| Even older hands, who, only a few years earlier
had been terrified of computers, are now completely comfortable
with them. Email has all but replaced the telephone as their
communications mode of choice. They are constantly visiting
amazon.com to check out competitive books or the BookScan
website to evaluate the performance of their own or competitors’
books. Text-editing software has reached a level of sophistication
that enables them to “blue pencil” drafts on their
monitor screens and transmit revision instructions to authors
without ever having to resort to a sheet of paper or travel
to the post office.
Increasingly, agents pitching projects over the telephone
can hear the editor’s fingernails clicking on a computer
keyboard as they converse. The editor is googling the author,
checking out his or her photo, web site, amazon.com ranking,
reviews and publication history, forming impressions (and
perhaps even reaching conclusions) before reading a word of
the author’s text.
Although this shift occurred without fanfare, it was an important
marker on the road from a tangible publishing model to a virtual
one. So delighted was the publishing community with the convenience
of these innovations that the larger significance –
a fundamental change in the publishing culture – was
largely overlooked. For many of us who had puzzled over Marshall
McLuhan’s famous dictum, “The medium is the message,”
the clouds parted and the meaning shimmered through: printed
and electronic communications are not merely different media;
they are fundamentally different experiences.
Many such indicators confirm that the shift to a new publishing
paradigm has progressed much further than some publishing
professionals, preoccupied as they are with content –
with words – think. This article attempts to
fix our location today on the trajectory of the book from
one medium to another.
Dog and Pony Shows
If form follows function – if the experience of reading
on screen is different from that of reading on paper –
it follows that the nature of the book itself will be transformed
by the way it is transmitted from author to reader. In fact,
that is just what is happening.
Before we examine how, it might help to look at the reading
experience itself.
A generation that defines books as material objects is giving
way to one that regards them as quanta of digitized information.
This new culture thrives on the vivid colors of television
and videos, the frenetic interactivity of email and messaging,
the emotional stimulation of video games and of channel- and
web-surfing, and the instant gratification of cell phones
and googling. Hyper-exposed to audial and visual media, the
new breed of publishing animal seems to exhibit diminished
confidence in the power of words alone to stimulate the imagination.
For many jittery young people, printed texts on a stack of
paper are, as one editor said, “kind of boring.”
“If all it is, is a book, merely words” he elaborated,
“it’s hard to get excited. I ask myself, ‘What
else is it besides a book? Is it a video game? A movie? A
web site?’ It’s got to be more than a
book to turn me on.”
In order to reinforce the impact of “mere” words,
authors and agents are being forced to package their projects
more vividly and interactively, loading them with every imaginable
bell and whistle to get attention and stimulate jaded editorial
imagination.
Whether we like it or not, appearances have become a factor
in the process of evaluating writers and writing, and authors
utilizing design, programming and media savvy have a distinct
advantage in this emerging multimedia avatar of the book.
A cool web site has become de rigueur for authors,
preferably one festooned with hot links to their book jackets,
photo albums, amazon.com review frames and other relevant
web sites, even videos, cartoons, and music. These eye- and
ear-arresting displays are more akin to commercials than book
proposals.
But aren’t we simply talking about jazzy new ways to
sell the good old book, to get buyers to travel to brick-and-mortar
stores to purchase those familiar manufactured objects called
hardcovers and paperbacks? For now, yes, because printed books
are still the reading devices of choice. But for each generation
that succeeds ours, the definition will continue to shift
to the virtual spectrum.
This is not some futuristic reverie. The medium exists now.
It’s called blogging, and writers are making money from
it.
Enter Blogs
A blog (contraction of “weblog”) is an online
chronicle or scrapbook of a person’s thoughts, views,
experiences and passions, enhanced by an almost limitless
variety of computer-imported text and graphic material ranging
from quotations to pictures to lists to hot links connecting
viewers to the blogger’s favorite web sites. The currency
of bloggers is called “memes,” bits of cultural,
factual or news content that define the personality of the
blogger and the shared interests of his or her community whether
it be politics, sports, entertainment, or hobby. The transmission
of memes in the “blogosphere” is exponential and
almost instantaneous. The term used to describe it is “viral.”
One source defines memes as “the cultural counterpart
of genes.” Many visitors to blogs use them as a primary
source of hard news.
Unlike conventional diaries, blogs are dynamic, multimedia,
and public. Indeed, it is their public aspect that provokes
fascinating speculation about their potential to become the
21st century’s answer to the book. They satisfy the
classic criteria for books: they are printed, distributed,
and publicized. But they are not printed on paper, they are
not distributed in stores, and they are not publicized in
traditional ways.
Blogs in one form or another have been with us for as long
as the Internet, but until recently were associated with geeky
information-sharing web sites belonging to special user groups.
However, the medium got a big boost after a team of San Francisco
programmers, Blogger.com (now a division of Google), simplified
and commercialized the process for creating one’s own
blog – “organizing the world's information from
the personal perspective,” as Blogger.com’s web
site puts it.
Blogs exploded into our consciousness during the 2004 national
elections when the web sites of strongly opinionated writers
attracted large numbers of visitors. The bloggers’ popularity
came to the attention of magazine and book publishers, who
offered contracts to some of them for articles, columns and
books. This wasn’t just a trendy tie-in to the transient
event of an election: publishers found the writers’
voices fresh and entertaining, their looks appealing and their
web sites stimulating.
Best of all, these bloggers come with two guarantees that
publishers crave: built-in sales numbers and built-in platforms.
Their popularity is not a matter of speculation. It is a function
of virally infectious appreciation, an audience voting with
clicks of its mouse. It can be measured precisely and analyzed
by the number, concentration, and demographics of “hits”
on their sites.
Even with advances in market analysis such as BookScan, traditional
book publishing is at best a speculative venture. Publishers
can compile information about readers ‘til the cows
come home, but when the time comes to decide how many copies
of a book to print, the best they can do is an educated guess.
By the very nature of blogs, however, precise and real-time
market research is embedded in the medium, research that can
be used to create pinpoint-targeted advertising campaigns.
And therein lies the answer to the question of how writers
can make a living writing in the new paradigm.
The New Commercial Model of the Book
AdSense, a service created by Google, is one of a growing
number of marketing service companies that access personal
web sites, instantly analyze their content, then (in the words
of AdSense’s own site) automatically deliver “text
and image ads that are precisely targeted, on a page-by-page
basis, to your site’s content—ads so well-matched,
in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.
And that means more clicks. And every click earns you more
money.”
Steven Johnson, writing in the January, 2005 issue of Discover,
described blogs as “a global platform for personal wisdom.”
“Most of us,” Johnson says, “…have
a passion about something.” By creating a blog around
that passion, a writer can locate a community of like-minded
souls that advertisers are able to quantify.
And to quantify is to monetize. Google tabulates a fee every
time a viewer visiting an author’s site clicks on an
ad, and sends the author checks on a regular basis. A growing
number of bloggers who have signed with AdSense and similar
services are not only receiving compensation, but are extending
the use of their blogs to develop related business and promotional
opportunities.
One such business is branding, and new firms are emerging
to help promote books and authors utilizing the full range
of media resources – text, video, voice, and music.
A flash-animated, interactive multimedia “trailer”
produced by a company called VidLit was employed to hype Little,
Brown’s “Yiddish with Dick and Jane,” sparking
what Publishers Weekly described as “a viral
marketing campaign” that materially contributed to the
book’s success. PW cited VidLit as “one of the
few companies to grasp the significance of pure entertainment
value in marketing books online.” The firm’s founder,
Liz Dubelman, produced her own commercial, “A Blog Apart,”
that exemplifies the multi-dimensionality of blogs: “It
starts with the written word,” she says in her narrative,
but “transforms the words on the page into a compelling
form of entertainment.”
How will we “read” this new type of “book”?
Though the technology for on-screen text display has vastly
improved, the original vision of e-book pioneers – a
dedicated reader like the Rocket Book – has yielded
to the reality that most consumers want their portable devices
to incorporate a multiplicity of functions of which reading
is only a minor component. In the next decade or two we will
see a convergence of such tasks as pager, text messenger,
book reader, cell phone, Global Positioning System, music
player, writing tablet, laptop computer, digital organizer,
radio, television, camera and game player. The all-in-one
device about which futurists have speculated, the “Personal
Media Player,” is rapidly becoming a reality. Perhaps
our children will continue to call it a book, but the PMP
will not be Grandpa Guttenberg’s book.
Goodbye, Gatekeepers
When traditional publishers talk about author platforms,
they often refer to circumstances that have little to do with
whether or not the author is a good writer – indeed,
with whether he or she is a writer at all. Does he own a chain
of fitness salons? Does she have a hit television series?
The appeal of blogs from a literary viewpoint, however, is
that many of them feature interesting thinking, entertaining
writing and other literary values intrinsic to authorship.
Theoretically, at least, in a blog universe interesting writers
will be better rewarded than uninteresting ones because more
readers will click on their web sites. For this reason, it’s
not fanciful to predict that the next generation of bestselling
authors will come not from Big Publishing but rather out of
the turbulent processes in the blogosphere, which, like superheated
gases in distant galaxies, produce young stars.
But wait! This sounds great for writers, but where do publishers
fit into this new world?
It’s a good question. As authors assume the roles traditionally
performed by publishers such as distribution and publicity,
the laws of disintermediation – the elimination of middlemen
or agencies of any kind – render publishers less and
less relevant. And that goes for editors, reviewers, critics,
bookstores and libraries. “Gatekeepers” –
the priestly class that tends the holy flame of literary taste
and tells us what is gold and what is dross – may have
little place in a world where the best judges of taste are
readers themselves.
And agents? (A question close to my heart.) Agents are no
more exempt from these forces than anybody else. Indeed, it’s
hard to find better candidates for disintermediation.
As Big Publishing becomes more and more dysfunctional and
authors grasp the capabilities of the new paradigm, the transformation
of the book from a three-dimensional object to a dematerialized
but richly sensory experience will accelerate. And so will
the redefinition, the reinvention, the repurposing of the
author, as we progress – reluctantly but inexorably
– on the road to virtual.
All the best,
Richard Curtis
Read Part Two of this Series
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About Richard Curtis
Richard Curtis, president of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc.,
is a leading New York literary agent and well-known author
advocate. He is also the author of numerous works of fiction
and non-fiction, including several books about the publishing
industry.
He graduated from Syracuse University in 1958 with a BA in
American Studies and also from the University of Wyoming with
a Masters degree, again in American Studies. He joined Scott
Meredith Literary Agency after graduation, and was foreign
rights manager there for seven years. In 1967, he launched
a freelance writing career, and has had some fifty books published
by many major houses. In the early 1970's, he began his own
literary agency, and in 1979 incorporated it. Richard Curtis
Associates, Inc. currently represents over 100 authors in
all fields. The agency reports more than $8 million in annual
sales for its authors.
Richard Curtis was the first president of the Independent
Literary Agents Association and President of the Association
of Authors' Representatives. He has had a long and active
participation in the Science Fiction Writers of America, including
fifteen years serving as agent for the organization. In 1994,
he was named recipient of the Romance Writers of American
Industry Award for Distinguished Service to Authors. He is
married and has two children. He currently resides in Manhattan.
His hobbies are sports, music and painting.
In 1999, his interest in emerging media and technology led
him to start E-Reads, now a leading e-book publisher. He has
lectured extensively and conducted panels and seminars devoted
to raising consciousness in the author and agent community
about the future of publishing.
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