Christopher Spencer's Blog: C. Lee Spencer's Blog - Posts Tagged "publishing"

There's sort of a mini-war going on in the publishing industry right now between indie-publishing and the old book-rack-publishers. You see, the book-rack-publishers revenues have been in free fall for most of this year. The revenues for indie-publishing now equal the revenues from 1,200 traditional publishers COMBINED. That is an awesome statistic.

I've always believed in the democratization of the Internet. People are so concerned with the hegemony of the "Media". Scary meme posters proclaim that six companies control every news outlet in the USA. Even the National Geographic has been bought out by Rupert Murdoch. This is a really scary situation for some. For me, it's not scary at all. I don't really care. Why? Because we have E.L. James and PewDiePie. That's right, the author of "50 Shades of Grey" (or is it Gray?) and that annoying gamer youtuber that has just attained a BILLION views of his videos.

E.L. James got her start writing fanfic for Twilight. She built up a fan base there that came out in support of her when she published her first book. From that foundation she's earned millions and a three movie deal.

PewDiePie is some Swedish guy (or is it Norwegian?) who recorded himself playing games and posted them online. Through sheer force of personality, he built a media empire that is replicated by thousand of youtube content creators.

Traditional media is dying. I see it every time I walk through the living room and find my nephew watching another presenter screaming into his microphone as he plays a game. I see it every time I read an article about the NEXT million E.L. James put in the bank for writing incredibly mediocre softcore porn books.

Just so it's not lost here, I hate the content of both of these creators. I think they appeal to the lowest common denominator audience. I cannot possibly fathom their appeal. Yet, it doesn't matter whether I like them or not. I simply have to acknowledge that they are the harbingers of a huge transition away from the gatekeepers of content from the old media outlets and the new "crowdsourced" method of discovery.

All of that is preamble to the real topic I wish to tackle here. The old media people are not taking this transition lightly. Like a huge giant being tied down by Lilliputians, it's trying to struggle loose from their tiny ropes. One of the arguments they make is that crowdsourced media is the lowest of lowbrow content. And, in a way, they're not wrong. They're also not right, either.

I'm going to focus on the ebook industry for the rest of the post, mainly because that's where I find myself. I imagine the broad outlines of my post can be applied to other Internet-based content industries, but that isn't my purpose here.

The argument goes like this: There is a flood of poorly written, badly edited ebooks released every day on Amazon (which has exclusivity on 73% of the ebooks sold online). Many of these books are written by authors who can barely string a grammatically correct sentence together, let alone produce anything coherent. There is precious little "wheat" in all of that chaff, and due to rigging of reviews, services that "purchase" books (for a large fee) to force the ebook up to the Amazon bestseller lists for better visibility, etc. I cannot begin to tell you how odious I've found Twitter. Tweet after tweet, hundreds a day, advertising an author or the author's latest book.
How, they argue, can any quality book ever wade through all that garbage to find an audience?

The one tried and true way is to quickly produce a lot of content. There are authors out there who write six to ten books a YEAR. Every month they release a new book. They write in all different genres to expand their audience net as widely as they can. They fiddle around with their search terms. They create, or buy, lists of email addresses so they can notify the audience they've built of every new release they make.

The logic goes like this. If there are a hundred fish in a barrel, each with a price tag attached, which would you rather be? The fishmonger who only has one fish in that barrel, or the fishmonger who has twenty? It's the difference between 1 in a 100 and 1 in 5. Sheer statistics favors the second fishmonger.

So, it's just a numbers game, then? Right? Well, this is where the grumblers of the old media stop thinking through the implications. They stop at discoverability. Perhaps they do this because to take the next step ruins the logic of, "crowdsourced gatekeeping caters to the lowest common denominator."
The fact is, the numbers game only helps the audience DISCOVER the author. It doesn't help with keeping the audience buying the author's books. In other words, if I fishmonger puts twenty fish in, but they're diseased, bony, and smell funny, the customer will not choose any fish from that monger again. If a fishmonger only has one fish in the barrel, but it's large, meaty, and succulent, the audience will return when he's netted another one.

And what of the fishmonger that has five fish in the barrel that aren't as large and succulent nor as skinny and diseased? What if his fish are just "okay". That precious middle point between discoverability and quality? Those are the fishmongers that succeed in the crowdsourced media world.

Very few people who indie-publish have any desire to be the next Tom Stoppard or Cormac McCarthy. They don't want to slave over the perfection of one book for years. They're not looking to be particularly "literary". But the good ones, the ones who gain a following and keep it, like Hugh Howey (writer of the "Wool" series), want to be excellent STORYTELLERS. They want to entertain. They're not so full of themselves that they think their work is going to win a Pulitzer or a Nobel. Nor do they particularly care for literary awards (nor the designation of "writer of literature").

They simply want to tell you a story. Maybe they can excite you, turn you on, or horrify you for a few hours. If they can do that, they've succeeded. And the audience will come back for their next effort, whether it's the fifth book they've published that month, or the first book they've published in five years. Though the rule of "discoverability" favors the writer who can both entertain and create a large library of work.

So, is it feasible to write a 90,000-110,000 page novel every one or two months? Sure, though it's not likely to be any good. There are exceptions to this, but in general there are only so many hours in a day and quality will suffer. That writer will be like the fishmonger with 20 ugly, yucky fish. Is it possible to write a 30,000 word story in two months? That's doable even at a fairly leisurely pace of 1,000 to 2,000 words a day. Any writer with discipline and proper planning can consistently produce at that rate. Will they be 1,000 to 2,000 PERFECT words? Will the prose scintillate? Probably not. But can they entertain? Arguably, yes, if the author has any talent.

So the best indie-authors, the one who can produce entertaining works quickly, are producing works of novella length. 30,000-50,000 words. Many write serials that tell a larger story in smaller segments, or a bunch of individual stories that simply share a common universe. This has the advantage of locking in an audience if that story universe is compelling enough. They'll come back again and again to see what those crazy characters are up to next.
This isn't even remotely a new concept. This is just reviving the pulp magazine era. This is just paralleling the comic book tradition. Largely disposable, light, and entertaining reading. Something you can pick up for a few hours, finish, and feel you've been transported for a while. It's not meant to sit on dusty bookshelves like a trophy declaring the owner a "well-read person". It's not meant to stand the test of years. These stories are not meant to be classics.

Charles Dickens, who got paid by the word, wrote for the pulp magazines of his years. His books were simply serialized chapters published each month. He didn't write them to be "classics". He wrote them to entertain for a bit. To be, ultimately, disposable. He'd be shocked (though pleased), I think, to know his works are still in print today, with many MANY movie adaptations.

This will also happen with the indie ebook market as well. Right in that landslide of titles, are the seeds, the germination, of works of true art written as "fish in a barrel" stories. These authors don't know yet that in two hundred years their works will be lionized. They are simply focused on meeting their word-goals for the day. They worry that their stuff won't be discovered. They read the articles that say what they write is garbage because the old media hasn't vetted it.

History will prove, I think, that this model has opened up the doors of opportunity previously closed to these future star writers. We will be blessed with points of view, philosophies, and wondrous characters that would otherwise never have seen the light of day. And, ultimately, in the numbers game, there are 1,200 traditional book publishers of any note. They'll discover far fewer of these future stars than the open arms of Amazon, who provides opportunity for tens of millions.