Eoin Purcell

Johan Gutenberg (Thanks to Flikr user Robert Scarth: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robert_scarth/)

Things will get worse for publishers as they currently exist!
The increasingly wonderful Publishing Perspectives caries and editorial by Richard Eoin Nash*. It is a nice tight piece that makes a number of clear points:

1) This is an industry based on a hobby:

The book business is a tiny industry perched atop a massive hobby. But rather than celebrate and serve the hobbyists, we expect them to shell out ever more money for the books we keep throwing at them (a half million English-language books in 2008 in the U.S.).

2) Our distribution system suits publishers, not readers or writers:

Instead of using the ever-increasing array of cheap and free tools now available to offer new ways to structure the writer-reader relationship, we’re using the technology to either thwart the readers (see: DRM) or to hustle them, using social media to move product, not have a conversation.

3) Publishing needs to change to a service type model:

For-profit publishing should not be saved — it should figure out new business models, ones that offer services that both readers and writers want and are happy to pay for.

4) And in the words of The Economist’s Intelligent Life Magazine, we are all writers now:

We’re also going to have to recognize that reading increasingly is writing — readers are writing back in all sorts of ways, commenting on books, re-mixing books as in fan fiction, or creating from scratch, and publishers, rather than barring this activity, or hiding from it, need to embrace it and find ways to serve it.

Stake-claiming
One area I disagree strongly with him on though is the idea of service. I feel like there have been a glut of ground claiming posts recently mapping out a future for publishing, Nash like Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly seems to be pointing firmly in the direction of Publishing as a Service (PaS) (although to be fair to Savikas, he does say Content rather than publishing), the idea that if publishers want to survive they should adapt to become facilitators of the people who are creating and consuming content (I know people hate that word). Mike Shatzkin on the other hand seems to think the focus should be on curating those niches and in re-engineering a publishing portfolio around a vertical segment.

Now that might sound like splitting hairs, but in fact if a publisher only chooses one of these options (or over emphasises services to the detriment of the content) they lead to different scenarios, one which sees publishers create a set of tools to facilitate conversation and engagement and the other whereby the publisher focuses on changing their list and reinventing their content into a package suited to a niche in which they have credibility. in space one they have become software engineers, in space two they remain publishers.

Reinventing the wheel
When I read that first concept I cannot help but think that those tools exist. There is WordPress, Blogger and Typepad and even Ning. There is LibraryThing, Shelfari and even to a certain extent Amazon. Why recreate the wheel?

Publishers are not coders and we probably never should be. Personally, I don’t think that most publishers should spend their time creating design software or better printing presses, leave that to the odd genius who happens to also be a publisher or the software programmer? It would be a stupid investment. It isn’t our specialization, far better for us to spend time curating and filtering content, because filtering is what the web needs.

That doesn’t necessarily mean gate-keeping, we may be facilitating the filtering by readers within a community, rather than choosing what floats. The point is that spending money creating tools seems a waste when they exist already and are owned by people with much deeper pockets in many cases. Spending money curating the content, packaging it however seems like a good investment, using the existing tools and new tools as they emerge to distribute content , engage with an audience and promote good material sounds like a publisher’s job and is certainly something we can do.

Ditch the tool creation idea, lets look at tool usage and author/community development
I think that Nash actually sums it up better than in this editorial on his About Page on his website when he writes:

Basically, the best-selling five hundred books each year will likely be published like Little Brown publishes James Patterson, on a TV production model, or like Scholastic did Harry Potter and Doubleday Dan Brown, on a big Hollywood blockbuster model.

The rest will be published by niche social publishing communities.

That short phrase encapsulates the changes I see coming to the world of books and reading. Communities of Interest (with readers at various degrees of engagement from Obsessed to Mildly Taken with a genre/niche) that are deep and to which publishers add value and thus gain respect, credibility and leadership of a sort that allows them to curate and (hopefully profit). There is a danger though, as discussed on Twitter with Peter Brantleythat this role would be limited to publishers and in many niches, single individuals might wield enough power to curate a niche. It sounds plausible but I DOUBT they would remain independent forever as some publisher hoovers the niche operations in a particular segment up to re-balance their portfolio.

Nash goes on in his about page to suggest that those communities (niches) need an infrastructural base:

Now is time to build their infrastructure. Let me know if you’ve the time or money to help.

But as I say above the idea of publishers as a provider of tools I think is flawed, sure we can advise on what tools to use for certain platforms, which blogging engine we prefer or social networks we find work for what genre, but actually making those tools is too far beyond our reach and represent foolish dreams rather than real ambitions.

There is a lure to thinking of publishers as some kind of technological innovators, but it is a call of the sirens, it will end in tears. I’m with Shatzkin in encouraging a concentration on the best quality niche content mediated through the existing and developing tools in a credible way to create and curate a community of interest around a niche.

Yes that means slicing, dicing, repackaging, up-selling, giving away and generally bashing content from place to place in the most platform neutral way, that still requires good enough content for them to think it worthwhile.

All of this is a long way to say that Richard is right in the overview but I’d be concerned on some of his details!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

But start we must
So how about with this piece from Crain’s New York about a new ebook publishing house (strangely sans website yet) OR Books. The house is run by, John Oakes and Colin Robinson, two veterans of New York’s independent literary scene. To my mind the most interesting tidbit in the article was in terms of their business plan:

Publishing only e-book and print-on-demand editions, OR won’t have to deal with any returns. The company also won’t share revenue with distributors, wholesalers and bookstores, which together can collect as much as 60% of sales. The savings will go into online marketing campaigns that will run about $50,000 to $75,000 per title—huge sums for so-called mid-list books.

Print-on-demand trade paperbacks will sell for $15 apiece, but the partners have yet to decide what to charge for e-books. Typically, prices for new titles range from around $26, or the same as a hardcover, to the discounted $9.99 that Amazon charges for most of its Kindle titles.

OR will also make a small number of books available to cooperating bookstores on a nonreturnable basis. And it will consider a title a success if it sells just 5,000 electronic copies.

I’ve added the emphasis there. That, frankly seems a pretty significant sum to be even contemplating in ad spend online (or will that mean print ads for ebooks? And the ebook price is not yet set? Stranger and stranger I say.

Wherever Spanish is read
Everywhere online and digital if the latest reports are to be believed. The top three Spanish publishers have joined forces to create a digital distributor. Seems eminently sensible. A much fuller article can be read on Publishing Perspectives a relative but very interesting newcomer to the publishing news scene, focused on international views and opinions. from the text it seems like these major players have developed a pretty sensible model too:

In negotiations with the Association of Spanish Literary Agencies (ADAL), the publishers have agreed to price ebooks at 80% of a printed books cover price, with a standard 25% royalty rate. Booksellers will be offered a maximum discount of 50%.

The truth, plain and unvarnished
I’ll only cover three items today and perhaps do a follow up post tomorrow, but that third item must be Andrew Savikas’ really gauntlet throwing down piece over at o”Reilly Radar in which he basically calls B*llsh*t in people who think the value is in theur conent. twitter has been abuzz with publisher types praising it all day and with real reason. it is clear, concise and devastating for those who disagree with his perspective:

“But people are still buying content when they buy a book or an album,” the argument goes. Yes, they are. The same way that you’re buying food when you go to a restaurant. You are purchasing calories that your body will convert to energy. But few restaurants (especially those you visit frequently) have ingredients any different from those you can get yourself at the corner store, for much less money. So it can’t be true that your primary goal is to purchase food; you’re purchasing a meal, prepared so you don’t have to, cleaned up so you don’t have to, and done so in a pleasing and convenient atmosphere. You are paying for the preparation of the food and the experience of eating it in the restaurant, not the food itself [2] (beyond the raw cost of the physical ingredients, which in the case of digital content is effectively zero).

And to finish the sad news, for the staff of Borders in Blanchardstown, the book buyers and the publishers of Ireland is that the only Irish store in the UK arm is closing along with four UK based branches. It is a real shame, I liked the store though I will freely admit I got there irregularly. I wish there was some way to avoid this outcome.

Not happy this evening,
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Some really interesting thoughts over at the Appingo blog (who by the way make what looks like the slickest web based publishing centric production software I’ve seen to date). The idea they are talking about has been on my mind for some time and I reckon they have a clear concept of what is involved. Books Going Hollywood and More Book Producer Talk

Bloomberg has an interesting piece on the economics of the Kindle and $9.99 ebooks. Which prompted Index//mb to point me in the direction of this CNET Audio which is well worth listening to!.

Last, but not least, Creativecareers.ie is back in action as a free and automated service. And a good one at that!

Eoin

Eoin Purcell

A screen capture from the SpringerImages site

If you are a Registered and a Subscribed User, you may

* Access, browse, copy, collate, display, search, bookmark, retrieve, display and use the Content for educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes, including illustration, explanation, example, comment, criticism, teaching, research or analysis in accordance with these Terms of Use.
* Add keywords to Content and save prior searches of the Content on your Account, and you may use the Content to tailor your Account in accordance with these Terms of Use.
* Download or create printouts of certain Content under certain restrictions and conditions. All reproduction and distribution of such printouts, and all downloading and electronic storage of materials retrieved through the Content shall be for your own internal, personal or scholarly use.

There is much more detail about the site here! In terms of what most casual users would need, this certainly hits the spot. Opening up these images is a very smart move and one that should be pretty widely welcomed. This is exactly the kind of material it is hard to find in the real world of web search which is the real value of opening up the database for searches even if the results of those searches might yield unusable images (for subscription reasons). I wonder how well the site plays with Google?

Go have a look!
Eoin

I asked Kate Dempsey of Emerging Writer to pen me a guest post, and here it is!

Why I blog
So why do you blog as an emerging writer? There’s a question I’ve been asked from time to time. After two years of blogging, the answers have probably changed a bit.

I have kept a diary of my writing projects, upcoming competitions and results and places open for submissions for a good few years. The competitions and submissions information came from a large number of sources: newsletters, emails, various writing websites, other blogs, radio, TV, word of mouth, and I collated it in one place for my own use. I thought this information would be useful to other writers and a blog seemed the easiest way to share it online.

Why did I choose the name Emerging Writer? I’ve been lucky enough to be accepted on some workshops and win awards in this nebulous category, it was easy to remember and I didn’t want my name directly associated. I was job hunting at the time and I didn’t want prospective employers reading about how many times I’ve had work rejected this month. Also I wanted to have a bit of freedom to be critical of establishments, books, poems and even people without them turning up at my front door wielding a hurley.

Then I did a few posts about my own writing successes and failures and, result, I got some comments. Ah heaven. People cared. I posted about writing and reading events in Ireland and started meeting people who read my blog. People who didn’t know me already. Is this fame? I posted writing tips and common errors.

I post pretty well every day now. I’ve posted on council grants and Haiku courses, Canadian magazines and photos for inspiration, literary agents and writing retreats. I always include a picture illustrating part of all of the post. Sometimes the link is tenuous and more for my own amusement than for my readers. I’m easily amused. And I’ve discovered the joys (and unexplained sudden failures) of submitting for a future dates. I use my blog myself for checking on upcoming deadlines and links to submission details.

But always in the back of my head was the idea that when my book gets finished and my agent gets it published, a blog is a great publicity vehicle for my faithful and mildly interested readers. I’m ever optimistic.

What have I learned?
People read blogs. Blogging is a form of networking, as useful in writing as in any other professions. Comments are good, positive or negative, discussions are healthy. Blogging and reading other blogs can easily eat into my precious writing time. All it takes though is discipline to stop that happening. Turn off the internet and get stuck in.

But first, I’ll just check the blogs I’m following for updates on Google Reader…

Eoin Purcell

Bloomsbury’s canny acquisition streak continues
Yet again, Bloomsbury have shown that they possess a very clear strategy when it comes to acquisitions. Today they announced that they intend to acquire Tottel Publishing in a modest deal (in the overall shape of things):

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (”Bloomsbury”) announces today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Tottel Publishing Limited (”Tottel”), an independent professional and academic publisher in the UK and Ireland. The offer to acquire the entire share capital of Tottel “debt free” will be satisfied by a cash consideration of £9.96m and upon completion Tottel Publishing Ltd will be renamed Bloomsbury Professional.

For the 12 month period ended 28 February 2009, Tottel generated revenue of £6.25m, operating profit of £0.93m and EBITDA of £1.19m (which included acquisition goodwill of £0.249m). The gross assets of the business at that date were £3.58m. Tottel was founded in 2004 and employs 27 people. The acquisition is expected to be immediately earnings enhancing.

Coming on top of their acquisition of Berg, Arden Shakespeare and the launch of Bloomsbury Academic, this really is a sign o where Bloomsbury see its future (as if following those, any was needed). To top it all off they offered us some insight into their thinking:

Bloomsbury has identified academic and professional publishing as a growing niche sector. The proposed acquisition of Tottel fulfils a strategic objective of Bloomsbury in pursuing opportunities in this market and follows from the acquisitions of Methuen, Berg Publishers, and The Arden Shakespeare and the set up of Bloomsbury Academic. Bloomsbury now has a solid platform in this sector and will continue to expand by exploring further strategic acquisitions.

As I have noted before these strategic acquisitions are perfectly suited to digital plays and they seem clear on the potential themselves:

Much of its revenue is subscription-based and in dynamic and fast-moving areas, making its information ideal for online delivery. The company already has a number of valuable online agreements in place, and will be seeking to build on these as it migrates its revenue online over the next two to three years. It already has an extensive e-book programme.

Oddly enough the approach that Bloomsbury are taking to their acquisitions is now reminiscent of the CRH (a large Irish-based multinational Building Product Group) approach which has always impressed me. It is hard to find a fault in this new acquisition and it seems to me that while everyone is busy trying to figure out how trade publishing can survive the digital shift, Bloomsbury is busy acquiring quality niche content that is well suited to digital delivery in the more reference, scholarly and academic sides of the trade. I think it will prove a winning strategy.

Impressed again,
Eoin

Peadar Ó Guilín agreed to write a post for me on, well it does what it says on the tin. I was inspired to ask him by the contribution he made to the forum on the future of publishing that CBI ran.

Paper Chase
There is a goose that lays golden eggs. Yet, its flesh is so tasty that sooner or later, people who aren’t getting their share of the gold, will say to one another — “why don’t we take that bird to the chopping block and have ourselves a feast?” It’s not their goose and they didn’t spend money feeding it. They have nothing at all to lose.

Good morning, or maybe, good afternoon. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but newspapers all around the world are going out of business right about now. The Rocky Mountain News has bitten the dust, The Boston Globe is slashing wages and even the world-famous New York Times, the “grey lady” herself, is predicted to phase out its print edition a few short years down the line. Journalists by the score are losing their jobs because they can’t compete with the lower quality, but free information that lives less than a click away. Nor, as Rupert Murdoch is learning, can online revenues make up for eyeballs lost in the real world.

“But books are different,” I hear you say.* “It’s all very well for gentlefolk to read a few headlines off the screen, but War and Peace would burn the eyes right out of their sockets…

A few years ago, you’d have been right about that, but these days the arrival of e-ink devices, such as the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle, mean that electronic reading causes no more eye-strain than paper. Indeed, if your peepers are beginning to age a little, the fact that you can increase the print size at will, might allow you to leave your glasses in their case all the way to Napoleon’s defeat at Moscow.

There are other advantages that make a compelling argument for the imminent rise of ebooks. Here are just a few:

1) some of these devices can hold thousands of books at once. This is handy if you want to carry around a whole law library, or take 17 novels away with you on holiday
2) some of them access the internet directly so that the user can buy a book while on the train, or sitting up in bed, or out for a walk
3) the title you want is never out of print or out of stock
4) some devices allow you to take notes
5) all of them will let you upload your own documents from work
6) school books weigh nothing and never go out of date

If none of the points above represent a compelling reason as to why you would want an ebook reader, then rest assured, there are thousands willing to take your place in the queue. Once they become the majority,** the publishing game will have changed forever and woe betide the writers, publishers, editors and book-sellers who don’t find an online berth for themselves before that day comes.

A Rising Tide of Tosh
We’ve all had the experience of spending our own sweet, sweet money on awful books. Books that we’ve flung at the wall, or abandoned in train stations, or given as gifts to our enemies. But even terrible books have to meet certain standards before they can be published. Somebody loved them enough to purchase the rights. And that same person only did so after a process that weeded out a thousand books that were even worse. Imagine that! Just close your eyes and think about how bad some of those rejected books must be. Try to picture them in a pile next to the one book that was chosen. This is important, because, that column of purest tosh,*** is the future of fiction.

You see, when electronic books take over, printed novels will become a bit of a rarity. I don’t believe they will ever die out completely. There are still specialist shops, for example, where you can buy the tiny number of vinyl records that the music corporations still produce. However, in the same way that most people these days listen to songs on CDs or mp3s, most readers will find their thrills on e-ink devices and a large amount of fiction will only ever appear in that format. After all, cut out the book shops and the printers, distributors, buyers, returns, warehouses etc. etc. and it will be cheaper to produce an ebook than a pbook by orders of magnitude.

Indeed, in many cases, the production of an ebook will cost precisely nothing. After all, anything you write on a word processor is already a document capable of being read on an electronic reader.

Rejectee’s Revenge
Once upon a time, the public would never have come across a writer’s work without the intercession of a publisher. A rejected author might shake his fist at the gods or smash a bit of furniture, but in the end, the manuscript would be retired to the sock drawer for the nourishment of mice and beetles.***

These days, however, the rejectees have another outlet for their frustrations. They can sell the book through their own website or even on Amazon, where it will compete with, and distract from, more professionally produced work. The authors can also give their novels away for free, and a great many do.**** That is, of course, their right and none of my business. But I can’t help thinking about what is happening to journalism right now as it tries, and fails, to compete with free sources of news

The Death of Reading?
This is dangerous territory for everybody involved in publishing, from the authors right on down the line to the person who stacks our books at Easons. It’s not just that we might all lose our jobs. There’s a very real possibility that the hobby known as “reading for pleasure” could become a thing of the past. A reader’s investment of effort in a book, is far greater than the three minutes it takes to sample a pop song. In a world chock-full of free, but pitiful fiction, the average novel will be a waste of time, an insult to the intelligence and an advert for every other form of entertainment out there.

Except…

Except, of course, there’s rarely such a thing as a completely random read. Most of our books come recommended from friends or reviewers we’ve grown to trust, or they’ve been written by a favoured author. We’ll still have such voices to listen to in future: the modern internet is already well-populated with heroic bloggers who sacrifice their own sanity wading through dung so that we don’t have to.

Instead of agents and publishers, we authors might end up submitting our work directly to the famous taste-makers of the day. Indeed, many of our current industry professionals, in particular, editors, might well find that their opinions are still be in high demand.

But what I can’t yet see, is where the money is to come from in this scenario. And I do believe, that the very best fiction, like great journalism, needs to be funded. Professional writers have more time to dedicate to their art; editors add enormous value by taming a manuscript and so on. Yet, in the end, none of us will keep our jobs unless we can find a way to succeed where the newspapers have failed: we must convince the public that our services are worth paying for.

For now, I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed. Hope to see you on the other side

*I have remarkably large ears.
**Which they will when schools start to make use of eReaders.
***This is not to say that all rejected books deserve such a fate, and we are all familiar with stories of spurned genius, but please understand that I’m speaking in generalities here. Also, some novels fail to find a publisher, not because of low quality, but because the potential audience might not be large enough to justify production costs. However, it is also true that the vast majority of what lands on a slush pile is pretty much unreadable.
****But since the ebook market is still so small, the effect is negligible for the moment.

Eoin Purcell

Start your engines
If business models in publishing are to change and if people are to adopt digital over paper books as their main reading method (whether that be in ebook, online access or whatever), publishers are going to have ro embrace the online world in a real way. To date, although some publishers have started to do this, few major movers in the Trade Publishing world have shifted in any earth shattering way.

Which is why the new, digital only, house Quartet Press is an interesting launch. For one thing the three members of the quartet that we know of are not easily dismissed. They are serious people with a record of expressing informed opinion on the trade, not to mention actually engaging on one level or another with the trade and making things happen.

The stature that Quartet will have because of the prominent status of its founders suggests that the digital publishing space is about to become much more interesting. Quartet may be the trailblazer but there is a every reason to expect that most trade publishers will follow suit and launch digital only imprints (or indeed change the basis of their publishing to digital first), maybe not in a rush but eventually as they translate their publishing from a predominantly paper based business to one that revolves around the types of verticals that Mike Shatzkin discusses in this post and many others and communities like Tor.com.

In any case, we watch this space with interest!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Books bought by the kilo, sold by the rupee. Probably about a mile of books along the street for sale. If you ever need any outdated calculus and basic programming books, I know where you can go!

Bad ideas sometimes have a long half-life*
Damian Horner has an opinion blog in the bookseller today and it is a pretty shameless self-defence piece:

That is why we are moving forward with the Book­aholic concept. It gives a new twist to the mantra “You can’t put a good book down”, one that provokes comment and debate. And with limited resources, that debate will be crucial in providing the campaign with the oxygen it needs to get noticed.

The comments on the piece are developing nicely and are worth paying some attention to.

By Booktard
Perhaps I’m flogging a dead horse here, but it really does seem that the statement ‘I’m a Bookaholic’, as you’ve presented it Damian, ie “Hello. My name is Damian Horner and I’m a Bookaholic.” which relies on implicit irony to have any impact at all, is a slap in the face to alcoholics, especially AA members for whom that statement is part of a ritual of overcoming their addiction. Even if it’s funny, it’s insensitive. You may as well try ‘I’ve got book flu’ (or indeed ‘I’m Booktarded’). It’s asinine and that’s why it’s under attack and not recieving the support it might require to ‘work’.

But by the far the more reasoned and on the button piece (in fact there was a second one too) on this was written by the wonderful Vanessa of fidrabooks a little while ago:

“Bookaholism” – that’s what they came up with. Yes people, we’re going to liken a love of books to an addiction to alcohol. That’s classy. And it gets worse. Apparently ”among the slogans likely to be seen in the campaign – which, having been green-lit, will be prioritised and rolled out before Christmas – are “Consume no less than one a month”, “Class A reading material”, “This book is seriously addictive”, “Once you’ve started it’s hard to stop” [sorry, but that was Pringles - are we now likening our industry to crisp-selling?], and “Books are mind expanding” – I can’t see those working in our children’s bookshop or among the Morningside matrons who make up a large part of our customer base: “Yes madam, do try the new Eoin Colfer, I believe it’s very similar to crack cocaine”… Maybe not.

She wasn’t shy about offering other ideas either, this was no lame attack without substance or alternative, it was informed, clever and well thought through:

It also struck us that unlike the addiction-based scheme, it needs to be a campaign which can easily be adapted to appeal to all parts of the trade from children to older people, from avid readers to people who read only a few books a year. We also loved the American Booksellers Association slogan of “Eat. Sleep. Read.” and I’m sure that the UK could license that from them. It is quite similar to 2008’s National Year of Reading but to be fair, the message is pretty much the same with the new campaign just being tweaked to encourage people to buy books. I don’t know how ‘bookaholism’ encourages buying books specifically rather than borrowing them from the library.

In return she felt so badly abused that she stopped blogging for a while only returning this week to reveal the great news that fidra is a) opening a gallery for the summer (whoop) and b) opening an adult bookshop as well. And why not?

I’m very partisan on this front and cannot help but think that the Bookaholic idea is a dud of gigantic proportions and I look forward to it being buried in lead-lined concrete bunkers along with the other toxic and radioactive waste!

Nice weather here in Cork!
Eoin

** Image From Flickr user Distra

Eoin Purcell

Google Books have bumped up the features on the service, nothing too amazing but some nice new additions!

A bit of accidental digging and searching for something else led me to this book on a natural history of New York City, Mannahatta, very cool indeed!

The Bookseller has a piece on the upcoming celebrity books this autumn season! Fun! Fun! Let’s hope it pulls the industry out of the fire!

Wishing I could wish for something better to rescue the industry! Like people suddenly deciding to pay for content online!
Eoin