Marc’s Comments (group member since May 27, 2012)

Marc’s comments from the Q&A with Kindle Single authors Adam Piore, Erika Hayasaki and Marc Herman group.

Sari wrote: "Any qualms about publishing though Amazon - cannibal that it appears to be?"

Personally, none. Because:
1) if I publish through a major publisher, it goes to Amazon anyway. It reminds me of the mid-90s angst over Barnes and Noble killing the community bookstore: on a tour, you read in both though, right?
2)Amazon is currently taking a more aggressive stance on this sort of format, length, etc, than is any other company with that sort of reach. I can´t pitch story ideas to Apple. I can´t pitch 30K words to Norton. This will, I assume, change. It hasn´t yet, though.
3) Sales aside, one writes to be read and people go to Amazon for things to read.
4) Publishing is full of cannibals. I don´t know that going elsewhere is all that different.

Or I´m wrong. Your thoughts?

Curious to see if Karp will put his money where his mouth is on that 20-40k word prediction?

Right, suddenly authors/reporters find ourselves facing the internet's basic problem: the ratio of signal>>noise.

My suspicion is that one of the fundamental reasons Amazon and the Big Six publishers have ended up in conflict more often than collaboration recently is exactly this question of distribution and promotion. Amazon told readers that a story I wrote was signal, not noise. A book publisher can also do that for me, as can a magazine. Increasingly, they all compete to offer me that service. (pre-digital it was the other way around: authors competed to be picked by curators, as you know).

That shift, understandably, makes magazines and book publishers feel assailed, because it's a shift of market power and represents competition for material that may bring them earnings.

As the guy with the material -- the book of notes and the pictures -- my fundamental question becomes: who gets my work to more readers, at just enough of a price to be accessible to the audience, while keeping my little enterprise moving forward? In that sense the difference between something like Singles and a book publisher -- like the ones you work with -- is not so much. Both pay and distribute me pretty well. Sometimes they even do that together, still (a publisher gives me money, I produce a book, the publisher distributes it via Amazon as well as traditional bookstores).

Weighing distribution of journalism via Singles vs via a traditional magazine is a more complex question. Via Singles, distribution and marketing are much more closely linked than they are if I sell a story to a magazine, and the appeal of going it alone for magazine-ish scale work, abandoning the magazine format, is very real. Simply, a magazine markets itself -- read Time/GQ/Cosmo! -- where singles markets my specific story. Curation by a magazine (Our editors have granted Marc two dollars a word in fees and three of this month's 76 pages to display his efforts) is less beneficial to me than direct marketing of my own story. The question is whether my story reaches more readers placed in some fancy title like The Atlantic or National Geographic, which people seek for their good curation, than if picked and promoted by Amazon, which people seek mostly for ease of use.

What seems to be happening is Amazon is starting to be taken as seriously as long-standing editorial titles. My distributor (Amazon) marketed me simply by saying "this exists, and it's legit," and that was enough for several thousand people to spend two bucks.

Like you say, we're straddling the line between book and article in more than one way. In a sense, Amazon is acting like a book marketing department, but more like a magazine title. In the sense that I can say "I am Marc, from X Magazine," I now say "I am Marc, whose Single Amazon is backing." That seems to work for a journalist.

Would eliding distribution and marketing is such a fashion work for a fine art book, where Amazon would probably sound more like a distributor than a curator, right? People seem willing to accept Amazon as a curator of short stories and journalism, so far -- Singles is successful. Whether they accept Amazon curating art is a pretty big leap, though there is probably some splashover legitimacy to simply being in the bookstore. Essentially the old media legitimacy of simply saying "I was published." Presence on Amazon still seems to represent a curatorial step up from simply existing on the internet, though the more people use the uncurated Kindle self-publishing platform, presumably the more that impression will erode -- demanding another curatorial effort from Amazon, or an abandonment of curation in favor of just being a really useful warehouse. My two cents.

So. The motivation for this discussion is the shocking number of curious emails I received after publishing The Shores of Tripoli, a Kindle Single based on reporting I did for The Atlantic in Libya last year. The questions were not about Libya. They were about the process of creating a piece of non-fiction for the Singles program -- the financing, production, reporting, and marketing. Some questions came by email, some came via interviews. Interest from media and tech press helped. Eventually, I started a blog to answer the questions:
https://marcherman.wordpress.com/2011...

A few weeks later, I got an email from Erika, who also wrote a single and teaches journalism at UC Irvine in California. I spoke to one of her classes, again about process as much as content, and came to the conclusion that there was still enough interest to host a small roundtable.

At which point my internet died. I live in Spain, and things move slowly here, and two weeks passed, and here we are. We're hoping the questions we've received elsewhere, can lead to a good discussion here about the how, why, and what of this new/old sort of journalism. Multimedia will increasingly play a part. So will players other than Amazon. It's the start of something, so we figure, best tease out some of the implications, and share some of the nuts and bolts.

Alright then. Ask whatever you like.

We're starting the discussion here, on Monday...but post questions whenever you'd like.