Kindlerama

[Note: I've removed my opening paragraphs because they were kind of whiny, and because this post is too long even without the navel-gazing. -Chris]

So why is there so much doom and gloom, instead of excitement, from so many in the industry? The problem is one of economics, yes, but I think the real problem is a lack of imagination. Too many professionals–publishers, agents, authors, technologists, journalists, economic types (but maybe not real economists)–see ebooks and epublishing as building off of the current publishing model. Instead, they should be thinking of epublishing as disruptive. To put it another way (and to borrow/misuse terms from biology), epublishing is not the next stage in a gradual evolutionary path for the industry; instead, it’s an example of punctuated evolution–that is, the industry has been in stasis for a long time, changing little, and now is beginning to undergo a dramatic mutation to a form that’s more suitable to the new market environment. Publishing in the future will look so different as to seem like a new species, I predict.

This framing of the topic begs a question: what will make it so dramatically different, then? How is epublishing really that different from physical publishing? If it’s truly disruptive, it had better possess some unique characteristics that have never before been seen in publishing.

That’s where I come in! As a hypothetical Future Published Author, I take a keen interest in trying to come up with new schemes to publish and sell books, so I think I can help provide some of that imaginative power for the FUD crowd that sees the future and only sees death.

Will any of these ideas come to pass? Possibly not, and almost certainly not in the exact forms I’ve described below, because who knows how many important details I’m overlooking. But these are just rough notes pulled from my head over a cup of coffee on Sunday afternoon as I sit in a Starbucks. I think it’s worth noting that almost everyone here has either a laptop open, or an iPhone next to them, or both. A few even have physical books or newspapers with them, as if to prove that physical print is not dead, but is also no longer triumphant.

A special note: many of these suggestions will be heresy to readers, authors, and publishers. I shrug at you, which is not the same as disagreeing. These ideas are based on the assumption that an author is in the content-creation business, not that the author is an artist who is producing art. This doesn’t mean writing can’t be art, of course, but since most writing-as-art is not necessarily profitable, and is especially not profit-driven, I’m not allowing it to influence my ideas below.

A second special note: many of these suggestions are intended to solve the problem of perceived value: how can an ebook cost the same as, or even more than, a physical book if the consumer doesn’t receive a physical object to own after purchase?

Some ideas about
the future of digital publishing

Manipulating authorship on demand

• Customized and personalized texts. When a customer buys an ebook, he can choose to personalize it in certain ways, including changing the name of the hero or the villain or of secondary characters. Simple search-and-replace customizations require no human interaction at all, leaving the author and his agents free to work on creating more meaningful value.
• Can there be more precise customization? For the premium cost of an ebook, a customer can submit a photograph and complete a short survey. A real person on the other end will evaluate this data and use it to complete a profile that can be digitally combined with a book, provided the book is prepared ahead of time with specific passages marked up in order to facilitate this more complex search-and-replace.
• Books can be published without final chapters. Imagine a mystery novel where the identity of the killer is withheld until a certain date, in order to get readers to speculate and even vote on what happened. The final chapter may be unwritten at the time of publishing, in fact, only to be finished after readers voice speculation or opinions.
• Books can be republished with new endings; authors can rewrite sections of a book and republish it as a new version, not to simply sell more books but to update locations, or refine what a character’s intentions are, or to simply take the ending in a novel new direction as a sort of postmodern approach to the novel and authorship.

Redefining what makes a “book”

• Short stories and novellas can be sold individually. (See Stephen King’s Ur for the Amazon Kindle Store.)
• Anthologies on-demand. Say you love horror fiction, especially horror fiction about zombies, and especially horror fiction about zombies and teenagers. A publishing house can offer you the opportunity to assemble on-the-fly a collection of stories in that specific sub-genre. The publisher makes recommendations of related material as well–zombies with college students, teens with undead-but-not-zombies. Publishers can work out content sharing arrangements with other publishers so that each publisher has access to a larger content library. Authors prepare stories in specific genres as requested by publishers, or simply write what they want and submit it to the publisher’s content library, and are paid an exclusivity license and royalties for each book-on-demand their stories appear in.
• Non-fiction books can be updated frequently, following the same model as software. That is, between editions there can be a dozen or more smaller updates: Edition 1.1, 1.2, 1.3; Edition 2.0, 2.1, etc. This is especially valuable for manuals and computer resources, as well as catalogues.
• Digests can be sold around specific topics. Following a model similar to Google News Alerts combined with the “Best [xx] Writing Of [xxxx]“, readers can subscribe to topic digests for recurring fees, or for a flat annual subscription, and receive 4-8 collections annually of all journalism, essays, short stories, studies, journal articles, etc. on a topic. These digests can be curated by experts in some cases, to add additional unique value.
• Fiction or essays about current or recent events can be produced quickly, formatted quickly, and pushed to digital stores within a week of the event. Topics like teen celebrities, sci-tech that’s in vogue because of a certain movie marketing push, essays based on last week’s D.C. scandal, can all become fodder for books or mini-books.
• Long-form articles from magazines and newspapers can be sold individually for smallish amounts–say, $1. As an example, several of Seymour Hersh’s pieces for The New Yorker on topics like Gauntanamo Bay and Iran could have been sold to interested readers who don’t wish to subscribe to The New Yorker itself.
• Reference works can be sold piecemeal–a book on book proposals, for example, can sell just the generic intro and the chapter on cookbook proposals.

Modifying the publisher/author/public relationship

• Publishing houses can offer repackaged publishing services to authors. Instead of an author relying solely on the publisher for all aspects of the process–approval, editing, marketing, printing, shipping, bookkeeping–authors and their agents can hire, or enter an agreement with, publishing houses to provide specific services. If you’e an established author, you bring your own favorite editor into the mix, or hire the editor from the publisher (editors can be free agents or in exclusive contracts with publishers based on their fame within the industry). You negotiate with the publisher to provide marketing or book assembly and preparation for all forms of printing.

  You arrange your own publishing deals through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, using on-demand publishing facilities. Or you create an LLC and find financing to pay for bulk publishing. A publisher can take on this risk for a royalty, or can provide a package of services and offer to finance it for either a royalty or repayment with interest.

  Some authors may choose to bypass physical printing altogether, and to also bypass in-house marketing for third-party marketing from ad or publicity agencies.

  The point: publishing houses may change so that they provide a service to authors and the public by being a mediator between the two–but they are no longer the gatekeepers. In fact, depending on the ability of the author to finance the process, they may no longer own the book at all. Existing publishers may refuse to transition away from owning content, but startup companies can provide these services (editors can leave existing publishers and form their own companies with marketers and agents, in fact) and replace publishing houses as mediators.

• A reader can commission a work from an author. No, it will not be cheap, but it can be affordable as a unique “life event” gift (e.g. anniversaries, births) if an author creates templates–an anniversary template, a birth template, a Christmas template–and then customizes them. This requires real writing, not simply search-and-replace as above, but it doesn’t require the same amount of labor as writing an original work from scratch–the story’s theme is already created, as is the basic length and most of the plot. The author uses his template and customizes it with information from the customer. The author can also farm out customization assignments to ghostwriters while retaining creative control over the finished work.
• An author’s readers can help determine the components of an author’s next work, and follow along with frequent updates from the author, as well as certain chapters shared for feedback. (Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail followed this model in many ways, although the finished work remained identical to other traditional published works.) In particular, this deep level of customer interaction guarantees a small but confirmed amount of presales, to help the author budget resources for the duration of writing the book.
• Authors can sell subscriptions to their output: everything *but* novels are pushed directly to subscribers, while novels are sold at a discount. This sort of subscription model can help support authors who aren’t prolific in the traditional sense of pushing out a novel every 14 months, but who still produce substantive writing in the form of letters, essays, articles, and unpublished shorts works.

Adding value over static physical versions

• New books can come with notes, email exchanges, and rough drafts; more work is required to format the material for the digital edition, but theoretically the book can add thousands of extra pages without increasing the distribution cost compared to physical printings. Authors can adapt character studies or removed chapters into stand-alone short stories or short-shorts and publish in an appendix. Special editions can include 3-5 short stories from other authors over related subjects–this can also introduce authors to new readers.
• Epilogues can be added months later, intentionally.
• Serial works can be sold as works in progress, either for a flat “novel” fee or in chunks, or on a subscription basis.

# # #

A lot of these ideas require a shift in the relationship between the audience and the producer(s), and I think that’s a very good thing. Currently, most audience feedback is collected indirectly from sales figures or market research; there’s almost no true dialogue taking place between the content creators and the consumers. One aspect of the future of publishing is that publishers will ask their customers to engage more directly with them and with authors, which I think will influence publishing in ways I haven’t imagined yet.

Another shift implied by the ideas above is the transformation to a sort of bespoke publishing industry, where mass customization is, if not the norm, then a significant percentage of the marketplace. In general, I think mass customization and bespoke products are the next stage in industrial manufacturing, using digital technology alongside industrial technology to return the value of human-to-human services to the market, but at a mass level.

The world beyond traditional
publishing houses

Maybe none of these ideas will come to pass, but I can already say with confidence that if I were to publish a new novel today, the only reason I would even consider going through a publisher is that they currently control access to printing, shipping, editorial, and marketing services.

If I would be willing to forego physical printing–or relegate that to an on-demand status to save time and money–and could hire my own editorial and marketing experts, there would be no reason to go through a publisher at all. I could retain all rights to my work, distribute it as I see fit, and partner with an agent or lawyer to work out licensing agreements should the need arise.

Without the imprimatur of a publisher my book would lack credibility, but with the cooperation of published authors who are respected in the marketplace, I could load up a book with blurbs and recommendations that would help signal to consumers that I’m a risk worth taking–and with discounts, freebies, and samples, I could lower the risk even more.

I am not describing a DIY amateur publishing world, but one in which authors work with other authors, with the assistance of expert agents, editors, and reviewers, to help sell books. The current employees of publishing houses would still be working in the industry, but perhaps not for the current publishing houses any more. And most important, authors and readers–the two crucial components of the industry–would have more freedom than ever before to produce and consume the written word.

(Robot drawing: clickclickclickclick)

Well, of course, the answer is a solid yes, because I truly believe this is the beginning of an evolution in publishing. Even though I grow tired of all the doom and gloom from old-school professionals, I’m grateful (and excited) to be witness to such a transformative event as this.