The View from Silicon Valley
Wired published a story called “Algorithms Could Save Book Publishing — But Ruin Novels”, which is a story for which I was interviewed a couple of weeks previously.
The starting point of the artcile is the book “The Bestseller Code” which comes out on 20 Septh 2016 and which I discussed here.
What is getting a few folks in publishing hot under the collar though is the notion that “publishing needs saving”.
Revenues in book publishing have been fairly steady in fact for the past 20 years, while those in music, newspaper publishing and other sectors have nosedived, not least as a result of innovations spreading from Silicon Valley.
Book publishing may not have grown much in recent years: Borders went bust and BN may be limping , in other words the era of bookshop chains has come to an end, but publishing is otherwise in rude health. Authors have more options than ever before, indie bookshops are experiencing a renaissance and major publishers are generating record profit margins.
Publishing does not think it is needs saving by Silicon Valley and certainly does not feel like it needs to be disrupted, thank you very much.
Yet at the same time, something is afoot. Wired profiled four pub-tech start-ups and one of them — Pronoun — has already been absorbed by a major publishing house (MacMillan/Holtzbrinck) for its data capabilities. Interesting is that the other 3 start-ups all have radically different business models: one is Callisto Media which is using data to decide what non-fiction books to publish, something that Elsevier has been doing for some time already, as Tommy Doyle described at the Digital Book World conference in March this year. Perseus has been doing something similar by listening to social media to pick up on relevant topics for some time, too.
Inkitt is a company form Berlin is using reading data, collected on its online reading platform, to identify promising titles and sell the titles to publishers. Most publishing insiders would recognize the company as being a literary agent, just one that is based on data and not human gut instinct.
Last, but not least, my own company Jellybooks is a service providers that helps publishers harvest data and make sense of the data with the goal of improving marketing decisions and book sales. How do readers engage, what appeals to them, how can you reach the right audience for the book? Also how do you test cover, title and description with A/B tests? It’s all about data-smart book marketing.
Yet these four companies have one thing in common: data that helps inform publishing decisions.
This is not algorithmically based publishing, the way high-speed trading on Wall Street is undertaken by algorithms encapsulated in computer code. Instead it is a data science driven approach to enhancing the capabilities of humans. Machines are not replacing editors or publicists. As Lord Kelvin put it “You can only improve what you can measure” and data is giving publishing professionals tools for improving publishing outcomes.
Data will transform publishing, not disrupt it, unless people give up reading books and there is no sign for that. Readers, young and old, are as passionate about reading books in any form — print, audio or digital — as they have always been. Publishing does not need saving, but it is about to be transformed in what I would call the third digital wave of the digital publishing transformation. The first wave was desktop publishing (production), the second was ebooks (distribution) and the third wave is a data-based approaches to connecting books with audiences (acquisition and marketing).
