By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

 

From March 15, 2012
Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days at the invi­ta­tion of Jane Fried­man at JaneFriedman.com

 

Beware the Ides of March

The noble Bru­tus hath told you
Cae­sar was ambitious.

But, of course, today, the 17th Earl of Oxford would have Marc Antony say:

Cae­sar was disruptive.

We like that word now, don’t we? Dis­rup­tive. Oh, yes, we do. Not for noth­ing did Gayle Feld­man, cov­er­ing the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of Pub­lish­ers for The­Book­seller quote one pub­lish­ing exec­u­tive say­ing, “things are going to get ugly” as the US Depart­ment of Jus­tice cir­cles with warn­ings of a col­lu­sion suit.

Give me excess of it, that, sur­feit­ing,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Whoa, wrong play. How dis­rup­tive of me. See?

This mor­tal house I’ll ruin,
Do Cae­sar what he can.

Right Antony, wrong script. Dis­rup­tive. Actu­ally, the library didn’t have the ebook edi­tion of JC, damn it, so I ended up with A&C, so sue me. No, sue the DOJ. No, sue the authors, isn’t it time we made it all their fault again?

But look where sadly the poor wretch comes read­ing, and on an evil Kin­dle, that whore­son jackanapes.

Speak­ing of whom, has any­one seen these two together??

In a cer­tain light…at a cer­tain angle…in the fog of War with Seattle…when minox­i­dil fails… “Halt! Who goes there?” “Ship it!” … “We’ll ship it free!” …I’m just sayin’. Disruption.

Meet me on the steps of the Sen­ate, Brute. I’m in.

 

Dis­rup­tion at #sxsw: The 4G human hotspots

Home­less Hotspots is a very real — and very earnest — ini­tia­tive, imported to Austin for this week’s South by South­west Inter­ac­tive fes­ti­val by BBH Labs, the skunkworks-y inno­va­tion unit of the mar­ket­ing firm Bar­tle Bogle Hegarty.

Hav­ing read Megan Gar­ber when she was still at Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Lab, I was glad to find her at The Atlantic, writ­ing up the strangest story com­ing out of confab-choked Austin. In Wi-Fi Hotspots Made of Home­less Peo­ple: Not as Hor­ri­ble as They Seem, Gar­ber explains how a so-called “char­i­ta­ble exper­i­ment” from BBH Labs of the mar­ket­ing firm Bar­tle Bogle Hegarty was set up:

Par­tic­i­pants in the pro­gram carry MiFi devices with 4G con­nec­tiv­ity. “Intro­duce your­self,” BBH explains, “then log on to their 4G net­work via your phone or tablet for a quick high-quality con­nec­tion. You pay what you want (ide­ally via the Pay­Pal link on the site so we can track finances), and what­ever you give goes directly to the per­son that just sold you access.”

I loved Guy LeCharles Gonzalez’s reac­tion in his piece on it, “A hobo is my WiFi hotspot.”

When I first saw this … I was like WHAT THE HOLY F**K?!?! Then I fol­lowed a few links, got some back­ground, read the orga­niz­ers’ ratio­nale, calmed down a bit, and am now… com­pletely flustered.

I’m still “flus­tered,” what a strangely apt word here, and that’s after a cou­ple of days of read­ing widely on the matter.

 

Gon­za­lez links to the producers-on-the-defensive. Their own explana­tory Home­less Hotspots: a char­i­ta­ble exper­i­ment at SXSWi includes sev­eral points gen­uinely worth noting:

+ We are not sell­ing any­thing. There is no brand involved. There is no com­mer­cial ben­e­fit whatsoever.

+ This is a test pro­gram that was always sched­uled to end today (there’s no 2-week pay­ment cycle)

+ Each of the Hotspot Man­agers keeps all of the money they earn. The more they sell their own access, the more they as indi­vid­u­als make.

And such a Texas-size range of responses, too.

Think about all the com­pa­nies involved in one way or another in SXSW who did absolutely noth­ing at all for Austin’s home­less pop­u­la­tion. How much con­dem­na­tion did they get? None. BBH’s stunt here offends our sense of human dig­nity, but the real offense is that peo­ple were lan­guish­ing in such poor con­di­tions that they would find this to be an attrac­tive job offer.

That’s Matthew Ygle­sias at Slate’s Mon­ey­Box blog, in SXSW’s Human Hotspot Prob­lem.

 

By con­trast, I’ll leave you with Tim Car­mody at Wired in The Damn­ing Back­story Behind ‘Home­less Hotspots’ at SXSW. He raises some badly “flus­ter­ing” ques­tions that just don’t get eas­ily answered.

This is my worry: the home­less turned not just into walk­ing, talk­ing hotspots, but walk­ing, talk­ing bill­boards for a pro­gram that doesn’t care any­thing at all about them or their future, so long as it can score a point or two about dig­i­tal dis­rup­tion of old media par­a­digms. So long as it can prove that the real prob­lem with home­less­ness is that it doesn’t pro­vide a service.

 

Ama­zon Sin­gles: Humans on the hot seat

I’m going to name my first child Ama­zon. I’m incred­i­bly grate­ful to them. There’s no other way to put it but that work­ing with Ama­zon totally changed my life for the better.”

Not only is author and bassist Mishka Shubaly talk­ing openly about his esti­mated $129,544.82 in Ama­zon Sin­gles royalties…not only is he under­stand­ably happy about how good the whole gig has been for him…but he’s also been allowed by Ama­zon Kin­dle Sin­gles Edi­tor David Blum to reveal his sales fig­ures. One of his three Sin­gles, Are You Lone­some Tonight?, has racked up 60,567 copies.

The per­son who brings us this and a lot more infor­ma­tion is some­body Eth­er­nauts know well. Not a week goes by when I don’t quote one or another bit of copy from Laura Haz­ard Owen at paid­Con­tent. This week, she hit it out of the park.

Her two-parter on Ama­zon Sin­gles — Exclu­sive: Ama­zon Has Sold Over Two Mil­lion Kin­dle Sin­gles and Exclu­sive: How Much Do Kin­dle Sin­gles Authors Make? – is, for my money, the most reveal­ing of Ama­zon per­son­nel and of some num­bers (Ama­zon num­bers!) we’ve had yet. Have I read all things Ama­zon­ian? No. But of what I’ve read, this trumps the pile, not just for num­bers but for the frank, straight-ahead com­men­tary the com­pany per­mit­ted. Take care to note, Ama­zon specif­i­cally allowed these writ­ers to break their con­fi­den­tial­ity agree­ments. Even if grudg­ingly, you have to admit, this was cool.

 

For my money, read­ing Tony Award win­ner Frank Gilroy’s com­ments alone is a high. This is the play­wright of “The Sub­ject Was Roses.” And I’m link­ing you there to the IMDB list­ing because — ready for it? — Ama­zon doesn’t carry a copy of his Pulitzer Prize–win­ning script. You can get the Samuel French edi­tion through other sell­ers. But maybe Blum will be good enough to see if Ama­zon wouldn’t like to offer that impor­tant script, itself, say, to high­light Gilroy’s upcom­ing sec­ond Single?

Dis­clo­sure: David Blum was Edi­tor in Chief with the Vil­lage Voice. I was a the­ater colum­nist and critic for Ross Wet­zs­teon at the Voice for sev­eral years, shortly after Euripi­des pre­miered Medea.

 

Check out some of the can­dor here. This is author Oliver Broudy, who has two Sin­gles out and reports some $65,241.16 in roy­al­ties to date from them:

Dave Blum lost sig­nif­i­cant money on the sec­ond sin­gle because of the advance that he gave me, which I needed because the book required some travel. But he still signed me up for a third with the same advance. The loss they sus­tained on my last sin­gle is noth­ing to them, noth­ing. They don’t care. They’re try­ing to develop an edi­to­r­ial brand here, and this is the price they’re will­ing to pay, much as they’re will­ing to take a loss on e-books because they want to sell Kin­dles. There’s def­i­nitely a lit­er­ary cul­ture within the Kin­dle Sin­gles pro­gram, and that’s a very good thing. Once they have total mar­ket sat­u­ra­tion, then pro­mot­ing this kind of lit­er­ary cul­ture may cease to be a pri­or­ity, but that remains to be seen.

Pre­dictably, some peo­ple focused on the over­all num­bers of the 14-month-old Sin­gles pro­gram. It wouldn’t do to be too impressed by any­thing Ama­zon­ian, of course.

Michael Cader at Pub­lish­ers Lunch, for exam­ple, gen­tly pooh-poohed the num­bers over­all, in Beyond the Biggest Authors, Ama­zon Admits “Sin­gles” Sales Are Quite Low.

The six best­selling Kin­dle Sin­gles titles are in fact all non-exclusive works from estab­lished authors: Lee Child, Stephen King, David Bal­dacci, Dean Koontz.…Two exclu­sive works from estab­lished authors, Karin Slaugh­ter and Jodi Picoult, occupy the next two slots, and seem to account for another 250,000 units (or) more, while the remain­ing 4 titles on the top 10 list look to com­prise another 200,000 units or so. (This) leaves the bulk of the Kin­dle Sin­gles list–155 titles–racking up sales of around a mil­lion units, or an aver­age of 6,500 units each (good for $6,500 to $19,500 in gross sales). And that’s with sig­nif­i­cant site pro­mo­tion and their own ded­i­cated best­seller list.

 

Right. And authors may find more to appre­ci­ate than early sales fig­ures here, par­tic­u­larly in the hon­est com­ments of author Will Bunch saying:

One thing I learned the first time around: Amazon’s not a tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing com­pany so they don’t really have proof­read­ers. I’m a ter­ri­ble proof­reader myself, and after the first one, ‘Octo­ber 1, 2011,’ we had to go in after a cou­ple of days and fix a fair num­ber of mis­takes. The sec­ond time, I made sure other peo­ple read behind me and proof­read it for me.

Gra­cious, telling com­ments, both glow­ing and cau­tion­ary. Real chat, made pos­si­bly by Seattle’s will­ing­ness to give Owen this kind of access. I con­grat­u­late Owen on “obtain­ing some gen­eral sta­tis­tics,” as Cader refers to them, yes, and some highly spe­cific insights that we sim­ply haven’t had on this oper­a­tion. Owen’s conclusion:

Kin­dle Sin­gles allows Ama­zon to draw in authors who deem the pro­gram low-risk because it’s not in con­flict with other pub­lisher rela­tion­ships they may have. Those authors may then stick around, espe­cially if they believe that doing a full-length project with Ama­zon has the poten­tial to be as lucra­tive as Kin­dle Sin­gles have been for many of them.

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