Welcome to SPUNC, home of Australia's small press and
independent publishing community.
What is Splog?
SPLOG is the Small Press Network blog, maintained by Kent MacCarter. Here guest writers and small press luminaries contribute lively opinions, ideas, discussions and other adroit whatnot about the small press sector and the industry at large.
Best selling author and entrepreneur Seth Godin talked recently to members of the US based Digital Publishing Group on making a viable success of publishing in the 21st Century:
The video starts with a general discussion on the capacity for free economies to generate greater title sales and popularity, but soon segues into how such ideas work when dealing with lesser known authors. Godin uses the example of literary fiction to explore the notion of ‘tribes’ within a publishing setting. Among other things, he suggests increased communication between readers and editors through blogs, online forums, and in person, to encourage greater transparency and consolidate fans of literary fiction into a critical mass.
Explains Godin:
"If you can just assemble these 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 people who love literary fiction, then you've earned the right to be the ringleader, the leader of that tribe—and you'll never, ever again have trouble selling literary fiction," Godin said. "What's missing is you don't know who those 100,000 people are, and you don't have permission to talk to them. Once you do, the book sales will take care of themselves."
Godin’s comments seem particularly prescient when dealing with an already thriving independent literary culture in Melbourne. He goes on to cites salons, be they virtual or actual events, as a greater part of this community engagement. While Godin's views understandably stress financial profitability, in Melbourne's case there are equally important, if less tangible benefits to be gained from such collaboration.
At present, local publishing has the potential to shift our very notion of what books mean to us as a society. Rather than attempting to compete with other visual mediums, publishing can instead raise the bar, bringing quality literature to a wider audience than previously thought possible.
To do this, we need synergy: a diverse and self-subsistent publishing network of like minded readers, writers, editors, bloggers, festival coordinators and publishers. A celebration of engaging, provocative and inspiring literature. A blueprint for redefining our literary culture.
With Readings, The Age, and more than 70 SPUNC members already stirring the pot of culture and creativity, it seems Melbourne is well on the way towards creating its very own “tribe” of passionate industry advocates.
Let’s hope that The Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas continues the evolution, bringing new opportunities, new audiences and the shared goal of building an ever greater culture to call our own.
We already know who our “people” are; we may yet find a way to truly mobilise them.
On February 29th, 2008, Neil Gaiman released the full version of his novel American Gods online, to be read free of charge for thirty days. The results were as follows:
-85,000 unique users visited the site during the promotion, reading a total of 3.8 million pages of the book (an average of 46 per person).
-The weekly average sales of the print version of American Gods went up 300% during the promotion.
-Sales of all Neil Gaiman titles went up 40% at independent booksellers during the promotion
(Independent bookseller results were the only ones able to be accurately inferred, as a parallel Gaiman promotion at various chains fuzzed the available data.)
Even considering the already esteemed status of Gaiman, these results are eye opening, challenging preconceived notions of free eBooks cannibalising sales of already existing print editions.
Neil Gaiman is not the only high-profile author to have recently experimented with digital content as a promotional tool. Wired editor and author of The Long Tail Chris Anderson featured his new book Free as a time-limited eBook through Kindle, Scribd and Google Books in July 2009, and Seth Godin’s Tribes appeared on audible.com as a free audio book towards the end of 2008.
Canadian writer Cory Doctorow has long championed free eBooks, offering free electronic versions of all his works under a Creative Commons license, effectively allowing unlimited duplication or ‘remixing’ of the original text for noncommercial use. Doctorow has long claimed that giving away free eBooks results in more print copies of said books being sold.
Watch This Space?
Whether Australia has the readership to support Doctorow’s hypothesis is unclear; to obtain the necessary sales, such an experiment would more than likely need the assistance of both a media outlet and any number of aggregators (blogs, Twitter accounts, etc) to spread the word. Here is an example of how such a project could work locally:
The Age Book of the year promotion: A tie-in eBook promotion with Sleepers Publishing. In the lead-up to Christmas (Late October/early November), Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming is released free to to read online (in a format similar to Scribd or Google Books) for a limited time from either the Sleepers website, or Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming website. The link is then publicised in the A2 section of Saturday’s Age and on The Book Show on Radio National, posted via literary blogs such as Spike, SPLOG and Literary Minded, and tweeted via the SPUNC, Austliterature, Melbourne Writers Festival and Emerging Writers Festival twitter accounts.
From there, Google Analytics charts the number of unique visitors to the relevant website and the average number of pages read, while Sleepers Publishing reports back on the number of copies sold.
(Note: In the above example of Things We Didn’t See Coming, international access restrictions for the free promotion would need to be enforced pending the release of foreign editions from February 2010 onwards.)
Again, this is just an idea, where the titles, publishers and aggregators are interchangeable. Prominent award winning titles such as The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas and Breath by Tim Winton are other possible alternatives, although their earlier release dates may render the profits of such a venture less viable.
Personally, I would be very keen to see such an experiment undertaken, if only to chart the viability of eBooks as a promotional tool in the Australian market. What do other readers think?
I love hearing writers talk. Its sad, but true. I’m sure my thoughts don’t represent every reader, writer and publisher out there, but I also know I’m not the only lit-freak that gets a genuine buzz from hearing writers speak, the tenor of their voice as they retrace literary footsteps in search of greater meaning.
Sad to say, there’s one area in which Australia has really faltered regarding the promotion of local writers. Even sadder to say, it’s US bookseller Barnes & Noble that are showing us how things could be done.
Barnes & Noble has hundreds of interviews both online and as part of their podcast, Meet the Writers with BarnesandNoble.com, available through iTunes. As a literary showcase of all things American, it is phenomenal. The host, Steve Bertrand, and the author talk about all manner of subjects, ranging from the book being promoted, to exploration of the writer’s motivations and their favourite works. While these podcasts are naturally designed to showcase an author and their current title, Bertrand does so in a way that actually widens the listener’s range of potential reading material.
Take a relatively recent Chuck Palahniuk interview, as received through the Meet the Writers Podcast on iTunes. During the interview Palahniuk not only mentions his latest book Rant, but when prompted for the authors that inspired him, he also cites Amy Hempel and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this case, the aforementioned podcast not only gives Palahniuk fans the opportunity to get to know him a little better, it also a) introduces them to the work of a classic writer such as Fitzgerald and b) gives non-Palahniuk fans the chance to frame his work in a much broader perspective.
The spin-off benefits are obvious. General book sales go up. Sales of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels also go up, injecting more funds into the country’s publishing industry. And most importantly, his podcast has the potential to reach digitally-inclined readers on their preferred platform.
Meet the Writers is impressive in itself, but it is only part of the B&N studio at www.barnesandnoble.com, where extended interviews with writers (as well as filmmakers and musicians) are paired with customers reading passages from their favourite books and video trailers for upcoming releases; where author biographies are listed featuring their book, music and film recommendations, descriptions of how long it took them to break through, and advice for emerging writers.
My aim here is not to trumpet the corporate salesmanship of Barnes & Noble. What is impressive, however, is not only their sheer weight of promotion of each and every American author that walks into the store, but the availability of author content on any number of platforms, ranging from the print biog through to audio and video podcasts.
Australian Independent publishers have few avenues with which to promote their work. Here a synergistic relationship between certain bookstores (or even a chain of bookstores) and SPUNC could take independent publishing online to a wider audience, while at the same time giving the creators their own voice as part of a greater nationwide dialogue.
In Melbourne, Readings Bookstores seem the most likely candidate to take the Barnes & Noble challenge. They already feature event podcasts and interviews online, but the podcasts are found via a text link at the bottom of their site and the interviews on the site are in print form only. By taking their existing website content (audio event podcasts and print interviews currently featured as links at the bottom of the site) and increasing a) its prominence, including uploading podcast content to iTunes and b) its availability in multiple formats, Readings could raise the bar for the promotion of local authors and the Australian literary community.
On a nationwide level, there are any number of bookstores that could similarly rise to the challenge, and I would keen to hear readers' opinions on those best equipped undertake such a venture in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia.
The potential benefits for both bookseller and publisher are self-evident: customers could search by name for their desired writer’s podcast, listen at their convenience and eventually shop intelligently with their preferences in mind; both bookseller and publisher would increase their reach to local, interstate and overseas listeners through streamable content, allowing for subsequent purchase directly from the bookstore’s site or the shop itself. And finally, if said interviews are picked up widely enough on an international level, both Australia and its quality independent output get wider exposure on the world stage.
Maybe I am missing something here, but to me web synergy seems the next logical step for independent publishing to reach a wider audience. And, if the internet is slowly falling prey to the mediocre and hyper-commercial, then maybe it is time we take the power back.
Like almost everyone else in publishing, I've been thinking a lot lately about the future. In fact, I don't think I've ever put so much thought into the future in my life. If I put this much effort into thinking about, say, t-shirt slogans or my brilliant idea for how to telephone all the items I own so that when I lose them I can hear them ringing from the mysterious location in which they lurk, then I'd be a millionaire. And no doubt, I'd have nothing to do with publishing. Perhaps in another dimension somewhere, that's me; wealthy and rolling in it.
But back to the future, as they say. Ordinarily, when one contemplates one's future from a personal perspective you'll have an objective, like: I wanna be the first person to climb Mount Everest, or I want everyone in this town to be wearing one of my fabulous hats by the year 2011 - and then you'd go about heading towards that goal with all the strategies and resources and tactics that you thought were going to get you there. But this future in digital publishing? We're all working the wrong way round. Take the Mount Everest example: we're not entirely sure what the objective is, but we're pretty sure we're going to need an ice pick. We've got a feeling it might be cold, so perhaps we need to start designing some kind of thermal headwear. We're pretty sure we don't have all the necessary skills to achieve this thing that we haven't clearly articulated, but something's telling me we need a sherpa. And fast.
This is the approach that the publishing industry, by and large, appears to be taking. But no one (excluding those who have - I guess they're out there somewhere) has clearly stated what the objective is. Maybe developing eBooks is completely the wrong way to go about it! How will we know if we don't know why we're doing it?
I've got my own hypothetical objective, but it's a confronting one, which is why it's hypothetical. And it expressly concerns the future. Not just of publishing, but of everything. It's this little issue around our environmental impact on this planet. Sometimes I think of it in terms of Anne Frank. For her, and millions of others at the time, she had a war to fight, and it defined her generation, and it dictated the outcome of her existence. For me, the war for the 21st century has been as clearly defined as it was for Anne Frank, and I will spend my life, one way or another, fighting it, and dealing with it, and finding ways to inspire my fellow human beings to do the same. I'm not an environmental activist, you'd barely notice that I spend that much time thinking about it. But I've committed myself, and I've made a personal decision about it. If this forms the basis for my objective then one of the strategies that just might help me get there, is finding a way for publishing and writing to have zero impact on the world's environment in terms of carbon emissions and other environmentally destructive activities. Is an eBook going to do that? Maybe. Maybe not.
To pursue digital publishing in the vain hope that it will be a source of money (and why should publishing suddenly be so lucrative - it never has before) is obviously no objective. To do it because you think you'll be left behind is certainly no reason to climb the tallest mountain in the world. But if you have an objective - and it can be either a personal one or a professional one, they're often the same in any case - then that is cause for celebration. Cause all of a sudden everyone will say 'right! I've got it - I see exactly what you're talking about', and you'll have have captured everyone's imagination and their attention, and everyone will know, without a doubt, what their job is and how they're going to go about it.
During this year's Melbourne Writers' Festival, there were some very well organised industry sessions that invited all SPUNC members, and lots of other publishing people, to take part. There was, as is the current trend, a lot of discussion about digital publishing and the future of the book. By way of christening this here little blog, I'm posting below a summing up of thoughts and ideas garnered from these talks.
• Preamble
One of the things that was most apparent in being part of the discussions on the future of the book and digital publishing, etc, is that if you have invested any time in investigating this already, then there are no great surprises here. What’s interesting is how many more people are buying into the discussion and putting up their hands for staying informed. There are more and more industry people paying attention now, and this will of course increase exponentially. But if you have been looking into this area already, then there may be no new information here. It’s all cause for further scrutiny though, so from that perspective I found the sessions at the festival very helpful.
Also, much of what is written about below is a result of my own analysis. I’ve extrapolated on discussion points based on my own interpretation of them. Therefore, the best thing to do after reading these notes is, of course, to go and conduct investigations of your own.
Finally: a list of URLs is at the bottom of this document to help with further investigation.
Speakers you may like to investigate further:
Elizabeth Weiss (Allen and Unwin);
Victoria Nash (Pan Macmillan);
Bob Stein (from a Think Tank in the US, Institute for the Future of the Book) and Kate Eltham (Queensland Writers’ Centre and Australian arm of Institute for the Future of the Book)
• Thoughts on the ‘Ebook’ – and the future of the book
Rather than seeing the development of e-publishing as an either/or thing, think of the Ebook as ‘another edition of the book’. In the immediate future at least, this is what we are looking at. It doesn’t mean that one is going to replace the other, but it certainly means that you should be considering the prevalence of electronic publishing in terms of how you attract authors, what you can offer them in your publishing deals, and how you provide content to readers.
The price point of eBooks is obviously the most confronting prospect to traditional publishers. Price points at $9.99 vs. the print version, obviously makes a print book more expensive, and while many consumers in the next 10 years or so will continue to purchase print books, as more and more contemporary writing becomes available at more than half the price of a print book, and more sophisticated devices are developed, this becomes a massive threat to the traditional publisher. Of course small press publishers are already dealing with a miniscule market, so in many ways we are best prepared to deal with this shift in the way books are consumed. Although there is a greater cost involved in setting your press up to deal with digital production, that is, without the resources and skills to justify the shift, and make it work financially.
One of the significant areas of the market to consider with ePublishing is libraries. Already there is a massive take up from libraries in offering eBooks. They let the file out for a couple of weeks, after which point it self-destructs. The issue here is why, arguably, would someone want to buy the file permanently? But then, this has never affected the way in which print books are bought. That is, libraries don’t necessarily threaten bookstores in any measurable way. But will people want to collect and keep electronic files in the same way that we collect and keep print books? Possibly. This is another area that wasn’t really discussed. Many people like to display their favourite books and current reads on their blogs, and facebook, and myspace etc. This is a virtual space that users like to decorate and display their personalities in much the same way as one would with one’s home. If you think about it in this way, then eBooks do not threaten our relationships with the physical object of a book. Reading is a social act, and just because it’s happening on a screen doesn’t change that. In some ways it will become far more social. However the fact remains that a print book can be a beautifully designed object, and in the area of the industry concerned with purchasing books as gifts, then this may not necessarily change all that much in the near future.
• Sales and Marketing
US & UK affects here and trying to claw back money
What happens in the US and UK markets obviously affects how the market will deal with change here. And because the market over there is struggling to claw back money lost to Amazon and cheaper price points on eBooks, this may explain a little as to why things are moving slowly here. The good news there is (possibly) that when they make sense of it, we can take it up here. However, the digital world doesn’t operate territorially, so that may be a furphy. When the code is cracked in one spot, we’re not really in the position to do it, as if for the first time, in Australia.
• Selling direct to libraries (sell a whole list of files)
And this goes the same for individual readers too. If you are selling electronic files directly to libraries, then you sell them a whole list. All your fiction for that year for example. Or a volume of issues in a magazine series. Presented in this way it makes for a more appealing package, and does compete somewhat with the way in which Amazon, for example, might provide a written work.
• We don’t have high profile as a local provider of devices and book files
This is one of the big issues that’s holding Australia back at the moment. There has been little, or slow, development in the manufacturing sector for eReading devices. Other than laptops or PCs or iPhone type set-ups, there’s little available on the market, and the prices are too high. A lot of Australians are using Stanza (via their iPhone). This is the most prolifically used eReading device on the Australian market to date.
• POD – Print on Demand (Lightening Source considered the most sophisticated POD provider world wide)
The developments in Print on Demand technology has lead to a massive resurgence of out of print titles. What this means now is that new releases are competing with out of print books in the market. No book can ever go out of print. However print on demand means that books are cheaper to produce, so potentially, while the unit price on a book may go up, there’s a lot more product for you to continually promote and sell (providing you’re not relying on a bricks and mortar bookseller to sell those old titles). The potential for things to work especially well here is in a subscription model. For example, via your website, or another website, your publishing house offers subscriptions to a year’s worth of your titles, and those titles are POD produced, and sent out directly to the consumer. Interestingly this is how a lot of traditionally printed books started out in the first place. This is sort of a return to the publisher as provider of the book. As opposed to the book going from the publisher to the printer to the distributor to the bookseller to the consumer!
• Google and Amazon willing to upload self published authors.
What this means in the future is that the current stigma attached to ‘self-published’ authors may no longer apply. If an author wants to benefit directly from the sales of his or her books, then they can publish their files electronically to Google or Amazon (or future providers) and bypass the publisher entirely. The editorial quality of the work notwithstanding, this could mean that publisher’s would need to offer something very handsome indeed to compete with that.
• Difficult to overcome your DNA (in terms of patterns of publishing model that’s existed up until now)
This is an interesting concept and one that requires quite a bit of head scratching. What it means is that buried deep within our cultural values and preferences is a desire to publish the book just as we have been doing for 600 years or so. The relationship we have with physically making a book, and everything that goes with that process, is embedded in us and in our connection with publishing as an industry. It’s not a matter of deciding that you’re going to go into ePublishing over traditional publishing because that’s where the future is going, since that may not be the right way of satisfying your inescapable desire to publish. This issue doesn’t necessarily have an answer, but it’s intriguing and something we collectively should be thinking about. The idea of cultural or artistic DNA as running through a society.
• IPhone – will there be MORE reading?
Australia’s massive growth in mobile phone usage over the past couple of years is second to none. And it’s growing all the time. People are using their phones for reading, for emailing, for web browsing, for shopping, for all sorts of things. And the mobile phone is always in your pocket. For people who wouldn’t ordinarily have a book on them wherever they went, this means that people now, potentially, have a book on them wherever they go.
• Most growth is happening in the developing world, arguably, as that’s an area that doesn’t already have established models and a culture of maintaining the status quo.
Interestingly, we may see the eBook and more technological advances like this happening in developing worlds as opposed to the western world. Countries like India and China are experiencing massive growth, and the way in which those countries are dealing with these sorts of issues isn’t so much a ‘how do we prepare for this’ rather than a ‘we’re building this for the first time and this is where the technology is already at’.
• Marketing Stuff and online community, etc
Apparently 84% of readers have more trust in user generated reviews than critics/journalism reviews – suggesting that a lot of reviews are being written and read online – importance of creating and maintaining regular content online to help increase sales and publicity.
Note: the digital campaigns that you generate work globally, so no matter who is selling or publishing the book around the rest of the world, you can all work together in making an online campaign work for you. So in the event that you’re sharing rights with other territories, rather than seeing this as a threat, you can work together in generating an audience.
Something Random House authors sometimes do is have characters in books interacting via Twitter, blogs, etc – generating content to support title. This depends on what the author wants to do – how much they want to do beyond writing the work itself.
User generated content is really strong in Australia – there’s a lot of it.
Partnering with other websites that do have forums and online chats, etc, to get things talked about – as opposed to investing huge amounts in your own infrastructure – piggy back on someone else’s. The idea here is that there are a of blogs and online discussions, and bookstores are generating a lot of this too. Rather than thinking about what you can do in terms of your own infrastructure, be in tune with what is already happening in that sphere and how you might be able to partner up with them.
Do you build your own community or tap into an existing one?
• Other
Author as having a clear view of what they want, how they want to market and position the book. When you have those initial discussions with authors, this is a good conversation to have early. Establish what the common intention, marketing-wise, is.
A digital campaign is not always the best way to promote a book, there’s no point in investing time and money and building a whole lot of whiz bank online stuff if it doesn’t suit the book or the target audience.
NOTE: a publisher website is more for the bookseller, the media and libraries and teachers, etc than it is for the individual consumer. Don’t necessarily structure your website content directly towards the individual/consumer – capture them in other ways, via blogs, etc.
• Direct Rights Management Stuff – details to bear in mind when drawing up contracts
(Legal advice is obviously preferable to what I’ve included here, but may accelerate your intentions to address these issues)
Authors will soon insist on retaining digital rights and may walk away from a publisher because of that. Something to be aware of when negotiating contracts.
NOTE: ebook rights versus digital rights (which covers all sorts of things). In a contract, stipulate the difference, cause an eBook is just another book, where as digital rights include numerous things, some of which hasn’t been invented yet.
You should include a digital rights strategy (even if you’re not doing anything yet) in your biz plans, contracts, etc – royalties based on the RRP model won’t work in this instance, so think about how you’re going to structure it.
Keep eBook rights with the print rights (when you’re buying rights)
In contracts, refer to it as ‘a work’ rather than ‘a book’ and this covers content other than ‘the book’
Compare to contracts around film options – not tied up for too long, flexible enough to absorb variable in future developments for the area.
On connecting with audiences and consumers directly – keep audiences permanently tuned in to what you’re doing, daily/weekly reviews, lists of favourite books, etc
Bear in mind cross pollination opportunities with other organisations, not necessarily publishers, or book people. (And there will be specific places you can do this depending on the book to make it most relevant.)
• Events
Tin House hold a lot of events, as well as a mini festival once a year, which although may not be sustainable in a market the size of the one here in Australia, behaves as an example of how important connecting with humans and community really is. The digital age has done one fundamental thing – it has given license to communicate distantly and ineffectually. A big email list does not a strong marketing campaign make. Emailing out occasional newsletters and updates, or advance information sheets is not the be all and end all of your communication with consumers when you have a new book. Engaging with people personally, face to face, or over the phone, or via blogs and a regular online presence is the best way to build brand and audience.
• Other Resources
-http://booksquare.com/
-http://www.futureofthebook.org/
-http://www.electricalphabet.net/
-http://smallbeerpress.com/ (Good example of a small press website, loaded with content and interesting stuff, although sometimes it’s a bit hard to navigate)
-http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ (UK competitive with Amazon – doing a good job, great content, book-centric)
-http://therumpus.net/ (good online magazine)
-http://www.graywolfpress.org/ (A very successful small publisher in the US)
-http://www.mhpbooks.com/ (Melville House – great content, updated blogs, video content, etc)
-http://www.tinhouse.com/ (lovely little publishing house, doing around 15 books a year, started on a magazine that is still published)
-http://www.eblib.com/ (eLibrary for eBooks)
-http://www.lightningsource.com/ (for Print on Demand)
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