Tag Archives: publishing

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Rushkoff is bullish on book futures

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browsing at the bookstoreThings don’t look great for the publishing industry right now, with retailers folding en masse and publishers consolidating. It’s convinced some folk to read publishing its eulogy, but Douglas Rushkoff has a more positive long-term outlook for the world of books in a short article for Publisher’s Weekly:

Along with the publishing houses, the megaretailers designed to profit off now-failing centralization are also beginning to feel the pain. Book depots just can’t sprout at the rate of Wal-Marts—besides, Amazon already does the centralization thing better than any brick-and-mortar business. Thus, the talented staffs of the superstores (meaning the talented former staffs of the independents) are also being cut loose, region by region.

The good news is that much of this talent—book editors, publicists and sellers—is ready to rebuild what Wall Street has seen fit to destroy. Book enthusiasts are not giving up. I get e-mails constantly from editors asking if I’m interested in writing books for their new, independent publishing houses. Many offer smaller advances but higher royalties and more attention to details—like the quality of my writing. I also get correspondence from people opening independent bookstores in the shadows of vacant outlets, stores that would be happy with a hundredth of the sales volume that made their larger counterparts unsustainable.

Behind the bad news, there is much to look forward to. Our industry has for too long favored those skilled at negotiating the corporate ladder and punished those who simply publish great books. Now that publishing has revealed itself to be a bad growth industry, it is free to rebuild itself as the vibrant, scaled and sustainable business the reading public can support.

I’m not sure whether Rushkoff is being a little too Panglossian here, but I certainly hope he’s right. [image by simiant]

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Niche mag publishing model #271: World of Warcraft, The Magazine

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Still looking for new niche magazine publishing strategies? I sure am – and here’s one that doesn’t revolve around free web content. Indeed, someone’s starting a high quality print magazine on a subscription model. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you World Of Warcraft: The Magazine. Take it away, Ars Technica:

Clearly, there is much to be skeptical about, but the team behind the magazine makes a strong case for a publication of this type. Here’s the scoop on how they plan to sidestep the issues of traditional magazine publishing and still make a profit.

“This won’t be driven by advertising; it’s based on a print-on-demand format. We will launch the subscription website on Friday, monitoring who is subscribing in what language, and print that many copies exactly,” John Gower, International Director of FuturePlus, told Ars. “This will be environmentally friendly—no waste.” This print on demand format allows them to keep publishing costs as low as possible, and releasing magazines to subscribers only—no newsstand—will make sure no copies get thrown away.

“I’m not sure gamers were walking into Waldenbooks to find the newest information anyway,” Dan Amrich, the magazine’s editor in chief, said. So how will the quarterly magazine be advertised? The magazine will launch at Blizzcon, with people being able to subscribe for $39.95, £29.95, or €34.95. That may seem high for four issues a year, but the team is promising a high-quality, large format magazine with heavy paper stock, a glossy cover, and 148 pages an issue… and no ads. “We want this to be a nice surprise when people get it in the post, like unwrapping a Christmas present every quarter.”

Now, the advantage WoW:TM has here over a more general magazine is a ready-made niche interest base of considerable size to pitch to, plus direct access to the information and content that that niche is going to want. But they’re also treating the readers with respect by removing the crappy ads that seem to fill more than half of most game or tech mags, and aiming for a quality physical product that you’re going to want to keep; I’m assuming the content will lean towards stuff that isn’t too time-sensitive. Furthermore, they save on the dreaded pulping margin by going with print-on-demand, keeping their overheads low.

So, I see two takeaways here for the genre fiction scene in particular. First of all, is this a potential model for the genre fiction print magazine surviving? We’ve talked POD in genre before, but I don’t remember it being combined with the no-ads idea. A magazine that makes the effort to be an artefact, a thing of beauty – I’m thinking more Interzone than Asimov’s on the aesthetic front, here – while also delivering 100% great content for a reasonable price… well, in some respects this isn’t that different a model to the existing one, at least in some cases. If WoW:TM succeeds, what will that say about the viability of genre magazines? Is the death of print simply a question of costs not scaling?

Secondly, and maybe more pertinently: World Of Warcraft: The Magazine strikes me as a damn good market for fantasy writers to pitch stories to.

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Has publishing given up on male readers?

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Via GalleyCat comes an article by one Tom Matlack, who thinks that the publishing business has given up on trying to attract male readers. The core of this theory seems to be based on his failure to find a publisher for a proposed anthology of what GalleyCat describes as “first-person stories about manhood”:

We hired the best agent in the business, wrote a detailed book proposal, and went shopping for a publisher. Fifty (that’s 5-0, including a who’s who list of the literary world) turned us down. They told us guys don’t read, would never read any kind of anthology, and most certainly wouldn’t read an anthology about men. Apparently we are all mindless fools. The publishers also said they were focused exclusively on the “sure-thing” celebrity books in the wake of deteriorating economics. Just about that time we noticed a well-received anthology in the New York Times Review of Books written by women during menstruation.

Well, I’m a male reader… and the prospect of a fifty-story anthology of first-person tales about defining moments of manhood is not one that has me enthusiatically opening a search tab on Amazon. My immediate instinctive response is that Matlack has perhaps mistaken lack of interest in a particular book proposal for a lack of interest in reaching male readers in general.

I’m willing to believe that men as a demographic may read less fiction, but if that’s the case then surely pitching predominantly for a female audience is actually a sound market-driven move by publishers? It’s a chicken and egg argument, really; are there less manly books for men because men don’t read so much, or do men not read so much due to the lack of manly books for men? The massive hype around the forthcoming Dan Brown book would seem to suggest that publishers have no problem with putting out male-orientated books if they think people are going to buy them.

Overall, I think the notion that publishing has “given up” on male readers is utter balls, even beyond the notably male-centric domain of science fiction; it sounds like a domain-specific re-run of those “OMG male white Anglo-Saxons are an oppressed minority!!1” whinges that get trotted out from time to time, and Matlack’s exasperated mention of a successful anthology about menstruation as somehow proving his point does little to dispel the whiff of affronted yet passive misogyny.

So, male Futurismic readers – do you feel that publishers aren’t putting out the sort of books that appeal to you as a man (as opposed to as a reader in general)?

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Niche magazine survival strategies and the author-publisher synergy

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magazines at the news-standThe Death-Of-Magazines debate seems to have gone off the boil in the genre fiction scene (albeit temporarily), but there’s still plenty of discussion – and innovation – going on elsewhere. Former Wired columnist and Japanophile Momus takes a look at the migration of magazines onto portable devices like the iPhone over in the Land of the Rising Sun:

Already, musician friends are thinking in terms of iPod apps the way they once might have thought of releasing albums on labels. Who needs a label when an app could be a worldwide delivery system for people interested in your music? Or how about keeping up with Japanese magazines? I’ve already mentioned Nakatree Viewer, a free app that lets you look at the paper ads for magazines that hang in Japanese subway cars.

Nakatree Viewer began as the ad sheets themselves (typically showing a modified version of the mag’s latest cover), then added pop-up QR codes allowing you to access some of the content of the magazines. Now there’s talk of the Viewer actually taking you to online versions of the magazines, either reduced versions (like Courrier Lite, a standalone application for one mag) or full ones.

At a time when magazines are dropping like flies, giving them a new distribution platform is giving them the chance of new life. Whether the iPhone is the ideal reading environment for magazines is another matter. I have a digital subscription to The Wire, but prefer to read it on my big computer, or on paper. But when Apple releases its iPhone-OS tablet computer — rumoured either for next month or early next year, depending on who you believe — who knows?

Meanwhile, Lifehacker flags up a web2.0 site called MagMe that puts full-resolution scans of magazines right into your web browser. While none of these examples are omega points for magazine survival, it’s plain to see that people are working to find solutions. The genre short fiction scene sadly lacks the money to invest in playing around with potentially viable solutions, but we can at least hope that one will come along soon enough for them not to die off entirely. [image by Diane S Murphy]

But talking of publishing models, and looping back to Momus’ comment about his musician friends thinking beyond the traditional record publication process, here’s an interesting reversal from the world of music: a record label that have signed a deal with a band [via TechDirt]. Yes, you read that right.

The release outlined a unique setup Blue Scholars have put together between Seattle’s Caffe Vita Coffee Co. and the excellent hip hop label Duck Down. Simply put, Caffe Vita is providing the cash flow, and they’re hiring Duck Down to run point on marketing.

Just another sign of what we’ve been saying for two years: the business is changing, artists have choice, and artists will find partners to help them get done what they need to — the mantra is no longer: “I’ve gotta get signed I’ve gotta get signed…”

Could this reversal of power work in book publishing? Consider a hypothetical author like Cory Doctorow, whose public profile gives him (or her) a lot of traction beyond the traditional book marketing channels; if they were offered a weak or creatively restrictive deal from their standing publisher (or, indeed, no deal at all) and decided to look around for alternatives, what small press wouldn’t jump at the opportunity offered by the chance to let that author publish the book they really want to write?

The author’s stature would reflect onto the small press and garner more media attention, enhancing its ability to shift units by lesser known authors; meanwhile, the author benefits from the experience and connections of the small press in the more traditional book marketing network, reducing the amount of leg-work required by comparison to a self-published (but already well-known) author trying to get the word out. It’s a potential synergy – and while there are plenty of details missing from that off-the-cuff idea, it doesn’t strike me as the most crazy scheme I’ve heard this week.

What do you think – can fiction publishing save itself by slimming down and becoming more flexible, or will consolidation, cost-cutting and rigid control be its saving grace?

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Is piracy irrelevent to authors?

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Looks like book piracy will be one of this week’s genre blog hot topics after io9 had a chat with successful media tie-in novelist Michael Stackpole, who seems to have come round to Tom O’Reilly’s aphorism that obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy:

Writers still trying to break into the publishing world have an unprecedented chance to start their own websites, build an audience and create a market for their work without relying on major publishers at all, said Stackpole. Posting short fiction or even a serialized novel on a website won’t cause problems if a writer tries to sign a publishing deal at a later date because mainstream publishers don’t see digital publishing as a serious threat.

[As many other commenters have already pointed out, that’s not really the case… and certainly won’t remain the case for much longer. Still:]

Rather than simply changing the method of delivering stories to readers, Stackpole believes digital formats will change the nature of the stories themselves. At the very least, authors should tailor their work to these new mediums. He cited what he referred to as “the commuter market,” people who read two chapters per day on their half hour train ride to work. It’s an ideal market for fiction broken into 2,500 word chapters, and could presage a resurgence of serial fiction. “It’s kind of like a return to the Penny Dreadfuls,” he said. “But the readers today are more sophisticated, so we as writers need to put more work into it.”

Insert your own joke about skiffy media tie-ins and the word ‘dreadful’ here… 😉

Still, the web’s ability to change the publishing game is a given (as we’ve discussed here many times before). What remains to be seen is how things will look when (or if) the dust settles. A commenter at BoingBoing has a summary that seems pretty plausible:

… I’ve been saying that in the future books will be either cheap and print-on-demand, electronic, or expensive beautifully designed and crafted art objects, and that publishers will soon become irrelevant but you will see the rise of superstar editors and designers.

Nobody has disagreed yet.

Anecdotal, sure, but it matches up with similar theories from a whole raft of people both within the publishing machine and without.

In related news, fiction isn’t the only printed medium that is finding a new (and more affordable) home online. The American Chemical Society plans to move its dozen-or-so scientific journals to being published online only, according to a leaked memo:

In it, the publisher lays out the basic facts: printing a hard-copy version of a journal is expensive, and researchers simply aren’t demanding one anymore. Advertisers are undoubtedly aware of the reduction in print readership, which means that the former calculus that made print valuable—more ads per journal than could possibly fit on a webpage—was reaching a point of diminishing returns. According to the Nature article, the journals publisher flatly stated, “Printing and distribution costs now exceed revenues from print journals.”

The person who finally cracks the online publishing business model is going to be a very rich man indeed. So let’s hope it isn’t Rupert Murdoch… he seems to be heading in the wrong direction, anyway.