[FM Discuss] Fwd: Complement to book sprints

[Edward Cherlin]

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Roest <marklroest at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:08 PM
Subject: Complement to book sprints
To: Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com>

Hello Ed,

I found this and thought of you right away:

Books from, and for, the people

The good news: Americans still want to read. The bad news: not what
publishers are giving them. Yet some creative thinkers in publishing
are letting consumers call the shots before ink hits paper.

By Laura Vanderkam

Jayne Bonilla, a stay-at-home mom who lives in Florida, always loved
making up stories for her kids. She spun yarns about bath time,
bedtime, even their toddler-years tendency to chew on their clothes.
That last puzzler morphed into a tale of one little Marley Barley,
coaxed into trying new foods by parents willing to get her garments
messy. Bonilla thought the story, Shirt for Dessert, might have
commercial potential. She sent it to the major publishers.

(Illustration by Alejandro Gonzalez/ USA TODAY)

She reaped a pile of rejection letters for her efforts.

Then last summer, she learned that a start-up called WEbook was
seeking new writing talent. She posted portions of Shirt for Dessert
on the website for other authors to critique. Marley Barley's buzz
built. So many parents chose it as their favorite project that WEbook
found an illustrator and will publish the venture next month.

If it sounds like Bonilla just won a literary version of American
Idol, you're not far off. Like American Idol, "we're giving a path to
aspiring new talent," says WEbook President Sue Heilbronner. But they,
and other print industry innovators, are also doing something even
more important — like American Idol, figuring out, in a changing
industry, exactly what will sell. The key? Nixing the attitude that
"people don't read anymore," as Steve Jobs once put it, and paying
more attention to what readers actually want. That means radically
different business models — but a good bet for helping print chew its
way out of the current crisis.

State of the industry

There's no denying that the book industry is in trouble. The Collins
imprint at HarperCollins disappeared recently, Simon & Schuster and
Random House suffered job cuts, and a Borders bankruptcy has been
rumored with every debt payment.

But what's ironic about this is that — Jobs' genius notwithstanding —
there's evidence that these should be great times for the printed
word. A recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
found that the percentage of Americans who read a novel, short story,
poem or play in the past year rose from 46.7% in 2002 to 50.2% in
2008.

So why are profits weak? There's a joke about a publisher hiring a
consultant to answer this question. After serious study, the
consultant announces that of every 10 books the publisher buys, two
make money, three break even, and five lose cash, and so he should
only publish the two that make money. If predicting hits were only
that easy! It's hard to believe, but when J.K. Rowling finished Harry
Potter and the Philosopher's Stone back in 1995, 12 major publishers
rejected her boy wizard. They simply did not want to bet on this
literary unknown. Instead, the current book industry model often means
paying big bucks to celebrities, who may or may not have good stories,
but at least stand out from the thousands of other titles published
each year. Or could have stood out. Simon & Schuster sued Lil' Kim
last summer to return an advance for a novel commissioned in 2003 that
she never got around to writing.

Clearly there is room for improvement. WEbook thinks it has one model,
unleashing interactive Web 2.0 on the literary scene. Anyone can load
up an idea. With 35,000 projects germinating, there's "a wide span of
quality," as Heilbronner puts it. But "we have found that the
community does actually have a pretty good way of finding decent work
on the site and gravitating toward it." Top vote-getters have enough
fans that WEbook bets they'll make money, not unlike the rash of
originally-written-for-cellphone novels sweeping Japan's best-seller
lists. Readers download these novels — often written by first-time
authors, because there are no barriers to entry — in 70- to 1,000-word
chunks. In some cases, it isn't worth reading seven words. But if a
critical mass of people keeps reading, publishers can bet this focus
testing means there's a broad market.

The business model

This "crowdsourcing" and crowd-testing model is a little different
from the usual curatorial version of publishing, in which agents and
editors mostly choose what they think will sell. But the broader trend
toward involving consumers is seizing many creative industries. One
media project, Spot.Us, is trying "community funded reporting" — that
is, a website where interested parties pool funds to commission
investigative journalism. On the SellaBand website, bands upload music
for the listening pleasure of potential small investors, with
musicians and investors splitting profits from the albums that result.
In two years, 29 acts have raised $50,000 each in chunks as small as
$10. A new international news service, GlobalPost, asks its most loyal
readers to present story ideas and vote on which ideas will be
assigned to correspondents. Even that bastion of elite writing, The
New Yorker, has readers suggest and vote on cartoon captions. They're
not all brilliant but, then again, neither are those of the pros.
Taken together, they produce a nice mix.

No one knows how all these experiments will shake out. In some cases —
like buggy whips — industries do die. But more often, they evolve,
like the phone companies changing from rotaries to text-messaging
gizmos. Society shifts, and the growing population of readers —
accustomed to creating their own iPod playlists and Facebook fodder —
may not, in the future, buy a children's book just because it was
written by Madonna, and a committee of editors chose to put it on the
shelf. But they will read, if given work whose creation their peers
demanded in the first place. With the NEA counting 16.6 million new
readers between 2002 and 2008, and many innovators trying to reach
them, any obituaries for print are as premature as Marley Barley's
parents giving up on getting their shirt-chewer to eat her veggies.

Laura Vanderkam, author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career
Without Paying Your Dues, is a member of USA TODAY's board of
contributors.

-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)