An Earthquake in the Petrified Forest, Part 3
Against Extinction
This is third and final part of a series by Dan Franklin on how digital publishing is evolving in the book industry. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. Originally presented as a talk at the Royal College of Art as part of their Ecologies of Publishing Futures event (#bookfutures).
What’s interested me a lot over my time in books is how difficult the digital step-change is to affect. But it makes sense — when businesses are built and established over the editing, design, production, sales and marketing of print books, systems and modes of practice will become calcified and ‘petrified’ in the sense I spoke of at the outset of this talk.
This doesn’t satisfactorily convey the cultural incursions that publishers make. Rather than petrified forests publishers often surge forward with supernatural agency like Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane. It’s a cliché to say that every book is a start-up, but it is. Creating demand for a new story or set of ideas has more in common with Steve Jobs’s philosophy than you might think, when you have to listen to endless eulogies about the ‘smell of books’. As a side note, how many commuters do you see taking in lungful of a new James Patterson? A new ereader smells great too.
Digital can, has and will do huge things for the popular distribution and consumption of books, more so than the Penguin paperback has. Don’t be fooled if the period of co-existence with print lasts some years yet. Remember that it took some ten years after the release of the iPod for digital music revenues to pull level with those of physical music, and that’s in the music industry, one commonly accepted as having been decimated by piracy and by extension the digital transformation happening to record labels who never saw it coming (or like Climate Change deniers, refused to recognise the evidence of it happening, or worse still did see it, acknowledged it, and did nothing about it).
(A quick book recommendation for you on that: Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free is a compelling true crime story of how global piracy of MP3s stemmed from one North Carolina record plant — a consequence of big record label consolidation, and the Wild West that was the web at the turn of the millennium.)
I’m arguing that publishers are venture capitalists in culture, but this doesn’t mean that their considerable tolerance for risk is always fairly applied to digital. It seems to contain a tolerated number of known unknowns, but often an intolerable number of unknown unknowns.
For good or ill, we live in the technology companies’ world so it makes sense that when we can we actively collaborate with them and if possible other creative entities from other parts of the media on initiatives that will open more people’s eyes to the possibilities. I’m pleased that Anna Gerber from Visual Editions is speaking today because we are a partner publisher in a brilliant initiative that they have set up with Google’s Creative Lab in Australia. That lab is run by Tom Uglow, the son of an erstwhile editor from Random House — it’s heartening to know that publishing blood is flowing through Google’s veins.
At this point I can’t say much about what we’re working on other than we’ve commissioned eight writers of fiction and non-fiction and we’ve joined up with a creative team represented by Lex, primarily a north London record label known for its hip-hop output, including the inimitable Metal Face DOOM. We will be launching in the new year, but this project is indicative of the possibilities of the new, mobile world. I’ve mentioned Faber’s collaborations with Touch Press, Profile Books was an investor in bestselling interactive story app 80 DAYS from Inkle, digitally-savvy kid’s publisher Nosy Crow recently teamed up with the British Museum: it’s the nexus of these partnerships where the new possibilities for publishing are being actively explored. In our case, it’s the biggest trade publisher in the world, one of the smallest in the UK, a record label, and a technology giant.
What I particularly like about Editions At Play are the design principles that have been laid out by Anna and Britt at Visual Editions. They speak to a manifesto for this digital and mobile first publishing. The Editions At Play values are distilled to: bookish, unprintable and delightful. The behaviours they espouse are: mobile, dynamic and (familiar enough to book-lovers) pages.
This isn’t to overlook the work being done by new kinds of digital storytellers. There’s what Eli Horowitz (ex-McSweeney’s, a publisher with the best design in the business) has done in geo-location-driven, crowd-sourced project THE SILENT HISTORY and THE NEW WORLD (originally published by digitally native start-up publisher The Atavist), both with co-writers and collaborators; there’s the exemplary, scenario-shifting audio storytelling that Bristol’s Circumstance created with A HOLLOW BODY for the Museum of London, and of course Sweden’s Simogo, most notably with crime app, DEVICE 6. We just need more of this and we need it to be consistently good.
The big challenge with it all is the discovery problem. How do we carve out any virtual shelf life in the margins, in the interstices of people’s lives?
We don’t have a discovery problem (we are told) because there is an abundance of stories out there for people to read and experience, and the surfeit of self-published work is held up as main reason for this. But publishers, curators of culture, and anyone who has a professional interest in distributing the stories and ideas that matter do see a discovery problem out there, an awareness problem. Yes, it is a false distinction to say the massive marketing muscle of FALLOUT 4 means one less person is devoting that time to A Brief History Of Seven Killings, but it’s the overall flatness of the landscape that makes building a mountain that much harder. It now involves a full communications strategy — optimise everything and be brutally optimistic: from metadata tweaks and SEO, to digital cover design (incidentally we don’t see many thumbnail specific versions of covers, but how they render at that size is a consideration), through to review coverage, comprising the interest of Buzzfeed Books’ Isaac Fitzgerald as well as the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani if possible.
I haven’t spoken much about authors but I hope you understand that it is because I regard them as implicit in all of the progress I outline above. When they aren’t bringing ideas to the table themselves, it’s their creativity and the editorial bond they foster with publishers that is so important to our collective future.
William Golding was famously discovered on the slush pile by Charles Monteith, a young ambitious editor at Faber. John Carey’s brilliant biography of Golding has their correspondence and friendship as its spine. Golding was published at Faber throughout his life, and in most business dealings they acted as his literary agents too, something which is rare these days. You only have to see the other working titles for Lord of the Flies before Faber settled on it to understand how important a sounding board and guide publishers are in editor-author relationships: Golding had suggested Nightmare Island, Beast In the Jungle, Fun And Games, A Cry of Children and Strangers From Within . . .
Creative partnerships led by, or deeply involving, authors are essential to the evolution of digital publishing and by extension publishing. What publishers need to be continually improving is the ability to provide a translation service between the technological possibilities and their author’s creative visions.
As The Inheritors reaches a conclusion, the band of Homo sapiens take one of the Neanderthal children with them and they marvel and shudder at this ‘devil’. As one species gazes on another that it supersedes and the lack of enlightenment they represent, the narrator asks ‘Who would sharpen a point against the darkness of the world?’ When it comes to preparing for the development of publishing at this time of transition, my answer is it must be publishers. And sometimes, gazing into the darkness, it is very difficult to say how it is all going to work out. But one thing is certain when it comes to our authors: we must evolve together.
