Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (58 page)

How much do you expect to pay for a perfect (but used) digital copy of Prince’s
Greatest Hits
? How about a penny?

One of the biggest distinctions between old publishing and new is the nature of luck.

The fact is, in the old model,
something
had to become a bestseller.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
just hit its tenth year on the bestseller lists (520 weeks in a row, 17 million copies sold). It’s a great book from a great publisher, but a run like that is as much the result of good timing, good breaks, and the fickle finger of fate as it is the result of
helpful content. There’s a reason the expression “surprise bestseller” is in the vernacular. Most bestsellers are, in fact, surprises.

Do the math: 170,000 real books published a year, probably 50,000 of them are commercial, well constructed, and seriously published. Of those 50,000, as many as 100 (that’s two a week) hit their potential. One out of five hundred. It’s got to be
some
book, but it doesn’t have to be yours.

Since there doesn’t appear to be a significant correlation between publishing prowess and success (even great editors, great marketers, and great sales teams at publishers don’t regularly succeed), at some point it comes down to a spin of the wheel. And the author gets to take that spin at someone else’s expense. Yes, she has to write a great book, and yes, she has to tour or interview or whatever the publisher asks, but it’s the publisher that’s putting cash and risk on the line. Why do some books from unknown authors sell well while others don’t? No one knows.

Compare this scenario to the lonely life of the self-published author. This is street fighting, one reader at a time. Getting a Word file turned into an ebook is trivially easy. Getting a book into the world isn’t so hard. Being discovered and talked about: really hard.

Building a tribe is not a matter of a miracle. Instead, it’s about converting tiny groups of people at a time, leading them, connecting them, building an audience. When a self-published author does this, she has a new job. Not the author part, but the publisher part. She’s not putting a book into the universe and hoping it will be found. She’s not even putting a book into a journalist’s hands and hoping it will be hyped. No, she is engaging in a yearslong journey to build a platform. It might take a decade to become an overnight success, but if you keep it up, if you keep building, the odds keep getting better and better.

That’s why it’s silly to compare the two ways of making a book happen. If you can get a great deal from a publisher and you’re into the spin, go spin! If you want to control the building of the platform, get your hands dirty, and avoid the whims of fate, then the other path makes a lot more sense, no?

[Analogy alert: the above applies to your career, to musicians, to entrepreneurs, to VCs, to coaches, and to just about everyone who is hoping to get picked.]

A hundred years ago, if you wanted to know what time it was, you had to make a significant investment—in a watch.

Twenty years ago, Timex made it clear that if you merely wanted the time (not jewelry), it would cost about $15.

And five years ago, every kid with a cell phone got the time as a free bonus.

And yet there are still watchmakers. Still Rolex and Patek and the rest. Some of them are having great years.

Clearly, they don’t sell the time. They sell jewelry. Exclusivity. A souvenir.

One reason to buy a watch (or a book) is because you want to possess it, show it off, give it to your grandchildren. Holding a book is a luxury, one for which you pay a premium. There are few books that contain information unavailable anywhere else, and fewer still that can’t be bought more cheaply and easily as an ebook. In the nonfiction category, the reasons to buy a book are smaller still. With a novel or a significant work of nonfiction research, the book itself might be part of what you’re paying for. In a busy universe, though, if all you want is information, you can probably find it faster and cheaper without the book part coming along for the ride.

And so 90% of the people who read my blog don’t buy my books, figuring that they can get the information (or at least enough information) for free. This is as big a change as the time-keeping change that rocked the watch world. You no longer have to pay a book toll to get information.

Sam Harris is worried that this change means the end of authors. At some level, he’s correct: the lack of a barrier means that the number of authors is skyrocketing, yet the sales per author are going down. Ebook distribution means that everyone can be everywhere, but it also means that more choice generates less income for each writer.

It’s as if the watch business had 100,000 competitors in it.

Patronage is one answer. The way it makes you feel to put a dollar in the busker’s guitar case, or to buy a CD even though you know how to
listen for free. I get pleasure out of buying books, and I like supporting the medium (even though the vast majority of the money I spend goes nowhere near the person who took the creative risks). Patronage, though, doesn’t make an industry work.

No, the future of books lies in amateur authors, together with the few superstars with a big enough tribe or a big enough reputation to earn significant advances and royalties. (And yes, a “middle class” of authors with a big enough tribe to make a living, but nowhere near what it takes to make it big.) The big middle, though, the writers who earned enough on tolls—those guys are in big trouble long term. As Esther Dyson predicted fifteen years ago, they are going to have to become troubadours again, traveling, selling live events, doing speeches, etc.

You don’t have to like it, but that’s how it’s sorting out. Anyone know what time it is?

There are countless new publishers being created. Online podcasts, talk shows, ebook publishers, new kinds of film studios and record labels—all of them need talent.

Here are four words that create an acronym for what talent wants (along with two things it no longer needs):

MONEY: this is the easiest one, because it’s simple to measure. When in doubt, pay an advance or a fee. When a publisher gives an author $850,000 for her next book, they have earned the right to call the shots. While this is clearly easy for publishers, you can see how difficult this is for authors to pull off in a long-tail, moving-toward-free world.

UBIQUITY: in an economy based on attention, the publisher that can offer talent a large platform has a significant edge. The reason virtually no one turned down Oprah during her reign was simple—she guaranteed the largest possible audience and she delivered it every single day. This is why a permission asset—a list of customers/listeners/readers just waiting to pay attention—is at the core of the publishing proposition.

STRUCTURE/SUCCOR/STANDARDS: talent often looks for someone who will care, raise the bar, shepherd the work, challenge, and
generally make the good, great. This is why stories of great editors are legendary. Charlie Rose and Woody Allen both get talent for cheap for this very reason. Make a project interesting enough and talent will be interested.

EGO: rare indeed is a talented person who is uninterested in what the world thinks. If they’re out there, you probably haven’t heard of them. Writers want to win a Pulitzer, and jugglers want Ed Sullivan to tell them they did a great job. Hollywood publishers are fabulous at this. Producers and executives spend most of their time engaging with the talent early and often and bringing them feedback or control or interesting challenges—the things that drive better work.

The TED conference, then, thrives as a publisher (even though they don’t pay a penny to the talent) because they bring a huge audience via video, because they insist on extraordinary presentations (and work with the speakers to get them), and most of all, because there is a prestigious audience, a group the talent would like to consider its peers, just waiting to give a standing ovation and to make connections for future projects.

The two letters missing from the acronym now turn MUSE into MUSEUM (sorry, couldn’t help it).

UMBRELLA: talent has often avoided the vanity press, the self-published route, the notion that it’s okay to pick one’s self. It was unseemly. You looked for cover, for an umbrella to protect you from the criticism that you weren’t good enough to be chosen. I think there are enough extraordinary successes in every field that this is clearly no longer the case.

MECHANICS: it used to be that the most obvious role of the publisher was to handle mundane, expensive, and challenging tasks like printing, binding, shipping, accounting, venue arrangements, film developing, carriage, etc. All of these elements are diminished in the digital world—some are still important, but most are easily outsourced by the talent if she chooses. Handling this role is not enough in itself, and those who can do only this are left resorting to offering money as an inducement, which doesn’t really scale.

The publishing landscape is being completely reshaped—in just about every medium. The next generation will replace this landscape
when they get ever better at providing at least three of the four things talent wants.

Now that shelf space is infinite, now that ebooks take up no room and every seller of them has an incentive to have a nearly infinite selection, the inevitable next step shows up:

When anyone can publish a book, anyone will
.

Far worse than the individuals publishing junk, though, are organizations generating literally thousands of books that no one would happily buy if they knew what was in them.

These books are created by shoveling public-domain content—often from Wikipedia, and with no human intervention, no care, no attention to detail—into ebooks. Worse, they are then mislabeled as something that feels like a pirated book or an interesting collection of essays.

While some bloggers have been doing this for a decade, surfing a blog is free and it’s a natural way to browse the Web. Buying an ebook is neither.

The real losers here, in addition to the ripped-off readers (and the writers who are having their names stolen), are the ebook platforms themselves. Once the Nook and the Kindle get a reputation as dark alleys filled with mislabeled junk, it will be hard to erase.

If it were me running the store, I’d delete every single book from a publisher caught with junk like this. And I’d figure out how to rate not just authors but publishers, so it wouldn’t be so easy for someone to show up and steal a brand and disappoint a customer.

Back when the only way to get people to read your work was to get them to actually buy your work first, a focus on selling and a focus on being read were the same thing.

Paper costs money. You need to sell the book if you want someone to read it, so feel free to spend all your time persuading people to
buy
it.

In the digital world, there’s a little bit of bluff-calling going on. If the
cost of delivering one more copy of the book is zero, then choosing to sell your work is optional. You might choose to work hard merely to get people to
read
your work, leaving money out of the equation.

Money cuts both ways, of course. If someone pays for your book, perhaps they’ll take it more seriously, focus a bit more energy on it. If your book is easy to get and find and discard, perhaps it’s not valued as highly. On the other hand, it will certainly spread faster.

Too many choices, no doubt.

But the real question remains: Are you writing to be read, or are you writing to get paid? They are becoming ever more divergent paths, with gradations ($6? $9?) in between.

(An example of this divergence is the publishers and authors that oppose libraries and the lending of ebooks. In these cases, even though money was paid, they’re apparently against being read—even though there’s zero evidence that library reading hurts book sales.)

Web users have been trained long enough to know what they want: everything.

That’s the promise of the Web. Every book for sale at Amazon. Every search result visible on Google. Every auctioned item right there on eBay.

Not piracy. Availability.

The music industry got confused about this and decided that people merely wanted to steal music. What’s clear now from the rise of iTunes, as well as ad- and subscriber-supported services like Spotify, is that people will happily pay as long as the music brings most everything along for the ride.

And Netflix shows us that subscriptions are generally more welcomed than à la carte sales.

Into this world walks the MPAA, the movie business, and the folks who make books.

And once again, there’s the same mistake: they think piracy is the problem. It’s not. The problem is that these providers are doing nothing to embrace ubiquity, because their heritage is all about scarcity.

When the VHS tape came along, the MPAA insisted that the movie
industry would be killed by it. They finally listened to the market and made a fortune. And when DVDs came along, the same thing happened. Form factors change and the business model that supports them must change as well. The business model for an ebook can’t possibly be the same as it is for a paper book, despite the best efforts and hyperventilation of a few overpaid book publishing executives.

When in doubt, move toward ubiquity. When wondering, favor subscriptions.

Readers will pay.

Moviegoers will pay.

If you give them what they want, which is everything, right now, easily found and discussed.

Why not ban digital cameras?

Kodak declared bankruptcy this week. Legislation to ban digital cameras could have saved this company, a “jobs creator,” pillar of the community, and long-time wonderful brand. One wonders why they didn’t make the effort? Would you have lobbied for that bill?

A friend tells a story about Kodak. Apparently, they had 59 buildings on the site that made film. As the film business started to shrink, the obvious thing for Kodak to do was to shrink as well, to reduce overhead, to become more nimble. The CEO said, “Look out at those buildings and answer this question for me: How many steps are involved in making film?”