seth godin | Multiple Enthusiasms

Tag: seth godin

August 21, 2008

Caught via Hugo-award winning and NYT bestselling author John Scalzi (and congrats on both counts there), the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Gordon Van Gelder, posts about the fate of short fiction online and asks for comments and feedback from readers regarding it.

His basic premise is the fear that if you start giving stuff away, no one will pay for it. Not just in the case of a specific author but rather in the case of publishing overall; if magazines start allowing readers to read online and for free the stories they print, no one will want to buy stories anymore. Which strikes me as quite a slippery slope of an argument, and I worry he’ll lose control of his toboggan.

I tend to understand his fears, though, I think, because really, it makes a lot of sense. I’ll note that since I started offering Entrekin as a free download, the downloads have shot way up though the sales have remained pretty steady. But it also makes sense in other ways.

I’ve been neglecting my other two blogs lately (writing and prepping for teaching tend to make me laser-focus), but had I been keeping up, I would have pointed to Tor.com, the new website of science fiction/fantasy publisher TOR books. So far, I’m quite stunned by its execution; in range and scope, I think it’s rather amazing, and exactly the sort of things publishers need to be doing more often. Free stories. Free novels, even. Forums for readers. Reading is not just about words on a page; it’s about community and culture, and in one fell swoop, Tor has realized the combination of the two. It’s damned near perfect, and I can only imagine it will get better.

When Tor.com posted Scalzi’s short story, “After the Coup”, the story managed nearly 50,000 hits in two weeks, a number that is, approximately, equal to the number of subscribers to three of the biggest science fiction/fantasy magazines combined. When Van Gelder pointed out that all those subscribers pay, whereas TOR.com readers are getting a freebie, Scalzi apparently responded he was “comparing eyeballs to eyeballs.”

Which puts it pretty well, I think. Because in neither case is either number a certain count of readers. One might hope, I guess, that a subscriber would read an entire magazine, but I don’t think I ever have; every magazine I’ve ever subscribed to, there’s usually one article each issue that’s a stinker.

In fact, Tor.com’s implementation seems like the perfect execution in an online world: a publisher gets behind an author, and gets first-look rights at what that author creates, which it can post on its website for an industry-standard fee. Readers can view it free, authors get paid, and publishers get free marketing (New! Exclusive Junot Diaz story! Only at Riverhead.com!).

Used to be that publication made sense, if solely for purposes of distribution; there was no way to get a lot of books to a lot of people without having the kind of operation only a major publisher could implement. Nowadays, though, sites like this seem to indicate that nearly 1.5 billion people in the world have Internet access, whereas something like 90% of books sell fewer than 1000 copies. Which seems to me to indicate that there’s a giant disconnect between content creation and content distribution, if only because so many Internet users read. Blogs, e-mail, news . . . it’s really just a giant database full of information and content.

I’ve read Seth Godin claim that books are really just souvenirs, and I’m not entirely sure about that one way or the other, but I do think that magazines and newspapers well could be. They are holders of information, but certainly no longer the best method of delivery of that information. I’d say I’m reasonably informed about global news, but I literally cannot remember the last time I actually even saw a newspaper, much less picked one up or read one.

Van Gelder notes:

So I started to wonder: has short fiction been devalued by the fact that so many places offer it for free online nowadays?

But when was the value of any fiction ever determined by the price people are willing to pay? All of Shakespeare’s work is public domain and available free, online, and what’s more, no one has to pay to produce or perform any of it.

What I think Van Gelder really means, though, is that we may be coming to a point where writers no longer need a short fiction marketplace (and I realize this is another slope of the slippery type, but still). In Japan last year, 5 of the 10 bestselling novels were distributed neither online nor by book but rather to readers’ cell phones. No mistake, the industry as a whole is changing markedly, and I think most professionals within it will learn to adapt to new ways of doing the business of getting good content to interested consumers, which is really basically all publishing actually is, anyway.

Personally, I’m still mainly surprised that The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction still only accepts queries by traditional mail. No electronic submissions.

I mean, seriously, what’s up with that?

(though they do accept payment for sample issues through PayPal. Interesting that)

March 12, 2008

I’ve started reading Seth Godin’s blog because, through my business course, I’ve learned enough to realize I don’t yet understand everything about marketing.

I caught this entry, and I don’t mean to come off as a chest-pounding proponent of revolution, but bear with me a moment.

According to above post, Borders discovered that, by displaying books with their covers out (rather than their spines), they increased their sales by 9%.

(of course, 9% in terms of the publishing industry is next to nothing, but that’s beside the point)

The Espresso machine is built to print a book in five minutes, flat. Consider that all that shelf space might instead be devoted to revolving banner advertisements with a limited number of books on hand, all of which can be previewed via the Espresso machines, as well as every other title in existence. Whatever you want, bookstores’ll have it.

And yes, certainly, some people browse books in the store, but I think the majority of perusal applies to magazines. So keep a periodicals section, while you devote all that glorious shelf space to 100 Espresso machines.

Certainly, it’d take a bit to get the venture started, but I have a feeling that’s how most bookstores are going to look in ten years. The fucker is pretty much a book vending machine:

This thing will take up less than five cubic feet, which, as many publishers know, is about the size of the remaindered rack in your average Borders or Barnes & Noble bookstore. What’s going to have to change, unfortunately, is how much publishers make via booksales. Because at this point, publishers are the equivalent of primaries; they’re in place so you know who’s good enough to buy books from, just like the primaries let you know who’s good enough to vote for president.

I’d say, in the future, it’s going to be more difficult to find the quality, but hey, you got to this blog, didn’t you? Just goes to show, somehow, it works out.

March 5, 2008

I haven’t really mentioned it except to note that I finished the draft and was going to start blogging again. Which was true. The draft is, finally, finished, but still needs some polish. It clocked in at a little more than 109,000 words, but since I posted that I was finished, I went back over the beginning and cut roughly 4,000 of those, and that was only in the first hundred and some pages. There are still at least two hundred to go.

It surprised me it clocked in so long, as I excised a pretty major subplot. But I did so because I upped the limitations for the main characters, and I think that ultimately makes it work better. It was something several readers suggested when they read the first draft of it when I first finished it a little more than a year ago, and they were very much right.

As it stands so far, I’m extraordinarily proud of it, but I realized, as I was tightening, that I shouldn’t yet. Which is what I’m doing now; I’m taking a couple of weeks away from it. This weekend/week, I’ve had to participate in a normalizing grading session, and on Friday I’m supposed to come up with a comprehensive marketing plan for a business class I’m taking (one reason I buckled down to finish is that this is the book I’m using for class example, and I was having trouble marketing without actually having a, you know, product). Coming from a scientific/literary background and being rather deeply analytical in nature, I’m fascinated by branding/marketing but find it difficult to apply some of the concepts. I look at some leading, renowned marketers, like Seth Godin, for example, and I just have to scratch my head, because it feels like it all becomes about attention and curiosity, and very rarely does anyone mention the actual quality of the product. It’s extraordinarily difficult for me to come to terms with the idea that the quality of something has absolutely nothing to do with its ability to find its audience, even though this is evident time and time again (Spiderman 3, for example).

I’m leaning toward a new title, too: The Prodigal Hour. It’s a phrase that came in a flash while I was at work one day, and it’s perhaps the one moment that felt most powerful with the book’s so-far best draft. This is the one that went farther than the others, and I feel like it’s the one where my skill as a writer finally matched up with my talent as a storyteller.

I’m going to try to finish a novel/la (I’m not sure which it is, yet) in the next few weeks, then finish the manuscript and start submitting it.

Multiple Enthusiasms

Infinite jest. Excellent fancy. Flashes of merriment.

Tag: seth godin