I honestly thought that he would treat this project like our family basement refinishing:  He would get 85% of the way through painting a villa/landscape mural and leave it to sputter out into a series of well-intended pencil lines.  I never thought after 10 years he would actually FINISH writing his story.

So, now he’s looking to me for advice and it’s flipped my usual mindset.  Do I sugarcoat everything because he’s my dad and I want him to be happy?  Do I do my usual ‘no bull’ approach and warn him he might not make it past a self-published work for family/friends because he doesn’t have a platform?  Do I drop everything each weekend and market the hell out of it, no matter how good/bad it is?

And how the hell do I explain ePub?!

How do I guide him through this process? He’s not going to be on Twitter.  He doesn’t have a platform.  He thinks ‘blog’ is a marketing term for nasal congestion.

On one side of my brain, I know what kind of writer my father is:  meticulous, verbose, and writing in a language that is not his native tongue (he was born in Greece), so it needs editing.  My inner businesswoman can’t shake the cold voice of skepticism I bring to every acquisition meeting.  It’s not like I can hand him a copy of Tribes (DRINK) and tell him to go forth and Tweet.

On the flipside, he’s the smartest person I know.  And, perhaps more importantly:  the King of Charm.  Bring us to a Greek diner and we’ll be eating for free after a quick word in the kitchen.  He’s best friends with the former Connecticut Secretary of State – who he met at a random fundraiser.  He’s the artist/photographer/taxi-driver/bridge inspector/travel agent/bus driver renaissance man – who’s never interviewed for a job.  He’s gotten them because he’s the master of one on one conversations.

Here he is, looking at his fairly successful daughter in the publishing industry and here I am, looking at my father, who has written a hefty Historical-Fiction novel without one clue how to bring it from words on a screen into a bound achievement.

I’m probably being selfish by even questioning the next step (shut up and support him, ya jerk!), but I can’t help feeling protective of my Pop, wanting to keep his expectations low, for his obstacles are many.

Is this my punditry coming back to bite me square in the press release?  Yeah, probably.

More to come on this subject, as Dad and I pursue his dream together.

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If I were a rich man, I’d buy B&N, get rid of all the mass market shelf space, replace it with an Espresso Book Machine, start strong-arming publishers to print and bind really, really nice hardcovers at lower print runs and stock the hell out of those, and open up the B&N in-store ebook store to all devices and platforms (fuck it; even license mobi from Amazon if I can).

What to do with all that extra big box retail space once I’ve coldly slit the throat of the mass market and trade paperback retail supply chain and replaced it with a POD machine? Simple:

1) Expand the café to include actual meals from a relatively gourmet kitchen with table service (featuring produce from a rooftop or back-of-house organic garden, where possible).

2) Create a lounge area for leisurely reading

3) Create a cloistered co-working space for freelancers

4) Expand the children’s area (with short-term day care)

5) Hire a badass events coordinator for each store to bring in local artists, musicians and theatre troupes for performances, as well as authors, for nighttime events

6) Apply for a liquor license for those nighttime events

Boom: Instant community centers that promote book (and other) culture where before stood a big, cold piece of consumer monoculture. And better yet: four of the above points should bring in some relatively decent revenue. Who’s with me?

EDIT: Bob Stein sent me a link to a post of his where he proposes a similar approach to brick & mortar bookselling, but with an interesting dimension: instead of focusing on an existing brick & mortar store like B&N, he posits that perhaps publishers should jump into the retail game. He makes the excellent point that, after all, many publishers actually started as printers and booksellers.

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When the book came out, I thought I’d take it for a test drive on the Kindle. And after a few pages, written in his exact tone of voice, I thought: I need to HEAR him tell this story! But alas, a voiceover actor named Frank Skinner has the honors. Yeah, you could argue that it takes a Herculean effort to make out what Ozzy’s saying. I mean, they DID have subtitles during the MTV series. But, screw it. That’s what makes him so charming and so much fun to listen to. Like Tracy Morgan, or Steven Colbert, who also have unique voices and line delivery.

Maybe Hachette didn’t want to gamble on this one. Or maybe Ozzy/Sharon didn’t want to do the recording. I doubt the latter, but it could definitely be the case.

I guess I’m rambling on this because I believe there are certain occasions where the audiobook, print, and eBook versions are multiple purchase opportunities.

Take I Am America, And So Can You. I bought the hardcover the first week it was out because I heart Mr. Colbert. Loved the book and read it from cover to cover in a no time at all. I then found I wanted to hear it from the man himself. So I bought the audiobook and used it as a distraction while I was riding passenger on #getjoeontwitter’s motorcycle. Yeah, 85 MPH with only a helmet and motojacket between me and four weeks in traction makes me a little squiggy.

Then, when I got my Kindle, one of the first books I bought for my library…was Colbert’s book. And I read it again. I’m a fan. Clearly.

My next purchase: My Fair Lazy, by Jen Lancaster, in hardcover. I already have all of her other books, follow her on Twitter, and think she’s the funniest author on the planet. If only she was actually reading her own audiobooks…I would buy that too. And the Kindle version, which isn’t up yet. HINT.

Another way to think of it: It’s a Gary V Fan thing (DRINK!). You know that fans of Gary (FOG) will buy Crush It, then buy the Vook, then watch his videos, then buy the next iteration…because they VALUE the content and want it everywhere at anytime.

What’s my point? I promise there is one: as publishers we have to think, thoroughly, about the possibilities and flexibility of our authors’ story. From the point of acquisition. While I agree it’s good to go back into the backlist and mine for digital opportunities, the meat of it belongs in the first meeting after the book is acquired. Maybe even earlier.

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Those of you who attended yesterday’s Publishing Point meetup, “In Conversation with John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan,” got to see a side of Sargent that wasn’t carefully scripted in a Publishers Lunch letter or blog post. Rather he continued his tradition of being accessible and personable with the publishing community and I, for one, appreciated hearing the scope of his opinions on issues beyond agency model pricing.

Sargent proved to be likeable and funny, and really seemed to get the issues that are on all of our minds. You know, stuff like, will we still have our jobs in five years? Interviewed by the Book Industry Study Group’s Michael Healy, the discussion ranged from the quality of e-book devices to the difficulty of monetizing cool imprint websites like Tor.com.

Sargent predicted digital sales will grow to represent seven to nine percent of total book sales in the next year, but also nostalgically reflected on the enduring experience of reading printed books and shopping in brick and mortar bookstores. He discussed how he could see video and social media enhanced e-books being comparable to a non-fiction paperback with a photo insert, and not necessarily interfering with the story itself. And despite publishers needing to adapt to changes in the way we provide content, Sargent predicted that very little will shift in the way we do our day-to-day jobs. Referencing the recent trend in vampire literature, Sargent pointed out that “keeping our finger on the pulse is what we [publishing professionals] do anyway.”

Twitter commentary mostly supported Sargent’s views, but some attendees questioned his optimistic foresight and flipflopping on the issue of windowing. I think others would have liked to have heard a solution or two for how to successfully replicate and monetize niche verticals like Tor.com, which at this point Sargent described as a “successful marketing vehicle.”

I caught up with publishing enthusiast Cameron Ackroyd on the way out of the talk, who went specifically to hear how Sargent was going to address recent publisher/retailer disputes. “John Sargent came across as a savvy realist, but I sort of expected as much going in,” Cameron said. “It was interesting to hear him so openly dismiss tactics, like windowing, they’d been grasping at before the whole Amazon debacle, but he seemed confident with his position now.”

Nice job, John, in continuing the discussion in an open and transparent forum and I hope some of your CEO colleagues join in the conversation in the same manner.

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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.

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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.

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Publishers: In times of crisis, the social media tools you have invested time into building up are worth their weight in gold.

I love that John Sargent’s letter went out via Publishers Lunch. It was a smart choice of delivery method, and pushed discussion in a seriously pro-Macmillan, pro-publisher direction. But let’s talk beyond official channels. If anything, this dogfight should be remembered as having launched hundreds of blog posts, thousands of comments, and at last official counting, a gazillion tweets.

Unfortunately, since Macmillan doesn’t have an established social media strategy as a corporation, or an official, empowered spokesperson who has spent the time building a respected and trusted presence in this arena, they didn’t have a way to leverage the support, or respond to their detractors.

No, ‘thank you!’ response to the number of indie booksellers who announced on Twitter that they would support Macmillan by hand-selling their titles. No comments on the blogs of authors like John Scalzi or Tobias Buckell, who wrote insightful, even-handed posts about the dispute and urged their readers to understand Macmillan’s side.

But most importantly, without a corporate social media strategy, the company couldn’t leverage a response to authors like Cory Doctorow, or blogs like the Business Insider, who both raised legitimate concerns about the nature of this fight and its impact on authors. (And lest you think these are the sort of blog that could be swayed by no argument, it is worthwhile to note that Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s comment on the BoingBoing post argued for Macmillan’s side persuasively enough to get Cory to re-edit the post.)

I don’t mean for this to turn into a slag-Macmillan party, both because, as Scalzi points out, in terms of traditional media they handled the conversation pretty well, and also because I don’t see any of the other major houses out there in a position to handle a situation like this much better.

It just seems like a good time to think about corporate policy towards social media communications. If publishing houses like Macmillan can’t step up and extend the etiquette of at least a ‘thank you’ to their authors, booksellers, and fans who took to the social media sphere to advocate for them, maybe it’s a good time to empower their army of smart, web-savvy employees who have invested the time to build up online reputations to do it for them.

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For me, I’ve been asked more than a few times ‘well, how did you get into digital publishing?’  And the answer’s never fun.  Because you don’t want to be an asshole and say ‘I just read stuff.’ But that’s actually 75% of it.  The other 25% is having a passion for the digital side of things, but I’ll get to that later.

You really don’t want to read about my background.  Trust me, I’ll fall asleep typing it.  But maybe you are interested in hearing about how pretty much anyone with enough testicular fortitude (tm Mick Foley) can be that Digital Evangelist without specifically beginning your career as such.

It’s not for the weak-hearted.  Nor for the wallflower.  But it does come down to a few simple rules:

1 – Be A Sponge.  To be a digital whatever*, you have to absorb every bit of material pertinent to the industry.  Read every pundit blog post (yes, even Godin).  Read Twitter feeds of smart publishing people.  Read Tech blogs, especially those outside of publishing.  Attend every conference your budget will allow, especially those outside of publishing.  There are free webinars, tweet-ups, networking lunches, working groups, party lines, soul trains, world of warcraft meetings…ok, getting carried away.  Just be there and be ready to learn.

2 – Try Stuff Out.  Don’t have an iPhone?  I hear ya, they’re expensive and AT&T sucks.  But you probably know someone who does, so go find them, ask them to download that eReader app you wanted to try out and buy them lunch to let you play with the phone for an hour.  Don’t have a Kindle?  You could hit up your old friend Techie McGadgety and see if he’ll let you take it for a weekend.  OR you could go on YouTube and watch a bunch of user demos to get an idea of how these things operate.  The important thing is to be familiar with how your readers are finding your content.

3 – Make Friends with the IT department.

4 – Work Your Ass Off. Sorry, there’s no short cut.  You’ll be up most nights reading Gizmodo’s latest review of the Atari eReader 5000**, or debating the unicorn with your new friends on Twitter, or trying to remember the formula for Pecha Kucha while signing up for Thursday’s webinar.  This is where the ‘Passion’ I’d mentioned comes in.  Look, we don’t have the answers, but we’re so excited to try to solve the digital business model mystery that we’re spending countless hours doing it.  If you’re just as jazzed about it, you should definitely hop right in!

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1. The Multimedia Editor: Book lovers been talking for years about The Future, where video and audio and more—maybe video games!—will mingle with words to create a sort of uber-book. Looking at the experiments of 2009, it seems like that day is creeping ever close. The thing is, we still haven’t really figured out how to insert these assets into the text without tapping the reader on the shoulder to let her know we’ve done it. “Look! We made a video! Isn’t that better than just turning a stupid page?” The ideal scenario would be a book that flows between text and multimedia for a seamless reading experience, not one that calls attention to its assets, pulling you completely out of the narrative. Every publishing house needs editors that are skilled not at the integration of words with each other, but with the multimedia elements into the text. Experience with designing webpages full of assets a must.
2. The Community Development Manager: Advice to businesses about using Twitter always emphasizes the importance of monitoring the name of your brand. For imprints, that doesn’t mean monitoring just the imprint and parent company’s name, but also all of the authors and book titles released by the imprint. That’s a lot of keywords. And this applies not only to Twitter, but to all online monitoring and engagement. It’s too big of a job to add to your already busy publicist’s plates—you need someone online full time entering the conversation and encouraging your fans. Example: there’s a huge following for Nick Harkaway‘s The Gone-Away World amongst bookish Twitter-ers (Stephanie Anderson is one of the ringleaders), all of whom would be thrilled to show up at an event, pre-order the next hardcover, or help promote any new writing. Does Knopf know about it?
3. The Passionate Insider: Publishing houses need to begin evaluating for jobs based on the interest level of the applicants as well as experience. Chelsea Green is a great example of what can be accomplished with a team of folks who are all truly passionate about the books they’re putting out. In the words of their blogger, Makenna Goodman: “Ours is a mission-based business, whose employees respect the lives (and values) of the authors they’re promoting. We put out books on fermentation, and make pickles at home, in other words.” While it’s true that you don’t need to be a scientist to edit Ray Kurzweil or a yoga fan to promote Elizabeth Gilbert, let’s be honest: it’s easy to see the magic that happens when people work on books that resonate with their interests. What’s more people who are engaged with the subject matter of the books they work on can brand themselves as experts in social media space, where authenticity is essential. These people are worth their weight in gold (people like Ann Kingman at Random House, or Jen Hill at Tor), and should be paid as such.

Has your house already taken the plunge and hired for any of these positions? Are there any other positions houses should be hiring for that I’ve missed?

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First, check out the new blog. I’m launching The New Sleekness with other smart, bookish types to fill a hole in publishing punditry: voices from the boots-on-the-ground folks actually working directly in that sweet spot of publishing and technology. I hope you’ll add us to your RSS Reader.

And second, YES! I have a shiny new job. I’ll be starting as director of business development at AdaptiveBlue on January 18th, working with a product you may already be using: Glue.

Glue provides an entirely new of way of connecting authors and books directly to readers (aka, one of the smartest things we publishing geeks can be doing). You know all that discussion about the need for curation and how authors and publishers must build direct-to-consumer relationships? Glue has enormous implications for both.

Before taking this new gig, I thought a lot about what it meant to leave big-house publishing (or ‘legacy publishing,’ as we’ve taken to calling it around here). Since it’s the only field I’ve ever worked in, it was a particularly hard decision to make. True, the challenges facing the industry now are serious, but it’s clear to me that publishing is chock-full of smart people who are all doing their best to keep things afloat. I love this business, and I have no doubt that it will find its way.

But I’ve realized that at least for the next few years, changes that affect the issues most important to me and to readers—DRM, rights, pricing—are going to be coming from the top down, not the bottom up. As much as I’d like to be able to say I’ve been in a position to impact decisions in these areas, a lot of them, by necessity, are made way outside of my pay grade and without any input from this peanut gallery.

As someone looking to fool around with the way that publishing works, this has been hard for me. One of the things I admire about tech companies is their willingness to try experiments quickly, evaluate the data, and then decide what’s worth pursuing and what should be ditched. Legacy publishers are learning to do this, but for the time being, it can be slow going. AdaptiveBlue offers me an opportunity to find a new way to connect readers and books. And man, does that make me excited.

So, I hope all of you will keep visiting this space to talk about ideas and experiments that are making you excited about the next few years in publishing, or feel free to contact me about them directly. I’ll certainly be putting mine up here. And maybe together we can try some of them out.

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