"Vanity" Press Goes Digital →

Via Sagatrope, who writes:

The Wall Street Journal has a great piece explaining all the advantages the self-published author has behind them. It looks like the publishing industry is starting to mimic the music industry. Here is what readers of WSJ online have to say about self-publishing.

It might come as a shock to some academics and those that refuse to accept a changing business model for something as seemingly unchangeable as the printed page, but it looks like it’s going to be hard for these big publishing houses to continue living in denial.

But, from the article itself (my emphasis):

More than 90% of sales still come from physical books. In addition to the editing and marketing support for their manuscripts, many writers depend on the advances they get from their print publishers. For some, this means seven-figure payments long before their titles hit the bookshelves. Self-published authors only generate revenue when their books are sold to consumers.

Going without editing or marketing can really handicap writers. The biggest dealbreaker, though, is the loss of the advance — especially if the self-published writer is paying someone else to edit, design, and market the book.

"This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and — if you can manage to get anybody’s attention — get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use?"

Mark Pilgrim, interviewed on The Setup. He continues:

Learn how to respond to constructive criticism and filter out the trolls, and you can write the next great American novel in edlin.

"A chief virtue of digital books is said to be their economical size—they take up no space at all!—but even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf. What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life?"

Kevin Hartnett, writing in In Our Parent’s Bookshelves for The Millions (via thebronzemedal)

Long Live Fiction: A Guide to Fiction Online →

The internet isn’t killing fiction! While it may be shrinking attention spans, it’s also giving new writers a change to grow and learn from one another. David Backer takes a look at several such communities for The Millions.

One of the sites he mentions is Fictionaut, which is invitation-only. I really like it. I received an invitation a little while ago and already have a story up: Driving Directions.

"We’re returning to an era when we get news from more than one source again, human beings, rather than one monopoly newspaper sending out as few people as possible so it can make as much money as possible. It’s a new golden age."

Paul Bass, “one of the most watched exemplars of scrappy, low-budget, high-impact local journalism — based on reporting, not attitude and opinion — through his New Haven Independent and Valley Independent Sentinel in the Naugatuck Valley.” Both sites are very well designed. Quoted in a NYT article about the new era of local journalism.

"Readers and publishers alike need to stop envisioning books as just “content.” In many ways, the digital revolution makes the back-end invisible and therefore hard to quantify, monetarily. Does anyone ever think how expensive it is to run the massive Google server farms? Or the enviromental impact of the billions of cell phones, ipods, and e-readers (not to mention computers), that last for only a couple years and are not recyclable? … Publishing works the same way. A book is not just content and production. We’re not the enemy here, we’re just trying to feel our way forward to an unfamiliar future–and in an unfamiliar present."

MobyLives writing on the challenges of transitioning from books to e-books

Some half-formed thoughts on one future for bookselling →

Reblogging this from austinkleon, who writes:

The future seems to be splitting in to directions: print-on-demand on the low-end, and book-as-object on the high-end. Interesting.

Not only that — it seems like Doctorow is looking forward to a future of extremely decentralized and deeply personal publishing. Sounds exciting.

"I don’t have answers, just a feeling that the journal-as-proving-ground model has gotten creaky, at least when it comes to attracting readers. Maybe it still works for the writers and the agents and the publishers. I’d like to know where the readers are in this equation."

Jennifer Howard, reacting to reacting to news that journal TriQuarterly is going online-only. This trend will probably only continue. As Howard notes, not many of these journals were read much in their heyday, and with new media competing for audiences’ attention it’s likely they’ll be read even less in the future.

TriQuarterly is currently running on a Blogger site; hopefully that will change soon. It will be interesting to see if these publications will be able to survive and thrive online. As writers realize publishers are becoming less necessary, perhaps we’ll see online journals act as gatekeepers to author-hosted short stories, with original criticism mixed in. Time will tell. (via The Millions)

A clean well-lighted place for books →

A set of notes detailing some different approaches for bookstores to take as we embark on our wild and woolly journey into our 21st-century media landscape. A few ideas: creating something more akin to a library and cafe, or perhaps shelving books according to publisher — accompanied by stronger branding by publishers, resulting in each publisher creating more of an identity by the types of books it publishes. (via The Millions)

"I think it’s going to be very interesting for editors to see how far along their journalists are in the work. Productivity enhancer? Yikes."

Poster on a Google Wave thread about Wave’s (supposed) impact on the writing and editing process. I completely agree.

Strange Light: Photos from the Australian Dust Storm

Derek Powazek put together a fantastic collection of images from the Australian dust storm in just 48 hours. He describes here how the magazine came to be. It’s published by the POD company MagCloud.

Here’s a cool interactive Flash preview of the finished product. The magazine has also been featured on Time’s web site, in an article which points out MagCloud’s shortcomings (no distribution, long wait times to print and ship copies). It’s an interesting look at where media’s headed. (via Jim Judd)

Novice Authors Must Promote Themselves, Since Publishers Won't →

Fascinating look into how writers are using new media to promote and market their books — because their publishers aren’t helping . Includes a couple of success stories. (via austinkleon)

Copy editing: Man vs. Machine →

Jason F. of 37signals — a web technology company — has helped write a book in the process of being published. Here, he explains why he prefers old-school pen and paper copy editing to the high-tech “track changes” style made possible by word processors. Sometimes old tech just does the job better.

Robin writes a book (and you get a copy) →

Robin Sloan is writing a novella. Rather than try to find a publisher for it — a difficult proposition for most writers, since few publishing houses will touch a novella from all but the most established authors — he’s turning to the Internet. Using Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing web site for funding projects and endeavors, he’s hoping to raise enough money to self-publish the finished book.

Sloan has already published two short stories to his blog, accompanied by gorgeous cover art: Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store and The Writer & the Witch. They’re both available on Amazon for the Kindle, each for 99¢.

This definitely sounds like the coming new model of publishing. Sloan quickly surpassed his $3,500 goal and is (right now) approaching $6,000 with 214 backers. That’s quite a bit more than the average advance for a first novel, let alone 30,000-word novella.

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."

Clay Shirky writing in his blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. This is only a small snippet of a long, thoughtful, depressing, and ultimately hopeful analysis of the huge changes the Internet is forcing on newspapers and book publishers.