Big Book Publishers Not Innovating Fast Enough
From PBS MediaShift:
When I saw Jason Ashlock take part in a panel on the future of book publishing at the Aspen Summer Words conference a few months ago, I immediately noticed something different about him: He lacked that black cloud of doom floating over his head that many people involved in the book industry tend to cower under these days.
Ashlock, who makes his living as a literary agent and multimedia book packager, was downright chipper even as he discussed the demise of bookstores, book reviews, and the traditional publishing model. Why is he so upbeat? Instead of worrying about what’s been lost, he focuses on capitalizing on the new enthusiasm among readers that the advent of e-books has created.
. . . .
Many publishers and bookstores have suffered financial losses in recent years, but on the other hand, readers have embraced e-books and some studies show that people who own e-readers are reading more than ever before. Are you optimistic that readers’ enthusiasm for e-books will translate into new sources of revenue?
Jason Ashlock: I have the luxury of being optimistic because my position in publishing is as close as you can get to the author, and that’s the best place to be. The anxiety that big publishers, bookstores, and other traditional players in the value chain feel is due to myriad factors, economic and cultural, but the truth is, the farther you stand from the author, the more danger you’re in. The author’s all that matters now — the author and the reader. Everybody in the middle is in a period of redefinition.
My job is to lock arms with the author, help them craft outstanding stories, and help them find their way to the readers who right now are craving those stories — even if they don’t know it yet. It’s a great time to be an author and a reader. It’s not as great a time to be anyone else. If you’re a reader, there’s more great content than ever, it’s more accessible than ever, it’s better priced than ever. If you’re an author, you have more venues than ever, more control than ever, more access to powerful technology, more direct relationships with readers.
. . . .
You said the author’s “biggest enemy today is not piracy, but obscurity.” Is anyone stepping up to fulfill the curatorial role that book reviews and booksellers used to play?
Ashlock: The void is being filled in an ad hoc manner by a mixture of online community recommendations, such as book clubs and newsletters and social media, and the ever-inaccurate online reviews. But these aren’t sufficient for most readers. The transition out of the bookstore and review tradition is a difficult one, and curation and discovery is still in a state of disorientation.
I’m glad you ask that question in that way, because it’s for this very reason we’re launching RogueReader.com this fall. In short, The Rogue Reader is a digital publishing channel for outstanding suspense fiction. We select only the very best new voices in the category and introduce only one author a month to our readers. That’s it. We call it precision-curation. We help that one author produce elegant e-books, beautifully designed and carefully edited, and we position their novels in the market in very strategic ways.
We believe there is exceptional value in quality curation. The signal-to-noise ratio on the web is immense. How do we know what to pay attention to? What’s of value? What’s worth my time?
Theoretically, what publishers do is up the signal strength by their brand. For authors, publishers offer the sense of being selected. Authors know when they’re published by, say, Random House, that they have been chosen from among thousands of prospects. And readers know when they pick up a Random House book that professional book people have selected these as the works that should be attended to.
But increasingly, the self-publishing community is producing works of arguably equal quality that are just as popular and appealing. Last week, 27 out of the top 100 books on Amazon were independently published. But among the millions of self-published books –which were not curated, and went through no filtering — how do we know what to read? We rely upon trusted voices: recommendations of friends, buzz on social media, even very impersonal and regularly useless systems like how many stars a given book averages in a retail channel.
Link to the rest at PBS MediaShift and thanks to James for the tip.
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“Lock arms with the writer” – does that translate into the English I speak as “lock up the writer”?
This guy talks a lot about curation. When are these people going to learn that we don’t need their curation? If he’s only curating one author a month, I can’t see how that’s much better than trad publishing. Unless you’re that one author, of course.
And as one of these “ever-inaccurate” online reviewers, I find his attitude more than a little condescending. I suspect what he means is “people who say what they think rather than what we pay them to say” online reviewers. As I argued elsewhere yesterday, I have a handful of review blogs I trust. Even if the bloggers tastes are different than mine, I know enough about how their tastes intersect with mine to know if a book is likely to be for me, regardless of what the blogger thinks of it.
http://adventuresfantastic.blogspot.com
http://futurespastandpresent.blogspot.com
Whenever you hear someone talk about “curation”, it’s time to run for the hills unless they work at a museum.
Ashlock said: “I have the luxury of being optimistic because my position in publishing is as close as you can get to the author, and that’s the best place to be.”
….Unless, of course, you actually ARE the author. Because that’s the best place of all.
“…help them craft outstanding stories…”
Um. No. Writers write stories and get more skillful with each one written. Agents? Really? Agents? No. Just no.
(I’m hearing a certain mentor in my memory saying, “Why would you want a failed writer telling you how to write your story?”)
Aside from everything else he says he has a worthwhile idea for a publisher or whatever RogueReader is. Create a clearing house for books? It could work. Question is how much of a cut do they want for their digital service, and what are the terms of their contract. But in the end will they be able to sell eBooks?
Why is he so happy? Because he’s turning himself from an agent working for the writer and into a publisher: “We help that one author produce elegant e-books, beautifully designed and carefully edited, and we position their novels in the market in very strategic ways.”
With so many writers needing external validation and willing to sign anything shoved towards him? Oh yes, he has good reason to be in a good mood, especially if his contract has a few well-worded clauses and poor royalty rates for the writer, and a good (for him) definition of net…
Anyone who has hired this person as an ‘agent’ should be running for the hills.
Yes.
I am very uncomfortable with anyone who is both an agent and a publisher.
I think this guy is smarter than a bunch of Industry folk, because he sees the potential, whereas most of them are clinging to the past, but I would need alot more information about him before I trusted him.
It never gets so old that someone else won’t try it. “Look at all the crap out there! Unfiltered! Uncurated! We’ll filter and curate and promote a limited number of authors (unlike establishment publishing, which filtered and curated and promoted a limited number of authors), and then the world will come and FIND us! So line up to become one of the chosen few.”
And the sad thing is they will line up to the far horizon.
“We help that one author produce elegant e-books, beautifully designed and carefully edited, and we position their novels in the market in very strategic ways,” Hachette assured Jo Rowling.
Oh,..er, what?
One of this guy’s statements is a clear statement of one of the fault lines in publishing:
This perfectly sums up the projection* that you see from many people in traditional publishing. Readers are doing just fine. It’s the professionals who are suffering from disorientation due to the transition.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
Disorientation due to the transition to digital?
Too-fast change?
Heh. That’s classic Future Shock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
Trad-publishers as Futzies?Hmm, I can buy that.
Whatever our jaded opinions may be about this happy agent, he’s right about one thing: our “biggest enemy today is not piracy, but obscurity.”
The ONE drawback to quality self-publishing, as I see it, is the limitation in marketing and distribution. We may not like his solutions, but we can’t deny the problem. Even though he’s offering a self-promotional “solution,” he does admit that “curation and discovery is still in a state of disorientation.”
That state of disorientation is not going to change. It’s going to get worse, because our marketing methods are married to the internet until death do us part. And the internet is probably the most disoriented contraption human beings have ever created.
Me, I’m counting on the lottery. One of these days some reader of Zinovy’s Journey is going to talk to another reader, who will talk to another reader, and so on down the line until one of those readers is an influencer. Then, of course, this great work of literature will go viral.
Whatever our jaded opinions may be about this happy agent, he’s right about one thing: our “biggest enemy today is not piracy, but obscurity.”
Yup. He can quote sensible people just fine. Verbatim, even. It’s when he tries to think for himself that everything turns to mush.
Hmm. He might have pirated that quote. Do we know? He must have said it at the Aspen conference, and he might have attributed it properly when he said it and the interviewer missed it. In any case, his entire article does have some interesting stuff in it for us. I don’t see the mush you refer to. Maybe you know more about him than is evident from this article though.
His whole article is at: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/09/literary-agent-jason-ashlock-big-book-publishers-not-innovating-fast-enough264.html
I take exception to the line, “…how do we know what to read?” Is he assuming that readers can’t decide what to read without help? Yes, there’s a ton of self-published literature out there and some of it’s crap, but it still doesn’t take a rocket scientist to find a good book.
quote: “And readers know when they pick up a Random House book that professional book people have selected these as the works that should be attended to.”
I don’t know about you folks, but I have been reading books for 50 years and I have never once said to myself “hmmm its a Random House book, therefore pro book people chose it, therefore it should be attended to!”
I look at the author and say: “hey its a book by Alistair Maclean I haven’t read. I enjoy his storytelling. I’ll buy it.” I don’t give a rat’s whiskers who published it.
I have no doubt he is a very well-intentioned fellow who believes that he can find that precious once-a-month author to launch… elegantly. But I wonder what value he is adding? And is it worth more than the percentage he will charge?
What, exactly, will Mr. Ashlock (sorry, if you speak German that name makes you giggle) do that a writer can’t do for herself? And what makes him think that the brand “Ashlock Monthly Finds” or whatever will persuade readers that his taste is more significant than that of the (shudder) hoi polloi writing reviews?
But I wonder what value he is adding? And is it worth more than the percentage he will charge?
That’s what you have to ask. What do they know that you don’t and what can they do that you can’t? The further legacy publishers migrates towards digital and the more indies that make names for themsleves (and major dollars) the more “agent-as-publishers” we’re going to see.
But “pay me to publish you” is nothing new. It’s always been around and, just as with scam (or just not as friendly as you thought) print services, writers that don’t want to do homework or research or even worse: don’t think of themselves as business people but rather “artist’s” who can’t be bothered with “all that publishing stuff” are going to continue get taken but only now by E-publishers.
Until I hear about an e-publisher turning an unknown into the “next big thing” through their service that’s my opinion of agent/e-publishers, no matter how nice they seem in interviews.
Entangled publishing has created 2 NYT bestsellers – they are an epublisher.
There are some legit epublishers out there. Entangled, Samhain, Elloras’ Cave, LooseID. Many of them have been around for years, and started in erotica and erotic romance.
“You said the author’s “biggest enemy today is not piracy, but obscurity.” Is anyone stepping up to fulfill the curatorial role that book reviews and booksellers used to play?”
Winner of the “Questions that Destroy Themselves” contest. Curation does more to create obscurity than create notice. The whole point of the digital revolution is that it bypasses the filter of curation. What an ignorant question.
Agents are safer because they’re closer to writers? That makes no sense at all. You can say that an agent is close to the writers they represent, but that has nothing to do with all writers. It’s all just a vacuous statement meant to make him sound “positioned”.
Ironically, his “closeness” to the author makes him uniquely bad at the role he has chosen. He is selling readership and exposure to writers, yet his agent role puts him as far from readers as possible. What does he sell readers? Curation? Not very unique.
Wow, saw that coming…
“Curation does more to create obscurity than create notice.”
I agree with all of you. I self-published totally, bypassing all middle men, even the self-publishisng “publishers,” and I’m so glad I did. But my point (above) was that we still have the problem of obscurity.
Curation does not create obscurity. Obscurity is already there. It doesn’t even make obscurity worse. Every time one of us puts another indie product on the internet, we create more obscurity for everyone. That’s just a fact of life in the information age. And though it’s true that traditional publishers aren’t providing much of a cure for that problem, neither are we. Unless we have a solution for the problem of obscurity, we’re not going to be any farther along, financially, than if we’d published with a traditional publisher.
So we need to work on finding a solution, not just dissing other people who offer lame ones. That’s my point.