Three Things I Believe (About the Future of Publishing)
A sermon of sorts.
I was excited to travel to Berlin last week to give the closing talk at a small event called Rewrite The Web — a day of presentations about publishing’s past, present and future, organized by the German print-on-demand service ePubli.
The crux of my talk was pretty simple. It was a rallying call to those assembled, a sermon of sorts. What I said was captured by Publishing Perspectives, but I wanted to outline some of it here by discussing three things I believe.
Here they are.
1. Quality
People often say “content is king”. But that’s not true. First of all, “content” is a shitty word that treats every created object as if it was the same: prose, poetry, photography, video, illustration, are all art. Art is not content.
But even more importantly, shitty content definitely isn’t king: it’s that irritating princeling that everybody hates (even the royalists.)
Quality is the most important thing you can aspire to. To me, it’s like a mountain: hard to get up top, but when you’re there you can see further, and if you wave a big enough flag, everyone else can see you.
It’s also much easier if you want to go down the mountain once you’re at the top than it was to get there in the first place. Of course, pursuing quality can be tough. But it’s important to set yourself tough targets. Just make sure you’re measuring your progress correctly.
2. Readers
As a publisher or author, readers are your secret weapon. OK, maybe not so secret: but undervalue them at your peril. This can manifest itself in many ways. It was Dan Gillmor who wrote in We The Media that “my readers know more than I do.” We absolutely believe our readers are smarter than us: When we meet up with them,their enthusiasm, spark and voracious interests remind us of that fact constantly.
We’re trying different ways to harness that. Of course, MATTER started off as a crowdfunding project, so we got on the bandwagon very quickly. But now every person who subscribes to MATTER gets a seat on our Editorial Board, and we ask them to help us in different ways. Some stories have had “co-pilots”; we’ve also asked the Board for story ideas (they did amazingly well); we are planning a lot more experiments around this in the coming months.
But because your readers are smarter than you, you must get the incentives right for them: for example, when we asked which of our existing stories should be given away for free (they chose Bad Blood), we got a lot less feedback than we thought we would. Our takeaway was that a decision like that didn’t have a great deal of meaning for Board members — our readership would rather have something positive to contribute that actively made our stories and our output better.
3. Words
Words are powerful. They’re the most democratic medium we have. We know they are great carriers of meaning, obviously, but they have other qualities too.
They’re portable.
They’re durable.
They’re copyable, shareable, translatable.
Some publishers see this as a threat, but it’s an incredibly powerful thing. Words are the most efficient way to spread ideas that we have.
It’s easy to look at some of the life that happens all around us —people staring at their phones, their computers, sending messages, updating Facebook— and see a world of screens. But think of it another way… these people doing something important: reading words.
In fact we are living in a golden age, an age of constant reading. Sometimes we feel like it’s too much, too distracting, too bewitching. But we should realize that this is a boom time for literacy, and we shouldn’t underestimate that.
Those are three things I believe. Take these in combination, and I think you’ve got something to build on. That’s the future of publishing, that’s the future of ideas. And they’re a foundation for the work we do.
