By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

 

From June 7, 2012

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

 

A final­ist in the 2003 Aus­tralian Com­edy Awards and adapted into a fea­ture film in Italy (Solo un Padre, Warner Brothers/Cattleya)

“Read­ers should enjoy this ami­able, well-crafted and gen­uinely roman­tic book.”

—Pub­lish­ers Weekly

Find out more on Ama­zon and down­load a sam­ple to your Kindle.

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BEA: Fight for Air

 

Why is it that a lot of peo­ple can look at the same set of facts and come away with com­pletely dif­fer­ent conclusions?

That’s Bar­bara King­solver, an author for whom I have a lot of respect. She was talk­ing at one of the author break­fast ses­sions at Book Expo Amer­ica (BEA), which is soon, mer­ci­fully, closing.

I say mer­ci­fully because I find BEA the most dis­cour­ag­ingly ret­ro­grade event of the year in pub­lish­ing. It’s old-school swag-‘n’-swagger, the hawk­ing of wares not to cus­tomers but to inter­me­di­aries, an anachro­nis­tic holdover in a busi­ness still hav­ing trou­ble rec­og­niz­ing pro­found change.

Kingsolver’s line was not about BEA. She was talk­ing about cli­mate change. She’s a biol­o­gist by train­ing, and her new book, Flight Behav­ior (Novem­ber 6, Harper­Collins) is about how rural farm­ers of the South, where she lives, are the least likely to believe sci­en­tific asser­tions about cli­mate change — and the most likely to be affected by it.

Some­how the theme of denial felt awfully close to home.

 

The pub­lish­ing col­leagues who man the booths and pavil­ions of BEA are some of the peo­ple who may be most gravely affected, at least as far as their work lives go, in cli­mac­tic changes com­ing into the indus­try.

King­solver:

It has occurred to me that the pro­fes­sion in which you’re least likely to get a book con­tract is: writer.

With Stephen Col­bert sit­ting onstage with her, King­solver steadily walked out onto a limb as she talked about “celebrity chefs, celebrity house­wives” and “celebrity celebri­ties” — who do get contracts.

She went on, chat­ting her way through pub­lish­ing tran­si­tions of the past:

Many, most, all of these steps have been about mak­ing books more accessible…paper started edg­ing out parch­ment. You know what peo­ple said: “This paper doesn’t do it for me, I have to feel the skin of a dead sheep for the words to work.” The phys­i­cal form and dis­tri­b­u­tion of books has changed rad­i­cally again and again, and we com­plain and we get over it, and what endures is the book.

Hav­ing to hope she’s right, I took a dif­fer­ent tack this year, and it proved a good deci­sion. I focused on one of the con­fer­ences that stands as a satel­lite to the huge show.

 

BEA is not a con­fer­ence. I hear a lot of peo­ple call­ing it that. It’s not. It’s a trade show.

Think of the major auto shows. Man­u­fac­tur­ers roll out their new mod­els and their loop­i­est pro­to­types, and they stage innu­mer­able stunts involv­ing dry ice and col­ored lights to make mem­bers of the press and major deal­er­ship rep­re­sen­ta­tives become excited about what’s rolling off the assem­bly lines for the next season.

This is close to what BEA does. At its cash-cold heart, the exhibitor floor is a maze of booths and pavil­ions in which pub­lish­ers hawk what they have com­ing up. Even the hearti­est lit­er­a­ture is reduced to “the prod­uct” in such a context.

Way beyond author plat­form­ing, this is major sales­man­ship of a kind that author Lois Lowry noted has been around for decades — she spoke at the 1987 edi­tion of BEA, she said, when the event was under another name and set in Washington.

 

At BEA today, self-publishers walk the car­peted aisles and try to give away copies of their books, prefer­ably to a reviewer, an influ­en­tial blog­ger, even­tu­ally to any­body who will take a copy, any­body at all. There’s some­thing depress­ing about these self-published authors try­ing to gain trac­tion amid the chrome and teak of the big com­pa­nies’ displays.

As Jane Litte wrote this week in one of her day-wraps, BEA: Day 2, Kobo announces self pub­lish­ing plat­form and Bowker releases ebook read­ing data:

Essen­tially, pub­lish­ers and other ven­dors set up booths and then adver­tise their wares to the other BEA atten­dees who are pri­mar­ily book­sellers and other indus­try indi­vid­u­als. The trade peo­ple are every­one from those who sell the card­board con­tain­ers that hold the racks of books at the book­store to printers.

The event is about mass buy-in. I’ll cheer for your list if you’ll cheer for mine. And do, please, have one of our tote bags.

 

King­solver, author that she is, has a dif­fer­ent take on the mar­ket­ing chal­lenges to come:

We are all jock­ey­ing for the atten­tion of the con­sumer, the reader, whom we now call the con­sumer. Try­ing to wres­tle a lit­tle bit of atten­tion from those Angry Birds.

 

I took shel­ter in the com­par­a­tive intel­lec­tual sanc­tu­ary of Mike Shatzkin’s and Michael Cader’s Pub­lish­ers Launch BEA Con­fer­ence.

I watched peo­ple drift in and out of the room from the simul­ta­ne­ously run­ning IDPF Dig­i­tal Book Con­fer­ence — quite a bit of inter­est was gen­er­ated by the Launch agenda.

There was also an ABA Day of Edu­ca­tion event; the BEA Blog­gers Con­fer­ence pref­ac­ing the Blog­World and New Media Expo; and on Sun­day, there’d been a cute-named uPub­lishU self-publishing event.

These huge con­fer­ence gath­er­ings take place in the lower-level con­ven­tion salons of the air­less Jav­its Cen­ter as the trade show thun­ders along upstairs. And after 5 p.m., the peo­ple of the indus­try! the indus­try! all head out to var­i­ous par­ties thrown by pub­lish­ers and star­tups to tweet each other across Manhattan’s twilight.

 

King­solver, these days, is try­ing to take a long view:

It’s always been like this. My point is the lit­er­ary reader is a small but prob­a­bly sta­ble demo­graphic. We have our place. We absorb and pass on infor­ma­tion in a way that endures.

I’m not as reas­sured as I’d like to be by Kingsolver’s good efforts to say that the forces of com­merce and enter­tain­ment have always chal­lenged the writer’s abil­ity to get across, although I cer­tainly appre­ci­ate her effort to ease the worry.

On the other hand, it was good to hear and see pre­sen­ta­tions and panel dis­cus­sions in the Pub­lish­ers Launch con­fer­ence — I rec­om­mend this series of con­fer­ences to you. They’re respon­si­bly put together and expertly run.

The outfit’s Jess Johns, in fact, some­how man­aged to set up a table for my all-day live-tweet cov­er­age with a power strip — a back-saving grace over hav­ing to hunch-‘n’-tweet all day from one’s lap.

Among the stand­outs of the day was a panel focused on what’s chang­ing about the agent’s role amid the new path­ways authors have to publication.

 

Simon Lip­skar of Writ­ers House dom­i­nated the ses­sion mod­er­ated by paidContent’s Laura Haz­ard Owen, mak­ing the case that agents’ work has changed from what once might have been the pas­sion of per­sonal advo­cacy to a new demand for — and reliance on — the “harder” proofs of met­rics and analy­sis. Lip­skar made his point well:

It’s a big change in how we think. We’re doing math. A new skill set for agents. We’re stats geeks.

Jen­nifer Weltz of Jean Nag­ger sug­gested that as the oblig­a­tions and oppor­tu­ni­ties of authors expand, so do the jobs of those authors’ agents:

We see our­selves as our authors’ advo­cates in every­thing they have to tackle to sur­vive this market.

Laura Dail of Dail Lit­er­ary con­curred, and spoke to the fact that once-traditional approaches can become frag­mented in a multi-platform market:

We do deals right now where it makes sense. We’re look­ing for part­ners. If e– and print, great.

And Tim Knowl­ton of Cur­tis Brown talked of dis­cov­er­ing a con­tract that men­tioned “elec­tronic rights” — from 1966.

More take­aways from Pub­lish­ers Launch BEA (we hash­tagged it #Launch­BEA, in case you’d like to review the day’s tweets) included some of the fine glob­al­iza­tion con­text that Shatzkin brings to the annual Dig­i­tal Book World Conference.

In this case, Ed Nawotka of Pub­lish­ing Per­spec­tives cap­tured a grow­ing ten­dency for non-US pub­lish­ers to con­sider mov­ing into Amer­i­can mar­kets. In US to Face Domes­tic Com­pe­ti­tion from Over­seas Dig­i­tal Pub­lish­ers, Nawotka quotes pan­elist David Cully of Baker & Tay­lor:

“Ter­ri­to­r­ial rights bar­ri­ers can’t stand and are falling. When a book goes on sale, it goes on sale — if you go online on the inter­net, rights are being vio­lated each in their own way. I think the mar­ket will deal with it finan­cially. Pub­lish­ers are rec­og­niz­ing that the rights they once acquired, will have a dif­fer­ent value.”

 

Javier Celaya of Dos­doce, Nawotka notes, described the trans­la­tion fac­ulty back­ing the com­ing com­pe­ti­tion from off­shore. Celaya:

“A lot of Euro­pean pub­lish­ers are hold­ing on to their own rights in an effort to cre­ate their own mar­kets.” While the United States has “no tra­di­tion of trans­la­tion, and those books that are trans­lated are con­sid­ered ‘dif­fi­cult’ books,” in mar­kets like Spain, France and Italy, as many as 30–40% of all books are translations.

In an onstage con­ver­sa­tion with Shatzkin, Molly Bar­ton of Penguin’s dig­i­tal oper­a­tion also talked of inter­na­tional expan­sion. Jeremy Greenfield’s cov­er­age of the ses­sion notes:

In addi­tion to sell­ing English-language e-books in coun­tries like Ger­many and Swe­den, Pen­guin has made sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in ramp­ing up e-book sales in coun­tries like Brazil and China, accord­ing to Bar­ton. Pen­guin has also been trans­lat­ing its e-books into for­eign lan­guages includ­ing Korean and sell­ing directly into those mar­kets. The pro­gram is a “pilot” for the future, said Barton.

 

In the after­noon, a Pub­lish­ers Launch sur­prise: Authors Cory Doc­torow, John Scalzi (pres­i­dent of the Sci­ence Fic­tion Writ­ers of Amer­ica), and Char­lie Stross joined Macmillan’s Fritz Foy to announce a com­ing online DRM-free store at Tor.com, open­ing later this summer.

Stross:

An ebook with DRM is unlikely to be read­able in five years’ time, 10 at the most.

Scalzi:

We have backup from our publishers…to do enforce­ment of copyright.

Doc­torow:

DRM in effect says to read­ers they’re “fool­ish enough to buy this book instead of steal­ing it.”

 

And mean­while, the Great Satan of Seat­tle hov­ered over all, send­ing a shud­der through the Jav­its just as things got under way with the news that it was buy­ing pub­li­ca­tion rights to 3,000 back­list titles from Avalon Books.

Michael Cader at Pub­lish­ers Lunch wrote it up:

Ama­zon direc­tor of busi­ness devel­op­ment, rights and licens­ing Philip Patrick notes impor­tantly, “None of these titles have been dig­i­tized yet and we know Kin­dle cus­tomers will delight in this great new offer­ing.” The acquired titles will be issued by the var­i­ous West coast Ama­zon imprints, and “will con­tinue to be avail­able in print for book­sellers and libraries nationwide.”

 

BEA Self-Pub/Owen/Litte/Greenfield: Kobo’s platform

Like Eng­lish weather, if you’re not happy with the options you have for self-publishing, just give it about 10 min­utes and some­thing else will turn up.

As the hard­est work­ing woman in show busi­ness, Laura Haz­ard Owen, wrote from under a chair some­where in a con­fer­ence at BEA, Kobo is the lat­est out­fit to give us a self-publishing plat­form, branded with the Norman-Rockwellian name Writ­ing Life.

Writ­ing Life is in beta tests with 50 authors now and will launch in Eng­lish by the end of June, “with new lan­guage and country-specific sup­port added in the com­ing year,” Kobo said in a blog post.

One rea­son you read Owen, by the way, is that she’s good about spot­ting com­pa­nies’ poi­son darts and call­ing them out on it. Yea, even when they’re aimed at Seat­tle. You see her do this quite hand­ily in Kobo launches e-book self-publishing plat­form, “Writ­ing Life.”

First the blow-dart:

On its web­site, Kobo takes a jab at Ama­zon: “Unlike some self-publishing por­tals we could men­tion, Kobo doesn’t bind you to us. Pub­lish to Kobo and take your ePub to your ador­ing fans, no mat­ter where they might be. You’re free to sell your eBook the way you want.”

Now she coun­ters, empha­sis mine:

To be fair, Amazon’s KDP doesn’t require exclu­siv­ity, but its KDP Select (which lets self-published authors include their titles in the Kin­dle Own­ers’ Lend­ing Library) does.

PR trash talk. My, what we’ve taught the Cana­di­ans, huh?

Owen again:

The main dif­fer­ence between Kobo and Ama­zon is out­lined in the press release: Unlike com­pet­i­tive self-publishing tools, Kobo allows authors to set their book price to “FREE” at any time with­out restric­tive exclu­sive agree­ments, in addi­tion Kobo pays 10% higher roy­al­ties on sales in many grow­ing inter­na­tional mar­kets and allows authors much more free­dom on pricing.

And for some clar­i­fi­ca­tion on that point about roy­al­ties, here is Jane Litte, as ref­er­enced by Owen, in BEA: Day 2, Kobo announces self pub­lish­ing plat­form and Bowker releases ebook read­ing data.

The terms are 70/30% (that’s 70% for the author) for books priced between $1.99 and $12.99. For books under $1.99 and above $12.99, the author gets 45%. There is no down­load fee or hid­den costs.

And there’s a DRM-free ele­ment here, as Litte clar­i­fies in her nicely parsed inter­view with Mark Leslie Lefeb­vre, Kobo’s chief of self-publishing and author relations.

The author can choose DRM or avoid it.

Another dis­tin­guish­ing point is brought out by Dig­i­tal Book World’s Jeremy Green­field in his write, Kobo Wants to Turn Writ­ing Into a Game.

One of the chief fea­tures will be bring­ing (Kobo’s) sig­na­ture gam­i­fi­ca­tion to the writ­ing process. By the end of the sum­mer, authors who use the Writ­ing Life plat­form will earn badges for sell­ing books in mul­ti­ple coun­tries (Glo­be­trot­ter badge) as well as for doing things like work­ing late at night (Mid­night Oil badge). The badges will be socially share­able so writ­ers can inter­act with each other through the Kobo tool.

So, you know, maybe your book sucks but you can still be the Mayor of Kobo.

Green­field:

The long term plan for Writ­ing Life is to have all authors, many of whom may not even use the Writ­ing Life tool to pub­lish and sell their books, inter­act with the inter­face to track sales, track social engage­ment with their books across the Web and, of course, earn and share badges.

“Of course, earn and share badges.”

I’ll just say that again. Badges.

 

Green­field again, this time on the ele­ment of baked-in social medi­a­tion planned for even­tual inte­gra­tion into the platform:

In addi­tion to gam­i­fi­ca­tion, high on the company’s prod­uct devel­op­ment roadmap is inte­gra­tion of social track­ing tools that authors can use to see when read­ers com­ment on their work on Face­book or using Kobo’s embed­ded social read­ing tools. Noti­fi­ca­tions for authors about when their books are trend­ing in cer­tain coun­tries or on cer­tain, highly spe­cific best-seller lists is also a high priority.

 

And here’s Lefeb­vre, very lik­able guy, talk­ing up the Writ­ing Life to an unseen Mercy Pilk­ing­ton from Good e-Reader on video at BEA. At 1:20 on the tape, Lefeb­vre answers a ques­tion from Pilk­ing­ton about why the plat­form is — osten­si­bly — going to focus so heav­ily on track­ing data for authors on their books. Lefeb­vre answers, in part:

We are treat­ing indie authors the same way we’d treat pub­lish­ers, with the same sort of respect and love and giv­ing them the same sort of tools and ana­lyt­ics we’d give pub­lish­ers. We’re find­ing in a lot of cases that indie authors are thirsty for that data. Nobody’s going to get behind a book than authors, them­selves. We want to give them every abil­ity to con­trol that book and to take advan­tage of detailed data.

Badges, shmadges, if Writ­ing Life truly deliv­ers on what Lefeb­vre is talk­ing about here with industrial-grade data to let authors track and dash­board their sales pat­terns, authors may find this route worth­while.

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