Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award: File This Under Depressing {Signs of the Publishingpocolypse}

It has been a hundred years since this photo of "Newspaper Row" in New York City was taken. I have a feeling the buildings of major New York book publishers will be on the historic tour before another 50 years is up.

This morning I clicked on this article detailing the 6 finalists of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, which awards a promising new author a Penguin publishing contract and $15,000 advance. Great. I want to enter next time around. Except let’s take a look at what’s really going on here. Penguin is using Amazon to vet new authors, narrow thousands of entries down to 6, and then let the public decide on a winner.

Translation: Penguin no longer knows how to find or pick a winning novel.

I’m all about social media, but isn’t the purpose of a publishing house to be able to source and promote new talent? If a major house like Penguin can’t do it, who can? Just another sign of the Publishinpocolypse, IMHO. Even major New York publishing houses need the public to tell them which book to publish.

Okay, so on the other side, it’s brilliant. Penguin is basically taking the risk out of publishing a novel by letting the public tell them which one they’re most interested in before Penguin takes the risk of signing the author and investing in the book. But as an author, I find this depressing.

Reason This Sucks #1: If Penguin can’t source good talent, why are we authors busting our chops to find a way to submit our work to them? Attempting to become a traditionally published author is looking less and less like a career choice and more and more like playing lotto.

Reason This Sucks #2: I’m an entrepreneurial sort and would happily skip the rejection slip doldrums in favor of publishing my first novel myself (it’s what I did with my first non-fiction book). But there still is no tool to replicate the distribution and promotion power of major publishing houses. Take it from me: promoting your own book on your own takes superhuman stamina with unpredictable results.

The Publishing World Needs Turnkey Promotion Tools

I can forego the ego boost of having my novel accepted by a traditional publishing house if there is a viable way to promote it on my own. Could someone please create a turnkey promotion system for self-published books that actually works? The services offered by print-on-demand and self-publishing houses are a joke, better labeled distribution services than promotion tools. There’s your mission, new media startups of Silicon Valley. Go.

Oh, and email me at laurakcowan at gmail when you’re done. I’ll be your first beta tester, paid user, and enthusiastic evangelist.

Liberty Media Offers To Buy Out Barnes & Noble, Not Borders

The old way of selling books is about to go the way of the Do-Do. Photo credit: Frisko_Dude, Flickr

Borders is in trouble. But this is not a sign that Barnes & Noble will soon be a monopoly of the bookselling trade. Quite the opposite: Barnes & Noble is also just hanging on by a thread to a business model and medium that are quickly being overtaken by e-books, blogs, and other new media. Yes, I know Barnes & Noble has its own e-reader, but that doesn’t mean it knows how to sell e-books. But the company does have some life left in its veins, which is why John Malone’s Liberty Media just offered $1 billion to buy 70% of the company. Liberty Media is offering a 20% premium over BN stock’s current valuation to sweeten the deal.

So, what do you think Liberty Media will do with Barnes & Noble? I expect they will shed old management and do something radical to make use of the bookstore chain’s influence and market penetration while it still has these assets. I’m thinking Apple Store meets brick and mortar app store meets Barnes & Noble. What do you think? Is Liberty going to change the bookselling world in a matter of months?

UPDATE: Liberty media has just confirmed it made its bid for Barnes & Noble because of the Nook e-reader and BN’s retail outlets. Apple store-style bookselling, here we come!

Via Reuters

Passing the Pen to the Next Generation of Writers

I had a tornado dream recently. In it, I sat outside a farm house with a family that was not my own and waited for a storm to approach. I have had tornado dreams before, always warning me of coming turbulence in my life: the last ones warned me of an impending layoff, the first of the dissolution of my church family in a traumatic church split that ripped my family and new in-laws apart days after my wedding. So, suffice it to say that I pay attention to tornado dreams, and I have been chewing on this new one for several weeks. I believe its significance is deep and two-fold, and even extends beyond me to some of you.

The odd things about this dream were that:

1) this was not my family–a first for my tornado dreams that always warn of swift changes coming in my life (i.e. the winds of change)

2) I knew before the dream even began that the older man in the family was going to die, that there was nothing I could do about it, and that my job was to protect the young girl of the family

3) when the tornado came at us, it had four funnels instead of one, which I believe refers to 4 events coming in quick succession to disrupt my life

I woke up with a strong sense that the little girl represented my writing, specifically my novel.

Then I had a second dream, in which I found myself swimming in the Pacific Ocean while toxic waste and industrial trash washed past me in two warm waves. This was one week before the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear meltdown, but I don’t think this deals with anything so literal.

THE DREAMS’ INTERPRETATION

Funnel #1 & Wave #1) I discussed my dreams with a few friends, who both told me they felt the dreams were actually about boundaries. Setting boundaries with a negative person in my life who is jealous of my writing lifestyle so I could focus on my writing, specifically. But that didn’t feel like a complete interpretation.

Funnel #2) Then my mentor passed away, and the dream took on a second meaning: I believe the fact that there was nothing I could do to save the man’s life in my dream meant that I was also to set boundaries on worrying about what happened to Mr. Davis and again to focus on my writing.

Funnel #3) Then I suddenly found myself the new Transportation Editor for Inhabitat, a great job that again challenges me to set healthy boundaries to make sure my writing doesn’t get shelved in all the busyness.

Funnel #4 & Wave #2) I’m still waiting on event number four, which I expect to be represented by the fourth tornado spout and the second toxic wave and relate to setting boundaries with a negative person again, but something occurred to me regarding the second meaning of the dream….

THE DEEPER MEANING

David E. was a professional mentor to me, who gave me a foot in the door in the magazine/online media world and who gave me great advice about how to live a writing life. One sense I had about my dream was that the timing was no accident. I grieved the fact that he couldn’t see my success with Inhabitat because he passed away just a week before I got the job–the day I applied, in fact. In a sense, I believe he passed a baton–shall I say pen–to me to carry on his love of quality writing. He told me I was one of the best fact-checkers and copy editors he had ever known, and I felt that if there was a mantle there to pick up, I wanted to carry on David’s legacy of writing craft and storytelling. It would honor his memory. I don’t think I’m the only one of his employees or friends who could pick up this job and run with it, but I am one of many who have that choice.

I started to wonder if my recent post about the changing of the guard in media was actually occurring as I pondered the subject. I found this article about the best-paid mystery writers in America and discovered that several of them had already passed away. Ditto for sound and media pioneer Sidney Harman, who just passed. In fact, it seems that many giants of the last media age are retiring or passing away. So, beyond the idea of setting boundaries to protect my own writing during this time of swift change, I am also wondering how many mantles are out there to be picked up. Do you want to place your feet solidly in the center of the New York book publishing scene or become a pioneer of new media? I say go for it. I am. Whether you honor someone’s legacy or take back territory for quality writing and integrity in the business world, there are posts standing empty that need to be filled and will be. Which one will you claim as your own?

The Future of News Is…

Front Page of La Canadien, 1806

Anyone else sick of the discussion about how the media/publishing industries can make money going forward? Not a single business model seems to be working anymore. This means one of three things: 1) There is no solution. An economic recovery will bring with it more advertising dollars, and we’ll stagger on until then. 2) There is a solution, but we haven’t gone on enough chat shows to find it yet. 3) There is no solution; there are solutions!

I’ll choose what’s behind door number three. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the news will look like in the future, and what I would be willing to pay for. The sad truth? I’m not really eager to pay for anything online, and that’s where I’ll be getting my news, for sure. For me to subscribe to a news service, it will have to be one-stop shopping, customized, interactive, and take the work/time out of exploring the web. I can see an improved Google homepage fulfilling some of these functions, and it occurs to me that the various functions I want from my “news” could be performed by different companies, different applications. What if we all started building niche news-serving tools like iPhone apps and then put together the best ones? Instead of reinventing the entire concept of publishing and news, we can simply invest piece by piece in the companies and tools that deliver content in new and tasty ways.

Here’s what Laura’s news feed of the (not too distant, I hope) future will look like:

- Headline news I can filter by category (block politics right before elections, or block sports I don’t give a whit about), produced by traditional news reporting/distributing agencies.

- Niche publishing industry, green technology, general interest IT, arts & entertainment, and international personal interest news. A combination of traditional reporting sources and blogs.

- Suggested news stories of all kinds based on my preferences and click-throughs.

- RSS feeds with a tool that suggests new blogs I might like to follow.

- An RSS reader that compiles blog feeds by category for easy viewing.

- A tool that keeps me informed of new or high levels of traffic on various websites across the intertubes.

- A tool that suggests new social media contacts based on my interests and activity.

- A tool that crawls the web for the best price on an item I’m thinking of purchasing, or finds baby gear sweepstakes, etc.

We consumers will pay one-time or ongoing fees for the apps that bring us the type of content filtering we like best. We can continue to pay for some content that is valuable to us, and less in-depth content will be supported by advertising dollars (hey, it could work as a partial strategy).

The good news? I believe at least marginally decent versions of all these tools/services are already available! Someone (ahem, Google) just has to put it together in a way that serves users on computers and phones, and they’re sitting on a mountain of gold. Seriously, if an iPhone fart app can make hundreds of thousands of dollars, there’s some money there for news-serving, web-exploring, horizon-expanding apps, don’t you think?

What would you like your news to do for you that it’s not currently? How would you like to access published content? Is your content lacking depth, accessibility? Let’s start a new conversation, please, on what news and published content product we’re willing to buy, not just how to make money off the old product after it’s long expired.

Self-Publishers Flourish

The New York Times just posted a piece about how self-publishers are doing well in the current economy, while traditional book publishers are struggling. I work for a couple of book publishers that are considered a hybrid of independent publishing and self-publishing, and this article lines up with my recent experience: one of my clients seems to have as many projects for me as I have time to complete, though the pay is lower than with bigger publishers.

What do you think about this trend? Obviously many self-published or co-published books have little to no audience, either because of poor quality or just because they appeal to such a niche audience, but we keep hearing stories of people who had to self-publish, only to be discovered after self-publishing by a traditional house and ending up on best-seller lists. Case in point: The Shack, a self-published book that sold over 4 million copies based largely on innovative word-of-mouth marketing.

Has book publishing become so saturated with content and so log-jammed by its traditional methods that even the agents and publishers can’t find the good content anymore? That certainly puts a new perspective on self-publishing, which used to be regarded as loser-ville for writers. This trend seems to parallel the move toward self-published videos on YouTube, self-published podcasts, and using Twitter to market a project or service, or even the difficulties that large companies in other industries (ahem, automotive) have with innovation when they pass critical mass and become too large to stay nimble. Where do you think this is going? If you publish a book in the future, what services would you like to have provided to you, and which would you be willing or able to do yourself?

Staying Ahead of the Curve

It’s hard to ignore the continual bad news in the media industry: layoffs, mergers, bankruptcies. It seems to me that the first casualties, at least in new media businesses supported exclusively by advertising revenues, are the full-time editors and freelance writers. “More quantity, less quality” seems to be the only way for some businesses with paper-thin profit margins to make it, but it also sets them up for future collapse by undercutting their investment in interesting content…and content is king.

How is your employer weathering the economic storm? Have you had to make any difficult decisions about what or whom to cut lately? And on a more upbeat note, has the current economy had any positive effect on your company’s transition to the new media reality? We all know print is changing (read: dying a slow death), so maybe these massive layoffs will produce some new ventures (provided some capital can be scared up) and ideas to move the industry forward. My current plan is to continue to seek out work with publishers who need freelance help, begin to blog and look for opportunities to gain experience in new media, and write creatively on the side. Fortunately, I love variety in my work.

It’s an odd and sometimes tiring thing to be part of both the media and auto industries. Both seem locked in a tailspin. But video killed the radio star, not media altogether, and cars replaced horses, but transportation continued. What do you think these industries will look like in 30 years, and in 50? How will you adapt to stay ahead of the curve?