Not Quite A Publisher In A Box, But A Step In That Direction

This is really interesting: From Seth Godin's Domino Project, successfully self-published author Jenny Blake provides her Excel spreadsheet listing the dozens of steps she takes from launch through publication and marketing of a new book.  It looks as though it would need quite a bit of customization to fit your individual needs, but I suspect this could be a valuable tool for someone getting started in the complicated world of self-publishing.

Who Will Pay for the Cheese Sandwiches?

Hilarious, charming, with an edge of perception. How many people can couple childlike drawn images of dead pantaloon-clad authors, blood-dripping knives, and a puffy-topped "publishing pie" with references to Elvis's shoelace, cheese sandwiches, and "the anchovies are restless"--and make a serious point about publishing, books, writing, and the future of it all--and what it means for authors, traditionally published and self-published alike? Only Margaret Atwood, in her talk "The Publishing Pie: An Author's View" at last week's O'Reilly TOC Conference/Tools of Change for Publishing.

Book Publishing By Subscription: Everything Old Is New Again

Here, via Boing Boing, is a new/old twist on the self-publishing model: Fantasy novelist Diane Duane has financed her latest book, The Big Meow ("third and last in the Feline Wizards sequence") by soliciting advance subscriptions from readers.  The completion of the book was delayed by health and other problems, as Duane explains on her website linked above, but it has now been written and will be made available to subscribers, primarily in ebook format, after it has been edited and designed.  I can't tell from her site how much subscribers were asked to pay, and Duane hasn't disclosed how many individuals took her up on the offer, so there's no way to know how successful the venture was.

This way of publishing books, in which the "author's advance" is generated by direct sales to readers without the intervention of a publisher middleman, goes way back: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary was financed this way in the eighteenth century, and Mark Twain raised money for the publication of U.S. Grant's autobiography by sending salespeople door to door to sell advance subscriptions.

Today, of course, marketing, payment, and delivery of the finished product can all be handled electronically, which saves time and money.  But it would seem that attracting a sufficient number of readers willing to fork over cash months or even years before the product is ready will be a difficult challenge, except perhaps for the handful of authors who already boast an avid fan base.

In the years to come, we'll be seeing more and more experiments with new business models for publishing, and I for one am hesitant about predicting with any assurance which ones will work and which won't. 

Will Publishers Get Better at Incubating Talent and Selling the Niche??

I'm unaccustomed to coherent thought before the second cup of coffee, but reading Publishers Lunch's recap of one of yesterday's panels at the 2011 Digital Book World Conference & Expo, "A CEO’s View of the Future," might have triggered a neural blip.

Lunch quotes Perseus CEO David Steinberger as saying that he "sees a giant wave [coming] where the book that has a more modest audience is going to reach people in a way that's more seamless than ever before."

Much has been written about self-publishing as an increasingly viable alternative to fruitlessly banging on traditional publishers' doors as they've become preoccupied with the "big book" for lots of reasons, some of their own making and some in response to marketplace pressures and profit demands of conglomerate owners.

Two things publishers brought to the table for physical books were distribution machinery and major media connections. If publishers can become as good at mining niche markets through online marketing for e-books as they became at distribution and major media for p-books, they could become once again a fertile ground where the so-called "midlist" or "niche" book can succeed and contribute to everyone's bottom line. Maybe there could be a renaissance of sorts, where publishers could return to a cherished earlier role of incubating talent rather than buying it at nosebleed prices that don't do the industry or the next crop of talent any favors.

Maybe others have had this thought - I take no ownership for its originality. It arrived, as I said, before my second cup of coffee.

Jason Epstein on Self-Publishing

The February 10 issue of The New York Review of Books contains a timely review (subscription required to follow link) of a book by British sociologist John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Jason Epstein's review provides a capsule history of the publishing industry (of which he was a notable member) over the past fifty years, and also looks ahead to a dramatically different future. Among other developments, he cites "the rapidly growing self-publishing industry."

Epstein believes the self-publishing industry, "relying on print-on-demand technology, has created infrastructure that groups of sophisticated editors might adapt to create their own lists for worldwide sale online while arranging with traditional distributors to market physical inventory to traditional retail accounts." He thinks these editors could be incubating the next Random House. From the man who invented the trade paperback, these might be prophetic words.

Epstein also points out in a footnote that "Self-publishing has an illustrious history. Milton published Areopagitica himself and Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. When he could not find a publisher for his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane published it himself." Epstein also mentions Ulysses (published by Joyce with bookstore owner Sylvia Beach), The Joy of Cooking, and such recent bestsellers as In Search of Excellence and Christmas Box. Self-publishing has a distinguished past and the possibility of defining publishing's future.

The Ultimate Vanity Book

Looking for a few new menus to spice up your family dinners? How about buying a new cookbook? Here's one that'll soon be available, and it costs only $625 (a mere $500 on Amazon). I know it sounds like a lot, but the money buys you six lavishly illustrated volumes totaling 2,400 pages and described by Tim Zagat as "The most important book in the culinary arts since Escoffier."

I'm thinking I can't afford not to buy it.

But if you're wondering who on earth would publish a book like the massive Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, the answer is the author--Nathan Myrhvold, a billionaire who used to be in charge of technology for Microsoft and has now devoted a large fraction of his free time to mastering contemporary cooking techniques. This article from BusinessWeek describes the amazing process by which Myrhvold created the book, which he admits cost "millions" and included hiring as many as 36 experts in cooking, technology, photography, design, and other fields. Publication is planned for March, 2011, unless the author dreams up some new material to include which could increase the book's size and price still further. (After all, when you're both author and publisher, who's going to enforce a deadline?)

This all may sound like wretched excess and a classic illustration of what happens when someone has too much time and money on his hands. But Myrhvold is apparently very serious about cooking and is making a conscientious effort to produce a book that will be a genuine contribution to the field. And anyway, writing and publishing a book, no matter how eccentric, is one of the most harmless ways I can think of for a billionaire to disburse some of his wealth. I wish more moguls would take on projects like this rather than (say) financing TV campaigns in support of tea party politicians. So I say, Go, Nathan, go!

Self-Publishing Pops Up in Soho

As a sign of the increasing interest in self-publishing, The New York Times reported yesterday on a pop up store in Soho offering self-publishing services to the public until the end of the month. The San Francisco-based company, called Blurb, is expecting an increase in interest around the holidays, because, as Eileen Gittens, chief executive of Blurb, was quoted as saying, "There's something about giving the gift of a book. It's difficult to gift a link." And who could argue with that sentiment?

For anyone interested in self-publishing, the staff will be offering workshops and advice in this temporary facility at Broome and Mercer. Go before this resource disappears.

Laura Miller on the Brave New Self-Publishing World

It has taken me a little while to get around to linking to it, but Laura Miller in Salon has written a decent article about the rise of self-publishing and its potential impact on the art and commerce of literature.

Read it for yourself and see what you think, but for what it's worth I think Miller is right about some points, a little off-base on some others. She's right, of course, about the abysmal quality of 99.9 percent of the material that finds its way into book publishers' slush piles. It's simply not true that there is a sizeable universe of unpublished masterpieces languishing in obscurity because of the blindness of the editorial gatekeepers.

She's also right, I think, when she says that, over time, new kinds of gatekeepers will inevitably develop to help readers sort through the flood of newly self-published manuscripts being enabled by the new online technologies. We don't yet know what form those new gatekeepers will take, but they will identify the blockbusters of the future and, by their neglect, consign the vast majority of self-published books to more-or-less complete oblivion.

But Miller is a bit off-base, I think, in taking a somewhat monolithic view of book publishing and readership. She writes, in effect, as if the entire industry consists of novels (and perhaps memoirs) that are suitable for a broad, general public and that are competing to attract that kind of readership. In reality, many, many books are nonfiction works aimed at very specific niche audiences--and this is where the new self-publishing technologies can play an important positive role.

There are thousands of topics that are of interest to small but devoted groups of readers who would be willing and able to buy books about those topics, generating sales not in the tens of thousands but in the hundreds. The new technologies make such "long tail" offerings more economically viable than in the past. And the Internet should make it possible for interested readers to find out about those niche books quickly and easily--without having to randomly wade through the flood of slush that Miller envisions as the brave new world of publishing.