Stumbling into publishing

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(This is the second Stumbling into Publishing post.)

If it looks like I have focus, that’s just because every hour, every minute, every second of every day, I feel lost.

I eye the world seeking sense and finding patterns in the same way a man on a sinking ship eyes the horizon desperately for sight of land.

I’d like to call it curiosity but it really is more than that; deeper and more obsessive. As I’ve grown older I’ve learned how to direct my fixations a little bit better, but I still sometimes fixate on a trivial subject and end up spending a weekend researching what is known about the Antarctic climate during the Paleocene for absolutely no reason whatsoever instead of doing whatever it is normal people do on weekends. (I wouldn’t know. Haven’t met a normal person in years except in passing. No idea what they actually do on weekends. Wouldn’t know where to start. I’m assuming there are social rituals involved as well as misdirected sexual anxiety. There always are.)

Still, I’m not as bad as I was ten years ago; one time I lost a couple of weeks fixating on the subject of dyspraxia for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

One tactic that has always worked well for me, to direct my focus and to work my way through by obsessions, is to write about them. It’s a way of processing. Sometimes that writing is non-fiction. Sometimes it isn’t. (The other thing, doncha know?) Sometimes that writing goes onto a blog somewhere. Mostly, over the past year, that writing hasn’t gone anywhere, just stayed in my Dropbox drafts folder.

I hope to make the reasons for that clear over the course of this series of blog posts and, by writing about it, process them, and learn.

The beginning is never where it starts. It’s in the instincts of most writers to begin where the story starts. Because you have a clear picture of the course of events—the progression of fact A to fact B all the way to fact Z—your instinct is to present everything to the reader so that they can see the beauty of the whole like you do.

But they won’t. They never will. They never see the beauty because they don’t care like you do. You see how glorious it is, the intricacies, and you feel in your bones how much it matters, because you care. You have to make them care. And that’s why you never begin where it starts. You begin where it gets interesting, where the emotions of the story are clear. You begin at the point when everything that is at stake can be taken in at a glance. They might not understand it all yet, but they can see it, like a grand emotional snapshot of the story’s landscape.

Only then, after you’ve drawn them in, after they have bought into the stakes—been touched by the emotions—only then can you show them how it all started.

And with that, everything unfolds in their mind. They see it like you do. They feel it like you do. They care like you do. The story has become a part of their world and they can’t breath without finding out, like you do, why it matters.

Back in 2009 before I had published my first blog post on baldurbjarnason.com—a year earlier—I began work on a plan to self-publish a series of novellas. I hadn’t decided what to publish; I just knew I would never publish any of the fiction I’d written before 2009. I decided I’d have to start from scratch with new stories and a new world. I’d have to figure out all of the details about how everything works in ebook publishing and production. I needed a lens, an angle that would let me approach, understand, and process what was going on in digital publishing. The project did that.

A project’s failure is found in its genesis. If it can’t be traced to a fundamental part of the project’s initial design then you can still find hints of it mixed in with the scattered and random jottings and outline that served as the first vestiges of a plan—like a haunting vision serving to onlookers and in your hindsight as foreshadowing.

All of my projects fail. Not necessarily because they are bad. Nor do they always fail to meet what I and others expect of them. Actually, they usually meet expectations.

(Have I told you that I have a reputation for pessimism?)

They fail because at the end of it, I know better. I can see all the incorrect turns, all the mistakes, all of the things that were simply wrong, even though I can’t articulate exactly why. They just are. I’ve found the patterns I’m looking for and they are irregular, broken, uneven, and so utterly human. All I can do after that is accept failure and aim to do better.

Hence this series of blog posts. They’ll be sporadic—mixed in with posts on other subjects—and it’ll probably be a long while before I feel done with the issue. I plan to go over what I learned over the last four years writing and preparing a series of novellas, self-publishing them, the mistakes I made, the emotional roadblocks I hit, the wrong turns that caused me to burn out on posting things on the web, the gaps that put me in a holding pattern, and the realisations that finally brought the sight of land on the horizon into focus.

The publishing industry’s new product categories

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(This is the first post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)

A while back it was popular at many of the bigger publishers out there to release apps that they called ‘enhanced ebooks’. Some of them were branded as ‘book apps’, but that name too suffers from the same basic idiocy.

Enhanced ebooks is quite possibly the worst possible name that anybody could have thought of for a piece of media. It misses out on the one thing that is that particular genre’s greatest strength: it isn’t a book, not in any way shape or form. It’s an app.

And by virtue of being an app, it can have a structure and form that is entirely unlike the book, gaining in the process the business model flexibility that ebooks don’t have.

The state of play

The publishing industry has a set of standard bling that they use in place of interactivity whenever they implement something ‘enhanced’ or app-like. (Video, maps, slideshows, 3D widget crap, etc..)

Some of these approaches are confusing to say the least. Others are just plain dumb.

Commercial interactive textual content is a genre without direction. Everybody seems to be throwing stuff randomly against the wall to see what sticks.

Which would be fine if they didn’t keep picking up the spaghetti strands that didn’t stick just to try them again.

—Maybe I didn’t throw it hard enough?

Or, you just picked the wrong thing to throw.

—No, really. Jack over there is doing the same thing. I can’t let him get a lead in case this turns out to be a big market. I just need to throw harder.

No, you really don’t. Jack is making a mistake.

—Are you absolutely certain he’s making a mistake?

No, of course not. It’s impossible to be certain here, there are too many unknowns.

—Ah, so he could be right! Okay. I’ll try my best to throw harder next time. [Bends to pick up a cluster of spaghetti strands that hadn’t stuck to the wall and pitches it at the wall again.]

Nobody wants to be left behind so they all run as fast as they can in the wrong direction.

What to do, what to do?

Before you run, you first need a direction. Before you start an interactive project, you need to decide on what sort of project, and don’t just jump on whatever bandwagon you think others in the industry are on.

I don’t really care what your ‘why create’ reason is. As far as I’m concerned you don’t need a reason to create. But, if you want to create and if you want to do it on a regular basis, you need two prerequisites:

  1. You need projects you can figure out how to make.
  2. You need to have a sensible idea for how to fund project after project.

Costs and revenue. Two things that, at the very least, need to balance out.

If the projects are simple enough, then you can make them yourself and funding won’t be much of a problem. This lets you experiment and iterate your way towards discovering a genre, form, or medium you like.

But, a lot of the time you can’t do that. Especially not if the ‘you’ in that previous sentence is a corporation whose owners need it to stay relevant in a changing world.

There are three ways to slice the problem of deciding what to do.

  1. Look at the genres of interactive content (all of them, not just the crap publishers release). See if you find a few that inspire ideas.
  2. Look at the individual bits and features that make up the genres, go more granular than just looking at apps as a whole. Sometimes the approach and style is more important and inspiring than the whole.
  3. Look at your means and capabilities. It’s not a question of staying within your comfort zone but of making sure you don’t stray into mediocrity. If your ambitions vastly exceed your own capabilities, then you need a plan for how to grow them yourself, without outsourcing them to somebody who doesn’t give a damn and is just out for a buck.

(Yes, this is a lot of work even before you start planning the project. What did you expect?)

Finally, once you have a set of ideas and aspirational projects, you need to whittle them down, or at least prioritise them. That means you need to look at the cost-revenue balance for each one. And to do that you need to figure out the business model, often from scratch because, unlike print, interactive media doesn’t come with a business model attached.

The last two Knights and Necromancers stories

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(This is the first Stumbling into Publishing post.)

A while back I started an experiment where I self-published a series of sword and sorcery novellas.

I’m ready to declare the experiment a failure for a variety of reasons.

The biggest reason isn’t that I didn’t get any readers (although they were very few and far between) but that I’m dissatisfied with the product. When I started I had what I thought were six decent novellas. But, the more I’ve looked at them the more obvious their major flaws and deficiencies become.

My plan for 2014 is to spend the year rewriting the novellas as a single story, fix everything about the setting, characterisation, and plot that isn’t working for me (which is a lot), and then figure out what to do with it once that’s done.

But, for those few of you who have been following the series, below are the final two stories in the series as originally planned, in EPUB and in MOBI.

I’ll be taking down the first four ebooks from sale and the web over the next couple of weeks. And I’m also going to write a few blog posts discussing why I consider the experiment a failure, all the things I did wrong, and all that went wrong.

  • Knights and Necromancers 5: EPUB or MOBI
  • Knights and Necromancers 6: EPUB or MOBI

Random, loosely connected, thoughts on the future

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Some end-of-year thoughts. Few of them happy ones.

Rule of thumb, anybody who hesitates to spend $10 on a product that will improve an activity is performing that activity as an amateur (i.e. isn’t earning an income on that activity or doesn’t see it as an income-earner). This is a rule of thumb for the producer, not a judgement of the buyer. The idea is that if you produce a work that improves somebody’s professional activity your price, even discounted, should be much higher than that of an entertainment product. Much, much higher.

I think in the long run we’ll come to see EPUB3, fixed layout especially, and IDPF’s work in general as a very costly mistake, sort of as if XHTML2 and ECMAscript 4 had actually become the minimum baseline for web development.

We are poor and have no money for joy. Youth unemployment is at a long term high and will not go down in the near future. Guess who are the biggest media consumers around? Long-term under-employment means that those under thirty today face a lifetime of struggling on the edge of poverty, owning nothing, owing everything.

Wattpad might not be the future, but the future will look more like Wattpad than it will the publishing industry (current self-publishing clique included). It will look the same to casual readers: one or two books a year break out into mainstream awareness and, backed by a large publisher, it will sell tonnes through bookstores, Tescos, and Walmarts.

Added benefit: we who are poor and have no money for joy can get stories for free if we want to.

The fiction publishing industry’s future is likely to look similar to the present day comics industry:

  • Sales one-tenth to a hundredth of their heyday.
  • Caters exclusively to pre-existing fans that grow older and fewer every year.
  • Storytelling so derivative and so creatively inbred that if they were human they’d have three arms and nostrils on their backside.

The truly innovative comics are largely prestige projects that don’t sell that much (like the current run of Hawkeye comics or FF), published by loveable nutters (like Fantagraphics, the world would truly be a sadder place were it not for loveable nutters like them), or translated (e.g. Naoki Urasawa). While at the same time the only truly mainstream publishing efforts are webcomics which get little credit from the ‘real’ industry: they reach larger numbers, have a greater variety in genres, have a much greater variety in audience, and are released for free.

Most webcomics are labours of love that never earn money. The revenue streams are ads (largely exchanges with other comics, only really lucrative for some genres of comics), merchandising, and Kickstarters for print books (the only way most fans can get a ‘real-life’ souvenir for the comics they love).

The only problem with Wattpad’s crowd-funding platform is that it might be a bit too early. Everybody involved will learn a lot over the next year or two, and these platforms will begin to attract established talent. A Wattpad-oriented crowd-funding platform will be a lot more interesting in a couple of year’s time. If Wattpad can keep their effort going through the awkward first years, they stand to be very big.

Theres a good chance that, as now, the future publishing industry will have a sharp divide between writers who make a living from writing or illustrating and the rest who earn very little, but with one big difference: you—every other profession in the publishing industry—will be unemployed and earning nothing. Corporations and publishing organisations will be fine. They just won’t be staffed with editors, proofreaders, designers, or illustrators. It’ll be a world of management and creative serfs, with the occasional serf rewarded with elevation, keeping the rest eager and pliant.

What would new iterations of the Wattpad-model look like? What form are future disruptors likely to take?

Three ideas:

  • Mini-wattpads. Either focussing on a niche or on a specific audience.
  • Curator-locusts. Small publishing entities that hover around wattpad and similar projects and gobble up projects to arbitrage to their audience.
  • Thrillbents. Coop-style publishers. Do stuff online for free, mixing in with your audience. Give them ways to pay you (subscriptions for insider extras, pay what you want digital sales for convenience, Kickstarters for print).
  • Blogs plus Topatoco/Make That Thing. Authors working from their own sites but all use a service company for merchandising, sales, and product management. Cafepress for those starting out and unproven. Graduating to more high end services such as Topatoco as they mature and gain audiences.

The ‘End of Scarcity’ dogma is profoundly evil in a world where investment banks and hedge funds make billions and kill thousands by jacking up food prices through speculation. I don’t care if the marginal cost of all media goes down to zero, that does not herald a world of abundance.

The Checklist: fix iBooks image handling

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Mike Cane suggested that I put together a checklist of problems that need to be fixed in ebook format handling so those at fault could be made accountable.

So here goes the first entry:

Hey Apple! Fix iBook’s image handling! Because it is totally broken.

When building an ebook with images you have two options today for how to prepare images for iBooks:

  1. None of them will display properly
  2. Some of them will display properly, seemingly at random

The difference lies in a metadata toggle called “ibooks:respect-image-size-class”. It may say respect-image-size, but it lies! A more appropriate name would be respect-image-size-sometimes-if-I-feel-like-it-and-you-sacrifice-a-chicken.

But I guess that would be to long. Maybe the name used is the abridged version.

Of course, Apple’s crazy madcap plan for worldwide sensible image sizing might have worked if every ePub production app in the world followed Apple’s rules, but they don’t. So, please stop.

So, here’s my suggestion to Apple: just render images like the browser does, paying attention to the attributes on the element and its style declarations. Don’t try to be smart because when you fail (which iBooks does frequently) you just look extra dumb.

Great text transcends nothing

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Disclaimer:

Working on ebooks is how I make my living. Therefor you should take everything I write about ebooks with a grain of salt. Anybody whose economic future depends on specific viewpoints is more likely to hold those views, if not for any other reason than to avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.

Yes, that does mean you should be sceptical about bankers on banking, real estate agents on real estate, and insurance salespeople on insurance, especially when they are defending the societal value of their profession as a whole. Assume they are biased and compensate accordingly. Of course, that can backfire when the professional in question is aware of their own biases and has already tried to compensate.

With that in mind…

There’s a peculiar sort of joy that comes from reading a good print edition of a great book.

@AthenaHelivoy said this here thing:

If Ebooks looked good, this sudden “novel” devotion to “intrinsic worth” wouldn’t have sprung up. … “Great lit transcends blahblah” is an uralt non-argument revamped for Ebooks.

From here and here.

There we have the problem with ebooks today in a nutshell (that and the fact that none of us actually own the ebooks we’ve bought, we only own licenses).

That isn’t to say that the ebook reading experience can’t be as good as reading print in some cases. The accessibility features of many reading apps open new titles up to those partially or wholly without sight. Changing the font size similarly helps those with bad sight. Those who read a lot of books appreciate the ebook’s relative weightlessness.

But for the vast majority of readers, ebooks as presented by Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and co. have only three real advantages. They are:

  • Cheaper
  • Immediate
  • Lighter

That’s it. Those are important advantages and, in many cases, all people need to pick an ebook over print. But ebooks still have miles to go.

Ebooks generally look worse than your average trade paperback or hardcover book. If competently done, they can manage to match or exceed the quality of a cheap paperback.

But if you pick an ebook at random and compare it to its print versions, odds are the ebook will look worse:

  • Typography will generally be worse. Automated pagination in existing ereaders ignores quite a few details that print typesetters pay a lot of attention to.
  • The resolution will be slightly lower, even on retina display screens.
  • The typeface will look worse and be less readable. Most fonts are designed for print and will look too thin and wispy on a high resolution screen. Odds are none of the fonts your app lets you choose are properly designed for screen reading.
  • On a lot of devices and many apps (Android and older iOS devices) your interaction with the ebook will have a slight but infuriating lag in even text-only novels. And if your book has a lot of images you can expect a substantial infuriating lag.

Moreover, as I’ve written about before, for many readers ebooks the experience as a whole will be worse because tactility is an important part of how we experience and remember things.

Some of these problems are solvable in practice. We can embed fonts that have been designed to look good on screens. We can mark the ebook up properly and pay attention to screen-specific detail in the stylesheets. And we can make sure to read our books in apps and devices that are responsive and render the ebook well.

Other problems are solvable in theory. LaTex and similar systems show that automated pagination should be a solvable problem. And there shouldn’t be any reason why we can’t match the overall typesetting quality of print.

The problem is that we manifestly don’t. And that’s because none of the key players care. It isn’t an issue of can’t but one of won’t.

Publishers don’t care about ebook quality. They’ll scrutinise every detail of the print edition while, as @liza quipped at the Books in Browsers conference the other day, not bothering to mark up a list in an ebook as a list. Ebooks, even from big publishers, are full of OCR errors and other mistakes. Almost every ebook backlist title I’ve read so far has had an OCR error in it somewhere (a numerical ‘1’ replacing an uppercase ‘I’ being the perennial classic). Publishers quite simply do not care what the ebook version looks like.

Ebooks are often hidebound by the demand that they match the styles of their print edition, even when many of their print design choices are grossly inappropriate for digital. (Like drop caps. Drop caps simply do not work in digital since they can’t be done without compromising accessibility where they break up the word.)

Hang on…

The Drop Cap rant interlude

Modern drop caps are a nostalgic affectation by people keen on spicing up their books with decorations but who are too stingy to pay an actual illustrator to draw an actual goddamn illustration.

Originally most drop caps were proper illustrations. Each was lovingly rendered with an awareness of its context, often commenting on them in witty and clever ways, and they did a marvellous job of spicing up the reading, as all well-made illustrations do. Reusing the drop caps from a book made about as much sense as reusing the illustrations.

Then drop caps became homogenised, pasteurised, blended, stamped, and cookie-cut into standard typographic forms. They got pre-made as fonts for people who wouldn’t know decent illustrations even if they were beaten into their heads at a picket line. People who think they can get the same effect as an illustration by buying something pre-fabricated from a font foundry.

You can’t. Never. The only effect you get from a modern pre-fabricated drop cap is vacuous nostalgia and the joy of being able to piss on the grave of the art of book illustration.

Then add to that the fact that they simply do not work in a cross-platform and accessible way in digital and you get only one conclusion:

JUST SAY NO TO DROP CAPS.

Yes. I hate drop caps. Unless you’re doing them properly as custom illustrations, of course. Then you get a pass.

The Joy of Reading

There’s a hard to define thrill that comes out of reading a good book that is well supported by it’s context and design. It’s like those moments in theatre where everything comes together to bring you a well-written play, with a great set design, perfect costumes, fantastic actors, with tone-perfect direction. The text of a play cannot transcend its actors or its staging no matter how great. Its words cannot dispel the curse of a mumbling actor or wash away the colours of a garish set. No phrase, no matter how beautifully crafted, can tone down an overacting diva.

A novel, no matter how great, cannot transcend its typography, packaging, or design.

Ebooks, quite simply, have to improve.

Quarantine all ebooks

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Michael Kozlowski had this here reactionary fit:

I think its very important for all major bookstores to have an indie section because small publishers and indie authors are abusing the system.

Others have highlighted the problems with this plan.

The short version of the counter-argument: what’s a self-publisher?

Most of the major ebook retail platforms direct small publishers to use their self-serve platforms not everybody who uses them is a solo author publishing his own work.

But, there’s still an set of obvious problems here that needs to be solved:

  • Most search results in ebook retail are full of crap. You search for an author or a title and get shitloads irrelevant titles. Amazon isn’t as bad as the rest at this but they all suffer from it to some degree.
  • Dishonest publishers lie in their metadata so that they crop up all over the place, often inappropriately. (This is the cause of the recent PR disaster that caused WH Smith to shutter their website temporarily.)
  • Dishonest publishers choose author names and book titles a little bit too close to popular ones.
  • Well, lets’ just say there is a lot of general purpose gaming of the system by dishonest people.

You can try and solve one thing but then the dishonest will just find a new exploit. It’s like the arms race between Google and black hat SEO folks all over again.

Instead I have a simple suggestion:

Quarantine all new ebook titles, even those from big publishers. Only remove the quarantine when either the ebook or its print counterpart has sold more than 100 copies.

Quarantined titles only appear on Author pages and if you follow a direct link to their page. This means that most publisher online sales and marketing campaigns would still work as normal.

Once a title has sold 100 copies it is reviewed by a human to see if it fulfils the ebook retail platform’s quality requirements. If it does, quarantine would be lifted. If it doesn’t, the publisher gets a notice as to what it is that needs to be fixed.

–But this would destroy the sales for most self-publishers.

Not really. It would smash everybody who doesn’t have the platform, PR, or sales mojo to sell more than a 100 copies down to zero. But it would increase search discoverability and the sales of those who do sell more than 100 copies. Consider it a ‘you must be this tall to ride’ kind of thing. The ebook retail platform would probably increase their overall sales with the added bonus of preventing forever PR disaster like the one that took place last weekend.

Would it piss everybody off? Absolutely, and on that basis alone I think it should be implemented on all major platforms.

The self-publisher’s perspective of the ebook market

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The writer Rosen Trevithick said this here thing:

For goodness sake Kobo, I took a risk publishing some of my titles with a relatively small eBook vendor. It took days to jump through your formatting hoops and I lost my bonuses for being exclusive to Amazon. I did this because I wanted to support an alternative to the market leader. You reward me by stabbing small publishing companies in the back. I’ll think twice about publishing with you in the future because you clearly aren’t ready to earn a larger share of the market.

Everything she says is true. But… I’d like to use this current crisis and her point about Kobo shafting small publishers as an excuse to look at what the ebook market looks like for a self- or small publisher.

  • Kobo’s search has always sucked (discoverability is non-existent) and they clearly have some sort of infrastructure problem (otherwise they’d have done the ‘purge’ the same way Amazon did, by flipping all suspect titles to Draft and forcing people to submit via a tighter process). They’re also clearly willing to completely shaft everybody using their self-serve publishing platform Writing Life whenever it suits them, PR-wise.
  • WH Smith. Non-existent as far as most self-publishers are concerned. No sales. No love. And now their site is shuttered.
  • Waterstones. Again, non-existent as far as most self-publishers are concerned. No sales. No love.
  • Foyles. Ditto.
  • Insert random bookstore’s Adobe DRM-based ebook platform. Ditto.
  • Feedbooks. Love the people behind Feedbooks but most self-publishers won’t even have heard about them, and you can only offer your stuff for free.
  • B&N Nook. Volatile as hell. Seems to be in terminal decline. Also unavailable to non-US self-publishers.
  • iBooks. A major hassle to use and submit. And, for most people I’ve spoken to, near non-existent sales.
  • Smashwords. Only really useful as a way to get into the above stores. Otherwise, meh.
  • Kindle. Stagnant platform. Almost all of the new features (series, Kindle Shorts, etc.) belong to Amazon Publishing and aren’t self-serve (and after the WH Smith porno brouhaha, two guesses as to why that is). But, it is where all of the sales are. And exclusivity offers several features that are likely to increase reach, visibility, and sales.

For those of us interested in a more open and varied ebook market, there is a singular harsh truth we must accept:

Amazon is playing the game better than the rest. That’s why they have the biggest share of the market.

I’d bet that even if Amazon abandoned discounts across the board, they’d still have their current marketshare simply because they seem to be doing a better job. Even their Kindle for iOS app has improved into borderline tolerability after the latest update.

So, if the EPUB crowd wants to compete, they need to up their game.

But, no. Instead they are either in a tailspin (B&N, WH Smith’s ecommerce side) or seem to be perpetually operating with all weapons set to ‘bland’ (Kobo, iBooks).

And, which is the fun bit, whenever something goes wrong, they don’t seem to hesitate to shaft the self-publisher.

So, I find it hard to blame any self-publisher who decides to go exclusive with Amazon. Nor do I blame any consumer who decides to buy a Kindle device or sticks to Kindle ebooks only. You don’t win customers by appealing to their charity. You have to give suppliers a reason to work with you, and buyers a reason to buy from you.

ETA: At the moment, the most sensible strategy for consumers is to buy from Amazon (and make DeDRMed backups if they are computer literate enough to Google and then use a drag and drop app). KF8 files convert nicely to EPUBs is you plan on moving to an EPUB-based platform in the future. At the same time the most sensible strategy for a small publisher is ‘it depends’.