Re: Our "publish then filter" future...

On Mar 24, 2008, at 7:20 PM, Lee Passey wrote:
> Setting aside the producer perspective (for the moment), and  
> turning to the consumer's perspective, if 99% of all books written  
> are crap (I'm assuming that 90% of what's published is crap, and  
> 99.9% of what goes unpublished is crap), The consumer is faced with  
> a very difficult proposition: how do I filter out the crap so that  
> what I actually buy has a better than 50/50 chance of being not-crap?

You're may be a bit optimistic. Most potential book buyers just give  
up on reading rather than wade through a morass of waste products to  
find what they want.

Jon is utterly right that we need to make it very easy for readers to  
get the books that will make them happy. Good book or bad book is  
completely beside the point -- meeting your customers' desires keeps  
books a mass medium.

> Mr. Noring suggests that in the "old model" much of this filtering  
> occurred at the publisher level. The filtering was two-fold: in the  
> first instance, publisher's would not publish that which they  
> believed they could not sell, forming a kind of first-tier quality  
> control. Second, publishers tended to produce books in their  
> particular niche. You could not get me to buy a Harlequin book no  
> matter how good the writing; I just don't have that profound an  
> ability to suspend my disbelief. This is good for both me and  
> Harlequin: I know what to avoid, and those whose tastes differ from  
> mine know where to go.

Now, quick, name the publisher of the last 5 books you read. You may  
be able to do so, but most of us cannot. I'm in the business, and I'd  
still have to look.

We buy by author, or we buy from a particular section of the  
bookstore (Thank goodness for BISAC codes!), or we buy from Amazon  
recomendations. (And replicating the Amazon machinery for ebooks is  
going to take more than a few million, so let's hope Amazon gives up  
on exclusivity and opens its doors wide for ebooks!)

We never really needed to apply much of a filter, because the  
transition from 2 million ms to a couple of hundred titles all  
happened upstream, and invisibly. And it was generally fair and  
thorough because that fairness and the wide mouth of the funnel was  
mandated by the market forces. Agents did some, acquiring editors did  
more, and distributors and retail stores' buying staff did the rest.

The funnel has, of course, gotten wider since LSI jumped into the  
fray in 1997.

> Further, maintenance of an e-commerce site is an order of magnitude  
> less expensive than a single brick and mortar bookstore, and  
> several orders of magnitude less expensive than maintaining a world- 
> wide chain of
> bookstores.

And generally pointless. That's why everyone in small press  
publishing has an Amazon Associates account and a link to their books  
on Amazon. Your sales from your site change very, very little, your  
overall sales go up, and you get a commission on the folks who were  
gonna buy there anyway.

Ecommerce sites need to give customers a reason to find them. The  
vast majority don't. And then they need to build trust. The vast  
majority don't. That's one reason why small ecommerce sites have  
sales in the thousands or tens of thousands instead of the necessary  
tens of millions.

Critical mass is still required in retailing books, (e or p) even  
though the barriers have dropped in publishing. And btw, they really  
haven't dropped that much. If you want to sell enough books to make a  
decent living, you STILL have to put in the resources required to  
give the reading experience your customers want (ie. you need real  
text design, decent h&j, etc.), and to bring books to your readers'  
notice. And that still isn't cheap. I also don't see the price of  
these efforts dropping nearly as much as you might think.

> As I read the tea leaves, the biggest problem with the "new" model  
> is that it is not necessarily better, but that it is inevitable.  
> Ms. Gropen asserts that in the new model, "There will undoubtedly  
> be a huge flood of dreck." She's right, of course, just as she's  
> right that some gems which the "old" model would have saved will be  
> lost in the flood. But that doesn't mean that the flood won't come.  
> The economic props that supported the "old" model are no longer in  
> place.

Maybe. Or maybe the day of the book is just about over. Readers will  
stop buying in droves if they can't find what they want.

Data to support that: Readers haven't been buying ebooks in any  
significant numbers. The total market is less than $100 million  
dollars, or so, right? The market as a whole generally hasn't met the  
required standards of ease of reading, quality of content, and ease  
of purchase. Hence, tiny sales. $100 million is the sales, AFTER  
discounts (50%) and returns (30%) of a single, SMALL publisher.

Filtering will have to occur, I agree, before the situation changes.

It may occur, as it does now for pbooks, at the distribution and  
wholesaler stage. It may occur via some kind of zeitgeist meter (the  
Amazon  ranking system, LibraryThing, Shelfari, . . . ). Or it may  
never occur, and the wash of drek may have untold consequences.

Remember, what and how we read have been in flux for a very, very  
long time. It isn't so long, historically, since reading wasn't a  
common leisure activity, and for those who did read, poetry was the  
leading choice. Now, of course, poetry is hard to give away.

We've gone from books as a rare and expensive luxury, to one that  
anyone can afford, in a few short centuries. There's absolutely  
nothing that says books will survive as a mass medium. It's up to us  
to make that so.

And one step in that direction might be to try to educate anyone who  
contemplates making books on the necessity of those invisible and  
disrespected disciplines that produce a quality experience for the  
reader -- design (both kinds), editorial work (all 3 kinds),  
proofreading, and above all, marketing.

Printing or producing an e-book file, those are trivial, and any  
idiot can get those done. **Publishing,** in p- or e-book form,  
**that** takes effort. Reach out and educate. Maybe you'll prevent  
some author's heartbreak, and along the way, you might actually help  
save the book from a fate worse than extinction.

Well, that's my opinion, anyway. I realize now that it's been a bit  
of a rant, and I apologize.

Marion Gropen
Gropen Associates, Inc.
By-The-Question Consulting,  Tools for Publishers, & Classes
www.GropenAssoc.com
Her blog: www.GropenAssoc.com/blog




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