Publishing in the Post-Gutenberg Age
Briefly, if you're a poet or writer, the challenge of the Post-Gutenberg Age is for you to realize that there isn't any reason why you shouldn't sell your books directly to the reader, that you can, and that in fact there is every reason why you should.
If that sounds too incredible, read this page, and then click: http://books.fglaysher.com
“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, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” March 13th, 2009
June 25, 2010. A response to "Big publishers have reason to be happy about how the book market is evolving." Publishing Consultant, Mike Shatzkin's blog, The Idea Logical
My definition of what constitutes a post-Gutenberg publisher is non-DRM.
The relevant model is shareware... by not worrying about selling every book, giving a percentage away, sometimes a large percentage, developers or publishers receive, in return, relatively free advertising and often global BUZZ. Many shareware companies make million-dollar profits on a conversion ratio of as little as 1% to 6%, retaining control of their product with a very low overhead. Shareware has been the Internet model for decades and is entirely rational for the individual writer, though it's very difficult for writers and publishers to understand.
Why should writers worry about corporate publishers? Writers have been exploited by them for centuries. Cut the publishers... It's time for publishing to change.
It seems to me most of your reflections are concerned with what's good for the publishers and geared to helping them move their monopolies to the Internet. As a poet, I'm concerned with what's best for writers and readers and believe publishers have stopped serving the best interests of the culture. It's long been observed that corporate conglomerates do very little to promote a book, and over the decades have come to do less and less for the author, especially in some genres.
For the most part, the books that receive an advance have increasingly become the popular fiction and non-fiction and talking-head tripe that largely betrays and undermines the culture in favor of shareholders, doing little to nothing for real writers, literature, or the civilization, eroding it for the most part. In the Post-Gutenberg Age, most writers who are taking the deceptive carrot of an advance ought to think twice and do the math.
The entire thrust of the digital revolution has been towards greater freedom and independence of the individual from oppressive control of one kind or another. As self-appointed gatekeepers, corporate publishing conglomerates merit only to be swept into the dustbin of history, following the music industry, film photography, print newspapers, and similar dinosaurs.
The Internet, POD, Jason Epstein's Espresso Book Machine, ebooks and other developments have already demonstrated during the last decade that marketing and distribution channels no longer reside with publishing conglomerates, who really have ceased serving authors and books, and have become an impediment to the advance of culture. The individual author no longer needs the traditional publisher.
Your examples of "vertical" communities, based on shared interests, have and are bound to take many forms. You’re right that it seems to be happening much faster than many publishers realize.
I think, with time, many writers are going to come to the realization that I have. The technology now exists to market and sell one's own books, both POD and ebooks, directly to the entire world through Lightning Source and one's own website and aggregate online stores.
For a very small monetary investment, any writer with moderate technical computer ability, can go around all of the traditional publishers, marketing and selling to the entire world, not just the USA. The ebook market is truly global. That’s what’s so fascinating about it to me. Facebook and other social networking make reaching that global market possible.
I have to disagree with your evaluation of traditional publishers and what publishing with them amounts to. I think you’re underestimating how much change has already taken place and how little the traditional publishers of poetry and literature in the United States actually have to offer. Compared to self-publishing, there are no decent contracts with traditional publishers. They’re not capable of recognizing or promoting anything really new and significant in literature. They’re a large part of the reason that a very dead and decadent literary period continues to drag along.
The Post-Gutenberg Revolution provides the means to go around all of them... and reach readers throughout the entire globe.
I agree that not all writers have the ability nor desire to handle the technical issues involved with web sites, html, ebook formats, marketing, and other such things. Given the wide range of human ability, there will remain a place for many of the intermediaries (predators, in some cases) who have forever made a living off writers and self-publishers of various quality. As you realize, they’re been making the transition to the Internet for more than a decade with POD and now Smashwords and many other venues.
I would say, though, all of those issues are much easier than writers who feel intimidated by them realize. For instance, there are only about a dozen html codes one has to learn to transfer a manuscript into an ePub or Kindle book. Anyone who has already put a web site together won’t find it difficult. Most who can use a wordprocessor and html editor have the skills. Publishers would be mistaken if they allowed themselves to think there are major technical hurdles that are going to save them.
As examples accumulate of writers who have put it all together, in addition to the prerequisite of being real writers, fewer and fewer writers will turn to the traditional publishers. They simply don’t have anything to offer. They betrayed whatever credibility they ever had long ago. Jason Epstein’s Book Business is only one notable work that muses on the deeper issues at the core of publishing’s problems. They’re also intimately connected with all the problems of higher education and the cultural angst of modernity. Most of the current corporate publishers and mergers have only been around for some decades and mark a definite decline, in their own way, for publishing and culture. For the most part, recovery and renewal lies not through them, but around them. In diminished forms, most of them will probably linger on for some time, but the writer is better served by a contract directly with Amazon, Kobo Books, Lightning Source, and other quality vendors, and selling his or her books directly to readers, which will become ever-more commonly done.
I don’t believe “building a community one writer at a time” is applicable to what I’m suggesting. It seems to me your “vertical” only applies to the kind of general non-fiction, run-of-the-mill kind of thing that publishing has become for most of the culture. What books the new online ebook publishers and vendors are choosing to place on the home page of their sites is not an encouraging sign for our culture; indeed, it bodes ill, demonstrating that the corporate mentality has no sense of the social obligations that publishing at its best was and should really be about and entail. They are not book people. They are not people concerned with culture. They're destroying it. They're standing in the way of real change. For the good of the culture, it's time to get rid of them.
I’m more interested in reaching the audience that Saul Bellow was fond of reminding people actually existed and which continues to exist, awaiting always the writers and books that will help it move to a higher level. The roughly 50,000 to 100,000 and more college educated people interested in and capable of understanding serious cultural and literary issues, discussion, poetry and literature, as in the case of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, global issues now... I believe that kind of success can now be done without the mega New York publishers, despite them, since they really stand with the universities in opposing anything beyond their own limited and defective sense of what should be published, what’s possible.
Far from publishers having a "reason to be happy about how the book market is evolving," Mike Shatzkin's claim demonstrates that neither he nor they really understand that the dynamics involved embrace the entire world culture, of which they are only one small part, guaranteeing that the day approaches when they, too, like the music oligarchs, will be swept aside with the fiber-optic speed of the up-loaded gigabytes of the Post-Gutenberg Revolution.
May 31, 2010. I have become increasingly interested in and absorbed by the philosophical and social implications of the Post-Gutenberg Age, not only in terms of publishing itself, but also at the much deeper level of the global implications, as we move forward. The drive of intellect, soul even I would say, is fullness of Being, into what that means for our transformative age, from the long perspective of history.
Jason Epstein, Publishing: The Revolutionary Future. NYRB. March 11, 2010
I agree with most of Epstein’s overall perspective on the vast changes that are and will take place both in publishing and our culture. We can only speculate on many of them at this early stage. His limitations are those of a traditional publisher, yet he’s one who has been central to developing the Espresso Book Machine which promises to go far beyond traditional publishing.
I’m puzzled by Epstein’s comment that "fiction is almost never collaborative." When was it ever? I can’t think of a single book of real fiction or poetry, of the first order, in any culture, that was "collaborative." What would it be? Maybe some of the old early epics, Gilgamesh, as he alludes to, very rare. Even it, in the end, as known to us now, was the work of one great master. Otherwise, a contradiction in terms...
Despite that caveat, I think it’s fair to say Epstein has his finger on the pulse of the Post-Gutenberg revolution more than most publishers, though I think he’s vastly undervaluing ebooks, though it’s understandable, since he’s placed all his chips on the Espresso Book Machine. I should disclose I’m slightly biased in his favor since I have three books available through the Espresso Book Machine.
In response to Epstein’s article, one blogger has interestingly observed, "Physical books are the author’s equivalent of musician’s concerts." I think writers and publishers ought to reflect deeply on that possibility. It may be that paper books ultimately prove to be the equivalent of "vinyl."
I believe eBooks will definitely take over a significant portion of the market-share of traditional publishing, and even eventually surpass POD and the Espresso Book Machine, both of which will continue to grow and serve their segments of the book market. EBooks solve all the printing and distribution problems of publishing. Most importantly, eBooks solve all the problems confronting the writer and the reader. I’m not interested in solving problems for the mega-corporate publishers; they are the problem. The sooner writers and readers can largely get rid of them, and their interference in who and what can potentially receive a hearing from readers, the better. It's the reader who should be judging who and what is worth reading. Not the gatekeepers. The Digital Age offers the individual an exciting challenge.
The tradtional "authorities" in publishing and culture have all revealed themselves as hollow and discredited. Democracy and the expansion of the freedom and liberty of the individual wants to move to the next level, the globe... Communication, information and dialog, aesthetic and literary expression, all are pushing forward to the widest scope and vista of freedom, the earth itself. The throbbing, digital Network has laid down the fiber-optic cable and the Wifi, along with the new resources of Web 2.0, so that it can happen. Ultimately, the cultural shift will produce and necessitate a practical, politcal one. The underdeveloped United Nations is its forerunner. Perhaps, first the culture, and then the politicians will have no alternative but to follow the people, or be left behind. That is the deepest implication of the Post-Gutenberg Age, the further evolution of global consciousness, a global ethic and culture, finding form, ultimately, in a political union seving all humanity.
I printed Epstein’s article to PDF and read it on my Sony Reader, already stocked with over 2,800 books and articles... My 4 and 8 gigabyte cards have room for several thousand more books. I'm currently working on getting all my books into ePub, Kindle, and other formats. Earthrise Press eBooks
Afterthoughts. As shocking as it may sound, the "shareware" model, which has now been around for probably thirty years with computer software, may actually have discovered early on one of the crucial ways of distribution for books in the Digital Age, going "viral," and the pricing that makes sense when the middlemen and their "overhead" are cut out for the benefit of the writer and the reader.
Clay Shirkey, The Collapse of Complex Business Models - Think, New York mega-publishers and those literary magazines, institutions, and academicians who have a stake in and promote the long-decaying, collapsing vision. Incidentally, Clay Shirkey is wrong about needing new filters; the Post-Gutenberg Age is about getting *rid* of filters, while demanding that the individual becomes more responsible in the exercise of his or her freedom.
December 9, 2009. Revised from my Facebook page
The democratization and decentralization of the Internet and Post-Gutenberg Age are the greatest challenge to the old model of publishing.
Regarding the article, "Some half-formed thoughts on one future for bookselling" on Boing Boing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/01/some-half-formed-tho.html
Print on Demand • POD • Lightning Source • bookselling • publishing • ebooks • Espresso Book Machine • EBM
It’s the opening up of access to knowledge and information, communication broadly, that’s taking place. The Gutenberg means of production, if you will, aided the king and his minions to maintain a tight control over what received a hearing.
I’ve been thinking about the transformation of publishing for more than a decade and working hard, as an independent writer, to figure out how to make the Internet work for me as a writer, not the conglomerates and gatekeepers. "Librarybob," in the comments on the article, makes some fascinating connections that I want to respond to, especially this question:
"What happens to the great author who just can’t work a social network?"
One word: Facebook—over 350 million people, and similar social networking sites—a worldwide market, serviced by Lightning Source, EBM, ebooks, etc., helping to identify and reach people with similar literary and intellectual interests. No gatekeepers and manipulators in between, e.g., academicians, ALA, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews (now justly defunct). Publishers Weekly is part of the old model. I’ve thought at times that something like LibraryThing would help, but they’re still clinging to the old model as well, in my view, to date. The major publishers are clearly trying to transfer their monoplies to the Internet, to acquire "eyeballs," as Mike Shatzkin, the publishing consultant has said.
I agree with librarybob that
"booksellers and librarians need to develop new ways, new online ways, to obtain and review titles so we can purchase them and make them known to the public."
But again, it’s the democratization and decentralization of the Internet and Post-Gutenberg Age that is the greatest challenge to the old model. The booksellers and librarians, as much as half-hearted, LibraryThing approaches, aren’t yet recognizing that enough.
The entrenched schools of thought are obsessed with controlling and manipulating what people can find available to read. They share that impulse in common. That impulse runs very deep in human nature. I’ve always known that and recognized it as one of the fundamental problems for an independent writer and publisher to have to deal with, but this discussion has opened it up much more to view—and the extent to which it is really still running counter to the entire direction of the Post-Gutenberg Age; indeed, contrary even, in a sense, though they’d deny it, to the entire modern democratic age or global revolution, which, for centuries, has been about expanding and protecting the liberty and freedom of the individual.
Think about it. They’re running scared. Their pitiful dirge, how do we remain in control? They believe they know and can identify what people should read. What’s good for the little people. Hubris. Arrogance. The whole system of the major publishers, academics, and librarians, scratching one another’s back, is coming to an end, changed by the new forms of social networking made possible by the Internet. Generations of exploited writers are exulting in their graves.
Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader are both attempts to corner the ebook market through their online stores. I believe the devices that will recognize and allow individual freedom of choice will win out in the long run. The ePub format opens the way for the majority of books to reach the global marketplace and reader. All the software and requisite tools and venues now seem to be in place, or coming soon, for the Post-Gutenberg Revolution to burst fully onto the world stage, with most books being published as ebooks before long. It’s an exciting time to be a writer and publisher. I discuss ereaders on my blog, eReading (available above under Blogs).
15 June 2009. Here’s another highly informative article, "Booking the Future" by Ransom Stephens
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/book-futures
The author may be more interested in the technical changes that have been and are taking place, print-on-demand, ebooks, and Jason Epstein’s Espresso Book Machine. But most serious writers have not sufficiently engaged with the implications of those changes, which are already here or coming, ready or not, as he argues. Far from a technician and a reason for reflection, Epstein saw it coming a long time ago and moved on to develop the next paradigm. People located at all the other bastions of the worn-out Gutenberg model have also either resisted or misunderstood the implications of change—long on moaning and groaning about it, and short on any visionary excitement about the new, possible future, around the globe, not just in the USA, for writers and readers—anyone remember them? Note well, readers and writers are not interested in what’s best for the manipulators and gatekeepers of the marketplace.
Ransom Stephens, offers some very interesting revelations on all this change, and worth reflecting on:
"Publishers’ role as the gatekeepers of quality has always been dubious... the only thing maintaining publishing’s quality-control role is the carefully manicured perception that self-publishing is anathema to aspiring professional authors. Publishing, through its marketing plans and budgets, today effectively controls who sees what book. But the grip of the industry’s role of gatekeeper is about to go."
Anyone truly literate and involved in writing and publishing knows all that is irrefutably the truth. The trash that has always come out of the major publishers is appalling. During the last twenty years or more publishing has failed literature and culture in every conceivable way, for all the well-known reasons I shan’t repeat. Suffice it to say that derision of self-publishing flies in the face of literary history. Almost every literary writer worth reading had to publish their own work in order to receive a hearing! Writers should vehemently reject the self-serving deceit and contumely that the major publishers use to exploit and steal from them the profit of their labor. Again, here’s an incomplete list of many of the writers by name, who had brains in their head, some of whom amassed significant fortunes from their own work, for themselves and their families, instead of handing it over to contemptibly illiterate corporate conglomerates and their venal board members and stockholders: http://www.fglaysher.com/mission_of%20earthrise_press.html
Given the history of publishers and reviewers throughout literary history, their almost universal failure to recognize what is new and worthwhile, it’s hard to understand why any thoughtful reader would look to either. It’s the readers who should be deciding who is worth reading, not self-appointed publishers, librarians, and corrupt review magazines and journals like Kirkus Review, Booklist, Library Journal, et al., stunted and blinded by their servile obeisance to their own ruling ideologies and assumptions—hackneyed tastes. Throughout the literary history of all nations, coteries have always developed, and they always seek to maintain their vision of life long past its day, as is the case now with postmodernism. The mediocre cluster in groups, journals, reviews, to prop up one another. Only the corrupt academy with all its attendant strangleholds on literary and intellectual life have enabled postmodernism to drag on for so long, seeping into every level of modern society.
I’m for exploring the possibilities beyond the rigidities of the entrenched worldviews that limit the individual writer, keeping the entrenched alive, on life-support, as it were. I stopped looking to the major publishers for anything new in serious literary writing long ago and think many perceptive people have. They’re not interested in creative, serious writing, poetry or fiction, but what will sell, as is well known, the crudest, most intellectually shallow works of non-fiction and other pablum. I argue that there is now a chance that writers might *really* get paid for their work by taking control of it, taking it back from the illiterate corporate conglomerates who have no respect for serious literary and intellectual work: http://www.fglaysher.com/mission_of%20earthrise_press.html
Online reviewing has yet to develop sufficient alternatives that are intellectually engaging and enriching, but things are improving, as everything moves to the Internet, and the thrill of freedom awakens the oppressed and the gifted. The traditional venues of review have long been atrophied, entrenched, while human experience has continued to evolve, which the old rags have blithely ignored, trapped in the already-written. The "established" reviews all in various ways have failed to keep up, stuck in their ruts, political, religious, or whatever, narrow assumptions, seeking to repeat literary history, imagining otherwise. By contrast, just dumping any heap of words into Lulu, Xlibris, etc., does not equal literature worth reading, though I would advise any serious writer to go directly to Lightning Source and cut out the new online middleman as much as possible.
I have at times wondered if reviews are really as important as traditionally conceived. Such social networking sites as Facebook might add an interesting new component to the online mix, a new way for serious writers, with a demanding vision, to find the reader at a similar level. Yet nothing can replace an extended piece of prose, on or off line, by an intelligent and thoughtful reviewer, a rarity in any medium. The problem is always that most reviewers are tied to the old paradigm, can’t see beyond it, continue to think in its terms. Similarly, much of the academy spurned literature long ago for "theory" and other philosphical and literary deadends, replicating the past through its MFA programs, which channel more-of-the-same to the "established" publishers.
"Book the Future" makes this insightful point about the major publishers, one which young writers ought especially to reflect on long and hard:
"Your only hope to build a dynasty is to sign the stars to multiple book contracts before they know they’re stars."
That is, lock writers into contracts while they’re young and dumb, which eventually will serve to rip them off of the big money should anything they ever suffer and endure long enough to write really succeed with readers. Or throw them an advance; they usually fall for it. Wake up! "Writers of the world, unite!" Don’t just give your work to the conglomerates. Readers now can and will find it, share it with their friends... buzz is now electronic, a global social network, a cloud, a thriving hive.
I also want to bring together with my thoughts above a related post I made in 2007 on publishing, on the now defunct UK blog, Grumpy Old Bookman.
16 October, 2007
Dear Mr. Grumpy Old Bookman,
I’ve enjoyed reading your blog since early summer and would like to comment on your post about "Publishing is a very friendly business" and Andrew Franklin’s article on PDF.
It seems to me the real message or lesson is Jason Epstein’s: http://www.ondemandbooks.com/
Writers and publishers who still fail to get that message are living with their heads in the sand, ignoring what’s already happened in the music industry and is beginning to happen in publishing.
"As mentioned here once or twice recently, this agency has fallen into the hands of the money men, who simply do not understand the ethos of publishing. Consequently agents and clients are fleeing in all directions."
Many writers are fleeing to POD, while waiting for Jason Epstein to work out the bugs, physically just as good a product as anything else, only to improve, and regularly used by the mega-publishers themselves, through Ingram’s Lightning Source and others.
"But where do books come from, whether chosen for literary merit and general worthiness, or for their ability to sell in large numbers? Answer, they come from writers and agents."
Any writer who doesn’t begin to try to figure out a way to get rid of as many of the middlemen as possible is a fool as far as I’m concerned: 55%, returnable copies stocking other’s shelves, 12% pittance, etc., all has to change.Ultimately, it is the writer who has got the goods... and only the writer who can create the goods. That is what writers and poets need to remember. And then act on it.
The illiterates who have taken over for their stockholders need a very serious wake-up call, here in the USA, as there in the UK, by the sound of it, I’d say, as has recently happened with music (Radiohead). Now it’s publishing’s turn to change.
A bookstore that has perhaps figured out the new model:
Gutenberg Redux, Part II: Vermont Gets Another Espresso Book Machine
http://www.7dvt.com/2009gutenberg-redux-part-ii-vermont-gets-another-espresso-book-machine
From The Poetry Foundation report, "Technology: Poetry and New Media." January 2009.
"Frederick Glaysher, the founder of Earthrise Press, is a dynamic presence among the advocates of self-publishing
and adopting the independent music model of direct purchase from artist to consumer."[search > Glaysher] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/newmedia-StevensReport.html
The Mission of Earthrise Press
Cut the publishers... Time for publishing to change. Here's how... Tell your friends...
Order Online Direct from the Author or your preferred online Bookseller
