What Is the Future of the Editor?

In his classic essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault offered an analysis of authorship that questioned received ideas about authorial authenticity and originality.

His essay describes authors not as persons but as a “function of discourse,” whether historical, social, or technological (124). Really, his essay ought to be called “What was an Author?” since he ends by saying that “We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author” (138). You can’t help but suspect he’d prefer to live in such a culture.

This is an alienating way to think of authorship, partly because the figure of the author turns out to be not someone who writes but rather someone who is, in a sense, written by circulating social discourses. Your former illusions of writerly mastery turn out to be an effect of your context. A lot of working writers might not find imagining such a world as “easy” as Foucault does.

This way of talking may be less jarring if you realize that you, as an aspiring author or working author-function, are always also contributing to those circulating discourses. So it might be more accurate to say that the author doesn’t disappear in Foucault’s account, but in some sense gets smeared across a variety of locations, persons and institutions, joining a good old-fashioned cybernetic circuit.

Which brings me to the question of my title. The first step in figuring out the future of the editor is to ask a prior, more important question. What is an editor? The editor, like the author, is also a function of discourse. But the editor also has a function. The editor’s job is to be a switching station, a resistant medium through which the writer’s message travels en route to readers (where we understand that reader and writer refer not to persons but to functions).

Without the medium of transmission, communication isn’t possible. Without editorial friction or resistance, writers and readers instantly disappear. Writing wouldn’t be communication but instead be a sort of telepathy or merging of minds. So editing is an ineradicable part of what any author tries to do. It’s not only a good thing that editors exist, but logically necessary that they do.

So the real question of the future of editing is the question of who will edit (not whether someone will edit). Online, writers get to be self-editors, and readers, via various channels (comments, click statistics) also act as various types of editor. The writer’s fantasy of escaping editors is just that: a fantasy. You are always being edited, always self-editing. The question isn’t whether you’ll be edited, but by whom and how. What future platforms will editing happen on? What forms of editing will these platforms encourage and discourage? How will editing be visualized, communicated, and incorporated into new drafts?

We might be able to imagine a culture without authors – though I admit I find it hard too – but in any culture with authors we’ll never eliminate editors. Which is a good thing. We should, instead, celebrate them. And pay them, while we’re at it.

The Future of Editing: Beta Readers and Agile Publishing

Perhaps it is my personal history as an editor that leads me to believe that no computer or algorithm can successfully replicate the role and work of a professional development or content editor. Regardless of how publishing changes, editors who offer valuable editing and feedback will always be in demand, at least until such a time that telepathy or brain downloads are invented.

That said, there could be considerable transformation in what it means to be a “professional” editor. With the rise of self-publishing (a 60 percent increase in 2012 alone, according to Bowker data), we’ve only seen the demand for editors increase, with authors more acutely aware of the need for some level of assistance in rewriting and polishing their work. But very few authors can afford professional-level, deep editing. Given how writing processes are evolving – with more online and collaborative work, more serializations and more works-in-progress being undertaken – one can envision a world in which smart readers serve as an author’s first editors.

While some career authors – who likely had to improve on their own and struggle for approval from the gatekeepers – may believe that emerging authors are publishing too early and too quickly without regard for quality, a new model is emerging that allows for those first manuscripts to be published, and for authors to improve as they go, with the feedback of beta readers.

We see this model already in progress in the fan fiction communities. The bestseller 50 Shades of Grey started as work-in-progress within such a community, and was a riff on the Twilight series. Wattpad, with more than 18 million users, provides a sandbox for many authors to experiment, practice and gather early readership. (Even Margaret Atwood is giving it a shot with zombie fiction.)

As authors gain experience and titles under their belt, they may progress from beta readers to more formal, paid editing teams, which may consist of trusted content editors, copy editors and proofreaders. In some community and digital publishing models that already exist, editors are rewarded by receiving a percentage of book sales, which presumably makes them more invested and incentivized to do their best work.

Another possibility, particularly for nonfiction, is crowdsourcing as a replacement for some level of development and content editing. Sourcebooks, a trade publisher, is experimenting with this type of authoring and editing process, which they call their “Agile Publishing Model.” People coming from the technology world would be very familiar with this type of iterative process and framework, which makes content available faster, gets real-time feedback from the target audience and shapes the final product based on collaboration. CEO Dominique Raccah says, “The traditional publishing model – long schedules, creating in a vacuum, lack of involvement with the readers of the end product – drives some authors crazy. This model is a great fit for experts who are highly immersed in their field and where the field is evolving rapidly” (“Sourcebooks Announces”). (Hopefully it’s not lost on readers of this essay that the very thing being read right now is a collaborative, multimedia project that is iterative and crowdsourced, and similar to the agile model used by Sourcebooks.)

A final thought: Future editors may struggle to hang onto their gatekeeping role, and only remain tastemakers if their name carries currency with readers, meaning they become brands that signify something important to both authors and the target audience. Are editors open to marketing and publicizing themselves as brands? It may be a difficult future for today’s editors to accept, since the predominant view in publishing is that good editors “disappear” and are not spoken of; the attention goes to the writer.

GitHub for Books?

When I started writing my first book in 2003, I’d been blogging for more than three years. I’d learned the value of a conversation with my readers. Most importantly, I’d absorbed the obvious truth that they knew more than I did. So, with the permission of my publisher, I posted chapter drafts on my blog. The result was a variety of comments and suggestions, some small and some major, that in the end helped us produce a much better book.

That process was an early stab at bringing the Internet’s widely collaborative potential to a process that had always been collaborative in its own way: authors working with editors. The notion of adding the audience to the process was, and remains, deeply appealing.

The tools of online collaboration are still relatively primitive, and often discouragingly awkward. But they’re improving, and I’m seeing glimmers of hope that in a few years we’ll have vastly more capable systems.

As Charlie Stross notes elsewhere in this book, Microsoft Word, ubiquitous today for authors and their editors, needs to be replaced. I rarely use it myself, but there are times when it’s the only way I can communicate with an editor. (I prefer to write in a plain text editor and then, if necessary, format in LibreOffice Writer; however, I find Writer even less stable than Word.)

The Track Changes feature in Word (and Writer) is, of course, a primary reason we all use it. Google Docs doesn’t offer this feature. It should. The closest thing I’ve found on the web for this kind of collaborative editing is Poetica, an early version of an editing tool that recreates much of the style – and I believe value – of traditional editing.

But we don’t do just text anymore. We “write” in mixed-media formats, incorporating charts, videos and more into our work, and e-book formats still aren’t supported as well as they should be. I’m still looking, for example, for a great EPUB-native editor. The open-source Sigil is a fine start, but also very much a work in progress.

Collaboration is going to get a lot more complex. The most famous Internet collaboration is the one almost everyone uses, at least as a reader: Wikipedia. Editing isn’t terribly difficult, though not nearly simple enough for true newbies. Even if it was, Wikipedia isn’t a book with an author’s voice, and isn’t meant to be. Yet it shows many of the ways forward, including the robust discussions in the background of the articles.

Wikipedia articles are also living documents, changing and evolving over time. Could books be like that?

They could in the editing process if we use powerful tools from the software world. I’m thinking here of GitHub, the version control system used by many software teams. What might a book look like created in GitHub? A team at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study has shown us with a dense (to non-mathematicians) volume called Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Foundations of Mathematics. As Wired.com noted in a story about the project, this was more than just an enjoyable project for some reasonably geeky folks: “If they’d tried to write this book by emailing each other files or using something like Dropbox, it would have been a complete mess…. But GitHub made it fun” (McMillan).

At least one writer (with programming skills) is working on a project to make this kind of collaboration easier than it is with GitHub. It’s called PenFlip, and described as “GitHub for Writers.” I’m signing up for the beta.

If books are to become living documents after their original publication – and I believe they should in many cases – we have another major hurdle: the book-numbering system called ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, a unique identifier created for commercial purposes. But the Library of Congress insists that any significant change to a book requires a new ISBN number – and that system is controlled by a single company that charges extortionate rates for individual authors.

There’s actually a good reason for this. If we cite a passage from a book, we need to know what version of the book we’re citing, not just what page (or URL if it’s posted online). Wikipedia archives every edit made to an article, and you can cite any version of the article you choose.

It will get complex, fast, to apply this notion to books. But in an era where some books can and should evolve, we should try. We should hack ISBNs, with or without the Library of Congress’ help (preferably with), and create a system that lets us constantly update our e-books and print-to-order physical books in a way that doesn’t break citations even as it gives readers the most current versions.

The Watershed Manifesto

The arithmetic magicians of old did not know what fire they handled, what heat they hefted, when they considered the humble ’1′ and the mystical ’0′. Certainly, they knew of power there, but none could have guessed what this dynamic digital duo would be up to come the 21st century. Indeed, heroic ‘one’ and the Enkidu ‘zero’ are a pair on a journey – and we are all along, passenger and crew.

The recent achievements of this binary couplet are many – but one in particular concerns us here. Binary has (re)turned content into a fluid. By content, I mean the stuff we generate to fill pages and the grey between our ears. Story telling, information transmission, all outward expression has been touched and transformed by digitization.

In the centuries-long epoch before alphabets and well before Guttenburg’s galaxy was colonized, story telling and information sharing were accomplished the old fashioned way – orally. Communication streams were fluid and rarely replicated with real precision. Instead, oral histories and story traditions flowed from central tenants, varied in the telling as they flowed through time. Communication was an act of memory, social interactivity, creativity, and present-tense, multisensual contexts (i.e. communicating by the hot fire, near those frog-chirpy trees, under the ruddy sunset sky…).

Alphabets solidified the stream. They freeze the words in place forever, allowing a message to exist independently of the physical presence of the human messenger. Vellum, paper, and clay all substitute for a present-tense story teller, vibrations of air, and semiotic eyebrows. As we’ve written in earlier posts, the wide spread of the paper codex eclipses orality with a print culture – one that puts the static paper book and its alphabetic encoding at the center of information transfer and story telling. And this exchange has been at the center of civilization for some 10,000 years.

Things are different now. The advent of binary immediately disintermediated content from container. And content is a multisensual stream once again. Digital storage and design allows for the innovation of powerful forms of content delivery. These are post-book opportunities. These new forms allow for a return of the fluidity of yore. Databases and APIs create a massive open memory archive. Well-designed user interfaces allow access and amendment to multiple content forms and feeds.

These are our assertions:

We are post-book. Digital affords us the opportunity to express book content in new effective forms and contexts. The paper book is an object and as such is easily attended to with object metaphors. Post-book artifacts and experiences are better characterized with stream metaphors. Books are visual and tactile objects hinged, strung, and stitched into existence; post-books are engineered watershed ecosystems with multiple content streams and multisensual experiences.

Post-book artifacts and experiences provide
1. multifarious content
2. fluidity over fixity
3. sensuality over monosensual experience
4. multiple content streams
5. dynamic and social marginalia

Post-book content should follow the what we will call the “Daly Principle” after the writings of Liza Daly. The principle may be stated thusly: If a post-book work has a central content stream, the additional streams must be:

1. Nontrivial: natural and useful extensions of the central content such as primary source material, obscure topics, deep dives into related topics. These may be provided by the central content author, publisher, or other users. third parties.

2. Immersive: natural and useful extensions of the central content made available to the user “at the moment that these curiosities naturally arrive in the course of consuming the text.”

As a place rather then object, the post-book enables readers (users, visitors?) to co-author the text as well. The content of a post-book experience may be authored by professional authors, the publisher, or readers.

Everything we state is already evident in the simplest of web pages. Hell, it was true of any MySpace page in 2001. It is true of several notable experiments with reading apps. We are not calling for the invention of anything new. Rather, we would like to bring these elements to bear directly on innovations in 1) digital storytelling vessels and 2) the mission statements of publishing companies old and new. Robust and courageous experimentation will yield the future.

By the way, we personally dislike the phrase post-book as a real name for what we describe – it is backwards-facing, skeuomorphic, and hyphenated. We only employ it here for lack of the imagination to devise a better term. Whosoever provides a better nomenclature for these new digital reading experiences wins a free phonebook…

What deals will publishers offer in five years’ time?

Perhaps a better question will be: what will publishers offer authors they want to work with?

I don’t just mean money, but the whole package. Traditionally publishing has included all the production and arguable amounts of marketing and publicity. This all amounts to costs in the end, of course, but it’s never been seen as such by authors or their representatives until now.

All the scribbling world is going indie. New, unpublished writers are, to establish themselves – even if they’re agented. And experienced, well-regarded authors are leaving their imprints – either being dropped or deciding to seek a better way to release their work. This is creating an authorforce that is, to a greater or lesser extent, publishing literate.

At the moment publishers watch the indie scene to see who does well. They pounce on the Hocking and Howey high fliers, but in a few years’ time they’ll have a different breed of writer to consider: the well established indie with a clutch of books and a growing audience. The kind of author who used to make up the midlist. I’m wondering, what deals would they offer?

For most of us it’s unlikely to be bidding wars. But it’s really going to test the industry because it can’t be a standard midlist deal. Most indie authors will have outgrown that.

Help with production

How much production help will a competent self-publishing author need? Of course, some writers loathe production and will be glad to hand it over. Others, though, relish the control (like yours truly) or will have it so smoothly managed that they’d rather hire the help themselves than hand over a bigger share to have it arranged.

A publisher might be able to offer an economy of scale – although they have often cut staff so much they are using the same freelances who are hired by indies.

Here’s an added complication. The book needs to look professional. How would a deal legislate for a situation where a writer’s production values look like a home haircut? Spin it the other way: what would stop a publisher vetoing an outside editor to keep the work themselves and accrue extra percentage points?

I’ve already made this more complex than I imagined. Suffice it to say: production costs will become a negotiation point.

Help with promotion and marketing

I’m guessing that one of the prime reasons for partnering with a publisher is to gain kudos, exposure and credibility in places we can’t reach by ourselves.

We all know that if a publisher pulls out all the stops they can make a huge difference to a book’s fortunes. But most of the time (ie if they haven’t paid big bucks for the author), they can’t afford to.

What most non-starry authors get is a few mentions in the national press. That can certainly send an indie author reeling with delight. But does it sell copies? The evidence is that it doesn’t. Most books don’t sell unless you keep them constantly on readers’ radar. A splash in the press is short term. Indie authors know they have to keep a sustained campaign of advertising and promoting. The midlist author launch package is little more substantial than a token cork-pop at the book’s birth. It won’t keep the book alive, month in, month out.

There’s worse. At the moment, when you sign a deal, publishers are often secretive or vague about what marketing they will do. They’re used to the writers being so overawed that they never have to explain what exactly will happen or how brief the publicity flare will be.

Indeed, it’s shocking how meagre a publisher’s marketing plan might be. One writer I know was asked for a list of blogs the publisher could contact to run posts about the books. Up until then, the writer had believed the publisher would use their own special contacts, not people the writer already knew about. Another author friend, after two successful books, was sent on a social media course. He learned nothing he couldn’t have gleaned from reading a few blogs.

However, many of my writer friends are excited about the Amazon imprints – even authors who feel they’re finished with traditional publishing. Why? Because Amazon have developed and honed an amazing machine for finding readers. What’s more, the algorithms can work long term with emails and targeted deals. That’s the kind of help we would all take seriously.

Ebooks

I haven’t even mentioned ebooks. As ebook formatting is one of the simplest things for an author to do or source, few of us will need help to make them. Where will a publisher add value? Publicity? The trouble is, their publicity machine is still wedded to print territories, whereas indies are already marketing on the, ahem, wordwide web. Perhaps publishers will start to think globally. Or perhaps ebooks will be left out of publishing deals with indies, as those markets may already be well served.

Distribution

Getting copies into bookshops is one area where indies struggle – and traditional publishers are acknowledged masters. However, go into your local Waterstones or B&N and you’ll be bewildered by the acres of book spines. What’s the likelihood of someone finding your book by chance, even if it’s there? Except for prominent displays (which aren’t given to every author), publicity is what makes readers pick up a book or ask for it to be ordered – and indies can already get onto the wholesale lists at very little cost. We don’t even need to buy the ISBN. So it is my contention that well targeted, long-term publicity is more significant to an author than distribution to a lot of shops. Do feel free to disagree.

Help with development

It probably seems cockeyed to consider this last. We can’t deny that editors can add a vital nurturing influence. Although successful indie authors will already have their infrastructure for making a book good, few of us would dismiss the chance to do it better. If we were convinced.

Equitable arrangements

At the moment a publishing deal is like a fixed-price menu. But the authors of the future will be savvy about publishing. They’ll look for equitable arrangements and publishers will have to be flexible for each situation. A la carte.

No more secrets

Publishers will also need to be more transparent. Right now the culture is to keep the author in the dark. A business relationship can’t be vague like that. And to be fair, many editors do recognise the need for change. But they don’t necessarily have the skills, systems or company culture to reinvent their relationships with authors. They’ve usually got enough to do keeping up with their publishing schedule – having managed an editorial department I know the realities of getting books out, and how diktats often come from lofty management levels that are impossible to fulfil while making the daily deadlines. So this kind of change is going to take time.

Ultimately a fair deal will take account of what each side puts in. Who, in a publisher, is equipped to strike a fair deal with the entrepreneurial author or their agent? The editors? They know about nurturing content, being its shepherd and handling production. But they aren’t skilled in converting this into workable contract terms and profit shares. And why should they be? That’s like expecting your plumber to be able to fix your computer. The other option is the contracts department. But they’re in a legal ivory tower, away from authors and the realities of book production or selling. It’s as if we need a new kind of job in publishers – a professional who can grapple with all of this.

And then there’s the value of judgement. Old-fashioned experience that tells you what works, what standards to stick to and which rules you can flamboyantly break – both in terms of book production and book writing. That might come from a long-established editor – but it might also come from an astute, talented author.

It’s going to be an interesting – and hopefully creative – future.

(This post is adapted from one that appeared on www.nailyournovel.com)

A brave new world of super store POD hubs and Frankenstinian books

Date October 10, 2013
Author A.M> Khalifa
Tags Future of Publishing, PGE, Published

Let’s ignore eBooks for bit. We can all prognosticate as much as we want how electronic publishing will dominate the future of how books are produced. Or not.

The printed book is the real paradox of the future of books. Like radio, printing is not going to perish any time soon. The way printed books are produced though will change dramatically. Mainly as a factor of how printed books will get sold in the future.

There are three main players that deliver printed books to the end consumers:

The online vendors which provide cheaper prices and infinite availability, but delayed gratification (like Amazon);
The large chains which provide immediate availability for most books but typically at full price (such as Barnes and Noble); and
The small independently owned bookstores that neither provide a wide spectrum of availability nor competitive prices, but an emotional hub in the community for people who are passionate about books. There are of course varying degrees of intersection amongst these three categories, like the medium-sized chain. The small book store that does lots of business online. And so on and so forth.

Like most people, I am guilty of walking into a Barnes and Noble, browsing for the books I want. Then even before stepping out of the store I usually place my order on Amazon using my phone. That is if I can afford to wait a day or two at the most to receive them. If I can’t, I pay the full price at the store.

The large bookstore chains are doomed, there is no question about that. It’s just a matter of when. Not simply because the online vendors are delivering books even faster, but because the number of books in print is increasing exponentially.

Barnes and Noble cannot and will not survive the Amazon threat.

But what if the future could provide an amalgamation of both the large book stores in in every neighborhood, and the competitive prices of online providers? The answer lies in a three letter word that’s so far has been an insult and telling of what sort of writer you are, but quickly gaining more respectability: POD. Print-on-demand.

Imagine this. You walk into a massive Barnes and Noble-like store where there are no physical books on display for you to buy. Just electronic pods as far as the eye can see where you and other customers can browse for books. Maybe there are no pods. You can use your own mobile device to browse. Even before you get to the store. When you’ve decided, you click on your screen or speak to a sales associate to place an order. Five minutes later after you’ve had a coffee or a bite to eat, the book or books you’ve ordered are ready for you: Printed, trimmed, laminated, packaged and ready to go back home with you. Even a little hot of the press. Just like a fresh baguette. At highly discounted prices.

I am talking any book you can dream of. In any language. In your choice of font size. You even get to choose the stock. Want to save a little money? Then print the cover in gray scale rather than color.

Behind the scenes, highly-automated, advanced print-on-demand futuristic robots do all the work. And the price of each book is based on complicated formulas that calculate royalty, your choice of physical specs, and how much stock and ink are used.

Still not convinced the printed book will last long enough for any corporation to invest heavily in the POD super store model I describe above?

Then let’s dream further and braver into the future.

Why do people love printed books? Mostly because they love flipping pages, and seeing each printed leaf visible in the same dimension, rather than a virtual one as in the case of eBooks. They love the artwork, and to hold a book in public and silently tell the world what they are reading. Readers also love to gauge how much they’ve read and how much they have left. It gives them an incentive to continue reading. And the progress bar of eBooks just doesn’t cut it.

Imagine if in addition to our eReaders, a new sort of book “vehicle” is invented. It looks and and almost feels like a printed book, but it isn’t quite so. It’s a hybrid between the printed and the electronic book. Let’s call it the “Pelectronic Book.” An advanced book shell made of an indestructible paper-like membrane with tiny electronic vascular circuits. Every time you want to read a specific book from your collection, you load it on your Pelectronic device through a USB like port on the back. Maybe even wirelessly. Within milliseconds the 400-500 blank pages of your device get populated with electronic ink that’s virtually indistinguishable from real ink.

Have a particularly long tome like War and Peace that will not fit in your standard 400 leaf Pelectronic book Frankenstein? Have no fear. You can buy page expansions in modules of 50-page units. Install them for the duration of your long read, then remove them when you are back to standard length books to avoid lugging around a heavy device.

The future of book production is coming. And it will be in far more shades of excitement than what the proponents of eBook vs. print would like us to think. We just have to be open and ready for it.

How will books be produced in the future, and who will produce them?

In considering how books will be produced in the future, we decided to approach publishing as a complex ecosystem with many stakeholders, instead of an assembly line process or a simple, unproblematic transaction between and author and a monolithic corporate entity:

Look out for our next set of pieces on the future of writing and editing, and contribute your own thoughts about the future of publishing today and tomorrow!

always the same story

Books will always be written by people. Whether by single authors, or by the contributing effort of many. I don’t think that a book can be like a video clip: an accumulation of small parts only related by the visual story it tells. A book has a direct link with the reader and need to tell a story. Even if edited by many – as you are now doing – the reader still needs to follow a story line.

Production with Mark Tebeau

reading or dreaming?

in the future, the reading space will be wherever you will want it to be. By looking at a spot in the corner of your eye you will start the possibility to incrust text on your normal vision. Imagine sitting back in a comfortable armchair, looking outside your window at your garden. By focussing or relaxing, you could change the focus on either the garden outside, or the text overlaying on top.

An Author-Centric Ecosystem

Date October 10, 2013
Author Dan Gillmor
Tags Future of Publishing, PGE, Published

A new production and financial ecosystem is emerging in book publishing, and it’s no longer centered on the publisher. The new ecosystem, more than ever, is author-centric.

Consider the people and institutions involved in a nonfiction author’s career. They include a literary agent, editor, publisher, publicist, speaking agent and more. They work to help create and promote various products that derive from the author’s ideas and writing: books, speaking/consulting gigs, websites and consulting, among other things. These produce different revenue streams, in distinct silos, and they oblige the author to make a variety of separate deals.

The relationships get complicated fast.

It’s an inefficient system, and needs updating to reflect today’s realities.

What realities? For one thing, most authors should regard their books as elements of a larger career. For me, books are at least as much about promoting ideas that have made me more interesting, hence more valuable, as a speaker, teacher and short-form writer. Speaking/consulting agents and managers regard books as excellent calling cards for their clients.

How can we align these interests more efficiently? Other creative businesses have tried, with varying success. The music industry’s “360″ deals of recent years have been one of the more notable attempts. In this model, a company (usually a record label) provides all management – including booking and promoting tours, not just recording and selling music – in return for percentage of all revenues the artist generates in record sales, live shows and ancillary sales. As The New York Times reported in 2007:

Like many innovations, these deals were born of desperation; after experiencing the financial havoc unleashed by years of slipping CD sales, music companies started viewing the ancillary income from artists as a potential new source of cash. After all, the thinking went, labels invest the most in the risky and expensive process of developing talent, so why shouldn’t they get a bigger share of the talent’s success?

Critics of this approach called the advantages for musicians dubious at best. Why cede even more control to an industry that has demonstrated vastly more concern for its own bottom line than its artists?

What should the new ecosystem look like? It’s not this:

It’s this:

The publishing industry has made forays into this field in small ways. Many publishers have in-house speakers bureaus for their authors, but this isn’t the publishers’ specialty, raising questions about the value of the exercise.

I’m proposing new kinds of business arrangements where everyone involved in this collaborates and takes risks. Everyone needs an incentive to make the overall project a success. Each party should get a cut of all revenues, but at a lower percentage than they do today for their single slice. Done right, if everyone’s helping to promote the author’s career, there should be a bigger pie.

Authors may decide to take more control themselves. They may farm out the overall management to a single person or firm. Among others in the current system, agents (literary and speaking) will have to rethink their roles.

We’ll see new kinds of business arrangements and contracts, where all participants see value in helping the other parts of the project. (If some of them say, “Aha, free money,” this won’t work.) We’ll need to see lots of experiments, many different kinds of deals. Some will fail despite the best efforts of all concerned, but that’s the nature of trying new things.

Above all, changing the ecosystem will require a willingness to experiment – and a decision by authors to take more control of their own lives.

The Atomization of Publishing

Date October 10, 2013
Author Jane Friedman
Tags Future of Publishing, PGE, Published

What gets published in 2013 can be divided into three broad categories:

Traditional publisher output: represented by all the publishers that exhibit at events such as Frankfurt Book Fair, Book Expo America, etc.
Self-publishing output: represented by the many distribution and publishing services available to authors, such as Amazon KDP, Smashwords, Lulu, CreateSpace, etc.
Custom publishing output: represented by the vast number of businesses and institutions outside the traditional publishing industry who might produce one or many titles per year.

In the future – assuming the container or attention unit of the book has not disappeared or become anachronistic – I believe we’re going to see vast expansion in the third category, given that the function of publishing is now far less difficult and specialized, and book distribution and production pose less of a challenge and expense than ever before. Any business or institution can feasibly start their own press or imprint and publish works that are in line with their mission and values, and distribute or sell them to a target audience they likely know better than a traditional publisher. This doesn’t preclude the possibility and likelihood of partnerships between traditional publishers and institutions (as there are now) – nearly a necessity for widespread bricks-and-mortar distribution – but certainly it’s not a requirement for success to have such a partnership, particularly if the content works best in a digital environment. Industry expert Mike Shatzkin has called the trend “atomization”:

Publishing will become a function of many entities, not a capability reserved to a few insiders who can call themselves an industry. […] This is the atomization of publishing, the dispersal of publishing decisions and the origination of published material from far and wide. In a pretty short time, we will see an industry with a completely different profile than it has had for the past couple of hundred years. […] Atomization is verticalization taken to a newly conceivable logical extreme. The self-publishing of authors is already affecting the marketplace. But the introduction of self-publishing by entities will be much more disruptive.

If the publishing function does in fact disperse across many entities, then what will the so-called traditional houses focus on? One imagines the realm of fiction will remain a mainstay and focus, but I’d also like to propose that publishers will turn increasingly to analytics, data, and consumer research to make publishing decisions – for both fiction and nonfiction – since this would produce more profitable publishing decisions and might not be pursued by other, new competitors.

Research-driven publishing decisions aren’t exactly new. During my tenure at F+W Media, we had a very strong consumer research component to every acquisition because we were (in part) publishing to satisfy our homegrown book clubs, where consumers were automatically sent a new book every month unless they proactively declined it. Of course, the book-club model has all but died, but F+W, as well as other direct-to-consumer publishers, often use research to ground their acquisition decisions.

Now that research often takes the form of SEO and keyword analysis, publishers can identify what people are searching for and quantify demand for a particular book concept or title. Online publications and magazines already use SEO and keyword analysis to determine what gets published, and as such analytics become more rich and detailed. And as purchasing continues to move online, we can expect that trade publishers focused on profit will be gathering all the data they can to make the best acquisitions decisions. (F+W now keeps an SEO specialist on staff who assists with book titling decisions, to ensure discoverability.)

In other media industries, consumer research has long been part of the process, whether for good or ill. Movies, TV and music are all extensively market tested and modified based on consumer reaction. It has become a widespread cliché in the movie business how little creative control a director retains if the test audience reacts negatively. There has even been software development to help predict blockbusters, which Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in The New Yorker in 2006.

Such a proposition likely sounds deadening and offensive to anyone who works in publishing, which is seen as an aesthetic pursuit (even an elitist or snobbish one, if compared to movies or TV) focused on producing important work or creative work, without concern for demand. Yet because the function of publishing is now more like pushing a button and less like a specialized process, there is less and less reason for publishers to dominate the playing field. We can already see how both new and established authors (especially when they band together) can successfully self-publish and produce their books with as much sophistication as their publisher. And for any institution that reaches its audience directly, the value a publisher provides is fairly minimal; it would make more sense to hire a consultant or freelancer, or hire someone away from the publishing industry if a long-term program is envisioned. This is happening already, in fact.

Will traditional publishers lose their “best” books and authors? Perhaps some can hang onto their business if they retain a brand or prestige that remains desirable to authors. This seems an unreliable strategy, and publishers certainly can’t depend on distribution and production services to provide value. To survive in an era of atomization, general trade publishers will likely have to focus on other ways they add value to the process, which probably involve their editorial function and their marketing function. One thing the mainstream publishers can do beautifully, if they put the money behind it and fire on all cylinders, is launch, package and place a book with impeccable presentation, so that no one can possibly not know about its existence – a marketing and promotion campaign of global proportions. That’s something you won’t find a self-published author or most institutions capable of pulling off.

Our Friend the Book D.J.

Date October 10, 2013
Author Lee Konstantinou
Tags Future of Publishing, PGE, Published

In the future, book producers will not produce books. They will manage brands.

Authors are already told they have to behave like brands. They need to run their own web sites, have a presence on popular social media sites, cultivate reader communities and market their own books (publishers won’t bother). Under such conditions, who needs publishers? Aren’t they little more than parasites on the reputation and income stream of authors? Won’t publishers wither away?

No, they won’t. They’ll become more important than ever. Paradoxically, as it becomes easier for authors to establish direct relationships with readers, publishers will become more significant, not less. This will happen for two reasons, both related to their essential future function as brand managers. Because these likely future entities won’t resemble contemporary publishers, let’s stop calling them publishers. Let’s call them Autonomous Literary Imprints, or imprints for short.

Readers will want imprints. Imprints will help them navigate the confusing, effectively infinite digital graphosphere. In my previous essay, I evoked the farcical figure of the Book DJ. Well, he’s back, and he’s here to stay. In his function as an embodied imprint, he may even be the same person running your local pop-up book retailer. His job is to have good taste. His livelihood will depend on his reputation. He will make – and break – canons. His stock will rise and fall with literary history. His culture will be his capital. He may, of course, be part of a multi-person imprint. Imprints may consist of one person or one million. They may interlock or be nested within each other. The point is, you will have a relation with the imprint. You will trust it as much as you trust your friends on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter. Imprints are people too, not only legally but also as vibrant presences on social media.

Writers, too, will need Autonomous Literary Imprints. In your role as a writer, you will look to imprints because they have the power to confer upon you a slice of their accumulated cultural capital. Earning the brand mark of the right imprint will shape your career. It will launch you toward fame or disrepute. It’ll determine whether you can get that university teaching gig that’ll pay your rent. Whether you’re invited to that posh writer’s retreat. Whether you can generate income streams from speaking engagements. Whether you’re invited to write essays for prestigious magazines and book collections. Whether readers will even (yes, it’ll still be possible) buy your books and (who knows) maybe even read them.

More importantly, in your role as a writer, you will need imprints because you won’t know who to believe in the shark-filled marketplace for author services. Do you trust that freelance editor? That book designer? In the future, the imprint will be a kingmaker and a node of trust for various literary actors. The imprint will be an orienting map in a confusing supply chain of authors, agents, editors, designers and academics.

In a field of production populated by a ragged surplus army of desperate, hungry, fame-seeking writers – in a world where more pretty good books will be published in one second than any reader can read in a lifetime dedicated to nothing other than reading – mediators will become more, not less important.

So a popular techno-utopian buzzword like disintermediation is deceptive. It suggests that we’re moving into a world of no limits or controls. Instead, we’re moving into a world of total branding. Whether this new world is desirable or not is another question. I’m ambivalent about this likely future, but I’m sure our friend the Book DJ is pretty stoked.

Publishers: What Are They Good For?

I think it’s important, when discussing the future of the book and the future of publishing, to start with an understanding of what publishers do today.

The job of the publisher is to take a manuscript (a written text or collection of text and illustrations) supplied by an author, turn it into a book and distribute the book to readers.

The publisher and the author may be the same person or organization, or they may be a publishing house – a company or organization that publishes other people’s work. The publisher may be for-profit or non-profit. It may range from the author distributing their own work for free all the way to a multi-billion dollar turnover multinational with divisions that handle other kinds of media. But whatever the business model of the publisher, the job is what I outlined in the previous paragraph.

This sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of intermediate steps in publishing. Manuscripts aren’t usually publishable as delivered. In the old days they may well have been handwritten; these days they’re usually prepared on a computer, but they may contain typos, spelling mistakes, internal contradictions, libelous statements (which might get the publisher and/or author sued if they are published without alteration or fact-checking) and other flaws.

The general process of publishing a book resembles the old-school waterfall model of software development, with feedback loops between author and publishing specialist at each stage. The stages are, broadly speaking:

Substantive editing: An editor or reviewer reads the manuscript, and calls the author’s attention to errors, problems or high-level structural flaws in the book. The author then fixes these.
Copy editing: A copy editor checks the manuscript for grammatical and typographical consistency, correcting spelling mistakes and punctuation errors, preparing lists of names, titles and other uncommon terms for reference, and imposing the publishing house style on the book if appropriate. The author then reviews the copy edited manuscript and approves or rejects the CE’s changes.
Book design: Cover art is commissioned. A cover layout/design is prepared, using the cover art. Flap copy/advertising material is prepared. Review quotes are commissioned. The book package is then ready for typesetting.
Typesetting: A typesetter imports the copy-edited manuscript into a layout program – typically a DTP package such as Quark Publishing System or Adobe InDesign, but it may be a formatting command language such as LaTeX – then corrects obvious layout options: ladders, runs, orphans and widows, hyphenation. The typesetter also prepares front matter and back matter such as a table of contents.
Indexing: Optional – an indexer prepares a list of keywords and generates an index from the typeset file; this generally goes into the back matter. The author may provide feedback on the keywords to use, or even provide the initial list.
Proofreading: A proofreader checks the page proofs – typically PDF files these days – for errors introduced at the typesetting stage. The author may also check the page proofs. Corrections are collated and fed back to the typesetter.
Bluelining: Final page proofs are prepared and re-checked for errors. The author is not usually involved at this stage, which may be described as second-stage proofreading.
Registration and marketing: The publisher registers an ISBN for the book and a Library of Congress (or other national library of record) database entry. A copy will be lodged with the relevant libraries. Additionally, Advance Reader Copies may be laser-printed, manually bound and mailed to reviewers (or electronic copies may be distributed). Advertisements may be placed in the trade press. Other marketing promotional activities may be planned at this stage (if there’s a marketing budget for the title and advance orders from booksellers indicate that promotional activities will generate sufficient extra sales to justify the expense).
Manufacturing: The publisher arranges to have the book blocks printed, bound into covers, and guillotined and trimmed. A dust jacket may also be printed and wrapped around the hardcover book. Alternatively, paper covers may be printed and the book block perfect-bound (glued into the cover using thermoplastic glue). Alternatively, a master e-book is generated from the typeset file and, optionally, uploaded to the DRM server (or distributed as-is without DRM).
Distribution: Copies of the physical book are shipped to warehouses or retailers. The e-book is released to the various commercial e-book store databases.

This waterfall process generally operates on a 12 month time scale. That’s not because it has to take 12 months – in extremis a trade publisher can rush a topical current affairs title through in as little as 8 weeks from start to finish, including writing time (by editing and typesetting chapters as they are handed in by a team of authors) – but because publishers operate a production pipeline – essentially a conveyor belt that takes in a number of manuscripts and emits the same number of finished books on a monthly basis. Everything runs in lockstep at the speed of the slowest supplier, because to do otherwise risks the production line stalling due to lack of inputs.

As much of the process as possible is outsourced. Publishers do not own printing presses. Copy editors are freelance workers, paid a piece rate per book copy-edited. Typesetting is carried out by specialist agencies. Artwork and design may be outsourced. In some cases, sales are outsourced. The only core activities that are always kept in-house are editorial, marketing and accounting, and editorial is as much about workflow management and marketing is as much about product acquisition as they are about their official job titles.

A major commercial publisher’s genre imprint may be emitting a handful of books a month – but the volume may be considerably higher. Tor, the largest science fiction and fantasy publisher in the United States, publishes approximately 300 books per year. Ace, Daw, Del Rey, Orbit – other genre imprints – emit 50-150 titles per year. In-house staffing levels are low; Tor employs 50-60 people full-time, so the ratio of books published to workers is roughly one book per employee per 2 months (plus perhaps another two months’ work by external contractors).

The upshot is that major publishers today operate extremely streamlined production workflows, with a ratio of perhaps five authors (content creators) per production worker (or a 3:1 ratio if we include external contractors).

A handful of final notes bear repeating:

The cost of manufacturing a book is surprisingly low – around 50 US cents for a paperback, rising to $2-3 for a hardback.
The cost of manufacturing an e-book is surprisingly high – if a publisher requires DRM, the DRM provider may charge up to 10% of the suggested retail price of the e-book for the (dis)service.
Of the retail price of a book, the publisher receives roughly 30-50%. The lion’s share of the revenue – 40-70% of the gross price – goes to the retail supply chain.
In general, trade publishers aim to make a profit on each book published equal to the physical manufacturing costs plus the (fixed) production costs (i.e. the costs of editing, typesetting, marketing and so on).
If the author’s agent has done their job properly, the author’s profit (a royalty paid per copy sold) will be approximately the same as the publisher’s profit. (The publisher makes themselves useful to the author by organizing the production workflow, marketing and distributing the product, accounting for sales and giving the author an advance against royalties – a non-returnable loan secured against anticipated future sales – which they can notionally live on during the writing and production phase of the project.)

This is what publishers do. Topics I haven’t covered include: the contractual basis for licensing publication rights to a book, the sales channels and pricing structure through which trade books are sold, how this spatchcock mess of an industry evolved and what the prospects are for its future development.

Tactile reading?

Will Louis Braille teach a new way of reading to the non-blind as well? What if we could read with our fingers? Read forms and shapes, feel temperature? What if words could be translated into impressions and understanding via a tactile experience? Will our fingers be able to change the direction of a story? Point it in another direction? Will we be ble to hold stries in ur hands, like small balls, and then watch them unravel?

Sprint Beyond the Book

The Future of Publishing