Future Perfect Publishing

One of the questions I often get when talking about blogging for writers is “What about the fiction writer?  How do they use blogs?”  It seems straightforward for an author with expertise in a field to use blog content to create a book that encapsulates their knowledge and insights.  But how does a blog work for a novelist?

While no clearcut answer has emerged yet, there is certainly a lot of experimentation going on in the blogosphere.  In 2004, a blog site (NaNoBlogMo) was set up to register the blog novels of authors who were participating in the popoular NanoWriMo(National Novel Writing Month) contest.  In this contest, which has been held each year since 1999, prospective authors are challenged to write 50,000 words or more during the month of November.  Writers who achieve this goal are recognized on the NaNoWriMo website.  (In 2006, NaNoWriMo logged over 982 million words and tens of thousands of participants.) 

The NaNoBlogMo registry recorded hundreds of blog novel sites, indicating a wilingness among budding authors to experiment with blogs as a new non-fiction writing medium. 

In scanning the blogosphere for samples of blog noels, you find many formats.  Some authors provide chapters of their book.  Often the blog records the struggles of the writer to develop characters, storyline, etc.  Backstory is sometimes included as well. 

Here are some thoughts on how a blog might be used to develop a novel.

Develop a writing discipline.  If the goal is to build an audience while the novel is being developed, a blog can help enforce the discipline of writing something every day.  To sustain an readership, you must contribute on a regular basis. 

Provides a convenient sturcutre for collaborative writing.  Novel writing has always been a difficult, lonely business.  The writer must hone his or her skills in storytelling, dialogue, character development and scene organization.  The process can be lengthy, iterative and frustrating.  Imagine instead developing a novel as part of a small team.  One team member may be the equivalent of a movie director, focused  on the story line and scene organizaiton.  Others might work on characters.  Other team members might concentrate on dialogue or descriptive narrative.  Especially for new authors, this could be a way to learn the craft and have the potential to complete and publish a work sooner.  A blog, being web based and accessible from anywhere, with support for multiple authors, can easily facilitate this type of team effort.  

Greater visibility to backstory, locale and characters.  More of the research information can be shared with the audience via the blog.  The major character could even post their perspective on events or other characters. 

Early audience engagement.  A blog has built in feedback mechanisms.  The audience can become contributors to the novel and significant contributors can be recognized in the published work.  This audience is the first place to begin marketing the published work.

The blog statistics can be used in a pitch to publishers or agents.  Information on the potential size and profile of the target audience is invaluable to a publisher.  It could be the difference between picked up or not. 

The Blooker prize has been established by Bob Younger, founder of Lulu.com to recognize writers in different fiction and non-fiction categories who have gone from blog to book.  In 2006, the winner was Cherie Priest for Four and Twenty Blackbirds, now published by Tor Books.  The 2007 prize for fiction went to British blogger Andrew Losowsky for “The Doorbells of Florence.”   No doubt such prizes will help propel the blog novel forward. 

I would welcome other examples of successful blog novelists. 

In his engaging book, So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid examines a seeming predicament of abundance.  The quantity of books published is growing at a faster rate than the overall population.  We are drowning in titles.  To illustrate his point, he published the following table:

And, at the same time, the data about literacy seems to indicate that reading and literacy have declined steadily over the last half century.  Yet book sales continue to grow.  The American Association of Publishers reported that in 2005, overall book sales were up 9.9% to $25.1 billion.  Encouragingly, the fastest sales growth in trade books occured in juvenille hardcover titles.  So we continue to have an appetite for books despite the competition from other media - - e.g. television, video games and computers.

Do we need to worry that book publishing will fade into obsolesence?  Probably not - the publishing industry has several things going for it:

First, it has the ability to publish books even for a very fragmented market.  When Zaid wrote his book, he thought a few thousand readers were sufficient to justify the publicaiton of a book.  With print on demand (and ultimately the book ATM), plus some clever Internet marketing, even an audience of a few hundred readers could be profitable.

Second, the Internet is a providing great tools to identify, aggregate and market to small audiences.  Whether it’s the search / recommendation tools of online booksellers, blogs or social media sites, there are new ways to carry on these conversations in print.

Third, the production and marketing costs for a title are on average low compared to those for newspaper, television, film and video games.  And technology promises to drive these costs down even further.

Finally, the printed book still has a credibility that other media may never match.  

Over time, book production has become more “virtualized.”  Every step in the development process has now evolved to the exchange and processing of digital information.  But after development, the moment of truth arrives.  How many books to print?  The spectre of physical inventory has always loomed large over the publishing industry.  Physical inventory is the biggest threat to a publisher’s profitability.  And with the uncertainty about returns from booksellers, even when you ship it out, a substantial portion of it may come back (estimated to be on average about 30+%). 

But what if no inventory was created until the point of sale - and every sale was final?  Publishing Nirvana.  Print on demand publishing has particularly helped small publishers avoid the inventory trap.  But the Book Espresso Machine (see picture at right) from onDemandBooks may bring Nirvana another step closer.   

You could imagine several scenarios for the way this type of technology is put to use:

• Book ATM - select your book, insert your card and the book is printed in a few minutes.
• One hour non-book retail service - Drop off your book request (author / title or ISBN) at a department store, drugstore or drive-up standalone book printer, and pick up the freshly printed book within the hour.
• Bricks and mortar retail bookstore with infinite shelf space - Walk into your favorite bookstore and no matter what title you want, it can be ready for you in a few minutes.  No waiting or paying for deliery and those nasty shipping / handling charges. 
• Online bookseller networks - Amazon and Barenes & Noble Online create their own networks of book ATMs.  They offer the great search and recommendation services, but carry no physcial inventory of finished books. 

In all cases, every book is printed at the point of sale and all sales are final.  While this is still speculative - technology is never such an easy road - we can see a new future for book sales.  As Winston Churchill famously remarked:  “We are not at the end, nor even the beginning of the end.  But we are perhaps at the end of the beginning.”   [. . . of the tyranny of inventory.]

When considering how book publishers might operate in the future, I think the blog network offers one potentially viable business model.

There are numerous blog networks and most are still in their infancy.  Like any nascent business, they are struggling with their identity and finding the right business model.  Many blog networks are essentially online magazines, supported by advertising revenues.  There has been lots of “turnover,” with many blog networks going out of business.  There has also been extensive controversy over how to recruit and compensate blog writers.  But in the seeds of the failures, there is the potential for a new form of book publisher.  Here is a vision of what this new publishing house might look like.

• The publisher sets up a blog network with a strong topic focus.
• The publisher provides blog marketing and management services to help the writer develop and monitor readership.
• Writers are recruited who can contribute to specific aspects of the general topic area in a complementary fashion.  The idea is to track audience growth and interest, and then repurpose the content into books and related products.  
• Writers are encouraged to share information and publish collaboratiely.
• Writer are paid a percentage of all revenues derived from the content; the percentages may be tiered so that revenue growth isn’t capped. 
• The publisher provides blog to book services - editorial / design / marketing - at the point where there is sufficient audience and the right content to go from blog to book.  The publisher may draw content from several blog writers.  The publisher has the analytics to see where the content “hot spots” are and the ability to quickly get a book to market to take advantage of this knowledge.
• The publisher may market the book initially in non-traditional venues and then perhaps co-pubish a title with a larger traditional publisher to get into wider distribution once it has found its market.

The goal would be to build a blog network with a tight content focus, and the ability to produce a greater number of books with a higher probability of success than traditional publishing houses, and at the same time provide some compensation to their writers while they are developing content.  This might be an attractie strategy for a smaller, established traditional publisher looking to reduce expenses while increasing title throughput. 

For an author starting a new book project and desiring to use a blog as a title / readership development strategy, here is one way to structure your blog as a book.

This format is probably most suitable for non-fiction works.  I will discuss potential blog formats for novels in future posts.

Using some intentional structuring helps the conversion process.  One of the interesting tools available to pull content from a blog and convert it into a book format is the Blog Slurper from Blurb.  Blurb is a self publishing service that provides tools to help authors easily create books for publication.   The tool imports and maps blog text, images, comments, and links into a book template, in real time.  It currently supports Blogger, LiveJournal.com, TypePad, and WordPress.com blogs. 

I tried it out on one of my old blogs.  I didn’t take advantage of all the various formatting options the tool provides, but the basic layout I chose produced a very attractive draft book in a matter of minutes.   This type of technology can do a lot to accelerate the blog to book strategy, especially for authors who are publishing independently. 

It has been rumored that publishers have a very low hit rate with the titles they publish - 10% or less.  Most books are not profitable.  This has a lot to do with the traditional publishing model.   The selection of titles is often based upon guesswork or the relationships of agents or acquisition editors, or copying what has worked before.  The effectiveness of tradtional book marketing techniques have been difficult to measure.  And hard sales data on which to base selection and marketing decisions has been sketchy.

But things are changing.  Blog to book development strategies are available for the creation and testing of authors and their works.  Publishers can determine whether there is an audience, who they are and what they like before committing resources to the production and marketing of a title. 

The response to new web based PR and marketing tools - book trailers, podcasts, virtual blog tours, pay-per-click campaigns - can be more precisely measured with less lag time than through traditional venues.  On the sales end, Book Scan data is supplanting reliance on the more opaque dynamics of best seller lists.  Book Scan provides detailed sales data from over 6,500 locations including bookstores, online sales and mass merchandisers such as Target and Costco.  Real sales data can have a humbling effect on both writers and publishers.  This data can have strong predictive value for publishers as demonstrated by Tim O’Reilly in his post on using BookScan to track technology trends that were important for his future books sales.

Analytics could make a huge difference to publishers.  Imagine changing the ratio of profitable titles from 10% to 90%. 

Seth Godin popoularized the concept of viral marketing in his book Unleashing the Ideavirus.  The idea, summarized in the subtitle, was to “turn your ideas into epidemics by helping your customers do the marketing for you.” 

The widget is the ideavirus incarnate.  Widgets are defined by Wikipedia as “a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.”  They can deliver content or services to a user’s website usually with a simple one click install.  For many sites - especially blogs - widgets have become accessory items. 

Widgetbox, one of the leading purveyors of widgets, has now created something it calls the “blidget.”  A blidget is essentially a blog encapsulated in a widget.  It delivers posts from a blog directly to a user without the need to navigate to the site.  For example, you can install a blidgt on your personalized Google home page and receive links to new posts there.   The coolest thing about the blidget is that anyone with a blog can create one in just a few minutes - no programming required.  Then you can provide a widget on your blog that lets visitors immediately install the Widget on their own site.  Widgets can be easily shared by visitors with their audience.

For authors who are using a blog to book approach, this provides the opprotunity for some free viral marketing while they are creating the book’s content. 

Authors who blog may have the intention to create a book from their efforts or may be prodded to either by their audience or by a publisher who spots an opporunity in their blogging success.  For writers who have been blogging regularly for some period of time, it’s easy to lose track of the content they have created.  Posts and comments accumulate, but as time passes, they slip into the archives. 

So how you tell when it is time to consider turning your blog into a book? 

Here are some potential factors to consider.  First - have you established an engaged and loyal readership?   Second - how much content do you have and how well organized is it?  And third - which content is suitable for publication?

The answer to the first question can be found in the myriad of traffic statistics available for web sites and blogs.  For example, unique visitors, number of feed subscribers (assuming you have enabled RSS feeds), average number of page views per month, downloads, etc.  A sample of the broad scope of statistics you can collect for your blog can be found by taking the tour at Clicky, just one of a multitude of web analytics service providers. 

The second question can be answered by examining the total word count for all your posts and comments.  Take this number and divide it by the typical word count in an average size book - say 75,000 to 90,000 words.  What you come up with is the number of book equivalents.  Since not all content may be appropriate for a single book, more than one book equivalent may be necessary to produce a coherent title.  The strength of the content organization can be determined in part by the categories the author has used.  Categories can, if chosen properly, can mirror the chapters in a book.  If there is a good balance of content across relevant categories, the material is off to a good start. 

Knowing what posts are most popular and evoke the most response is a good clue as to what content will most likely do well in a book.  If you provide content for download, knowing what material gets downloaded most often is also a good indicator for inclusion in a title.  Another indicator - which posts get bookmarked on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us. 

Many authors are now finding that the new onramp to publishing success is the blog.  The list of success stories for writers starting out this way is growing every week.  Some examples include:

• Gina Trapani - book:  Lifehacker; blog:  Lifehacker
• Tom Reynolds - book:  Blood, Sweat & Tea; blog:  Random Acts of Reality
• Julie Powell - book:  Julie & Julia; blog:  What Could Happen?

So what’s behind the nascent success of “blooks” - blogs that are converted by their authors into books?  Probably the biggest reason is illustrated by Judy Clain in an interview with BusinessWeek (April 25, 2006).  She is an executive editor for Little Brown, which picked up Julie Powell’s book.  “There was a built in audience.”  She recalled that, during a 2005 New York book fair, over a third of the people who claimed one the 1,000 copies of Julie’s book knew her blog and had been waiting for the book.  Writers who blog can build their audience while they’re developing the material for their book and then they (or their publisher) can market the book back to that audience.

 Publishers also like writers who blog because it gives them the opportunity to see the quality and tone of the author’s writing. 

Another important factor is that blogs have many associated metrics.  Publishers looking to limit their risk can see how many visitors the blog is getting, what they’re viewing and what content is the most compelling to the audience.  Comments left on posts can provide some idea of the demographic / psychographic profile of the audience.  They can also see what sites are referring the traffic.

In a world where publishers are looking to limit their risk, blogs can provide a little more certainty about where they should make their investments. 

The picture at right symbolizes the traditional world of publishing - controlled by gatekeepers jealously guarding access to scarce editorial, production and marketing resources.  But the explosion of books pouring from publishing services such as Lulu, Blurb and iUniverse portends a new, more open world of publishing.  There seems to be an almost insatiable urge to publish.  And the effects of technology driven long tail economics is creating a new kind of publishing industry that will support a much wider range of product choices than in the past.  

The growth in independent publishers over the last 50+ years has been dramatic, as these statistics published by Dan Poynter illustrate.

1947: 357 publishers
1973: 3,000 publishers
1980: 12,000 Publishers
1994: 52,847 publishers
2003: 73,000+
2005: 89,000+

Today, over 78% of all titles now come from independent publishers.  

Just as Amazon and other online booksellers have created bookstores with essentially unlimited shelf space, print on demand and self publishing services makes it easy for anyone to publish a book in small quantities at low cost.  Many offer in-house or third party services to assist authors with cover design, interior design and content / copy editing.  This is the first step toward the democratization of the book production.  The availability of low cost marketing and promotion techniques via the web allows independent publishers to ramp up book sales outside of the traditional bookstore channel.  This represents a major step forward in the democritization of book marketing.   The last leg of the journey to a fully open publishing model could be indicated by the launch of the Espresso Book Machine from On Demand Books LLC - a system which can bind and print a book in 5-7 minutes.  This may eliminate the overhead of inventory and distribution altogether.  The book remains digital all the way to the point of sale.  One could imagine bookstores downloading, binding and printing a book while the customer has a latte.   The infinite bookshelf comes to your local bricks and mortar bookstore. 

Technology will no doubt create new opportunities in book publishing.  This is why I am writing this blog.  I am a bibliophile and a technology optimist.  Here is my belief about the future of one of mankind’s most amazing and durable inventions:  As the democratization of publishing progresses, prepare for a renaissance in book writing, publishing and reading.