I like infoporn. I love to pore over traffic charts for websites, or look at survey numbers from opinion polls, or sit back and marvel at a really good graph, which is infoporn’s centerfold. One area where the data-crunching promise of personal computing has delivered is in capturing, assembling, and displaying this kind of labor-intensive data for easy access by the layperson.

It’s become ubiquitous, too: think about how every social network service presents some sort of low-level and instant feedback on itself, from Twitter followers to Facebook friends, Diggs to Google Reader Likes (also now in use on Google Buzz). Older Internet communication, like email or instant messaging, tended to focus on two-person relationships and relied on self-evident participation measurements–you could ask the other person if she received your email, or see for yourself whether she responded in your IM chat. As soon as more than two people are involved in communication, however, the measurement burden begins to grow, and the PC is there to start measuring and reporting on that relationship.

The promise of analytics–data presented in a way that helps you make more money, to put it crudely–is a component of this new publishing world that has the potential to dramatically empower authors and help them make money. On the other hand, like every other aspect of new publishing it’s also potentially disruptive, or at the very least distracting. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bookseller notes today that authors and their agents are struggling with publishers over just how broad a reach current contracts should have when it comes to ebook rights, particularly so-called “enhanced” ebooks that contain content that’s not available in print.

Some publishers–Hachette, for example–want everything; authors and their agents want to divide it up so that they can negotiate more precise, and potentially more profitable, royalties. Here’s how agent Jim Gill of United Artists puts it:

He said while some basic enhancements might be covered by an existing grant of ebook rights, “beyond that we’re talking about very sophisticated products which don’t resemble at all what we’d all understand to be ‘a book’ licensed under a volume-rights agreement”. Gill added United Agents would “no sooner naturally sell those rights to a book publisher than we’d sell them film rights.”

I’ve grown increasingly less convinced that existing publishing cabals are capable of being leaders in yet-to-be-developed digital publishing platforms or formats.

If the history of commerce on the Internet is at all predictive, then we probably have a good ten years before big publishers bring the right big guns to the fight and suck up the majority of the market. That leaves a lot of time for disruptive newcomers to transform the marketplace significantly enough that they emerge as permanent and powerful market leaders. See: Amazon this past decade.

Plenty of authors don’t want to worry about the business side of writing and publishing, which is why agents and publishers exist of course. But I’d caution any writer to hold as tightly to undefined rights as possible and to keep it out of a publisher’s hands–not so you can negotiate higher royalties down the line, but so you can experiment rapidly with new digital distribution methods without being hampered by slow-to-react corporations.

“Agents and publishers grapple over ‘enhanced’ e-book rights” [The Bookseller]

(Photo: einalem)

I attended a Google Book Search settlement workshop yesterday hosted by the National Writer’s Union (NWU), the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The workshop’s panel included representatives of those organizations as well as an agent, a professor who has been studying the issue, and the executive director of the Authors Guild, which is one of the primary parties involved in the settlement. Here are the main themes from the event.

 

“A settlement isn’t the right way to settle this.”

New York Law School Associate Professor James Grimmelmann, who remained a largely non-partisan outside observer (although he has stated he thinks the settlement should be approved, with modifications), pointed out that a class-action lawsuit isn’t the right way to determine an issue like fair use under copyright law. It needs to be addressed by the government and not through private negotiations, he said, because it has huge societal implications.

Grimmelmann also pointed out that if the settlement goes through, it’s likely Google will emerge with a huge market advantage over any potential competitors, which may negatively impact any healthy competition in the marketplace.

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild and a lawyer, argued that the risk of losing the lawsuit was too great: if the courts found Google’s scanning to fall under fair use–as Grimmelman and at least one other legal expert think it could–then others would copy Google’s scanning project. “In our view,” he told the hostile crowd, “It would be catastropic.”

Grimmelman responded that the proposed settlement wasn’t the only valid solution, and that there could have been other paths to a compromise.

 

“The settlement is overreaching, and probably untenable.”

Lynn Chu, an attorney, author, and book agent, was the most vocal opponent of the settlement, calling it an “outrageously bad deal as a financial matter” for writers and a “typical entertainment industry scam.” At one point she implied that the Authors Guild had been misled by incompetent legal counsel, which not surprisingly seemed to anger Aiken.

Chu pointed out that the business model proposed by the settlement has nothing to do with the original lawsuit, which was solely about fair use. “You glued a business contract to a waiver,” she told Aiken, and accused the Authors Guild of appointing itself as an agent to the world’s authors.

She also criticized the proposed Book Rights Registry, which is sort of an ASCAP for authors appearing in Google Book Search, noting that it would help Google shift costs over to authors by forcing authors to take care of administrative and publishing tasks on their own dime.

“[The settlement] probably won’t survive an appeal,” she told the crowd, a sentiment that Grimmelmann seemed to agree with. Still, she cautioned, “There’s no reason to be apathetic.”

 

“The settlement isn’t really author-friendly at its core.”

Edward Hasbrouck of the NWU pointed out a worst-case scenario that could happen to an author under the terms of the settlement: You have a book included in the database, but your ex-publisher claims that because it has authorized a print-on-demand version of the book it still owns the rights, so you and the publisher agree to binding arbitration and you lose. Since the arbitration is legally enforceable, you will have permanently lost your claim of ownership over the digital copy in Google’s database.

Chu noted that Google reserves the right to audit the Book Rights Registry, but that the favor isn’t returned because Google claims trade secrets will be compromised. She also noted that authors can make their own deals with Google and don’t need to rely on the settlement.

Note: the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America hosted an online panel discussion this morning. You can read through it at http://sfwa.org/online-google-settlement-panel/.

I’m heading to a workshop today to listen to authors, agents, editors, and who knows what else talk about the proposed Google Book Search settlement. It’s being hosted by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

A lot of authors are having trouble deciding whether the settlement is good or bad for them, probably because it’s a little of both when you get right down to it. I tend to side with Google, but then, I tend to think that making every. single. thing. in. the. world. searchable is a Good Thing and should be done, and I have no faith it will happen in the next 20 years without a for-profit corporation getting involved. (And believe me, I am no sycophant of big business.)
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Last week, the BBC Radio 4 program Open Book focused on the role of the editor in publishing a work. Host Mariella Frostrup interviewed five editors or author-editor combos about what value an editor–whose job didn’t really formally exist until after World War II–provides.

You can listen to the half-hour show here; the first 10 minutes alone are worth it just to hear Diana Athill talk about the unique editing requirements of Updike, Naipul, and Rhys. But here’s a summary of key points from the full episode:

• An editor can help shore up a writer’s weaknesses. Some writers may be masters of language, but need help shaping something into a finished work. Other writers may be great writers but lousy at taking care of other essential life tasks, so they would otherwise never write or publish without someone’s help.
• An editor is a guaranteed, and perhaps the only, extremely attentive reader a writer will have. Diana Athill says, “What one learns when you’re working with an eidtor, is that actually very few peole get their books read extremely attentively by anybody. A writer is dying to have his or her work read with complete attention. And here is this editor person, and the one thing they have done is they have paid full attention to your work, which is very gratifying.”
• An editor may act more like an agent or a music producer. Some editors will work closely with writers to help them determine career steps, going so far as to advise on what sort of book to write next. Others, like Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish, will manipulate the original manuscript so much that their role becomes something more collaborative, or even borderline Svengali-like, as with music producers.

Open Book for Thursday, 31 Dec 2009 [BBC]
(Photo: Nic’s events)