tweetstorm of posts from people at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. It’s really amazing how, with so many people posting snippets from each talk, you can actually get a three-dimensional (if patchwork) image of what each talk covered, and the messages.
Let me tell you, it’s some fascinating stuff – makes me wish I was there. Here’s some of the best bits I’ve gleaned, either paraphrased or as direct quotes from twitter.
On publishing
So far, in the various sessions at the conference, two messages about publishing in the digital age are coming through loud and clear.
While these concepts are new and difficult for mainstream publishers, indie or indie-ideal authors [Doctorow, Scalzi] and small imprints have embraced them from the start – often without even realizing they were doing something revolutionary. Big publishers now have something to learn from the independent, publishing writer.
“What can publishers do for writers who are better at the web than them?” (And don’t say “a listing in catalogs for chain stores”, because… upping the book price to cover the cost of getting a book listed with stores that represent less than a third of book sales, and whose share continues to dwindle? Not a selling point.)
“Media that doesn’t die can still dwindle — Opera relies on rich weirdos, not cultural relevance/commercial viability.”
Re: eBooks: “Paper is just a device.” That might bend some people’s minds, since it’s assumed as a publishing basis for so long. The horse was a “device” too.
“Best way to predict the future is to imagine that the thing you can’t live without will stop existing and prove to have been unimportant.” (Read that in terms of the current-and-perpetual publishing industry.)
“Free books enable the market for paid books.”
“The more you restrict the ability to transform an ebook (thanks to DRM – did you know that reading an ebook from your iPhone to your kid while walking through the grocery store is actually illegal?), the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a tree-book. E-books fail on those axes.”
People want to configure their personal culture. Making a priori assumptions about reading habits will cost you customers.
You know where 30% of reading occurs? In bed. [[Personal bitch: given that information, why doesn’t Kindle have a backlight?]]
On Creating your Work Today
Down economies are golden ages for bohemia as creatives are released from the rat race and make art instead.
“Don’t just blog, do something more sophisticated with all of your content.”
The value of a web-site is orthogonal to its value as commercially-prepared info. Its real worth is dependent on its social characteristics.
“To double your success, triple your failures.”
Publetariat: It’s time the word “indie” carry the same street cred for book authors as it does for indie musicians, [me: “gamers”], and filmmakers.
One of the most repeated tweets regarding TOC had to do with the representatives from Audible.com getting up and walking out on Cory Doctorow’s anti-DRM presentation. (Note: this didn’t actually happen. :)
The heart of the message from that presentation:
“‘Doctorow’s Law’: if somebody puts a lock on something you own and doesn’t give you the key, it’s not to your benefit.”
People will pay for content, provided you don’t make the case that buying content opens you up to having it taken away later by DRM.
There’s tons and tons more stuff coming out from ToC, but that’s what snagged my brain this morning.
Publetariat points out the absence of the emperor’s clothes in this post:
Do you remember precisely when you stopped going to chain music stores like Musicland and Tower Records, and why? For me, a music fan with eclectic tastes, most often looking for artists not represented on Billboard’s charts, the birth of online retailer CDNow (later absorbed by Amazon) was the beginning of the end. No brick-and-mortar store could hope to match CDNow’s selection or prices, and if I wanted something really obscure, I knew I’d sooner find it at an indie/used record store than a chain store. For people seeking chart-toppers, the widening selection of music available at discount stores, big box stores and warehouse clubs like Target, Best Buy and CostCo sounded the music chains’ first death knell.
Hmm… that sounds… familiar, somehow…
Compare the death of an entire [music store] industry to chain bookstores’ current situation. Greater selection of books can be had online, at lower prices? Check. Bestsellers, gift books and discount books can be bought more conveniently at other stores, for lower prices? Check. Obscure and out-of-print books can only be found online, or in indie/used bookstores? Check. Attempts are being made [in the chain bookseller stores] to diversify product mix by introducing DVDs, CDs, toys and other products, but none of these products are being offered at lower prices or in a wider selection than through other, pre-existing retail outlets? Check.
Yeah. When was the last time you were in a Borders or Barnes and Noble? I can’t remember either.