Lone Gunman

We’ve talked much about what’s hap­pen­ing in pub­lish­ing, paper, and dig­i­tal cul­ture, but let’s talk about what should happen.

“Book Oven is cloud-publishing: we are an online toolset that enables indi­vid­u­als and groups to make, improve, pub­lish, and sell print books and ebooks. Book Oven is designed for inde­pen­dent writ­ers and small presses.”

Regard­less of what you think about Book Oven’s imple­men­ta­tion, they have the right idea. It is a community-centered net­work that pro­vides a plat­form for writ­ers to preen their work and eas­ily export it into for­mats for dig­i­tal and print-on-demand pub­lish­ing. This is a fan­tas­tic tool, but does not pro­vide any pipeline into tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing cir­cles. Enter Richard Eoin Nash’s start-up, Cur­sor:

The busi­ness will focus on devel­op­ing the value of the read­ing and writ­ing ecosys­tem, includ­ing the growth of mar­kets for estab­lished authors, as well as engag­ing read­ers and sup­port­ing emerg­ing writ­ers. Each com­mu­nity will have a pub­lish­ing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as dig­i­tal down­loads, con­ven­tional print and lim­ited arti­sanal editions—and will offer authors all the ben­e­fits of a dig­i­tal plat­form: faster time to mar­ket, faster account­ing cycles, faster pay­ments to authors. But the great­est oppor­tu­nity is in the com­mu­nity itself. Each will have tiers of mem­ber­ship, includ­ing paid mem­ber­ships that will offer exclu­sive access to tools and ser­vices, such as rich text edi­tors for mem­bers to upload their own writ­ing, peer-to-peer writ­ing groups, rec­om­men­da­tion engines, access to estab­lished authors online and in per­son, and edi­to­r­ial or mar­ket­ing assis­tance. Mem­bers can get both peer-based feed­back and pro­fes­sional feedback.

Now we are get­ting some­where. Richard could speak to this bet­ter, since the plat­form doesn’t exist yet, but from what I can glean this looks more like a tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing scheme that is tak­ing advan­tage social media. Do you catch the dif­fer­ence? Both ser­vices are try­ing to fig­ure out how to make a book hap­pen, but Book Oven seems to be ask­ing these ques­tion from a writer’s stand­point: can we cre­ate a ser­vice that helps writ­ers, edi­tors, and read­ers inter­act? Richard, how­ever, is ask­ing the ques­tion from a pub­lish­ing stand­point: how can we help you writ­ers pro­duce a good, viable prod­uct that peo­ple will buy? At least, that’s how I see it.

We should not, how­ever, neglect what Dave Gray is doing with unbooks, the book as soft­ware. If we view a book as some­thing always in process with a com­mu­nity cen­tered dis­cus­sion, then this would change how we would define the web plat­form. For instance:

• The writer of the book ought to be able to track exactly who bought the book, so he can bring them into the dis­cus­sion (either pub­licly or pri­vately). This also gives the author greater power over his brand.
• If we take the soft­ware metaphor seri­ously, then why can’t some­body pur­chase the book at any stage of devel­op­ment? Why not just sec­tions of a book? The power and use­ful­ness that could bring for the sale of tech­ni­cal man­u­als, for exam­ple, would be incredible.
• And–to extend the metaphor to hardware–why not plug and play books? I cre­ate my own selec­tion of short sto­ries from a cat­a­log and make my own (through print-on-demand) col­lec­tion of sto­ries, or I am a col­lege pro­fes­sor who wants to select spe­cific chap­ters from spe­cific books to cre­ate my own text­book. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are limitless

The list could go on.

The one group, how­ever, that seems to have been neglected are book design­ers.* My ques­tion, as spin off from my lit­tle mantra, “In an age of increas­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion, objects become more valu­able”, is how can we make a com­mu­nity cen­tered plat­form that makes gor­geous books, elec­tronic or hard copy, as a focus? What will it take to make a book ver­sion of Ponoko and is that a viable busi­ness model?

*Nash actu­ally alludes to it in the quote above, “dig­i­tal down­loads, con­ven­tional print and lim­ited arti­sanal edi­tions”, but I sus­pect it is not his focus.

No, I don’t mean blogs.

• “Pro­tag­o­nize was orig­i­nally devised as a lark, test­ing out a new tech­nol­ogy plat­form with what was sup­posed to be a sim­ple, fun idea. When the site launched in late 2007, it was ded­i­cated com­pletely to the (nearly) lost art of the addven­ture (yes, that’s spelled right), a very spe­cific type of col­lab­o­ra­tive fic­tion. Shortly after our ini­tial launch, the site was expanded to sup­port the cre­ation of lin­ear sto­ries, as well, based on user feed­back. This sig­nif­i­cant change allowed the site to attract a much broader com­mu­nity of authors look­ing to hone and refine their cre­ative tal­ents. Since that time, many more updates and addi­tions have been made to enhance our authors’ expe­ri­ence on the site.”
• “Book Oven* is cloud-publishing: we are an online toolset that enables indi­vid­u­als and groups to make, improve, pub­lish, and sell print books and ebooks. Book Oven is designed for inde­pen­dent writ­ers and small presses.”
• “Fic­tio­naut** brings the social web to lit­er­ary fic­tion, con­nect­ing read­ers and writ­ers through a com­mu­nity net­work that dou­bles as self­-selecting mag­a­zine high­light­ing the most excit­ing short sto­ries, poetry, flash fic­tion, and novel excerpts.”

*Book Oven is very much in beta and does not yet sup­port direct print-on-demand pub­lish­ing
**Fic­tio­naut is invite only at this time.

If you do hap­pened to get signed by a pub­lish­ing house, odds are you won’t get the atten­tion you think you deserve. Once you fin­ish your book and actu­ally get it out there your job is just begin­ning:

“Being an author has become much more of an ongo­ing rela­tion­ship with your audi­ence through the Web, rather than just writ­ing a book and dis­ap­pear­ing while you write the next one,” says Liate Stehlik, pub­lisher of William Mor­row and Avon Books. “You have to be out there in the online world, talk­ing and participating.”

Authors are expected to behave like mini-entrepreneurs, says Kamy Wicoff, founder and CEO of She Writes, a Web site devoted to help­ing women writ­ers pro­mote their books. She started the site in June. More than 4,000 writ­ers have joined.

For just such occa­sions, Austin Kleon sug­gests authors cre­ate a blogger’s kit:

Everybody’s heard of press kits, but the aim of a Blogger’s Kit is spread­abil­ity–images and videos that are easy to embed, post, dis­sem­i­nate on the web.

The best place I can see this hap­pen­ing isn’t on a publisher’s web­site, but on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Flickr, unlike a publisher’s web­site, is a destination–a place where peo­ple hang out, favorite pho­tos and com­ment. Peo­ple love Flickr. They go there for inspi­ra­tion. Pub­lish­ers should go there to meet them.

Here is a sam­ple from Austin’s kit for his newly released Black­out Poems:

I pick Austin as an exam­ple because he is a fairly savvy web per­son­al­ity whose work is intrin­si­cally con­nected to paper. He under­stands that paper can be exploited in ways that HTML and CSS can­not, but sees the web’s power of “spread­i­bil­ity”, or what the social media gurus call “mar­ket­ing” and the rest of us call “conversation.”

A few quick links because this day is mov­ing faster than I anticipated.

eli­mae, pro­nounced el-ee-may, and stand­ing for elec­tronic lit­er­ary mag­a­zine, was founded by Deron Bau­man in 1996 and has pub­lished essays, fic­tion, inter­views, poetry and reviews. At the end of 2004, Bau­man departed to con­cen­trate on other respon­si­bil­i­ties, and the edi­tor­ship was assumed by Cooper Renner.

Hon­est to good­ness great work curated and edited monthly. Cooper cur­rently has his review of William Car­los Williams reis­sued book In the Amer­i­can Grain up:

Williams pub­lished this book of essays like­wise con­cerned with voice but rather more with his­tory than myth, though myth lurks always nearby in any exam­i­na­tion of national ori­gins. As one might expect from Williams’ poetry, which often stands con­trary to the lit­er­ary Mod­ernism of his peers, In the Amer­i­can Grainis a con­trar­ian look at early Amer­i­can his­tory, a “warts and all” approach which must have seemed espe­cially con­tentious in its time, when the United States was new to the cir­cle of world pow­ers and the ‘20s were roar­ing hap­pily along.

Coop also does fine work in poetry him­self and I hap­pen to have a copy of his lat­est on my bed stand.

And then there is designer Jonathan McNi­col who seri­al­izes books in the pub­lic domain and releases gor­geous  lay­outs in pdf for­mat. His cur­rent project is a riff off the web’s dar­ling meat­space project:

With the end of the sum­mer came the end of Infi­nite Sum­mer, but today marks the open­ing of a new iter­a­tion, Infi­nite Sum­mer: Drac­ula, and I’m happy to announce that I’ve signed on to pro­vide a hand­somely type­set, easy-to-read ver­sion of Stoker’s clas­sic text to sup­ple­ment the project.

Here is the lay­out of the first chap­ter of Drac­ula to whet you palate.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I blog with all of these gen­tle­man (Deron, Cooper, and Jonathan) on clus­ter­flock.

In the spirit of self-publishing, Rus­sell Davies et aliud cre­ated News­pa­per Club, a mostly UK launched col­lec­tive ded­i­cated to build­ing a ser­vice to help peo­ple make their own news­pa­pers. One of my favorite ideas is Things Our Friends Have Shot On Flickr which is a beau­ti­ful exam­ple of the dig­i­tal world col­lid­ing with print media.

It’s very rem­i­nis­cent of James Bridle’s Tweet­book which, itself, is a prime exam­ple of hack­ing cur­rent tech­nolo­gies to get what doesn’t, but should exist:

I wanted to test Lulu’s capac­ity for hard­back books, to con­tinue exper­i­ment­ing with the lit­er­ary cor­nu­copia machine, and to see if you could make a tra­di­tional diary/journal in ret­ro­spect. And you can, and it’s quite nice (apart from some weird kern­ing issues). No, most of it doesn’t mean any­thing, cer­tainly not to any­one else, but it makes phys­i­cal a very real time and effort.

It was cob­bled together with InDe­sign, but required a cus­tom code to scrape the twit­ter API which is trick­ier than it sounds since you can only make 100 API calls an hour and are lim­ited to down­load­ing 2000 tweets per hour.

The take away, I sup­pose, is that dig­i­tal cul­ture is find­ing new ways to couch its con­tent and, fur­ther, that paper is still a legit­i­mate medium. Best of all, there is an inver­sion to the book/newspaper/scroll metaphor emerg­ing on the web and it’s caus­ing design­ers to rethink the tra­di­tional print media lay­outs: