Bait 'n' Beer

As I wrote in my previous post (www.baitnbeer.com/content/welcome-back-my-friends-show-never-ends) I've grown increasingly weary this summer with the conversation about the Future of Publishing. Honestly, I don't think Seth Godin's recent announcement (sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/08/moving-on.html) is either interesting or relevant to more than a handful of authors. Nor do I care particularly about the Wylie-Random House detente (www.dailyfinance.com/story/company-news/random-house-andrew-wylie-backlist-ebook-amazon-kindle-rights-deal/19607446/) since a deal was always inevitable, given their mutual reliance. And apparently, several more sectors of the industry, more devices, and another format or two have been declared kaput since my last outing here. Yawn.
 
While all these (and more!) were being discussed and debated to death, I've spent a lot more time reading and it reminds me that this entire business and all its travails are simply a means to the important end of getting great books in front of readers. To that end, I'm using my space today to recommend a title that I read in one sitting yesterday and which struck my sensibilities more than any debut novel I've read in years.
 
A week or so ago, Greg Michalson (Co-Publisher, along with my good friend and music/spiritual advisor, Fred Ramey) at Unbridled Books (unbridledbooks.com/) was kind enough to send me a galley of Peter Geye's Safe From the Sea, with an extraordinary personal note praising the book (to be released in October). As soon as I completed a couple of unfinished books on my nightstand, I picked up Geye's novel and never put it down.
 
The book's story is one of reconciliation between a long-estranged father and son, with a back-story of a shipwreck tragedy on Lake Superior that was the defining event in the father's life and which became, as a result, the defining event in his family members' lives. I won't spoil the tale but will say that the pacing and narrative of both stories unfold nearly perfectly, building to the reconciliation and conclusion in the most marvelous way. In addition, Geye captures the unique "up north" Minnesota culture and experience, and the voices of those who live and work there with perfect pitch and an uncommon eye for detail that allows even those who've never visited there to feel as if they are, in fact, experiencing the place. He writes tautly, but he omits none of the essentials. It's a fine mix.
 
Those of you who know me are aware that I seldom gush over anything, but allow me to gush over this fine literary novel. I hesitate to use that term since (a) for some, it implies the preciousness or elitism along the lines of the current Franzen-Stein masturbatory frenzy and (b) this book has all the adventure and excitement of a Jack London story, which I'd hardly characterize as exclusively literary. But the writing and the stories are masterful, the characters (and I include the Lake as a character) are as fully drawn as in the most literary of novels. It's a stunning debut from a Minneapolis native.
 
I urge you to get your own digital galley at NetGalley (www.netgalley.com/) and/or to pre-order a copy from Unbridled's website or from your favorite indie, chain or online bookseller. I also understand that Geye will be at both the Midwest Booksellers Association and the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association fall shows. This book and this author deserve a wide audience. When you've read it, I think you'll agree and join me in evangelizing its merits. I'm not shilling for Unbridled (they're very capable shills themselves) but I plan to talk this up to everyone I know.
 
Now we can go back to arguing about which part of the book business is dead. (It sure as hell isn't the reading part.)
 

Within the past week we have learned many things, among them these:
 

• The physical book will be dead in five years (techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/physical-book-dead/),
• That a new e-reader/social platform will "Challenge Amazon" (mashable.com/2010/08/03/copia/) and "rewrite the whole reading experience" (www.thecopia.com/about.html), and that
• Barnes and Noble is facing its 'final chapter' (www.economist.com/node/16749054).

Wow. Everything is spinning out of control. Or not.
 
Now I understand the value of a scare headline, a provocative lede, and the use of hyperbole to instigate debate (or attract eyeballs) And those cited above aren't even the most egregious...just some that popped up recently. Heck, .I've been known to lob in the occasional incendiary headline or comment myself. But I have to say the breathless nature of the conversation about every event -- even the most insignificant -- in the world of books and publishing has reached a point where it's just becoming tiresome.
 
Tipping points exist and will come in segments and categories, but by and large, the transformation of publishing from print to digital is and will be incremental and evolutionary rather than sudden and revolutionary.There are too many tools, systems and institutions in place, too many dollars invested, and too much inertia for things to move as rapidly as some predict or desire.
 
That's not to say the shift won't come...it's definitely coming....but it won't be wholesale or overnight. I remember being told we'd 'soon' have a paperless office when I took my first job out of college in 1975. I still see paper. I even see people printing and filing their emails.
 
The hyperbolic predictions and bombastic punditry will always be with us. The trick for people and companies trying to navigate through this time of change is to sort fact-based opinion and observation from uninformed assumptions and agenda-biased commentary.
 
 
 
 

It's summer and the always inward-looking, gossip-loving book biz is well into one of its periodic silly seasons. Others have written at greater length about most of these topics, but just a few thoughts on some of the events in the publishing world over the past week or two.
 

• L'affaire Wylie is but the latest in a series of the inevitable kerfluffles that will rear their heads with increasing frequency as the shift to digital becomes more pronounced. As I've said before, these fights are healthy as they help us sort out the very real issues that arise as we all enter uncharted territory. What's not particularly healthy is the hysteria that has accompanied the Wylie/Amazon deal and the pronouncements of apocalypse for one or more industry segments as we evolve. Words like 'outrage', 'condemn', and 'appalled' are appropriate for human rights abuses in the Sudan, not for office suites in Manhattan. Keep calm and carry on.
• My big takeaway from the whole Wylie brouhaha is that it's not good enough for publishers merely to assert their ownership of digital rights. If you're going to make such an assertion, you'd better be simultaneously exploiting those rights to the benefit of the author (or his heirs and assigns) or somebody else is going to find a way to do it for you.
• In a related matter, disintermediation is nothing new. It happens when businesses change so get used to it. Sears, Roebuck disintermediated the local dry goods store when it mailed its first catalog and it continues unabated in every sector...not just publishing and bookselling.. As Mike Cane has pointed out, there's a sad irony in watching independent booksellers ranting about being disintermediated by Amazon as they listen to music they downloaded to their iPods from uber-disntermediator, Apple iTunes.
• It's interesting and instructive that the new big things in the publishing world are identifiers/metadata and rights/subrights--subjects traditionally thought of as among the least sexy parts of the business. People are figuring out that (a) these things have sales and marketing implications, particularly in search, (b) as rights are further unbundled, the identifiers for each format or chunk of content become more important and (c) getting them right adds significant value to the organization. People like Laura Dawson, Michael Cairns and the BISG have been talking about them for years. Finally they're getting more attention than the latest unlikely-to-actualy-appear new e-reader.
• A quick thought on all the Amazon hate. Yes, they can be heavy-handed and it's always a concern when market power concentrates, but let's keep two things in mind. First, from a publisher or distributor's perspective, they sell a boatload of your books, they return almost nothing, and they pay on time. None of these is a bad thing. Second, as someone who lived in rural Mississippi for a time (where the closest decent bookstore was one hundred miles from my home), Amazon gave me access to books I would never have seen or heard of. Please remember that not everyone in this country lives within easy striking distance of a great independent, or even a strip mall - based Barnes & Noble.
•  Finally, does anyone really think traditional publishers are going to do a great job with enhanced ebooks? The skill sets required to produce a first class enhanced title are simply not resident in publishing houses, nor are those most qualified to bring those skills to the party likely to choose boiok publishing as the most promising career path. Because of this, if I were an agent or author, I'd be very careful about which rights (therre's that word again) I licensed to book publishers unless and until the publisher can demonstrate that it can take full advantage of anything beyond print, digital and audio.

It's almost August. Take deep breath, stay cool and keep reminding yourself that accelerating change is the new norm.
 

There's a good post (followed up with a lively debate in the Comments section) over at Northshire Bookstore's Blog. You should read it for yourself here (http://www.northshire.com/blog/?p=4159).
 
In the post, Chris Morrow, who's one of the smartest and most forward-thinking independent booksellers I know, describes an instance where a visitor to the store, made a series of notes as she browsed and spent considerable time with one or more staff members asking questions and soliciting recommendations. In the process of doing so, she said she planned to download these titles from Amazon for her Kindle and left without making a purchase at the store. Reactions from staff and from commenters at the blog ranged from moral outrage and insult to "whaddayagonnado" shrugs, and Chris winds up his post asking some serious questions about the place for physical bookstores in a digital age.
 
Obviously, there are no easy answers and it's still unclear to me whether a Google Editions arrangement, nicely described by Joe Wikert here (http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_average_joe/2010/07/the-rapidly-shifting-ebook-retailer-landscape.html) will provide any meaningful help in addressing Chris's issues (setting aside the fact that Google Editions remains phantom-like...it's been coming "next month" for many months now).
 
There is one suggestion I'd offer Chris and his team, though, and that's not to get discouraged or take umbrage at those who come to the store to "mooch" ideas and recommendations, as frustrating as it may seem at the moment. It's a sign that what you're doing is valued. I'd offer the analogy of digital piracy, which is much discussed in the publishing community these days and which, in my judgment, has been written about most intelligently in a number of posts by Brian O'Leary at Magellan Magellan Partners' blog (www.magellanmediapartners.com/).
 
There's a negative reason and there's a positive reason for my suggestion. On the negative side, pushing back or trying to control "pirates" in either the digital or physical space tends to be expensive and non-productive. DRM on digital products is often said not to hinder pirates while merely annoying real, paying customers. I doubt, without having been privy to the conversations at Northshire, whether the event described above was a lost sale; more likely, it was never going to be a sale.
 
On the positive side,  there's enough evidence in the digital arena to persuade me, as Cory Doctorow (or was it Tim O'Reilly--or either of them?) famously said, that piracy is better than obscurity. The moocher obviously thinks she gets good advice and recommendations from Northshire. Maybe she tells her friends who tell their friends. Maybe they don't all want digital books and at least some of them, who might otherwise never have thought of darkening Northshire's door, actually come in and make a purchase or three. Think of it as 'sampling' rather than 'mooching' and it becomes a whole lot more palatable.
 
I'm not minimizing the challenges facing indie bookstores and while I've been critical of (some of) them at times for being in denial rather than forward-leaning in their business approach, the good ones, like Northshire, are enormous resources for their local communities and for the common culture. I'm just not sure that browser/moochers are a problem to get too exercised about.
 
Be the place EVERYONE comes to get information and advice and you'll sell your share (and more) of whatever you're selling.
 

Last week we learned that Demi Moore has signed a $2 million deal with Harper Collins for a memoir in which she'll detail her three marriages, thirty years in show business and (undoubtedly) all manner of TMI about her troubled upbringing. Presumably, someone at Harper has determined that lots of readers will be fascinated by tales of living with Ashton Kutcher (think Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), a behind the scenes look at the making of "GI Jane", and what it was really like being photographed for the notorious Vanity Fair cover. I say "Bully" for Ms Moore (along with, "Why didn't you hold out for $3 million?).

So this is where the great publishing houses of the 21st century have landed. Celebrity biographies, confessionals and cookbooks. Dystopian worlds inhabited by werewolves, vampires and zombies. Relationship, investing and"lifestyle" advice.from experts with what can only be described as modest levels of expertise. Looking for the next blockbuster or churning out me-too regurgitations of the last one.  And so on.

Now, I understand the economics of the publishing business and how one big hit can make a publisher's year. I know that a known quantity like Ms Moore is an easier sell internally than an unknown Paraguayan author's first novel in translation. And I completely get the part about giving readers what they want ("We need more zombie mashups! Stat!).We're competing with other forms of entertainment, after all.

But I also think that if we are to stem, or at least retard, what has been described as the inexorable decline in prices for content, the industry has to produce content that's worth more than what the competition can provide. Do you really think Harper Collins can do a better job with Demi Moore than, say, People, O, or even TMZ? I'm not so sure.

So I'd suggest that publishing's role should be less about just reflecting the culture (though despite what's written above, there's a place for that) and more about leading and even defining the culture. (Consider whether a major publisher would pay a big advance for Absalom, Absalom today and you'll see my point.)

There are dozens of independent publishers doing just that...presses like Melville House, Unbridled, Graywolf, and Europa (to name just a few)...but if books are going to more than just another choice among commodity entertainment options, our industry's leaders (and for good or evil, that's the top twenty trade houses) are going to have to do their part..

As I've said before, this is not about economics, though it's certainly about that. It's also about the culture of our society.
 
 
*Last Paula Cole reference ever. I promise.
 
Post publication note: And if you like Demi Moore, you'll love this. Coming in November Kardashian Konfidential. (www.usmagazine.com/moviestvmusic/news/kim-khloe-and-kourtney-to-write-a-book-kardashian-confidential-2010176)

There's one question about which I am a nag, a noodge, an annoyance. I am a beater of the dead horse, the player of the broken record. I'm the single mosquito in your otherwise silent bedroom, the four-year-old with the never-ending 'why?', the publishing equivalent of 40,000 vuvuzelas blaring at full blast all day. I ask everyone I know and nobody has given me a satisfactory answer. I really need to know. We all need to know.
 
A listserv I participate in was home recently to a multi -day, multi-thread discussion and debate about what the role of the publisher is and will be in what is politely referred to as 'the new environment'. The discussion was lively, often entertaining, sometimes Manichean in the fineness of distinctions, but overall worthwhile. The generally agreed-upon answer was that the New Publisher is "a gatherer of audiences". All sides shook hands and retired from the field. But that's not the question that's bothering me (and that I'm bothering everyone else with).
 
A day or two ago, my friend Mike Shatzkin, who thinks continuously and with great intelligence about these things, posted a new piece to his blog called "A Roadmap for the Future: Six Suggestions for Today's Publishers that Many Can't Follow". You can (and should) read it for yourself here (www.idealog.com/blog/a-roadmap-for-the-future-6-suggestions-for-todays-publishers-that-many-cant-follow) but it reinforces the publisher as audience-gatherer position. Mike further asserts that this has to happen because the price of content will continue to decline and that the best way to gather audiences is around a common interest or 'vertical', something Mike has talked about for some time, citing Harlequin (and other romance publishers, Sourcebooks' Poetry Speaks experiment and F+W, among others as examples. The punchline of all this is that in the future, publishers will be selling audience eyeballs instead of selling IP or content.
 
To which my nagging question is: So how will content creators get paid?
 
Now I think communities can be established around certain categories (genre fiction, crafts collecting, cooking, DIY and perhaps others where natural communities already exist) that can generate sufficient sales of something to be viable. That said, there's considerable doubt in my mind as to whether it's possible to sell enough books at very low price points and/or charge membership fees for these communities and/or sell enough related merchandise directly or through affilaites and/or build a community based on ad revenue. Gathering a community is one thing; monetizing it is another altogether. I just don't see the financial return for most players for the investment required to run these things.
 
But even if you allow that certain categories could work, I have a hard time picturing the same thing happening in, say, literary fiction or even something more specific like "European History between the World Wars". So what happens to those authors whose livelihood depends on creating and selling this IP?  And even if you're not sympathetic to the writers' plights, where will new content come from if no one is paying for its creation and distribution? (Yes, writers will self-publish successfully and new metadata and discovery tools will make it easier to seek out and buy books that interest you,  but does anyone really think we're going to find the next Nabokov or even the next Rowling by trawling through Scribd or Smashwords on a key word search?) I think this is important stuff, not so much because I like publishers and authors (though I do) but as a cultural matter.
 
There's not an answer right now and I'm not naive enough to think it will be a one-size-fits-all model as we sort it out. What I know is that we have to figure it out. So I'll keep asking..
 
(With a nod to Fred Ramey of Unbridled Books)

For the past couple of weeks we've been treated to a bevy of announcements about new products and services from various vendors that has rivalled (almost) the flurry of e-reader announcements earlier this week. Amazon has a new translation imprint caled "AmazonCrossing" (tinyurl.com/28xnmuj), Barnes & Noble has a new digital self-publishing service,"PubIt!" (tinyurl.com/26adl5f) to compete with Amazon's self-publishing platform, Kobo seems to announce a new development daily, most recently a deal with Borders (tinyurl.com/27evor7), and more, including Google Editions, will be hitting the markets in the coming weeks and months.
 
As I read these announcements, I have a couple of thoughts.
 
First, most of the new goodies are retailer or device-specific. While I understand that it's to their advantage to stake out as much proprietary turf as possible by controlling the device, the platform, the format and the distribution channel, that strikes me as a short term game for most players. Ultimately, at least in my judgment,  interoperability is what's going to spur explosive growth in digital books and making it harder, rather than easier, for consumers to buy and use books by restricting the way they can be read is self-defeating over time. But competition will ultimately sort that out since there's probably not room for more than a couple or three 'winners' in this market.
 
 
My second thought was brought to the front of my mind by a post Mike Cane (http://twitter.com/mikecane)pointed me to yesterday called "The So What Factor" (tinyurl.com/23hn48f) by Howard Greenstein at Inc.com. Greenstein references one of the true fathers of modern marketing, Harvard Business School professor Ted Levitt (tinyurl.com/6csqec), who famously pointed out that when marketing a product or servie, the key question to ask is "So What?", by which he meant, "What problem does this offering solve and does it matter?". My sense in some of these new announcements, and some I know to be forthcoming, is that they're solutions in search of a problem and if someone were to ask "so what?", the businesses offering them might not have good answer. Just as an example, how many self-publishing services do we really need when the offerings are not significantly differentiable?
 
We have some real problems that need solving and amazing opportunities in this business that demand attention. Fussing around with marginal products and services that don't get at publishers' and the supply chain's fundamental weaknesses is a waste of time and energy, and takes our collective eye off the ball as we rush to make sure we're somehow a part of the next new thing.If you're a publisher, focus on quality content and on the tools and systems that position you to survive and prosper regardless of what happens downstream.If you're a distributor or retailer of content, think about whether further product proliferation is a benefit  to your long-term success or whether you're just cluttering your customers' brain space.
 
 
 
 

Last week I attended the Book Indsustry Study Group's www.bisg.org/ annual "Making Information Pay" conference  in New York. As usual, it was a good program with fearless prognostications from Mike Shatzkin, some surprising survey results showing at least some publishing industry participants apparently in denial about the change that has happened and is ongoing in our business, and several indusry players describing what they're doing in their own businesses. You can read Publishers Weekly's account here: tinyurl.com/2eq7c9a and there are other summaries around the web.
 
Afterward, I enjoyed a long lunch and  conversation with my friends and spiritual advisors (and two of the smartest people I know), Laura Dawson of ljndawson.com  and Brian O'Leary of  magellanmediapartners.com/.We talked for a while about the presentations, which were uniformly good, and about the fact that there wasn't a lot of new news (not surprising given the recent Future of Publishing conference glut and the constant chatter in the blogosphere and twitterverse about anything resembling news). Then Laura said something that was really insightful.
 

She asked (approximately), "When are we going to be able to go to meetings like this and not hear about someone beginning to use an XML workflow, setting up a Digital Asset Management system or getting their metadata organized properly without its being treated as something unusual and remarkable?"
 
And she was dead on (as usual). She and Brian, among others, have been talking about these things for years, urging publishers to take this stuff seriously and position themselves as favorably as possible for the future. It's been "change or die" for a long time and many are just getting around to implementing the beginnings of the changes necessary to make their content as valuable as possible across as many platforms as possible. That actually doing it is still viewed as remarkable is remarkable in itself.
 
Now we learn that The Big Money (a sister publication of Slate) will be putting on yet another Future of Publishing conference in June (untethered.thebigmoney.com/), this one about publishing in the "tablet era". (In a related development, apparently there is such a thing as the tablet era.) But here's the thing: You don't publish for a device or even an era. If you publish properly and do the (what should be) unremarkable things like using an XML workflow, a good Digital Asset Managment platform and if you are diligent about tagging and providing proper and consistent metadata, you don't care what device's era it is.
 
We're spending too much time trying to be remarkable and running from fad to fad. Assuming you have quality content (and if you don't, you're sunk anyway) it's the unglamorous stuff you have to sweat over that ultimately will sort out the winners from the losers.

I've had time over the past couple of weeks to do a good bit of reading, which is fortunate because my To-Be-Read pile on my nightstand had been leaning precariously since I have no willpower whatsoever when it comes to buying books. I've read some terrific fiction, narrative non-fiction, history and true crime titles, all of which were released in the last twelve months. And I noticed something disturbing.
 
The quality of the writing, organization, editing, copyediting, fact-checking, and proofreading in five of the six titles was poor enough that I became conscious of it and it idetracted from my reading experience and enjoyment of what were, at their respective cores, very good books.
 
I've been a publisher and I know that even with the most conscientious efforts and backstops in place the occasional error will slip through. And I know the pressure in-house and freelance editorial staffers are under with time and budget constraints (I was told last week by an experienced freelance editor that she had stopped doing trade non-fiction for a prominent trade house because the time allotted for copyediting and fact-checking had been cut to four days).
 
I am a believer in the concept of "good enough" (i.e., a business can deliver a product or service that meets but doesn't exceed market expectations--and willingness to pay) for some things. We see "good enough" software released all the time to meet announced schedules, only to get a massive update/patch shortly after release. Where speed-to-market is a key success factor, "good enough" can be the way to go. I can also accept "good enough" on a good portion of the web, where I'm not being asked to pay up for the content (and if you're reading this, you certainly are willing to do the same).
 
As an industry, publishing is in a competitive battle with lots of forms of entertainment and information. Since we can't 'patch' a book after release* we need to get it right on the first pass unless we want our products to look more like the "good enough" (read: free or cheap) than like something customers will value.
 
The pendulum has swung too far in cutting budgets in basic skill areas in which publishers have talent and expertise and where they add value. New business models and digital publishing will not save us if we don't get the basics right.
 
*  Yes, I know about 'fixing it"  on subsequent printings and errata sheets but I'd argue if you get it wrong on the first go-round, you might not get another bite at the apple.

Like many others, I had planned to be at London Book Fair (www.londonbookfair.co.uk)  this week. And like many others, I am not there, my flight from JFK to Heathrow having been cancelled due to the "Ashpocalypse" from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in southern Iceland. So I've cancelled the fifteen-odd appointments I'd made for the Fair and while disappointed I won't be able to frequent a couple of my favorite public houses and see some friends I haven't seen in person for a while, I'll go about my business this week and life will go on.
 
As it undoubtedly will for the hundreds of others from around the world who won't make it to the Fair.
 
My friend Brian O'Leary (whose blog posts at  www.magellanmediapartners.com you really should be reading) and I were discussing this today and separately came to the same conclusion:  So what?
 
Well, a lot of folks, including me, are inconvenienced a bit and have lost some deposit money and may have to pay change fees for airline tickets;  the Fair's organizers and the support services for the show are surely feeling some financial pain;  and some opportunities (I'd especially note those  for publishers and authors from this year's featured country, South Africa) will be lost. But on the whole, given our ability to communicate and send manuscripts, proposals, contracts and everything else virtually anywhere instantaneously, most of the business that would've gotten done on the floor at Earl's Court will get done anyway. And publishing will survive.
 
I'm afraid the same would be true if Book Expo America (www.bookexpoamerica.com) went 'poof' tomorrow and while Frankfurt Book Fair (www.buchmesse.de/en) and Bologna Children's Book Fair (www.bookfair.bolognafiere.it/en/) serve a special purpose for buyers and sellers of rights, they're not completely immune either.Just as we have learned that many other things we've always thought of as essential in the publishing business may not be, we are coming to realize that we can get by without Book Fairs, especially those for industry insiders only.
 
Eyjafjallajokull may prove what some of us have been thinking for a while.
 
 
*Hat tip to Sarah Weinman for the "LBF Versus the Volcano" title.
 
Also, I know, I know, I'm working on cleaner linking.