Scribd, Kindle, Booksurge: Is the alphaWorks of Publishing Coming?
National Public Radio (NPR) reported on Scribd’s latest announcement yesterday. Scribd is a terrific young company that helped me get my first novel online in under four minutes: www.thehiddenstage.com
Their embeddable e-reader, well-designed service, and social network made it the obvious choice for me as an author trying to get the widest possible readership. I was frankly amazed at the quality of the reader, and four minutes beat the two months it took me to get my book on the Google reader system.
I also have the book on Kindle and published with Amazon’s Booksurge imprint (a leader in print-on-demand publishing). I believe print-on-demand is the future of publishing, even for famous authors. Why should anyone “kill tree” before someone buys the book? Even for larger runs to fill a Barnes & Noble order, only those books should be printed. The days of doing a 100,000 unit print run on the hope that 50,000 of them will actually sell are numbered. You don’t want to know how many unsold books wind up in landfill. Publishing today (specifically the focus on large runs of dumping ink on dead tree, instead of focusing on hiring great editors, great designers, and great talent promoters) is a ridiculous, antiquated system that only the most myopic Luddite could love.
I believe that Scribd, and possibly some Scribd partners, have an opportunity to change the game.
Here’s the idea: When I was at IBM, I ran a group called alphaWorks. The brilliant thing about alphaWorks was that it allowed IBM to put early-stage research technology on the web for download without harming the overall IBM brand for quality. The purpose was to get early adopters to tell us what they would do with the technology if we turned it into a product, and this was wildly successful. alphaWorks has been helping IBM accelerate and improve the path to market for new products for a decade. I have to think that using Scribd, Kindle, and Print-on-Demand, a major publisher could easily create the “alphaWorks” of new authors.
This “alpha” brand would say, “Hey, one of our editors likes this writer, but we aren’t ready to put all our muscle behind her on a big print run. So we are putting the author on our “alpha” list. Because they aren’t yet on our imprint, they haven’t gone through the rigorous editing and quality control process that have given us our great reputation in publishing, but we think this author might be a diamond in the rough, and we want you to vote. If we see lots of great comments and lots of people reading online at Scribd, buying copies through Scribd and Kindle and Print-on-Demand, then we may graduate that author to our official imprint.”
A publisher can afford to do this, because they have spent virtually nothing to do it. Scribd is free to use, and Print-on-Demand has only a minuscule set-up fee, and then costs only come when someone buys a book…no inventory! The publisher is just lending its “imprimatur” to get more readers paying attention to the writers on the “alpha” list.
If I were a publisher, I would embrace the inevitable. Publishing is going to be about finding, developing, and promoting talent…not about who can take massive capital risks on processing large quantities of dead tree in the hope a particular book will become a blockbuster. And Scribd, Kindle and Print-on-Demand will be the tools for reducing the search costs and risks associated with spotting the talent and getting a better sense in advance of whether or not they will resonate with real readers.
[...] promise and sign them up. BTW, John Wolpert suggests publishers do something similar (at the Three Percent Blog) - If we see lots of great comments and lots of people reading online at Scribd, buying copies [...]
It is true that publishers remain leery of these new alternative channels. Some agents caution new authors against using them for fear of turning off a potential publisher.
Times are changing though. First, the association of “print-on-demand,” Kindle and Scribd with the moniker of “self published” is going away. The field is now home both to the bad authors (who want something in print for vanity’s sake) with the terrific budding authors who deserve a chance. It is even becoming home to well-known authors who are tired of submitting to the limited royalties and control given to them by old-school publishers.
There is plenty of dreck coming out of publishing houses, for all their gatekeeping, and there is plenty of dreck out here in the electronic and print-on-demand world. But there are also great authors like Stephen King who are now choosing to go straight to electronic and print-on-demand. We still need people we trust to tell us what to read and what to pass by (e.g., reviewers), and we still need terrific editors and designers. But publishers – who haven’t been terribly good trustees of the “what is worth reading” imprimatur in the first place – are quickly losing this role.
More and more authors (just like musicians) are looking away from publishers toward promoters. With a record level of top editors being laid off from the major houses, many of them with terrific reputations, some are going to set up shop without the overhead of traditional publishers – focusing on editing, qc, and promotion. Give me a promoter who can get my book into the New York Times, and I’m happy to forget about the fact that they don’t invest in 100,000 print runs or give advances. (I’d prefer my book to sell – who cares about the advance…unless you are talking about the millions given to the already famous.)
Now that pricing in Scribd and Kindle is such that I can make more selling an online copy than I can in royalties from a traditional publisher, the only real reason to go with a traditional publisher today is promotion and the remaining problem of print-on-demand, which is not yet rigged for handling returns from the brick-and-mortar shops (who remain important). We still want the physical book on shop shelves, not so much because of distribution but for “advertising.” Those endcaps are still important for the casual buyer. But the “returns” problem is going away. Booksurge and others are working hard to remove this barrier to the major bookstores. Soon, a POD book will be able to go directly to the stores.
Did you see that they are now introducing a print-on-demand kiosk? It prints high-quality books (even Dr. Seuss) quickly while you wait. Millions of titles stored in memory, little tiny footprint, minimal inventory cost. Print-on-demand files go straight to the one place they can’t get to right now: the store.
So in the end, if publishers don’t wake up to the shift and start embracing authors that are finding their readers directly through these new media, the authors will simply step around them and find promoters who ‘get it.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if a Scribd were to discover that they are a great front-end to a dedicated book promoter operation that cherry picked the best stuff on Scribd and made them famous.
Industrial change is like evolution or plate tectonics…nothing changes for a long time, and then, just when everyone has come to believe that the Cassandras are wrong, Bam – everything changes. This economy is the kind of environment when that sort of thing happens.