Lean Publishing

What do you get when you distill modern book business through the structure of tech startups? You get Lean Publishing, a means by which a writer can look at book production as a profit-building exercise. You won't find any writing tips or methods for overcoming writer's block in this manifesto. Peter Armstrong has produced a plan that puts people with an idea on the same path of Angry Birds, rather than the traditional route of finding a literary agent.

Every problem looks like a problem with the pipes when you ask a plumber, and Lean Publishing is much the same case. Armstrong's background is in a web development and architecture start-up, so fixing the problem of developing a profitable book, of course, looks like something to be solved the web start-up way. Many of the terms and ideas sound very foreign to somebody who has no connection to that world, but there is one advantage to the language of VC start-ups. "Creatives" are the people for whom the start-up system was built, and the methods for navigating a start-up are suited towards directing creative people through business minefields. There's a reason that much of the internet was created by art majors who quickly hired a CFO once checks started coming in: a creative founder needs that sort of help to reach a profitable end.

As such, the people who can benefit the most from Lean Publishing are the people stuck on the traditional publishing path. The process requires giving up the usual process of getting words onto paper, and introduces the scary idea of making ideas available to readers (and the competition) before the text is complete. The Blooker Prize was a bit ahead of its time in recognizing that a worthy book could come from the web. The success of Julie and Julia, the 2006 Blooker winner, should have inspired more in that direction, but taking that route to publishing lacked the roadmap to such success. Lean Publishing hopes to brandish a machete and clear that road, blazing a new path to long-form writing success through the methods that built the internet into what it is today.

(Via.)

Forgotten Books and New Media

Over at The Infomercantile, I posted an ad I found in a library-industry magazine from 1968. Race relations were definitely at a head, and the ad was promoting a "forgotten" list of Negro-focused books, many of which from the 19th century (I believe they were public domain even in 1968). I found that most every book listed in the ad is still available today, many of which for free from various sources.

Back in '68, there was a firm structure for how books were published and distributed -- it left a lot of control in the publishers and distributors, and less in the hands of bookstores and customers. With the advent of the internet, two sides are benefiting most: publishers and customers. Publishing has become enormously cheap, provided you look at new technology models (eBooks, POD), and customers can ask for and receive most any publication they'd ever want. As you can see flipping through LuLu, quality is all over the board -- but that's not bad according to capitalists; you need the wide range of quality and value in order to have a truly open market. Middlemen, of course, dislike open markets because it reduces their influence over what's sold and for how much. Markets which can circumvent salespeople has a huge negative impact on those middlemen, and when publishers say the new market hurts them, it's largely because the impact on distribution has climbed the chain and they had no other plan. Distributors go under, inventory is lost or siezed, and that results in loss for the publisher.

Bookstores, as is lamented so many places, has received a large brunt of this new technology impact. People love bookstores for their cultural and social aspects -- but the ability for customers to get books from other places, the problem of how to carry sellable books out of so many available, has quashed so many sellers' operations. Figuring out how to continue to provide the societal value of a bookstore, despite diminishing value as a seller of books, is the toughest aspect for bookstores to overcome. It requires a niche, fulfilling a need.

The original ad, however, does have a purpose: there was a need in the marketplace, and the publisher saw the niche to fill and took it. They made it easy to stock African-American focused books without requiring the stereotypical white, female librarian to do much research. Publishing today has a similar need: publishers are running full-force into meeting the needs and niches they saw twenty years ago; I can't say we've been the most successful at it, but there's a need for a certain type of publishing business today...it might not be the same as the publishers remember from fifty years ago (which is good) and it might not be the same as the business model that once supported independent bookstores (which is bad), but there will be a need for books, whether it was 1968 or is today: books are here, used, and needed...somehow, a model for book distribution will evolve that will profit businesses and writers, but it's scary now and hard to believe that someday people will look back and wonder how the book business stayed afloat in the 20th century.

Business 2.0 Closing Up Shop

Business 2.0 is closing up shop -- but they say it's because of a lack of advertisers, not a lack of readers. Part of me wonders if this will (or should) drive a shift to book publishing on topics formerly dominated by magazines; the impermanence of a magazine is supplanted by websites and blogs, but the internet can't produce the permanent-reference aspect of a book. Magazines on paper: not worth the expense. Books on paper: still worth the money spent. Readers will always be readers; give them something they'll value, rather than something advertisers value. This should add up for publishers looking at how to publish their words.