Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

HarperCollins Publishers, one of the largest English-language publishers with sales over $1 billion, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Last fall it launched authonomy, ostensibly a sort of social networking site, where authors could submit 10,000 words or more from an unpublished book (or self-published) and the devoted and literate members of the authonomy community could read this stuff, and comment on it, and rate it. HarperCollins editors would keep an eye out for which submissions seemed to be getting the best member response, and decide whether to make a publishing offer to the author.

Today marks the publication of the very first book to result from the experiment. According to a release I received from authonomy the book is called The Reaper, and written by Steven Dunne. It is described on the web site as a “combination of Silence of the Lambs and The Poet set in Derby. A long dormant serial killer strikes again and the hunt is on.”

Apparently the book “was picked up by HC late last year,” so with the speed typical of traditional publishing houses, in took seven or eight months to get it into print.

Well, I for one don’t think it worth the wait, nor a strong indication of authonomy’s promise. The first chapter is available to read on the site, and I offer this modest selection from the prologue:

Prologue

The cat froze, suppressing its instinct to run, and peered into the swirling gloom towards the noise. To break cover, even in this fog, could be its undoing. That’s what its own prey did. That’s when it had them. The animal stared, unblinking, head locked in the direction of the approaching footfall.

From the gasps of fog a figure emerged as though exhaled from the bowels of the earth. The boy was tall and though his clothes were baggy, he was identifiably lean as the cold breeze folded his roomy, low-slung trousers around his legs. He scuffed his Nikes along the rutted pavement, as though wiping something from them, before stopping to sniff the air. The peak of his grimy baseball cap came up as he looked around, sensing the animal nearby.

For a second he stopped hunching himself against the cold and looked toward the cat. He saw its eyes and stood perfectly still.

Softly the rumble in the boy’s throat grew until his armoury was fully loaded and he let fly. An arc of spittle landed near the cat’s front paws, splashing its legs. The cat tensed then leapt to the side, wide-eyed. To banish any chance of feline forgiveness, the boy darted towards the animal and aimed a kick at its retreating rear.

“Here puss puss,” coaxed the boy bending down to click his fingers, scouring the dark ground for missiles. Surprisingly there were none. The boy had alighted upon the only spot on Derby’s Drayfin Estate that wasn’t crumbling.

“Fuck it.”…

Well, there you have it (or the first part of it). I doubt it makes you want to read on. Perhaps it was the sentence, “From the gasps of fog a figure emerged as though exhaled from the bowels of the earth” that put you off? Or was it the Nike product placement in the second paragraph? The repulsive description of spittle in the fourth? Or the obscenity in the sixth?

Some commentators are more impressed by HarperCollins’ authonomy effort than I am. I conclude this entry by noting that like most large publishers today, HarperCollins no longer accepts unsolicited manuscripts directly. The famed “slush pile” of yore is not to be found there. What is to be found is a web site where the unpaid public are given the chance to read through the slush for HarperCollins, and the company can pray that a few bestsellers emerge. The one aspect that would qualify as social networking is that all of the folks who voted for chapter one of The Reaper are strong prospects to purchase the finished book, and feeling a certain ownership of the process whereby it was published, will read it with more generosity than I can summon, and quite possibly recommend it to their friends.

I’ll be continuing to follow the experiment.

The title of this blog is the title of a presentation to be made this weekend in Austin, Texas by Michael Murphy, a 27-year veteran of the book publishing business.

I read about it on Ron Hogan’s fun blog on MediaBistro today titled, “Making the Future Up As We Go Along.”

When I saw that title I suspected the post would be about a subject near and dear to my heart: as much as various executives, experts and analysts put on a brave face suggesting that they’ve got everything under control, I believe that we’re making endless stabs in the dark, hoping we’ll hit the quarry.

Hogan reports that Murphy sent him an explanation of the session as follows: “It (is) really meant to covey that we are all pretty much making-it-up as we go through this period of fundamental change in the book business. There are many rather smart people issuing completely divergent opinions about The Future of Publishing.

“This could be a wonderful new era where some people much smarter than me figure out how to effectively use the opportunities of the Internet to establish like-minded viral communities and give many more writers much greater access to their core readers than was ever afforded when a buyer in Ann Arbor or on Fifth Avenue in New York were the primary deciders of what readers were presented as New & Noteworthy. On the other hand, a new era could be even more restrictive as The Era of The Ampersand Wielding Book Barons (Barnes & Noble/Simon & Schuster) gives way to The Dot.Com Book Baron and Amazon becomes the all-powerful voice of book consumption… I use Amazon; I love their speed, ease, & efficiency. But I don’t trust them to serve my reading needs over their quarterly profits as far as I can next-day deliver them.

Hogan continues: “After three decades in the book business, Murphy says he’s never seen this level of ‘passionate debate about where we’re headed and what we’re doing wrong…But what I find most “wrong” about our current state of affairs,’ he concludes, “is that our conversations have become so dominated about the bottles and so little about the wine. I’d much rather be talking about my writers, like Tony O’Neill and Barb Johnson, who are so talented they bring tears to me eyes…on a back lit screen as well as the printed page.’”

Great stuff…I’m tempted to head out to Vancouver airport for a last-minute flight to Austin.

As you would perhaps imagine, it’s an enormous task to keep this site relevant and up-to-date. I made a choice years ago: in order to detail the future of publishing I would examine a very wide swathe of industries and influences. To my great surprise, Google Analytics consistently noted that my article on the future of graphic design was one of my most-often read articles.

I’d never considered it one of my better analyses, but seeing its popularity, I knew it required an update. I’ve posted the update this evening.

Looking to other sources for information on the topic I was surprised to find a paucity of articles that address the broad issues. From my reading over the years I know that there are numerous commentators far better informed than I who examine various aspects of the topic. But apparently very few take in on in toto. I was greatly surprised to find my article from late 2008 at the head of the Google list. So I felt a huge obligation to update the piece. It’s intended more for a general audience interested in this key aspect of the future of publishing than for thoughtful designers themselves.

Please let me know which of my observations fall short of the reality you encounter on this key topic.

While researching my previous blog entry, I found another very interesting piece on the U.K. Guardian’s excellent site, more specifically the OrganGrinderBlog, which focuses on digital media. A May 6th entry, covering the FIPP World Magazine Congress, reports on a presentation by Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director. Apparently Google has shared U.S. $5B with publishers through AdSense, its contextual ads program, in the last year. Is this just in the U.S.? The U.K.? MediaWeek offered more detail — the $5 billion is a worldwide figure. The MediaWeek report also noted that “In addition, Google Search and Google News were said to be responsible for directing one billion clicks a month to publishers’ sites.” Further “Brittin pointed to the ‘massive growth’ in interest in the range of content published by traditional publishers. Since 2005, the number of searches on Google for ‘magazines’ had risen 225%, while searches for ‘glossies and tabloids’ had increased by 458%.”

Surely when you look at the overall increase in the volume of searches on Google in that period, this is small potatoes. Mathew Ingram estimates that the volume of searches on Google increased by 700% from 2005-2008.

The ongoing message for publishers from Google: better to live with us; you’ll have trouble trying to live without us.

I’m encountering an increasing volume of commentary on blogs and in news analysis that newspaper and other periodical publishers are now searching for a workable method to start charging for all the content they’ve been giving away for the past decade+. Content may wish to be free, but publishers are determinedly searching for handcuffs or perhaps an electronic ankle bracelet to get the content back into the stables (small side note…I searched Google for the correct term for electronic ankle bracelet. It brought up one ad: “Stylish Electronic Ankle Bracelet. Accessorize With Lovely Jewelry.” I guess if law enforcement is keeping track of you there’s no excuse to lose your sense of fashion).

Today I watched an interesting video on the Wall Street Journal site featuring an interview with Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, who with partners Steve Brill and Leo Hindery is launching a startup in September called Journalism Online. A report in the Guardian indicates that the three believe they can get “10% of web readers to pay for news online.” You can read much more media coverage of the venture on its beta web site.

The same Guardian article mentions a competing effort called ViewPass, described in more detail on editorsweblog. Both startups are intended as syndicates that would act as single point of access and payment to readers, as this is clearly far more practical than every publication creating a separate payment system.

Meanwhile on June 23rd in a keynote speech at the annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook conference, Dow Jones CEO (and current publisher of The Wall Street Journal) Les Hinton called Google a vampire that was sucking the blood out of the newspaper business.

According to a report in Crain’s New York Business, Hinton said that “There is a charitable view of the history of Google. [It] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

By offering its content free on the Web, the newspaper industry “gave Google’s fangs a great place to bite. We will never know what might have happened had newspapers taken a different approach.”

We’ll all be keeping an eye on the efforts to re-attach cash to content, wondering whether it truly can be harnessed and put back in the barn, while perhaps driving a stake through Google’s heart.

A very funny clip of comedian Louis CK, appearing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Courtesy of my friend Bob McArthur, who in turn found it on The Digitalist, which noted that “this clip will resonate with anyone involved in digital publishing…”

With all of the attention these days focused on newspapers, eBooks and Twittering, I thought it might be time to check in on the printing industry, the background engine for so much of the country’s publishing activity.

My colleague Howie Fenton works at the NAPL, which though not the largest, is I think the finest  trade organization serving printing companies. Amongst its many virtues, the organization has an excellent economist on staff, Andy Paparozzi.

In Howie Fenton’s latest blog entry on Graphic Arts Monthly he points out the the latest NAPL economic research “has both good news and bad news,” although I have to say I’m hard-pressed to find the good news. Howie reports that “according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, total production hours in the commercial printing industry were down 14.2% in the first quarter of this year from a year ago.”

Further, commercial print sales are down by about 15% in the first quarter.

And meanwhile the largest printer in the U.S. (R.R. Donnelley) is actively engaged in trying to take over the second largest print in North America (Quebecor). (Update late June: Quebecor has rejected Donnelley’s offers and is still trying to renogitate with creditors.)

OK, I’m changing the channel now…next up, if the Kindle is selling so well, why was E-Ink Corporation sold at fire sale prices?

The title of this blog is the same as one appearing today on Chris Brogan’s thoughtful blog.

After a brief intro he offers the following:

The Next Media Company Manifesto

Here’s what I believe might (emphasis mine) need to be true about the next media company:

• Stories are points in time, but won’t end at publication. (Edits, updates, extensions are next.) (10)
• Curators and editors rule, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff. (10)
• Media cannot stick to one form. Text, photos, video, music, audio, animation, etc are a flow. (10)
• Everything must be portable and mobile-ready. (Mobile devices need to evolve here, too). (10)
• Everything must have collaborative opportunities. If I write about a restaurant, you should have wikified access to add to the article directly. (5)
• Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue. (8)
• In-line content marketing, clearly delineated/disclosed/explained is one revenue stream. One of many. (8)
• Contributors come in many shapes: onstaff, partner (how pros like TechCrunch link to Washington Post), guest (for love and glory only), and conversational come right to mind. Who else? (7)
• Value-add services are another revenue stream. Why not book hotels and flights from my travel magazine directly? Why not buy how-to information on marketing from AdAge or FastCompany? (6)
• Collaboration rules. Why should I pick the next cover? Why should my picture of the car crash be the best? (5)
• Everything is modular and linkable. Everything is fluid. Meaning, if I want the publication to be a business periodical, then I don’t want to have to read a piece about sports. (10)
• Paper isn’t dead: it’s on demand. (9)
• Do-it-yourself publishing is next for us all. At first. (10)
• We will all audition for mass physical distribution. (10)
• It won’t matter (mass physical distribution) to us, lots of the time. (8)
  

I rated each item in the Manifesto from 1-10 (10 being the strongest agreement), and you’ll see that I support many of Mr. Brogan’s intriguing suggestions. But not all.

First a comment on his lead sentence. A manifesto is generally defined as a “a public declaration of principles and intentions” and a call to action. I don’t think that the word “might” has any place in introducing a manifesto. With it, the more appropriate title would be, “Some Thoughts Towards the Next Media Company.”

That aside, I see the major conflict between Brogan’s second point, “Curators and editors rule,” and his tenth point, “Collaboration rules.” Are these not contradictory? One of the key debating points about the media these days is exactly who rules. While we all welcome that the Internet has opened up so many opportunities for new voices to be heard, there’s a growing recognition that no one can possibly follow all the voices available, hence the need for curators and editors to guide us and catch errors of fact or omission.

So here too I stumble on his fifth point: “Everything must have collaborative opportunities. If I write about a restaurant, you should have wikified access to add to the article directly.” The use of the new verb “wikified” implies to me that Brogan is suggesting that I should have access to his restaurant review and be able to anonymously change or augment his content. I’m all for separate authored comments, but if I want to forge a reputation as a restaurant reviewer, I don’t want to write anonymously and give others the freedom to change what I’ve written. Takes us back to the curators and editors. They must rule.

In last week’s The Economist there’s an excellent analysis of the changes in the media business, specifically the news side of the business. The article focuses on the value of aggregators, such as the Huffington Post. Surely aggregation and curration can be used interchangeably?

To find out the inside scoop on stories like that reported in my previous blog entry, I’m now subscribing to Publishers Lunch Deluxe newsletter, which I receive as part of a $20/month membership to Publishers Marketplace. Thus far I’m finding it to be of excellent value for my research and understanding of what’s happening in the world of trade publishing.

Today’s issue features a long article that goes into considerable detail on “the headline that rocked the book industry” a few days back, namely “Number of On-demand Titles Topped Traditional Books in 2008″. Of course the real story is quite different than that lurid headline implied.

It’’s not appropriate to quote the article in full, but I’ll extract a few facts. The unnamed author of the story states that his or her source was Bowker executive Kelly Gallagher (he is General Manager of Bowker’s Business Intelligence Segment).

1. The distinction that Bowker made between on-demand and traditional books refers solely to the manufacturing method: traditional offset printing, versus much more recent digital print-on-demand technologies. So the number can’t be interpreted as equal to the number of self-published titles. It refers only to books printed digitally, and assigned a new ISBN number. Traditional book publishing companies are increasingly turning to this newer technology to publish books in short runs where offset would be too expensive (although Bowker has not yet done the analysis to determine what percentage of the books derived from what type of company).

2. The whole self-publishing industry is, statistically speaking, a mess. For example, according to Lulu.com’s Corporate Profile page, in 2008 “Lulu alone published over 400,000 titles.” Blurb.com claims it published 300,000 titles in 2008. That’s 700,000 from just two companies! But as Publishers Lunch points out, “a lot of the output from outfits like Lulu.com…and Blurb.com never get ISBN numbers at all (it’s an optional service at many such companies).”

3. Further compounding the muted value of Bowker’s numbers is that no eBooks are included, whether from Amazon or elsewhere.

4. I had heard just last month from my colleague George Alexander that there is a new class of publisher that is just grabbing as many out of print books as it can, scanning them, and tossing the whole lot onto Amazon to be printed on demand when the occasional order is placed. Kessinger Publishing, for example, has over 33,000 titles listed on Amazon, all of these with new ISBNs. I feel that adding these titles to Bowker’s annual new title output just misleads the industry about what’s really happening in publishing in America. Searching for Kessinger titles on Amazon, the first on the list is Ernest Holmes’ (1887-1960) Your Invisible Power. The book appears to be a combination of Christian reflection and mystic meanderings. Its 52 pages retail for $13.22 and its Amazon.com sales rank is #802,616 in books. Another firm, BiblioBazaar has over 37,000 listings on Amazon.

The well-designed cover of "Your Invisible Power"

So stay tuned, as the industry associations and analysts burn the midnight oil trying to get a handle on statistics that reveal, rather than conceal.

How’s that for a headline! Pulled directly from Publishers Weekly, the word is that “The number of new and revised titles produced by traditional production methods fell 3% in 2008, to 275,232, but the number of on-demand and short run titles soared 132%, to 285,394….Taken together, total output rose 38%, to 560,626 titles….Since 2002, production of on-demand titles has soared 774% compared to a 126% increase in traditional titles. Gallagher said the improvement in on-demand printing technology was a major contributor to the growth.”

Keep in mind that last year on-demand added over 120,000 titles, so this number is less impressive than it sounds; the two-year jump would be astronomical.

I’ll have more on this shortly. But for now, read ‘em and….think.