Welcome back, dear reader, and a belated Happy New Year! Are you optimistic about this year? The news is so full of economic doom and gloom these days, I’d understand if you were feeling a bit mis. January was a long, dark month. Then today saw the start of the heaviest snowfall in the UK for 20 years. This is also the traditional season for a staff cull and restructure among some publishers. Those left may find their salaries as frozen as their fingers, their workload increased and their budgets squeezed.

The recession was declared a reality in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve seen a few high street shops close, including Woolworths, parent company of wholesalers Bertrams and EUK, causing a bit of a distribution flap at the end of last year.

But is it true, as Publisher’s Weekly predicted last month, that 2009 will be “the worst year for publishing in decades”? I think that’s a little bleak. Easy for me to say as an industry outsider, you might think. I’m not saying it won’t be tough. But I think there are opportunities for publishing this year. It’s just that I might mean something different than you when I say ‘publishing’…

What I think is in trouble is the traditional business model of print publishing by media corporations: bad times. But publishing is changing radically, and for those prepared to embrace the new realities, technologies and opportunities: good times.

Publishing doesn’t just mean shifting product. It doesn’t mean churning out ever-increasing volumes of paper products (including all those marketing leaflets and catalogues) when it’s clear that people do not access information in remotely the same way they did even a few years ago. People’s attention is shifting away from print and on to digital media.

Anyone who writes a blog, records a podcast, uploads a website, films a YouTube video – or uploads an ebook, a video or some music to Lulu, Yudu or Createspace – is also a publisher. When I press the ‘publish’ button on this post – I have just published something.

An article in Time Magazine a couple of weeks ago sums it up well:

If you think about it, shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20th century. Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms. Devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon’s Kindle have gained devoted followings. Google has scanned more than 7 million books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones. Compared with the time and cost of replicating a digital file and shipping it around the world–i.e., zero and nothing–printing books on paper feels a little Paleolithic.

One of the interesting side-effects of the problems with EUK/Bertrams was that many publishers and booksellers were able to get around distribution problems by dealing with each other direct. The value of a distribution business is in its relationships. If we can manage without the middle-man and form our own relationships, do we still need large wholesale distributors?

Part of the value of a publishing business is in its production capabilities and marketing channels. If authors can cut out the middle-man, self-publish and develop relationships with their readers direct using free online marketing tools – do we still need publishers..? This is the year when ‘vanity publishing’ will stop being a dirty word. Publishing will, finally, become disintermediated.

Publishing will still be around, but it will change into something you may not recognise. The possibility of publishing increasingly becoming an activity done by authors rather than (or as well as) publishers is a very real one.

So will publishing as we know it become a service industry and provide production and marketing services to authors? Will it become a rights business? Will its value be in editorial judgment, gatekeeping and filtering? In providing a brand identity? What IS publishing? The Association of Online Publishers define it as “original, branded, quality content.” But how will that content be delivered in the future? Who will decide the quality, and who will brand it? Does the average reader really care who the publisher is?

Are we finally reaching a tipping point in the industry, as happend in the music industry a few years back? It seems very up in the air at the moment. But these are the questions to think about in the coming months. Meanwhile, wrap up warm – and don’t have disintermediation nightmares.

The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world

…

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.

Continue reading at: http://nymag.com/news/media/50279/

On a more positive note, here is one of the videos referred to earlier in the piece – staff at new imprint HarperStudio holding aloft yellow lightbulbs and having some bright ideas about book publishing:

We need a bit of yellow lightbulb thinking, rather than bemoaning the fate of publishing. Why not slash those absurd advances and offer 50% royalties instead – a model HarperStudio are experimenting with.

Like the Cult of Skaro, we need to break out of old ways of thinking, think the unthinkable, and evolve into something else. Bright Ideas on a postcard please.

Print sales are falling. According to the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2007 report To Read or Not to Read both reading standards and voluntary reading rates of traditional print material amongst young people are falling. Textbook publishers are fighting for sales; campaigning to alert students to the necessity of using their products. Hardback fiction has almost gone the way of the dinosaur. The open access debate rages on. Publishers and retailers have consolidated. More and more books are produced, but there is less and less choice on the high street. Leisure time is transferring away from books and reading, away from television even, to the Web; to social networking sites, blogs, instant messaging, video and music file sharing sites. The attention economy is shrinking, fast. Academic research is – for many students – all about search. Let’s face it, for most students, actually, it’s all about Google. Who needs books anymore? More to the point, who needs publishers?

In an ‘always on’ world in which everything is increasingly digital, where content is increasingly fragmented and ‘bite-sized’, where ‘prosumers’ merge the traditionally disparate roles of producer and consumer, where search replaces the library and where multimedia mash-ups – not text – holds the attraction for the digital natives who are growing up fast into the mass market of tomorrow, what role do publishers still have to play and how will they have to evolve to hold on to a continuing role in the writing and reading culture of the future? Will there even be a writing and reading culture as we know it, tomorrow? Is the publishing industry acting fast enough and working creatively enough to adapt to the new information and leisure economies?

Continue reading…

Free distribution of digital content (music, books, visual art) is embraced by—and benefits—customers because it gives them access to a much wider range of content. This is because the restrictions on the amount of content they could get—based on how much they can financially afford—is eliminated.

Instead of money, the bottleneck becomes the time required to find content they’re interested in – this is where Google leads the field by providing an ever-improving and expanding search facility for finding the content, whether it’s webpages, books, news, academic articles, images etc.

Free distribution of digital content is slowly being embraced by—and will benefit—creators (artists, musicians, authors etc.) because it allows their work—and reputation—to be distributed to a much wider audience.

Musicians such as The Charlatans and Nine Inch Nails are making headlines with new ways to make money while giving away MP3 files of their music for free (and unsigned bands have been doing it for years).

Authors such as Suze Orman and Dan Solove are giving away free ebook versions of their books, in the knowledge that the wider distribution this gives them helps to sell more paper copies of their books.

So where does this leave publishers? The book publishing companies and music companies seem to have been left out of this equation. You could argue that they’ve left themselves out of the equation by desperately attempting to pretend that the business model of content creation has changed while vainly suing fans for the crime of being early adopters of a new economy.

Actually, there is a role for clued-up skills-rich publishers. It’s just a slightly different role than they’re used to. The clues can be found when you examine the new business model summarised above and look for the holes. That’s what I’m going to try to do now (but not exhaustively – I’ll leave that to people much smarter than me).

Continue reading…

Publisher, web producer and friend of the show, Rich Holman, has written a very interesting post about the implications of digital media for the business models of content industries. He reminds us that it’s not a straight fight between new media and old media. Because new media doesn’t care. It will just continue doing what it does well:

• Disaggregation – content reduced to the micro-format, individual components – photo, song, article, chapter, web link, tv clips.
• Aggregation – platform(s) to view micro-formats, these are the winners – google, yahoo, facebook, flickr all using human/computer filtering to serve relevant content back to user
• Content creation – new tools enable anyone to create content at ‘professional’ levels, Adobe, Apple, Internet applications, MS Word.
• Content distribution – the internet, social-networking, algorithms, RELEVANT advertising
• Business structures – new technologies and applications enable relatively small groups of people to run large operations (Craigslist?). Income doesn’t need to be that big to support such groups (even reenumerate them handsomely)

So to sum up, less people, money and effort is required to sustain a content business that is several (hundred) times the size and breadth of anything seen in human history. All this spells out a massive change in the way companies have operated for over 200 years, top down, pre-packaged, advertised, distributed, and sold to the consumer.

As he says – 2008 is going to be a big year…

Continue reading…

1. Publishing and the Internet: Connecting with an Online Audience – Society of Young Publishers, Wed 27 June, 18.30-20.00

From the flyer:

This month we take publishing and the internet, one of the hottest publishing topics of current times, and throw open the discussion between our expert speakers and audience. Are e-books as big a threat to books as the ipod has been to music? How differently are publishers engaging with a generation of increasingly savvy internet users? And where does the ever-struggling high-street retailer fit into this new, uncertain bookselling formula?

Speakers confirmed:Fionnuala Duggan, Director of Random House Group Digital; Jason Hanley from Google’s Booksearch Program; with Claire Warwick, Programme Director for the MA in Electronic Communication and Publishing.

More details on the SYP website, or on their Facebook Group. Anyone can go – whether you’re young, or just young at heart.

2. Models in Flux: Books and Journals – Centre for Publishing, Wed 27-Thu 28 June.

A 2-day conference on e-publishing and e-publications featuring the blogosphere’s very own Richard Charkin as a speaker in the last session. From the website:

All of us involved in the information chain and especially scholars instinctively think of books and journals as the main way that knowledge is mediated by us and to us. We are therefore concentrating on communication using these means. They are constructs that have served us well for centuries and continue to do so. This conference, planned to be the first of an annual series, questions the sustainability of the old models of content delivery as well as the old business models themselves.

I sadly can’t make either event – but if you go, do let us know what you thought!

At the Margaret Atwood Digitise or Die event in April, Stephen Page applauded bloggers for the valuable service they provide to publishers: “we don’t have to read that stuff any more”. Andrew Keen takes this a step further, and bemoans the digital detritus of home-made media as a whole – blogs, wikis, music, video.

This debate is frequently characterized as a polarity between cultural gatekeepers and DIY democracy. As you might imagine, I come down on the ‘elitist nonsense’ side of the argument. But it’s more fundamental than that.

This is not an argument about cultural elitism. It’s about vested interests sneering at ‘citizen media’ and ’so-called democracy’. Institutions and corporations claiming content ownership, and blaming a media illiterate society for their falling revenues. I think falling publisher revenues have less to do with competition from amateur bloggers and YouTubers, and more to do with a mismatch between the ways in which people want to access content, and the forms of content that are offered by mainstream publishers.

Bloggers and podcasters are not “inane amateurs”. Andrew Keen’s sweeping dismissal of social media as “unreliable and deeply corrupt” is little more than tabloid hysteria. Which is ironic, because this debate has echoes of elitist Edwardian outrage at the birth of the tabloid newspaper. But this is not even 20th Century thinking. It is 19th Century thinking. As Charles Leadbeater, author of We-think, said during his Newsnight debate with Keen this week, it’s a reprise of the 1885 public libraries debate: “the masses cannot be trusted with information and knowledge”.

I believe a knowledge revolution of the same scale is happening at the beginning of this century.

But it seems that some bloggers are more equal than others. Uber-critic of citizen media, Citizen Keen Himself, has his own blog. It’s quite good. I suspect that Keen’s views are more nuanced than his polemical appearance on Newsnight would suggest. But I fear that the argument presented in his book may offer a procrastinating last-gasp of hope to those page-sniffing old media folks with their heads buried in the slushpile. Reassurance that, actually, this web 2.0 stuff is a lot of old nonsense, a fad that will soon pass, so we can return to maintaining cultural taste and decency for the masses without digitizing or dying.

Our new web 2.0 culture is participative, collaborative, creative, critical, transparent. And it’s here to stay. The crowd is wise after all. Wikipedia works – it is accurate and accountable. The blogosphere provides a level of direct and unmediated global debate, feedback and commentary unlike anything previously seen in human history.

Creative media production has also been disintermediated. But it still only finds an audience if it’s good - just the same as the offerings of a commercial publisher, radio station, film studio or record label. It’s still all about the content, and consumers are more critical and vocal than ever. That’s not only democracy, it’s meritocracy.

This can all be disruptive and threatening to many mainstream media producers, including publishers. But there is a simple way around it: JOIN IN.

• Don’t pretend it’s not happening
• Don’t cling to old top-down content delivery business models
• Do engage with your audience: invite feedback, criticism, and content
• Do encourage community, creativity and collaboration.

Publishers in the future will not be gatekeepers. The gates are already open. It’s time to become a content facilitator.

The magazine is well-produced – even a lovely object, with its stylish matt pages. I love its obsession with Japanese culture, the coverage of politics, design, business – and the Manga comic at the back. I feel like I’m at the cutting edge of international politics and culture when I’m reading it. It’s like the early, glory days of Wallpaper*, before it went to IPC (an interesting place for it to end up – Condé Nast would seem a more obvious home).

What’s really interesting is the business model. While most magazines offer a discount for annual subscriptions, MONOCLE charge more. £5 per issue against £75 for 10 issues doesn’t seem to add up. The rationale is that you get access to premium website content with your subscription.

At the moment, the website is free. It consists mainly of short film clips that supplement articles in the magazine, such as mini documentaries, film previews and Japanese pop videos. A nice extra that does encourage me to shell out £5 to ‘read more about this in the magazine’. Whether I shall pay extra to access this once the trial period runs out remains to be seen.

There are no established business models for monetizing content on the Internet. We’re all making it up as we go – and MONOCLE is a new twist. But the main models people are currently trying out include one or more of the following:

1. free content as marketing
2. free content as a taster for ‘premium’ content
3. contextual advertising
4. subscription
5. data capture / infomediary
6. micropayments / pay-as-you-go

People are used to getting content for free on the Internet. That may change, as it did with music. We may get used to some sort of micropayment system if it becomes easy and intuitive to use, like clicking on a track in iTunes and being charged 79p. It may not.

Many people in mainstream print publishing are squeamish about giving content away for ‘free’. I think this is shortsighted. As Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, said at the Unbound conference:

We do give away our content for free. Most magazines and newspapers do, because we believe the marketing value of all those links and word-of-mouth more than compensates for the lost sales.

When people see the value of content, they will pay for it. But you sometimes need to give something away first. For example, I subscribe to MarketingProfs.com, a useful source of articles on marketing topics. You get limited content for free, and full content for around US$50 per year, which, to me, is worth it. But I read an awful lot of free content before I signed up.

The content is key. So is building an audience around it. For that, you also need good search engine optimization (SEO). That includes not hiding all your content from Google behind a login! Increasingly, you also need social media optimization (SMO). More on those stories later.

In today’s media climate, it’s more important to focus on researching your market, getting the content right, building a community around it – and the cash will follow.