[T]he writer’s imagination, that magical entity from which ideas arise, has other principles besides ars gratia artis. It’s more apt to come up with ideas if there’s a use for them.
In a post about short story as a literary form–and how epublishing may revive it.
Out there in The Long Tail you’ll find some mighty fine brewskies. P.S. Southern Tier, please bring Iniquity back. Thank you.
Only imagine: MSNBC has a story up about beer sales, and lo and behold, they’re plummeting — for mainstay brands like Bud, Old Milwaukee, and Michelob. [UPDATE: sadly, story no longer there…]
Of the 23 “largest selling beer products” in the U.S., “eight . . . have lost a staggering 30 percent or more of their sales between 2005 and 2010.”
Yikes.
But here’s what strikes me. For years, we’ve been hearing that “digital” is killing the publishing industry. Digital is killing newspapers. Digital is killing music.
And the focus for the most part has been on the medium. You’ve probably heard “kill the medium!” arguments along these lines:
But here’s the thing. With beer, you take the medium out of the equation. People can’t buy or sell beer in digital form. It’s an analog world experience still, thank doG.
So beer becomes a control case.
Right?
You have your traditional, old school industry — all those gargantuan beer brands that our grandfathers used to drink — and you have this nascent (well, still sort of nascent) decentralized craft brew movement with its funny labels and quirky flavors.
And what happens?
We learn that when people have a choice, lo and behold, they will abandon “safe,” boring, insipid products and seek out interesting, imaginative, vibrant alternatives. In proverbial droves.
This also suggests IMO that “brand” — which you may have noticed has been elevated in the past couple decades to near-mystical status in the marketing lexicon — is actually not enough to carry a product. On the contrary, “brand” has some mighty heavy clay feet.
Anyway, a prediction. Bud, and Old Milwaukee, and Michelob (which btw is in my WP spellcheck. Really? My spellcheck doesn’t recognize the word “spellcheck” but it generates its red squiggle if I type Michalob or Michelobe? Really????) are already working furiously behind the scenes to launch a stunning new menu of “craft-style” beers.
Second prediction. Book publishers will engage in a parallel activity, if they’re not already. And they’ll figure out which self-pubbed products sell well (possible examples: shorter novels; serials) and start assembly-lining e-books into those niches with a vengeance.
But without offering author advances ;-)
It’s easy enough to assert that books “make a difference” — now Alain de Botton has gone a step further to explain how:
One effect of writing . . . is that, once readers have put the book down and resumed their own lives, they may attend to precisely the things that the author would have responded to had he or she been in their company.
Thanks to a book, their minds will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness. The effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, only to realize that the silence existed at a particular frequency and we, in fact, shared the room all along with waves of sound coming in from a Ukrainian station or the nighttime chatter of a minicab firm.
Have you ever experienced this by reading a novel?
What novel, and how did it affect you?
So this cracks me up.
One of my characters in Can Job
Mind you, the book is not really political, unless you count poking fun at politicians as “political.” The particular pol that figures in this scene is Bo Valgus, whose biggest mistake was not his position no the issue necessarily but that he wasn’t quick enough to voice support for it during a local radio interview. This being fiction, I also couldn’t miss a chance to take a dig at a certain former state governor :-)
The DJ had asked his opinion about same-sex marriage and he’d answered “I haven’t had a chance to think about it, to tell the truth.” The idiot. Everyone knew that a same sex marriage would have come to the floor if ex-Governor Eminent Flipzer’s ungovernable hetero sex drives hadn’t led him to disgrace and ruin. Well, if not ruin, then a brief time-out to think about what a bad boy he’d been.
Overnight, the legislature had become suddenly paranoid about any issue associated with the letters s-e-x.
And so here they were, to express their chagrin with Bo Valgus.
Anyway, I’m laughing today because only a couple months after self-pubbing the novel, a same-sex marriage bill has now passed in our state.
My book is already dated!
lol
But I really couldn’t be more pleased :-)
As one of my FB friends posted, it’s a great day to be a New York Stater.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Fergus Bordewich reviews Mightier Than the Sword by David S. Reynolds: a book about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Bordewich quotes from the book that in the first year after its release, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
sold 310,000 copies in the United States, triple the number of its nearest rivals.
It would eventually sell a million copies in Great Britain alone.
The book “opened the way for a widespread acceptance in the North of antislavery arguments that had long been ignored or dismissed.”
It helped pave the way for Lincoln’s efforts to “convert countless apathetic Yankees into men willing to fight for the emancipation of slaves.”
I read the book many many years ago, as a pre-teen — it was one of the novels I found as I worked my way through my hometown’s little library. Even then I recognized it was not only dated but propaganda; I recognized that the writing was in service of a Cause rather than an esthetic.
But what a cause, and what an accomplishment for a writer to almost single-handedly turn an entire country away from its acceptance of slavery . . .
That wasn’t in the Disney version! John Chapman (Appleseed’s real name)
kept Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell” with the Bible in his cookpot hat. Arriving at a house on one of his walkabouts, he would greet the inhabitants: “Will you have some fresh news right from Heaven?” The answer didn’t matter—he was already reaching for the cookpot. Chapman’s “religious intensity,” not his apple planting, was “the driving force of his life,” Mr. Means says.
Guess what else. The apples that grew from his trees weren’t the big luscious bake-into-a-pie sort you find in the supermarket today.
Nope. They were little sour things — that people grew to make hard cider.
LOL
Pretty amazing bit of literary investigation, here. Bill Steigerwald set off to retrace the trip John Steinbeck recounted in Travels with Charley, and discovered that the trip was largely fictionalized.
My initial motives for digging into Travels With Charley were totally innocent. I simply wanted to go exactly where Steinbeck went in 1960, to see what he saw on the Steinbeck Highway, and then to write a book about the way America has and has not changed in the last 50 years.
But when Steigerwald started cross-referencing events Steinbeck recounts in the book against other evidence — letters, hotel records, etc. — he discovered so many discrepancies that, he concludes, “virtually nothing [Steinbeck] wrote in Charley about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.”
Steigerwald’s piece isn’t an attack. He personally believes that Steinbeck didn’t set out to deceive anyone. He was, at the time, 58 years old, in poor health, and had promised to produce book for which “he had taken virtually no notes.”
Whoops.
Still, it’s interesting that for 50 years the book was trusted as a nonfiction account of what one man discovered when he crossed our continent, when in fact it’s fiction.
Good thing Steinbeck never appeared on Oprah ;-)
Those of you who know me personally know that for many years I’ve worked as a marketing communications professional supporting some pretty big, name brand companies, including one fondly known as an anchor company here in Rochester, NY. And as it happens, over the course of my career, I’ve had occasion to write about some of the more sophisticated printing devices these companies manufacture — machines that can produce one-off items from digital files.
Since I also follow the book publishing industry, I’ve been waiting for years for the day when book publishers would embrace the technology.
Good thing I wasn’t holding my breath.
Oh, I know, per-book cost goes way up — it’s a lot cheaper, per copy, to do a traditional print run of 10,000 or a million books than produce them in onesy twosies.
But in a world where just-in-time manufacturing principles are now the norm, it would seem a no-brainer to work these POD technologies into the production stream somehow. Think about it. You’d have a database of your content on the back end. Orders come in from distributors via a front-end web portal and are automatically sent to the printer — nobody would need to touch them (lowers your overhead right there). Suddenly the backlist is relevant again, it’s available to respond to demand. And as new media arises — ebooks, say — you just hook up a new output path, kind of like the Smashwords Meatgrinder.
I suppose the idea of transitioning to such a radically different production model was too wearying for publishers. Heck, they don’t even have their rights tracked in databases yet, apparently.
That said, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the entire industry will shift to a just-in-time model, albeit belatedly. But in the meantime, bookstores are installing POD systems, essentially taking over the production piece of the publishing business.
The above link is a story about The Expresso Book Machine, invented by Jason Epstein, 83, the guy who also came up with the concept of mass market paperbacks(!)
The Expresso Book Machine is basically a digital POD printer + book binder.
But get this. The article’s author, Ilya Marritz, first notes:
People in the book industry revere Jason Epstein, but they are increasingly skeptical his latest innovation will take off. The Espresso Book Machine is bulky, its menu of books limited mainly to backlist and public domain titles and users can’t operate the machine on their own – they need help from trained bookstore staff.
Guys, the reason titles are limited to backlist & public domain is that the publishing industry hasn’t realized, yet, that it needs to support POD with current titles. So it’s kind of two-faced for “people in the book industry” to be “skeptical.” Instead of being skeptical, how about building an infrastructure to feed the POD stream?
Sigh.
Contrast with this a couple paragraphs later:
But the machine has proven to be a hit with customers. More than 1,000 books were printed on the machine in the first four weeks for prices starting at $8 apiece. Kurtz said the main attraction to the Espresso Book Machine is that it is a tool for self-publishing.
Not surprising that self-publishing has emerged as a strong use case. Indie writers “get it.”
But IMO, if this were marketed properly, with the proper front end, it would be a huge hit with consumers as well.
There is absolutely no reason on earth I shouldn’t be able to go online, order a book, the book gets printed at my local bookstore (or library. or supermarket) where I can pick it up — or maybe a courier brings it to my house later that day —
I should be able to do that by clicking on a link of a book review I read on a blog or online newspaper, or from my e-reader.
I should be able to do that from a kiosk in a bookstore.
Think about it. Bookstores would no longer have to be mammothly expensive warehouses (that’s all a big box store is, when you think about it — a warehouse with carpet and escalators). They could be salons, gathering spaces designed more like living rooms than commercial spaces.
Bookstore managers could stock based on real time data about what is selling or to support promotions they’re running. Poetry reading tonight? Print one or two copies of books by major poets and set them out for sale. Holiday coming up? Local paper run a review of a new title? Author in town for a signing? Ditto.
But most of your titles, you’d sell not by putting out physical copies but by generating opportunities for word-of-mouth sales and by running in-store promotions. I love golf, for instance. Think I wouldn’t notice if a local bookstore kicked off spring by hosting an event by a local teaching pro in conjunction with a sale on golf titles, make it a Masters tie-in?
The possibilities are endless, literally.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz once said that he envisioned Starbucks as “the third place” — the not home/not work place you spend time because it’s comfortable and familiar and you feel welcome there.
There is absolutely no reason bookstores couldn’t also become “the third place,” but only if the business model supports it–which means you have to lower overhead. Smaller footprint, no more warehousing books based on publisher push instead of local market pull, and emphasize creating communities rather than moving product.
Could happen. Would like to see it, personally. I’d hang there.
Dani Amore, writing on technorati.com [UPDATE: link no longer good…], weighs in on the “how to price an ebook” debate by attempting a comparison between songs and novels. This cracked me up:
A song that sells for 99 cents that just happens to be a masterpiece of beauty, timelessness and meaning and can change a person’s life, is much more valuable than a $2.99 novel that the minute it’s downloaded immediately causes your Kindle to smell like a rest stop toilet.
But it’s a little sad, too, because the fact is people don’t think of novels as beautiful, timeless, and life-changing. For good reason — they’re generally not.
But should they be?
Have you ever read a novel that took your breath away, that gripped you the way a song can? What was it, and how long ago?
And what would you pay to experience such a novel again?
Just watched a 6-minute interview with Jane Friedman, former CEO of Harper Collins. She’s now CEO of Open Road Media, a publishing company she co-founded to so she can play exclusively in the digital space.
Key things in her remarks that caught my attention:
She describes advances and inventory as the two things that caused her most stress when she was in traditional publishing. Little wonder: an advance is a gamble and inventory is a huge cost-burden.
She describes her new digital venture as entrepreneurial. From her lips, that’s code for “I believe there’s a lot of money to be made.” One source: author’s backlist titles. “Backlist was always something that completely interested me.”
She places a huge emphasis on her new company’s ability to market its authors. I find this interesting because as we know from reading writers like Dean Wesley Smith and J.A. Konrath, that writers no longer need “publishers” for . . . you know, “publishing.” So what’s left for “publishers” to do? That would be marketing.
She envisions ebooks as multimedia. “We are bookending the text with video.” “Enhanced biographies” embedded at the end of some ebooks include text, video, photos etc.
