Fallen agents – how everything just changed

By Philip Jones

The Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and five of America’s biggest publishers begins like a John Grisham novel, talking of Apple’s “aikido move”, violations of anti-trust law, and tens of millions of dollars having been overspent on e-books. But in reality the document is a 49-page slasher-novel that leaves no-one in the industry unscathed.

It is a remarkable document that details dinners in private rooms for chief executives, clandestine phone-conversations, not-so private email exchanges, and gestures of solidarity among the world’s biggest publishers in the face of Amazon. All bizarrely caught on camera, and now laid-bare for anyone to read about.

There are some choice passages:

 

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Misadventures in publishing

By Kerry Wilkinson

After the news this week that I have signed a publishing deal with Pan Macmillan, I thought I would write a little bit about my experience with “the industry” over the past few months.

My first book, Locked In, started selling pretty much straight after I self-released it. Within two or three weeks, it had climbed into iTunes’ top 20, then not long after it started to sell well on Kindle too.

On the advice of a “proper” author, at some point in those initial four or five weeks, I emailed a few agents pretty much by picking names from the internet. I gave them the details of what I had already done and got a handful of half-interested replies but nothing other than that. I wasn’t too bothered by the apathy because, while that was all going on, I was learning more and more about e-publishing and how everything worked. It was approximately 13 weeks from me releasing Locked In to it reaching number one on Kindle.

That was the point where a handful of other agents began to become interested – as you might expect. My initial impression of them was, to be honest, quite appalling. I had numerous patronising emails almost entirely promising to make me rich and/or telling me any success I had already had would be short-lived if I didn’t go with them. What was also clear was that none of them had read anything I had written, or knew anything other than the fact that I was selling pretty well.

Perhaps those types of bullying overbearing tactics would draw in some people but I don’t really go for that.

With all the people who contacted me, only two really treated me as something other than a walking opportunity to make money.

The first was a woman who gave me decent critique of some of my work after I sent her my-then unpublished book three to read. We had some pleasant email chats but, although I liked her, I never really got the impression she knew quite what to do with me.

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Nine truths about e-book publishing

By Emma Wright

I fell into digital publishing after doing freelance work for various online business start-ups based in East London. At the time, I was looking for a full-time job and not thinking so much about career progression, but it occurs to me now that my background with the online businesses left me peculiarly suited for working with e-books.

The main reason for this is that, since the traditional publishing industry has been forced to go digital, it has found that the Internet Age has changed consumers’ expectations of digital products for good and it is no longer enough for the e-book just to be the electronic manifestation of the printed book. E-books and websites exist in the same world, competing for the top spot on Amazon or Google respectively and drawing similar expectations from the consumers, about their appearance, functionality and interactivity.

So, as a former online business-type and e-book (and publishing) novice, here are the most important things I have picked up and worked out about e-book production since I started nearly two years ago:

TWO GENERAL POINTS
1. An e-book is not just an extra, tacked onto the production of the printed book. As much work needs to go into it as would a new edition of a printed book. That is, a design specification, editorial checks, and reflection on the target audience.

2. Leaving aside arguments about aesthetics and tactility, an e-book can be so much more than a printed book, without any of the print production considerations and costs. A straightforward e-book can be designed with colour, contain extra pictures and text, and be completely linked internally as well as externally.

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The book was great and the typos weren’t very bad

By Philip Jones

Last night I received an email from Rob Heinze, who has self-published 14 novels. His latest The Swarm is now riding high on the Nook and Kindle charts. “Reviewers are calling me the next Stephen King,” he tells the email list. This is one of many such emails I receive from authors telling me of their indie success – almost daily.

This morning I read too that self-published crime writer Kerry Wilkinson was the biggest selling Kindle book on Amazon.co.uk in the final quarter of 2011. According to his Amazon page, the Daily Express has described him as “The Hottest New Author In Britain”. Not bad for an author who has yet to find a publisher.

These are just the latest examples: before Heinze and Wilkinson, there was Hocking and Konrath, Locke and Leather, Eisler and Edwards.

This list represents a growing worry for traditional publishers, but it is also one often overstated. According to an analysis by Publishers Marketplace of the NYT bestseller lists last year, just 11 self-published authors made the charts, and since they were selling at a fraction of the price of other books they were earning a fraction of the income. However, as Joe Konrath points out here, or Lexi Revellion here, they do not need to earn grand sums of cash in order to maintain a living at this (and damage the reputation of those publishers who should be publishing them).

For years the publishing industry has ignored self-publishing and dismissed those companies helping authors reach the market as vanity operations. The authors themselves have been pilloried and left to languish on the slush-pile. It’s little wonder so many of them seem pissed off with publishers.

But the world has moved on, Amazon has created a huge freemarket for “published” content where there is little or no differentiator based on quality, or other suitable algorithm. I’m not always sure the big publishers have moved with it. The reaction of some publishers is still to be airily dismissive of self-published writers, as was evident in the recent Guardian piece “Ebooks are being driven by downmarket genre fiction”, or Profile founder Andrew Franklin’s view, expressed at the London Book Fair last year, that at dinner parties you turn away from self-published writers.

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The book is not dead: but long live the book

   Submitted by Philip Jones

The Guardian has of late taken a peculiarly hostile approach to book publishers. Two recent blogs (here and here) have asked the question whether the professions of writing and publishing can survive the transition to digital, an argument which seems to emulate the views of the author Graham Swift, who told Radio 4 that he too feared for the future of professional writing as the industry shifts to digital.

At times it seems that every journalist or news editor want to break the news that the “book is dead”, rather than reporting on the slightly more complicated reality that the book is evolving. That reading is in rude health, but the supply chain from author to reader is being disrupted by, as you’d expect, the growth in a new medium.

In his book Start It Up maverick investor Luke Johnson argues that these views reflect the world of journalists themselves who are becoming increasingly gloomy as a result of their own trade being threatened by the internet.

There is clearly some truth in that, but as Joe Esposito writes in his blog published on The Scholary Kitchen website, the doom-mongers have always been with us. “Eschatology is the defining meme of this industry wherever it is practiced. Gloom and doom, gloom and doom: it is the prevailing narrative, and it has been at least since I got into this business 30 years ago.” He is right – the death of the mid-list, the decline in author advances, the demise of independent bookshops are stories that keep on giving. But they rarely tell the full truth about an industry that ironically cannot be painted in black and white.

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Turning the tanker around: navigating publishing’s future

Submitted by Alastair Horne

  Is publishing a vast, slow-moving tanker that will take some time to turn around? Or rather a fishing boat  seeking out “blue oceans” where the fish have not yet all been caught? These and other nautical analogies arose at a discussion last week that took place as part of the Future of Publishing programme, a series of events that will climax in October with a conference held, appropriately enough, at the south coast town of Bournemouth.

Conferences on publishing’s future seem as popular as Kindles these days, and most appear to share common aims: to spark debate and offer opportunities to showcase pioneering new work. And though the Future of Publishing programme professes these aims too, where it looks to offer something different is in its focus on facilitating actual innovation. Its conference will be the culmination of a series of events that have explored practical solutions to the challenges facing the industry. May’s BookHack Day at the FreeWord Centre in Farringdon (described here by participant Tom Abba) brought geeks and publishers together to demonstrate through collaboration on actual projects how the combination of open minds and rapid development methods can create innovative new products. A similarly hands-on approach should be taken to another of the programme’s aims: exploring how the industry might successfully create new business streams.

Last week’s discussion in an airy Soho loft brought together attendees from across the industry: publishers from the trade & academic sectors, start-ups offering access to technologies & new routes to market, agencies promoting literacy & innovation, academics and the media. And though booksellers were noticeable by their absence, those present included a number of authors and a great many readers.

Unsurprisingly, readers provided one of the main topics of discussion. Though reading habits are definitely undergoing changes, it’s harder than ever to fathom quite where those changes might be leading, as they comprise a number of seemingly contradictory trends. Despite the widespread take-off of ebook readers and tablet devices, for instance, the amount of time spent on screen-based reading, it was claimed, is actually decreasing.

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The infinite book

Submitted by Ilana Fox

 I started writing a very clever (but possibly boring) post for FutureBook last night – about the mechanics of perspective, and how we should use it to view the future of publishing in a new light – but then I got distracted by the hack on The Sun’s website.

I used to work at The Sun – I was the editor of the community section of the website – and I watched the events unfold on Twitter like it was a surreal soap opera As the hack continued, it got me thinking to the future of publishing with regards to hacking, and I decided to discard my original post for something more topical. Hacking is bad – especially when it involves stamping over someone’s privacy and interferes in police investigations – yet in the technology world, hacking can often be seen as good. We’re not talking about statement hacking as seen on The Sun, or Assange-style political attention-seeking hacking, but something a bit more democratic, more open-source … something that builds upon original code to do something good.

We take it for granted that the future is somehow online, and that it’s in a virtual cloud of clever coding and slick technology – but we don’t often talk about how safe the structure of stories are with regards to hacking. We mainly focus on the business side; the effects of hacking with regards to DRM, how hackers can take advantage of customer email addresses collated in the CRM. But we don’t seem to think much about the possibility of what hackers could do to the words of authors themselves.

Imagine that at some point in next couple of years HarperCollins (if they’re still around) decide to publish a memoir of a News International executive’s account of 2011. Even now, while we’re right in the middle of it, we know this will always be a sensitive subject. A murdered girl’s voicemails were deleted, people are asking about the coincidental death of a former NOTW staffer, and there are whispers of corruption within the previous government and the present. And while the story is undoubtedly fascinating, it’s also painful for those involved. It’s probably painful enough – and anti-establishment enough – for hackers to want to take a stand like they did with The Sun last night. Could hackers infiltrate the words of a book and deface them like they did to the News International websites last night?

The future of books is technology-driven – that’s obvious. But can we create a technology that ensures the words of an author aren’t hackable? And do we even want to? Is it possible that the future of books could be live documents – ones that are open to editing, to change, to constant updating?

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The London cluster

Submitted by Michael Bhaskar

clusters

By now everyone knows about innovation clusters. It goes something like this: people start doing interesting things, they achieve some success, so more people come to hang around, spin out of them, bolt on, get inspired and go beyond them, and they in turn achieve some success, and the process continues and keeps building and before you know it, boom, you’ve got Silicon Valley.
The lesson is that innovation breeds innovation, that proximity is important to spreading ideas and that clusters of talent, competition, investment and know-how are the motors behind productive change.

At the minute I think we are seeing the making of such a cluster in London that puts it at the centre of global publishing innovation, ahead even of that behemoth of the book industry, New York. Publishers in London are creating the new kinds of products and taking the sort of interesting risks that define innovation, and they are doing this because of the set up of the city.

Silicon Roundabout might not be The Valley, but it remains the most fertile space for tech start-ups in Europe. The nation’s media and trade publishers are overwhelmingly concentrated on the capital (for better or for worse). Publishers and developers jostle for space in offices and bars alike. Most of the country’s hottest new media businesses are a 15 minute cab ride from most publishers, something less true in New York. We are starting to see a network that connects entrepreneurs, writers, editors, games developers, coders, media services, digital studios, designers and thinkers, all working at ways of re-inventing books and the publishing industry.

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Even more bushes to beat – PR in a digital world

By Vicky Hartley

I spent some time with Penguin’s stunning On The Road app this week, it’s a treasure trove of engaging content, illuminating back-story and to top it all off it’s a book I love.  However what really caught my eye was the pre-publication letter from Patricia McManus, the Publicity Director of Viking, to Jack Kerouac.

It may have been written 54 years ago but it highlights just how little has changed between then and now in terms of a traditional publicity campaign. She discusses the pitches she wants to put forward to the key magazines, asks him for his personal contacts within the press, suggests the regional contacts she thinks will support him as a local author, and explains the difficulties of getting coverage – ‘it takes a lot of beating and many bushes to flush out a few worthwhile birds’.

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We are all postmodernists now

By Gavin James Bower

 The future of the book, if you believe the hype, hinges less on publishers and more on one of the retail and technology giants – Apple, Google, Amazon – dominating the space, both in terms of market share and platform.

That 85% of ebooks are now purchased through Kindle at least covers the former – for now. But what of the latter: format? Some commentators – very few, but some – have argued that there’s no impending death of the book at all, and the question of hardware’s moot. As Dan Franklin’s maintained on this blog – James Bridle with his Open Bookmarks, too – reading won’t go away. Only the experience of reading will change.

So how does that impact on me, an author?

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