Bertram's Blog

My guest blogger today is Dale Cozort, author of American Indian Victories. This is the third in a three part series discussing the future of books. Normally I don’t post such long articles, but I thought Cozort’s analysis was too important to edit down. Cozort writes: 

Part one looked at how the filters that keep readers from having to sort through a glut of really bad writing are breaking down.  Part two looked at how authors and readers can adapt to a world where the traditional filters are less uselful. Part three is kind of an “Empire Strikes Back” section.  It looks at how publishers might react to the new environment.  I’m not necessarily advocating these solutions.  I’m saying that companies or individuals may go these routes. 

Publishers could try to restrict the number of books published by raising the cost of entry.  In a lot of industries companies have prospered by making it difficult for competitors to enter the market.  That can be done a variety of ways.  Companies can raise the cost of marketing by launching expensive ad campaigns that only companies with a lot of cash can match.  They can get patents on key parts of a production process.  They can use economies of scale to reduce their costs far below their competitors’ costs.  They can dominate shelf space and exclude their competitors. 

All of those techniques other than maybe patents have been used to some extent in the book market.  None of them are likely to stop the proliferation of small print on demand or e-book publishers or the increase in self-publishing.  Expensive marketing campaigns can drive sales of some books up.  Publishers can’t afford to do those kinds of campaigns for all of their books though.  Lesser known authors with smaller sales potential can’t justify large ad budgets, and they are the ones most at risk from competition with small POD or e-book companies.  Economies of scale do make the cost of production lower for traditional large publishers as opposed to POD publishers but their return policies and the need to maintain inventories eat up much of the savings.  Dominating shelf space works in brick and mortar stores but is less effective at Amazon.com because there are no shelves to dominate. 

Publishers could work harder to establish themselves as reliable brands.  I rarely notice the publisher when I’m trying to decide whether or not to buy a book.  I look for favorite authors.  I look for attractive covers.  I look for exciting concepts.  I sometimes look at reviews.  I don’t recall ever buying or not buying a book based on the publisher. I may be wrong, but I think most readers are like me. 

Publishers may work to change that, marketing themselves as “name brands”-places you can rely on for high quality reading.  That’s tricky because quality in books is very much a matter of opinion.  Appealing reliably to a segment of the book buying public might not be hard, but a generalized ‘high-quality’ is more difficult.  Publishers could and probably should feature their imprint names more prominently on books and in advertising. 

Many if not most small POD and e-book publishers claim to be very selective.  Some of them may be selective, but it will take a while for those claims to be widely accepted by readers. 

I hate to say this, but publishers might also rely more on company owned pen names using a variety of ghost writers, and then promote the pen names.  That’s been done with various pulp and young adult series books from time-to-time, and publishers might extend it to areas outside of series books.  Frankly I hope that doesn’t happen.  Recognition is a large part of a writer’s compensation. 

Publishers may try to differentiate themselves by reinventing the book:  We have Web 2.0.  Why not Novels 2.0?  The idea is that the technology of publishing lets publishers do a lot of things they couldn’t do thirty years ago.  The design and layout of magazines, newsletters and textbooks have changed a great deal since the sixties.  The layout and design of novels really hasn’t.  Companies trying to differentiate themselves from the glut should be asking themselves how they can make novels more visually exciting for a generation with a short attention span, just as textbook makers and magazine editors have done.  They’ll need to do that without running up printing costs too much. 

So what would a “Novel 2.0” look like?  I have some ideas I’m experimenting with, but I’m sure a professional design team could do better.  The key is to actually enhance the reading experience or at least not get in the way of it, while avoiding page after page of dull black on white that turns off younger generations of readers and avoiding a comic book feel that would turn off more traditional readers.  Good design could enhance the reader’s experience without drawing attention to itself. 

Going to some kind of “Novel 2.0” design could do a kind of filtering by raising the bar for acceptable book design, making it more difficult for individuals without design experience to make a professional-looking book. 

Novels 2.0 might be easier in e-books.  An e-book doesn’t have to be a simple transfer of an existing book to electronic format.  E-book readers are just specialized computers.  That means that they can potentially do a lot of things that you can’t do on a printed page.  The current generation of e-books may not be able to do all of these things, but eventually the e-book version of a novel could have built in mood music that changes as you flip the pages (I would hate that and turn it off).  It could have a built-in audio-book version with good professional-sounding audio.  That would let you read, then simply switch to the audio version when you had to do something like running errands. 

E-books could have hyperlinks to pop-up boxes that let impatient readers find out more about a character or a town or some event that is mentioned in passing, or even pictures of characters or scenes.  For that matter they could even have small clips of video embedded in the pages at a few crucial points.  An e-book mystery novel could have clues to the mystery hidden in hyperlinks.  It could also have “Easter Eggs”-little hidden touches that could only be accessed by a special combination of buttons.  Easter Eggs are common in computer software and DVDs.  They’ll probably become popular in e-books too.  Readers might find an alternate ending that they never knew was there, deleted scenes, insights into some of the characters, backstory, or historical notes.  Some brave authors might even include earlier drafts of the novel as Easter Eggs or additional content. 

E-books could also have more color illustrations.  Adding color to a print book adds to the cost of printing.  In an e-book the only cost would be the illustrator.  E-books wouldn’t have to be restricted to black on white print color schemes.  Without the restrictions of having to be printed, pages could be as eye-catching as web-pages. 

All of these “Novel 2.0” ideas might make it more difficult for an individual or a small publisher to create a state of the art book.  They would also raise a publisher’s costs.  Getting a state of the art novel 2.0 ready would require a person capable of creating professional-sounding audio, someone capable of making visually exciting interior page designs, probably a professional illustrator, and maybe even someone capable of making professional-looking video clips. 

From a publisher’s point of view, would standing out from the competition be worth the additional costs?  Would readers really seek out books written as Novels 2.0 rather than more traditional books?  How long would it be before little groups of would be writers, designers and illustrators found each other through the Internet and began producing their own Novels 2.0?  They might even produce Novels 2.0 before the big publishers do. 

Unless I’m missing something it doesn’t look like the old ways of filtering out “bad karaoke” writing are going to come back.  Some of the things I’ve talked about may bring back some of the filtering by “raising the bar” of talents you need to have in order to publish a state of the art novel.  Readers will still have to get used to a situation where they have more choice but they also have more junk to wade through. 

The Future of Books: The Problem of Filtering (Part 1)
The Future of Books: The Problem of Filtering (Part 2)

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 Dale Cozort is author of American Indian Victories.  Visit his website at www.DaleCozort.com.

My guest blogger today is Dale Cozort, author of American Indian Victories. Normally I don’t post such long articles, but I thought Cozort’s analysis was too important to edit down. Cozort writes: 

If you’ve been around aspiring writers much you know that a good percentage of them produce the writing equivalent of really bad karaoke.  You also know that there are undiscovered gems out there.  Until recently the book buying public has not had to deal with the ‘bad karaoke’ books.  We’ve probably missed a few gems too.  What we saw in bookstores was filtered.  Sometimes that filtering kept out good books, but it mainly kept readers from wading through an awful lot of crap. 

Like it or not, the filters are going away.  Good books are still being published but they are hard to find among increasing amounts of drek.  Readers, authors and publishers need to figure out how to deal with the glut.  If we don’t the book market will continue to spiral downward, with more writers pursuing fewer and fewer readers.

The key issue for readers, authors and book publishers is going to be how to replace the traditional filters and get high quality novels together with their audiences.  

In part one I’ll look at what has happened to the traditional filters.  Past two will look at potential replacements. 

So what have the filters been and why are they going away? 

Filter One: The Expense Of Putting Together a Manuscript: Until recently putting together an acceptable manuscript was difficult and expensive.  Personal computers and affordable laser printers made writing a novel and putting together a manuscript much easier.  Before  affordable PC and laser printers you didn’t just have to write the novel, you also had to type up the manuscript, then retype revisions, a slow and cumbersome process that kept many would-be novelists (including me) from ever sending a completed manuscript to a publisher. 

Affordable computers and laser printers let more people write novels.  Established writers could write faster.  The result was empowering.  A lot more people wrote a lot more stuff.  The result was also disastrous.  The publishing industry simply couldn’t deal with the increased flow of manuscripts.  That brings us to filter two.. 

Filter Two: Publishers: Publishers used to look at the stream of manuscripts coming in from aspiring writers and rejected the ninety-nine percent or more that for one reason or another they couldn’t profitably sell.  That took care of most of the ‘bad karaoke’ writing. 

Writers had little choice but to accept the verdicts of the publishers.  Publishing and promoting a book was expensive.  An author could almost never make money publishing a book independently.  Also, ‘subsidy publishers’ preyed on would be authors, charging exorbitantly to print unsellable books.  Most readers correctly felt that self-published books were mostly junk because if a book was any good it would have been published by a real publisher. 

The system worked for the most part.  Authors with enough persistence and skill could find a publisher.  Readers could know that the books they saw on a booksellers shelves usually, though by no means always, met a set of minimum standards.  Publishers prospered in that environment, taking most of the risks and most of the profits from publishing.  Most writers didn’t prosper, though authors who made it through the filters and established a name for themselves could earn a modest living at writing, and a few very big name authors became moderately wealthy. 

Smart publishers made an effort to find the few publishable manuscripts among the “slushpile” of unsolicited manuscripts they received.  That made sense because if they didn’t they not only lost out on a potential profit, but they also handed that profit to their competitors.  Good publishers also took pride in finding and nurturing new talent. 

Several things changed that system over the past several years.  First, the sheer number of manuscripts coming in made even skimming the slushpile more expensive.  Second, many major US publishers were bought out by conglomerates from outside the publishing industry.  They moved to the short-term “what is the bottom line this quarter” thinking that has destroyed so many US industries.  Many publishers also seemed to develop a “who needs talent when we have marketing?” view of the industry. 

Most major publishers stopped looking at unsolicited manuscripts a few years ago.  They farmed that function out to agents.  As the slushpile flood diverted to agents, those agents were also overwhelmed and most of the good ones stopped looking at unsolicited manuscripts too. 

New authors found it harder to get published by traditional publishers.  They also found it easier to take other routes.  Print-on-demand and e-book technology makes both self-publishing and being a publisher much less expensive. 

Some readers still look down on self-publishing and to some extent on being published by small POD or e-book publishers.  Part of the problem is lingering attitudes left over from the old “big publisher versus vanity press junk” dichotomy.  Part of the problem is that a lot of small POD and e-book publishers do publish “bad karaoke” writers.  

Small POD and e-book publishers have little short-term incentive to filtering out the junk.  Being selective can actually hurt a small publisher in the short-term because most novels will attract enough of the novelist’s family and friends to pay the bulk of the (very low) costs of publication. That makes it close to cost free in the short term to take a chance on a new novelist if the advance is low enough or if there is no advance.  Some, but by no means all POD publishers actually charge the author for publication, which gives them incentive to publish just about anything. 

At the same time, POD and e-books are in many ways a much more rational way of publishing books than the traditional publishing model with its wasteful return policies.  Some newer, smaller publishers are finding and publishing gems or at least books that satisfy certain audience niches more effectively than traditional publishers.  Readers who stick exclusively with traditional publishers do miss out on some good reading. 

Filter Three: Bookstores.: Up until the last couple of decades, bookstores acted as an additional filter, with small bookstores owned by people who were also avid readers  Those bookstore had limited shelf space and did not stock books that they didn’t like or think would sell. 

That changed in two waves.  First, bookstore chains pushed most small independent bookstores out of the market by stocking a larger selection and charging lower prices.  That cut out much of the filtering function of bookstores.  More shelf space meant that bookstores didn’t have to be as careful what they stocked.  Loose return policies meant that if a bookstore overestimated many books would sell it was the publisher’s problem, not the bookstore’s. 

The increasing power of the chains also made the market less responsive to local preferences.  A local bookstore had to know what would sell locally and order accordingly.  Owners often knew and talked with customers.  That was much more difficult for chains. 

Second, Amazon.com rose to challenge the chains.  Amazon lists books at very little cost to themselves and do almost no filtering.  Best sellers from big traditional publishers are listed along with self-published “bad karaoke” POD books.  Amazon reviews can give some idea of the quality of a book but they’re fairly easy to game. 

So the traditional filters are disappearing.  Readers can’t find new authors they like among the glut of “bad karaoke” books.  New authors often can’t find a publisher, and often can’t find an audience even if they find a publisher.  Traditional publishers no longer reliably find fresh talent and increasingly rely on marketing rather than talented writers.  That shrinks the market by making books less attractive to younger readers. 

So how can all of that be reversed?  I have some ideas.  They’ll be in part two.

The Future of Books: The Problem of Filtering (Part 2)
The Future of Books: The Problem of Filtering (Part 3)

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Dale Cozort is author of American Indian Victories.  Visit his website at http://www.DaleCozort.com