Streamwriting

The shape of publishing to come

©2009 Dan Holloway

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone who says “the future will look like this” has only to live long enough in order to end up feeling a prize pillock. Fortunately, as a former Weakest Link contestant and sometime Rocky Horror Show frequenter, I’m no stranger to prize pillockdom. So here goes.

The safe part of predicting the future is that it won’t look like the present. That’s also the bit we – even the most imaginative SF writer (which kind of makes you question their mojo) – find hardest to accept. We’ll imagine all kinds of gismos and whatnots – provided they do the same kind of thing we do now. And publishing’s the same. We are happy to envisage all kinds of changes in the means of delivery – just so long as what those means deliver are the same old same old.

Now that I’ve got the “humorous intro” and the “zoom into topic with a snide aside at the expense of my peers” over and done with it’s hard to know where to start (see, I really must be a writer!). So I’ll start with my predictions. Then I’ll say why. And finally I’ll get to the bit that really concerns us – what opportunities these changes hold for writers.

 

1. People will always read books made of something like paper. There will be e-readers. But there will also be books. I’m not going to elaborate that.

 

2. In ten years’ time the bookshop won’t exist like it does today. Secondhand bookshops, specialist bookshops, showrooms for new talent maybe – but not Borders and Waterstone’s – and certainly not blockbusters on the supermarket shelf. Nor will we buy books through Amazon and online suppliers in the same volume we do today. So what will we have instead? We’ll have POD machines on street corners where you search for a title, pop in your credit card (or whatever passes for money in those days, and out comes the book). Rich(er – it will come down in price) people will have home versions. Supermarkets will have them at the door and you’ll pick up your book on the way out.

 

3. The business of getting a book from pen to reader will be much flatter and leaner than it is now. The author will be at the centre and will outsource tasks to different specialists rather than have publishers do everything.

 

4. The key people in the new bookselling business will be the pluggers – people who hold the key to the doors that open out onto the public. They might not look like the music industry pluggers of today – they probably won’t. They’ll be an updated version of Richard and Judy – people who have access to buyers. Canny authors will be able to do this themselves – but I see a role for specialists too.

 

5. Writing will be a much healthier proposition for people with niche audiences, who can happily sell a few hundred copies of their books every year without anyone ever getting frightened of large print runs. We hear a lot about decreasing opportunities for writers because of blockbusters and celebs. On the other hand we have publishers saying these fund new writers. In ten years’ time this will be a non-debate. Things will actually be better all round. All writers will have the potential to reach the market. The good ones will have a better chance to make money than they do today, whatever their genre.

 

6. Writers will increasingly make their money from things other than their books. Books will increasingly be given away to attract or reward fans. Writers will make money from appearances, events, merchandise – from giving their readers an experience. NOTE – this will happen more or less according to genre – and it will be an opportunity and not a universal fact. Romantic fiction will always be most about lying in a warm bath alone with a book and a glass of wine. Some SF will probably push things to a point where gaming, film, conventions, and fiction are practically indistinguishable. Most will be somewhere in between.

 

7. In terms of the business landscape, there will be new players on the scene. Some of them will be get huge and swallow up ancient traditional publishers many times huger, stripping them down and using their constituents. A few old names will remain, doing different things from what they do now. And there will be a lot of small and medium size specialist companies instead of a few large ones, reflecting the new, flatter business model I talked about earlier. This landscape will evolve like a mini bubble – a vast number of these micro-businesses will start up. Many of the early ones will make their founders a tidy sum. Almost all of them will go out of business – but what’s left will be the new landscape I mentioned at the start of this paragraph.

 

So why do I think this?

 

 

1. Technology plays a part. There’s more we CAN do. Most of it will turn out to have no commercial value at all. Some of it will catch on – technology that changes the consumer’s experience because some indefinable alchemical mix happens; behind the scenes technology because helps to deliver that consumer experience.
2. The recession will hasten it. Big publishers just can’t keep up with the pace (even if they were minded to). They’re too cumbersome. And the ethos just isn’t there. Small, innovative groups of specialists can move at such a fast pace they CAN keep up. And necessity is the mother…
3. The web. Not because now we’re all celebs – now we can all write a blog that no one reads. But because of what we can use it for. We can form highly-focused networks to carry out one-off tasks. We can join forces without committing to a single institution (we can be in many Facebook groups!). The web lets people join together and not be diminished by homogeneity – it doesn’t take many people for the total number of possible pairs and groupings (the total number who can generate ideas off each other and put them into practice) soon to swamp the number of actually possible connections in a traditional business – even one with thousands of employees.
4. Existing models. This is how the internet revolution happened. More important, it’s what happened with music. Writers believe at their peril that music is a different entity – that it offers experiences writing can’t match. It doesn’t. Just look back to the earliest civilisations. They had music and they had stories – and the two were often inseparable. Both were equally capable of being communal experiences.

 

So how do we as writers fit in?

 

This is a scary vision. It’s the future I’ve been predicting ever since Napster. And for years it scared the living daylights out of me. Before long books will (or at least enough will) be free – or at least freely available. So as someone who’s broke, who can’t afford to support a full-time (or even part-time) writing career with my own (or anyone else’s) money, that’s it – I’ll never find an audience. I just can’t afford it. The admittedly tiny chance I had under the old agent-publisher system has shrunk to zero.

Only tht’s not what happened with music. File sharing wasn’t the death knell of new, skint bands. It was the making of them. Now anyone can get their music to the public for nothing. They can get fans that way – fans who’ll come to gigs. Who’ll buy merchandise.

But that’s still not helping. As late as mid 2008 I was scratching my head wondering how I was ever going to make money like this – writers can’t do gigs and merchandise, after all. I was desperate to sneak under the wire. To get “in” before it was too late. I felt like I was fleeing a country on the verge of war.

And the I joined the Harper Collins website “Authonomy”, where authors can upload parts of their work, get it reviewed and voted for by their peers. And the top 5 each months get looked at by a Harper Collins editor. As a website it’s so much part of the old school I can smell the starch on its collar. But it put me in touch with over a thousand creative minds all of whom had a common purpose. Over a hundred of whom are now Facebook friends. Twenty of whom are now working with me on Year Zerø, a collective of writers focused (positioned in marketing speak) around the core philosophy of pulling down the barriers between readers and writers. We have a very simple manifesto that defines us:

 

The problem

The Factory: agents, editors, media arbiters of taste, publishers. A chain of filters that takes raw fiction, cuts it, sells it on, cuts it again until the street product peddled to readers is weak, toxic, and addictive.

YEAR ZERØ exists to eliminate the impurities and deliver prose in the pure and raw.

Pushing the boundaries of substance through new technologies, YEAR ZERØ provides prose just as addictive, in many cases justas toxic, but with a powerful, instant high that will stay with you for life.

YEAR ZERØ is not an industry. YEAR ZERØ is not a group of writers. YEAR ZERØ is not a set of beliefs. YEAR ZERØ is an approach to culture.

 

·       Culture is the breath we suck from each others’ lips.

 

·       Culture is not alive. Culture is life.

 

·       Readers and writers, like all producers and consumers of culture, cannot exist apart from each other. They exist only insomuch as literature flows between them. Inasmuch as The Factory exists to separate readers from writers it exists only to bring death, to create ghosts and hollow men.

 

·       Culture speculates; culture takes risks; culture hijacks every human artifice and structure in the name of life.

 

YEAR ZERØ exists as a conduit for this process.

 

We are not YEAR ZERØ. We are some of its voices. You are its heart.

 

And we have 20-something people from the US, Hong Kong, Finland, France, Spain, Greece, and the UK all working on one issue – how to get that manifesto message out to the public so that when we release our first books in September, we have a readership. Print on demand lets us outsource printing. Some of us are artists, some of us have done some editing, many of us are teaching ourselves to use all kinds of freely available software. All of us are passionate about our books and excited about finding readers for them.

This is one way I see writers working together – niche audiences (we aim to reach 18-40 urban indie readers); outsourcing the technical stuff (to people we choose in every case); pooling our resources on what matters; using the Web to join a very few people into a very large network of connections (and think of the number of local TV and radio stations we can reach – very little duplication of tasks but a lot of replication of tasks).

So how will writers make money frm giving their work away? It’s something bands do already to great effect, of course. Last year I snagged the Charlatans’ new album, and the new Nine Inch Nails on free download,  and new bands are always giving their work away – I’ve been to two recent gigs where The Boxer Rebellion (who reached number 1 on iTunes without a record label or a physical CD) have been headlining, and two of the support bands, Moscow Drive and InLight (who have given me permission to use their songs for The Man Who Painted Agnieszka and whom I’ve adopted as the project’s house band –  this is the kind of collaboration that benefits everyone), have been giving away music. The motives are very different, of course – established bands do it to reward fans and build rapport; new bands do it to grab a piece of the market. That’s the situation new writers are in.

What people most commoly say to me about giving away their work is either - they couldn’t possibly do that, they’ve put too much into it, or – how are they going to make money if they give their work away? To answer the first point, there comes a time when we have to decide whether we want to make some kind of a career from our writing. If so, we have to be just a little bit ruthless. It goes without saying we love our manuscripts, have put everything into them – but if we’re going to be in business, we have to face the fact that these are our assets, and we need to use them as such. Furthermore, if we’re ever going to make it, we’ll have to churn out a book a year – so we just can’t afford that kind of attachment.

Back to the questionof the shape of publishing to come: how are writers going to make money from writing if they give their work away? Because if they don’t find a way, it’s not a realistic business model, and it won’t raise a molehill on the landscape, let alone change it forever. I see the lines between writing and other forms of culture blurring more and more. We can’t, as writers, play gigs and take door money like bands do – but we can create experiences. I intend my Facebook novel The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes to be an event, rather like a festival. I want people to be excited to be part of it. The book is there, for free, on the website, along with a huge amount of other material. But I want – like a music festival – for people to come away wanting a souvenir of the time they spent there – and that’s what the “book” will give them. It needn’t be a transcript of the novel (although it will probably include that) – but it will capture their experience, jog their memories just like a programme does. And because it’s MORE than a book, you can sell fewer copies than a traditional paperback, and charge more.

If aything’s for sure, it’s that 90% of what I’ve said won’t happen, and the other 10% will happen in a radically different way from how I’ve described it. But the point about predicting the future is that we don’t do it for curiosity’s sake. We predict the future largely so we can start to shape it. And I hope some of the things I’ve suggested will give some of you the ideas and the confidence to go out and try to shape a future in which, by stepping outside the current models, you have at least some success.

 

 

Dan Holloway writes fiction about life in post-communist Europe. Details of his published and forthcoming writing can be found at www.songsfromtheothersideofthewall.co.ukHe has presented papers on literature and identity at a number of international conferences, and is a founder member of the Year Zero writers’ collective. He is currently writing an interactive novel, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, on Facebook, and can be contacted at songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com