Post-Journal Journalism (Part 3)

Deca’s Marc Herman on letting the work speak for itself

Here is the third and far from final part of our ongoing Marc Herman interview. This section concentrates on some of the details of making the project work, exploring alternatives to going for as big an audience as possible, and what it means to seriously compete on quality as an independent. There is, of course, more to come.

Enjoy.

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REEDSY
So talking of magazines, how is Deca presenting their pieces? I’m not sure how things worked with Magnum — do you see audiences coming for Deca, or for the stories? As opposed to, say, in print where the magazine as a brand is sort of primary over the stories inside it?

MARC HERMAN
We’re definitely thinking of these books, as a business, more like short books than they are like long articles — for all the reasons I was just on my soapbox about. The notion of the magazine doesn’t seem to fit reader behaviour anymore except in some very specific examples. But the idea of a book — we never really tore the book apart. We may now read on a tablet rather than off a shelf on paper — we still seem to do both — but it doesn’t seem to be quite so zero sum. When you look at what we’re producing they do seem like short books. They have covers with an author’s name on it; they have a beginning, a middle and an end; they have chapters, where applicable: it looks like a little book!

This isn’t unprecedented. I know that in American publishing, for example, if you go back to the history of the paperback, why does the paperback book exist? Well, because hardback books were too expensive for most people and they wanted to sell something cheap and short that you could read on the train. Well, that sounds familiar. And a lot of that stuff was crap! Go back to Mickey Spillane and these gangster stories that were 75 pages long and they sell for a dime at the bus station — whose idea was that? The traditional publishing industry. At the same time they were selling great literature they were selling these — and making great bank on it. If they do that again in the digital realm…

We never got used to not paying for this stuff. On the web you expect everything to be free, and there’s that original sin where everyone just gave it away, but books? People will pay two and three bucks for a book. There’s this understanding that you download it, you’re not on the web, you’re reading on a device, you’re in an immersive experience, and then it’s on the shelf — whether that’s digital or otherwise. And that’s worth a couple of bucks.

There’s a lot more places asking for your money these days, and there’s a lot more places asking for your time. So what’s going to convince somebody to give us fifteen dollars to get one of these downloaded every month? Well, it’s just going to have to be really, really worth it to somebody — it’s going to have to be really good. That’s a playing field I’m very comfortable playing on. If you tell me you have to fit all of these demographics, and you have to get a certain number of hits, and the eyeballs have to arrive in certain ways, the way they do on websites, I’m totally at sea. But if you just tell me you guys have to produce a whole bunch of really good stories that are really interesting, we can do that. We’ve been doing that for, collectively, a long, long time. So that’s kind of in our wheelhouse.

I mean, what’s my alternative? Pitch these things to Harpers and Granta and those places? If I’m pitching to those places I certainly ought to have the confidence to stand on my own next to them. If I’m not, I really shouldn’t be pitching to them.

REEDSY
I like that relationship — that if an idea is something good enough to pitch, then it has to have this value that might let it stand up on its own.

MARC HERMAN
There are a lot of questions about why the industries behind these different formats are what they are. It completely baffles me, for example, why in the music industry it was Apple that comes up with iTunes and it wasn’t EMI or one of these guys. Why didn’t the record industry figure this out? Why did Silicon Valley figure this out? It’s bizarre.

Same thing — the publishers are very mad at Amazon. Well, you know, they say ‘you’re working with Amazon’, ‘you’re distributing through Amazon.’ Well, London and Manhattan didn’t give me much of an opportunity to work with them. I mean, do you know of a place that’s doing these in any serious way part from Amazon and a couple of others? No! So what are we supposed to do?

It’s this very peculiar thing. When I sit down with editors and I say ‘Convince me to work with you,’ basically all they come up with is ‘Well, if we like your idea it’s conceivable we’ll give you a lot of money.’ That’s it. They’re basically banks. And that’s a strong argument — if somebody wants to give me a $20,000 book deal, I’ll sign it. But there’s gotta be more to it than that over the longterm. Otherwise really all they are, truly, is banks. And, you know, we already had banks.

REEDSY
And of course whatever they offer you has to be worth any goals they have for the work that are different from your own — the need to be so profitable, for example.

MARC HERMAN
They do offer- to be fair, they make this sort of venture capital argument which is something we’ve borrowed. ‘OK, we’re going to publish 20 books. We accept that hopefully one or two or three of them are going to be huge blockbusters, and those are going to subsidise the ones that aren’t going to be blockbusters — not because they aren’t good books, but because they’re about something that doesn’t have as much appeal publicly.’ So the teenage vampire novel that’s going to sell to every other fourteen-year-old on Earth will end up subsidising an expensive, fascinating investigation into the politics of Pakistan or something like that. So, you know, you have to respect that — they make that possible. But we can do that too!

We have nine or ten or twelve people and some of us go out and write, I don’t know, you write about climate and a lot of people are reading about climate now, and OK. That’s going to find a public. And someone else goes out and they write about …. refugees in western Algeria, and that’s also fascinating but you can’t really expect quite as many of those to go out the door, right? But it’s OK because, just like the book publishers, if some of ours sell reasonably well we’ll subsidise the ones that don’t. And then we’ll have created a mechanism for funding good journalism that has that effect you sometimes want of having a small audience, but of people who are seriously interested in a given topic and may even be engaged in that topic professionally. You write something for a small publication but it happens to get read by the Secretary of State, that’s important. So you gotta figure out a way to do that.

This was part three of our interview with Marc. Keep going with part four. Start from the beginning with part one.