What is a Book?
As an author, technology professional, and digital native, I think it’s beyond time to ask ourselves what a book is, and how technology has broadly transformed the business of publishing.
What we traditionally identify as a book is a certain dimension and size; something that was physical and has pages that we manually flip through to read in consecutive, sequential order; that it has a spine; it has a cover and a jacket, requiring layout designers, typographers, and visual artists.
Because books were physical, there needed to be a process to edit it and make sure it was right. Errors and omissions couldn’t be corrected in the finished product.
In order to make a profit off the product of a book, it had to be economical to produce it. There had to be at least x-number of pages printed under certain constraints to make y-amount of profit. Historically, the profit motive is what filtered writers from being published at all. Publishers knew that, in order to make a profit off a book, there was a formula associated with the cost of production, requiring a minimum and a maximum number of physical pages, in specific dimensions and materials (paperback vs hardcover, for instance).
In order to sell the book, marketers knew that there was a formula that worked: a strong character-driven story with a three-act structure with lots of escalating, high-stakes action, in regards to a fantasy novel, for instance. They knew that a man had to write it; the fantasy demographic repelled female authors. They knew that the protagonist must be a human male to best identify with the reader, and in particular, a white human male. They knew it needed a splashy cover and vivid colors, and it needed to be between x-number of pages, otherwise, a segment of the market wouldn’t be interested in it.
Publishers knew how many units they needed to produce and sell in order to make a profit off the volume. Thus, they made exclusive arrangements for marketing and distributing a book. These exclusive arrangements allowed for a certain amount of time a book sat on shelves, and was calculated from the amount of loss they’d suffer if they didn’t churn the inventory quickly enough. In most cases in the latter half of the 20th century, publishers had to buy-back underperforming books from the retailer and eat their losses.
Authors of traditional books were disconnected from their readers because they had no way to speak to them at scale without the marketing muscle of the publisher.
And physical books suffered a long-tail problem: they’d need to be taken into the storeroom within eight weeks or so to make more room on physical shelves for more product, physically leaving the consumer’s sight and imagination. Only books at the forefront of the consumer’s attention and imagination are what sold; anything else in a store room or warehouse was inaccessible by the consumer.
Therefore, up to the year 2010, there was a lot of gatekeeping that went on in the publishing industry. Fantasy books were costly to produce, expensive to distribute, must meet a slew of criteria to be successful, and excluded female authors and protagonists that didn’t mirror their readers. Authors couldn’t cultivate their own marketing relationship with consumers, and books had an eight-week lifecycle at most.
Throughout the 20th century, those filters, the sheer risk of publishing a book, generated mountains - continents - of rejection letters because, if we’re to be honest, who’d want to be a publisher anyway? Tons of costs, lots of risk, and tiny profits. Publishing sucked as a business model, and retail wasn’t any better. Only scale made money; i.e., Barnes & Noble killing traditional booksellers - remember that?
So what happened in 2010?
Around 2010, a number of factors converged to destroy traditional publishing.
The Internet had created a generation of consumers prepared to consume electronic content;
Broadband - fast, inexpensive Internet access had been brought to most of the industrialized world, and used routinely by lower-middle-class consumers;
The arrival of viable tablet-based computing platforms, allowing one to reasonably hold an electronic copy of a book in facsimile to a traditional book;
Electronic distribution platforms for booksellers allowed retailers to produce print-on-demand products, build electronic products on their platform, and resell and distribute digital media at scale;
Social media allowed authors to disintermediate the publisher and talk directly to consumers, to build their brand as an individual;
The proliferation of secure, nearly costless, Internet-based payment systems enabling an author to sell directly to consumers.
These influences are ongoing and erode the power and profitability of traditional publishing. Very soon, the traditional publishing world will be reduced to just a few players for, in a world where you make < 5% on printed products, scale is everything. M&A like Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster must happen, otherwise, there is no scale, only efficient competitors, eroding each other’s market share and driving prices to the bottom; nobody will make money, and there will not be any more traditional book publishing business. It simply costs too much and there’s no money in it. If consumers don’t mind paying a premium for a book ($30/unit vs, say, $10/unit electronically), then not a problem. I’d be willing to bet, though, that sentiment will not last, no matter how people like the physical feel of a book in their hands.
So, what is a book?
Today, it a book is digital media - it’s an electronic product.
A book can be created by anyone with a computer.
Books are software. They can be edited and changed at any time, providing instant updates, and released through versioning - just like software.
Authors can grab an ISBN directly electronically; they can manage their own catalogs and meet reseller requirements for inventory and distribution; they can print-on-demand, doing one-off unit-based printing at practically zero cost to them, eroding maybe 2% of their margin.
An electronic book can be distributed at zero cost to anyone, anywhere, in the world, and run off any digital device. There is world-wide distribution of a book at zero cost with no licensing intermediary eroding your margin.
It doesn’t matter what size a book is - how many pages or words; in this case, size doesn’t matter. The costs of production and distribution are exactly the same. A book can be replicated a zillion times at no cost.
The longtail is overcome by filters, social media, and search. Consumers can dig into catalogs with millions of titles and find what interests them, and social media can help market titles to new readers.
A book can be marketed directly to consumers by authors, allowing them to make their own brands and relationships. No longer does a publisher get to intermediate that relationship, allowing anyone, anywhere, to create a following of readers.
Its typesetting doesn’t matter. The consumer, not the publisher, can choose their own preferences for typeface on their digital readers.
In an electronic format, books are extensions of digital assistants like dictionaries, thesauruses, note taking and research/citation tools, and Internet search. A single in-narrative click can help inform a reader or lead them to more engagement with the author online.
Editing and art assets are increasingly cheap - most of that labor can be outsourced using Internet based freelancing - allow authors to access quality talent at increasingly lower costs. And one day, AI-generated imaging will offer authors free high-resolution artwork at zero cost.
The development and publishing of a book is highly automated. If you can learn how to press a couple of buttons, you can move data between - what used to be - complicated formatting changes.
In essence, the author is their own publisher, editor, and marketer, and they have direct access to the market and consumers from which to create and maintain their brand. This is simply the dream of authors like Richard Brautigan - we are all publishers.
I am fortunate enough to live in an amazing time of transformation in this industry. The nature of what a book is has radically been transformed.
I generally write short stories (~10,000 words) and distribute them world-wide at no cost, about characters and settings that’d usually be gateway’d out by traditional publishers. But with today’s model, I can write and distribute anything of any size. Who’d want to read novellas about Halflings anyway? Well, I’m lucky enough to just do my own thing and improve my art to connect with audiences and build my own brand. What an amazing time!
The era of waiting around for someone to validate you as an author with an acceptance letter is over. You are an author; you are a publisher. Even traditional publishers vet authors based on their skillsets in developing their own work - they’re more likely to hire someone who comes in with an audience of 10,000 readers and an established catalog of content, than someone who doesn’t already have it. Why put a risky bet on someone who can’t do it themselves?
Even as I write this, though, I’m very much aware that another transformation is in play concerning AI (Artificial Intelligence). In the very near future, most of what readers consume will be written by automation - computers trained on writing specific forms of content, creating amazing works of art that will compete with even the best of us human authors. So the ability to be seen, hired, read, and compensated as an author will continue to meet headlong forces. I write because I like telling stories; not because I think I’ll make any money at it, and that concept of making money is probably unrealistic.
In a world where computers produce written content, only a miniscule percent of authors will actually make money in this business. True talents will own their own brand, disintermediate publishers and booksellers, and go directly to their audience, who will circulate their work in social media as to attract new readership; all the while, they’ll be under constant threat from AI that can emulate their unique style at a drop of a hat.
What is a book? And what is an author? Well, both are rapidly changing.
Take advantage of change. You, as an author, no longer need to wait around for someone to tell you you’re good enough. That’s crap - go publish now! And publish every day.
Thanks for reading my work.
R
