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?

One book to rule them all . . . .

Life-changing books, eh? Well, my first thought was to write about a book that has helped to shape my philosophy. The Tao of Pooh is a big stand-out in that regard, as is Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and the Truth About Reality. At the same time, though, those are both a little too overtly philosophical. They helped me refine my points of view, but didn't really expose me to anything too new. They just helped put words to things.

Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's illustrated Primer introduced me to more new ideas, and some that are particularly relevant to me now. I still go back to it often when I think of the possibilities for ebooks and ebook technology. Still, despite the new ideas it gave me, it didn't really change the way I think in any real way. It came along a little too late in my life for that.

When looking for a book that really shaped who I am today, a book that helped form my ideas of right and wrong and that helped me figure out the kind of life I wanted to lead and the sort of person I wanted to be; well, there was really only one possible book to write about: Frodo called it The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King, but we know it more simply as The Lord of the Rings. I first picked it up the summer between fourth and fifth grade, and I re-read it on at least a yearly basis; I know that by my junior year in high school I had read it ten times.

The discovery part was easy--my parents loved Tolkien. Not that they were horrendously geeky people, or obsessed, or anything (granted, their silver Volvo does still have the license plate SHDWFX, in tribute to Gandalf's horse--still, that was mostly my doing). They just really liked Tolkien's stories, and they passed that along to me.

The Lord of the Rings influenced my early life in so many ways; because I loved it, I read other fantasy, started playing role-playing games (yes, I was one of them), and regularly broke friends's fingers with broomstick swords. But those are the more superficial ways that it influenced my life, really.

From Aragorn, I learned to love the idea of travel, while Gandalf passed along a hunger to know the ancient roots of things. Frodo taught me the importance of trying your best, even in circumstances that are much, much bigger than you, while Sam showed me that all the complexities of life aren't really nearly as complex as we think they are. And from all the hobbits I learned that really, the important thing to remember most of the time is that life is good.

The lessons from The Lord of the Rings keep coming, on each re-read. I've learned the importance of honoring one's word, the value of mercy, and the sad truth that all things must change and nothing will ever again be as it was. The Lord of the Rings is the book that set me on the path that I'm on now; it shaped me. And I couldn't be happier about it.

Another reason for Ooligan to be excited

In thinking about the Ooligan website and what sort of redesign it's going to end up getting, it occurred to me that we might want to have a look at the websites of other publishing programs in the country. I knew that there was a publishing degree available at NYU; their flyers show up in the halls of PSU sometimes, and I actually got to chat with oneof their instructors at the conference I was at recently. I had a vague idea that there might be another one or two around, but exactly how many, I didn't really have any idea of.

Well, a bit of googling brought me seven US programs that at least claimed to be about publishing, and another two that claimed to be in the US despite addresses in Aberdeen, Scotland. In no particular order, those are:

• Columbia's Publishing Course. They bill themselves, apparently with pride, as being "the shortest graduate school in the country." It's six weeks long; you spend 3 on books, 2 on magazines, and one on "new media."
• NYU's MS in Publishing. This looks to be a more serious sort of program than Columbia's, though their list of courses makes me think the emphasis of the program is on publishing as a business--I would expect the people who come out of this program to want to be publishing executives in big companies, rather than the well-rounded publishing generalists that we tend to turn out at PSU.
  
• George Washington University's MPS in Publishing. This is a two-year program that, like NYU's program, has a very stron business emphasis; shockingly, they have no courses on editing on their curriculum, though at least they offer one on design.
• Emerson College's MA in Publishing and Writing. They claim to deliver "an overview of the publishing industry from writing and editing, through design, production, promotion, and distribution," and their course selection looks reasonable enough--they seem to offer most of the courses that we do here at Ooligan, with a fair few additional ones devoted to magazines.
• University of Denver must be having a competition with Columbia--they have a program called The Publishing Institute that beats out the Publishing Course by a third--that's right, their course is only four weeks long. 'Nuff said on that, I think.
• Pace University offers an MS in Publishing that also seems to have a fairly decent course selection--there are plenty of courses on editing and design, and like Emerson a fairly full selection of classes on magazine publishing. They also have a number of classes on technology in publishing.
• Harvard's Extension School offers a publishing certificate, but there don't seem to be too many classes offered that are publishing specific--in fact, it looks like there are two (Principles of Editing and Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext), and the rest of the courses are electives from various writing and journalism fields.

So, there are some other publishing programs out there, and some of them actually look like they're pretty decent. But none of them have what we have with Ooligan: A student-run press. Actually being able to work on books that are really going to be published in the real world is a huge thing. I can't say for sure, of course, but I would think that this gives those students who really take advantage of Ooligan a world of experience that students at other schools won't get.

So why should we be excited? Well, it seems to me that we're in a really good position. There is apparently a fair bit of interest in publishing--enough to support eight programs in the States, even if some of them last for weeks rather than years. And we have a lot of experience with teaching publishing by publishing; we're even going to be putting out a book about it soon. We have the chance to start a dialogue with all those other students and teachers of publishing, and we can use that conversation to expand our web of contacts, share a lot of information with the industry in general, and get ourselves some good name-recognition. There are lots of possibilities here, and I'm excited to try to grab some.

No, really, with lasers!

Well, I can't say that I've ever actually personally bought something because of an email campaign. I tend to not sign up for many mailings, and those mailings I do sign up for all go to my spam email address, so I look at them all at the same time, once every month or so. Usually I don't spend a lot of time going through stuff--I skim, seeing if there's anything of interest, and then I delete it all.

Well, except for this once. I had signed up some while previous for the ThinkGeek newsletter. For those not in the know, ThinkGeek is the home of the most awesomely amazing toys on the internet: You can get remote control helicopters, screaming monkey slingshots, T shirts that tell you when there's a wifi signal, and stuff designed exclusively to annoy your coworkers. It's a gadget geek's heaven.

So one late one winter, I was going through my spam email address, clearing stuff out, when I hit the ThinkGeek newsletter. I had just recently gotten off the phone with my parents, who were despairing of ever being able to find me a decent Christmas present, when lo and behold, what should I see but a really super-cool looking strategy board game. With lasers. I drooled for a while, read some reviews, saw what other people thought of the game. And I liked what I read. So, I sent a link off to my parents. A month and change later, and what should I discover under the tree but an Egyptian-themed laser-equipped board game?

And that's about the closest I've come to succumbing to email marketing.

Ebooks and DRM

One of the big topics at the TOC conference was Digital Rights Management (DRM) and how it should be applied to ebooks. DRM is technology that basically locks up a file to prevent unauthorized duplication. This sounds like it shouldn't be a big deal in theory--after all, most people out there would agree that unauthorized copying shouldn't be permitted--but when DRM is implemented, many problems become evident. One of the primary issues is that of transferability. Say you have a DRM program that prevents the file in question from being copied at all. This would certainly prevent unauthorized copies from being made, but it would also keep me from being able to move the file in question from my computer to a mobile device. Even more troubling, it would keep me from being able to transfer the file from my old mobile device to my new one, meaning that I would have to buy the file all over again on my new device.

Cory Doctorow delivered a keynote speech blasting DRM. He had a number of excellent points, but chief among them was the fact that using DRM takes the terms of the ebook out of the publisher's hands and puts them in the DRM providers hands. This can cause all sorts of problems, as it did when DRM provider Overdrive decided to pull its service from Fictionwise. While this did not mean that people lost all of their ebooks, as some have claimed, it did mean that purchasers could no longer download new copies of things they had already purchased--files could no longer be transferred, in effect. So if your old Sony Reader had been dropped in the swimming pool one time too many but you were holding off until the new version was available in your area, you lost the ability to access all the ebooks you had already bought.

The other problem with DRM is that users hate it. As Doctorow said many times, all it does is make people feel like it's okay to steal from you, because you're a jerk. This is the primary reason that the music industry has belatedly moved away from DRM. Publishing is moving more slowly, to a large degree because electronic formats are a new thing for us, but we seem as an industry to be following in the footsteps of the music industry, determined to repeat their mistakes.

The difficulty with moving away from DRM is that the distributors get involves. Amazon, for example, refuses to let ebooks be sold for the Kindle without DRM. Publishers are left with a bit of a dilemma, then: Hold fast to principles and be denied a major market, or throw up your hands and say "fine", and put DRM on your files?

On Email addresses

I went off to go backpacking around Ireland for what turned into a year or so in 1997, and I remember before I left having a conversation with my dad about how neat it would be if there was some sort of email service that you could access from anywhere on the internet, by just giving a user name and a password. I remember he said that he didn't think such a thing would work, because of the way that mail servers worked. Well, a month or two later, some Australians I ran into in a hostel told me about this great service called Hotmail. I still have that Hotmail address, and I'm proud to say that it doesn't have any numbers or opening and closing "xx"s (I've never understood that particular naming convention). Of course, over the years that address began to get more and more spam, and I've mostly retired it now. It's the email I use to sign up for things that require email addresses, but that's about all I use it for.

My primary email address today is a gmail one. I actually have two of them that I use reasonably frequently. One is my general purpose main email, and the other is one I use specifically for writing. It doesn't see a whole lot of use, but it gets some.

Coming to PSU has, of course, granted me another email, and then there's a Yahoo! one that I got just to sign up for a newsgroup, but I don't check either of those too often. The PSU email forwards to my main gmail account, while the Yahoo! one just gathers dust in the hall closet of the internet.

Forwarding of emails and gmail's excellent filtering and labeling system makes it quite easy to maintain multiple email addresses without the hassle of having to check them all all the time, though hotmail and some other web based email clients won't forward mail unless you have a paid account with them--a petty but probably fairly effective tactic to ensure that the people who get their email for free at least have to look at ads.

The (I would guess fairly common) phenomenon of having an email address specifically for signing up for things has interesting implications for online marketing: When we collect an email address, we have to ensure that we're going to provide content that is interesting enough to people that they will want to have it delivered to their primary email address, if possible. It's very likely that newsletters that get sent to the spam addresses just languish unread in the inbox until they are purged in a massive fit of "select all; delete." The hard part, of course, is generating that compelling content.

Publishers and online marketing

Only a few hours in, and already the last day of the 2009 TOC conference is proving quite thought-provoking. Two of the three keynote speeches this morning emphasized the role that publishers need to have in marketing books. Both Tim O'Reilly and Nick Bilton stressed that publishers need to have more to do with their authors' online marketing efforts--authors need to be helped. Increasingly, sales efforts are moving online, and that means that our marketing efforts need to as well. It is not fair or helpful to ourselves or our authors to ignore that side of marketing, or to leave it up to the authors.

The ramifications of that, of course, are that publishing needs people who know theind their way around the tech side of things, and can get things done. As O'Reilly said, you can't be satisfied with IT departments who will say "Well, I'll need a specification for that. . . ." Instead, you need the people who have the ability and the drive to build what's needed and to communicate with others to get things done.

O'Reilly also pointed out the profound importance of delving deeply into social networking. The long tail, he said, is a fact, but it's important to remember that there's a head as well. Every new meida develops a head, and it is a property of the head that those in it can drive traffic down the tail. If a publisher is to attract those who would otherwise just self-publish, one of the best ways to do so is to have a secure position in the head of many social networks. This enables the publisher to drive traffic to their authors.

That barely scratches the surface of what was said during the morning's keynotes of course, but there are more sessions coming up. More later.

XML, XML, and some XML

Whew, it was quite a day--a good one, but a long one, and I have to admit to a certain amount of brain overload. Lots of fascinating details about XML and how to use it in publishing. The idea of using geospatial tagging in ebooks to produce books that can give different content is a pretty cool one, and DAISY also seems like a really worthwhile sort of thing--I'm all in favor of putting content out there in formats that might make things easier for blind, dyslexic, or visually impaired people.

About time for me to turn in, though--going to be another long but good one tomorrow, and the next day.

Questions about giving it all away for free

Brian wrote up a pretty interesting post recently about how giving away your works for free can drive sales, and while I agree with that thesis for the most part, I do still have a doubt or two. Mostly, those doubts come from the fact that the people who you hear success stories from are generally already quite well known. Certainly, that was the case for Monty Python when they started giving away skits. It works quite well for Cory Doctorow as well, but he's fairly well known. I wonder how well it works, though, for those who don't have the luxury of preexisting fame.

The Monty Python case has another significant difference from publishers giving ebooks away, and that's that Monty Python was only posting individual skits, not whole episodes. Publishers could do something very similar by releasing only the first chapter or two of novels for free, a la Shortcovers (a site I've mentioned previously), but that may not drive sales the same way.

A final area of concern with giving away ebooks is that if Reader technology becomes so user-accepted that it becomes the dominant method for reading, won't releasing ebooks for free in order to drive print sales be fairly pointless? Granted, this will probably not happen in the near future, but it may happen sometime in the next 20 years or so. If it does, I think publishers will have some serious rethinking to do, and will essentially have to reinvent the industry. If I'm lucky, I'll get to be a part of that.

Possibilities for the Portland Red Guide

Ooligan Press published The Portland Red Guide almost two years ago, and it has proven to be a very popular book for us. In it, Michael Munk show takes readers on a tour of Portland's radical past. The book is organized like a travel guide book, with sites important to the leftist history of town clearly marked in well-designed maps that take readers on walking tours of Portland.

Books that give information are great to have in electronic format; in any reference work, the ability to search and find the information you need is paramount. Finding information, as Google can attest, is much easier when book are in electronic form. Imagine knowing that The Red Guide had an entry about the home of notable radical writer John Reed, but not being able to remember where the article was. The ability to search the book electronically makes finding this information much easier.

That is hardly the limits of the possibilities for ThePortland Red Guide, though. GPS technology is increasingly ubiquitous in handheld devices, including smart phones and ebook readers. Imagine a guidebook that knew where you were and could tell you what was nearby: "You are currently across the street from the site of Miss Caitlin's School for Girls." As ebooks become more and more popular, this sort of added electronic content will become more and more imporatnt. A revloution in reading is right around the corner. . . .

Anticipation!

So, I'm pretty excited about next week; I get to run off to New York to go to O'Reilly Media's Tools of Change for Publishing conference, which will run from February 9-11. I'm footing the bill myself, which is somewhat painful, but fortunately I have a good friend with a spare bedroom in Brooklyn (as hard as that is to believe), so at least I won't have to pay extortionate hotel rates. The conference looks like it should be a blast: some of my favorite authors/editors will be there giving talks, as will plenty of notables in the publishing community. There should be plenty of opportunity to try to figure out where our industry is going, and also to meet some neat people. Who knows, maybe I'll even be eble to get some leads on some post-graduation work!

There are a ton of courses available at the conference, and I still haven't entirely figured out what I'm going to be taking; some of them are no-brainers, but others--well, sometimes it's tough to figure out which is the one I most want. So far, it's looking like:

Introduction to XML for Publishers: Without a doubt. This one is key for me, since one of the things that I want to do in my time as Digital Content Manager is get Ooligan using XML.

XML in Practice: Formats, Tools, and Techniques: This is part two of the previous class.

The next morning, I'll be listening to Bob Stein, mostly just to pass some time. Don't tell him that though, okay?

Then comes Literature as a (Web) Service, which is right up my alley.

Cory Doctorow is next, and that should be great--he's a fantastic author and has some really interesting things to say about intellectual property.

The course on the Google book search program is pretty much mandatory for me, particularly as it's being given by a guy from Google who heads the Boston Book Search team.

After that, it's still more fun with Google, this time from a bit more of a publisher's perspective.

And then there's lunch.

For the next section, I'm a little torn between going to the course on The Rise of Ebooks or the one on Adobe's Digital Publishing tools. I'm leaning towards the former, as I'm worried the latter will mostly just be an infomercial, but we'll see.

There's a talk on how publishers can take advantage of mobile phones, then one that explores what the future will look like for publishers, and then the serious part of the day winds down with a reception. After that there are some informal roundtables and demos, and then it's back to bed in Brooklyn.

The final day starts with a selection of keynotes, and then faces me with another choice: a Survey of Current E-Readers or Unleashing the Power of the Unbound Book? I lean towards the latter, as the former seems more utilitarian than inspirational. Plus, I'm of the opinion that dedicated ebook readers will not be around for too long, anyway, which means the stuff I would learn would be more short-term than not.

Lessons from a Book's Simultaneous Publication in Print and on the Web is a hugely long title, but should still be a pretty interesting talk, so I'll be checking that out.

My next choice is between a talk about retaining traditional publishing values in ebooks and one about wikibooks that anyone can edit. This one is a bit of a stumper; maybe I'll flip a coin.

The final few classes are on success stories and failures in digital publishing, what you do with a site with massive readership, and a talk from the guy who started NaNoWriMo.

So yeah, that should be a pretty crazy few days. I'll post some updates from the conference about the awesome stuff I learn, so stay tuned!

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?