Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (Penguin Books in the UK, FSG in the US) has been with us for decades, but arrived too early to look at questions of what crowds can mean in publishing.
And with the advent of the digital dynamic comes the idea — the ideal — of crowd wisdom, of crowd leverage, of crowd choice, and, of course, of crowdfunding.
What Canetti, a 1981 Nobel Prize laureate, described were concepts that would come to be called by many of us the “crowd mentality” — basically, turning over one’s own discretion and judgment to a group or community…or mob. The less attractive term might be “running in packs.”
What happens to the individual conscience when it’s suddenly a member of a mass movement? As we know all too well from major-event stampedes, the answer can be disastrous. On the whole — and there are exceptions — these considerations of crowd-think don’t end well.
With the “democratisation” thought by many to be inherent in the rise of the Web, ideas of crowd-power frequently take on far sunnier aspects.
- Need money? Turn to the crowd.
- Need ideas? Turn to the crowd.
- Want to generate interaction with readers? Turn to the crowd.
- Want to send a message to this mean corporation or that mean government agency or the other mean politician? Turn to the crowd.
Recent examples of the concept in its widest play in publishing have to include the efforts of Authors United, led by novelist Douglas Preston, to influence Amazon’s “negotiating tactics” with the publisher Hachette. That’s a crowd of about 1,000 writers, some of them huge household names, working to address other crowds — the public, New York Times readers, the board of Amazon, the US Department of Justice — on its collective opinions about Amazon’s handling of its vendor relations.
And, hey, here comes another crowd, the self-publishing-based resistance to Authors United. Today in The Bookseller on the stands in London, turn to Page 33 to see the author-activist David Gaughran declare the “innate elitism” of the Authors United (traditionally published) group. He dismisses the Prestonites’ efforts as “hilarious really.”
Indeed, reactions to Amazon’s sales-page handling of its negotiations with Hachette, have revealed an ugly, bitter rift between many successfully traditionally published authors and what appears to be an angry, sarcastic self-publishing community.
The independent crowd asserts that the major publishers’ authors want to protect their success as corrupt and disingenuous aristocrats. In actual fact, far less is said — you hear almost nothing — about the independent crowd by the Authors United corps. At this point, the hostilities seem to be flying one way.
And none if this may be the warm-and-fuzzy idea of Internet “democracy” anticipated by many, huh?
Follow the money
Easily the most coveted approaches to crowded dreams of success are various takes on funding built on the shared small donations of the crowd. Most are familiar to you: Kickstarter, IndieGogo, Unbound, Pubslush, and — a new one in the States — InkShares.
Of course, the numbers you don’t hear much about are the ones that describe the “failed to fund” cases.
Kickstarter has an especially helpful, constantly updating set of statistics on its own operation.
- A quick check indicates that as of this writing 5,953 projects relating to publishing at Kickstarter have succeeded to find the funding they sought.
- However, 13,197 projects relating to publishing at Kickstarter have not found their funding. Well more than twice as many publishing projects went down in unfunded flames by comparison to the ones that succeeded.
So ubiquitous are crowdfunding campaigns for books and other publishing efforts that many journalists — I include myself in this — have to cordially decline to report them except as parts of other stories. If we begin by going to press about every crowdfunding book project, we’ll end up covering nothing else.
And questions for our #FutureChat group on Friday included a key one relative to bookish crowdfunding — when does the fatigue set in? Is “the crowd,” that amorphous but fervently assumed entity “out there,” already tired of being nickeled-and-dimed by this crowdfunding campaign and that one?
Read the Full Story at The FutureBook
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By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
The FutureBook: Crowds and empowerment
Read the full post at: FutureBook.net
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