I once had dreams of making it as a literary writer. Those notions were, of course, about as far fetched as my earlier dreams of playing professional baseball. But we’re not here to discuss my childhood dreams. Thanks to fresh data from The Wall Street Journal we’re going to examine just how hard it is for writers–even writers of exceptional merit–to make a living.
“In terms of making a living as a writer, you better have another source of income,” says Nan Talese, whose Nan A. Talese/Doubleday imprint publishes Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and John Pipkin. One reason for Talese’s pessimism is the hard facts of a shrinking market for books. Consumer books peaked in 2008 at 1.63 billion units and are expected to decline to 1.47 billion this year and to 1.43 billion by 2012.
With all the entertainment options and various time pressures like work and raising a family, who has time for a book today? Online game developers are getting rich; meanwhile, our nation’s scribes are applying not just for grants, but for food stamps.
Yet, where there is disorder there is also opportunity. “Writers come up from nowhere, from the ground up, and nobody is looking for them or asking for them, but there they are,” says E.L. Doctorow. Who’s going to produce and market their work, and help them make a living? No one knows. But writers, like weeds, will keep coming. That we do know.
One answer can be found in independent publishers like Turtle Point Press who are signing some promising literary-fiction writers, so it’s not as if good books aren’t being written and published today. But independents offer, on average, $1,000 to $5,000 for advances, a fraction of the $50,000 to $100,000 advances that established publishers typically paid in the past for debut literary fiction.
What about eBooks? eBooks are selling like hot cakes, right? According to the Journal, eBooks are far from a game changer for emerging writers, although they do provide a nice bit of change for best selling authors.
Let me ask, what is your relationship to the printed book? Do books take up a lot of shelf space in your home? Are they packed away in boxes in the garage? Have you sold them all back to the used bookstore? Do you carry all the reading material you’ll ever need in one electronic device?
Personally, we have more books in our little cottage than we know what to do with. But I’m not reading new books at the pace I once did. The atomization on content is to blame. Like music fans who now buy just the single instead of the entire album, I click through the web harvesting bits and pieces from my favorite sources. I don’t have to subscribe to a magazine or newspaper, or buy a book. For the most part, I just click and read.
Interestingly, all this online clicking and reading repositions the book as special event in my life. To set time aside for a printed book is to say, I’m here now concentrating on this long form narrative. Email and iThis and iThat be damned.
Simon Dumenco, writing for Ad Age, taps a nerve when discussing the rise of social gaming and what it means for our culture.
In FarmVille, of course, you “work” your own plot of land, while FrontierVille stokes nostalgia for Manifest Destiny. (“Howdy, Pardner! Come join us on the frontier, where you’ll carve out a home in the wilderness and raise a family.”) Cafe World makes you a small-business owner/operator.
FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook, with over 61.6 million active users and over 24.1 million Facebook application fans in June 2010. If you spend any time on Facebook at all, a portion of your friends will spam you with Farmville requests. Dumenco asks, “How America-right-now is that?” I might simplify his rhetorical question to “How American is that?” Day-dreamy ambition is indeed an American trait. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his entire career addressing the topic, and he’s one of our most literate 20th century voices.
Dumenco admits to being depressed by the rise of social media gaming. I know what he means but it’s important to make room for the imagination. There are more imaginative things to do than play games, online or off, but on the grand scale of attention robbing activities, Farmville and its lot are relatively innocent. First person shooter games are another story. Giving kids toy guns is bad enough, but now we provide the whole killing experience via the click of a mouse. Now that’s depressing. It’s also sick and wrong.
Fred Wilson is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm. He writes the popular “A VC” blog (“musing of a VC in NYC”), and has invested in numerous game-changing tech companies, including Twitter, del.icio.us, Etsy, and FeedBurner.
I’ve been reading his blog off and on for years, but have never seen him speak. Thanks to The 99 Percent, part of the Behance Network, we can now hear his thoughts on the all the various ways to run your own show.
Wilson describes various types of organizations that entrepreneurs run.
the sole proprietorship
the partnership
marriage partners as business partners
the boutique
the federation
the project
the tour bus
the startup
the breakout
the company
I feel like my new company, Bonehook LLC, borrows freely from several of the examples above, namely the sole proprietorship, the partnership, the boutique, the federation and the project. I’m the sole owner of Bonehook, but I have a partner in AdPulp. In the creative services arena, small firms are often called boutiques, and I have no problem with that. The federation model that Wilson describes is perfectly resonant, as the work Bonehook does is totally dependent on my network of collaborators who step forward on a project basis to help solve client’s marcom problems.
I also like the examples Wilson gives for each model: Matt Drudge; Openshop Studios; DailyLit; Union Square Ventures; Allen & Co; Avatar; Hype Machine; Red Stamp; Foursquare; and Twitter.
Cathy’s Book is a transmedia storytelling experience written and produced by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman (with illustrations by Cathy Brigg). First published in 2006, the book includes an evidence packet filled with letters, phone numbers, pictures, and birth certificates, as well as doodles and notes written by Cathy in the page margins.
Cathy’s Book is a huge success and now two more books, Cathy’s Key and Cathy’s Ring round out the trilogy. All three are presented in print and online in a complimentary and overlapping fashion.
One of the author’s, Sean Stewart of Fourth Wall Studios, spoke to ARGNet about building “interactive arcs†into the stories, so that a reader might send an email and go through a 3 or 4-step investigation to arrive at a satisfying endpoint.
Online or off, the magic here is the series of interactions taking place between readers/followers/fans and the storytellers. Stewart explains:
MA: What was your favorite out-of-book element in the trilogy?
SS: Actually, I think my favorite thing we did was to build a gallery for readers to post their art…and then put some of those pictures in the printed books. There is something very beautiful to me about closing that circle: the books invite you into Cathy’s life beyond the page, and then, eventually, circle around until your life is part of her printed world. That for me is a lovely version of The Dance – that cooperative give-and-take between artist and audience that is seems so clearly to be part of what the next evolution of art will be.
With the rise of digital culture, writers are now required to think beyond their manuscript. And while the writer remains the architect of the story, as the larger experience of the story unfolds, others with a deep interest in the story emerge to help bring finishing touches and/or new ideas to the table. This could be somewhat off-putting to the storyteller, put in needn’t be. When you tell a story in the ancient tradition–around a campfire!–the people gathered there clearly impact the pace of the story, the details left in or taken out, the ending, etc. Thanks to the interactive abilities of today’s always-on mediums, we’re getting back to that more familiar model.
Digital ninja, Faris Yakob–who I had the pleasure of meeting at a conference in Cambridge, MA a few years ago–made a guest post on Gaping Void that resonates.
Here’s the heart of Yakob’s argument:
Once you begin to extend yourself via media, you become aware that by broadcasting your life through media fragments, you are creating an idea of who you are that is distinct from, but inextricably linked to, who you are.
And that brand is a highly defensible asset.
Naturally, Yakob is referencing the ideas in “The Brand Called You,” a 1997 article by Tom Peters in Fast Company. I bought in to this line of thinking pretty much since it emerged and I’ve been actively “extending myself via media” since 1999, when I launched my first site.
Given the investments I’ve made in my brand, particularly at AdPulp, I ought to have a “highly defensible asset” that can be used to land clients, speaking engagements, job offers and the like. Yet, the reality on the ground isn’t nearly as grand as all that. I’ve spent many a long night tossing and turning on why that is.
One problem is I’ve established myself as an ad critic while continuing to work in the business, which may lead to some unintentional confusion. For instance, when you meet me, are you meeting David Burn the ad guy, or David Burn the guy who rips on and/or compliments other ad guys? Personally, I’ve never had a hard time unifying the two. To make quality communications, one needs to be acutely aware of the rest of the field in order to instinctively react to it, build upon it or utterly reject it. For that reason, AdPulp ought to be the ultimate portfolio piece. But unless the job in question calls for the creation of an online media property, it’s often perceived to be an apples-to-oranges situation.
Here’s the thing though, I’m not really concerned about the brand called me problem I just outlined. As Shakespeare said, “to thine own self be true.” I’m doing what I like to do, and what I’m good at. I don’t need a bunch of people to recognize how to best employ my talents for their own benefit, I just need a handful of people to do so. That’s why I started Bonehook and that’s why it’s a content development firm, versus an “ad agency.” I’m making it as obvious as I can that my success with AdPulp is directly transferable to any number of my client’s marketing problems.
Serial entrepreneur, MarkAndreessen, thinks print media companies need to take a page from the Spanish Empire’s playbook and make real their commitment to digital.
Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.â€
In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,†he told me, “you gotta commit.†His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.
I like the imagery Andreessen’s using, but instead of burning the boats, it might be smart to keep all oars in the water, as it were. It’s not like there won’t be printed newspapers and magazines in the future. There will be. They might become rather expensive–as they are expensive to produce and distribute–but they’ll be available.
Good Magazine is sharing a particularly good idea here.
Having lived in San Francisco, I know what a pain it is to park there. Sometimes you go round and around for half an hour to an hour just to find an empty spot, which is insanity, but that doesn’t stop it from happening.
Dynamic parking meter pricing and availability is technology that’s solving an actual need. Thank you Streetline. So many of the tech developments that grab the media’s attention are inconsequential in the grand scheme. For instance any news about Facebook is completely wasted on me.
How has the Internet changed the way you think? That’s a huge question for our time and it’s the question Edge.org put in front on 167 world-class scientists, artists, and creative thinkers. Their range of answers is a deep well that one can dip into time and again, like a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
To get a taste for some of the thinking, please sample these small bits…
Crap detection — Hemingway’s name for what digital librarians call credibility assessment — is another essential literacy. If all schoolchildren could learn one skill before they go online for the first time, I think it should be the ability to find the answer to any question and the skills necessary to determine whether the answer is accurate or not.
The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.
And as a result, speaking for myself, the Internet makes me mean. Resentful. Short-fused. Reactionary.
In fact the propensity of the Internet to diminish our attention is overrated. I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind.
We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
If we know anything about knowledge, about innovation, and therefore about coming up with big deep thoughts, it is that it is cumulative, an accretive process of happening upon, connecting, and assembling, like an infinite erector set, not just a few pretty I-beams strewn about on a concrete floor.
Back in the mid-1700s, Samuel Johnson observed that there were two kinds of knowledge: that which you know, and that which you know where to get. The Internet has changed our thinking, but if it is to be a change for the better, we must add a third kind of knowledge to Johnson’s list — the knowledge of what matters. Knowing what matters is more than mere relevance. It is the skill of asking questions that have purpose, that lead to larger understandings.
This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.
So it falls to us to make sure that isn’t all that happens.
Of course, we all have our own essays to write.
I started using a computer to type up my college papers in 1983. But it wasn’t until 1995 that I started using email and even then, I used it sparingly. For me, 1997 was the year when the information revolution swept me up in its fast moving tide. Which means I’ve only been thinking inside this particular framework of networked machines for 13 years. Fundamentally, has it altered the way my brain works? I don’t know, but I do know my habits have changed radically. While I read fewer books now, my overall volume of reading and writing (and thinking) has increased dramatically. I now spend many hours almost every day reading, writing and thinking. I’d like to think that’s a good thing, although I’m keenly aware of the need for balance.
I’m fascinated by Jonathan Harris and his sketchbooks.
When we use manual instruments to write and draw, I think there’s more feeling in the work, similar to how there’s more sound in a vinyl record than there is in a compact disc.
Harris is obviously a master with pen and paper, but he’s also a technologist. As he considers next steps in the evolution of storytelling, he imagines that it will play out online (which is more than a little likely).
Here’s a passage from the video above that’s worth studying closely:
Anything can be the hub. Anything can be the center. I really believe that’s the future of information presentation. The metaphor of the page as an organizing principal is dead. It’s archaic. It doesn’t work anymore. A better approach is to portray a world of connectivity. A world of connections. A huge connected graph where any node in the graph can be the first order node and everything else is expressed in relation to that node.
For sure, the page has always been a lonely place. Maybe that’s why I find comfort in it. The reality is both modalities are in play today—the lonely page (physical or digital) and the rushing river of real time “conversation.” Both have immense value. But the roar of the river can be deafening, especially in the rainy season. A notebook is a quiet place to think, a refuge from modernity. I need to spend more time in mine.
Alan D. Mutter writes Reflections of a Newsosaur, where, for the reader’s benefit, he combines his experience in Silicon Valley with that of his time spent at newspapers. As such, he’s a good person to consider how publishers can make money online, or if they can.
He offers this quick checklist:
1. You cannot charge for such commoditized content as world, national, business, sports and entertainment news.
2. You might be able to charge for local coverage, if it is sufficiently intensive, comprehensive and exclusive to make to make it required reading for residents of the targeted community.
3. In the business-to-business realm, you probably can charge users for exclusive information that helps them make money, avoid losing money or, ideally, both at the same time.
4. You probably can charge consumers for two things: (a) exclusive entertainment content and (b) authoritative information that helps them hang on to more of their money.
I think this is a pretty tight look at the topic. Exclusive content, especially in an area that others rely on to do their own jobs or manage their own money, is worth paying for/subscribing to, now as before. But such content is not common. It’s rare.
The online monetization conundrum isn’t about electrons versus print at all. The issue is the same as it ever was–the publisher with the best, most relevant and entertaining content wins. And that victory won’t be delivered by paid subscribers alone, but through a mix of revenue streams that might include semi-annual fund drives, selling merchandise like books or t-shirts, wise use of search and display advertising and sponsored events or conferences.
