iStock­photo / JoshBlake

By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

From Jan­u­ary 19, 2012
Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days through the kind (and brave) benev­o­lence of Jane Fried­man at JaneFriedman.com

Imme­di­ate seat­ing available

For once, it doesn’t mat­ter how cold it is in New York. As the first big annual F+W Media con­fer­ences of 2012 heave into action, the uphol­stery is toasty. Con­fab­World is cooking.

And we don’t have to wait for the mas­sive Dig­i­tal Book World Con­fer­ence & Expo to open on Mon­day. Atten­dees of the Writer’s Digest Con­fer­ence, which opens Fri­day, will find them­selves in a Sev­enth Avenue salon super­heated by the snick­ers of self-publishing authors who think they have the biz licked – and by the fum­ing of other writ­ers deter­mined to go less gen­tly into that 99-cents furnace.

Just arrived New York. Sunny! Mak­ing an LA boy feel wel­come. #wdc12

Wednes­day 18 Jan­u­ary 12 16:36 via Twit­ter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@jamesscottbell

James Scott Bell

To reas­sure you quickly: you don’t have to be there to be there.

If you’re not able to join us on the hearth and find your own chaise-chaude in our book-ly ball­rooms, no prob­lem. We’ll be sure some smoke gets in your eyes.

Warmed by the socia­bil­ity of new media, our indus­try loves Twit­ter. Per­haps you’ve noticed. Well, of course you have. So keep these hash­tags handy: #wdc12 and #dbw12. Another good one to add day­time ET on Mon­day is #dbw­sum – that’s the DBW Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit.

I’m @Porter_Anderson in the Twee­t­erie, as you likely know, and you’re wel­come to shoot up a flare with any ques­tions. I’ll imme­di­ately hand them to Jane Fried­man, oth­er­wise known as Porter’s Brain.

Also: soft­ware will­ing, my site’s home page – PorterAnderson.com – will dis­play a self-refreshing cap­ture of hash­tagged tweets. I’ll be doing my live-tweet cov­er­age of select ses­sions, from top to bot­tom, in hopes of giv­ing you a coher­ent account of the pro­ceed­ings. And our com­mu­nity is unham­pered by shy­ness when it comes to blog­ging, colum­niz­ing, opin­ing, and scrawl­ing on vacant walls at ConfabWorld.

You keep an eye on the tweets. We’ll keep you going with comely confabulation.

Gear­ing up for a real live writer’s con­fer­ence! Alter­nat­ing between puk­ing with excite­ment and puk­ing from nerves. #wdc12

Tues­day 17 Jan­u­ary 12 15:36 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@jasonevermorr

Jason Everett Morris

I also can offer you a series of pre­view arti­cles, with both text and video. Con­fer­ence speaker Dan Blank of We Grow Media and I have put them together:

• Pre­view: Dig­i­tal Book World Con­fer­ence & Expo 2012
• Pre­view: Writer’s Digest Con­fer­ence 2012
• Your Guide to Writ­ing & Pub­lish­ing Con­fer­ences, 2012
• How To Get The Most Out Of A Con­fer­ence
  

And as we the peo­ple of let­ters con­vene, I want to cat­a­log some of the  kin­dling – sorry, wrong word – a few of the drier twigs, that’s bet­ter, which are fuel­ing what surely is among the most fired-up con­fer­ence sea­son this busi­ness has seen since Mar­garet Mitchell fanned those other flames.

Every chair at the Sher­a­ton New York Hotel & Tow­ers is a hot seat. That’s because just about any­body who can make it to a reg­is­tra­tion table can accuse all the oth­ers of mess­ing up every­thing — and be accused of mess­ing up everything.

We’re going to see 70 agents slammed by 90-second pitches from 450 authors for three long hours at WDC.

And while the car­pet is being replaced after that, cast a wary eye over this list of com­pa­nies attend­ing DBW. Yes, that’s Our Friends From Seat­tle and Google and Barnes & Noble and Apple and the Big Three-Plus-Three and the top 400 part­ners and rivals imme­di­ately south of them — all up in there at once.

Be aware that the near­est exit may be behind you. This could sim­ply dis­in­te­grate into a 1,200-person brawl in the ball­room. Shall we finally start jack­ing up authors’ roy­al­ties? Roy­al­ties? I got your authors’ roy­al­ties right here. Why not just slug it out and be done with it?  (I like “brawl­room,” don’t you?)

Watch for dis­count code DBWFIGHT, $40 off on your ambu­lance ride.

Oh good lord.

Tues­day 17 Jan­u­ary 12 17:43 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DonLinn

Don Linn

And as the news media close in for their spe­cial cov­er­age, here are just a few says you might see the tracer fire fly on Reuters’ video:

• How do agents feel about self-publishing authors these days? How do agents feel about pub­lish­ers? How do agents feel about agent-publishers? How do agent-publishers sleep at night?
• How do tra­di­tion­ally pub­lished authors feel about agents? And com­mis­sions? And self-publishing authors who brag about hav­ing no commissions?
• How do small pub­lish­ers feel about the Big Four-Plus-Two?
• How do the Big Six’s staffers feel about being told in meet­ings, “You guys bet­ter digi-up”?
• How do any of us feel about meta­data? It’s dri­ven Laura Daw­son to knitting.
• How do inde­pen­dent book­store own­ers feel about the Interwebs?
• How do librar­i­ans feel things are going? Pack a lunch before you ask that.
• How do self-publishing authors feel about every­body? Okay, we, we know that already.
• How does every­body feel about Amazon?
• And does Ama­zon feel any­thing at all?

So don’t get com­fort­able, know what I mean? Don’t sit back and relax. Sit for­ward and be tense.

I’m flaber­gasted by how much inter­est there is in my ses­sion with Bill Newlin of Avalon about meta­data at #dbw12. I blame @Porter_Anderson

Fri­day 13 Jan­u­ary 12 12:39 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@ftoolan

Fran Toolan

I’m going to run you through a quick litany of mul­ti­ple view­points. The road to Con­fab­World this year is paved with hot coals. Try to keep up:

I know a few agents, and they’re tear­ing their hair out. An agent recently told me “edi­tors in big pub­lish­ers are basi­cally read­ers for mar­ket­ing depart­ments.” Another said in the past year she’d got more than 10 excel­lent books to edi­to­r­ial board, with all the edi­tors staunchly behind them, but mar­ket­ing vetoed them. An edi­tor I know – very senior in terms of job title and the pub­lisher she works for – laments that she is no longer allowed to accept the rich fic­tion she loves to read and has to pub­lish shal­low sure-fire super­mar­ket titles.

London-based author, best­selling ghost­writer, and writ­ing instruc­tor Roz Mor­ris writes these and more telling obser­va­tions in Why play­ing safe in pub­lish­ing is riskier than ever

We’re too savvy to make these #self­pub­lish­ing mis­takes, so pass this to some­one who might http://t.co/vT5nrFdx #books #authors #writ­ers

Mon­day 16 Jan­u­ary 12 16:31 via Hoot­SuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@dirtywhitecandy

Roz Mor­ris

The major pub­lish­ers have com­pletely abdi­cated respon­si­bil­ity for pro­duc­ing the dig­i­tal ver­sions of their cat­a­logs: it’s all handed over to ama­teurs. You see it through­out the indus­try. From the typo­graph­i­cal hor­ror of most eBooks, through to the lack­lus­ter iPad titles being produced.

Chris Stevens is inter­viewed by the Toronto Review of Books in Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A

Chris Stevens dis­cusses his overnight sen­sa­tion of an inter­ac­tive book app, Alice for the iPad. The app is based… http://t.co/vEI4utqv

Wednes­day 18 Jan­u­ary 12 19:52 via Face­bookReplyRetweetFavorite

@WestVanLibrary

West Van Library

It seems to me that those of us who sell goods – be they books, white goods, clothes or any­thing else – need to learn to think far more closely about the user experience.

Sheila Boun­ford in On Expe­ri­ence at Off the Page (and What of the Book?) before remind­ing us “Dr Seuss famously said ‘Some­times the ques­tions are com­pli­cated and the answers are sim­ple’” in On Change (via Dr Seuss & W H Auden) 

@Don­Linn thanks for the RT, Don. I like to keep my cul­tural ref­er­ences as eclec­tic as possible…

Wednes­day 18 Jan­u­ary 12 15:17 via Twit­ter for Black­Berry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@SheilaB01

Sheila Boun­ford

The over­rid­ing message…is that books are an entre­pre­neur­ial exer­cise, com­bin­ing the selec­tion of a sub­ject, the self-confidence to stay with it through the report­ing and writ­ing ordeal, and a com­mit­ment to mar­ket­ing the results, which for many authors is an espe­cially unfa­mil­iar process.

Peter Osnos at The Atlantic writes Good Writ­ing Isn’t Enough: How to Sell a Book in the Dig­i­tal Age, an arti­cle he bases on the Nie­man Foun­da­tion for Inves­tiga­tive Journalism’s excel­lent Nie­man Reports edi­tion titled Writ­ing the Book(a free download)

Good Writ­ing Isn’t Enough: How to Sell a Book in the Dig­i­tal Age — Peter Osnos — Enter­tain­ment — The Atlantic http://t.co/JrBZsXk1

Thurs­day 12 Jan­u­ary 12 15:36 via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@fiiblog

Ricardo Lourenço

While writ­ing this post, it felt anti­quated how best­seller lists still seg­ment out sales by edi­tion (hard­cover, paper­back, mass mar­ket, elec­tronic). If these lists are printed to serve and inform readers—and per­haps that’s a huge assumption?—how much does this dis­tinc­tion mat­ter, except to those inside the indus­try? How much do these dis­tinc­tions serve to keep the old par­a­digms in place? (E.g., “hard­cov­ers” are more impor­tant or mean­ing­ful than “paperbacks”?)

Jane Fried­man, Uni­ver­sity of Cincin­nati new-media pro­fes­sor, indus­try ana­lyst, and long-suffering host of the Ether here at her site, preps for one of her pre­sen­ta­tions at WDC this week­end in eBook Sta­tis­tics For Authors to Watch, writ­ing, “You can not only find var­i­ous data sets, you can also find many inter­pre­ta­tions“

I’m speak­ing at @Writ­ers­Di­gest event this wkend. See my top ses­sion picks: http://t.co/FL5E6DJd [+save 20% if you haven’t registered]

Tues­day 17 Jan­u­ary 12 10:05 via Hoot­SuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@JaneFriedman

Jane Fried­man

As tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers exper­i­ment with ebook sales…it seems they may be push­ing self-published authors off the list…The aver­age price of a self-published Kin­dle top-100 best­seller con­tin­ues to drop, but a new look at these titles’ per­for­mance in 2011 sug­gests these books are fac­ing increased com­pe­ti­tion from tra­di­tional publishers.

Laura Haz­ard Owen, who assid­u­ously cov­ers pub­lish­ing for paid­Con­tent, has this inter­est­ing analy­sis in Did Self-Publishing Hype Hit Its Peak In 2011?

No more new Pen­guin down­load­able audio­books in libraries. Which pub­lisher will be next to pull their titles? http://t.co/5YHitigb

Wednes­day 18 Jan­u­ary 12 18:47 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@laurahazardowen

Laura Haz­ard Owen

Amanda Hocking’s “books from Trylle Tril­ogy were removed from dis­tri­b­u­tion in August, will be repub­lished in weeks, in print and dig­i­tal for­mats – and cost a few times more.… In 2011 self-publishing was bear­ing the badge of novelty. Now it becomes the part of the dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing landscape…Publishers and authors would like to avoid such sto­ries (as Hocking’s) and that’s why they’ll find each other much sooner – and that means that less good qual­ity books will come out as self-published ones.

Piotr Kowal­czyk writes up his Top Self-published Kin­dle Ebooks of 2011 [Report], as Jane Fried­mannotes, a “help­ful pars­ing of Ama­zon data” with which we can begin to dis­cern “Is the 99-cent price tag for e-books wear­ing out?” and other issues

2011 was a year of books being self-published in “bulk”. Such a thing is not gonna hap­pen again http://t.co/dehBZgHo

Sun­day 15 Jan­u­ary 12 18:10 via Hoot­SuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@namenick

Piotr Kowal­czyk

We should stop think­ing of self-publishing sim­ply as a nice way for indie authors to be pub­lished. Viewed another way, mea­sur­ing self-publishing activ­ity cal­cu­lates the amount of money Ama­zon (and oth­ers) are no longer shar­ing with pub­lish­ers. And it’s grow­ing.

The empha­sis is mine. This ring­ing com­ment comes from the Milano office of ATKear­ney in its upcom­ing report at DBW. Mike Shatzkin, con­fer­ence coun­cil chair, used it this week in his walkup to some of the data ses­sions in the con­fer­ence ahead, Show me the data!I may give it one more ride in a later seg­ment of the Ether, as one of the most pen­e­trat­ing evo­ca­tions yet of the indus­try — inclu­sive of Amazon

I’m at ABA’s Win­ter Insti­tute, learn­ing things. Highly inspired and amused by Ann Patchett’s great talk this morning.

Wednes­day 18 Jan­u­ary 12 20:30 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MikeShatzkin

Mike Shatzkin

I get mil­lions of hits a year on this blog. When peo­ple dis­cuss self-pubbing, my name often comes up. But the peo­ple who visit this blog, and dis­cuss my self-publishing efforts, are writ­ers. Writ­ers aren’t buy­ing my fic­tion. They aren’t buy­ing my non-fiction either–I have an ebook called A Newbie’s Guide to Pub­lish­ing and it is among my lowest-selling titles. The peo­ple who buy me are read­ers, and the vast major­ity have never heard of me. Read­ers find me on Ama­zon, because Ama­zon has made it easy for my books to be dis­cov­ered… If one of Amazon’s imprints offers to pub­lish you, accept. Right now they are the only pub­lisher who can increase your sales.

Joe Kon­rath – as he says, “Peo­ple con­sider me to be one of the mouth­pieces of the self-publishing move­ment” – here takes on The Value of Pub­lic­ity, posi­tion­ing it as fairly anal­o­gous to the stan­dard author plat­form encour­aged today

Kon­rath posts his Kin­dle num­bers. http://t.co/rZnZdqEA

Wednes­day 11 Jan­u­ary 12 11:22 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@jakonrath

JA Kon­rath

We’ve com­piled an infor­mal account of all of the self-published ebook authors to make the NYT best­seller lists last year with an orig­i­nal work (thus we are not includ­ing reis­sues or short-form pieces). Con­trary to the pop­u­lar impres­sion, the total num­ber is…11. The authors, along with the date of the first appear­ance on the list, are:

Nancy John­son (2/20)
Vic­torine Lieske (3/6)
Stephanie McAfee (3/27)
Heather Killough-Walden (5/1)
John Locke (5/8)
Court­ney Milan (7/10)
Dar­cie Chan (8/28)
Chris Cul­ver (9/4)
Rick Murcer (9/4)
CJ Lyons (9/11)

The one self-published non­fic­tion author to make the list was Sarah Burleton, whose WHY ME? debuted on the 10/2 list

Michael Cader, writ­ing at Publisher’s Lunch in How Many Self-Published Authors Were Best­sellers In 2011? has the above sober­ing num­bers, sug­gest­ing, as has been stressed many times, that the Kon­raths and Hock­ings (pre-St. Martin’s) are excep­tions to the rule. And Laura Haz­ard Owen’s head­line above about self-publishing hype hav­ing hit a kind of peak in 2011, bears seri­ous consideration

Guess­ing Bertelsmann’s Results; Adding Grain of Salt http://t.co/s1RRvoEv [reg. rqrd.]

Wednes­day 18 Jan­u­ary 12 11:23 via twit­ter­feedReplyRetweetFavorite

@PublishersLunch

Pub­lish­er­sLunch

Twi­light and The Hunger Games showed young adult fic­tion to be a poten­tial gold­mine. Authors and pub­lish­ers quickly latched onto the galaxy of online book sites, where a vast young read­er­ship roams, as the key to global suc­cess. But can you har­ness that energy? Should you even try? More and more blog­gers are reluc­tant to host the author blog tours that now swamp book sites – only to find that pub­lish­ers refuse them free advance review copies of the new books they want. Who wins there?

Julie Bertagna, in YA novel read­ers clash with pub­lish­ing estab­lish­ment at the Guardian reminds us that another issue dog­ging the indus­try is the abrupt dif­fu­sion of crit­i­cal voices. The rise of blog­ging review­ers sim­ply pulls the rug out from under yet another once-orderly, stan­dard­ized ele­ment of busi­ness, the assump­tion and pro­to­col of mainstream-media crit­i­cism. As Bertagna sees it, “The hard­est thing a writer has to learn is that once you pub­lish a book, it’s no longer truly yours.”

@Aus­tralianOpen So lets talk tips and tac­tics… for us lot back home cop­ing with 3am #mur­ray coaster. #Andy­nap first or #sleep­is­fortheweak?

Mon­day 16 Jan­u­ary 12 19:33 via Twit­ter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@JulieBertagna

Julie Bertagna

It is unde­ni­able: we are at trans­for­ma­tion. And I sus­pect that 2012 may well be the most impor­tant year in any of our pro­fes­sional lives and, quite pos­si­bly, in the his­tory of the book. With that in mind, I wanted to share some of our 2011 year-end results for Source­books. While these data points are just for one pub­lisher, we believe that they can help us bet­ter think about the year that we get to cre­ate in 2012. I hope that they help you as well.

Dominique Rac­cah, pub­lisher at Source­books, announces a superb per­for­mance for 2011, includ­ing an 19-percent increase in rev­enue growth and print-book sales run­ning 11 points higher than the Bookscan aver­age. It’s in the ebooks arena that she trum­pets some of her most ebul­lient news this way:

kid you not RT @Adver­tis­ingLaw Shakespeare’s ‘The Tem­pest’ Barred from Ari­zona Pub­lic Schools | WSJ Law Blog http://t.co/ku2P3pMj

Thurs­day 19 Jan­u­ary 12 00:14 via Twit­ter­rificReplyRetweetFavorite

@draccah

Dominique Rac­cah

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com

About Porter Ander­son

Porter Ander­son, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute and has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, UK. As a jour­nal­ist, he has worked with three net­works of CNN (CNN USA, CNN Inter­na­tional, CNN.com) and was on the lead devel­op­ment team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Vil­lage Voice, Dal­las Times Her­ald, D Mag­a­zine, Sara­sota Herald-Tribune and other out­lets. He writes the weekly (Thurs­days) WRITING ON THE ETHER col­umn at JaneFriedman.com and (Mon­days) ETHER FOR AUTHORS col­umn at PublishingPerspectives.com. Ander­son also is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Dig­i­tal Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Pro­gramme, and served as Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copen­hagen. He is based in Tampa and his pri­mary medium is Twit­ter. Fol­low him @Porter_Anderson

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By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

From Jan­u­ary 12, 2012
Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days through the kind (and brave) benev­o­lence of Jane Fried­man at JaneFriedman.com

The sec­ond word is ‘jerk’

And in fact, why don’t we get down on our patel­lae and pray?

In his decades in the Methodist pul­pit min­istry of South Car­olina, my father, surely a closet pub­lisher, loved pro­duc­ing the Sun­day bul­letin. Think Play­bill. It con­tained what we called The Order of Wor­ship for the main ser­vice, list­ing the hymns to be sung, creeds to be chanted, prayers to be made, and, of course, Daddy’s big ser­mon title of the week. The mono­logue. On its back page, the bul­letin car­ried a list­ing of Fel­low­ship Ahead. Com­ing attrac­tions. All put together by a local print shop with less than exten­sive proof­read­ing forces.

And on a swel­ter­ing August Sun­day morn­ing at our red-brick church in Denny Ter­race,  every­one turned at Daddy’s request to fol­low along as he read aloud from the chan­cel the Fel­low­ship Ahead and found him­self intoning:

4:00 p.m. TODAY:  Church-wide panic. Please be prompt.

That typo, my mother the school­teacher claimed, pro­duced the best-attended church-wide pic­nic of Daddy’s career.

Today, it wouldn’t hurt our con­gre­ga­tion of pub­lish­ing to catch a church-window reflec­tion of how we look engag­ing in one industry-wide panic after the next. Our ener­getic knees-up exer­cises of fever­ish fel­low­ship seem so fre­quent nowa­days that we might as well sched­ule them.

That way, we wouldn’t be caught off-guard by knee-jerk reac­tions when Twit­ter lashes out at Google search changes (Alexei Oreskovic, Reuters) … only to learn that Google+ enhanced searches can be turned off and on by users as update con­tin­ues rolling out.

Before you scoff and get all knee-jerky about that one again, note that Eli Pariser, author of The Fil­ter Bub­ble: What the Inter­net Is Hid­ing From You, told Steven Levy:

It’s def­i­nitely a big step in terms of trans­parency and con­trol. It’s kind of awe­some to see them do this.

Pariser, a major ana­lyst and critic of our philo­soph­i­cal echo cham­bers on the Web, believes we may be see­ing trans­parency from Google? Oh. Hm. Well. Gosh. As you climb down off the ceil­ing, you can read Levy’s Epi­cen­ter post: Has Google Popped the Fil­ter Bub­ble?

Oh, and Twit­ter didn’t renew its agree­ment with Google to have real-time feeds of tweets included in search results. Which might indi­cate a cer­tain amount of chutz­pah in Twitter’s com­plaint that tweets may not top search results. Oreskovic reports:

Google also said it was abid­ing by code embed­ded within cer­tain Twit­ter mes­sages instruct­ing search engines not to rank the mes­sages within their search results.

Oh. Hm. Well. Gosh again.

I could type “Oh Good Grief” about eleventy times a day on Twitter.

Wednes­day 11 Jan­u­ary 12 15:20 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DonLinn

Don Linn

And maybe we weren’t star­ing into the edge of night a week ago, after all, when Jenn Webb at O’Reilly Radar was among the few sen­si­ble enough to ask the log­i­cal ques­tion, Can the Nook be a viable busi­ness by itself? Lots of art­ful alarmists had enjoyed fore­telling Barnes and Noble’s col­lapse, Arc­tic ice melt­ing in the non­fic­tion sec­tion, Bezosian storm troop­ers invad­ing our liv­ing rooms and rak­ing the last “real books” right off your sainted hand­made bookshelf.

The site for this year’s Jan­u­ary 23–25 Dig­i­tal Book World Con­fer­ence & Expo — #dbw12 to your Twit­teresque neigh­bors — leads with the line “When change is the only con­stant, it’s time to get with the pro­gram.” Not bad advice for all of us. It’s really all Dad was ever say­ing, after all. Dif­fer­ent pro­gram. Same problem.

Lots more fun to go astray first and ask for­give­ness later, lots more fun to pitch a fit about the lat­est pub­lish­ing hic­cup and later act as if you never believed for a minute the Armaged­don you said it was.

How many peo­ple have tried to pre­dict what Apple would say in its “event” this month? –before Ingrid Lun­den and some oth­ers gave us the mer­ci­ful word (and burst a few fat fil­ter bub­bles): Apple Event In New York This Month Will Focus On Edu­ca­tion. All we had to do was wait. No church-wide panic was needed.

Our pro­gram is change. We’re going to hit a lot of bumps, sur­prises both happy and oth­er­wise. And we’re going to wear our­selves out if we let the hot­ter heads among us call the dynamic shots. We need to leave DEFCON to the Pen­ta­gon. We have smaller fish to fry.

I’m going to look at sev­eral items in this par­tic­u­lar snoot­ful of Ether with reflex­ive knees in mind. Join me. Wher­ever we’re headed in pub­lish­ing, you’ll look bet­ter when you get there with your Sunday-go-to-meetin’ hat still on your head.

So cool your knees. Enough panic.

Thank you, google maps, for help­ing me remem­ber the bar I have a drinks meet­ing in shortly. Yelling SOMETHING BAR at peo­ple wasn’t helpful.

Wednes­day 11 Jan­u­ary 12 19:48 via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Gin­ger Clark

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com

About Porter Ander­son

Porter Ander­son, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute and has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, UK. As a jour­nal­ist, he has worked with three net­works of CNN (CNN USA, CNN Inter­na­tional, CNN.com) and was on the lead devel­op­ment team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Vil­lage Voice, Dal­las Times Her­ald, D Mag­a­zine, Sara­sota Herald-Tribune and other out­lets. He writes the weekly (Thurs­days) WRITING ON THE ETHER col­umn at JaneFriedman.com and (Mon­days) ETHER FOR AUTHORS col­umn at PublishingPerspectives.com. Ander­son also is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Dig­i­tal Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Pro­gramme, and served as Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copen­hagen. He is based in Tampa and his pri­mary medium is Twit­ter. Fol­low him @Porter_Anderson

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By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

From Jan­u­ary 5, 2012
Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days at JaneFriedman.com

No e-deus ex machina

“God in a bucket,” we used to call this in my the­ater days, not to say my the­atri­cal days.

There was no “e-” in front of it in the 18th cen­tury, of course. But the con­cept from works of ancient the­ater (Aeschy­lus, Euripi­des) was that the way one got char­ac­ters out of a mess of an end­ing to a play that was run­ning too long any­way was through a bit of stage­craft. A machine was deployed to raise or lower a god­like fig­ure into the fray to get every­one sorted, untan­gle a big mess, and jolly the audi­ence off to the post-show Bac­cha­na­lia. Worked out well for Medea.

In chat­ting with some year-enders as we watched that ball ex machina descend in Times Square to haul us all out of the mess that was 2011, it became clear that many authors today see the dig­i­ti­za­tion of things as just such a handy lift, a char­iot swing­ing low to carry us home (where the read­ers are) — to deliver every­one from the gate­keep­ing Eumenides of old pub­lish­ing and into the stage-center jig-fest of DIY aban­don. Mickey Rooney, that ancient thes­pian, called this “let’s put on a show!”

For the record, I won’t be unveil­ing a new ereader at CES either.

Wednes­day 4 Jan­u­ary 12 11:19 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DonLinn

Don Linn

Now, if we set aside the Steve Press­field–scale bat­tle of the bul­lies that some­times threat­ens the traditional-vs.-self-publishing issue — pray to your gods that we see fewer such unseemly skir­mishes in 2012 — we do, how­ever, find Mike Shatzkin ready en toga, olive leaves in his hair, to offer us the Poet­ics of our lesser day, and in winged words.

Book­stores are dis­ap­pear­ing. Sales are mov­ing to dig­i­tal. We’ve had an iPad in the mar­ket­place for almost two years. And we have as yet dis­cov­ered no for­mula for suc­cess to con­vert a suc­cess­ful illus­trated print book to a suc­cess­ful illus­trated ebook.

In his new essay, The dig­i­tal future still is a mys­tery if you don’t pub­lish “immer­sive read­ing,” Shatzkin refers to, say, a stan­dard novel or work of non-fiction that requires no major graphic embell­ish­ments as “immer­sive read­ing,” immer­sive by its sub­ject and/or writ­ing alone. So is a good pro­duc­tion of “Seven Against Thebes” at Epi­dau­rus, the great ancient the­ater in the Pelo­pon­nese, at least until that bucket arrives bear­ing Greek con­trivances. It’s what most of us write. Books of text, suit­able for print or, now, for e-versioning. We have to hope they’re immersive.

Pub­lish­ers of immer­sive read­ing can, at least in the short run, largely count on keep­ing the sales from read­ers they’ve always had. The prob­lem for these pub­lish­ers will be keep­ing the big authors (at a sus­tain­able roy­alty rate) if the busi­ness becomes largely dig­i­tal and most read­ers can be accessed with­out the capa­bil­i­ties of a major com­pany oper­at­ing at scale.

Where Shatzkin sees the wheels com­ing off is in “the rest of the book out­put,” some of it in the realm of children’s illus­trated mate­r­ial, sure, but even beyond that.

It isn’t just illus­tra­tions that stamp a book as “not immer­sive read­ing.” Books of con­tent chunks, like cook­books or travel guides, are also not “opti­mized” merely by mak­ing them reflowable.

Pro­duc­tion expense, repro­duc­tion dilem­mas, cross-format com­plex­i­ties, and even copy­right­ing issues bedevil these sec­tors and will become increas­ingly a part of the pub­lish­ing plot as phys­i­cal book­stores strug­gle to sur­vive as out­lets for such prod­ucts in print.

Not only do these not con­vert well to ebooks, they aren’t as well dis­played in an online shop­ping environment.

For all our respec­tive and col­lec­tive carp­ing here in χάος — khaos — it’s enough to make any­one not work­ing in these areas feel “shut my mouth” lucky to be ply­ing the wine-dark immer­sive sea. And glad to have a thought­ful first write of the year from Shatzkin for the journey.

Tell Pene­lope we’re on the way.

Note: Shatzkin speaks at the Dig­i­tal Book World Con­fer­ence & Expo later this month on “Remak­ing an Indus­try: What pub­lish­ers should be think­ing about in 2012.”

While I was on break I kept a list of “Things I need to fol­low up on when I’m back at work in 2012.” Guess how many items are on that list.

Wednes­day 4 Jan­u­ary 12 12:28 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Gin­ger Clark

FYI: The num­ber of things I need to fol­low up on is…24. Not as high as many of your guesses!

Wednes­day 4 Jan­u­ary 12 12:51 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Gin­ger Clark

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com

About Porter Ander­son

Porter Ander­son, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute and has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, UK. As a jour­nal­ist, he has worked with three net­works of CNN (CNN USA, CNN Inter­na­tional, CNN.com) and was on the lead devel­op­ment team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Vil­lage Voice, Dal­las Times Her­ald, D Mag­a­zine, Sara­sota Herald-Tribune and other out­lets. He writes the weekly (Thurs­days) WRITING ON THE ETHER col­umn at JaneFriedman.com and (Mon­days) ETHER FOR AUTHORS col­umn at PublishingPerspectives.com. Ander­son also is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Dig­i­tal Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Pro­gramme, and served as Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copen­hagen. He is based in Tampa and his pri­mary medium is Twit­ter. Fol­low him @Porter_Anderson

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