Via Technology Review

If you’re a supporter of indie publishing and want an easier way to find new authors to try out, you might want to take a look.

There’s a catch, however. In addition to pitches for unfinished work, Amazon will consider content that’s already published on the Kindle Store, but will reject anything that’s been published elsewhere. The content also can’t be available for free on the web. In other words, Amazon is attempting to build up a stable of exclusive content that its competitors can’t offer, which makes the Kindle Singles similar to what a magazine or book publisher does with new content.

Check out the Kindle Singles submission page for more info.
(Photo: Nemo’s great uncle)

That, in a nutshell, is one of the reasons why Sidney Williams recently teamed up with Crossroad Press to republish his older novels as well as new works.

Williams published his first book in 1989 through Pinnacle, and in the years since he’s written horror, young adult novels, and graphic novels like “The Dusk Society”, as well as an audio adaptation of “War of the Worlds”.

But like many midlist and genre authors his titles have all but disappeared from brick and mortar bookstores, even though there’s still an audience for them.

While the early novels involve werewolves, vampires, and—in the case of “Gnelfs”—malevolent children’s cartoon characters, his latest book, “Midnight Eyes”, is a more realistic suspense thriller about a Louisiana serial killer, a dangerously ambitious newspaper editor, and a sheriff who must ask his estranged son (and former FBI agent) for help if he wants to prevent more deaths.

I asked Williams about his decision to publish through Crossroad Press, and his own experience with ebooks so far.

Booksprung: In your bio and in other interviews, you’ve said that you were a journalist for eleven years, and among other things you covered crime. Was that the genesis for “Midnight Eyes”?

How did you decide to publish digitally, and why did you choose to go with Crossroad Press?

What’s your writing process like, and has it changed much over the years?

What was the first ebook you read?

How was that experience?

Do you have any “guilty pleasures” that you find are easier to read in ebook form?

The cover art for your earlier paperbacks from Pinnacle are definitely of an era, but there’s no denying they were striking and attention-grabbing. What do you think about the role of cover art in digital publishing?

I like cover art a lot. I miss record albums because you had such beautiful big artistic opportunities for covers. I am kind of fanatical about my mp3s. I try to get all the cover art right on my iPod, or my iPhone now, and I still like covers, I like seeing them on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, wherever.

As far as covers with Crossroad, its been fun to have a second edition of my books out and kind of see new directions with them.

It’s challenging to get cover art. David Dodd did “Blood Hunter” and I thought he did a great job. I can remember being on the phone with—you know you didn’t get a lot of input on covers in the old days, and I remember being on the phone with my editor talking about what the cover should be. My original idea was of a moss-covered arm or claw reaching across the cover, but instead we got a swamp scene and a young girl looking through the trees on the original cover. I thought David Dodd did a great job of capturing the setting for the story without giving much away.

Neil Jackson did the new “Gnelfs” cover, and I really like that. The original “Gnelfs” cover is very 80s/90s, and I thought Jackson kind of captured the mood and the flavor of the story without giving too much away or spoiling letting your imagination form the monsters in that one.

You know when you download a book, it usually defaults to the first chapter, and I go in on my Kindle and reset it so that the cover is the first page until I start reading it, because I like even the monochromatic covers.

You have an unlimited budget and a crack team of designers and engineers. What does your ideal ebook device look like?

What are your thoughts on ebook lending and resell rights? How do you think those two issues should be handled in a way that’s fair to all parties involved?

Do you have any preference for print or digital books?

And finally, who are your favorite authors?

Sidney Williams is currently working on a literary thriller as well as a fantasy novel, and he’s re-editing his vampire novel “Night Brothers” for the forthcoming ebook edition.

“Midnight Eyes” is available on the Kindle Store and in multiple formats from Crossroad Press.

Visit Sidney Williams at sidisalive.com

(Photo: treyevan)

Here is the original article that started the current round-robin of blog posts, thus leaving me in a bad situation where if I ignore it, I’m not being topical, but if I write about it I’m being as ridiculous as the rest. Oh well. I’m usually even more ridiculous.

Out of all the me-too posts that sprang forth from the Great God Internet’s loins over the past few days, this is the best one in terms of supplemental original research:

And here are a few thoughts about the topic, noisily claptrapped out on my keyboard with annoyance this morning because I’d rather find something more fun to write about.

1. This isn’t a new phenomenon. As I mentioned above, people who actually follow this market have been making a similar point since at least last November. The reason this is a story in June 2011 is because a mainstream media (MSM) outlet took an interest in it. Today, for reasons both practical and irrational, there remains a large trust gap between blogs and MSM news organizations, with most information flowing unilaterally from MSM to blogs. For a topic to be taken as newsworthy by most MSM orgs, it must first be identified, (hopefully) researched, and publicly presented on a peer’s news platform—by Reuters, in this instance.

2. This is an undesirable state, but it doesn’t break the Kindle store. In my experience, and I bet I spend more time on the Kindle Store than the average consumer, I almost never come across these spambooks. I’d rather just say “never,” but it’s possible such titles have shown up in the past and I’ve forgotten, which is a clue that they clearly don’t register as an annoyance with me yet. (And I’m easily annoyed; look how irritated I get over a low-level news cycle about a legitimate topic.)

In my opinion, Amazon isn’t doing enough to combat the problem internally, but for now at least there are so many third party websites offering what are essentially free curating services (like what I do with the Amazon Bargains posts, for example) that spam titles aren’t just easy to avoid but actually difficult to find unless you’re diving deep into the Kindle Store. Publishers and authors also kick in a little curation mojo to promote real titles, and barring a massive pandemic of reader stupidity, no spambook will ever crack the two main Top 100 lists on the Kindle Store.

The spam problem is gross because it reminds one that many people are nasty little scavenger beasts who will happily jump onto a carcass and try to drag away a bit of viscera. But if you blog, you see this sort of scavenging all the time anyway from jerks who steal your content, so it’s not new.

And more relevant to this topic, it’s not like I’m having to delete spam from my Kindle each morning. It’s a real issue that in practical terms remains a non-issue.

3. No one has a good solution to prevent it yet. Casey Johnston at Ars Technica mentions one commonly offered solution: that Amazon should charge money to publish on the Kindle. I’m surprised Amazon hasn’t already implemented a fee, but it seems to me that as of right now, Amazon finds it more profitable to let vendors come on board for free and hand over a cut of every sale.

On thing worth noting, however, is that Apple has always required a nontrivial $100 fee before you can submit your apps, and it seemingly hand screens every app submission before allowing it on the App Store, and yet the App Store is lousy with crapware, including public domain content wrapped in a hastily devised iOS shell.

In other words, a $50 fee to publish on the Kindle store, even if it’s refundable, may end up being nontrivial for some real self-publishing authors, but a justifiable expense for a spammer who plans on excreting 150 private label rights ebooks to the store over a two day period.

If Amazon charged the fee for each title submitted, that might have a more effective result—but it would remain a very real obstacle for legit authors too, a perfect example of punishing the honest to try to get at the dishonest.

4. It’s not always so easy to tell what’s fake content and what’s just badly written or ill-conceived content. Sure, the examples in the articles above are easy enough to identify. But unless Amazon/Apple/RetailerX wants to get into the official gatekeeping business—you know, like a real publisher—it’s going to be hard to manually comb through submissions and make a judgment call on whether every “how to improve your finances” title is just a bad purchase or actually spam.

5. This highlights the need for an independent content monitoring tool that authors, publishers and retailers can use. For now, this might look like Amazon’s problem, but it’s a problem any time a retailer opens the submission doors to the public. And private label rights ebooks are only part of the problem—there’s also the issue of people stealing published content and reselling it. Worst of all, unless it threatens to take over a store’s most public areas (which is unlikely), it’s a bigger problem for authors and publishers than for retailers—which means retailers may ultimately say to authors and publishers, “You deal with it.”

It’s hard to root out this sort of theft, and although I suppose there are businesses cropping up to sell you monitoring services, it would be healthier for the publishing industry to create a standalone body to do it. Assuming the key players in modern publishing will never be able to work together to achieve such a mutually beneficial common goal, I think Google or Amazon should create it and then sell it to other businesses as well as individuals.

I assume that publishers would do everything possible to sabotage such a tool unless they were the ones to develop it, probably by arguing that it violated their copyrights. So for the near future we’re stuck with spammers on our ebook stores, and as with spam in email, spam on Twitter, and spammy websites, your best strategy is to simply avoid them when possible, report them when you can, and ignore them the rest of the time.

(Photo: t3rmin4t0r)

The idea — to essentially crowdsource the slush pile (or to “make it social” if you prefer), and thereby turn it into a form of cheap, high-volume/mixed-value content — is the same as what some bigger publishers are doing; Harper Collins has authonomy, and last month Penguin revealed its new site Book Country. All three sites assume you will join to share your own writing as well as read, and although they make no promises, there’s a chance an editor might discover you and offer you a contract.

I don’t have an issue with this approach, and it certainly seems like in theory it could prove more accurate than the current system at helping publishers find marketable books.

But I’m not personally interested in spending too much time on any of these sites right now. The larger the slush pile grows — and let’s face it, the slush pile is now pretty much everything, including the ebook stores from Amazon and Barnes & Noble — the more I want and need some decent curation. The problem right now is that the volume of published work is far too great for current levels of crowdsourced curation to be effective. For example, a Smashwords title might have three reviews, all three of which are from people who know the author. More commonly it will have no reviews at all. Without a publisher’s stamp of approval or some proof from the marketplace that the work is of sufficient quality, the reader has no idea whether to bother.

Red Lemonade might address some of this in the coming months. There’s a Featured section where presumably Red Lemonade’s staff passes an editorial filter over submissions and chooses worthwhile titles to promote, and I’m optimistic that this could be a good source of free new works by new authors.

At launch this morning Red Lemonade has only 54 titles, which seems very manageable from a crowdsourcing perspective. By contrast, over the weekend Smashwords announced that it has now published two billion words from authors. You’ll need a lot of battle-hardened readers to sort through that many words to find the good pieces.

I think the challenge for Red Lemonade and its social slush pile competitors, assuming they grow popular enough, is to create a better ranking and filtering system that helps customers find great things to read — and I suspect the solution will require something more than just crowdsourced free labor. The publisher or website who invents that is probably going to enjoy a huge, and deserved, advantage over competitors in the near term.

(Photo: Hryck.)

“This morning when I booted up my computer and immediately went to check Publetariat to make sure it’s up and running normally, as I always do, it occurred to me that if I lose my home I probably won’t be able to keep running Publetariat and its sister sites. Then it occured to me that Publetariat’s audience would probably be very disappointed if this happens.
And it further occurred to me that Publetariat’s audience numbers in the tens of thousands, and if each one of them were to pitch in just one dollar, it could keep my children and I—and therefore, Publetariat—afloat for a few more months, while I try to get more work and make other financial arrangements.”

If you’ve ever found Publetariat useful, or just want to help out your fellow man, you can read her full story and donate a dollar or two at Publetariat.

You can pretty much always find outspoken, passionate diatribes about ebooks online. I’ve written several myself, but in my defense I had to, or else the Ebook Bloggers Board would have flogged me and taken away my WordPress dashboard. Even setting aside my own involvement, I’ve always enjoyed this sort of spirited discussion–it’s like politics, only it doesn’t leave me feeling coated in a sludge of despair the way a political jeremiad does.

But there occasionally comes a tipping point. Sometimes I read too many pieces in the same week, or I wake up and, while browsing the morning links in bed, get stuck on a particularly over-the-top article or editorial or news item about ebooks and publishing*, and I snap. “What are these people thinking!” I yell at the cats. “And stop licking my neck! I’ll feed you in a moment!”

I’m going to put the subject of The Cat Nuisance aside and just focus on The Ebook Diatribe Nuisance right now. (Although really, not writing about cats is probably the second or third cardinal sin of the blogosphere–I’ll have to go hide my WordPress dashboard after I hit “publish.”)

Here are three common misperceptions that I think we’d all be better off discarding before writing anything else about ebook publishing.

Misperception #1
Pricing: Publishers don’t get it!

They get pricing; they just don’t always do what we’d like as consumers. When a publisher prices an ebook higher than Amazon’s suggested ceiling of $10, it’s trying to do any of several different things:

• reduce demand for ebooks to help improve sales at physical bookstores, because that’s where the bulk of its business model exists;
• prevent or slow the erosion in the consumer’s mind of what a new book should cost, so that the eventual switch to ebook dominance doesn’t also lead to an across-the-board drop in revenue;
• wrest pricing control away from Amazon, a company known among publishers to be ruthless in its pricing and service demands.

Much has been made about that high-priced Ken Follet book, but as I suggested back in August, this is how it should work with ebooks. The price should be elastic, and publishers should be able to charge more early on in order to profit from consumers willing to pay a premium for earlier access. I wonder whether there’s a psychological barrier–specifically on the side of the publisher, but also with consumers–that makes it difficult to think of a book as having a fluctuating price, but that’s how it should be. You’ll notice that Amazon adjusts prices up and down for inventory throughout its website, fine-tuning the offer based on the consumer, competitors’ prices, and who knows what other secret variables.

What I do worry that many publishers still don’t get is that digital distribution of books will soon become a foundation of the publishing business model. Taking a protectionist stance on a pre-Internet business model may feel right today, but is likely to be a less profitable strategy in the near long-term (say, 4 to 10 years). I hope the smarter publishers are using pricing to buy themselves time to transform their business processes to be more efficient in the digital space. I don’t, however, know if any of them are actually doing this; sadly, they may just be under the impression that they can control the digital beast, despite compelling evidence in other industries that it’s truly disruptive.

Misperception #2
Ebooks could potentially ruin publishing

This is a ridiculous statement as I wrote it, but add one word to it–”ebooks could potentially ruin traditional publishing”–and it’s accurate. If your business is built around a printed book model, then there’s enough disruptive qualities to digital publishing that it could wreak havoc with your profits. Clearly that’s already happening with physical booksellers like Barnes & Noble and Borders, although I’m not sure any big publishing houses have really felt any significant pain from ebook sales so far.

The more important question, then–the one that might actually motivate those of us who aren’t part of the traditional publishing industry to care–is whether or not traditional publishing can do a better job of preserving and building a society’s culture than some still-evolving digital model that generates less friction with respect to geographic territories, distribution, and resource usage.

I think these two recent news item answer that question rather neatly:

Amazon is creating a new market for original works that so far have failed to find an outlet in traditional publishing, mainly (probably only) because there is no feasible way to physically print, ship and stock a 20,000-word novella and actually make money off of it. Ostensibly, these will be both reprints (particularly with magazine articles, I suspect) and new works from living authors who are still writing.

By contrast, Penguin is pulling from its extensive vault of copyright-protected works that might have already been more widely read had they been in the public domain on Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks. Penguin hasn’t been able to find a way to monetize them, apparently. In the article I linked to above, a Penguin rep even says that the goal is to expose new readers to works that have languished under the current publishing model and that are being forgotten by modern readers.

So both announcements are purely about making money, but Amazon’s offering may actually enable new content to enter the marketplace, whereas Penguin has been prevented by its business model from sharing valuable existing cultural content with the world.

You can expand this to other forms of writing. How many terrific first novels were never sold in the past 50 years because there wasn’t a market for them? Theoretically, a behemoth online seller like Amazon or Barnes & Noble can find the 2,500 potential readers for a well-written but niche novel that’s distributed digitally; even better, that retailer can pass the bulk of the labor off to the writer (or whomever the writer hires) via self-publishing tools to minimize the initial investment. I suspect traditional publishers could take advantage of digital technology to publish in this way as well, but I also suspect they’re trapped in pre-digital ways of thinking and can’t conceive of how to profit from it.

Misperception #3
The customer value propositions bookstores offer include a sense of community and handpicked selections

I call these the “connection and curation” arguments, and they both make me cringe. These are not two of the strengths local bookstores can uniformly offer to communities, and focusing on them is a waste of time.

Let’s look at the human connection proposition first. As a human, my own experiences may be anecdotal but they’re relevant, since they neatly disprove the suggestion that a bookstore provides a basic human need. I have never made friends with a bookstore. I have never found new friends at a bookstore. I have never filled a pit of loneliness by “only connecting” in a bookstore. Once, back when I was about fourteen, a stranger grabbed my butt in a Waldenbooks at the mall, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what people are thinking about when they wax raphsodic about the human element of a local bookstore.

On the other hand, I am sure that there are people who are the exact opposite of me, who have ongoing friendships with employees or owners of local bookstores. But there are also people out there who become friends with their coworkers, or neighbors, or the young couple that opened the coffee shop a block away from Starbucks.

I know that the potential for human connection exists, in other words. I just don’t think that local bookstores can claim this as a unique value.

This is part of a larger sales strategy that isn’t discussed as much as I think it should be, so I’ll bring it up now: despite all advertising to the contrary, you can only make friends with certain animals and with other people, never with companies. Every time a business wants to make an emotional connection with an actual human being, it’s engaging in a sneaky, underhanded marketing tactic designed to sidestep your more rational marketplace behavior and get you to spend emotionally. Never trust a company that wants you to think of it as a friend, unless you know that if you were in a car accident and called that company for help, it would come to the hospital immediately. (What, you don’t have that company’s home phone number? Ah, see, there’s the rub.)

The curation argument is even easier to dispel. Simply put, if I had to choose my next book purchase based on either a single employee’s recommendation at a Barnes & Noble, or the results of an algorithm that has collected shopping data from thousands of consumers whose purchasing histories closely match mine, I’ll choose the algorithm. It’s just a numbers game to me; I think the algorithm will have a better predictive capability. James Surowiecki in The New Yorker this week says essentially the same thing when talking about the curation of movie titles:

Places like Netflix and Amazon have demonstrated the great irony that computer algorithms can provide a more personalized and engaging customer experience than many physical stores.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t like people or that I don’t value the personal recommendation. It just means that in the marketplace, I want to choose the more efficient mechanism to help me get the best value for my dollar. I can distinguish pretty easily between real human connections and data-mining tools, and I’d prefer the tool when I’m in the marketplace.

So what are the customer value propositions for local bookstores? Beats the hell out of me, but I’d suggested the following. Only the first two require a massive financial investment to implement, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon beat local booksellers to the punch regarding print-on-demand in the next decade.

• immediate access to hundreds of thousands of printed books, particularly using print on demand technology;
• custom books assembled from publishers’ content libraries, printed while you wait using print on demand technology;
• communal spaces for humans to connect to other humans as equals, not in a customer/employee dynamic;
• access to books that lose their essential qualities in digital form, such as photo books, coffee table books, poetry, gift books, graphic novels, pop-up and children’s books;
• direct access to authors (originally I typed “face to face,” but I think improvements in communications technologies means it’s theoretically possible to pool resources and create virtual readings, signings, and Q&A sessions);
• rare and collectible book services.

Those last two are all about scarcity, and they may be the only types of scarcity that ebook dominance can’t erode.

(Photo: Lars Plougmann)

Donna Fasano’s first novel was published by Harlequin Silhouette in 1990, and it was chosen by the Romance Writers of America as a finalist for its Golden Hearts Award. In the twenty years that followed, Fasano–sometimes using the pen name Donna Clayton–published over 30 novels via the traditional publishing route, won the HOLT Medallion three times, and sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide.

In December 2009, however, she tried something different: she self-published her new book The Merry-Go-Round, which had at one time been in the hands of a large publisher (more on that below), through Amazon’s Kindle Store. Now it’s also available through Smashwords, BN.com, Apple’s iBookstore, and KoboBooks, and a print version could be hitting Amazon’s virtual shelves as early as this month.

I spoke with Fasano about her experience with self-publishing, where suddenly the author has to do everything from prepress to customer service, and whether she plans to do it again.

Why did you self-publish The Merry-Go-Round?

Donna Fasano

[In the mid-2000s] I sold Where’s Stanley? to Harlequin Next, and my editor liked it so she bought two more women’s fiction novels. It took me some time to write those two novels, and The Merry-Go-Round was one of those. The other manuscript was called Hindsight.

By the time I finished those two manuscripts, the Harlequin Next line had folded, so they returned the rights to me. But this took about a year’s worth of time because they purchased a lot of inventory, and they were trying to slot some of the books and put them in other places [within Harlequin's lines].

For many authors, like myself, the books didn’t quite fit anywhere else, so they returned them to us. I was trying to decide what to do with the book and didn’t like the idea of it sitting gathering dust, so I decided to try Kindle.

What did your agent think of this move?

He read The Merry-Go-Round and Hindsight and he said they were too… they were written for Harlequin, they’re women’s romance fiction novels, and Harlequin is very specific in things like word count. When women pick up a Harlequin, they know what they’re getting. So he felt that he wouldn’t be able to sell them anywhere else, unless I did a lot of work to them. And I liked them just the way they were.

So I didn’t ask my agent. I just did it. I mean, he freed me up, he said he didn’t know where to send these, so he was okay with me doing whatever I wanted to do with them.

So how did you choose Amazon and what was that experience like?

I knew absolutely nothing. I probably Googled “upload my manuscript as a Kindle book” to try to find some information somewhere, and that’s where I learned about Amazon’s DTP [Digital Text Platform].

It took quite a bit of time because I had to read two different formatting guides. I had to do everything. You know, formatting, cover, blurbs, everything, which is very different for me. A writer usually just writes the manuscript and sends it in, and then starts thinking about the next book.

Then I learned about Kindle Boards. [Kindle Boards is an online community of Kindle readers and writers. -Ed.] I went there and the writers there are just wonderful, just so helpful and supportive, and that’s where I learned about Smashwords, and that through Smashwords I could offer my book for sale in other venues.

When did you do this?

I believe I uploaded my book to Amazon in December ’09, and I did absolutely nothing for several months just because I didn’t know what to do.

It was after that, probably in January or February that I found Kindle Boards, and slowly but surely I have been improving the marketing of the book. I’ve changed the cover twice and worked on the product description a couple of times, and I’ve done interviews for blog writers. I feel so out of my element because I don’t do this part, I’ve never done this part. It’s been very exciting but very different and difficult.

This explains the different covers I’ve seen depending on the store.

Yes. The very first cover is the orange one, and that was my very first cover that I made and I was very proud of it. (Laughing). But the book was not selling, and a Kindle Board author–Karen McQuestion, who just had her book optioned for a movie–said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I don’t want to be insulting but I’m wondering if your cover is hurting your sales.” She explained that at first glance it looked like a children’s book. So I licensed a couple of pictures and put another cover together, and it was much better but I don’t think it was professional looking. So the cover with the large carousel horse and the couple in the oval–that’s the newest one. And it’s brand new.

The evolution of a cover, December 2009 to July 2010.

Have you been able to measure how the different covers have impacted sales?

Well it’s difficult to tell, but I can tell you that once I took the orange cover off and put the second cover on, my sales tripled. However, it’s difficult to say that it’s just the cover because I also was contacting all these blogs and offering reader copies for reviews and I just started to do things, I started to do marketing.

How did you handle tasks like copyediting, layout and design? Were those things already pretty far along because of the past deal with Harlequin Next?

Actually, Harlequin hadn’t edited it, so I read it and had a writer friend read it.

[As for formatting,] Smashwords has a formatting guide and Amazon has a formatting guide, and also there’s a Kindle Board author named Edward C. Patterson who has a formatting guide, and I read that too.

A reader sent me an email saying she found seven or eight typos in there, so I fixed those typos and then re-uploaded it. So it’s an ongoing process.

Are you going to offer it as a printed book at any point?

Yes. I just uploaded The Merry-Go-Round to CreateSpace. In fact, the proof copy is in the mail to me.

So it should be available in a month or two?

Oh, it won’t take that long at all. I was absolutely shocked. I just uploaded that book this week and the print copy is already coming. I just have to go in and click a button if the proof is okay, and then they’ll put it up for sale. So it may be within days.

Looking back, it seems you’ve been in a crazy, compressed learning phase for the past six months.

Yes I have!

How would you describe it?

It was fun. It was exciting. (Laughing.) I am very lucky to be married to a man who earns enough money so that I am able to do this, because the money’s not anything like the money that I made at Harlequin.

But have you seen ebook sales trending up each month?

Very much so, yes.

Does this mean you’re prepping Hindsight for self-publishing as well?

Yes!

In fact, I’ve gone further than that in that I have contacted Harlequin and got the rights reverted to my first eleven books. [Usually, after a book remains out of print for a certain length of time, the rights revert back to the author. -Ed.] But I don’t have electronic files of those books so I’m scanning them in and turning them into Word documents. I’ve never done anything like that before either, so I’m learning all kinds of new things.

I’m going to do everything. (Laughing.) I’m going to do it all!

Having experienced all this, do you think you’d go back to a traditional publisher in the future if the opportunity was right?

I haven’t thought about it. (Thinks.) If I could sell both, I would. I’m not in a place right now where I’m creating new stories. But I could see myself [in the future] submitting my work to a publisher. I love publishers, and having somebody else do your marketing for you is great! And proofreading, and editing–all of that.

How did you settle on a price for it?

I started out at $1.99. J. A. Konrath on his blog said that was a good price. There are some indie authors who sell their work for 99 cents, but because I have twenty years’ experience and I know I can deliver I felt it was worth a little more than that.

So I started at $1.99, then Amazon changed their royalty payment schedule, so I increased my price to $2.99. [On June 30th, Amazon announced an opt-in royalty program that provides much higher royalties on Kindle books, but requires a minimum price of $2.99. -Ed.]

I’d love to jump 10 years into the future and ask a writer whether running the business side of things has a negative effect on creative output. Is it too early for you to gauge that right now?

It probably is too early, but I can tell you that I spend a lot of time [on non-writing activities]. The readers on the Amazon discussion forums and on the Kindle Boards, they don’t want me to just go in and say, “Hey, buy my book!” They want me to come in and chat and get to know them.

And can you do that?

I’ve been doing that, but if I didn’t currently have [extra time], I wouldn’t have very much time to write. I could spend all day online, because there’s Goodreads, and LibraryThing, and Kindle Boards, and MobileRead. You know, everywhere you go, there are readers!

Finally, do you own a Kindle? If so, what’s your experience with it been like?

Oh, yes! And I have about 50 books in my TBR pile.

I love my Kindle because it enables me to carry all my books around–all the time. I’m a big reader and I have always carried a paperback everywhere.

I love books! I love the feel of a book in my hands. I love the tactility of turning the pages. Books just feel warm and inviting and comforting. That might sound strange, but books were an escape for me when I was a kid.

At first, I didn’t think I was going to be able to get used to the metal of the Kindle. But I found a way around that–a leather cover. (Laughing.)

I believe there will always be a place for print books. But I also believe that, in these techno-savvy times, the e-book is here to stay… and it is destined to grow. I’m very happy to be a part of this new… hmmm, not sure what to call it. Age?

The Merry-Go-Round by Donna Fasano [Amazon Kindle Store]

Donna Clayton Amazon Page [Donna Fasano's pen name]

(Carousel illustration sources: celesteh and mira66)

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.

In February, author Henry Melton noted that after he wrote a couple of iPad-related posts his site traffic jumped considerably, and coincidentally he sold more ebooks. But while he knows there might be a correlation that’s worth further experimenting (and data collection), his heart’s not into it as a writer. Heck, he doesn’t even want to deal with being on a social network when he writes:

I can’t understand how other writers can be bubbly and personable every day on Twitter and Facebook and whatever other social networking fad is trending today, and at the same time, get their writing done. For the past month I’ve been deep into a new first draft novel, and my social interactions have been suffering. My priorities put the new writing first, and the marketing aspects of the job second. That may be a bad thing.

That power for analytics to distract one from productivity is something Jonah Lehrer commented on just a few weeks ago. His focus was on personal relationships, particularly how the human brain seems wired to organize groups into hierarchies and then to constantly take a measure of one’s own status; he suggests that social network websites overstimulate this part of the brain by first making your social group much larger than what’s historically been the norm (never mind that we may not consider Facebook friends real friends; I think what he’s suggesting is even pseudo-friends may figure into the primal hierarchy-sorting behavior), and then by providing feedback–aka analytics–on their actions as they relate to you.

I thought of Lehrer’s primates-and-hierarchies post when I stumbled across Supernormal Stimuli earlier this week, a new book that argues that animal brains seem to have evolved to be attracted to outsized experiences and data inputs. It’s why we like really fatty or sweet foods, why we’re drawn to hypersexualized entertainment (porn), and–seriously–why birds prefer crude, over-exaggerated fake eggs to real ones.

Both Lehrer’s post and Supernormal Stimuli put me in mind of the kind of infoporn I’m discussing here. After all, the promise that you’ll be able to have an instant macro-view of how the world interacts with your or your content is incredibly appealing, even if it’s almost certainly an unbearable data load for any one person to handle even after a PC does the crunching and chart-building.

Even so, the data is too useful to ignore, and it will keep coming. It may also become as important a part of future publishing contracts as current obsessions with copyright protection and the carving up of rights into different distribution channels, according to Clive Rich, a lawyer with experience in the music industry who spoke at a publishing conference in London last week.

Rich’s argument is that it’s quickly becoming impossible for an author to exert much meaningful control over all the ways a book is sold. In one example, he notes that the practice of “unbundling” or selling a book piecemeal might become a market reality. Another example he gives is that it may become too expensive or time-consuming to negotiate approval over every licensing or business deal in a market with rapidly proliferating distribution channels. (Imagine in a few years: a publisher might try to sell an author’s book on three or four mobile platforms, as stand-alone mobile apps, as fodder for subscription-based online services, and as elements in one-off anthologies created by consumers at the point of sale, all in addition to traditional print copies.)

Rich thinks the trade-off for an author, other than potentially more sales, is that he can demand greater transparency into the business data–analytics, in other words. Here’s how he’s paraphrased in the Publishing Perspectives summary of his presentation:

Transparency is the pay off. Rather than a royalty statement every month, a “realistic objective” for authors might be to get notice of any deals and, in so far as publishers are receiving reports from a distributor, monthly or even weekly reports on consumer purchases and other activity.

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There could be reports on number of users, hits, how many times an application is downloaded, average dwell times, or number of units sold,” Rich said.

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As authors develop conversations with their readers (via blogging and social media) the digital service provider can collect information, which may then be used for more conversations and to up-sell. “It’s a legitimate area of interest for the author to be able to share in that data; they could send an email about the new book with a call to action.” Authors could collect the data through their own websites.

This also hints at a transition in how publisher contracts may be structured. Advances might be lower, says Rich, but “the contract looks more like a service agreement,” with publishers offering a customizable list of services and related fees instead of taking merely a flat cut of any sale. How much you pay to the publisher will partly be a function of how willing and able you are to deal with the business analytics side of things yourself.

Some published authors are already experimenting with publishing their back catalogues through direct relationships with retailers–Ian McEwan is doing it with Amazon, for example. But most of the news in these early days of digital bookselling has been about determining the right price, or determining if there is just one right price, or arguing over how to split the revenue fairly. It will be interesting to see how the discussion changes once some of the more business-minded writers out there begin to make deep dives into analytics and report back to the rest of us on how it impacts sales, marketing, fanbases, and the act of writing itself.

Some quick conclusions:

• The low transaction cost of communicating directly with readers is a double-edged sword. It can make a positive impact on revenue, but drain resources for producing further work.
• “Infoporn” is perhaps a more accurate term than I realized, in that it can be a sort of supernormal stimulus that the human brain naturally gravitates toward but that can distract from constructive productivity.
• Not every writer is going to want to deal with this, which is closer to the “business” side of writing and publishing than the “art” side. (I’d argue it’s actually its own domain and not inherently business or art, but clearly it will be used in the near future mostly for maximizing revenue.) Publishers will likely provide encompassing services for authors, although perhaps some agents will as well. Ironically, if we continue down the disintermediation path away from publishers and distributors, new third-party services may pop up that sell analytics services to authors. Perhaps a Google Analytics-style service will appear, but Google’s free products are justified by their direct connection to ad placement and sales and aren’t simply good deeds.
• Reader data might replace critical reviews in some conditions, for the same reason it would supplant traditional sales ranking reports: reader data is more granular and can offer more accurate feedback for a writer, including the demographics of his highest-spending readers, his works that are most commented on or shared, or which subsections are most purchased independently of the entire work.
• Analytics might be used to actually shape or help create new works, especially “live” writing or works that are deliberately left unfinished until adequate reader data is collected.

(Photo: pdinnen)