Closer . . .

It figures that a Romance publisher would get it:

Harlequin is the first publisher to release entirely enriched eBooks

TORONTO, July 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Harlequin Enterprises Limited (http://www.eharlequin.com/), the global leader in series romance and one of the world's leading publishers of women's fiction, announced today the launch of their Enriched Edition eBooks. With this launch, Harlequin becomes the first publisher to offer entire eBooks that are enriched with interactive buttons that hyperlink to Web sites with more information about the content.

Won't be long now until it all comes together.

The future of publishing (part four)

[This series started on 2/20/08]

So why will authors need publishers in an all-electronic, all-digital world?

First of all, I think physical books will continue being sold for a long time, just as CDs are. While paperbacks won't last once a good ebook reader comes along, hard cover books will continue to be important for a number of reasons. Still, their sales (and the profit from them) will pale compared to the cheaper and more easily produced ebooks of the future. And for publishers, this is an enormous problem.

Individual authors can set up their own web sites and, in an environment where the ebook dominates, cut their own deals either with the customer directly or retail channels. Stephen King essentially did this several years ago. Most analyses of his experiment grade it a failure, and in one sense if clearly was: King could have made more money by going through traditional channels.

But that experiment shouldn’t necessarily be judged by that standard alone. King couldn’t achieve mega-author status on the internet alone – but he could still sell a significant amount of “product” at a time when the technology was far from perfect, and the tools for exploiting the technology (marketing on the web, etc.) were not yet (and are not yet) fully developed.

I don’t think that authors working alone will be able to reach mega-sale status, and that’s one area that traditional publishers can continue to leverage. They can also still deliver some amount of prestige and, at least in theory, increase the quality and therefore value of the book by careful editing. (Of course, if they're not doing these things to begin with - but that's another topic . . .)

But those are things that publishers can offer to writers – what can they offer readers?

1) A convenient place to acquire books. To do that, they have to control the distribution – their websites, etc., have to be the only place to get the product.

2) When they’re selling a book, publishers are really selling an experience. That experience is not just that one story, but the feeling of belonging to a community of readers that has experienced that story, and wants to experience similar stories or adventures. By collecting a number of authors together, the publisher enhances and expands the experience and community – and not coincidentally, sells more books. The web offers publishers a chance to create mini-salons and cyber cafes that complement and add to the experience of reading the book.

3) Publishers can use their resources to enhance e-books, adding to the virtual experience. While authors can do this on their own, the ability to finance better productions and thus raise the readers’ expectations can benefit the publishers, marking their product as more professional and therefore desirable.

Note that none of these things necessarily help writers, at least not directly. Even if they were all done successfully, the changes in technology are so fundamental that publishers may not be successful. But if they don’t at least start thinking along those lines, I think they’ll all be out of business by 2020.

* * *

The interests of publishers and writers are not precisely parallel, but they don't have to be diametrically opposed. One often gets the feeling these days that they are - not so much from the editors, but from corporate-centric decisions that harm the product and the industry in general.

As traumatic as the changes in technology have been and will continue to be, people will still want a good story, will still want usable information, will still long for the sort of reality-suspending experience books currently provide. The question is, how and who will provide them in the future.

The future of publishing (part two)

What's happened to the music and newspaper industries in the last ten years is admittedly very complex, and neither is an exact model for publishers. But it does seem to me that some lessons can be drawn from them:

1. You need to have an identity with your customers in order to survive.

2. If you devalue the product you’re selling, it’ll eventually catch up to you.

There are three things publishers can do to meet the challenge of the changing technology:

1. Increase the value of the product they are selling. They can do this by paying more attention to editing above all, but in other areas related to the books as well. Part of this probably means they should decrease the number of books they publish as well, allowing them to concentrate their resources to do a better job on the books they do publish. But it primarily means that they should pay more attention the quality of the talent they have working for them. Every editor I know is underpaid by a good mile, especially the young ones. Anyone entering the profession basically has to swear an oath of poverty and work under ridiculous pressure. Editing is a difficult art to master; many if not most publishers make it even harder with their work conditions.

2. Make themselves known to their real customer. Most readers don’t have a clue who publishes a book. There’s a legitimate reason for this: For years, the publishers’ customers have actually been the bookstores, and the people who deal with them. But the internet and other facets of modern commerce have weakened these middlemen, in some cases making them irrelevant. The publishers have to build a brand identity with the end customer, so that the house name means something. “We’re the people who bring you Stephen King and all those other writers you like...”

3. The publishers have to take back control of the distribution channel. If that sounds a little antagonistic, it is. The big mistake the record companies made was following the old model of letting the middlemen sell their music. Yes, the first threat was to record stores, etc., but the ultimate victim were the companies that depended on those stores for their sales. Why should I go to Itunes to buy music? If I’m buying my music on-line, it’s just as easy – or rather, it could be just as easy – to buy it from XYZ as it is from them.

. . . (to be continued)

The future of publishing . . .

. . . or at least publishers (part 1)

A few people have been talking with me about ebooks, giveaways, and publishing, and suggested that rather than being my usual wise-ass, I take a more serious approach.

Heh.

If I were a publisher, I would be very worried about the direction of the industry. So many things have changed over the past two decades – the loss of independent stores and regional distributors among them – that it’s very easy to overlook the potential impact of the web, ebooks, and alternative delivery systems for books. Or not so much ignore it, but not position myself to deal with the revolutionary change that is coming.

But it’s an absolute necessity. What has happened to two other media – record companies and newspapers – are frightening examples. The music industry has been devastated by the technological changes in the way music is delivered to listeners. Large record companies, which had very little identity to listeners, once were able to have dominant positions because they added value to the music “product” – recording and making it into a format that could be consumed easily – and controlled the distribution. They no longer do the latter, and have seen their role in the former steadily reduced.

Newspapers were in a somewhat different position. Well ahead of the arrival of the internet, they had consolidated and achieved, in most markets, a competitive monopoly. Once that happened, they met any new economic pressures by taking a relatively easy route to maintaining profit levels – they cut staff and, in turn, harmed their product. There has been a steady erosion of not only quality but volume of news coverage in print newspapers over the past two decades. (While this is an industry-wide trend, it is not the inevitable result of inroads from television and radio, or the general decline of literacy, as is often claimed. Magazine pages have increased over the same period.)

To be continued . . .

Free e-books

A couple of publishers have gotten some news this week, inside the industry at least, with new free e-book programs. There's been a big conference in NY about new media, and that's generated a lot of talk about how great it is to give away your stuff. Especially when it's not really your stuff, I guess.

I'm against it. I think publishers should be giving away guns. Or at least bullets.

Drinks, too. Maybe not at the same time, though.