publishing
Kickstarter, books, design, the future
This post by Craig Mod is awesome on at least three overlapping levels:
- It’s a detailed, quantitative account of a successful Kickstarter project, full of useful findings.
- It’s about the (or at least a) future of publishing. (And it features a really nice-looking book.)
- It’s beautifully designed! Great typography, great photography, great spreadsheets (!), all assembled in a really readable way. Super-super-impressive.
And I think there might be another level on which it is awesome that I have not yet identified.
Five days left, and to beat Obama, I need ninjas… lots… of… ninjas
Just five days left on my Kickstarter project!
Here’s my latest update. In it, I talk about completing the manuscript (!!), getting “real-time feedback,” Designing Obama, and raising an army of ULTIMATE NINJA ALLIES.
The mantra
Publishers need to act like… record labels.
Say it again.
If there were a Tony Wilson of publishing, you bet I would buy every book printed, (disposable income permitting.)
Think about how true that feels. And think about how few institutions or mechanisms there are that create a sense of trust or of identity in book publishing — especially in the wide-open, nobody-knows anything world of mainstream fiction and nonfiction.
The new book club
Great piece by Sarah Hromack over at the Brooklyn Rail, all about blogs and books and how they fit together—how they should fit together. Snarkmarket makes an appearance!
I like this passage almost for the language alone:
It is a very specific sort of book that I refer to here: feather-light, just slightly larger than a pocket-sized romance novel of the airport bookstore variety. Design-wise, covers are usually flimsy and garish, but painfully so. Type is often oversized and lazily set; the paper tends to be coarse and cheap, a couple of pounds heavier than newsprint. Generally priced in the $10-$18 range, this genre occupies its very own corner in a literary limbo reserved for weight loss plans, how-to guides, and Salt-Water Aquariums for Dummies (For Dummies, 2002)—information manuals collated, bound, and marketed slapdash for mass market appeal.
Ouch!
Sarah also has some nice things to say about New Liberal Arts:
New Liberal Arts was printed as a slim, limited edition chapbook that sold (and sold out, fast) for $8.99; the manuscript is also available in its entirety as a free PDF under a Creative Commons noncommercial license. Unlike its made-for-bathroom contemporaries at Barnes and Noble, NLA’s design is clean and well-considered. The fonts are carefully chosen; the text is readable. It is a book and it takes itself seriously as such. It is a book that I would buy.
And finally, pardon the self-blockquote, but I spent a bit of time thinking about this line, and I really believe it:
“To me, the appeal is almost 100% social,” writes Sloan. “If you’re buying a physical book that’s the culmination of a process or a community that you’ve been a part of, even in a small way—it’s almost like that’s the trophy you get for winning the race. It’s something to read, but also something to be proud of!”
Find it on the internet shelf
This CNN.com article on “internet novels” in China is tantalizing. It’s an interesting story, but this treatment is too shallow—it reads like gee-golly dot-com coverage circa 2000.
It’s about the rise of young writers who build huge audiences on bulletin boards:
Today [Murong Xuecun] is considered one of the most famous authors to have emerged in contemporary China. His debut work, “Leave Me Alone: A novel of Chengdu,” has been read by millions of Chinese “netizens” […] and adapted for film and television and translated into German, French and English.
He also is viewed as a pioneer of what has become nothing short of a literary renaissance online in the country, particularly among young Chinese writers. This is a constituency that has struggled to find a platform for their work in a publishing industry that is viewed as conservative as it often faces state censorship. Instead of remaining silent, a new generation of authors has found its voice on the Web.
Mostly I like the idea of the “internet novel” as a genre:
Bookstores now have sections devoted to Internet novels published as paperbacks […]
And mostly mostly I am just fascinated with the culture of reading and writing in China. I want to know more, more, more. Where’s James Fallows when you need him?
Via Novelr.
Know thy market
For the past few years I’ve been trying to think this way about projects, professional and personal: I need to know how big the market is, and I need to know what success looks like. Now, this doesn’t mean the former has to be huge and the latter has to be blows-the-doors-off; in fact, the opposite usually sets a better stage for satisfaction. Small, well-understood audience; limited, well-defined success scenario. The Powell Doctrine of projects.
So you can see why I loved this estimate from Daniel Menaker in the Barnes & Noble Review (which I didn’t even know existed)—
I have this completely unfounded theory that there are a million very good — engaged, smart, enthusiastic — generalist readers in America. There are five hundred thousand extremely good such readers. There are two hundred and fifty thousand excellent readers. There are a hundred and twenty-five thousand alert, active, demanding, well-educated (sometimes self-well-educated), and thoughtful — that is, literarily superb — readers in America. More than half of those people will happen not to have the time or taste for the book you are publishing. So, if these numbers are anything remotely like plausible, refined taste, no matter how interesting it may be, will limit your success as an acquiring editor.
This is great. Even if it’s off by an order of magnitude (and I don’t think it is), it’s great. It’s like Drake’s Equation for publishing. Here are the odds that there are intelligent life-forms in the universe… who will buy your book.
It’s hugely important. The reason the web works so well—even though, for so many things, the web barely works at all—is because at this point it’s simply so sprawling. Your starting number, N, is huge, so even if you have to whack it down (oh, only 10% of N are even interested in this, and of those N1, 1% will ever find our blog, and of those N2…) you still end up with a huge number.
This is not true of the Kindle-verse. Not true of the App Store—though it’s growing fast. Some markets just don’t have the liquidity to support anything other than the utterly generic, the totally mass-appeal—and it’s not that hard to scratch out some numbers and find out which is which.
An estimate like Menaker’s is also important because it helps you gauge success. What we always hear about are the best-sellers and the blockbusters. They tend to make any numbers that don’t end in –million seem pretty lame. But with Menaker’s numbers as context, suddenly a super-smart book that sells 10,000 copies seems like an improbable success.
So, this is stuff to think about when you’re creating anything. How big is the potential audience—the upper limit? And what fraction of those people do you have to reach to feel like you succeeded?
Via Matthew Battles’ posterous, which is just about my favorite thing on the web these days.