Media

Commentary on various aspects of publishing and marketing, primarily focused on books, magazines, and social media.

An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

New Media’s Credibility Problem

thou shalt not shill by duncan
thou shalt not shill by duncan

By offering consumers a low cost digital product, the economics of ebooks create a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle. The low price expands the available market by making it affordable to more consumers; low production and distribution expenses allow the publisher to earn a healthy margin; and the larger addressable market allows publishers to sell more units at greater profit margins.

Mark Coker, Why We Need $4.00 Books

One of the problems with the new media business model of trading exposure for content and attempting to monetize the eyeballs (a la The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Geek Dad, etc; all a variation on the B2B editorial model, but with even more of a self-promotional angle) is that it makes the content suspect. Without a firm editorial vision, the result is typically a mish-mash of shallow opinion and punditry, with the occasional gem slipping through.

In his first essay for The Huffington Post‘s new Books section, Smashwords founder Mark Coker offers a half-hearted op-ed on ebook pricing, taking the narrow position that print books are too expensive for many consumers, especially those in developing economies, and that $4 ebooks are the mass-market paperback of the future.

Of course, there’s not a single mention of the prohibitive costs of eReaders, smartphones and their expensive data plans, or broadband Internet access. It’s a classic case of willfully ignoring the forest for the trees.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Motivational Cliches Aren’t Business Models

Snake Oil shading and coloring by opacity
Snake Oil shading and coloring by opacity

“If the people who make the decisions are the people who will also bear the consequences of those decisions, perhaps better decisions will result.”

John Abrams, The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community and Place

I hate pundits.

[ETA: Maybe I should have said I hate Twitter? Update at the end of the  post.]

Whether in politics, sports or publishing, on radio, TV or Twitter, they’re the know-it-alls who usually have no skin in the game, no accountability and, worse, no interest in seeing the big picture. They love to hear themselves talk, to offer their opinions on how things should be done, and to stir things up just to see what happens.

They also tend to love motivational quotes, dropping them into their speeches, and blogs, and tweets as if they were offering actionable advice and original insights; precious wine from water for the thirsty!

“Meh,” I say. “Meh.”

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

6Qs: Richard Eoin Nash, Social Publisher

BEA: Richard Nash by cgkinla
BEA: Richard Nash by cgkinla

“Basically, the best-selling five hundred books each year will likely be published much 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.”

—About Richard Eoin Nash

Richard Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull, has been making waves ever since stepping down from the acclaimed indie earlier this year to “go all in” and pursue his vision of the future of publishing. Equal parts philosopher and raconteur, his over-the-top performance at BEA’s 7×20×21 panel reminded me of Frank T.J. Mackey, Tom Cruise’s motivational speaker in Magnolia; I fully expected him to start yelling “Respect the READER!” at one point.

He caught some flak as the focal point of my post asking “Is Social Publishing simply Vanity Publishing 2.0?“, not so much because I think he’s actually going into vanity publishing, but because of the various social/digital/ePublishing initiatives I’ve seen popping up lately, Cursor seemed to have the closest thing to a viable business model worth critiquing.

After doing exactly that backchannel, he graciously agreed to a brief interview to shed some more light on the subject and I’m thrilled to have him as the second in a sporadic series of interviews with insightful publishing and marketing professionals – Richard Eoin Nash, Social Publisher.

1) Define “social publishing” in terms the average book reader would understand; no buzzwords, no “organic gurgle of culture”. What is it, and what’s in it for the reader?

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

On Branding, Tribes, and Seth Godin Goes Wild

Seth Godin Rides A Unicorn by zoomar
Seth Godin Rides A Unicorn by zoomar

“If you can just assemble these 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 people who love literary fiction, then you’ve earned the right to be the ringleader, the leader of that tribe—and you’ll never, ever again have trouble selling literary fiction.”

–Seth Godin, How to Fix the Publishing Industry

Seth Godin arguably did not have the Best Week Ever last week, between his ill-conceived Brands in Public initiative, and his controversial talk at a brown bag lunch put together by the Digital Publishing Group here in New York City. Harsh reactions to both raged on Twitter and in the blogiverse, and he quickly walked back his brandjacking project, a brazenly opportunistic social media scam that effectively sought to leverage the real-time web and SEO tactics to extort $400/month from brands looking to control the presentation of their dirty laundry via his Squidoo site.

Between these two incidents, and his ill-advised comments on non-profit organizations and social media a couple of weeks ago (for which Geoff Livingston and Ike Pigott deftly cut him down), I’m starting to think the old man has lost a step.

Or three.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Will eBook Exuberance Kill Publishing?

One iPhone Case To Rule Them All by Photo Giddy
One iPhone Case To Rule Them All by Photo Giddy

“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. We started to market it that way, and it just took off.”

–Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs on Amazon and Ice Cream

There’s a particularly virulent meme running through the publishing industry that says the only thing keeping eBooks from supplanting print books tomorrow is a great eReader, and that Apple’s long-rumored Tablet is that killer device. Yesterday, another Apple event came and went and, as has happened every single time, there was neither an announcement of a Tablet, nor any mention of eBooks being a critical part of their plans for world domination.

Interestingly, Jobs specifically noted that eBooks weren’t a significant market yet, pointing to Amazon’s continued silence on the actual number of Kindles they’ve sold: “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”

Two other notable developments popped up yesterday that suggest the hype surrounding eBooks has hit an unwarranted level of “irrational exuberance”: the premature demise of Quartet Books (“there are very few industry best practices“), and Tor.com’s announcement of a POD-based imprint.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Freemium for writers is two debates

[This is a guest post by Dan Holloway. His info is at the end of the post.]

Audience in Red by felipe trucco
Audience in Red by felipe trucco

The battle isn’t getting people to pay; it’s getting people to read. If they do read, they might not pay. If they don’t read, they’ll never pay.

Writers who use the “freemium” model face two distinct challenges, and the harder one isn’t always the one you think.

What a delightful piece of coincidence that I should be asked to write this blog the day before I headed off to the Reading Festival. My wife and I were going for the headline set by the most important band of the 1990s,  Radiohead (sorry, Kurt), who propelled the issue of providing content for free into the public consciousness (sorry, Trent) when they released their album In Rainbows on a set-your-own-price basis; 60% of people chose, in the event, to pay nothing.

A delightful coincidence, but not actually that significant. Radiohead are still the most important band in the world; Trent Reznor is one of the most important figures in [re]shaping the music industry; Stephen King is about the most long-term successful writer on the planet. And Chris Anderson is, well, Chris Anderson. But these are the names that come up again and again in the freemium debate – “look how great they are; see what they did!” on the one hand; “it wasn’t a success, it was a disaster; and the free wasn’t properly free!” on the other.

I want to make two points. First, the exploits of established megastars have nothing to do with the relevance of the freemium debate to new writers. Second, they actually skew the debate rather dangerously, because they focus attention on the wrong challenge, not the one that’s most important to new writers.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Soda Pop Stop Lessons for Bookstores

“Thank you very much, Pepsi-Cola, for reminding me that I own my shelf space and I can do anything I want. So I immediately went out and found 25 little brands of soda that were still in glass bottles…”

—John Nese, Galcos Soda Pop Stop

John Nese, proprietor of Galcos Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles, shows independent bookstores one way they can deal with major publishers and compete with Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc. — depth over breadth.

I came across a great example of this approach while on vacation a couple of weeks ago, at Adventures Unlimited Books in Cottonwood, AZ, located on North Main Street in the historic part of town. Covering two decent-sized storefronts (maybe 800 sq. feet total?) with a small entrance connecting them that doubles as a seating/reading area, the left side features a modest selection of the kinds of new, recent and notable books across the typical categories that are found in most small, independent bookstores.

The right side, though, is an alternative history, conspiracy theory, sci-fi/fantasy aficionado’s dream, featuring an impressive selection of Adventures Unlimited Press books as well as books from other publishers covering similar topics and territory. It’s about as niche as you can get, sort of a bricks-and-mortar take on Tor.com‘s store, or the book equivalent of Nese’s impressive selection of 500+ sodas not produced by Pepsi or Coca-Cola.

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