Everybody who knows what I do assumes that I’ve given up on print books.
—You make ebooks? Haha, you don’t need any bookcases then, do you? Must be nice.
Not that I haven’t used it as an excuse once in a while. As a rejection, it’s a little bit nicer than telling somebody that I don’t want their book because it isn’t good enough to put on my shelf—oh, and the cover’s ugly to boot.
(This is the tenth post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)
The reason why the term ‘book app’ is so dangerous is that it blinds people to the sheer variety there is in content apps and to the many possibilities apps and websites offer.
(This is the ninth post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)
The syntax of HTML and XML—angle brackets and closing elements—isn’t complex. It’s tedious, but it isn’t complex. If the problem lay in the basic syntax we’d have an easy time fixing it. The problem with markup complexity lies in the underlying model. Or, in the lack of one. Simply put, HTML is a mess.
This is from an email sent by Matthew Thomas to the WhatWG mailing list (that list was at the time responsible for the development of HTML5) almost ten years ago. Everything it says is still true:
In response to the proposal that HTML5 add a host of semantic elements, each with no default rendering to distinguish it from other elements, Matthew predicted the following:
The A-list of Web developers will begin using all the elements
correctly on their Weblogs, and they will feel good about it.A greater number of Web developers will never use most of these
elements, but they will replace all occurrences of<div>on their
pages with<section>because it’s more “semantic” (just like they
did with<em>for<i>and<strong>for<b>), and they will feel good
about it.The vast majority of article producers (Weblogs and online
newspapers) will never use<article>, because there’s no visual or
behavioral benefit from doing so. So<article>will never become a
reliable way of dissecting or aggregating pages.The number of knowledgable HTML authors, the proportion of HTML
pages that are valid, and therefore the overall usefulness of the
Web, will be less than it otherwise would have been because of
HTML’s increased complexity.
I’d argue that his prediction, ten years ago, was pretty much spot on:
header and footer, and possibly article after that was blessed as a generic sort of standalone content container instead of section. Most of the elements are regularly used incorrectly.The web remains too unstructured for article to become a good way for ‘dissecting or aggregating pages’ as originally envisioned. The HTML5 outlining algorithm isn’t used by anybody (except the A-list gurus) and, even worse, supported by very few browsers or screenreaders.
As Matthew Thomas mentioned in the email above, unless there is an immediate visual or behavioural benefit to using an element, most people will ignore it. This is compounded by the angle-brackets mess of HTML. By completely separating design (CSS), behaviour (JS), and structure (HTML) the specification gods have taken away the context that would make it easier for us mere mortals to give our documents a meaningful structure.
That’s without getting into the problems with the syntax itself.
While the separation makes using HTML for documents and ebooks more difficult, it is essential for it becoming an app platform, which obviously now the web’s primary purpose.
(Most websites today are just web apps for delivering ads. They certainly aren’t made with readability in mind.)
There was a long period of time when the markup of most websites was unreadable because they used a mess of nested table tags to render the site. The markup was meaningless and complex. For a few years, though, after that, when you viewed the source of your average website, you would have seen relatively clean and nicely structured markup that most people could understand, even without specific knowledge about HTML. Google’s web crawlers loved simple, well-structured documents and so the web filled with them.
Now we’re back to seeing almost the same level of complexity and messiness in most web pages as we saw in the worst days of table-hacking. The semantic elements from HTML5 are largely unused. Those that are used such as <header> and <footer>, are used incorrectly because people misunderstand what they mean. Every page is riddled with div elements with opaque classes and IDs nested in a document structure that is more complex than many I saw in the table-layout days.
This escalating complexity is arguably one of the biggest ongoing issues in web development because it makes things like authorship, search engines, discoverability, and automation more difficult than it should.
You see, if the markup you assign to a piece of content has a specific meaning, you can write code that’s aware of this meaning. You make human meaning machine readable. This is useful if you want to make the text more searchable or if you want blind people to be able to hear it with their screenreaders. If the markup is too complex (both the underlying model and the markup syntax) to use properly, the humans won’t be able to do the markup properly, making the content’s meaning machine-opaque again. HTML5 has a big problem with markup complexity where even A-list developers have spent countless hours debating what the various new semantic elements actually mean.
Hint: They don’t mean what most of us assume they mean. Section, Article, Footer, Header, all of them have differences in meaning from what we’d assume from existing practice or basic understanding of English.
HTML5 is itself complex. Most developers can’t or won’t put in the effort to properly mark up their content semantically. EPUB3 and its ilk add even more complexity, more ‘semantic’ elements and attributes, all of them even more difficult to understand and harder to explain than the basic new semantic elements of HTML5.
Badly implemented complexity, such as in HTML5 and EPUB3, means we get all the pain and difficulty of escalating complexity, but with few of the benefits. Unfortunately, these are formats whose limitations we have to work around and surpass. They are a disadvantage on both the web and ebook industry. One of the tasks publishing has ahead is to try to neutralise that disadvantage.
(This is the eighth post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)
The problem many publishers are facing is that their titles need to be reused in a variety of contexts.
Book apps are very unfashionable at the moment but there is a brisk trade in small, fairly cheap, and functional apps based on book content, where the content is often licensed by a small app development outfit from a small publishing outfit or book packager. These range from military history apps, to children’s apps, to travel guides and in many ways are prototypical Content Development Kits like I described in an earlier post.
Then we have a variety of web and app gateways popping up that sell access to ebooks on a subscription basis, either directly to consumers or to libraries or other educational establishments.
The source format for these apps is often an EPUB version of the title and this is, in the cases I know, the source of a lot of problems and complications. The structure of the EPUB doesn’t tell the app developer where to hook the functionality of their app into the title’s content. This means that the app developers have to spend considerable time adapting and editing the text of the title and its structure. In some cases they have to spend more time on pulling structured text out of a crap EPUB than on the development of the app itself.
For most large publishers they see development as the single biggest cost of creating apps from their titles. This is because they are focusing on the digital equivalent of a tent-pole blockbuster movie. Small publishers and small app developers tend to focus on smaller scale apps with a much bigger emphasis on code reuse. For them, anything that cannot be automated is a liability and a cost centre.
You can think of a structured ebook file as an API. Most existing ebooks don’t need any API capabilities. A novel benefits little from it.
Reference books, however, gain immense value from becoming detailed and functional APIs in the digital space.
A reference book that is the source of only one or two concurrent editions in print can be the content source for hundreds, if not thousands of apps. A classic example being the dictionary services built into Mac OS X and iOS.
Any reference title can be a similar source provided that its content has been made available as an API.
Unfortunately, we don’t have many formats or tools that make this easy, making a lot of these services custom jobs.
Stop. Go back. Reread. Can you tell what the big problem is with what I wrote above? The idea that publishers could benefit from turning their titles into well structured ebooks—files that can serve as APIs—has a fatal flaw:
Only certain kinds of books have the internal structure that suits this purpose. Books that can be mapped onto a database structure (e.g. reference books) work perfectly. Structured non-fiction tends to work well. Anything that has a story less so.
Even the most structured dictionary or reference book is still not flexible enough to really suit the purposes of app, web, and interactive media developers. They need more. They need content that is adaptive.
What they need are structured projects that offer enough variety in their fabric to adapt to varying devices and context. Instead of single length chapters you need entries that have full-length, abridged, even more abridged, and tweetable versions of the chapter’s content. You need the chapter’s full title, tweetable title, display title (if different). Every chapter needs descriptions of varying lengths (like the chapter’s content). Do that for every chapter in the project, mark it up so that it’s usable, and you’ve got the beginnings of something really flexible.
What this means is quit thinking that what you are doing is designing and creating for the final presentation. You’re not in the business of making brochures. You’re not in the business of mobile applications. You’re not in the business of making web pages. You are in the business of making content and structuring that content so that it’s presentation independent, so you can get it out onto whatever device or platform you want to. (Karen McGrane – Uncle Sam Wants You to Optimise Your Content For Mobile)
Adaptive content—making things work for mobile, web, desktop, apps, tablets—is not just a design problem but an authorship, business, and editorial problem.
A large content library is not an asset in this context but a liability. It’s an ossified monolithic resource when you are surrounded by small and nimble players using small and flexible resources. The individual smaller players do not represent a threat—most of them are more likely to fail than not—but as a whole they do. Where each one may only address a tiny sliver of your back catalogue’s target market, they do so with content that is more flexible than yours because they had to start from scratch. Or, they have had the time and focus to adapt it by hand because their survival depends on this one title, which is a level of attention you can’t give to tens of thousands of titles.
As a collected whole, the smaller web players, self-publishers, three person publishing houses, indie app developers, and the like, are much more likely to be able to properly leverage the advantages of digital publishing than a large publishing mega-conglomerate. Publishers approach each edition as something that demands a unique design, custom editing, and detailed work to adapt the title’s content to that editions particular form. This isn’t scalable, neither in terms of labour or cost.
Adaptive content is essential when we face a plurality of devices. Having a ‘mobile content’ strategy means that you are just making the same dumb mistakes again because there will be other platforms in the future, and if your content isn’t readily adaptable you’re just going to face the exact same problems again that you are facing now with the mobile transition.
Not to mention the fact that you are opting out of a revenue stream from licensing your catalogue to various developers.
Your existing non-fiction titles are flies caught in amber. They exist only as evidence of a single evolutionary context, incapable of adapting or changing to survive in a new one. Because of the costs and work involved in making an extensive back catalogue adaptive, it becomes a liability when competing with a host of smaller outfits starting from scratch.
Trying to change a major publisher’s mind on DRM is a lost cause. That’s why even though I disagree with IDPF’s DRM efforts, I can only hope that their work will result in the wholesale adoption of a completely ineffective and useless DRM technique and bring us into a de facto DRM-free world.
(You could argue DRM isn’t a problem for existing consumers. That’s true, but only because we just buy from Amazon.)
What I hadn’t expected but has become abundantly obvious over the past year is that the publishing industry has a pathological preoccupation with controlling the reader’s actions. I had originally expected publishers to respond to reason, logic, and ruthless capitalistic ROI calculations (all of which weigh against DRM). But those who favour DRM do not respond to logic. When nailed on one argument they slip over to another:
—No no no, piracy isn’t a problem, it’s uncontrolled sharing
Po-tay-to po-tah-to. When it becomes hard to find evidence that piracy affects revenue the response is to rebrand it and claim that it’s still a problem.
I don’t quite know how to deal with an irrational obsession on that scale. Obviously, if piracy is cutting your revenue, that is a bad thing. But so much of the concerns around piracy are indistinct and vague—piracy worriers can’t articulate specific business consequences beyond ‘lost sales’ hand-waving with no data to back it up.
My own views on piracy, as a result of having worked in the software industry for a few years, is that, insofar that it’s an actual revenue drain, fighting it is largely a lost cause. As games developer and publisher Jeff Vogel has been fond of pointing out: if you’re selling a digital product, by definition everybody who decides to give you money is an honest person. The dishonest people will just pirate your product without a care or worry. Heavy-duty, iron-clad DRM can’t force the dishonest to buy and imposing it would have massive detrimental results both for the honest reader, the author, and the publisher (but not the dishonest reader). The dishonest would rather simply go without than pay. And even if you could force them, they’d be the customer from hell, overloading support channels and public forums with Olympic level whining.
So why worry about them? ‘Pirates’, even if you can prove they exist and affect revenue, which most publishers discover is hard, are a non-factor from a business perspective, about as relevant to your sales as Mac users are to a Windows developer. They simply aren’t a part of our market. This fact is also a big part of the reason why measuring piracy and the impact of piracy is so difficult. It’s like trying to measure the GDP impact of a Buddhist chanting. Non-participation isn’t measurable. Estimating the loss from non-participation is little more than science-fiction.
I wouldn’t mind talking about piracy to publishers if they discussed the issue in the same logical, matter-of-fact, manner that most indie software developers discuss it. But they don’t. What publishers mean when they say ‘piracy’ is more of a general worry about change and new technology and so most of them are extremely reluctant to discuss the details of what they believe and fear.
In publishing, the piracy concern is a superstition, magical thinking driven by a hope that the digital space is fundamentally inhospitable and the old times will be proven to be fundamentally superior to the new. The believers resist all attempts to empirically verify whether there is or isn’t a problem. Arguing with them is like arguing with a creationist. They don’t want proof, even if it is in their favour, because what they want is blind faith. What is worse is that many are using the fear of piracy as an excuse for not entering interesting new markets, which is a loss of opportunity, money, and revenue more certain than any threat that stems from piracy.
Tracing the problem right down to its roots, it’s clear that the publishing industry’s behaviour towards readers (not their readers since we’re talking about the author’s readers not the publisher’s) comes from the same source as their behaviour towards authors.
Just as with authors, who they saddle with fundamentally unfair and insulting contracts, publishers simply have a disdain and fear for readers, preferring to let proxies like bookstores take care of all direct contact with them.
I see no other way to explain their behaviour. You just don’t do these things to people you like (readers or authors).
DRM is an extension of that disdain and fear. It is intrinsically hostile to the reader. It’s value isn’t supported by any evidence of substance. Publishers are willing to harm their authors’ readers just on the possibility that they might be doing something they disapprove of. There is no evidence of harm to the author or the publisher.
The question whether sharing or piracy actually takes place or whether it will affect publisher revenue is clearly irrelevant, otherwise they would have abandoned DRM years ago.
Do NOT install Adobe Digital Editions 3.0. Some DRM ebook licenses will then be incompatible with mobile devices. As in can't be ever read.
— Micah (@micahsb) January 27, 2014
Welp.
Outside of the fundamental disrespect for the reader it represents, there is one major business reason why DRM is a very bad idea for publishers:
It involves inflicting a recurring technical, infrastructural, and administrative cost on all of their sales in perpetuity to solve a problem they can’t prove exists. By tying their entire catalogue, in perpetuity, to the fate and competence of a single external service provider (whoever provides the DRM solution) publishers are taking a business risk of unfathomable proportions. These are the kinds of risks that sink large companies.
That anybody would make this sort of decision without hard evidence to back it up is utterly mind-boggling.
—Publishers really invest in quality and editing.
Except editors keep getting laid off as a part of cost cuts.
—If you want proper marketing for your book you need a publisher.
Except you’re expected to do most of the online marketing yourself, and online is where all the sales are happening.
—You need a publisher if you want the book to look good.
Except the books from big publishers often look like crap in digital and utterly mundane in print—no better than a well made self-published book.
—At least publishers always provide good covers.
Except the covers so often completely misrepresent the book and whitewash it of all minorities and personality.
—Publishers can help you sort out your social media ‘platform’.
Except they increasingly won’t even sign you on unless you already have a platform.
—The editor always brings out the best in the text.
Except when the editor simply doesn’t see the world the way you do and buries everything unique and special.
—The editor always hones and clarifies what the book has to say.
Except when the editor simply doesn’t get what the book has to say.
—At least with a publisher the printed book won’t be Print-On-Demand.
Except it increasingly will be.
—Books that haven’t been edited are always crap.
Except when they aren’t. Sometimes the combination of beta readers, volunteer editors, and the right book results in something good.
—Books that are edited are always improved by the process.
Except when they aren’t. Sometimes the editor is just a bit of a fool. You rarely get to choose your editor.
—Books from big publishers are always edited.
Except when they aren’t and the writer has to bring in a freelance editor if they want any real editing done.
—A publishing company is a well-honed machine for creating and releasing books.
Except the next available slot in their publishing schedule is in the autumn, two years from now.
There’s this tendency among advocates to compare the absolute worst of the enemy with the perfect, best case scenario on your own side. The crowd that is hostile to self-publishing often likes to compare the worst dinosaur porn (which still sold, though, and made more money than many other titles) to one of those wonderful, Never-Neverland publishing companies that to this day invests massively in editors, doesn’t use exploitative covers, spends its untold riches on making the book’s typography absolutely perfect, has a workflow that spits out beautiful, error-free ebooks with ease, gives every author a personal PR rep, and has a multi-million dollar marketing budget for every title.
Of course self-publishing looks bad when you compare it with a piece of fiction that’s less realistic than the more deranged parts of Alice in Wonderland.
The reality is that book retail has been steadily deteriorating over the years and publishers themselves have been compromised by decades of cost-cutting. Most book sales are online. Titles today get much less editorial attention than similar titles did years ago. Covers have always been completely disconnected from the book’s actual content.
In terms of marketing, quality, distribution and design the difference between a competently published book and a competently self-published one is now less than you think. Competent self-publishing is getting easier every year as tools and services improve. Publishers offer less and less as they try to stay competitive through cost cuts and ‘optimisations’. Over time publishers seem to be devolving into self-publishing services that offer little but demand everything.
One key difference between self- and traditional publishing that is unlikely to fade in the near future is traditional publishing’s rank disdain for the author.
Rank disdain? Yes, there’s no other way to describe it. The standard contracts offered to most authors are insulting. The contracts are de facto for life and make breaking up with the publisher complex and hard. They frequently feature non-compete clauses that shackle the author’s entire career to the whims of the publisher.
These are terms that would be onerous in an employee contract where the desperate victim can at least expect a salary, if not actual benefits. For publishers to expect an author to swallow them in exchange for the pittance that most books earn is nothing short of insulting.
Pointing at other media industries won’t get you out of this one. Standard contracts in other media industries are also unfair and insulting. There’s a lot of disdain for creators going around.
—But, Baldur, haven’t you said that some of the biggest pain points for most publishers today are narcissistic idiot diva authors?
Absolutely.
Fixed term, for five to seven years. If you want more, you can renew the contract for another five to seven years once the first term is up. Or, you can just pay for the privilege of a longer term. Up front.
Absolutely no non-compete clauses. If you don’t want a writer to publish other writing elsewhere, pay them enough money so they don’t feel the need to. If you can’t afford to pay that much then you have no right to complain let alone to demand non-competition.
No options or rights of first refusal. Stand or fall based on your standard of work and the strength of your relationship to the author.
The copyright always, always, stays with the author.
Both parties should have the right to unilaterally end the contract and all of the obligations it entails should there be a major change in the circumstances of the other party. E.g. the publisher should be able to end the contract if the writer is sectioned or jailed. The author should be able to end the contract if the publisher gets sold or declared bankrupt.
(The bankruptcy bit is a bit complex, admittedly, but having language in the contract that covers the scenario is always going to help the author more than harm.)
A fair publishing contract is one between peers, where the rights of the two parties are in balance.
Even if the naysayers are right and self-published titles are always objectively worse than traditionally published titles, at least with a self-publisher you can count on the publisher treating the author with respect.
What books have always had are small teams. Outside of the people who work for the printer, the number of people who work on a book directly—especially compared to other media industries—is tiny. Maybe a couple of editors, typesetter, cover designer, writer, maybe a couple of office staff—making a book isn’t manpower intensive. You could argue that selling and marketing a book is, however, but that’s also the bit that is being disrupted by the web.
Finding your small team, one you can trust and rely on to help you make your book, is more important than whether you are self-published or not. It’s the team that makes the book, not the publishing model.
The problem for writers seeking to be published is that they usually can’t shop around for a good team. They might be able to shop around for a good editor, but not a team. People within a company inevitably vary and the author is forced to trust that they’ll be lucky with the people assigned.
What the self-publishing model does do is put the author in control over the team instead of the publishing company’s stockholders. If the author wants to spend more on editing because the editor is just so good, they can do that. If the author wants to spend less on editing because they have such a good group of beta readers, they can do that. If they want the cover to actually reflect the book’s story, they can work with a cover designer to make it so. They can assemble a team of freelancers around every book as needed, on an ad hoc basic.
The publishing companies that don’t compromise on the small team and can offer the flexibility to respond to the book’s needs won’t have to worry about self-publishing at all.
Other publishers will have to worry.
Which may or may not make sense.
Imagine that we have a resource mineral that, while not vital to the survival of the human race or essential to continuing technological progress, plays a pretty important role of making said things easier, more convenient, and bearable.
Now imagine that this mineral needs to be refined before it becomes a useful product. The big six refineries have locked down all of the rights to all of the major sources of the mineral, which they stockpile. Their stockpile and mineral purchases vastly outstrip their capacity for refining them, but they continue to hoard them nonetheless.
Several things become obvious in this scenario. First of all, every single new entrant that attempts to play at the same level as the existing six gets crushed very quickly. They can’t rely on stockpiles of existing materials. They have to rely on new mineral deposit discoveries and to do so they try to entice existing prospecting agents over to their side.
The problem is that said agents became rich by working with the big six and so their cooperation is fairly limited.
Then there’s the issue of modernisation. When you run a big operation with massive revenue, any technological upgrade of your processes costs a fortune—for the big six refiners to finance the retooling of their plants, the new technology needs to deliver a sizeable impact to the bottom line. Which hardly ever happens because most technological improvements are incremental.
Another, obvious, thing is that lower quality competitors enter the market as demand exceeds what the big six can supply. These use a new mineral similar to what the big six supply – it serves the same purpose – but it isn’t the same and operates differently with different, possibly more, side effects. These entrants make up for the lower quality of their material through a variety of means. They build their refineries closer to the customer, ensuring prompt delivery. They try not to be tied down to the same strict processes as the big six and so can respond quicker. But, mostly, they compete by building much closer ties to the miners of their competing mineral than anything the big six have done, using networks and modern communications to leverage a large number of smaller mining operations instead of a smaller number of large mines. Year after year, their access of unprocessed mineral improves and improves.
Now, this presents a dilemma for the big six. The competing product is clearly a bit rubbish, but it’s improving quickly and, worse for the big six, a lot of the customers don’t seem to care. They value other things than the over-engineered, expensive product the big six refiners produce.
There are a couple of obvious thing for the big six to do:
Either they compete directly with the new product by building out new operations that leverage the material properties they have now discovered that their customers actually do value. The problem with this approach is that this gives their competitors a big leg up, their entire business model just got validated and they have a massive head start on the big six.
Another obvious thing to do is to try and offer their services to the new industry, become a high-margin provider of solutions and services. The problem there is that they actually have fewer core competencies in this new field than the new entrants and so end up selling these services mostly to each other and to dumb money trying to capitalise on the disruption.
The blindingly obvious thing to do, which they never do, because it means giving up what they see as a competitive advantage, would be to sell off their stockpile of minerals. They have more resources than they have the capacity to turn into a product. By opening up the licensing market of the mineral they create a completely new industry of refineries who can be agile because they aren’t tied down to mineral acquisition, but are free to innovate in their production techniques.
This enables new kinds of companies and new kinds of products. It opens up the field to a new set of disruptors who can disrupt both the big six’s existing refinery operations and the newer, lower quality refiners. Moreover, since the single most important core competency of the big six is the acquisition of mineral rights, they have ensured their continued existence and profitability.
Back to the real world.
The big sixfive, as a rule, demand long term rights exclusivity while only really leveraging the full value of these books for the first few years. After that they just stockpile them, hoping for a film deal or sequel that might spin up demand for the older titles again.
This is a massive resource that they are simply not equipped to turn into product. Their product development units (publishers, that is) are busy publishing new stuff. Non-exclusive, API-based, and widespread licensing of their backlist to competitors in chunks would make them a lot of money, ongoing, and it would open up the field to a completely new kind of publisher.
I’ve been hearing conflicting reports about how easy it is for writers to break up with their publisher. The vast majority of reports say that it is at the very least a hassle and at worst a nightmare.
But there is a subset of the reports that say that it’s easy peasy. It isn’t fun and the publisher might get a bit grumpy, but it isn’t too difficult.
My theory is that the minority who find it easy to get the rights to their work back are getting their stories from people with influence, i.e. authors who either have enough money to have lawyers on retainer, or enough reputation oomph to convince the publisher to be nice.
Whatever the cause since the majority seem to be having difficulties and since there’s another big whack of titles who don’t have an advocate (like titles controlled by uninterested heirs), the above scenario isn’t too far fetched. Publishers seem to be employing non-compete clauses and hard-to-sever contracts to hoard titles and authors they aren’t otherwise using.
It crosses my mind that publishers are hoping bulk licensing of their back catalogue to, for example, subscription services might earn them a lot of money, and that’s part of the reason why they are hoarding titles and authors.
It always starts well because I always start alone. Working by myself, I have the peace of mind to just focus on the work, work on the components, polish the details, and simply go where my interest takes me.
Sometimes you share with people you trust; never more than with a small group.
Sometimes you lose interest and just stop. You are working alone and so who is going to judge you for giving up?
As time goes by, the thrill you had when you first started working begins to give way to something deeper—more profound. Your desk becomes the place where you sit down, heavy with troubles and worries, and stand up, hours later, light with serenity and calm.
Your routine becomes a glass palace where your soul lives, made out of emotional transparency and honesty of work; a place as fragile as it is beautiful.
Before 2010, I had always blogged just for myself. When I first started blogging, Facebook hadn’t even reached the point of being an obnoxious idea discussed at a college canteen. If you wanted to write and share with your friends, your options were Livejournal or a blog. I picked blogs, mostly because it offered more scope for experimenting with web technology. (I’ve been making websites for what is approaching two decades. It used to be fun.)
I never had any cause to be concerned about the ‘people out there’ who came to my blogs from outside my social circle.
That changed when I decided to take blogging seriously. It was all a part of the one and the same experiment:
Learn about publishing and study it.
Do it by self-publishing.
Write for an audience on the blog.
Take the idea of having an audience seriously.
Write fiction for an audience.
Take the self-publishing process seriously.
Learn everything you can about the process.
Talk to people.
Take them seriously.
Adjust your writing to suit the audience.
Lose the love for writing.
Let a deluded community guide you away from much more important problems and to focus on the tedious and mundane.
Lose the joy in tackling a hard technical problem.
Let self-interested shills dictate the issues you focus on.
Lose the thrill of figuring out a complex issue.
Lose the love of telling a story.
Lose heart.
I documented earlier the toxic difference between blogging and other kinds of writing, where the immediacy, tight feedback loop, and brevity of the form doesn’t compromise the writing to nearly the same degree.
The problem was more fundamental than that. It was much more basic than a conflict of form and desire. I failed myself.
I got into blogging, debating with people, commenting on the format specification process, talking at conferences, and participating in the publishing community online. I began to take seriously the feedback people in the community gave me and adjusted my writing to suit. I changed my focus of what problems to look into based on the suggestions of people in publishing. I began to rely on external feedback—other people’s responses—to counteract my utter conviction that I suck at this—that I suck at everything publishing.
Because, like so many others, I think I suck.
The feedback loop didn’t counteract that conviction. It strengthened it.
Because:
Even worse is the fact that I was (and am) monitoring the responses. I used to check Google Analytics every week. I used to monitor the response on Twitter. Even though I pretended otherwise, these things mattered to me.
Then I burned out. I didn’t lose faith in myself. I burned out when I realised that the only reason I inflicted this torment upon myself was that I never had any faith in myself to begin with.
When you’ve burnt out, lost faith in yourself, and lost respect for your audience, you begin to play at being deliberately provocative.
Part of it is a desperate attempt to get people to take something—anything—more seriously than just a yay or nay retweet. Dialling the idea up to eleven and having them reject it is better than having them ignore it completely.
Part of it is a loss of respect. While I respect the people I’ve communicated with online and in real life, I haven’t respected blog readers as a group for a very long time.
I think the only way to respect blog readers as a group is to ignore them. Write either for yourself or for a specific individual. The most interesting and rewarding blog posts are the ones that are like a letter to yourself or to a friend.
That means giving up on the idea of getting any real value out of your blog, much like the only way to enjoy social media means giving up on the idea of benefiting from it.
Your blog can either be a resource for your career, or it can be a piece of work you enjoy writing.
Social media can either further your business, or it can make your life richer.
Optimising your activity on blogs and social media is toxic. It’s a pit of venomous adders because all of the compromises and adjustments that increase the response and improve your career are also actions that poison your mind. They draw you away from yourself and into a feedback loop where your self-worth depends on what button some moron decides to press on their smartphone.
Once you’re hooked by the loop you start doing crazy things like compromise your other writing projects, self-censor, and make a truck-load of bad choices in general.
See also: ‘sellout’, ‘Judas’, ‘dishonesty’.
(Lesson one: if you’re going to sell out, do so properly and get paid. Don’t sell out for free.)
I made bad decisions:
I decided I wasn’t any good at anything I do.
I decided that anything I enjoyed didn’t have value.
I decided other people knew better than I did about what I was good at.
I no longer trusted my own taste.
I lost the will to work on projects I enjoyed.
I listened to people’s feedback, adjusted my work to suit, but I didn’t believe them and so lost the emotional connection to my work. I no longer had the bond with my work, the pact you have with your own imagination that you need to make something that interests yourself.
All that crap about how the only way to reach your readers is to be true to yourself? Probably true about book readers but patently untrue about blog readers. The manipulative, evil, and sleazy crap works online. It doesn’t just work, it works brilliantly. It gets traffic. It gets conversions. It gets leads. It gets sales. I have no idea how people do it without completely losing their souls.
The path to repair yourself is to write for yourself again:
Don’t write for the hungry horde of blog readers.
Don’t write to prove yourself or demonstrate what you can do.
Don’t write for the feedback loop.
Disengage.
Disentangle.
Explore.
Wander around the words and see the sights.
It takes a while. Bad habits tend to stick around—those bastards are hard to shake. But, with practice and heavy writing, they begin to fall off one by one.
Some bad habits seem to stick around forever but that’s all right. There’s always room for more improvement.
Most of the posts I’ve been publishing on my blog this January were written some time over the past couple of years. They are not new. Most of what I wrote during this period just went into a folder, to be stored and forgotten. Some of them I wrote to shake some bad habits loose. With many I failed.
In writing largely for myself over the past couple of years, I’ve built up a small pile of text files. Not all of it is suitable for you piranhas. Some of them are. Some of them won’t make sense to you. Some of them are just crap. With a lot of them I was still in the habit of stating the obvious. Some of them are clearly written in the toxic blog style I hate. Some of them I like. Others I don’t like but will post anyway. Some I genuinely enjoyed writing. Others were a torment through and through. Whatever the quality, over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a bunch of them on this blog, roughly one a weekday, until they run out.
I’m monitoring the traffic to these posts and replying to the comments. Not as a part of the old feedback loop where I used to try and figure out how to get to you people. More as a comparative experiment. Since the writing process and the monitoring of the data have been completely separated, there is relatively little risk of the feedback loop reinstating itself.
I don’t know what I’m going to do once I’ve unloaded that bucket of half-digested crap onto the blog. Maybe I’ll just continue in that vein, writing for myself and throwing an occasional one onto the site after it’s aged a bit and the stink of the first draft has been brushed off. Maybe I’ll just stop and just use the blog to let people know about what else I’m up to whenever I’m up to something interesting.
Whatever else I do I’ll keep writing. The only question is whether you will have a chance to read it or not.
I haven’t decided. Whatever I do, I’m not going to take your advice on it. Don’t tell me what you want. You don’t get a say.
(This is the seventh post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)
The mix of reader types in your readership isn’t an unchangeable fact, a curse bound in iron by the gods of old, a universal constant for all eternity. It can be changed.
Actually, that isn’t really true. The readership mix for most titles and genres is probably set in stone, one of those big blocks of ‘fixed, can’t change’ that you just have to work around.
What you can do is create a new readership with a new product in a new product category, but one that uses the text, images, and other materials from the old product. A new product that appeals to a market that is different from your print edition.
Most of those new product categories are just rebadged interactive media, and to create those you need people who know how to create interactive media (interactivity designers, app developers, or whatever you want to call them).
Most publishers give the digital edition of a title thought only after the fact—after the book has been written, edited, proofread, line-edited, typeset, and on its way to the printers—preferring to see what they can accomplish by tweaking whatever piece of digital rubbish their print workflow automatically craps out, wipe the InDesign shit-stains off it, and call it an ebook.
If you want to do something interesting with the digital edition of the title, you need to plan this right at the start, before any work is done on the title. And please do involve a professional developer right at the beginning. Think of them as co-authors of the digital edition and not as carpenters putting up a shelf you’ve specced out.
Once you start, once you’ve planned the print version of the title, your options for the digital edition go down dramatically. At that point, the easiest thing to do is to gloss up the title with idiotic ‘enhancements’ or other interactive doohickeys. Anything else is too expensive because you are, in effect, reinventing your production workflow on the fly.
Don’t do that. That’s crazy.
If all else fails and you’ve been given the task of adapting a pre-existing title into digital, you have a simple set of options:
One reason to do a totally unviable ebook that’ll just lose you money and only sell three copies is to avoid PR backlash. You see, people who want ebooks really want ebooks. They get very angry when there isn’t an ebook version and will complain loudly. It’s better to do what they—.
…
Hah! Had you going there for a moment. Don’t do that. That’s crazy. Here’s a simple rule for you:
Ignore crazy people who haven’t already given you money.
Which problem would you rather have?
I’d choose the first problem every time. The last thing you want to do is piss people off who’ve already given you money.
So, you’ve backed yourself into a corner. You have a title that probably has to be something other than an ebook.
At this point your only real options are:
Either do nothing (a perfectly valid choice, since nobody runs a business specifically to lose money, doing nothing is always an option)…
Or, you take the title and everything related to it, give it to an accomplished app developer, and tell them to make something out of it. Don’t tell them what to make because, if you work in publishing, you are almost inevitably clueless and incompetent when it comes to the web and apps. Give them a target audience they should serve. Any involvement by you beyond instigating the project will decrease its chances of success. Or, judging by some of you, it would massively decrease its chances.
Tell them to figure out a new product with a new title (the old title’s readership isn’t interested in digital, remember) using your materials. Set up whatever rules, goals, and benchmarks you need to feel comfortable. Set up whatever licensing agreement you both think will make you both some money. Then get out of the way because, honestly, if you’re in publishing, you probably don’t know what you’re doing.
(In digital media, I mean. Oh, you thought I meant in general? So, sorry.)
Best part? You can do this again with another developer. You can give another developer a brief to create another product from the title, for another target audience, with another name. Once you are playing at this level you are creating completely new products with new titles that just happen to be based on your stuff. Why limit yourself to one go at the roulette table? Especially if you can convince the developer to do the project without paying them up front payment while sharing the profits.
Even better, there’s a way for you to get almost unlimited tries at the table at little cost to yourself—all upside: just create a standardised licensing kit for a selection of your non-fiction titles. You don’t even have to do an API, just what you might call a ‘content developer kit’ or CDK: a zip package of the title’s content in a structured format that developers can license on whatever payment basis you want. Bonus points if you set up a self-serve ecommerce site where developers can buy CDKs at whatever price you set (preferably royalty-free; there’s room here for flexibility). Just lay down a few branding, contract, and promotional guidelines and you’re good to go.
You probably have to require your licensees to use something like “this app is based on X, published by Y” in their app or web descriptions, for the consumer’s sake, though.
Building up in-house digital product development is risky and expensive, especially at the start when you have to build up the necessary expertise and tools to do the job and change your organisations implicit value network.
The problem is that changing an organisation’s value network is next to impossible without firing everybody (yourself included) and replacing them with different people. Adding individuals who have different values from those prevalent in your organisation won’t change the value network. It’ll just make your new hires miserable before they quit or get fired. Which means that building a top notch, in-house digital product development team is going to be difficult for most publishers.
So, either partner up or build the team that is isolated and sandboxed from the rest of the company’s incompatible values. For most publishers, anything else is unlikely to work.
Now that I’m running down a long queue of mostly ready posts, it’s interesting to see which of them get traction and which don’t. These are posts that were written at varying times and in varying situations over the past year and a half and have received a diverse amount of attention when it comes to rewriting and editing.
Unfortunately, I pretty much nailed the pattern last week in when I wrote that blogging has trained me to assume you’re stupid.
The most popular post this week? Recipe for pundit response to Hugh Howey’s suggestions. Which was little more than a glorified listicle mocking other blog posts. And yet, as simplistic as the post was, it netted three times as much traffic as the next most popular blog post. The discussion it engendered, even on other sites with more of a tradition for discussion, was about as nuanced and detailed as the blog post itself (which is fitting).
(Best thing about the anti-blogging post? The only comment it got proved its point entirely.)
The ‘publishing industry’s new product categories’ series consistently gets a so so response. Not bad, but not brilliant. Very consistent. These blog posts tend to get almost routinely retweeted even though most of them tend to just state the bloody obvious. The blog post that least fit the formula (state the obvious, explain what it was that was so bloody obvious, state the obvious again) bling it up for education was also the least popular of the series this week.
Some posts generated more noise than traffic (the various types of readers). One post (the unevenly distributed ebook future) in the series did unusually well this week and, if I had to guess, I’d say it was all thanks to Sam Missingham’s retweet.
None of those come close, in my view, to the most interesting blog event of the week: I published the most unpopular blog post I have ever posted. And that’s saying something since I’ve been doing this blogging thing since 2003.
On Wednesday, I published sex, violence, and stílbrot which was a post about writing styles, self-censorship, and sex & violence. And in the comment thread we talked about pseudonyms and the discomfort that comes from writing books your friends and family know about. It had an amazing conversion rate to likes and commenting, but that was because its views can be counted on your digits.
I can’t quite say that this week proved what I’ve said for a long time (a blog post’s popularity is inversely proportional to how fun it was for me to write) because I enjoyed writing the second half of ‘bling it up for education’ and that post did okay. I think that’s because the first half of ‘bling it’ was formulaic enough to generate the retweets while most people ignored the second half.
Other than that blip, this week continues the pattern blogging seems to have devolved into.
Studio Tendra 