the darkness at the end of the tunnel

September is a month of full moons, totally lunatic with classes starting up and a million things to do at work. (I’m department chair these days, am teaching a first term seminar, and I agreed to also serve for a year as the director of our faculty development program. Shoot me now.) I’ve had a couple of conferences to attend in the past month and always feel behind on the weekly column I’ve been writing for Library Journal’s Academic Newswire. So posting here and on my Scandinavian Crime Fiction blog has fallen by the wayside. But I want to share this . . .

I just got the cover art for my next book – and I love it. Minotaur asks for ideas, and I made up a web page with some images that seemed to fit. And they picked right up on it! This shot is one of Chicago’s many spooky and intriguing underpasses. And I’m happy it isn’t a picture of the Loop which is what almost appears on the covers of books set in Chicago (and is so not the Chicago I write about). I’m also highly tickled because it’s based on a CC-licensed photo I discovered on Flickr, not on the usual stock photography that appears (again and again) on book jackets. At the end of Open Access Week, this just feels so right.

The title, by the way, was inspired by a Leonard Cohen song, Anthem. There are a couple of lines that I particularly like that I used to introduce the book. I can’t quote them here because they are owned by Sony Music, and I had to pay a lot of money for the right to quote them. (This is sometimes jokingly referred to as “seeking permission” – as in “I just sought permission for a new Jaguar, and man it’s fun to drive. Too bad I had to remortgage my house.”) What really burned me was that not one penny went to Leonard Cohen. I wish he got at least some of it.

I’ve just started reading William Patry’s new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, and as you can see, it’s getting me all stirred up.

book publishing is broken, exhibit C

Shelf Awareness has been profiling interesting tidbits from BEA and one of them was a presentation about a New England independent bookstore, Northshire, that offers print on demand services with a rented Espresso machine. People enjoy watching it make books, and the store sells 150 to 200 Espresso-printed books per month. Given the machine costs a thousand dollars a month to rent, requires a full time staff person, plus takes up a 5′ x 15′ plus clearance chunk of floor space (and apparently a fair amount of under-the-breath cursing because it is finicky) the bookseller thinks it still has the potential to provide a comfortable profit, particularly if it could quickly fulfill orders for frontlist books that aren’t in stock.

But what is their Espresso serving now? Mostly self-published titles, which run $10-$15 for a 200-page book and involve staff time providing layout and other services. Lulu is cheaper, but Northshire is high-touch and has local appeal. They’ve essentially become a small publisher, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say a printer who provides some publishing services. They also print copies of public domain books through Espresso’s arrangement with the Open Content Alliance . There’s a theoretical arrangement with Lightning Source to provide mainstream publications, but very few in-copyright back- or front-list titles are currently available, which the bookseller thinks may be related to the  lack of the Espresso’s system to integrate with publisher’s inventory systems. Or maybe it’s one more technical hassle the publishing industry doesn’t want to undertake until it has blockbuster potential.

The new Espresso 2.0 was rolled out recently. (Northshire has the 1.5 veriosn.) You can see it at work in this promotional video printing a copy of Jason Epstein’s book in which he predicted an ATM-like machine that would print books from an electronic catalog on demand. He partnered with the inventor of the machine to founded the company that makes Espressos.

I can’t figure out the math. The machine costs a lot – far more than a $1,000 / month rental would support. It’s available in a handful of independent bookstores – one each in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia; some university bookstores and libraries also have the machines. Are these demos just to get the word out? Though there is a market to produce nicely printed copies of things like reports and conference proceedings, as well as self-published cookbooks, memoirs, local histories, novels, and poetry, the lack of integration with publishers’ lists mean it won’t change mainstream book distribution, not unless things really change dramatically. That means there is no “greener” or more financially efficient book market as a result – just bookstores becoming print shops and adding an entirely new set of services to their business.

I think there’s a significant market that will endure for printed books. I think readers want to have high-quality books that have been carefully chosen, professionally edited and well-designed; hand-crafted, but not home-made. I would like to think there’s a less wasteful means of delivering them to readers that could be nearly as instant as it is with Kindle. (Don’t you think the reason they use a “whisper-net” is so that you can’t quite hear the price tag of that book you just bought on a whim?)  I’d like to think this efficient and fast delivery could be done without some vertically-integrated Wal-Mart of books becoming our one and only bookstore, self-publisher, and e-book vendor. But for every innovation that shows promise for the development of a healthy book culture that isn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business, there are seemingly impossible barriers for making those innovations deliver books from traditional publishers.

It amazes me that publishers rush to do business with Amazon even while fuming that they have artificially depressed the cost of e-books to sell their proprietary hardware and reset the retail price point. Why can’t publishers do more to maximize the potential that independent booksellers have to create a healthy and innovative book culture? There has to be way.

libary=pirate bay

This snack from Publisher’s Lunch reported from BEA caught my eye:

Macmillan’s John Sargent underscored that “you shouldn’t focus on Google as the danger point; the danger is what Google enables in making a copy and giving it to libraries,” whose mission to is disseminate information for free. “It becomes a very dangerous world when piracy exists, most importantly,” Sargent said, “to get control of the digital copies that libraries are going to have.”

On noes! Free copies!! Agghhh, run for your lives!!!

But, uh . . . the books being digitized belong to the libraries. And they can’t share the digital versions without getting their asses sued. So what are you so worried about, exactly? That pirates will hack Hathi Trust?

Why aren’t you all freaked out about that search inside full text at Amazon? Oh, right! [smacks head] They sell books, so they’re okay. None of that scary free stuff. Whew.

social capitalism

As I was just saying . . .

There’s a blurred line in social networks between communicating and selling.  And Leonie Margaret Rutherford has that borderland nicely nailed in a new article in First Monday, “Industries, Artists, Friends and Fans: Marketing Young Adult Fictions Online.” The abstract:

The Internet has facilitated the coming together of formerly more separated youth taste cultures, such that literary, screen and graphic fandoms now more readily overlap. Media industries have invested in online strategies which create an ongoing relationship between producers and consumers of entertainment media texts. Using the Internet marketing campaign for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga as a case study, the paper examines the role of the publishing industry in marketing popular teen literary fiction through online channels in ways that often disguise promotional intent.

Fan culture and Web 2.0 are often described as being places where cultural hierarchies are disrupted and tastes are actively shaped by diverse audiences who gravitate to niches. Anita Elberse has challenged Chris Anderson’s claim that the “long tail” of niche items will win out in a world where audiences can make their own choices among a myriad of options. Elberse’s research suggests that digital buzz actually compounds the blockbuster effect. And Rutherford’s research shows how this works. As she puts it,”[o]stensibly democratic networks of online youth sociability exist in a complex and complicit relationship with the processes of global media industries.”

She quotes  from a Publisher’s Weekly story in which a publicist at Scholastic said, baldly, “part of the trick to marketing books to teens online is that the most effective results seem to come from the coverage that appears most organic, viral and uncommercial in nature.” Appears. In other words, when you sell something, do your best to make it look as if you’re just another fan, raving about a positive experience.

As the quote from Scholastic’s publicist illustrates, the lines between user–generated fan sociability, and industry–generated social marketing are blurred. Such overlaps demonstrate the informational circuit of what Nigel Thrift calls “knowing capitalism”. Audiences/users gain information about narrative remediations and consumer opportunities related to their interests, while publishers and media industries garner data about their audience base. Through user feedback, publishing and media industry stakeholders are able to make projections about the viability of merchandising or cross–platform products associated with their literary or screen media properties.

Rutherford points out that genre fiction, particularly women’s romance fiction, has traditionally built on a strong connection between fans and producers of fiction. But the marketing aimed at youth also is intended as recruitment for a future market by going after the youth demographic and building the kinds of loyal relationships previously developed between women readers and romance publishers. But there’s also another key element: “The marketing of young adult fictions has also increasingly been aligned with the cult of celebrity.” Meyers built her own website so she could align her image with fans and identify as a storyteller, a geek, one of them. But the feedback loop between the author and the fans and the fictional world builds a committed customer base. “The author, the series and its characters have become celebrity commodities, fuelled by Internet communities of interest, an intersecting, cross–media stardom.”

Which is all very thought-provoking. This research does seem to describe the mechanisms by which audiences cooperate with and are coopted by marketers in making blockbusters, which in turn gives audiences a sense that they are participating in something really, really big. Which, of course, means niches are all very well but it’s not where the cool kids want to be seen.

The attention economy, like our economy, apparently has a widening gap between the rich and the rest. And on the Internet, nobody knows you’re an advertisement.

hand me the remote

Cory Doctorow has a column in the Guardian about the silliness of the Amazon/Authors Guild dispute over text-to-speech. After giving it a good going-over he points out something that is actually much more disturbing.

. . . while we were all running our mouths about the plausibility of the singularity emerging from Amazon’s text-to-speech R&D, a much juicier issue was escaping our notice: it is technically possible for Amazon to switch off the text-to-speech feature for some or all books.

That’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it? Now that Amazon has agreed with the Authors Guild that text-to-speech will only be switched on for authors who sign a contract permitting it, we should all be goggling in amazement at the idea that this can be accomplished.

After all, the Kindle customers who’ve already received their units, bought devices that were advertised as “capable of reading Kindle books aloud”, not “reading some Kindle books aloud”.

He points out that we wouldn’t be too happy if we bought other products with features that could be remotely disabled at will. He also raises the issue – what if Amazon changes? What if it goes out of business?  Poof.  Your books are gone.

And though he doesn’t raise it, there’s the chance books will morph. Not too long ago, a suit against a publisher in England (where the libel laws are very different than in the US, which is why people bring suit there even over US-published books) led to a publisher sending libraries a letter asking them to either withdraw the book or tip in new pages to indicate that a certain Saudi banker hadn’t been rumored to support terrorist causes after all. My library didn’t own the book, but if we did, I certainly wouldn’t change its text based on the complaint of one of the subjects of the book.

What would Amazon do in such a case? It’s quite possible that the book would still be on your Kindle, but poof . . . the offending information would be gone or altered.

Cory Doctorow concludes that none of this is in authors’ interests.

. . . on the day that Amazon goes crazy, goes under, or goes to the dogs, our readers – the people whose long-term goodwill we depend on to earn our livings – face the possibility of having their Kindles arbitrarily downgraded, refeatured, or otherwise modified to attack them and the books they’ve bought from us.

If I were running the Authors Guild, I’d be sounding the alarm to my members to license their ebooks only for formats and devices that give our readers – our customers – a fair deal that makes them glad to have supported us.

book publishing is broken: exhibit B

As found at the excellent Rap Sheet, part of its Copycat Covers campaign to stamp out cheezy reuse of stock images.

book publishing is broken: exhibit A

One of the reasons people think book publishing is running off the rails can be seen in this tidbit from Publisher’s Lunch . . .

Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s book about his journey that led up to his being ousted from office, promising to expose “the dark side of politics that he witnessed in both the state and national level,” to Michael Viner at Phoenix, for publication in October 2009, by Jarred Weisfeld at Objective Entertainment.

These days when someone does something incrediby, blatently bad the next thought is “bet he’s going to get a book deal . . .” I bet my husband nobody would pick up Blago, but I guess I was wrong (though Phoenix and Objective Entertainment aren’t exactly household names in the industry.)

how to lose friends and irritate people

Apparently the Author’s Guild has hired a Bad-PR  firm to burnish their image and make authors appear venial, greedy, and stupid. And they’re doing a terrific job!

Their objection to the auto text-to-speech feature (used in all kinds of electronics) included in the Kindle 2 as a violation of authors’ rights has just shaved double-digit points off the public’s approval rating of writers. Gee, thanks. Next thing you know, they’ll claim e-books are an appropriation of film rights because, you know, there are images involved, and lights and stuff. Oh, and moving images when you turn the pages. I’m amazed they haven’t  yet launched a campaign to charge libraries higher prices for books as a kind of “site license,” something journal publishers have inexplicably gotten away with for decades. (Crap. I hope they don’t read this.)

Seth Godin has it right – standing in the way of change because you didn’t think of it or make it happen but you want to make sure every new way to find or enjoy a book becomes a revenue stream is no way to grow the market for books. And given the average earnings of authors (in the low thousands annually) trying to put all your energies into intalling toll booths in as many places as possible that will collectively earn over the course of years maybe a few pennies for the average author will not increase the flow of traffic. In fact, it will divert it to roads that are less of a hassle.

Lawrence Lessig points out how absurd this all is -and how these corporate squabbles and settlements forfeit public rights

We’re worse off with the Kindle because if the right get set by the industry that publishers get to control a right which Congress hasn’t given them — the right to control whether I can read my book to my kid, or my Kindle can read a book to me — users and innovators have less freedom. And we may be worse off with Google Books, because (in ways not clear when the settlement was first reported) the consequence of the class action mechanism may well disable users and innovators from doing what fair use plainly entitled Google to do.

One could also raise a disability issue – but there’s no way to use a Kindle to enable the audio feature if you can’t read print. A feature that might actually be useful to a blind person – especially for books that have no audio edition – isn’t accessible to blind people. Which makes me think that this speech-to-text feature was an easy to toss in feature that simply brought more attention to the product when the objections rolled in.

(Hat tip to Peg Brantley for pointing out the Seth Godin post to the Sibs.)

rebuilding trust in our trust networks

Anita Elberse once again explains why spending millions on a potential blockbuster makes sense for book publishing,* an issue that she previously explored at greater length in the Harvard Business Review.** The only way to make real money is to go after books that will sell lots of copies. In order to sell lots of copies, you have to invest even more money into marketing (e.g. paying for it to be visible in chain bookstores and Wal-Mart and be written up in newsletters: wow, this is a book we think you should read – we won’t mention the publisher paid us to say so). Interestingly, she ties this not to consumer gullibility or to clever marketing, but to the social nature of reading, which has long interested me.

Media companies’ hit-focused marketing did not emerge in a vacuum. It reflects how consumers make choices. The truth is that consumers prefer blockbusters. Because they are inherently social, people find value in reading the same books and watching the same movies that others do. This is true even in today’s markets where, thanks to the Internet, buyers have easy access to millions and millions of titles.

But, but . . . buyers also have access to loads of reader’s responses to books, thanks to the Internet.

This happens to resonate for me with a comment that popped up when a George Mason professor had students in a class on history hoaxes create their own hoax and spread it virally using the social networks made available through Web 2.0. The commentor said it violated trust networks – that people believed in the hoax not because it had been marketed to them or because it was reported in USA Today, but because historians they trusted talked about it. Their trust network, wired through Internet channels, had been breached by someone who deliberately manipulated that network and their trust for false purposes. There are pedagogical and ethical issues involved that are better discussed elsewhere – but the existence of those trust networks woven together by online connections replicates the “invisible college” or Polanyi’s Republic of Science. It’s bound together by trust and based on both expertise and disinterestedness (in John Ziman’s sense of the word).

Readers have trust networks, too. The best way people can determine what to read next is to have a trusted and well-known fellow reader make a recommendation. There are thousands and thousands of online communities that exist for this purpose. The goal isn’t to sell books, it’s to share information about really good books. A side-effect is that it leads to buying books and to satisfying reading experiences that builds an audience for books.In other words, a trustworthy and disinterested social network that promotes reading is good for business. Once it’s corrupted, it’s nearly useless.

Sadly, they are vulnerable to stealth marketing, and have been exploited that way from the birth of Web 2.0. There are countless websites, blogs, and experts explaining how to use people’s social impulses to sneak in marketing messages. To me, this is fundamentally immoral. And it totally permeates the book business, at least in US culture. I don’t see the same frantic marketing dynamic in the Scandinavian countries, where enthusiasm for books is nevertheless high. And I’ve heard British authors say it’s much worse in the US than in the UK, where a hard sell is simply boorish and unwelcome.

The only way for bookish social networks to work well is for us to draw the kind of firm line between sharing honest information about books and advertising that the best news organizations embrace. Authors, too, can be much clearer about when they are promoting their work and when they are acting as members of a reading community.

Here’s my attempt to adapt the Society of Professional Journalists’s Code of Ethics to book blogging and other social networking. I realize that journalists rank a little lower than lawyers in the public eye, but I have a strong attachment to these principles – which I have borrowed from liberally in this adaptation.

For readers (including those who happen also to be writers)

• Seek out interesting books and write about them honestly. Don’t rely on marketing materials to make your choices. Don’t read other reviews before you form your opinion. Tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of literature by seeking out the lesser-known and unusual. Shun sources that are a hybrid of information and promotion, and recognize the special obligation to speak the truth of your experience with books regardless of other people’s opinions or any potential for personal gain or harm.
• Minimize harm. The temptation to be clever should never lead to an unfairly humiliating review. Criticize the book, not the writer or the reader of it. Pursuit of critical rigor is not license for arrogance. Balance the book’s right to a fair reading with readers’ right to know. Likewise, make sure your enthusiasm for a book you love is accompanied with concrete reasons for your enthusiasm so that other readers can make a more informed choice.
• Act independently. Avoid conflicts of interest. Disclose any relationships that might compromise your objectivity or even the appearance of compromised objectivity. Do not review books in exchange for favors, however intangible. Don’t let the potential to grow close to a much-loved author (or to any other opportunity) influence your judgment.
• Be accountable. Don’t get your feather’s ruffled when people disagree with you. Be open to alternative perspectives without abandoning your best judgment.

For writers in particular

• Don’t see every social encounter as a chance to sell a book.
• Don’t strategize everything you say based on what you might get out of it (good or bad).
• Don’t join social networks to use them for marketing. That’s not what friends are for. Besides, it’s deceitful.
• Don’t strike bargains, overt or unspoken, to cross-promote other writers’ works in exchange for their support. Disclose potential conflicts of interest.
• Marketing isn’t half the job. Writing is the job.  Marketing is a semi-necessary evil that can do more harm than good.
• Don’t go for the hard sell. Just don’t. It’s obnoxious.
• Be honest. Be yourself. Act with integrity.

*Thanks to Maxine Clarke for pointing out his article and getting it on FriendFeed.

**In case anyone is wondering, I don’t read the HBR on principle. Any publication that will add to its expensive full-text licensed content in library databases a clause that it cannot be used for classes deserves to be shunned. I guess if your subject is filthy lucre, it’s a great way to write a license. It’s a lousy way to communicate research.

the tail that wags the tail

Fascinating article about the “long tail” in the Harvard Business Review that I picked up from Siva. Anita Elberse contents that the digital world actually favors the blockbuster. The reasons that people go for the hyped book, music, film – because it’s higher quality, it’s what everyone else is doing, and it’s abundant – are actually amplified in the world of digital choices.

Chris Anderson (not surprisingly) disagrees, but mostly over the methodology. Had she defined the head and tail differently, the conclusions would be closer to his – that the long tail has an advantage in a digital world.

What seems to me the two critical issues are that publishing still bets on the blockbuster. That’s where their resources go, and that’s where their profits come from. Second is that social urge to read what everyone else is reading and – failing a reliable source for ideas about what to read next – what everyone else is reading is a very common way of making a decision. If everyone’s reading it, it must be good. I can discuss it with others, and I won’t have any trouble finiding it. It’s probably at Wal-Mart, on discount.

This made me think about how I decide what to read next. When I started reading mysteries as an adult, I didn’t know people who read them, and I mostly relied on reviews in PW and the NYTBR. It was hit and miss, but better than the best seller lists, which proved absolutely useless. (The “quality” argument, above, fails, at least in my experience.) Marilyn Stasio introduced me to Dennis Lehane, and pretty soon I had a few names of writers I could count on. But I didn’t have a good method of straying outside that circle of known authors until I joined an online community of mystery readers. Now I don’t have any trouble at all  knowing what to read next, other than a slight feeling of panic that I’ll never have enough time to read them all before I die.

What one needs to take advantage of the long tail is a deep well of knowledge AND a good sense of which source of knowledge matches yours. For me, choosing a mystery is easy because I know what I like, and I know who else likes the same kinds of books, and we share our reading lists so each of ours gets bigger.

I don’t have that for other genres. I don’t have that for movies or music or restaurants, so I might fall back on buzz. (Actually, I’d ask my kids. They know.)

A problem with digital communities as wells of knowledge where you can learn about good stuff is that they can easily become polluted with BSP (blatant self promotion). Even more so, they’re polluted by subtle promotion, circles of authors who promote their buddies, circles of fans who promote their friends, and very little authentic reader response.

There are a lot of things that make my reading group – 4MA -  work, but one of them is that there is absolutely no promotional activity. None. Zero. Zip. And there is a ton of discussion about books, which oddly enough promotes books far more effectively. We have the advantages that hype supposedly provides: we know we’re getting recommendations of high-quality books, we have a social experience, and we know how to get our hands on the books we want because members have shared information about where these books can be purchased, even from abroad. In a pinch, we mail our copies to each other.

None of this works when trust goes out the window, when we aren’t sure if the recommender has ulterior motives. If the community of consumers is infiltrated by sellers. And the din of voices telling creative people they have to sell themselves is absolutely deafening.

That is the tail that wags the tail. Unless consumers can trust what they’re hearing, it won’t work. And right now, who’s wagging the long tail? It’s very hard to tell.