I’ve finished writing a novel (tentatively titled Clouds On Wall) and expect to complete the editing/polishing/paring by the end of the month. The looming question is: what next? How do I package and market the thing? In the broad strokes, my two options are:
1) flog it to the traditional publishers; and
2) self-publish.
I’m disinclined to follow the traditional path. Too many of the big publishing houses have been snapped up by Big Media (e.g. CBS owns Simon and Shuster, News Corporation owns HarperCollins, and Bertelsmann AG owns just about every other major publishing house you care to name). Read the (reasonably balanced) story of a disillusioned Harpercollins author. Books get packaged and marketed like GI Joe action figures off an assembly line. All but a select few authors have any bargaining power in the relationship. The rest have to market their work as if they’d published it themselves anyways. Simply put, I don’t trust the game. If I publish myself, at least I know that my publisher cares about me.
On the other hand, self-publishing is fraught with problems too. There is a stigma associated with the process that has a lot to do with the fact that most self-published writing is crap. People who self-publish lack objectivity and often need to be told that their writing is crap. I’ve had the pleasure of breaking the bad news and know from experience that the news isn’t well-received. But even a good self-published book faces challenges. Self-publishing has typically required a large up-front investment. And the retail side of things has gone in the same direction as publishing, controlled by a handful of giant booksellers. The indie bookstore, with its natural affinity for the small press and nurture of independent-minded writers, is an endangered species.
However, technology is providing new options. A shift in the prevailing winds is beginning to favour the self-published work. So here are a few thoughts as I embark on my research.
First, print-on-demand services have gotten relatively affordable. This eliminates the large up-front investment that an initial print run would require. The most promising of them is Booksurge, which was acquired by Amazon and (as one would expect) integrates with the Amazon store. See also Lulu.com which is a well-established self-publishing outfit. The downside is that, as with publishers and book retailers, the POD outfits tend to get gobbled up by larger corporate concerns.
Second, for delivery of digital print, the music industry provides lessons that can be applied by analogy to the transformations that are now gripping print media. The shift to digital media (and the ease of replication and distribution) has forced record labels to contend with so-called piracy. It turns out that “piracy” is the word companies use when they’re too lazy (or lack the imagination) to develop new business models. In the end, the companies that have thrived, like Apple, have dropped Digital Rights Management and have recognized that the Pandora’s box of digital media has been opened up and nothing will stuff all that music back into the box. The distributive architecture of PSP file sharing makes it impossible to shut down.
Many musicians have recognized the benefit of new media/new marketing/new delivery. For example, the Barenaked Ladies dropped its record label and returned to its indie roots. They’ve been vocal opponents of DRM. You can listen to tracks for free on myspace and can download tracks for free and are invited to create your own remixes. [Links no longer work.] Not surprisingly, print media lags behind in its shift to the digital world. There are a couple reasons for this. First, the print market is an older demographic. More 80-year-olds read the newspaper than download tracks from iTunes. Second, no company has yet produced the equivalent of an iPod for print media. That’s about to change. Amazon is hoping the Kindle 2 will do for it what the iPod has done for Apple. (See the Wired review here.) But they should take a lesson from Apple and kill the DRM and stop charging for conversion of pdf files. That’s just short-sighted. Nevertheless, the market for print readers is about to explode, and reading a digital book is about to become a pleasurable experience.
Even without print readers, the traditional newspaper is facing challenges as a commercially viable proposition. With the emergence of 100% online news sources like the Huffington Post and with the bankruptcy of media companies like Sun-Times whose assets are heavily weighted in favour traditional newsprint, the signals are clear. Coupled with the paring effect of the current economic downturn, only those newspapers which fully exploit the online delivery of their product will survive. Those, like the Globe and Mail and the Washington Post, which tried to charge a subscription fee, have dropped the idea because they lost readers instead of gaining revenue. Their lessons demonstrate that you can’t develop an online business model by analogizing to the world of physical print. Digital print is a medium unto itself and it has its own rules.
So what are the rules?
Am I going to publish through something like booksurge and market a physical book? Am I going to create an digital document that’s readable on Kindle? A combination of both? I wish I had a crystal ball.
More thoughts on the rules of the digital print game in my next post.