Moving notice!

Well, the Online Marketing class I was in at PSU's graduate program in publishing is all done, so I'm moving my blogging efforts back over to my personal blog. Feel free to stop on over and check it out, or if you prefer just mainline it right away with an RSS feed. If you've been following along at this blog, you'll probably see some familiar posts in the archives--but there are others, too. Check 'em out!

The Fallacy of "Nimbleness"

It seems like an accepted truism that small publishers are more nimble and quicker to adapt to change than large publishing houses, probably on the basis of all the layers of bureaucracy that a large publishing house has to claw through in order to change the status quo. When analyzing a publishing house in terms of content, this is probably the case; a smaller editorial staff means that there are less people to object to an "experimental" book.

I would have to disagree, though, with all the people out there who say that the nimbleness of small publishers makes them ideally situated to take advantage of the possibilities of ebooks. The problem here is that we aren't talking about new content--we're talking about new delivery channels. These new delivery channels require some technical expertise to be able to work effectively with, let alone imaginatively. And that requires staff whose jobs are to check out new technologies and see how to do stuff with them; in short, it requires a research and development team.

Most small publishers that I know of barely scrape by. They make enough to pay the bills, pay themselves, and have enough left over to get started on another book or two, but that's about it. There's no money to fund research in a small publisher. I would guess that most small publishers out there don't even have the money for an IT staff. What this means is that small publishers, by and large, are not the ones who are doing exciting new things with technology. Sure, there are some exceptions, but most of the innovative uses of technology are going to come from the big houses. Small presses who don't have the technical know-how to develop new solutions on their own are going to follow the lead of the big houses.

If any publishers are nimble in regards to innovative uses of technology, it's the mid-size to large houses; they're the ones who have the staff to explore new options. It's certainly quite possible for a small press to take advantage of digital technology and ebooks to do something really fascinating and new, but I would argue that most small publishers don't have the resources to do so. Small publishers may be more organizationally nimble, but that nimbleness doesn't do much good wthout resources, either in the form of cash or in the form of on-board knowledge about digital technologies. If small publishers want to take advantage of their nimbleness, they need to acquire the knowledge to do so; they need to study online technologies, learn XML, maybe some basic web design, and try to understand what sorts of things are possible in this brave new world of digital publishing and what sort of things aren't.

The future of publishing is a big thing to speculate about; there's a lot of change happening in a lot of different directions. There are the purely technological changes, like new ebook readers coming out; the business changes, like corporations buying up each other; and there are the distribution changes, like distributors providing content for new devices. Then on top of those, there are the social changes--how people interact with books, and with each other when they read books. Things will certainly change in the next ten years or so, and those changes will be largely in ways that we can't predict now. There are too many variables to be able to predict with any degree of certainty how things will look.

That being said, if I had to take a guess, it would be that:

• Reading ebooks will become more and more popular, for many different reasons. Devices will become cheaper, prices of files will drop, people will be drawn to the social aspects of online reading; all these things will conspire to make income from ebooks the lion's share of revenue for most publishers.
• Print books will increase in price faster than they have been, and paperbacks will slowly start to die off as ebooks take their place. Eventually, mass market books will be put out entirely in ebook form. Printed books will become something you buy for books you really like--deluxe editions.
• Self publishing will become more common, as people find it easier and easier to get in touch with freelance editors and designers online, and then to sell their ebooks through a digital storefront like Amazon or Fictionwise.
• Small general trade publishers will struggle. The large houses will continue to attract the bulk of submissions, due mostly to their sales and marketing forces. Smaller houses, with their corresponding smaller marketing reach, will have to work hard to justify their existence.
• Small niche publishers will do quite well, as long as they are prepared to take advantage of the internet and the ease of communication the digital world brings. Niche markets will become increasingly important, and publishers who are seen to be responsible members of niche communities will derive great benefits from that.
• Big chain bookstores will falter. As ebooks become more and more common, people will have less and less interest in browsing through a warehouse store, when they could as easily do a quick search fr a particular topic or learn about a cool new title from friends on a social network.
• Independent, niche bookstores will rise from the ashes. As niches and micro-communities become more important, smaller stores that cater specifically to those niches will proliferate.

I'm sure this will be a post to look back on and laugh about in ten years or so; just about all predictions of the future are, after all. Still, it's worth thinking about.

On repurposing fiction

I"ve been thinking quite a bit lately about different ways to repurpose content. This has come mostly from my delving into the wide world of XML, which is a great thing for publishers to look into, assuming there is some repurposing of content to be done. If you have a properly tagged XML document, it becomes very easy to recycle parts of it, or restructure the whole thing, or just generally mess about with it in new ways. This is great for publishers because as long as you have the electronic rights, you've already got the content.

Repurposing is fairly straightforward for some classes of books: A travel guide, for example, could be pretty easily repurposed into a mobile-based geospatially aware application that could tell you what's across the street from you. Cookbooks, similarly, can become databases that are easily sortable by ingredients, or serving size, or appliances needed, or whatever. Textbook-type nonfiction, where each chapter is a more or less discrete unit, can even be segmented and used in anthologies or as journal articles.

Fiction, it seems to me, is the tricky part. What sort of repurposing can be done with a novel? Certainly, there is some room for customization--one of the vendors at TOC did exactly that, and would sell you a copy of a book for a friend with your friend's name used in the text of the book, or printed on the dedication page. But other than that, I'm at a bit of a loss. I think there's got to be a fascinating way that fiction can take advantage of geospatial recognition to build stories that go different ways depending on where you are, or perhaps on how many other people around you are also reading the same book, but I haven't been able to figure any of them out yet. Any thoughts?