In his post reacting to Jason Weaver’s piece on post-punk publishing last week, Mike Cane pointed out that books, along with being inherently more difficult to sample than music, don’t have any true equivalent to the DJ.

“What’s the equivalent of a DJ for a writer or book? A reviewer? Which reviewer and where?”

The growth of electronic publishing will mean that an ever increasing number of people, liberated from the authority of the traditional gatekeepers, will be able to publish their work.  That’s a good thing.  Probably the biggest negative of this phenomenon, however, is that it will become increasingly difficult for readers to discover the good stuff among all the “sludge.”

Book reviewers don’t really do this job.  They write about the book itself but typically offer only small samples.  They usually only look at newly published work and, with some exceptions, only touch books published by established publishing houses.  Plus, I don’t see our current conception of a “book” staying the same for too much longer.  In an e-dominant world, written content will come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

I’ve previously spoken of the possibility of “super readers,” but here I’ve included a bit more detail.  I’m not sure whether any of this would actually work, but it would be interesting if some people tried a little somethin’ like this:

• Just as with traditional music DJ’s, a “word DJ” would have a fairly consistent taste (though not necessarily a niche or genre) and people with a similar taste would follow the word DJ’s who share their own taste and who do the best job of turning them on to new stuff.
• Rather than simply making recommendations, the word DJ gives significantly sized samples of whatever kind of work fits in with the DJ’s specialty.  Fiction or non-fiction.  Samples from books, samples from short stories or articles that might be published only online and even samples from poems (or entire poems).
• The word DJ would most certainly not limit herself to newly published work.  Any work from any period could potentially be included.
• As with music DJ’s, some word DJ’s would have a narrow focus and some would be more ecclectic.
• Also as with music DJ’s, some word DJ’s would focus upon one written work at a time, while others might do “remixes” that cut up and mix together work from various writers and works.
• The true purpose of the word DJ is to take their readers on a journey, not to evaluate written works critically.
• The word DJ does not to tell his readers “Go buy and read this ENTIRE book.”  In many cases, readers will go and buy and read the entire book, but they will often be content to read only the sample.
• Everything that is sampled would have a convenient link to purchase the entire work.  The word DJ’s could even get an affiliate-type commission.
• Word DJ’s would need to sample much larger segments of a work than would normally be permissible under “fair use.”  Wise writers and their publishers (if they have them) would happily go along with this.

There are bookish bloggers doing some of these kinds of things already.  But I wonder if consciously thinking about this person as a “DJ” would change how the DJ works and how others would read the DJ’s aggregations.

I’m sure there is a better term than “word DJ,” too.  Suggestions?

Update: In the Comments, Blissfool correctly points out “If a DJ is a disk jockey, and a VJ is a video jockey then surely a Book DJ would be a BJ?”  Oh, yes!  How could I have missed that?!  This idea may well catch on…

I’m thinking about the place of fiction in the 21st Century.  Might its role in our culture be diminished?  Among all the other distractions available, how likely is it that an individual will discover and choose a novel or short story over some other diversion?  Will most people be willing to invest the time and intellectual energy it takes to get through a longer work of fiction?  Do people still appreciate a story’s resolution, a proper ending (something that doesn’t go to the next “level” or that doesn’t link somewhere else)?  Might the fundamentals of a work of fiction change somehow?

Might it be true that, more and more, potential readers can’t find the BEGINNING, don’t have time for the MIDDLE and don’t want the END?

No, I don’t think things ever change that much.

Despite all the technological changes that are affecting the way people read, despite all the other distractions that are available today, I don’t think we’re seeing the end of Aristotle’s three essential plot elements.  There’s something inherently satisfying about a well-constructed story.  As has always been the case, there will be large portions of the human population who have no time for or no interest in a good, fictitious story.  That’s fine.  But for those in the know, for those attempting to peer a bit deeper into the human experience, there is no substitute for quality fiction.

Of course, writers, publishers and sellers of fiction should not assume that the rest of the world sees fiction’s indispensability as self-evident.  Don’t wait for readers to come to you.  Go to where people are and shove your valuable product in their collective face.  Act like a pharmaceutical company trying to promote a new drug.  Tell people you know they have a problem and that fiction is (part of) the cure.

Just as Seth Godin has dared to imagine a better Kindle and a better Amazon, I’d like to try imagining an altogether better ebook retailer.

Hey, Google (or somebody with money, programming skills and ad sales), create this…

• Online database of all ebook titles, à la Amazon, including tools for discovering content.

• eBooks only.  Only digital inventory and distribution.

• Readers can conveniently purchase books from all participating publishers via the central database.

• Publishers set their own price.

• Publishers get contact info of ebook buyers.

• The Google-ish entity gets a small percentage of the value of each purchased ebook (i.e. something far, far less than Amazon’s 60%) and also displays relevant ads.  Ad sales allow the seller’s royalty to remain low.

• eBook buyers retrieve their ebooks from the Google-ish entity, where they are available and permanently stored in all viable formats, including .html for online reading.  I repeat:  a reader purchases the book once and will permanently have all existing and new ebook formats available for that title.

• Perhaps users of the eBook Warehouse can lend access to the book (or maybe even sell it) to other users.  While loaned, the title is no longer available on the owner’s virtual bookshelf, though it can remain on any device to which it has been downloaded.

• Since the majority of ebook readers will love the eBook Warehouse, the majority of ebook sales go through the Google-ish entity, allowing it to enjoy insane profits while keeping its own royalty percentage very low.

• Publishers, and by extension authors, will know who their readers are, giving them a better chance of drawing each reader into the publisher’s and/or author’s community.

• Authors will get a much larger cut of each book’s revenue than they do either with Amazon’s current ebook model or the standard print model.

• Readers will know that they will own their ebooks perpetually and that they will always be available to them online.  They will have the ability to loan them and to use them on any device.

Build it.

P.S. Increasing publishers’ standard ebook royalty rates can be dealt with separately.

Update: Of course, it would be best if several companies tried to do this.  Barnes & Noble, with its ready-made brand, would be a natural player (and how amusing would it be if the brick and mortar giant become the ebook sales giant?).  Also, publishers could band together to set maximum royalty percentages they will allow a seller to retain.  Any seller trying to increase its cut above this level would get no new ebook titles from the coalition of publishers.

Although most of the sessions at last week’s PSP Conference were fairly industry-specific, there were a couple of items that might be of general interest to normals.  Here’s one…

The Devil Is In The Devices

Dr. Bill Detmer, founder, President and CEO of a company called Unbound Medicine, gave this presentation on publishing content for handheld devices.  He summarized the current state of affairs, the rapidly expanding market for handheld devices, the even more rapidly expanding market for iPhone apps, and all of the ridiculously varied ebook formats.  His advice to publishers was to find a way to prosper without DRM, his view being that it causes as many problems as it had the potential to solve.  Of course, he didn’t offer a solution to the question of how publishers–especially those whose content commonly costs thousands of dollars a year–could put that content out into the world without DRM and not fall financial victim to mass piracy.  Again without offering up an example of how it has or could work, he also spoke favorably of publishers using “the power of free.”  This is the same kind of thing that has been discussed here and elsewhere: give users some free bait in anticipation that they’ll appreciate it so much that they’ll eventually come back and pay for more.  More and more, this is becoming a fairly acceptable option even in the stodgiest corners of the corporate publishing world.

The question that occurred to me during the session was this: is there a company like Unbound Medicine for fiction publishers and self-published fiction authors?

Essentially what they do is stay on top of handheld technology (including ebook technology) for publishers and then handle the technological development of such content.  In most cases, even the largest publishers don’t feel confident enough to handle complex medical ebook production themselves (lots of graphics make it problematic). They’d rather leave it to a specialist.  So is there a company that self-published fiction authors could go to that, for a reasonable fee, would produce expertly formatted ebooks in a variety of ebook formats?  Or even just the few most significant formats (EPUB, PDF and Mobipocket, say)?  I can imagine that such a company might have a different pricing model for individual authors, another for small publishing companies and yet another for the larger publishing companies.

Would this be useful?  Does somebody do this?  If not, is anybody interested?

Ted Striphas asks why we insist on calling ebooks books:

So let me end with a modest proposal. Perhaps it’s time we cease referring to electronic reading devices as “e-books” and instead find some other, less papercentric, name. Maybe then, when the technology no longer feels compelled to prove its worthiness in relation to paper, will digital reading achieve what’s been expected of it for so long.

I can’t disagree with what he’s saying.  Comparing “ebooks” to “email” isn’t fair because the word “mail” just never had that much emotional significance attached to it.

But if it’s an electronic version of a print book, it would be hard to call it anything else but a book.  Or is “book” too general?  Should we be more specific in calling things what they are (gay Sikh romance novel, spit-flecked right-wing diatribe, thinly disguised pornography for teenage girls, etc.)?  Or should we be more general and simply call it “electronic text” (brrrrrr…so c-cold)?

Or should we just come up with a new term altogether for the ebook?  Suggestions:

• hot words
• text-a-go-go
• e-golem
• meaningful arrangement of electronic letters
• word game
• iBook (name taken)
• da book
• naked lady
• metanarrator
• iPhone words
• awesome
• word war
• final draft
• crystal words-meth
• affirmation!
• mike cane
• time killer
• word virus
• second life third life
• ephemeron
• social interaction avoidance mechanism
• thousands-of-hours-of-work-thing
• information that wants to be freeeeeeee!!!

Any other suggestions?

Hat tip, J.A. Furtado.

In my first post in the Moriah Jovan/The Urban Elitist cross-blog series on how author’s might earn money from their work,  I made the following questionable assertion:

If requiring payment from every reader will limit the potential for a written work to be discovered by a larger audience, then I believe the writer should forgo that revenue. For now. [snip] If I could choose between 100 readers who had paid $10 each, or 1,000 readers who had paid nothing, I would choose the 1,000 readers. Only with a base of readers can a writer expand her readership to the point where she could earn enough to make a difference in her life.

I’d now like to go even further out on a limb and suggest that there are some related lessons authors might learn from the world of scholarly journals.  This might sound like a bit of a stretch, but stick with me for a couple of minutes.

Scholarly publishing, the strange but somewhat profitable sector of the publishing world where I make a living, moved into the electronic age far faster than consumer publishing (hmm…think there’s a connection between profitability and e-publishing?).  This is particularly true for scientific publishing.  For both journals and books, the majority of scientific content is now read in an electronic format, either online or in a downloaded pdf in most cases.

When a brand new journal is launched, many publishers offer the electronic content for free for two or three years in an attempt both to gain readers and to maximize the journal’s potential impact in its field of specialization.  Usually they don’t just put the content online and wait for readers to show up.  Instead, in promoting the new journal, they tell customers (usually academic and corporate libraries) that to get the free content they have to “opt-in.”  That is, they have to take action and sign up for the journal to get the free access.  From the start, the publishers know which customers have an interest in the title.  And because it’s electronic, they can monitor usage and see where it is and isn’t happening.

After those two or three years are up, the publisher looks at the new journal’s number of opt-ins, its usage, the reviews it has received and its impact factor (essentially how often the title has been cited in other journals), and then uses all of this information to set the price for the title.  So the opt-in model not only gives the journal a running head start before it’s priced, but also gives the publisher invaluable market research in the process.

Does it work?  Well, usually the number of opt-in customers that are converted to paid subscribers is in the range of 10-20%.  That doesn’t sound so great, but evidence shows that it’s better than the alternative.  Although data is relatively limited, journals that use the opt-in model seem to do better, and to do better faster, than titles that are never available for free.  (Sorry, nothing online to show as evidence.  Please let me know if you’re aware of anything online that has data on the success rate of the opt-in model.)

Not everyone likes this model.  Scientific societies, who are often responsible for the content of these new titles, sometimes complain that the opt-in model devalues their content.  They believe their content is of such a high quality and has such great contributors that of course customers will be willing to pay from the very first issue.  Why, they think, should they wait several years for those royalties to start pouring in?

Self-published authors, of course, often feel the same way when faced with the decision of whether to try to sell their little known book (and their little known selves).  Its a perfectly legitimate argument.  But, just as with a business strategy, sometimes it makes more sense to take a long-term approach.  Sometimes a short-term financial loss is necessary for longer term financial gains.

In a sense, most authors are like journals.  Their work will probably have a consistent thematic focus from book to book, story to story or article to article.  Their style will remain fairly consistent, as will their quality (though hopefully the quality of an author’s work will improve with each book).  A core audience of readers will return to the author’s work, just as they would return to the journal, because there’s something about it that they need in their lives, whether it be for professional or personal reasons.

If an author does decide to let the electronic version of his book out into the world for free, I think it’s very important to collect whatever contact information he can from those who download it.  Asking for an email address in exchange for a free ebook is perfectly fair.  This can be used not only to announce the next book but also for (occasional) updates on the author’s progress and any other relevant news (published stories, articles, etc.).  Potentially, an author could even survey those who had downloaded the book to find out what they liked and didn’t like about it.  No matter how many beta readers and editors might have previously given feedback, I’d bet an author could learn a great deal from her casual readers.  Maybe the mere fact that these casual readers were asked for feedback will make it more likely that they will want to read the author’s next book.  If they feel like they’re contributing and that the author values their opinions, many will feel like they have a vested interest in the author’s work.

Yes, that first book is out there floating around in the ether for free and, at least in its electronic format, it will always be free.  But assuming that the next book’s content, style and quality are consistent with the first book, the author has ready-made audience (with contact information!) for book number two.  Probably only a fraction of those who downloaded the free first ebook will buy the second.  So be it.  Those people who do buy it will be the start of the author’s core audience.  They are the people who will be the agents of free word-of-mouth publicity.  They are the ones, hopefully, who will come back for the third and fourth book.

Even first-time authors published by a publishing house could potentially benefit from the Cory Doctorow model of letting the ebook out into the world for free and using print sales for revenue generation.  I’ll have more on Doctorow’s modus operandi later in the series.

I know the analogy between journals and authors is not a perfect one.  Just because the evidence seems to indicate that journals using the free opt-in model do better in the long run does not necessarily mean that the same strategy will work for each and every author.  But authors who think such a strategy might work for them should not be ashamed to give their first book (or even their first few books) away for free in an electronic format.  It’s a perfectly legitimate strategy used by companies with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

The key word here is not “free.”  It’s “strategy.”  An author needs to have one.  No matter how many free books are tossed out into the (soon-to-be) million ebook world, fame and fortune will not come looking for him, and neither will a moderate income from writing.  They must be pursued smartly and deliberately.

Although it has been around for quite some time, only recently have I really gotten into the internet radio station Pandora.  There are other online music services out there, like Slacker or Rhapsody, that allow users to determine which songs or musicians or genres they want to hear.  Last.fm, like Pandora, makes suggestions based upon your musical taste, but it only allows 30-second samples of recommended music in many cases.  Pandora, based upon my own (admittedly limited) experience and the experiences of many others, does the best job of both recommending and delivering a huge variety of musical content.  An outgrowth of the Music Genome Project, it uses over 400 musical attributes and a mathematical algorithm to identify music that might appeal to the the end user based upon song or artist entered by that user.  It also uses your personal history of marking songs with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to make (or limit) recommendations.

What makes it so good?  The sense of discovery, and the surprise of discovery in a world where it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are a lot of people you’ve never heard of doing really good and original work.  To give an example of a path my own listening has followed, I created a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy station at Pandora after this New Yorker piece on Will Oldham reignited a curiosity about his music that had been simmering for quite some time.  When you create a station at Pandora, it plays a song by that artist perhaps once out of every nine or ten songs, and the rest of the time plays songs that might appeal to fans of the artist based upon those 400 musical attributes.  So not only did I find that I like Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy/Will Oldham, but I also found that I liked a musician known as Iron and Wine (I’d never heard of him despite his newfound fame after having a song included in the Twilight soundtrack).  I then created an Iron and Wine station, which in turn lead to the discovery of the amazing but tragic folk musician Jackson C. Frank.

None of those particular artists is terribly obscure but even if they had been it wouldn’t have mattered whether or not they were signed by a major label or got any press.  All that mattered was that they were good.  This is an effective, objective-as-can-be way to discover new musical artists.  Of course, Pandora is not putting just any old song on their servers.  There is obviously some quality control system in place.  There always has to be.

So why isn’t there a service like this for books, something that looks deeper than customer buying habits at Amazon or broad genre categories?  Well, there is!  It’s called Book Lamp and it tries to match readers who like a given book with other similar books based upon not only genre but also things like tone, tense, perspective, action, description, and dialog.

Problem is, Book Lamp now only has a few hundred titles in its database and they seem to be very skewed toward science fiction.  George Orwell’s 1984 was one of the few books in their list that I was actually familiar with, and when I selected it the top match was the USA Patriot Act by the U.S. Congress.  Very funny, but not terribly helpful.  The rest of the suggestions seem to be mostly science fiction.

It would be great to have a Pandora-like system that included all books/ebooks and that gave you a one paragraph synopsis plus free electronic access to the book’s first chapter.  If you liked what you read, there would be a conveniently located link for purchasing the title (just as Pandora has for songs and their associated albums).  I’m sure something like this will come to be.  As I’ve mentioned previously, an author will really need to make both the summary and the first chapter good ones if she hopes to gain new readers in a million ebook world.

A brief word on Pandora’s pricing model.  Everything is free if you want it to be, but you also have a single advertisement on the screen and sometimes a 15-20 second audio advertisement perhaps every ten or twenty songs.  If you don’t want to see or hear any ads, you can get an annual subscription for $36.  The audio ads are a recent development and did cause some small bursts of outrage from some listeners who apparently live in a fantasy world where millions of dollars are spent developing a web site and music genome system for the greater good of mankind.  Judging by the comments on this Wired story, however, most listeners understand why the ads are necessary and are willing to tolerate them as long as they’re infrequent, brief and not obnoxious.

The bad news for non-Yanks:  right now, because of copyright issues, Pandora is only available in the USA (try last.fm).  They’re working on it, though.

Note:  As mentioned previously, Moriah Jovan and I are doing a cross-blog series on how writers might be justly paid for what they’ve created.  Mojo explores the issues currently confronting writers in her introductory post.  Below is my introduction. Although the two of us may differ in our approach, we both do agree that the ease of reproduction in the electronic age does not mean that writers need to regard their work as a pro bono offering to the world.  Hard work deserves reward.

I believe that the writer’s path to making money with her work can be summarized in three not-very-simple steps:

1. Make it good.
2. Be discovered.
3. Determine the most effective means of generating income from your writing and do it.  You’ve earned it.

The purpose of this series is to explore that third step, but let me touch on the first two briefly.

Make It Good

This, by far, is the hardest and most important part.  If you’ve not written a damn fine book, nothing else you do will matter (unless you’re a celebrity already).  If you’ve not written a damn fine book, don’t worry about self-publishing options, ebook formats or business models, because hardly anyone will read the thing anyway.  Your book won’t appeal to everyone but it had better have the potential to appeal to your target demographic.  Enough said.

Be Discovered

In the traditional publishing world, this meant being discovered first by an agent, and then by a publisher, and then, if everything went according to plan, by an enthusiastic and grateful reading public.  Now there are many more routes to being discovered by those readers.

As I described in my post on “How to Get Your eBook Read,” I believe we’ll soon live in a world flooded with self-published ebooks, and authors, whether self-published or not, will need to adapt and get creative if their work is to have a chance of standing out.  Gaining a group of devoted readers may lead a writer back to the first step of the traditional path (getting an agent), or it may not.

So is it more important for a writer to gain as many readers as possible, to be discovered, and not worry about getting paid in the early stages of his self promotion?  Or should a writer treat his work as a valuable commodity and demand payment of some sort from every reader?  I can see both sides of the argument.  As Mojo laments, all the information that’s available for free on the internet creates in readers a sense of entitlement to cost-free text and also has the effect of devaluing that same text.  If I could magically change all of this, I would.

But this is the world we now live in.  No solitary writer, or even a gang of angry writers, is going to change it.  If requiring payment from every reader will limit the potential for a written work to be discovered by a larger audience, then I believe the writer should forgo that revenue.  For now.  If, somehow, charging money has no adverse effects on expanding a book’s readership, then by all means charge whatever you can get away with.  But if I could choose between 100 readers who had paid $10 each, or 1,000 readers who had paid nothing, I would choose the 1,000 readers.  Only with a base of readers can a writer expand her readership to the point where she could earn enough to make a difference in her life.  Just as a start-up’s business plan might envision years without a profit as the company attempts to build a customer base, a writer needs to accept that long-term goals may require short-term financial sacrifices.  Of course, giving a book away for free certainly doesn’t mean an author will find readers, but the challenge of finding those readers is a topic for another day.

Those 1,000 readers certainly won’t be enough to allow a writer to quit her day job, but it’s a good start.  The more readers an author has, the easier it will be to get more new readers (even if it’s never easy).  I can’t say at what point a writer will have enough readers to begin generating significant revenue.  That will depend upon the type of writing and the method of monetization.  But even those 1,000 readers, if you can get them to come back for more, will be enough to generate some meaningful income, even if it’s not via the traditional per book unit model.

Get Paid

It has never been easy for most writers to earn money with their work.  Although there is much to be concerned about in the publishing industry as a whole, I don’t believe individual writers are in much worse of a position today than they ever were, despite all of the free content that is available.  As Lev Grossman’s piece in Time points out, literary reading by adults has increased 3.5% since 2002, and writers now have a potential global audience of billions.  It’s confusing for writers, though, because their strength is writing, not revenue generation.  Although the traditional route (write well, get published by a major publisher) of course is still available, and is still the most reliable means of generating at least some income from writing, there are now many other options available to both the self-published and those published by the big boys.  Those numerous options are what I plan to explore in this series.

None of these options will in itself give a writer a life-altering, day-job-replacing revenue stream.  A writer will need to be discovered by a hell of a lot of readers for that to happen, and getting to that level is probably just as much a matter of luck as it is anything a writer can control (see “Make It Good” above).

Despite my tendency to go off on flights of fancy imagining how the publishing world might work in the near future, I’m going to try keeping myself grounded on planet Earth and focus upon methods authors might use to generate income with their work right now, in the world we currently live in.  A few of the topics I may cover (and Mojo may take on some of these herself), are:

• Options for the traditional charge-by-the-book-unit model, for both print books and ebooks.
• Making money through secondary services like paid writing assignments, teaching, lectures, tours, promotions, etc.
• Monetizing a writer’s blog, whether a personal blog or one used for blog fiction.
• Can a writer do it alone? Or does she need, if not a publisher, then at least to be part of a group of writers who work together in some way to help sell each others books?
• Advertising in books.  Although this is not currently an option for most and would probably require a Google-like entity to make it technologically and logistically feasible, I’d still like to explore the possibility since it may well be writers’ best hope for making money in the near future.
• Cory Doctorow, what others might learn from his experience and why most writers could not successfully do what he did/does.
• I’d also like to have some interviews with, or guest posts by, writers who have successfully monetized their writing, especially those who have done so through non-traditional means.  Are you one, or do you know one?  Please get in touch with me!

If anyone has other topics you think would be appropriate, please leave a comment or let me know here.

Moriah Jovan and I are going to be doing a cross-blog series on how authors–whether traditionally published, e-published or self-published–might get paid.  For their writing.  I know, I know, it sounds radical.  But we’re going to give it a shot anyway.  I’ll have my introductory post up next week, but Mojo has her first post up today.  Go check out her response to those who feel that “Information wants to be freeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

Consider this open source business development.

I wrote this at 6:30 PM, after not having eaten all day, while standing on the platform at the West 4th Street subway station, three levels underground.  I’ll leave it to you to decide whether these are ideal or disastrous conditions for creating a business model for an ebook only publishing house.

Update: What I’m trying to do here is not flood the world with ebooks so that quality content gets lost among all the bad content.  Rather, I want just the opposite.  I expect ebooks (both self-published and not) to one day be nearly as numerous as blogs are now.  What this model attempts to do is help readers filter out the bad stuff and discover the good stuff.  It would help both readers and quality writers.  (Thanks to Scott Douglas for illuminating the need for this clarification.)

• eBooks only (or mostly).
• The publisher accepts authors, not manuscripts.
• Therefore, authors can publish whatever they feel is necessary: something book-length, something article-length, a short story, a paragraph, a sentence, a poem, a play, a script or a rant.  Fiction or non-fiction.  Finished or not finished.  The idea is not to create and package “books” but rather to create a forum and content delivery system for quality writing that will appeal to a certain type of reader.  Think of it almost like a hybrid book/magazine publisher.
• The publisher focuses on developing content to suit the tastes of readers in that publisher’s market.  Not a niche, necessarily.  Just a shared taste.
• The publisher publishes hundreds or perhaps thousands of writers.
• Most content is free.
• Most revenue is ad-based.  The publisher and the author share revenue from ads on the author’s home page and pages with the author’s content.  If content is downloaded to a reading device, it still has the ads.  Use either a pay-per-click or pay-per-impression model.
• Readers can purchase subscriptions to a publisher or to an author.  When they do, they get ad-free content and perhaps some value-added content (if such a thing exists).  I know, this sounds like Salon.com circa 2004, but just try it and see.
• Update: Readers can also purchase ad-free content by the unit, rather than buy subscription.
• Ads are sold either by the publisher or by a third party (not the author) and will appear in the content for all of that publisher’s authors.
• The publisher provides the technological infrastructure, including the ability to incorporate video, audio, photos and whatever graphics may be appropriate.
• The publisher provides editing to maintain standards.
• Update: As Mike Cane points out, the publisher should also provide ebook designers and cover artists.  Few writers are equipped to do these things well, and they shouldn’t have to be.
• Authors are responsible for their own publicity and marketing, in whatever form it may take.
• The publisher does promote itself collectively, however, as the home of great authors to those in the target demographic.
• If they wish, authors may post works-in-progress and solicit reader feedback.
• All published work may be commented upon by readers.
• Quality pieces (regardless of length) within a publisher’s body of work perhaps can be voted on with a Digg-like system, to draw other readers to quality material.
• It’s not really ebook only.  Readers who want to order print-on-demand cheap paperbacks or beautifully well-made hardcovers can do so and pay properly for the privilege.  If readers want something, the publisher should gladly take their money for it, at a profit (shared with the author).
• Publisher and author must sign a deal for a certain amount of time so that successful authors are not continually fleeing to the highest bidder (or the publishing house that offers the best deal).
• Authors retain all rights to their content.  If an author leaves a publisher, she takes her content with her.
• Update: In case its absence did not make it clear:  no DRM.
• Of course, any writer could still go it alone with his own web site.  What the publisher provides are:
  • validation for readers…they know they’ll be getting content up to a certain standard most of the time (just like now!)
  • a community of readers with a shared taste
  • technological infrastructure
  • quality editing (if it’s not good, readers will go elsewhere)

Details to be worked out later.

Someone is gonna get rich with this, and it ain’t gonna be me.  I prefer writing and coming up with kooky ideas.

Update: This could work even better as a not-for-profit endeavor or as a cooperative of some kind, as long as standards were maintained.

If I were to publish my novel with a publisher, the book’s chances for success would be slim and would be entirely dependent upon my own actions. If I were to self-publish my novel, the book’s chances for success would still be slim and would still be entirely dependent upon my own actions.  Therefore, I wonder, rather than spending potentially years searching for an agent and/or publisher, might I be wiser simply to self-publish and give it my best shot?

Here’s the problem: As always, money and time are the problem.  I don’t care about the stigma.  As e-books become more common and as they become easier to publish, I believe self-publishing a book-length work will eventually have about as much of a negative stigma as writing a blog (as opposed to being a “professional” journalist, for instance). But if I’m going to spend a hell of a lot of time and money self-publishing a book, I want to know that my work has reached a certain threshold of quality.

As the traditional gatekeepers, agents and publishers are responsible for determining first of all whether a book is good, and secondly whether it stands a chance of making them some money.  Of course, I’d like my book to make money, but that’s not the reason I wrote it.  There are easier ways to make money than writing a work of literary fiction (ex. working at McDonald’s).  Therefore, my primary concern is that my work is competent.

No, I’m not going to take my mother’s word for it.  Or my friends’.  Or even the kind words of acquaintances who might have given it a read.  I want to hear it from someone who really knows what he’s talking about and has no personal connection with me whatsoever, and preferably from several such individuals.

Here’s the idea: create some kind of peer review board for fiction writers, similar to the peer review that all published scholarly books and articles must go through.  They wouldn’t say whether they liked the book, or whether it was terribly original.  They wouldn’t make suggestions for how to improve it or edit it in any way, like a crit group or beta readers.  Instead, they would simply state that, yes, this book-length work of fiction is of a high enough quality that it is suitable for publication.  That’s it.

Such a judgment would certainly be subjective.  Hence, having a board of several readers rather than giving a single person veto power.

This approval would give me the confidence that I was not wasting my time and money self-publishing something that never should have been published in the first place.  Being able to state that my novel went through this peer review process might even help alleviate concerns among potential readers that the book is just a self-published turd.

How might this work?

The not-for-profit option:  A writer could submit her own book for review only after having reviewed five other randomly selected books herself.  Each book would be judged by five reviewers.  Reviewers would not only give a thumbs up or down, but also briefly justify their judgment.  That way, if a writer’s work was rejected, she could decide whether that rejection was reasonable and therefore whether it should be taken into account.  Yes, you’d certainly get some people in there who don’t know what they’re talking about, but this wouldn’t be workable with only certified professionals of some kind.  Having five reviewers per book would help mitigate the influence of the ignoramuses.

The for-profit option:  Same as the above, except the company running it would screen the reviewers and pay them.  There would probably be fewer reviewers per book.  And the writer would have to pay substantially for the review.

Here’s the problem with the idea: I don’t like the idea of art of any kind being subject to an approval process.  If this kind of system were to catch on, just as self-publishing is being de-stigmatized, experimentation could be further stigmatized if it were not somehow allowed for in the approval process (perhaps each book could be categorized by genre so that writers of similar taste would be doing the reviewing?).  Better to have a lot of crappy self-published books out there than to create some fascistic infrastructure that would keep a would-be William S. Burroughs from getting “approved.”  Yes, that person could still self-publish, so perhaps it would not be the end of the world.  I could even imagine writers bragging that their work was rejected by the conservative peer review process!

Is there a better option for a writer who wants to get his own work judged objectively by someone who just might say “this is not good enough”?

The problem is time.

It’s common for writers to complain that reviewers rarely touch books that haven’t been published by one of the major corporate publishers, in contrast to the music business, where musicians and bands without a major label contract are commonly written about and reviewed.  Of course, listening to a song by someone you’ve never heard of takes only a few minutes.  Reading even a short book by someone you’ve never heard of will take many hours.  Without the validation that comes via presence in a book store, or a review by the mainstream media or some other trusted source, even the most adventurous reader is rarely willing to invest the ever-dwindling hours of her life in an unknown.

As I’ve described in my vision of the future of book publishing, the coming dominance of e-books will hopefully mean that the almost absolute power of the traditional gatekeepers–major publishers and reviewers–will be dispersed among a much wider group of literary-minded people and organizations.  There may be Oprah-like “super readers” with a talent for finding and promoting titles that will appeal to their like-minded followers.  And we will certainly see more niche blogs that will guide their readers to otherwise invisible works of interest.

Of course, the relative ease of publishing an e-book means that there will be many, many more books published than are currently published.  Soon, I bet, there will be an e-book-only self-publishing success story (à la “Clerks” in the independent film world), the last remnants of the self-publishing stigma will evaporate, and we’ll suddenly have many thousands of new e-books on the market.  In order to be read, almost all authors, whether self-published or not, will need to work even harder than they do now to get their books noticed.  So how might they do this, and how might the content, structure and design of their books facilitate this process?

There will always be books that break all the “rules” yet are still successful simply because they’re so damn good.  Most writers, however, will have to make a conscious effort to help their books break out from the pack.  Since I write fiction, these suggestions are slanted in that direction, though most of them would apply to non-fiction, too.  Likewise, many of the suggestions below would serve a print book just as well, but in an e-book dominated marketplace I think they will be essential.

The New But Not So New

• Keep It Short…Or Don’t:  Nobody is going to be impressed with the virtual heft of a 200,000-word e-book.  Few readers are up to the challenge of a super-long book, so unless an author already has a following, there’s no reason to make length yet another obstacle to getting a book read.  Then again, with no printing costs, if a book just has to be 200,000 or 500,000 words and you’re not planning to print it, so be it.  Nothing to stop you.  There’s got to be an e-book-only War and Peace or Infinite Jest out there somewhere in the future.
• Go Global:  Forget foreign rights.  Once an e-book is published, it should immediately be available globally.  If an author writes in English, there’s certainly no reason to limit its appeal to the U.S., Canadian and U.K. markets.  Yes, translators can be hired to target certain non-English-speaking markets, but it’s very likely that a large percentage of potential readers in non-English-speaking markets are already fluent in English.  Take advantage of the English language’s global dominance while it lasts!  Keep these potential readers in mind during the writing process.
• Readings Should Be Global:  Why would an author limit himself to those willing to drag their tired asses to a bookstore for an old school reading?  Those in-person bookstore readings are fine (though very rarely do I have an urge or time to attend one myself), but why force people to leave their homes to hear a reading when you’ve got millions of people already sitting in front of their computers?  Again, make it interesting.  Have yourself videotaped reading your content at a visually dramatic location relevant to your book.  Have a physically attractive actor read for you.  Whatever it takes to get people interested.
• Become a Super Reader:  Why wait for someone else to promote your book?  If the potential market is there for a book but the infrastructure (blog etc.) for your niche does not exist, consider yourself fortunate and create that infrastructure yourself.  You will be the leader and your followers will be your ready-made readers.  Update: As Moriah Jovan points out in the comments, you are probably bigger than a single niche, and your book is, too.  Participate in whatever blogs might have readers to whom your book would appeal.
• Create Compelling Advertisements:  It’s not enough simply to have a YouTube trailer or something like it.  It actually has to be good.  It has to be something that people will want to watch for its own sake.  Not everyone who sees it will read the book, but some of them will.  If a writer does not have the mad skills to create such advertisements herself, she should collaborate with someone who does.
• Serialize:  Perhaps the reason why serialized fiction hasn’t been big since Victorian times is that there hasn’t been a reliable delivery mechanism.  With a mobile device and an RSS feed, the reader will have everything conveniently delivered to one place.  People are very accepting of serialization with their TV viewing, so perhaps serials for written fiction will see a resurgence.  An author doesn’t necessarily have to write as a serial to publish as a serial, though it might be interesting for some writers to experiment with the serial form.
• Use Merchandise the Way Musicians Do:  Quality design should not be limited to your e-book’s virtual cover.  Put that same design on a tee shirt that people will want to wear just because it looks cool.  Let them be your walking advertisements (and let them pay you for the privilege).  Do the same with buttons, iPhone skins, hats, leg warmers or whatever item might appeal to your core audience.  You could even offer a free tee shirt with every e-book purchase (or every donation, if that’s your model).
• Influence the Influential:  For example, if your book has potential among hipster types, hire a midget to wander up and down Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, reading selections of your book aloud while pushing a cart displaying your merchandise, info cards on where to buy the e-book, and maybe even a few print copies if you have them.  Or something like that.  Determine who your core audience is, identify the movers and shakers of that core audience, and then make sure those people know about your book.  Hopefully a few of them will actually read it and pass on the good word to their broad networks.
• Don’t Stop Promoting (read to the tune of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”): As an e-book, your book no longer has just a few make-or-break months (or weeks) on the bookstore shelves. If at first you don’t succeed, reevaluate your strategy and try again. If you have succeeded, try to keep the book’s momentum going by moving it into new markets. There’s no reason why even a book with moderate success shouldn’t continue to sell and be read years after the initial publication.
• Update: Make It Easy for Those Who Downloaded Your Book to Remember Why They Did:  This excellent idea comes from Moriah Jovan, as well.  She suggests including a brief but descriptive blurb about your book on one of the first pages of the e-book so that people can remember what the damn thing is about (i.e. don’t expect them to read it right away).

The Good Ol’ Fashioned Basics

• A Brilliant and Original Cover Design:  There is no substitute for it.  To paraphrase Zoe Winters, although you will no longer be able to judge a book by its publisher, you will still be able to judge a book by its cover.  You know you do it, and so does everybody else, so writers should consider hiring a quality designer an essential investment.  They shouldn’t depend upon their publisher, if they have one, to do it right.  e-Book technology still has a way to go to find a workable solution to book cover design (the Kindle and Sony Reader don’t do pretty, and the iPhone make-your-book-a-beautifully-designed-app option isn’t a long-term solution), but it will certainly happen.  There is the added but essential challenge of making the cover look good in thumbnail size since that is how most potential readers will first see it, but as Soft Skull Press demonstrates, it most definitely can be done.
• A Sharp and Shiny Hook:  It’s more important now than ever before.  We know that no story will be completely original, but with so much else available, readers will need a reason to choose a given title over the hundreds of thousands of other e-books that will be instantly available, not to mention instantly available movies, video games and countless other diversions.  Writers who have already developed a following will probably be able to get away with a subtler storyline or subject (but don’t count on it).  Everybody else will have to blow the potential reader away with the concept alone and do it with a single sentence.  The rambling jacket copy we’re accustomed to on print books won’t cut it.  In a purely online bookselling environment, one sentence may be all the chance you’ll get.
• A First Sentence that Draws the Reader into the Story:  Many people browsing in a bookstore will flip through the blank pages, the copyright page, the title page, the acknowledgments and the dedication, find the real start of the book, and read a few sentences or paragraphs.  More commonly, they’ll just read the jacket copy.  In an online environment, it’s much easier to get to chapter one, page one, sentence one with a single click.  Therefore, that first sentence may well have a much greater influence over a potential reader’s decision than it currently does.  With everything else a writer has going against him, for crying out loud make that first sentence a really good one.
• A Very Short and Very Gripping First Chapter:  Writers can learn a thing or two from Hollywood’s success.  Get your customer interested and emotionally involved from the get-go, before she even fully comprehends what’s going on in the story.  Make it quick.  No, the first chapter does not have to be a car chase (in fact, please don’t).  But it should be just as emotionally gripping.  Not everyone will read the entire first chapter before deciding to purchase and read an e-book, but many will.  Even those who have purchased and decided to read the e-book will need a reason to keep reading.  It’s far easier to stop reading an uninteresting e-book than an uninteresting print book.  There will be no physical presence to inspire the guilt that forces the reader to return to the book and plow through to the end.  If a low-priced (or free) e-book model comes to dominate, there will be even less reason for a reader to return to a book that is not calling her back.
• Write Anywhere You Can:  Write your own blog.  Guest post on other people’s blogs. Write articles.  Write on the restroom wall of your local dive bar.  Write anywhere a potential reader of your book might be lurking.
• Enrage a Religious Organization:  Or do something that will get your books some free publicity.
• Update: You Can’t Make It Alone:  Writers need other writers.  If they’re smart, writers will band together and form some kind of critical mass to help each other sell their books.  As Maureen Ogle suggests, they might create an online virtual storefront where potential readers can download a sample of each work and then buy the complete edition if they like the sample.  As this piece by Jonathan Baumbach demonstrates, this kind of cooperation by necessity would not be new, even if the format is new.

The Most Important Thing: As always, by far the most essential element is the quality of your book’s content. If, by your target readership’s standards, your book is not good, nothing else you do to promote it will matter. The good news is that in a more democratic e-book publishing world you will be able to go directly to your potential readers without having to convince agents and corporate publishers that your book will be financially successful enough to justify their time and expense.  Success will be measured not merely in financial terms but also in terms of the size of your book’s readership and its impact in your market. Your book’s success, therefore, will be in your hands.

Update: Nope, nothing here about how a writer will actually make money from all those readers.  This topic will be covered in future posts.

Note:  I would like to make this post something of a living document.  If anyone has anything to add (or change, if you think I’m off base somewhere) please get in touch with me or leave a comment, and I’ll add your thoughts to the main body of the post (with full attribution, of course).

Hugh McGuire at The Book Oven Blog brings up an intriguing point that I hadn’t considered previously:

eBooks, and digital devices are a different medium, they call for a whole new design approach. The constraints are different, the reader’s needs different, and so how you’ll design a text is going to be different. I was shocked that with the iPod, the small screen actually seems to me an *advantage* over the paper book in some ways. And so where Kindle & Sony Reader have tried to reinvent the book in electronic form, using the same kinds of design principles, the ereaders on the iPhone/iPod have instead tried to build a new kind of design/interaction standard into existing constraints of devices people already have.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what kind of effects the rapidly growing readership of ebooks and the medium itself will have on writing.  Will books or paragraphs or sentences become shorter on average?  Might we see the resurgence of the novella?  Or will there be little or no effect at all?  I’ll have a post next week on how writers might effectively tailor their books for a world in which more books are read on ebook readers and, just as importantly, a world in which far more books are published due to the relative ease of ebook publication.

Hugh goes on to point to a new open-access electronic journal launched by graduate students at the University of Toronto’s iSchool, Scroll: Essays on the Design of Electronic Text.

Yes, lots of people are thinking about this.