The New Sleekness

Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Being Part of a Community

by Jane Litte

Lately we’ve seen a lot of encouragement for publishing folks, like the editors and marketers, to come to communities and participate.  It’s a great sentiment, but I can see reluctance on the part of these people to fully engage in a reader community, or any community for that matter.  Perhaps in order for the people who make publishing hum to come and share their thoughts about books, there need to be some guidelines and tips and here are a few of mine (which are by no mean exhaustive or mandatory).

From the publishing side

First, I think that each publishing house should have a set of guidelines on how to interact with a community of readers.  The guidelines will help the editors and marketers have certainty regarding their behavior online so that these individuals can participate without fear of internal reprisals.

Second, the publishing house should have some kind of time set aside each day which would allow for the editor or marketer to participate in online communities whether it be message boards, blogs, twitter or facebook.

Third, the publishing house needs to allow the editors and marketers to have a personality.  Readers want to interact with people, not marketing machines.  People have personalities. It’s what makes them interesting.

In the community

Once the editor and marketer is allowed to be set free on the internet, I would offer these helpful tips in participating in online communities.

First, choose a community of which you actually want to be a part.  In other words, that community doesn’t need to be a specific reader community.  Perhaps you have great interest in knitting and would be more interested in interfacing with other knitters.  I get quite a few link backs and referrals from ravelry.com.  The point is to find a robust community around a topic or two that interests you the most.  This way, participating in a community won’t be a chore, but a pleasure.  Readers are everywhere, even at knitting sites.

Second, don’t push your books right away.  At Tools of Change, one presenter said that you have to talk up other products, goods, services, etc twelve times to build credibility before you can push your own products, goods, services, etc.

Third, go with the purpose of being part of the community.  If you go with the specific purpose of being part of the community instead of seeing it as a target for marketing books, then one and two fall into place.  Further, your interaction in that community will be far more natural.

Fourth, don’t be afraid to toot your horn.  In almost every community, there is a time to introduce yourself and make known your background.  You don’t have to hide the fact that you work for a publisher.  You should wear that badge proud.  This way, when someone has a question about publishing or books, you are the go to person for this knowledge.  (Just don’t preface every comment or post with “As an editor” or “As a marketer”.  That can get old fast).

I feel like readers are always looking for recommendations and if you are part of a community and have built credibility in that community, readers will trust you and your recommendations.

Cablevision and ABC: consumers don’t care about your silly reindeer games.

by Pablo Defendini

I have to admit I’ve not really been paying too much attention to the two-year-old spat between Cablevision and Disney which has culminated in Disney pulling its ABC feed from Cablevision on the eve of  Oscar night. As someone who hasn’t bothered with a cable TV subscription since 1998, in favour of getting all my programming via the internet, it’s just not an issue for me: between iTunes, Hulu, Netflix and YouTube I’m pretty much covered (caveat: it helps that I couldn’t care less about sports or live broadcasts like the Oscars, although I hear that even the Oscars are being streamed online tonight).

As an outsider to that industry, I’m obviously not invested in the back-and-forth between Disney and Cablevision, and I have no informed opinions about who should or shouldn’t be paying money to whom—as someone who watched Macmillan/AmazonFail from a relative position of clarity recently, I’d wager to guess that the contractual issue is hardly black-and-white.

However.

As a consumer, I couldn’t care less about these two corporate behemoths hammering it out, and as a consumer, it’s my perception that the only people who are losing, really, are the poor chumps who signed up—and are paying good money for—a bill of goods that has suddenly been reduced.

It’s simple, really. Let’s break it down:

ABC makes content that I want to watch, and am willing to pay for.

Cablevision lays down a pipe to my house, and I am willing to pay for that pipe. With that pipe I can access and pay (or not, as the case may be) for ABC’s content via one of many content providers.

Cablevision would like to deliver that content to my house in one specific way—through their cable TV service and set-top box/DVR, which I would have to pay extra for. However, since I only subscribe to Cablevision’s internet service (despite their annoying and excessive dead-tree snail mail campaign trying to “upsell” me on their Internet/Cable/Landline package. I have absolutely no use for two out of those three, dudes. Get it through your heads and stop killin’ trees.), and ABC has made the content that they created available to me by other means (iTunes, Hulu, etc), I’m perfectly fine without Cablevision’s double mediation. As far as I’m concerned, Cablevision’s value to me is as a dumb pipeline, the faster and fatter the better. Any additional ’services’ are simply Cablevision trying to take a vig from my interaction with ABC.

Granted, Apple takes a vig from ABC’s fee for my purchase of an episode of Lost on iTunes, but it’s on a per-show, or per-episode basis, and there’s no commercials. I’m only paying ABC for what I consume, and that, to my mind, is perfectly fair. Moreover, I’m paying Apple for the convenience that iTunes brings to the table, and that, to me, is also perfectly fair. With a cable subscription, I’m paying for what I consume and for the Home Shopping Channel, the 700 Club, and who knows how much more inane crap that I have no intention of ever watching *ahem*Jersey Shore*ahem*. That’s simply money I’m not willing to throw away.

Now, if instead of trying to upsell me on crap I don’t need, or trying to squeeze a cut out of my interactions with content providers, Cablevision said to me “Hey, we wanna charge you this extra money on a monthly basis, but in return we’re gonna give you the same ultra high-bandwidth connectivity and uptime that they’ve got in Asia,” that would be money well-spent, in my opinion. That would be Cablevision adding real value to my service, and I’d be all over that in a heartbeat.

Let pipes stay dumb, I say. This Disney/Cablevision squabble is a perfect argument for support of Network Neutrality.

As for ABC, this would be a great time for them to let all the dejected Cablevision subscribers know that they have the option of watching ABC’s (and most other networks’) content online. There’s only one hitch: since most content providers are scared of cannibalizing their current model*, they’ve artificially constrained their content to small computer screens (unless you have a PC or an TV connected to your big screen, like I do). Here, they’ve shot themselves in the foot. By trying to impose barriers to consumer behaviour by limiting choice of delivery method to what has worked for them in the past, they’ve locked themselves into being beholden to the whims of Cablevision.

There’s a lesson here for publishers, of course, and it’s a simple one: your consumers (readers, not the book buyer for B&N, ‘natch) are for the most part interested in paying for your quality content, but you have to meet them halfway and make it available on their terms—in ways that are easy, accessible, in tune to how people are using technology, and in ways seen as fair to consumers. For that to happen, you need to recalibrate your institutional compass; you need to listen to the reader, they’re being damn vocal about what they want to see from you. Otherwise, publishers will join the ranks of the record industry, cable companies, and TV networks as some of the most reviled corporate entities on the planet.


*  To my consumer mind this makes no sense: why favour the badly-measured-ad-supported model when they could be pushing for people to adopt direct-pay alternatives that look much more favourable, not to mention quantifiable? Beats me. But then, I admit that there may be factors I’m not taking into account out of ignorance.

Readers Are Fickle, Learn to Embrace Us

by Jane Litte

Publishers  are starting to dip their toes into the social media water and are trying to learn more about the end user of their products, the readers.  I have to tell you right away, publishers, that readers are fickle.

What readers want today will not be want they want even twelve months from now.  One speaker at Tools of Change said that readers are always complicating the situation by buying new devices and wanting new things.  This was said with affection, though, not disdain.

It’s important to remember that readers are fickle and that there is no one set of tools that will work for every reader, all the time.  When Sarah, Angie and I were preparing for our own talk at the Tools of Change, we engaged in a heated discussion over whether the cover blurb should be included at the front of an ebook or in the metadata to be pulled up at the reader’s convenience.  Angie and I are both avid book readers and in some ways we are a lot alike but our own preferences in how we consume the book can be quite different.

Take a look at the iPhone/iTouch as a reader.  Some people believe it is too small.  Others find the convenience of the size perfect for their reading needs.  Some readers like the flat readable aspect of the eink screen and others clamor for a backlight.  Everyone likes the convenience of the one click shopping.

What’s the answer to the reader fickleness? It’s not to denigrate the reader for being fickle. You just have to accept it.  This behavior will not change.  You have to embrace it. It’s reader fickleness that allows you to take advantage of our impulse buying purchases.  It’s reader fickleness that makes us take chances on new authors.  It’s reader fickleness that will open new markets and new opportunities.

Embrace us readers, warts and all, and we will buy your books and be your evangelists.  Denigrate or talk down to us and we will be fierce adversaries.

Introducing guest blogger Jane Litte from Dear Author

by Pablo Defendini

So, as some of you may or may not know, Kate Rados and I participate on a weekly discussion webinar, the Digital Book World Roundtable, along with Laura Dawson and Bridget Warren, and moderated by Guy LeCharles González. The webcast happens every Thursday at 1PM EST. For this last one, both Laura and Bridget couldn’t make it, leaving the two more foul-mouthed, incendiary members (that would be Kate and yours effin’ truly, of course) of the round table without a tempering foil. Since Guy’s a smart dude, he quickly rounded up a cohort of special guest stars to temper Kate and me, including Heather McCormack of Library Journal, Brett Sandusky from Kaplan, and Jane Litte, of Dear Author and #romfail fame.

The show was, of course, a success—great discussion, high energy, and mad passion. During the back-and-forth emailing after the show, Jane mentioned the New Sleekness, and I casually mentioned that we’d love to have her as a guest blogger, if she ever wanted to. After consulting with Ami (“1000x yes!”), we extended the invite, and she said yes. So without further ado, we give you the formidable Jane Litte, a sleek, sleek publishing person if there ever was one.

Welcome to the Sleekness, Jane. Stick around for as long as you want.

Discoverability + Author Follow-Up = WIN!

by Kate Rados

I was on Twitter (natch…) and saw that the 1980s Pop Culture feed/podcast Retroist was touting a memoir written around the time Star Wars had leapt onto the scene.

“Collect All 21! Memoirs of a Star Wars Geek – http://bit.ly/aEN3yu

As a complete and unashamed geek, I immediately clicked on it and saw the author had created a landing page for the book, offered it as a $5 PDF download, as well as a paperback via Lulu, Amazon, and BN.

I immediately Re-Tweeted:

RT @retroist: Collect All 21! Memoirs of a Star Wars Geek – http://bit.ly/aEN3yu // $5 for the PDF – I may make that donation!

Within the next couple of hours, I found an email in my Inbox from the author:

Kate -

I just wanted to say thanks for the re-tweet of The Retroist’s note
about my Star Wars book. It’s always a pleasant surprise to see my work
get a boost from unexpected sources. If you decide to get the PDF,
please drop me a note and let me know what you think!

- John Booth

Strange thing is – I wasn’t creeped out by the unsolicited email.  In fact, I was feeling pretty special and pretty damn impressed that he took the time to look me up.  True, my email is on my site and I’m pretty transparent about how to reach me, but I thought it was cool all the same.  So cool, in fact, that I bought the paperback today.  I hate PayPal (a story for another time…), so the PDF option didn’t work for me personally.  After hearing from the author, I had no problem parting with an extra $10 to get the print edition…nor adding tags on Amazon…and ‘liking it’ on Glue.  He’s got me not only as a customer and reader, but an activist.  AND I haven’t even read the damn thing yet!

I’m not saying that every author should Tweet-Stalk their potential readers, but I think the takeaway here is for authors to make a complete investment in reaching out to their community, even through non-traditional methods.  Would I have advised John to follow Retroist, then check out @ replies, then look up email addresses and reach out?  Probably wouldn’t have asked him to go there, but I think this minimally invasive approach hit the right note with me and I applaud his effort.

Macmillan Blogs…And The Heavy Lifting Begins

by Ami Greko

Wow, cool. Macmillan started a blog! (Incredibly well-designed, too. Wonder who did that…)

First of all, I think I speak for a lot of people by saying, good on you, John Sargent. This is absolutely a move in the right direction, and I can’t think of an executive better suited that Sargent for speaking plainly and honestly. It really suits him.

And now? Now is when the heavy lifting begins—making Macmillan Speaks a success.

The pitfalls of executives blogging are well known. It’s hard for anyone to blog regularly, let alone someone as busy as Sargent must be. I suspect crafting posts takes even longer once you add in the additional challenge of needing to make sure nothing you say inadvertently, you know, makes the lawyers angry.

There’s also what I’ll call the SXSWbp problem. Remember last year at SXSW, when the audience went a little berserker over a panel of the publishing executives who were “there to learn” what readers wanted? As Kassia from Booksquare smartly described it:

At the after-party, one panelist told me that “this is all new to us.” Give. Me. A. Break. It’s only new for those of you who’ve been pretending change is something you get from a dollar bill. Now you’re wondering how to interact with blogs? Now you’re learning that there’s an entire conference devoted to change in the industry?

Obviously there are differences between Macmillan’s blog and the panel. But I believe the underpinnings to be the same: the smart comments on Sargent’s post are questions and thoughts that have been kicking around in discussions on digital publishing for a while.

At this point, for the most part, discourse seems respectful, and even civil. Readers are willing to give him some breathing room because hey, he’s new at this! But how will they respond in two weeks? In a month? In half a year? The key to social media is right in the name: it’s social. As in, to be successful, you need to both speak…and listen.

Getting Sargent on the blog is a great first step. His responding directly to comments on his post is an incredible second step. We’re all excited to see what’s next.

Dave Winer is Sleekness.

by Pablo Defendini

Dave Winer is, well, Dave Winer. And he gets it:

There are a bunch of smart, mostly young, people who work either in tech startups or inside big publishing companies who will, in a few years, form the companies that are hybrids of technology and publishing that will lead us into the future. They won’t be like Google, Facebook, Twitter or Apple. And they won’t be the NY Times, Time-Warner or even the Huffington Post or Gawker. But they will learn from all of them.

This is exactly why Ami and I started this blog. For all my railing and kettledrum-beating for legacy publishers to move, move, move and get with it, changing things from inside the big companies will only get us so far. And the fact that someone with Winer’s insight gets that feels very gratifying. There’s hope yet—we’re only getting started here.

Presenting the E-book Abomination Index

by Pablo Defendini

India Amos is tired of shitty-looking ebooks. The lack of attention to detail, or rather, the lack of any quality control at all lets errors like this make it onto readers’ ebook devices:

a McGraw-Hill Professional book in which the first letter of every paragraph appears on a line by itself. Thus:

T
he quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Hella annoying. And there was an egregious typo in the book, repeated three times in one paragraph.

So she’s set up a web form for people to log their ebook tales of woe: the E-book Abomination Index submission form.

Due to the mass-production, assembly line, and outsourced nature of ebook production at the big publishing houses, and due to the fact that, until the Kindle-fueled exponential growth in ebook sales last year, eBooks were seen as a very, very, very small source of revenue (practically negligible), there’s been little to no effort to internally police the quality of electronic books coming out of the big six publishers.

With the increasing popularity of the Kindle, and the imminent arrival of Apple’s iPad, ebooks are about to gain some serious k-points in readers’ mindshare—not to mention marketshare vis a vis their print coutnerparts. Not monitoring quality, and letting errors like these reach the end user gives validity to the accusations that some in the very zealous, very vocal, but very under-informed and up to now very small eBook enthusiast community have been making for years about the big publishers: that they don’t give two shits about readers in general and eBook readers in particular, and—in some extreme cases—that the big six are somehow out to actively sabotage the burgeoning ebook market, and that they should respond in kind.

Both charges are patently false, of course, and my serious issues with the zealots in the ebook enthusiast community could be the subject of not one, but many additional posts. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re entirely wrong—to the best of their ability they’re interpreting the message that publishers are inadvertently putting out there. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case, for every “we’re interested in eBooks” platitude that publishers put forth with their words, there’s twenty such cases where their actions (or lack thereof) communicate a different story.

On Production.

by Pablo Defendini

I came of age, career-wise, in the late 90’s, as an art director at J. Walter Thompson, a multinational advertising agency. The 1990’s were an interesting time to be in an art department. The desktop publishing revolution was changing the way art directors and designers went about their work: x-acto knives, paste-ups, and letraset lettering were being displaced by Macs running Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Freehand (nowadays Adobe Illustrator, sadly. Freehand kicked ass) and Quark Xpress (these days it’s InDesign, thankfully. Quark Xpress is a piece of trash and should be put out of its misery with a bullet or twenty. But I digress). Many old-school designers and art directors were being forced to completely upend their usual modus operandi. During my tenure at JWT and other agencies, I saw art directors mostly take one of three tacks to attack the problem of their suddenly impending obsolescence:

a) hire a bright young thing to translate their hand-crafted comps into electronic desktop publishing files,

b) hunker down, learn the new tools of the trade, and become proficient in the new lingua franca of creative production, or

c) sit back with their head in the sand, coast on their reputations (and their sometimes exorbitant paychecks), complain loudly about how computers were destroying their livelihood, or how they were just a fad or trend, and would soon pass.

I remember being one of those bright young things from a), and I learned a lot from my mentors, who would—in exchange for some relatively minor Photoshop jockeying—help me hone my conceptualization and design skills: you know, the kinds of abilities that no amount of Photoshop-fu can magically instill in you; I still keep in touch with some of my former colleagues who embraced solution b); and had absolutely no patience for the old-guard who decided to take tack c). I’ve no idea what’s become of those poor fools—they are certainly not professionally active in any substantial sense anymore, as far as I can tell.

As time went on, my career and interests expanded into film-making and web design, and I saw the same effect in these sectors. The advent of Apple’s Final Cut film-editing software in the early 2000’s, for example, allowed me to put together a very lean television production team, hiring out producers and creatives like directors, DPs and editors directly, and creating TV spots which enabled me to not have to depend on outsourcing production to film-based studios, thereby (legitimately) undercutting competitors on price and speed-to-air. The debut of software like Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG code editors allowed me to learn to code HTML in a way that was much more accessible to me than having to learn a programming language blind, and let me put together a nascent interactive department.

It absolutely boggles my mind that, at this late stage in the game, publishers still consider themselves somehow exempt from the repercussions of the digital revolution.

As publishing makes its unfashionably late entrance into the digital realm, the people working in publishing production are facing similar challenges. Unfortunately, the prevalence of attitude c) is legion, especially among the big six legacy publishers. It amazes me that, despite being run by what seems to be a bunch of genuinely intelligent people, and despite the fact that, within all the big publishing houses, there are incredibly smart and competent and observant people (usually our age and pay grade) who are acutely aware of what needs to be done, legacy publishing is stubbornly determined to make the same mistakes that others have made before them.

There is a saying that my mother is very fond of, and it’s one that I’ve been saying to myself over and over, like a mantra, over the past couple of years: Si las barbas de tu vecino se están quemando, pon las tuyas en remojo. Or, for the monolingual among you: “If your neighbour’s beard is on fire, you should go soak yours in water.” So let’s take a look at what a hypothetical publisher with some cojones could stick in their bucket of water, shall we?

You know that author who swears by their 1965 IBM Selectric, the one they bought at a garage sale when they were fifteen and still use to this day, because “the only way I can write is by clacking away at my Selectric in my special writing corner of my special writing cabin in the middle of my special woods”? Well, that’s adorable, really. Very quaint, and I’m sure it makes for a wonderful quip while on tour and trying to aggrandize the author’s romantic mystique. Unfortunately, it’s also fucking retarded. You know what? Grow a goatee, or wear a beret, but use a modern word processor, or even better, an XML editor. Like it or not, authors who produce creative work for big publishers are not fine artists, they are commercial artists, like illustrators, designers, session musicians, etc. If you’re writing a book of poetry for yourself, or as a purely artistic endeavour, then go ahead and break out the chisel and chip away at your stone tablets. But if you’re a commercially published author, who depends on a production team in order to get your work published, you’re damn well served making your support team’s life easier. Musicians don’t hand in a box full of reel-to-reel tapes to their record companies; they’re rocking ProTools files.

Editors, same deal: learn to author XML. Learn to love versioning tools. That way you’ll have full control over the master edition of your work: the one that gets distributed to all the different formats: print, ebook, web, smoke signals, what have you. Looking for typos and errors in galleys of the printed book before it goes to press is too late in the game (not that it shouldn’t be done, of course). By the time something hits the production department, it should be good to go. That kind of print-centric approach is soon to be very inadequate anyway, as ebook production gets rolled into the main line of a book’s production cycle, which in turn becomes much less linear.

Hey typesetters, compositors, and producers in general: you know how I’m hectoring authors and editors about XML? Well, that goes quadruple for you. Learn how to cleanly import XML into InDesign for your print edition (hint: it’s not quite as simple as mousing over to File>Import); learn how to create a proper, well-crafted, compliant and appropriate ePub file from that XML document (which is also not quite as simple as hitting File>Export to Digital Editions—go listen to what Liza Daly has to say. Listen to that woman—make her your bible, your fucking virgin mary); learn how to automate these processes so that you’re always working from the original manuscript (which is now an XML file), as opposed to making ad-hoc, in-line corrections on the fly which don’t propagate to subsequent editions.

Wait a minute… it’s kind of quiet in here. Where did everybody go? Oh shit, big publishers outsource a large part of these services, don’t they? They’ve found that cutting out expensive production departments and hiring out the services of middlepeople, who also handle distribution and sometimes even retail fulfillment, saves on people power (read: health insurance and pensions), hassle, and extra load on their IT departments. Well, guess what one of the cardinal rules of the digital revolution is: digital production eliminates the need for most middlepeople. Bring this all back in-house, make it a lean operation. Settle on nothing less than a standards-compliant workflow, but please, build it from the ground up, as opposed to tacking it onto your existing production setup as an afterthought. I’m a rip-the-band-aid-off-quickly kind of guy, so it should come as no surprise that I’m advocating the scorched-earth approach here, but scorched-earth is the right approach here, I think; things are moving too quickly around you for it to not be.

I know it’s an enormous outlay of capital at the beginning, and it requires re-thinking many of your core business relationships and practices, and that we’re in a recession, and that you don’t want to lay off or re-train half your workforce. It’s gonna be hard. Real hard. Old habits, and all that. But you know, it’s going to have to happen sooner or later, like it or not. Why not get a jump on things—be proactive, take advantage of the fact that we’re in a recession, and people are out of work, and looking for gigs. Steve Jobs once said, during the dot-com bust of the early ’00s: “We decided to innovate our way through this downturn, so that we would be further ahead of our competitors when things turn up“. That’s worked out rather well for Apple, don’t you think? Take a page from Uncle Steve’s playbook.

Otherwise, smaller and more agile shops are coming in to eat your lunch. They don’t have the large amounts of capital from the latest Dan Brown/Stephen King.J.K. Rowling/Stephanie Myers/Janet Evanovich, but they also don’t have the overhead, the legacy, or the inbred, grandfathered attitudes so prevalent at legacy publishing houses.

Ami and me on Hey Everybody!

by Pablo Defendini

Ami and I just did a bit on Hey Everybody!, novelist J.C. Hutchin’s podcast, where we talked a bit about the Sleekness, the state of publishing, and (of course) the iPad.

J.C. Hutchins is an award-winning novelist best known for his 7th Son technothriller trilogy, which he released as free serialized audiobooks from 2006-07. With approximately 100,000 downloads of his episodic fiction still occurring each month, 7th Son is the most popular “podcast novel” series in history.

Listen to the podcast here.