Q&A: Jennifer 8. Lee, Co-Founder & CEO @ Plympton
Jenny started her career in journalism as a reporter at the New York Times, but has since branched out to different types of media, including co-founding a literary innovation studio , writing books, producing documentary film, and serving as the vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. The Idea caught up with her to learn more about why she transitioned into book publishing and what types of innovation in the literary realm she’s interested in.
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What is Plympton?
Plympton is a literary studio. We do innovative projects in publishing: it has to be innovative and intersect with publishing in some way. That could take a very broad sense — for example, we did a VR film for the New York Times based on George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo, we’ve done this really fun book cover project where we ask designers around the world to reimagine covers for public domain books, we worked with the New York Public Library and the MTA in New York City to do the Subway Library, we’ve done literary hackathons at MIT.
You started at the New York Times — how did you make your way into book publishing?
I was a writer at the Times — obviously everything was sort of being disrupted — and I wanted to find a business model that lets writers write for a living. We’re a poor society; if you don’t have a social structure that lets creative people create art, then society suffers. That’s one.
And two, what’s interesting about publishing versus journalism is that [in publishing] people pay for value. There’s a transaction: I’m paying for this book, and if it’s a two-way transaction between the person who wrote it (or the publisher) and the person who’s reading it, that’s actually a very stable transaction. But then there are subtleties like what’s the mechanism, what does the sales funnel look like, what is the price point, how do you pay.
Journalism is a very hard nut to crack. You have three pieces: you have the reader, you have the publisher, and you also have the advertisers. It’s a weird triumvirate — it would be really hard for one person to make a difference there. I felt like book publishing is more manageable because I felt like one person could actually make a difference given the fact that the business model and transaction is actually pretty stable. You would have to morph for digital [publishing], but that premise — I’m going to pay for something of value because it’s worth something to me — is super robust compared to journalism, where for the last hundred years, it was advertisers who subsidized the creation of high-quality content: people were not necessarily paying face value for that high-quality reporting.
What is an interesting project you’ve been working on recently?
One of our big projects right now is we’re commissioning a lot of socially-relevant short stories. At this point, the main partner is Amazon Publishing; we come up with the ideas and the selections. One collection we did is on cli-fi, which is climate change fiction. Another set we did is what we call social suspense, or horror-type stories based on the real issues of our day, like being disappeared at the border. We have another collection that’s coming out on family secrets.
In as tumultuous a period as we’re having right now, fiction is, in some ways, one of the most clear-eyed ways to look at social circumstances. There’s so many reports that come out — there’s always some storm, there’s so much pushback on if climate change is really happening — but all our stories fast forward between ten years and millennia into the future, and reading that and seeing the world in the way that it might be is actually a much more powerful experience because it pulls back in a very macro way, as opposed to a lot of the things we’re dealing with in climate change [news] feel incremental. It’s great that there are many writers who care a lot about doing something, and this is their way to do something.
Separately, one of the more interesting things about what we’re doing more largely is coming up with a new business model where the fiction is more on a licensing model than on a sales-based print model. Right now, most e-books are descended from print books, so if you buy one copy of an e-book, only one person can read at a time. Where this gets really weird and interesting is in libraries — I’m on the board of the Digital Public Library of America, and one of the things that libraries struggle with is how publishers deal with them in selling e-books. It might expire after 26 lends, it might expire after two years, or if it doesn’t expire, you’re paying seven times the cost of what a normal retail customer might pay. Part of it is because the e-books are descended legally and structurally from print books. We think there’s a different model that’s meant to emerge, and it might be more like a revenue-share licensing model. So you might have windowing — some platform might have it exclusively for one year or five years and then it could move on to other places.
Short stories are particularly interesting because they have less restrictive rights compared to print books. With print books, the rights are usually controlled by the publisher, but by default in the short-story realm, rights usually go back to the writer after an initial exclusivity period. And as a result, you can do much more interesting things in the digital realm with short stories than you can with print books, like making them available on the Subway Library, or distributing them as a benefit to Amazon Prime members, or making them available for libraries so that they can have unlimited multi-user access, which is not something that currently works so well with high-quality e-books.
Writers [are] willing to make their work available for libraries and for non-profit use, and we need a license like that to be standardized that’s not the Creative Commons license. Because the Creative Commons license is about copyright, and this isn’t about necessarily copyright but licensing. So as a publisher, I can say I can make these books available for schools and libraries but not for commercial use. A friend of mine, Adam J. Goldstein, gave me a small grant to create a standardized version of that license — and in his honor, we called it the Goldstein License — and what we want to do is get libraries on board to get everyone on the same page to what these rights should look like. In a way this takes inspiration from the software open source licenses that are well-known and pretty standardized, and as a result, people know which ones to choose. We want to create versions of licenses for writers to make their work available to libraries in the United States or overseas in developing nations or for use in public transit situations. That is the project I’m trying to rally people most to get excited by.
Another fun project we’ve been doing is creating a digital set of children’s e-books that are meant to be translated all around the world. One of the good things is in developing nations you have Android tablets showing up in the classroom, but the main problem is they don’t have kids books that are properly licensed to be made available on an Android tablet. So you can have Android tablets with a reading app, but there’s nothing to put in them. Instead of taking existing content and trying to make it available — licensing is very thorny — we said okay, let’s develop stuff from scratch that is meant to be digital-first and kid-friendly. We partnered with Library for All to design a set of books that could be universally translated around the world. What would that set of books be? You don’t want them to have houses and baseball and cars because not all kids relate to that, so we’re doing a 50-book series called Did You Know?, which is about science. So basically it’s science books that are designed to be digital-first. That’s one of my favorite projects.
You’ve talked about quite a few different types of innovation: innovation in content, format, distribution, and business model. How do you decide what types of projects to work on?
All of our projects have to be self-sufficient in some way: they have to cover their cost through revenue, grants, or partnerships. So one, “Is this innovative and interesting?” and two, “Does it pay for itself in some way?”
Where do you see literature or book publishing headed? What are a couple trends that you’re watching?
I think that short stories are going to find interesting momentum within this digital space. It’s more natural in reading on a device, and they’re more friendly from a rights perspective.
I think ideally, we’d like to start seeing serialized fiction or collection-type fiction. I think right now we don’t necessarily have the distribution infrastructure nor the audience for it, but I think inevitably something’s going to push in that direction, so you get episodic literature delivered digitally. I think you see little bits of it — like you see Wattpad, where you see people writing serially in very short chunks, and you see something called Serial Box, which is a little like HBO for books, where people write episodic chunks as though it’s like television. And then you see these collections that Amazon Publishing is putting out, where they’re collectively one theme but they’re released as a bundle.
Who else in publishing do you think is doing innovative, interesting work?
There’s a company called Truly*Adventurous. They focus on non-fiction and on creating timeless magazine-type pieces that are movie-friendly. [They took] the fact that Hollywood has always been interested in high-quality writing, non-fiction, and fiction, and then trying to backwards figure out what kind of business model makes sense so we can create high-quality work that has the highest chance of being optioned.
This Q&A was originally published in the June 3rd edition of The Idea, and has been edited for length and clarity. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.
