Pirates, Gatekeepers and Darwinian Publishing Part III

One of the supposed dangers of the Internet is the possibility that a few search engines or providers will dominate the net and therefore will be able to surreptitiously direct us to their preferred customers or supress sites they don't agree with. As of this writing Google accounts for 66% of Internet searches. Unless you include non-traditional (isn't that delicious) search 'engines' like Facebook, which accounts for about half of all searches in the US. Add the dozens of watchdog/reporting/marketing services like Search Engine Watch, and the hundreds of industry specific search services, eGroups devoted to one thing or another, blogs, etc and you realize there is no chance of a monopoly taking over the Internet.

Unless it's the Feds of course. That would be 'snowball earth' scenario in our little Darwinian world. But I digress.

For writers there is no better time and there is no worse time. All the known, comfortable ways of publishing seem to be changing, morphing before our eyes. Each week we learn some new thing that opens up possibilities, yet confuses our path even more. Query letters? Agents? ePub? Self ePub? Start our own publishing house? (It's easier than you think, they're springing up like weeds.)

Kindle, Smashwords, Pubit, and the like offer unprecedented access to world markets. Oh, yeah, you need a killer cover, and marketing blog/website/twitter/facebook pages that establish your platform, or as Kathryn Craft put it, your 'street cred' for whatever you're writing. And you better get your branding right.

Confusing, mind numbing, head-spinning changes and terms, yet more and more authors are choosing to epub their own works. Established mid-list authors are reissuing their back-lists to establish revenue streams from otherwise unavailable novels. New authors are publishing their first books. Services exist that will get you an ISBN number and push your book through the process that puts it on Kindle, Nook, and other eBook outlets. New services are springing up to design covers, web sites, blogs to develop the branding and platform for eAuthors.

Oops, I think I just coined a term, eAuthor.

So lets assume anyone can do this (and if you're smart and persistent enough to write a novel you can do this) what are the consequences? What happens when anyone who wants to publish a book can do so at little or no cost except personal effort?

First off, virtually all novels are written on spec, that is you write it, then shop it around and try to sell it. That means there are a lot of unpubed novels sitting on hard drives. I suspect a flood will hit Amazon, Pubit, Nook, etc. over the next two years as ebooks become more 'legit' and people become savvy about how to publish them. Many of them will be trash, of course, and will sink without a trace.

But among them will be dozens, or even hundreds, of runaway best sellers. And thousands of mid-list books, none of which would have seen the light of day without self-epublishing. Thousands more will find a large enough 'niche' market to make decent money for their authors without ever reaching the mid-list.

Successful authors will write and publish more eBooks, the unsuccessful will get better or disappear. Sites like Goodreads will help us tell each other about the good ones.

Remember the market is word-wide and the information is free.

When main stream reviewers see this, some of them anyway, will turn to the eList (Oops, coined another term) for books to review. That may take a while, especially for the self-pubd. Eventually main stream publishers will also recognize the value to be found in the eList, and contracts will be offered to top selling authors.

This means that we, the writers, will increasingly choose what to offer the public, and the public will increasingly choose what is successful. There are few gatekeepers in this ePub world to tell us what we can or can't have.

In essence self-epublishing for novels will become a world sized Helium, brutally Darwinian in its selection process and brilliant in its ultimate output.

It's what real competition is about.

I can't wait.



Pirates, Gatekeepers and Darwinian Publishing, Part II: How we got here.

Last time I made the argument that the nature of the publishing business over the past two centuries had worked to keep real competition from the marketplace. This time I'd like to come at it from a different direction.

Thirty years ago, in 1980, it was a silly notion that microcomputers (IBM had just invented the marketing term Personal Computer) would ever have a serious place in business. Oh, sure some specialist might use one of them for some technical work, (I did) but it was inconceivable that they would have a place in the everyday business of business. REAL computers took up whole rooms and needed megatons of air conditioning.

In 1990, a few PCs were scattered around some offices doing word processing and spreadsheets, but a real tool for critical business operations? Well…no.

By 2000 PCs and networks were a given, and nearly everybody had one.

In ten years, it went from 'eh' to crucial 'gotta have.' (Today many of you will post your comments from your eThing or your iThing. It's not a gotta have anymore, it simply is.)

What made the difference? Hardware advanced, doubling capability roughly every eighteen months while staying the same price or actually getting cheaper. Connectivity, Internet & intranet, became ubiquitous, then essential, and software products to do things that had been pipe dreams, or not even conceived of earlier, exploded onto the business and recreational scenes.

Writers please note: I used the passive voice in the last two sentences. But the process was anything but passive. It was cutthroat competition among hardware and software manufacturers to bring new, innovative and useful products to the marketplace. Thousands of products competed, rose to prominence, and went by the wayside. (Remember Ashton Tate? The ZIP drive?) We tried the new stuff, made it work for us, and discarded it when something better came along.

The point is this came about because there was an open, competitive market for us, the customers, to choose stuff for ourselves. It was, and still is, a relentlessly Darwinian process. There are no gatekeepers to tell us what choices we can have, or to artificially elevate one product over another. (More about this next time)

The Internet, its wireless incarnations, and the aps being written for it, are completely unregulated and entrepreneurs have made available a truly astonishing range of products, many of them free or pretty cheap. Web sites, only ten years ago the must have thing, are now a ho-hum given. Blogs, facebook, twitter, youtube, ustream, all of which are free, are the new media. Add-ons by savvy entrepreneurs turn these freebees into powerful marketing tools, with everything from email newsletter managers to sidebar advertising targeted to the individual consumer.

I will use one illustration of how entrepreneurs are changing the way things get written and published. A site called helium.com (thanks to author Jeffrey Allen for the info) is a place where you can pick a topic, write about it, and get feedback plus a ranking vs. all others who have written about the same topic. You are expected to read and critique other works, not related to yours, so it is a mutual cooperation process. As you get your feedback and ranking you can rewrite and resubmit, getting more feedback and being re-ranked. As you improve, you move up the scale till you may reach the top. The top ranked pieces are submitted to appropriate publications by the helium staff, and you may actually get paid for it. The process is free, except for having to rank other folk's stuff. Helium does a lot more too, but this is what I want to highlight now.

Can you think of anything more brutally Darwinian? But if you participate, and persist, I guarantee you will become a better writer. This is now geared to non-fiction, but can you think of any reason, other than length, why it couldn't be adapted to fiction?

The people who put Helium together have invented the perfect writer training academy: write and be ranked, try again and be re-ranked, move up the food chain. The entire process is anonymous, so you don't feel so bad.

In a way, the entire publishing industry is about to become like this.  We are at a cusp of a change that hasn't happened since the invention of movable type. In some ways this change has already come about. Many of us are members of critique groups that consist of people we have never met and who may live in other countries. We routinely exchange manuscripts (which means 'hand written' BTW) with people on the other side of the globe.

There's a corollary to all this, something that is not always obvious. That is that the marketplace has become vast beyond imagining. Which means that the niches are also vast beyond imagining. The entrepreneurs who learn how to fill those niches will prosper.

As a writer you can be an entrepreneur who fills some of those niches.

More in Part III: Competition and Monopoly.