Obligatory reading, both these. Keep one thing in mind though—no one reading this blog (wait, Jobs, that's not your IP address, is it?) will make a living off the long tail. It's for aggregators, not creators or providers. But if the aggregators are making money then that can be nice little incremental money for those of us with backlists of 100-200 titles. Anyhow that said, read two experts...
Should You Invest in the Long Tail?
Anderson's thoughts in response...
Coupla interviews with the one-man-three-ring-literary circus that is Jonathan Evison (he of All About Lulu)
Powells asks "Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvin?"...Evison: "...If I wanted my kid to be a really high-maintenance landscape architect, I might name him Fahrenheit, but probably not." More.
The Inside Cover asks: "Captive-bear-feeder?"...Evison: "...for awhile I was volunteering at a wildlife refuge in Merlin, Oregon, which I totally loved because I got to be around all the animals; cougars and wolves and bears and foxes and owls and eagles and otters and beavers...the downside was, I got a lot of the dirty work—cleaning cages, etc. People would bring fresh roadkill in, and one of my jobs was to hack it to pieces with a machete and feed it to the bears, a job which I had neither the stomach nor the heart for, but undertook for the pleasure of the bears." More.
...so I don't have to. Coming in October:
Click here, since Paul did the work, or read on if you must...
“The whole time I was thinking about Min. Well, I was also thinking about Marc and I was thinking about Cherkis, and I was thinking about what a world-class champion of fucked-up I was. One week ago I’d been a carefree bon vivant in the City of Lights ballin’ in the mad cheddar, as Thebes would say, and now I was passing out in gas stations and drinking wine out of the bottle with an imaginary animal for a boyfriend and a fifteen-year-old at the wheel. I didn’t know if we should turn around and go back home, head straight to the hospital, or crank it up a notch and haul ass to Twentynine Palms. Maybe drive all night. But in which direction?”—Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans
Galleycat: Now that we've all had a chance to read Jon Karp's WaPo brief on the state of publishing, which, as Leon Neyfakh notes, is in many ways a Twelve mission statement "to invest in works of quality to maintain [a] niche," I've got a question for you editorial types out there:
Which of the growth strategies Karp identifies are you feeling the most pressure to achieve?
( polls)
As Karp points out, the first strategy has generally proven popular, but I'm guessing that y'all are getting pulled in plenty of other directions, too. But you tell me—and feel free to elaborate in the comments section.
(And, by all means, feel free to make the argument that Karp's "quality rather than quantity" approach is already being successfully deployed by smaller independent presses in service of creating and distributing "the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else," excellent books that speak with perfect clarity to an audience ready—eager, even—to read them. If you do, though, help us figure out: Is that solution scalable to the level of the big houses? If so, how radical a reorg will it require?)
Soft Skull: It really wouldn't be very hard since they're already doing it in children's books, they're already doing it by providing client distribution services to other publishers and they're already doing it in sales by establishing corporate-wide organizations to supply sales services to the existing imprints. The corporate publishers have to convert themselves into distributors akin to Perseus/PGW, Consortium, etc except that they also provide editorial, design and production services, and they provide office space and human resources support. But editorial and and marketing/publicity gets disaggregated into multiple imprints. Each has a budget, anyone can get fired for not staying within budget or not have a plausible explanation as to why budget will be made, and then some, in the subsequent fiscal year. (That is, approximating the fiscal discipline of the average independent publisher.)
To make this work there would be one critical adjustment to make, which is to ignore those agents who play publisher egos off one another and convince them when they've overpaid for yet another debut novel that they've "won," that they "beat" the other house. However, I believe that having the smaller imprints will render more transparent those who know how to reach an audience, and be profitable, compared to those who just know how to "win" auctions. As a result, kudos will go to those folks who are reaching their audiences, rather than to the editor whose strengths lie in talking the suits into writing big checks.
Corporate publishers have the talent, the sales force, the publicists, the management information systems, they just need to realize that while things are not yet fucked in the publishing business and while it might seem for each senior management person that they've more to lose by rocking the boat than by holding tight, you don't want to be trying to turn the aircraft carrier into the flotilla of destroyers while sales are down 10% like in the music business and you're getting strafed from above, forgive the militaristic metaphor.
As a transatlantic transplant myself, writing on the 20th anniversary of my departure from the country of my birth, Ireland, I've occasion to note the weird disjunctures that territory-by-territory licensing of intellectual property engenders in the world of book publishing. That is, the little bits of fucked-up-ness that happen when books are published in the US and UK (and Canada and Australia, sometimes) months and years apart.
Our translation of Dorothea Dieckmann's Guantanamo was just published in the UK, and got this marvelous review last week in The Guardian—Michel Faber on Dorothea Dieckmann's delicate dissection of the horrors of Camp X-Ray—although we'd published it in September of 2007.
There's a lovely piece on vinyl fetishism in yesterday's [London] Times that mentions Travis Elborough's The Long Player Goodbye: How Vinyl Changed the World, which we shall publish in April or May of 2009, while Jessa Crispin loved Kevin Myer's "beautiful, brutal," memoir of covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland Watching the Door so much, she couldn't help but immediately review it in her column in the US-based The Smart Set, even though we're not publishing til April of 2009 also...
In fact, I suspect that facility with which news of good work now travels across licensing territories is becoming such that we publishers are under increasing pressure to develop more reader-friendly approaches to how we handle the timing of publication...
Bookcourt Brooklyn, for a number of years Soft Skull's nearest store, and still my own personal nearest store, possessed of perhaps the youngest general manager in American Bookselling, Zack Zook, who can't be more than 25, has posted a bunch of author readings on their site...Toby Barlow, Samantha Hunt, Jhumpa Lahiri...
Kim Pearson, from the BlogHer network, on how some of the contributors to our book Be a Father to Your Child: Real Talk from Black Men on Family, Love, and Fatherhood edited by the super high-octane April Silver have issued a "Statement of Black Men Against the Exploitation of Black Women."
Favianna Rodriguez is all over Bay Area radio right now. And print. And live in person. Who is she? Here are some photos from her launch party. She's the co-editor of Reproduce and Revolt aka ¡Reproduce Y Rebélate!: Imagenes Radicales para el Siglo 21.
Magazines on demand.
So while the below is something I'm luck y to share with you, it was because I still haven't figured out how to turn on the comments for this blog (because, yes, I do want them enabled, provided there's some type of spam protection). Anyone who feels like walking me through this, can you email me.
The comment would have followed this post, a speech from Mike Shatzkin. And I've no doubt but that it would have been the single most thoughtful comment this "The Future is Now" category would have gotten. Instead, he emailed me his comment, and I was so taken, I asked if I could post it:
Hi Richard,I was just about going to post a right-on type of comment regarding the article you linked to your on your blog from Mike Shatzkin ... but your comments aren't enabled. Hope your enable them so that Soft Skull's blog can participate in the happy vertical-making internets.
But anyway, that is the truly the case what he is saying about publishers NOT reflecting niche markets. Writers who do work a niche that isn't defined or properly understood by the trade publishers (and for the most part small presses, with notable exceptions, kind of follow like sheep what the big guys are doing because the big, old companies have set the entire tone and structure of the horizontal market.) ... consequently these writers end up, I believe, not being served very well by the publishing industry. The Tennessee novelist William Gay, being a good example I think. He’s published four books with three different presses.
Multicultural literature, on the other hand, has a niche and often these special sections -- Gay Novels, African-America Lit, etc. in bookstores seem fertile compared to the alphabetic shuffle of the general "fiction" section. There is a context for work in a special section in the same way there is a context for nonfiction books filed away in their various sections: biology, WW2, cooking, etc.
My own experience has been one of working in and gradually building a context for my work in relation to the existing niche of Pacific Northwest literature. Mass publishers and agents seemed flummoxed by this somehow. I've had no trouble selling (a few) books in other markets (and not to say I’ve sold many books in any market), but I think it is in relation to the existing niche that it has worked. The flattening of the Web has been essential, and as he points out in his article -- the digital defined vertical markets, connects them, and provides the means of actually selling books. There are (a few) people interested in this niche. The Web automatically creates its own nearly-infinite special sections.
I think it is interesting that in Seattle, too, these special sections have become entire bookstores that have managed to do okay business in an environment that has been particularly hostile to most independent, general bookstores. We have a poetry-only bookstore: Open Books, and a genre bookstore Seattle Mystery Bookshop.
My main problem though with the SOP of publishers is that they pay little attention to creating a vertical market. Taken to the extreme, each individual author becomes their own niche with their own special section. Stephen King could easily support a physical bookstore. But, remove the expense and constraints of a physical store front, and suddenly every writer has a store. If you are interested in James Sallis, his Web site offers an extensive array of Sallisannia. If you are interested in J. Robert Lennon, Matthew Simmons, Kathleen Alcala, and on and on.
In this highly vertical environment, I think any content has to be develop through the structure of "a channel," like TV, movies, a movie serial, or magazines. New York Literary agent Marie Massie told me that an author should release a book every six years or something like that so that each event could possibly become an event. This seems like pure horizontal thinking to me... there needs to be some manufactured or real event, an appearance on Oprah, an award, the release of a book after some scandal to excite the chains of horizontal commerce.
The vast majority of writers do not have access these kind of external prompts to juice up the veins of horizontal commerce. To wait six years between books is to let any possible sustained interest from readers wither and pass away. This has been my experience. The gap between my first proper book and my second proper book was six years. My first book received okay notice, but by the time my second book came out all of those folks had moved on and I had to essentially start from scratch in terms of relating the book to an existing community.
This is a tremendous waste of resources from a writing perspective and of course in those six years I ended up writing three more books that lacked any kind of outlet.
Compare this with how Maxwell Perkins worked Scribner’s magazine by serializing novelists he wanted to establish. He pushed them through his magazine and then released the book.
I think a book should be released at regular intervals, say, once a year or once every eighteen months. It should be released in such as way that readers who like the book know when to expect the next one. And around this regular channel, the author can contribute to or work on relating their book to the community that may find interest in the book. In my case, the completely misunderstood (in the East) vertical of Pac Northwest Lit -- other people write from different vertical niches, submarkets, or what have you.
The reality of trade production and bookselling do not serve this kind of writer (my kind of writer) at all. Writers are constantly switching presses, which screws up the entire infrastructure of book releases. Lit Writers in particular, tend to be marketed, too, as denatured, contextless athletes of the written word, i.e., Annie Dillard’s much-used blurb: "The best we've got." This positions a writer as a kind of prize boxer in a global contest.
This article I think makes it clear that the Long Tail will undo much of the market control that has been established by the publishing industry. Nice bit on the irrelevance of publishers' brands to consumers -- yeah B2B all of the way -- although I think that is more important than he makes out, but certainly not as important as Viking/Penguin would have you believe. Often key influencers in a vertical market are very aware of the B2B brands. Thus FSG will have more traction with the influencers than Lulu.com. But increasingly, even influencers are playing less of a vital role in the commerce of books and, instead, readers frequent the million special sections of individual author Web pages where they can buy whatever Raymond Mungo or James Sallis are selling.
Anyway thanks for posting a link to the speech it was pretty good...
Matt
[I'm going to let this speak for itself, except to add one tiny comment, which is that I don't know that Maria Massie, an agent for whom I have great admiration, necessarily meant the once-every-six-years as something that would apply to all authors...]
