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.

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)