Redbean - This is a comment from Dan Holloway, a US based author trying to shake up the book publsihing industry. I thought it deserved a blog of its own:
Dan - I’m trying to drag writers into the twenty-first century but it’s hard - they’re a pretty reactionary bunch - as a result, as a collective we look rather unradical to the outside world because we have to keep pace in our publicity with our slowest members out of respect, but I think the future is in grass-roots community building, and that means direct engagement with the fans, which is what I’m trying to do with the Free-e-day festival (www.freeeday.wordpress.com) - it’s interesting to see so far the reaction I’ve had from filmmakers and musicians has been more positive than from writers, who are a deeply suspicious bunch (convinced you’re trying to do them out of a living, rather than trying to create a larger interface between readers and writers - in the new landscape the ones who’ll be done out of a living are the publishers not the writers!).
Here’s my post:
The publishing industry’s main failing is that it refuses to be reader-centred (hence the lack of engaging experiences – what we need to do is learn to listen, to offer up models, and respond to the feedback – which is what I’m trying to do with my interactive Facebook novel The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes). It is also uniquely badly placed by being so cumbersome and keeping everything in house – the future will bring, I am sure, flatter models where editing, design, printing, logistics are directly outsourced by writers or their PRs. Social media work bottom-up, which is why traditional businesses suffer – they have to listen and not impose – which ties in with the last of your four points – great networkers would be an invaluable asset to publishers, but impossible for them to justify in the current economic climate.
All of which is great news for the likes of us, because unless the publishers stop looking down their noses at the newbies and realise sometimes we can do it better, some of us newbies will before too long be buying them up and asset-stripping them.
I wrote a long article on this in May if anyone would like to take a look:
http://streamwriting.com/blog/?p=116
Best
Dan
July 21st, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Paul, thank you so much for posting this. I must say since I contacted you, the response I have had from writers regarding Free-e-day has been fantastic - we now have a whole slew of slam poets (I don’t know if there’s a collective noun for slam poets) involved, and there are already a goodly number of novels that can be downloaded for free from the site.
I should probably make it clear that the suspicious writers are the ones who have in some way “made it” through the existing system, amongst whom there is a very - cautious would be an appropriate word - approach to new ways of doing things.
Two further things have happened since I got in touch with you in the book world - the first is the explosion of debate surrounding Chris Anderson’s book “Free”, and the second is a large amount of soulsearching over the pricing of e-books. I remain 100% committed to providing the e-books of my work for free (not popular amongst established authors, very popular amongst readers
)
Thank you again.
Dan
(my opinions are in no way a reflection of those of my fellow Year Zero Writers)