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How we live now: Amazon reviews and sales figures

Posted on April 27, 2012 // Leave a Comment

I was speaking recently to a clever chap who knows about things, and he told me of a self-published author he knows who has had a bit of code written which queries the Amazon API for regular daily sales figures and the latest reviews on her books. He told me that there was a direct correlation on Amazon between a bad review hitting the system and the sales numbers; they dropped by 75 per cent immediately.

So this author does this: every time a bad review hits the bit of code she uses, she contacts one of her friends and asks them to write a five-star review. They do so, and hey, whaddya know? The sales go up again.

This, I must admit, made me feel a bit queasy.

Firstly, it made me wonder why publishers in Britain don’t have similar bits of code to this author, telling them in real time what’s going on; or, if they do, why they don’t seem to use this information particularly aggressively.

Secondly, it made me ask myself if I should be doing something similar to this: watching the reviews, and instantly responding to them by calling in favours.

Thirdly, it made me ask myself why I feel such a colossal reluctance to do anything like that.

Fourthly, it made me wonder at the value of Amazon reviews.

Fifthly, it made me wonder why I’m so horribly naive.

Filed Under: Books and publishing //

The tragedy of attention

Posted on April 14, 2012 // Leave a Comment

Not Joni Mitchell

David Hepworth’s written a brutal and honest assessment of the difficulties anyone putting a record out just now has in getting the attention of “taste makers” who can propel it from almost-ran to hit. He has a particularly graphic way of illustrating these difficulties, which I’ll quote from here:

As I write this I have at my left hand a copy of Burning Spears 1976 album “Man In The Hills”. Ive actually only just heard this record. Until recently I never went further than “Marcus Garvey”. Anyway “Man In The Hills” is brutally good.  I keep it close at hand as my Control Sample. Not far behind it is a copy of “Revolver” and Nick Lowes “The Old Magic”, both of which could easily be Control Samples.

The presence of the Control Sample means that I have to decide whether Id rather spend the next forty minutes of my life reaching a further level of intimacy with something I know is worth the investment or risk it on something untried from my huge great box of new stuff right, most of which, I have learned through experience, will never be fit to dust the shoes of those three great records. Thats why lots of the time the Control Sample wins.

via David Hepworths Blog: Record reviewing and the Control Sample.

I had three responses to this, as someone with a new thing out there (in my case, a novel) which needs the oxygen of attention to survive.

Response 1: AAARRGHHH. Because what this seems to describe is, if you like, a Tragedy of Attention; a world in which the recent cultural past silts up our appetite for “new stuff”, a world in which there isn’t in fact any “new stuff” at all, just spins on the “old stuff”, a world in which every new piece of heralded stuff just kills the future. To repeat: AAARRGHHH.

Response 2: Hepworth is a man of gargantuan experience in the music industry, well into his fourth decade of responding to and writing about music. He is, without doubt, my favourite music writer (in fact, I sometimes think he’s my favourite writer, full stop). But I wonder if he also has a different attitude to new stuff because of that experience. The fact is, he does have four decades-worth of fine music in his head, but a younger reviewer does not. So perhaps that possible younger viewer is not comparing, for instance, Laura Marling with Joni Mitchell. Perhaps, for them, Laura Marling is fresh and new and sparkling. Or at least, more potentially interesting as a “current” Joni Mitchell; our Joni Mitchell.

Response 3: Despite being one of the most clued-up “old media” executives when it comes to thinking about the digital world, Hepworth is pretty much describing the old world of review opportunities in a limited number of outlets, when a decent review or a Record of the Week slot could make a career. Those slots are still essential and potentially career-making, but they’re no longer the whole story. There are more independent channels and there are more, far more, opportunies for word of mouth to be amplified. The English Monster, for instance, got a cracking review in Londonist, the independent London blog. Is that more valuable than, say, a review in the Times? Almost certainly not, but it’s getting there. And meanwhile on Twitter people can say they love something and be retweeted and retweeted and be getting attention from tens of thousands of other people within minutes.

I’m not arguing with Hepworth – I would not presume. But I do think the world isn’t quite as brutal as he suggests.

But I’m also aware of the obvious comeback to this happy-clappy techno-utopia stuff: well, of course, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Filed Under: Books and publishing //

More parleying with pirates

Posted on March 20, 2012 // 4 Comments

Last week I wrote a thing for Guardian Books about my experiences talking to some people from the Mobilism website about book piracy – specifically, about why they thought it was OK to pirate my book, and therefore deprive me of income. I won’t recap the whole thing here, but suffice to say it went a bit nuts over the weekend, and the article is still being retweeted all over the place as I write this.

Because of the attention, quite a few people dropped me a note via this website, and said some quite interesting things in the process. They contacted me privately so I won’t reveal who they are or what they said, but I wanted to honour their intent. I firmly believe the greater the dialogue between the people who write books and the people who “pirate” them, the better.

But there’s one exception to that policy of keeping all the comments private. It was perhaps the most significant and controversial message I received. It was from someone who claimed to be the “owner of Mobilism”, the site where I’d first encountered all this piratical activity. The email address was “admin@mobilism.org” and he asked me to keep any “correspondence” private. So I won’t publish what he sent to me. That’s a way of acknowledging his ownership of his words – see what I’m doing here?

I am, though, going to reproduce what I said in reply:

Hi – many thanks for that, very interesting, and you’re right, I should have emphasised that an author can ask for a title to be taken down. But then that begs the rather obvious question: why should they?

Under law, I own my content. I have licensed it to certain individuals and companies to be used in certain ways which I give permission to. The fact that I am now having a conversation with an anonymous person who has essentially (though indirectly) taken it upon themselves to change the economic basis on which I sell my goods is wrong, unworkable and will in the end lead to people like me doing something else with my time. I do believe that.

This, for me, is the essence of the matter. If I own something, I should be the one making the decisions on how it is exploited. By providing Mobilism, you have taken a good deal of power out of my hands. The decision not to provide the book for free, or very cheaply, may indeed be the wrong one – but it is mine to make, not yours, and not the users of your site.

I am using strong words to make myself clear, because I want you to understand how your activities make people like me feel: we feel emasculated. We feel we have created something that we want to distribute, and we want to make our own mistakes. We don’t want to be lectured on marketing by people we have never met, nor ever will. We don’t want to be told we “don’t get it” – you are not saying this, I know, but some people responding to my article have said that. I do indeed “get it.” I have a better understanding of the economics of content than 99.9% of the users of Mobilism. I know what I am doing. And if I screw up, it will be my mistake.

I thank you for responding to me, and if you wish to keep this conversation private I will honour that wish. But I would say this runs very much counter to the principles you and Mobilism seek to profess, and I would like to put the exchange on my blog and keep this out in the open. But I will allow you to make the call on that – a courtesy which, I would point out, your site did not extend to me in the first instance.

Thanks for dropping me a line.

As you’ll see, I said I would allow him to make the call on publishing the email, but he never replied. So here we are. My response was rantier than I would have liked, but it was also heartfelt; whatever the rights and wrongs of the strategy behind free content and free promotion and pirated material, at the end of the day it should be the people who create the content who make the call on its distribution. I respect and support Cory Doctorow’s right to distribute his books for free, and I know why he does it. I’d expect him (as I’m sure he does) to respect my right not to do so, and to allow me to be wrong if that turns out to be the case.

Anyway, enough pirates. Back to writing books.

Photo from Flickr user evilnick, licensed under Creative Commons. This acknowledgment is called “respecting someone else’s copyright.”

 

Filed Under: Books and publishing //

Harkaway on books, ebooks and contexts

Posted on February 9, 2012 // Leave a Comment

It’s the second reference to Nick Harkaway in a week on here, but what the hell, he’s got a book out this week (and bloody good it is too, judging by the first hundred pages).

Anyway, Nick’s jumped into the whole “ebook v. print” debate which some people wish would go away, others are making a whole living out of, and the rest of us find fascinating and satisfyingly controversial.

His point, in an excellent posting on Futurebook, is that ebooks are fine, but only when they find their right slot inside our personal cultures:

After a few years of enjoying and thinking about electronic books, paper still has a very specific place in my world – in fact, it has regained some ground. The depthless grey of my Kindle screen and the gloss brightness of the iPad or iPhone are fine and good, but they are not the hearth and home experience. For that, I want paper, with its grain and flexibility. I want to be able to manipulate pages in three dimensions, riffle through them, flick back. I want to be an ape with an object for a while, relax into my physical universe while my mind generates the world of the book.

via … everything looks like a nail… | FutureBook.

For myself, I’ve yet to be able to read my Kindle at bedtime and here’s the thing: I don’t know why. It just doesn’t feel right. I read my Kindle in the living room, on the bus, at the kitchen table: anywhere where portability matters and time is moderately fleeting. But bedtime is different; bedtime is for quiet reflection, surprisingly sharp concentration, and for unplugging oneself before sleep. So there, I’ve maybe answered my own question: that’s why I prefer a proper book. And as of right now, it’s Nick’s, even though it’s a heavy bloody thing and I wake up with sore wrists and a sizzling head in equal measure….

Filed Under: Books and publishing // Tagged: ,

Can I read something short now, please?

Posted on November 7, 2011 // 2 Comments

Hector brought back to Troy

We all of us have massive gaping holes in our reading, I am sure. Well, perhaps not all of us. Clive James almost certainly doesn’t. But the list of books I haven’t read is growing all the time, and as I get older it looms over me like some dark tower in Mordor (I am half-Welsh, and thus my glass is always Half-Empty).

Last night I managed to take at least one brick out of the tower by finishing the Iliad. Shamingly, it was an edition I bought at college over twenty years ago and had never read. I only picked it up again because of an old Start the Week which featured Caroline Alexander discussing The War That Killed Achilles, a book I bought probably because I thought it would make me finally, at last, read the chuffing Iliad. Which it did.

This isn’t a review of the Iliad. It’s a blogpost about the impossibility of reviewing the Iliad. Reading something like this is quite a bit more than spending some time with anything as paltry as a book. It’s more like learning to meditate, or tap dance, or fly.

It’s repetitive. Its narrative is all over the place. It flips from Olympian comedy to nauseating violence within a dozen lines. Entire pages go by listing names of soldiers and their fathers and their brothers and their cousins and the farm they grew up on in the region they were born in, and you’ve never heard any of these names before, and they all begin to merge into one like the art does in the Louvre, as you drown in the strangeness of it. And it’s long. Really, really long.

So I’m sure most people think “why bother?” and I can’t blame them. But I think when you pick something up like the Iliad you’re actually performing a kind of service to humanity. There’s no less ponderous way of saying it. There are some texts – and they tend to be texts which have been preserved from a long-gone civilisation – which need to continue to be read, because in some way the reading of them connects us with our past and preserves the texts for the future. I’m thinking of Gilgamesh, of Beowulf, of Langland and of Chaucer and of the Greek tragedies and the great Indian texts. I’ve read only a few of these things, and (whisper it) I didn’t enjoy the reading of them nearly as much as I wanted to, but I’m glad I did. In some way I can’t explain, you should be glad I did as well. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest there needs to be some kind of web service that allows every human who reads one of these things to hold their hand up and go “Here! Here’s another one!”

These are mankind’s sacred texts (and I should of course include the officially-sanctioned “sacred texts”, and I really must read the Koran one of these days). In aggregate, they tell us who we are and who we were. They would die from lack of attention. It is our duty as human beings to at least try to read as many of them as possible. Reading the Iliad was frustrating, difficult and often tedious. But at the end of it, it had become part of me, and I would recommend anyone to read it without hesitation.

That said, I could murder an Alistair MacLean right now.

 

Filed Under: Books and publishing, Delightful //

A second post about the old days when everything was great

Posted on November 1, 2011 // 4 Comments

I posted yesterday, in a trademark rambling fashion, on how digital networks are changing the way we consume culture, and how I felt this to be an occasionally bad thing. Or at least, how I felt we were losing something in the process. There were some responses to that, and I read some other things too, so I thought I’d do another post, but this time it’s more linky.

First of all, Pete Townshend. I hadn’t actually read his John Peel lecture, but he said quite a lot of things which, on the face of it, were pretty similar to what I’d been saying. He certainly seems to say that the cataclysm which has ripped through the recorded music industry – or, more specifically, the record companies – has weakened the industry’s ability to launch new acts. He suggests that networked services, including iTunes, can perform the old record company functions, but I’m really not sure. Neither, it’s worth saying, is David Hepworth, who thinks long and intelligently about these things:

When record stores were the shop window, the companies could hope that your attention might be attracted by something you hadn’t gone in there to get.

All that’s gone now. People download individual tracks, which means even successful acts get a fraction of a fraction of the revenue. Record companies can’t afford to spend money on promoting records. All that matters nowadays is getting into those few inches of space occupied by the home page of the iTunes store.

Another long post I read this morning, which linked to mine but was in no way inspired by it (I’m not that cocky) was by Matt Locke, a former colleague from Channel 4 who is far, far smarter than me when it comes to media theory. Matt was actually responding to Townshend, and says his nostalgia for the past (which I’m not really sure is fair to Townshend – he seems quite positive about the future) is based on a misplaced view of how culture is consumed now:

The ways in which audiences attention can be driven to new culture is infinitely more complex than in the late 20th century, and its only been in the last 5 years or so that we’re starting to see what the new patterns of attention are. Some of them look familiar, with niche content organically (or calculatedly, in the case of shows like The X Factor) getting large amounts of attention. But these patterns are much more unstable that they used to be, and the rewards are nowhere near enough to offset hits and misses.

Alongside the familiar patterns of mainstream attention, there are a huge number of new patterns that could only exist in digital culture. Some of these patterns are very slow, with attention accruing over months or years, as social recommendation or small groups of fans gradually accrue around content. Some are extremely fast, synchronising audiences’ attention around a piece of culture within days, before moving on just as quickly. Some are driven by deliberate plans, orchestrated between broadcast channels and social media. Some emerge via the organic connections of lots of smaller drivers, from blogs and niche channels to SEO and twitter accounts.

Matt calls this kind of consumption Spiky. He says something like punk – a sudden breakthrough of a new cultural experience into the mainstream – will never happen again, but instead “there are a hundred punk moments happening every day.”

The thing is, I think that’s basically what I was saying. Matt doesn’t place a value judgement on that, but I suspect that, knowing him as I do, he is incredibly excited about a world where “a hundred punk moments happen every day.” But my point yesterday was that, indeed, this is happening; but it is, by definition, a more fractured experience. A hundred punk moments may only each be a hundredth as exciting as the One Big Punk Moment which happened in the 1970s.

And yet, and yet: a former colleague said this on Twitter:

Which I really love a great deal. There are more loci of intensity. The great, probably unanswerable, question is whether the intensity is of the same nature as it used to be. Phil (who tweeted that) also pointed out, jokingly, that I am a good deal older than him. I pointed out, joking but with an edge creeping into my voice, that a great many people are older than him.

Finally, my friend Tim Wright asked me if I’d read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which I hadn’t, and he pointed me to the YouTube versions of his famous 1970s television version of that book. In it, Berger essentially says the great cultural artefacts of the past have been fundamentally altered by the development of first photography and then film; that we see them differently now, because our viewing of them is so often mediated by lenses and technology. In other words, technology changes culture. Here’s a clip:

Any more thoughts? Jump in the comments below.

 

 

Filed Under: Books and publishing, Digital content //

A post about the old days when everything was great

Posted on October 31, 2011 // 6 Comments

We shall not see his like again

It’s a generational fact that all my most important cultural experiences were, in one way or another, non-digital. I saw my favourite film (Alien) in a cinema. I read my favourite book (Portrait of a Lady) as a, er, book. My first favourite album, Out Of The Blue by E.L.O, and my second favourite, Life’s Rich Pageant by R.E.M (what’s with the acronymal band names, Lloyd? No idea, sorry) were both bought and consumed, richly, on vinyl. And concerts – either Iron Maiden at the Hammersmith Odeon or Blur at the Brixton Academy, since you’re asking – were the most analogue, unrepeatable experiences of them all.

As I get older and those days recede and incipient nostalgia overwhelms I’m increasingly convinced that the very analogue unrepeatability of those experiences is what made them so profound, and is what served to hardwire them into my brain. And I wonder if the singularity of those experiences is itself unrepeatable. Is it even possible to have unrepeatable experiences anymore? In a world of infinite choice, massive accessibility and ubiquitous playout devices, is every cultural experience doomed to be less meaningul, more ephemeral – thinner?

I’m a bit haunted by this question, I must admit. I’ve spent the last decade-and-a-half working in digital media, and I’ve been a crashingly dull and and consistent advocate for the enormous human benefits which come cross-border networks and digitised content have wrought. Wikipedia, email, Twitter, real-time news, YouTube, distance learning, online banking and shopping – the list of things which I believe have made the world smaller and more interconnected and more free is extraordinary.

And yes, iTunes is wonderful, as is the Kindle, as is the iPod/iPhone. They bring massive convenience to the purchasing and consumption of culture. Being able to download War and Peace instantly to a device the size of a DVD packet is a miracle, and it is, I strongly believe, a good thing for book publishing as an industry.

And yet, and yet….

Read this, by Anthony Lane, on the growth of video-on-demand:

There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.

I think his point about compulsion is interesting, but not quite right. I think it’s more to do with the amount of effort we make to do something, the amount of attention we invest in it and, crucially, the unrepeatability of the experience which gives culture its resonance. Being part of a crowd makes an experience unrepeatable. Being given a piece of culture as a gift does likewise; we have really lost the art of giving music to each other in the shift to digital – unwrapping an album-shaped gift used to be one of the most unspeakably exciting things in the world. Getting an iTunes code to be redeemed by a piece of software is by no means comparable. And don’t get me started on the lost romance of mixtapes…

When culture is instantly accessible and available, it loses lustre as it gains democracy. Part of this is due to a degradation in its quality; we trade high-and-low-end frequencies for the convenience of MP3. But I think this is a red herring. I don’t believe men of my age (and it is almost always men) are increasingly obsessing about vinyl and lossless encoding because of sound quality. I believe they’re hunting for an unrepeatable experience. I think they want culture to be more difficult, more inconvenient, because that way its consumption becomes more of an event. It seems to mean more.

I was already thinking about such matters when I read this, earlier today. It’s from Michael Pollan’s incomparable book The Botany of Desire. He’s talking about cannabis and what it does to music:

All those who write about cannabis’s effect on consciousness speak of the changes in perception they experience, and specifically of an intensification of all the senses. Common foods taste better, familiar music is suddenly sublime, sexual touch revelatory. Scientists who’ve studied the phenomenon can find no quantifiable change in the visual, auditory, or tactile acuity of subjects high on marijuana, yet these people invariably report seeing, and hearing, and tasting things with a new keenness, as if with fresh eyes and ears and taste buds.

You know how it goes, this italicization of experience, this seemingly virginal noticing of the sensate world. You’ve heard that song a thousand times before, but now you suddenly hear it in all its soul-piercing beauty, the sweet bottomless poignancy of the guitar line like a revelation, and for the first time you can understand, really understand, just what Jerry Garcia meant by every note, his unhurried cheerful-baleful improvisation piping something very near the meaning of life directly into your mind.

I love that phrase the italicization of experience, and it’s exactly what I’m talking about here. Digital culture has, I’d contend, removed a lot of the italicization (though not, it would appear, from this post). Experiences have become ubiquitous but endlessly repeatable, just like a sound file has become endlessly repeatable. Spotify makes a world of music available to you, at the cost of sound quality (of course) but also at the cost of memorable discovery and deep, memorable noticing. I’ve tried listening to an album on Spotify. I just haven’t been able to. Whenever I use Spotify, I feel the sort of strung-out dissatisfaction I feel after a microwaved ready meal.

It happens at an industrial level, too. I can’t remember where I read it, but someone recently wrote that there will never be another Bruce Springsteen, not because his talent will never be replicated, but because Bruce is as much our shared experience of Bruce as he is an individual artist. The flipside of the cliff-like barriers to entry of the pre-digital music industry was that those who broke through to an audience by necessity became massive, because our appetite for music was enormous while the supply was deliberately constrained. Bruce was heroin and diamonds, precious and rare and addictive, but the intensity of that experience is gone forever. We traded it for something else.

(This isn’t to say there wasn’t something a bit disgusting about the majestic hugeness of those pre-digital bands. They became rich after all by indulging their hobby. But there was something majestic in being part of a community which worshipped them. There just was. And it didn’t matter how big that community was, either. There’s no-one more dedicated than a fan of The Fall).

So, what did we trade all this stuff for, and was it worth it? We got convenience. We got choice. We got it for less (but are we spending less on entertainment and culture? I’d argue almost certainly not. More, if anything). In some cases and for some people, we gained the ability to adapt and remix the culture to create something new. For people who are creating culture, the tools of creation became ubiquitous, and those cliff-like barriers to entry tumbled into the sea.

All of those things are worth something. What they are worth to you will be different to what they are worth to me. Some people believe (with almost religious fervour) that the ability of more people to create content and to remix other people’s content is actually the dawn of a new era of human culture, an era in which we all become creators and through our combined efforts generate something sublime.

Perhaps that is true – although it hasn’t happened yet. It’s a beautiful vision but also, as of now, one which requires a great leap of faith – particularly for those of the pre-digital generation who made a career out of creating at a time when demand exceeded supply. But I also think we should pay some attention to how we might secure at least part of what made the pre-digital culture so exciting.

You can start to see people doing this. It’s my impression (though I have no data for it) that book groups are more popular than ever, as people seek to replicate a more communal sense of reading just as more and more titles are becoming available – reintroducing scarcity, as it were. A friend of mine organises a monthly record group, in which each attendee chooses a selection of tracks and plays them to the others, and they drink wine and discuss the music and generally have a rare old time. People go to literary festivals, pay huge amounts for concert tickets, and watch more and more culture and review shows.

Also, I think it’s interesting how young people consume music even today. Both my children (now teenagers) do exactly the same thing. They find music quickly and efficiently, often through the lens of radio and friends (no great cultural revolution there). They make playlists. And then they listen to those playlists again and again and again. The playcounts on my iTunes show how my daughter might listen to the same song 10 times or more in an evening. So they’re still investigating music deeply. They’re just doing it on a device with less sound quality, and (crucially) they’re doing other things at the same time. Chatting online, mostly.

For us refugees from the pre-digital dark ages, it’s like we’re reaching back for something. Back for a time when there were more shared cultural moments, when tens of millions of Britons watched a single broadcast of Morecambe and Wise, when there was nothing on television on a Sunday afternoon and we were forced, actually forced, to listen to Out of the Blue time after time after time because there was nothing else to do. And as a result, we knew every chord change, every bass note, every swelling of the strings, as well as we knew the colour of our own front doors.

Filed Under: Books and publishing, Digital content, Writing //

That article in the Guardian

Posted on August 30, 2011 // 3 Comments

So, the article I wrote for the Guardian about book publishing, statistics, gloom and optimism has caused quite a splash today: hundreds of retweets, lots of comments on guardian.co.uk, a few grumbles but also a great many hurrahs (which I’ll come back to later in the week).

For now, this is just to say “thanks for listening”, and to give a place here for discussion of the article if, for some reason, people don’t fancy doing so on guardian.co.uk.

And in conclusion: I’m not and never have said that everything in the garden is rosy. I’m just saying the data that’s available doesn’t prove that it isn’t. That is all.

Picture from mtsofan on Flickr.

Filed Under: Books and publishing //

We’re overdoing the gloom about books and publishing

Posted on August 23, 2011 // Leave a Comment

"We're doomed. Doomed!

Sometimes, it’s good to have your head in the sand. It stops you hearing people cutting themselves to pieces.

I’ve just finished reading Ewan Morrison’s extraordinarily gloomy offering from the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The Guardian are running an extract from his speech, Are Books Dead and Can Authors Survive, on their website. Go and read it. Then (if you’re an author) go and shoot yourself.

Or maybe: wait, and think for a minute. Let’s look at what Ewan is saying – and let’s wonder if he really has made his case.

Warning: I don’t know Ewan, and haven’t read his books. But I do have a book coming out next year. I am therefore professionally obligated to affect a cheery disposition when it comes to the future of the novel as a commercial entity. Ewan may or may not be in the same boat. He certainly doesn’t seem to be very optimistic. I may also quote selectively for the purposes of argument. And I’m not saying the book has a bright future (well, I sort of am, but let’s leave that for later). I’m just saying that Ewan hasn’t demonstrated that it doesn’t, and I am using his speech (rather unfairly) as an example of the kind of apocalyptic language which I think is wrong and unhelpful across all the creative industries, not just books and publishing.

So, here we go:

The printed book will go within 25 years:

On the paper front, depending on whom you listen to, statistics vary wildy. Barnes and Noble claims it now sells three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined. Amazon claims it has crossed the tipping point and sells 242 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks, while Richard Sarnoff, CEO of Bertelsmann, admits that the future of the paper book is tied to the consumption habits of a generation: the baby boomers. Generation Y-ers (the children of the boomers) already consume 78% of their news digitally, for free, and books will follow suit. Interpreting Sarnoff’s calculations, the paper book has a generation left.

First of all, the Barnes and Noble stat is for bn.com only – in other words, it’s only online sales. And the B&N announcement actually emphasised that the increasing popularity of ebooks had grown the company’s overall sales by 20%, while in-store sales (of, presumably, printed books only) fell by 3%. A decline in one sector more than offset by growth in another. Of written books that people are paying for. Hardly the end of the world.

And yes, it does appear that in Amazonland Kindle versions are dramatically outselling hardback versions. But hardback has been a shrinking market for years – long before the Kindle came along. And is there not another view: that people are paying relatively high amounts for books a year before their paperback release, because they want them now on their digital devices. Isn’t this a good thing?

Which leaves us the final point in this section: that there is something inevitable about “Generation Y” demanding their book content for free, because that’s how they’ve come to think about content. But where is the demonstrable link between people’s attitudes to news and people’s attitudes to novels? And doesn’t this ignore the stark reality that one sector has grown more explosively than any other in fiction in the last decade: the young adult sector? If all those kids are downloading books for free, how do we explain the bank accounts of JK Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, Anthony Horowitz and Charlaine Harris?

It may be a naive view, but it seems to me that people are buying as many books as they ever were; perhaps even more than before. And they’re paying pretty handsomely for them too, by and large; the price collapses experienced by the music and home video industries have, to date, largely been avoided by the publishing industry. Whatever you think of agency price agreements and the like, it seems clear that people are still prepared to pay pretty well to get hold of books. In any format.

Publishers are no longer paying advances

With the era of digital publishing and digital distribution, the age of author advances is coming to an end. Without advances from publishers, authors depend upon future sales; they sink themselves into debt on the chance of a future hit. But as mainstream publishers struggle to compete with digital competitors, they are moving increasingly towards maximising short-term profits, betting on the already-established, and away from nurturing talent. The Bookseller claimed in 2009 that “Publishers are cutting author advances by as much as 80% in the UK”. A popular catchphrase among agents, when discussing advances, meanwhile, is “10K is the new 50K”. And as one literary editor recently put it: “The days of publishing an author, as opposed to publishing a book, seem to be over.”

Ewan might be right about this. It’s certainly something I’ve read and heard a lot recently. But here it is all rather anecdotal: a Bookseller piece from two years ago, a popular catchphrase, a tidy aphorism from an agent. Advances may be declining, and that is presumably a direct result of publishers changing their approach. But publishers may only be reacting to market signals, and in this case it is writers sending out those signals. In a world with ubiquitous tools of creation, more people will create. More people are coming into the market with works, which means more submissions to agents and publishers, more self-publishing, more stuff. At the same time, mass-market publishing (which is still barely a hundred years old) has become more business-like and a good deal more corporate, possibly as a response to big publishing houses being absorbed into larger entities. In that world, with more books being made available and more of a focus on the bottom-line, it doesn’t surprise me that advances would come down. It’s at least as plausible an explanation as the one that says the bottom has fallen out of the book business.

It may also be true that writers now, on average, earn less. But how many published authors are there now? I don’t know the answer, but I’ll bet that there are more titles available today from more authors than at any other time in history. So, even if people were buying as many books today as they were a decade ago, the average writer’s income would be falling. Now, that may not be good for the average writer – but does it mean the end of the business? Surely not.

The long tail is inevitable and will destroy livelihoods

The long tail is Amazon and iTunes, Netflix, LoveFilm and eBay. It is, arguably, between 40% to 60% of the market, which was hidden and/or simply unavailable before the advent of online shopping.

As more consumers come online and chose to select content for themselves, the long tail gets longer. It also starts to demolish the old mainstream system of pre-selection, mass marketing and limited shelf space for “bestsellers”. Amazon is a successful long-tail industry: it has forced publishers into selling their books at 60% discount and driven bookshops out of business. As the long tail grows, the mainstream mass market shrinks and becomes more conservative. The long tail has created this effect in all of the other industries that have gone digital.

Ewan doesn’t give a source for his assertion that the long tail is “40% to 60% of the market”. 40% of what? Revenues, volume, profits? I’m not sure. And it’s worth saying that the long tail theory, now some seven years old, has itself taken quite a battering in recent years, not least in the pages of the Harvard Business Review. I’m not sure you can use a partly-discredited theory and some asserted statistics to prove very much at all.

Also, I think you’d need to prove something else: that people were buying “long tail” titles (hard to find, impossible to stock in traditional retail) instead of new, mass-market releases. Is there any evidence for this? If there is, I haven’t seen it.

Everything tends towards free

Ewan asserts that every medium in which digital networks have intruded – music, home video, porn, newspapers, telecommunications, photography – has witnessed massive piracy and aggressive price-cutting in a downward march towards zero:

In all of the cases above, digital industries have been pushed towards zero price by two factors: (1) mass piracy and (2) the consumer demand for massive discounts. Book piracy has only just begun but it is now very simple to break through the DRM protection systems set up by publishers and to illegally download books in less than 60 seconds.

Yes, there has been massive piracy since the advent of digital content. And I don’t want to make the argument here that “books are different” (although I think they are, a bit, but not enough to make a case that digital copying won’t have an impact). But we’re only hearing half the story here. The other half of the story shows that businesses can be sustained in this new environment, if costs are cut, but it’s a painful transition – it’s expensive and tiresome to maintain a business which publishes both CDs and MP3s, but while people are still buying CDs you’ve got to do it. It also shows that convenience is more important to people than cost; when systems make it easy to pay for content, as iTunes has done, piracy declines (not to zero, mind). And it’s not at all about DRM – you can’t stop people copying through technology. You can stop people wanting to copy by making it easier to pay.

And there’s a category error here, that people always make. It says that a decline will always result in a collapse towards zero. But that is not the case. The big corporate names in the entertainment business today look awfully similar to the big corporate names in the entertainment business a decade ago. It’s perhaps worth wondering why that is.

The need to protect writers

Ewan concludes his offering with an apocalyptic vision of content sweatshops and the “culture lords” of service providers and advertisers. Needless to say, I don’t have the same vision. I’m much, much more optimistic. I think people will continue to be willing to pay for novels. I think the networked world provides endless opportunities for writers: to sell their work, reach out to readers and find new things to write about. But I also believe the days of living high-off-the-hog on advances are long behind us, just as the days of record company jaunts and newspaper lunches are behind us. The industries we work in are smaller, more competitive and fiercer than they were – but that is true of all industries, not just the creative ones.

And I firmly believe that by locking ourselves into a narrative of inevitable collapse we will miss opportunities and engage ourselves in battles and arguments which are essentially pointless. I don’t know if the printed book will survive, but then nor does anybody else.

Ewan’s closing argument is this:

The only solution ultimately is a political one. As we grow increasingly disillusioned with quick-fix consumerism, we may want to consider an option which exists in many non-digital industries: quite simply, demanding that writers get paid a living wage for their work. Do we respect the art and craft of writing enough to make such demands? If we do not, we will have returned to the garret, only this time, the writer will not be alone in his or her cold little room, and will be writing to and for a computer screen, trying to get hits on their site that will draw the attention of the new culture lords – the service providers and the advertisers.

Is he asking for some kind of regulatory device which protects writer’s income? Without knowing exactly how that would work one cannot argue with it directly. But I instinctively feel it would be wrong because it would have to work by limiting output in some way. I go back to my earlier point: there are more people writing and publishing today than at any time in history. That may be a bad thing for individual writers (but by no means as bad a thing, I believe, as Ewan argues). But it’s a very, very good thing for people as a whole.

Filed Under: Books and publishing, Writing //

“Books are becoming these places to congregate”

Posted on August 7, 2011 // Leave a Comment

I’ve read a lot of stuff in the past year about how reading will change over the coming years. I know reading will change, but I’ve found a lot of what people are saying about it to be depressingly similar to the things that were being said about newspapers a decade ago; a tiresome mix of the messianic, the banal, the sneering, the obvious and the pretentious. Sometimes all in the same place.

So it was cheering to come back from holiday and read two things which really, for me, nailed some key aspects of the effects of moving from the printed page to the networked screen. First up is an interview with Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book, an organisation which has the kind of brain-clenching presumption in its title which I would normally recoil from. But Stein is definitely onto something with this paragraph:

There is this social aspect: books are becoming these places to congregate, the form of expression is undergoing changes. In most cases e-readers and the e-book developers haven’t caught up to this. There are concepts that are too far afield, like people trying to write a novel collaboratively in World of Warcraft. I have no problem with such a book being considered fiction just like Tolkien but the execution isn’t there. And then there is something like Push Pop Press. Yes, the Al Gore book has interactive media but it is just for one reader at a time. They are simply books with audio and video on the page. We figured that out long, long ago. And it isn’t sustainable. When you’re doing something for the first time you can beg, borrow and steal all sorts of help when it comes to all this content. But when you go back to do it again and again you have to pay up.

via The Social Context of Reading: Five Questions for Bob Stein — Imprint-The Online Community for Graphic Designers.

There isn’t a word of that I would disagree with, and most importantly that idea of a book as a congregation is really reminiscent of something my old boss Simon Waldman at the Guardian was saying about newspapers more than a decade ago. Simon had this fetching image of online newspapers being like DJs in the corner of a party, attracting people into a shared experience through a judicious mixture of performance, curation and personality. I liked the image then, and I like it now, because it speaks to an important truth: that a congregation adds to the thing it is congregating around, whether it’s commenting on an article, highlighting a key paragraph on a Kindle, or recommending a movie on Lovefilm. The congregation amplifies.

The second thing I read was Shane Richmond’s sane but typically forthright piece for the Telegraph, “The Printed Book is doomed: here’s why.” No fence-sitting there. Shane’s point is that when it comes to formats, convenience always trumps the perceived internal value of a particular format. MP3s beat vinyl, and if you don’t believe me visit the vinyl section at HMV. Vinyl might be making a comeback, but only among a very, very core set of aficionados. Everyone else has swapped audio fidelity and warmth for huge convenience; they’ve swapped needles for iPods.

The process is the same for books, says Shane:

However, I’ve noticed that I’m increasingly frustrated when reading printed books because they don’t have a search function. With an ebook I can quickly search the text to remind myself who a character is or to re-read a particular passage. It’s also much easier to annotate and highlight an ebook. I’ve never liked annotating printed books. It feels too much like spoiling them. Annotating an ebook, however, just adds a layer onto a digital file. It can disappear if I want it to.

There are other advantages to ebooks too, such as being able to carry lots of them on a small device and the ability to download a new book in seconds, but it’s searching and annotating that I think are the killer functions.

Not sure I agree that search and annotation are the killer functions. I think it’s the suite that is the killer: portability, search, annotation, instant access to new books and, as Stein says, congregation. And convenience really does win out. Being able to shove a Kindle into my holiday suitcase instead of half-a-dozen doorstop volumes was blissful. As was reading Anna Karenina on a beach without my wrist bending back upon itself.

Picture courtesy of Denise // at Flickr under Creative Commons.

Filed Under: Books and publishing //
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