Wednesday, September 02, 2009

A Radical Revolution?

I was reading an article in the San Francisco Chronicle online called “Watch Out Publishing Industry, There’s a Radical Revolution on Your Heels” and I thought, Really?Radical?

Here are some snippets from the article by Frances Dinkelspiel:
When Kemble Scott walks into the Booksmith on Haight Street tonight, opens up a copy of his new novel The Sower, and starts to read to the collected audience, he will be committing an act of radical revolution. …

Scott's previous novel, SOMA, was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. But he thought the subject and references in The Sower were so topical - think mentions of The Daily Beast, Susan Boyle, and more - that they would be out of date when a book published the traditional way was printed. (that might be as late as 2011)

So in May, Scott teamed up with the website Scribd, the on-line publishing company, to put The Sower on the Internet as an e-book. It sold for $2 a copy, and Scott was paid 80% of that price.
On top of that, a publisher approached him about putting it out in print. Scott at first thought, no, that’d take too long. But then, he found out the publisher, Numina Press, uses POD printing, which meant “the turn-around time was a mere 29 days, rather than the year it usually takes to get a book out in print.”

Scott liked that idea, so he decided to draw attention to the print book by treating it like a movie, and releasing it in selected markets.
So Scott has decided to make the hardcover edition of The Sower only available in Bay Area independent bookstores during the next month. If the response is strong, when The Sower is released nation-wide, larger chain bookstores will be more likely to take notice.
Okay, I agree, this is a different way to approach publishing. But radical revolution in the publishing world?

Okay, a $2 e-book from a best-selling author who gets 80% of each sale. That’s fairly big. He’s going to be using POD printing for the print book - that’s not big. Lots of books are printed that way today. He’s getting his books out in local markets in independent stores in order to create buzz and attract a national market. Not big. Unknown authors do that all the time. They turn to their local markets to try to jumpstart the sells, in hopes that bigger stores in not-so-local markets will start carrying their books.

But it is good that a “big” author is, in a way, trailblazing some new ideas. Perhaps that’ll make it easier for the rest of us. But is this radical? Not particularly. Will it cause a revolution in the publishing world? I think that revolution had already started before he joined the troops.
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28 comments:

  1. Definitely not radical. Maybe 'innovative,' considering his success in the print industry. But for heaven's sake...Stephen King has already embraced the internet as a distribution mechanism! And that was years ago that he had an ebook serial. And it was free! THAT was radical.

    Elizabeth
    Mystery Writing is Murder

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  2. Gotta agree with you Elizabeth. Maybe it's his publicist who is behind the times.

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  3. I agree. Glad to see him joining some of the rest of us who have had to 'think outside the box' to get word out there about our books!

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  4. Kings e-book serial was funded by payments, if I recall correctly and he pulled out of the project before finishing it.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plant

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  5. Perhaps the "radical-ness" of it is the fact that a big author is doing it (like you said), but if King did something similar years ago... Small publishers can get books out in no time. I wonder what exactly bogs the biggies down?

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  6. Not so radical, but good luck to him I guess. :)

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  7. It's good and bad if well known authors join the POD ranks. The same thing is happening with ebooks. The downside is the extra competition, the upside is validation for POD and ebooks.

    Morgan Mandel
    http://www.morganmandel.com
    http://choiceonepublishing.com

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  8. Morgan - you were going to be competing with them anyway, so I think it's a good thing overall. All it means is you were right all along and they're only catching up to the idea. ;-)

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  9. To be a leader, you have to think outside the box - and that's what Morgan and other on-their-way-up authors are doing.

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  10. Anton, you closed down your blog! I can't even leave a comment. Are you going to be posting on another?

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  11. Innovative yes, radical not so much. Still, I love to see innovative approaches in the realms of writing, publishing, and distribution. More power to him.

    Bummer to hear Anton shut down his blog. I only just discovered it. :(
    ~jon

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  12. I would agree with the innovative, not radical--and nice for the options to increase. I think though, his success with it is largely on the coat tails of his former success. I don't think it is opening some brand new gateway to success for first time authors.

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  13. Not radical at all. Whatever works for him will eventually "trickle down" to the rest of us. :)

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  14. My hat is off to his publicist as convincing the Chronicle to write that article was a master stroke. A San Francisco paper labeling someone as a radical is a sure-fire step to success. Wonder what the next step is 'cause that publicist is really earning her/his fee.

    Elspeth

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  15. I completely agree with your assessment, Helen. The "little guys" have been approaching publishing like this for years. The "big guys" just hopping on the bandwagon shouldn't get the credit!

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  16. I go along with the crowd here - it's an interesting approach but certainly not radical. I do think the publicity might help other small independent publishers who use POD.

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  17. That's not radical. It's a calculated jump onto the already fast moving bandwagon. Smart, but not rad.

    My 2 cents.

    Marvin D Wilson

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  18. I guess it's big in terms of visibility, since they're writing about it.

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  19. No, not really radical.
    And he's already well-known. He just decided to tread the same path 95% of all self-pubbed authors do, which of course was made eaiser for him because he's already known.
    Maybe the media and public really DON'T know everything self-pubbed authors do to promote their books...

    L. Diane Wolfe “Spunk On A Stick”
    www.circleoffriendsbooks.blogspot.com

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  20. It sounds fishy to me. A story without universal subject matter and with references so topical they can't be updated? No disrespect meant to Susan Boyle, but she's already past her shelf life. Does the author really think readers will rush to get the book today because tomorrow it will be stale and out of date? I suspect the book has serious problems and the publisher didn't want it.

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  21. Helen, the more big authors who do this, the better for all of us as it draws more attention to e-books and POD technology and gives it credibility.

    BTW, I nominate your blog for the Kreativ Blog award. Visit my blog for all the rules.

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  22. Thank you Maryann. You are so sweet to nominate me.

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  23. Had to close the blog, Helen.

    I won three awards in the last month alone. It went to my head. It was dizzying, but I was out of control... I can't even remember who gave me the first award that started me on this downward spiral...

    Honestly, I had some embarrassing old posts I wanted to delete. So I did. Then I thought about all the posts I put up at the start of the blog about that novel I never wrote. Best to get rid of them too. So I did.

    Every post I got rid of, lightened my mood a little. Right now I'm just two deleted posts away from euphoria.

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  24. Just sounds like he has a really good publicist who convinced the San Francisco Chronicle to do a story on him...and they wanted to make it sound sensational...

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  25. Maybe it's just the end of a long day, Anton, but your comment had me laughing. I have a vision of you deleting posts until you totally disappeared. Just your Cheshire grin left up on a tree branch.

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  26. I think we'll be seeing more and more single or group author publishing efforts as time goes on. The big publishers are having problems, and authors are not just artists, they're entrepreneurs. Where there's a will, there's a way.

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  27. I love the "new" media and the increasing respect ebooks, small presses, and self-pubbers are getting. I think it's healthy.

    It's a little annoying that the big guys are starting to join the ranks and now want credit for the movement, but that's the way it goes. As Morgan said, it means a bit more validation for the little guys.

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  28. As long as it doesn't become the old banging your head against a glass ceiling, but not being able to break through.

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