Publishers on the web

I think the misguided focus of most publishers' websites is due to people still, even 15 years after the rise of web commerce, not really understanding how to use the internet. It doesn't fit neatly into the business models that people are used to, which means that the web becomes the problem of someone who's mostly worried about other things. I imagine the general train of thought is essentially that the web is probably not the responsibility of editing, or acquisitions, or even design, and it's surely not accounting's problem, and since it deals with communication and ads and things, we might as well just make it marketing's problem. Marketing grudgingly accepts this responsibility, shrugs, and move on, doing the same sorts of things online that they do offline: trying to sell books. They look around and see that pretty much everyone else is doing the same type of thing, and they look at Amazon and see how much potential for profit there is in connecting directly to readers, and they think "Well, that must be what we need to do." So they carry on trying to sell books online.

The problem, of course, is that people don't go to publisher's websites to buy books. I have never bought a book from a publisher's website, and as a student getting a master's degree in publishing I'm probably far more likely to do so than a member of the general public. Before I started the publishing program here at PSU, the only reason I had been to any publishers' websites was to look at submission guidelines. Since then, with one exception, it has been to evaluate the websites of other publishing companies. That one exception? Tor.com, which I visit frequently for their articles. Nevermind that that's not Tor's actual website--the point is, it's the closest thing to a publisher's website that I visit on anything resembling a regular basis. And while a lot of the site could be construed as advertising, since it mentions lots of books, and in particular Tor books, it's not actually too common to find links to places where you can buy those books.

To me, this illustrates that direct-to-consumer sales are not likely to work out for publishers. People just don't go to publisher websites to buy books, and it's doubtful that they ever will. Perhaps if a consortium of publishers banded together and built a website that would distribute orders from customers to the appropriate publisher, it would work--but setting up that sort of thing would take a massive outlay of capital, something that is in disturbingly short supply right now. In addition, it may not work out to be worth it. In order to attract customers, after all, such a website would have to offer prices at or below those of Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and Borders, for however much longer they're around), and Amazon has the available funds and the willingness to operate at a loss for years--something that most publishers probably can't manage.

Ebooks are a slightly different matter, in that there's no appreciable distribution cost, and no reason to not sell them through the website. That being said, people are still going to go to a wider distribution center when they try to buy things. That's why malls work--people want to go one place where they can get a huge variety of things, not one tiny little store that sells one or two types of things.

The way for publishers to get readers to order from them directly is to offer something that they can't get through a retailer--some facet of production that the retailer can't offer or do anything about. Customizable POD books might do the trick--you order a book to certain specifications, and it gets printed up and shipped off to you. Maybe you want a certain weight of paper, or your eyes are going so you want to order the whole thing set in 14 point, or you want it in hardcover, in a slipcase, bound in purple silk (Which reminds me, I did actually visit a publisher's website once; it was to pick out a Christmas present. Sadly, the company in question appears to no longer be, or at least to no longer have a web site. So perhaps the deluxe edition business isn't all it's cracked up to be).

Consequences of RSS feeds

One of the most challenging things about new technology is having to adapt to it and not being able to predict how it will influence things. I'm particularly interested in RSS feeds in this regard. Feeds are great, because they make it really easy to check a number of blogs that you're interested in, without having to actually go to the site in question to check to see if there's new content. It's incredibly convenient; I subscribe to almost 30 feeds, some of which are only updated once or twice a week, and others that give me 30+ new articles a day. That's great for site owners, because it means that they know there are people regularly reading the stuff they write.

That being said, it's also a challenge, because it means that those people aren't seeing the site itself--they're just getting the posts. Your site design, at that point, becomes more or less meaningless, as it's not being seen. All that people see is what you write, in whatever format their RSS reader shows it to them. In many ways, this reinforces the old web truisim that "content is king," because the only thing that matters in an RSS feed situation is how often you put out new content and how good it is--if it's subpar content, people will quickly unsubscribe.

Ad revenue can also be hurt by RSS feeds--if nobody is coming to your site, they aren't seeing the ads that could conceivably bring in revenue through pay-per-click programs like google's.

RSS feeds are by no means new; according to wikipedia they've been around for about ten years, but they've only really become popular in the last four or five. Clearly, they haven't had enough of an impact to make web design or site ads obsolete, but it's certainly something worth thinking about. When you're writing something for a blog or website with RSS enabled, many of the people reading your posts--and in particular those who are most interested in your posts, who have taken the time to subscribe--will not be seeing your post on your site, with all the bells and whistles you've added there. The moral seems to be: Make sure that everything you write on your blog can stand on its own.

On Amazon

The growing dominance of Amazon in the bookselling and publishing world is bound to have an impact on the world of books, but that impact will be different for different sectors of the industry. Bookstores will be the hardest hit by the competition with the internet giant; Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Books a Million are all down in sales for the holiday season, while Amazon is doing fine. This trend will probably continue, at least as long as our current economic woes do. Amazon tends to be cheaper than any of the big box stores, even if you end up having to pay for shipping, which makes it the more economical choice. A big part of a physical bookstore's appeal is the ease of browsing around through the shelves and finding little treasures that you didn't know you were looking for, and that kind of browsing is something that people in an economic crunch will be less likely to do. For the bookstores, then, Amazon is a real problem.

I don't see Amazon as much of a direct threat to publishers. BookSurge is not a particularly attractive way to publish a POD book from a money-minded point of view; LightningSource is much more flexible and offers much better price points. For the self-publishers, there are plenty of other options, like Lulu, which offer terms at least as good as Amazon's. Even if Amazon offered the best terms for self-publishing, though, I don't think the large publishing houses would be that heavily impacted; there is a prestige to having a book accepted by a major publishing house, and that is part of the reason authors are reluctant to self-publish.

The ease of self-publishing in general (rather than Amazon in particular) will have consequences for smaller publishers. Much of what authors go to small publishers for--the book design, developmental and line edits--is widely available through freelancers. The one thing remaining that an author wants is marketing for their books, and small presses, I'm sure we can all agree, do not have the marketing clout of a place like HarperCollins. I would not be surprised at all to see more and more authors, particularly of regional interest books, opting to self-publish instead of going through a small publisher.

In the ebook arena, I think there is not much to worry about from Amazon. Their Kindle made a big splash when it came out, but many people are becoming disenchanted with it. The reason for that is one that I touched on briefly elsewhere: People do not want to have a half dozen gadget to carry around all the time. They want one thing, or perhaps two. We've seen this desire reflected clearly in the trend of cell phones becoming much, much more than just phones, and as more and more people get smart phones, more and more ebook traffic will go in that direction. If the iPhone remains the dominant smart phone on the market, we might have to start worrying about the impact they will have on what we read; they've already made it clear that they have no problems being ebook censors.

A look at Shortcovers.com

While poking around O'Reilly's TOC blog, I came across a review of a pretty interesting new site. Or service. Product, maybe? It's called Shortcovers, and it's from the people at Indigo Books and Music, a large Canadian retailer. Essentially, it's an iPhone app (though one would assume that they will also be looking into making their service available for other smart phones) that combines the content delivery of a iTunes with the community orientation of a site like goodreads. When the site goes live next month (their iPhone app is still making its way through Apple's approval process), after getting the app you will be able to download the first chapter of any number of books for free. Chapters beyond the first will be available for a fairly low price--about 99 cents. As Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal points out, that will be a real boon for people looking for just part of a travel book or a business book. You will also be able to buy the whole book through Shortcovers, or even order the print book along with (and often bundled with) the eBook. eBooks bought through Shortcovers will typically sell for about half the publisher's list price, according to Mossberg.

In addition to buying eBooks, people will be able to use Shortcovers to recommend books, talk about them with their friends, rate them, and even make "mixes" of chapters of different books and upload their own writing. It's this community focus that intrigues me most about Shortcovers. People like to talk about the books that they like, and combining book selling with discussion groups seems like a very sharp move. A community of readers who chat with each other and refer books around is exactly the sort of thing that anyone in the book business should be happy to see, and I'm guessing that Shortcovers will do well because of it.

A look at some publisher websites

Like Brent, I started my publisher website tour over at Tor books. Tor's site is great, so much so that I've subscribed to it so I can be sure to catch all the great stuff they put out. They put out loads of content for a few different audiences, though all of those audiences are drawn from a fairly narrow selection of fantasy/sci-fi enthusiasts. One of their key virtues is that they have recognized that just because they publish books doesn't mean they should ignore other forms of the same genre, so they give plenty of news about movies and TV shows that readers of their books might like. They also provide links to those interested in more technical aspects of publishing, such as cover design. They produce somewhere around a half-dozen posts a day, so plenty of content. They have a variety of writers, from Tor employees to well-known authors. In many ways, they seem to be following the model of BoingBoing by having a number of authors and a pop-culture focus. In all, tor makes it quite clear that the focus of their site is on the web-literate sci-fi/fantasy afficionado, and they do a good job of delivering content that will keep those people returning to (or at least subscribed to) their site.

There are other sites that try to do the same sort of thing--Baen has a website that focuses on readers and potential writers, even going so far as to offer short story critiques that occasionally lead to sales in their forums, but the site feels horribly outdated--it looks like a relic of the late 90s, and is not terribly user-friendly. Del Rey's website is more modern looking, but without any of the content that makes Tor so appealing. At least both of these sites have a strong focus, probably because they are genre imprints.

Probably the worst publisher's website I visited, both in terms of design and of focus, was Penguin books' site. for starters, you have to click in two different places to even get to their main site--once to select a country, and once to tell them if you want to remember the country information you just selected. When you get to the website, it's a jumble--there are ads for vampire TV tie-ins, diet books, penguin classics, and current event-related titles right next to each other. They do seem at least to be addressing their readers primarily, but they don't seem to have a clear view of who those readers are, which seems like a major downfall to me (especially as they seem to be trying to be cutting-edge and Web 2.0, which means community, which is hard to get if you can't quite work out who you're meant to be communing with).

Just a little bit of goodness from MacMillan, via the fine folks at BoingBoing. They do a good job of demystifying the publishing process.

So I've been thinking a bit lately about fantasy and sci fi and how they differ--particularly about the kinds of stories they allow us to tell and the kinds of things they allow us to talk about. On the surface, they're both pretty similar forms; they aren't particularly connected with the "real" world, and there are all sorts of strange new things. There are those who will argue that the difference is that sci fi is based in reality and is just an extrapolation of what we already know, while fantasy is purely imaginary and not based on anything in particular. I would disagree, though--fantasy has just as much internal logic as sci fi does, and sci fi has just as much imagination as fantasy does.

The difference, I think, is that sci fi settings seem more real to us, while fantasy settings seem more fairy-tale-esque. It is the seeming that is the important part, after all; how stories affect us is all about our perception of them. The interesting thing about this difference is that it means that we can discuss different kinds of things with a sci fi story than we can with a fantasy story--or at least that fantasy is more natrually predisposed to talk about some things, while sci fi is about others.

Because we see sci fi as more rooted in reality, it is easier to project the actual occurences of a sci fi story into our world. This makes it easier to talk about politics and social issues through sci fi than through fantasy. Fantasy, on the other hand, seems to be less rooted in reality and more rooted in fairy tales, dreams, and myths. This makes it a bit easier to tell stories about how individuals should live, stories that are guides for the self.

It seems to come down, then, to self vs. society. Fantasy is well suited to telling stories about the self and personal growth and discovery, while sci fi is well suited to hammering out suggestions of how we can all live as people. Certainly, there are a number of exceptions to this general idea, but I think it holds true for the most part. Any opinions out there?