Jenny on “The Third Tier” of Publishing

The Seattle Times just published this piece by Jenny on the emergence of the “third tier” of publishing, and what we can learn from the blogging revolution.

WHEN I was a young New York Times technology reporter at the turn of the millennium, we scrupulously defined “blog” as short for “web log,” followed by helpful descriptions now wince-inducing in their narrowness — “a personal website” or an “online diary.”Within six years, blogs and online-first media have become an ascendant force in the political — and cultural — landscape.

The book-publishing industry is now going through the same painful transition, as the world’s largest book fair, Frankfurt Book Fair, opens Wednesday in Germany. It’s a perplexing time for authors. Opportunities are shrinking with the publishing houses who have long underwritten the livelihoods of writers. Meanwhile, Amazon.com and other e-reader and tablet platforms beckon with promises of potentially lucrative self-publishing that bypasses traditional gatekeeping and distribution.

Of the 100 best-selling titles of all time on the Kindle, an astounding 27 were directly released through Amazon.com’s self-publishing platform. But do-it-yourself publishing is burdened by DIY marketing, copy editing and cover design. It’s a distressing path for writers who just want to write.

But a new choice will emerge, if changes in journalism over the past decade serve as a guide.

In journalism, a watershed moment came in 2004, when the Democratic National Convention credentialed 36 bloggers as members of the media. (My article headline: “Year of the Blog? Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of the Convention Press Corps”). And by the 2008 presidential election, blogs and online-first media had come to dominate politics. One-person endeavors, such as Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos, matured into full-fledged businesses.

Investor-backed ventures such as The Huffington Post and Politico were launched (now both have won Pulitzer Prizes). And by then, The New York Times and other media stalwarts had taken the cue, rolling out their own expanding suites of blogs.

So we see a sequence: Legacy media organizations — in this case newspapers, magazines and cable networks — are buffered by a Cambrian explosion of individual voices initially viewed with a “not-one-of-us” disdain by the establishment. In between, a third tier is rising that combines the scale and rigor of enterprise with the nimbleness of the newcomers.

That third tier is now emerging in book publishing, bringing together the production quality and professional aesthetic of the imprints with the flexibility and speed of a digital-first mindset.

Startups, such as the Atavist and Byliner, started with short-form nonfiction, and are expanding. Hollywood producer Scott Rudin and media mogul Barry Diller recently announced a headline-grabbing $20 million investment in their new digital-publishing venture, Brightline. New companies are targeting romance and erotic literature, one of the most vibrant areas in e-publishing.

My first book was published by a traditional publisher. My new literary studio, Plympton, is making a bet on serialized fiction for digital readers.

These digital opportunities will be good for writers, and readers, in the long run. More efficient distribution and “printing” frees us from the cost constraints of paper, brick and mortar. Publishing can open itself up to creative new formats and the resurgence of old ones. Just as television allowed for a viewer experience distinct from that in movie theaters, digital readers can give us a different experience from the dead tree. Already, we are seeing experimentation with serials, novellas, subscriptions and lending libraries. Books can be re-imagined. Novels can be updated.

To be sure, there are worrisome trends that come from a shifting landscape: concentrated market power, fragmented platforms, incompatible and rival formats, demands for exclusivity and a drumbeat of legal battles.

Marketing of e-books (unless you are Amazon.com) is still an amazingly hard nut to crack. There is no effective equivalent for the front table at a bookstore and accelerating readers’ discovery of new titles along an infinite digital bookshelf is neither art nor science yet.

The publisher who solves that challenge will discover a large part of the formula for long-term success.

Jennifer 8. Lee is co-founder of Plympton, a literary studio focused on serialized fiction. She is the author of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” and a former New York Times reporter who splits her time between Boston, San Francisco and New York.

Yael’s Open Letter to Writers

Yael Goldstein Love wrote the below piece for The Huffington Post:

Fellow fiction writers,

Let’s be frank: we’re not the healthiest-minded bunch. If we were we’d spend our days doing something more pleasant than writing fiction. But lately we seem to have taken a turn for the worse. We look out at the shifting landscape of publishing – e-books rising, big publishers quaking – and obsessively ask, both publicly and privately, Is the novel dead? Is it all Fifty Shades of Twilight from here on out? Are we going the way of the poets, soon to be read by only each other?

The fear is palpable in any group of fiction writers larger than zero. (Non-rhetorical question: how often do you come away from a literary gathering without some new tidbit of doom? The famous writer who couldn’t sell her new novel. The legendary editor who’s been canned.) The effects of this fear can be seen in our bad behavior. Take, for example, the embarrassing overreaction to the e-library LendInk, when the Twitter-fueled confusion of several dozen novelists brought down a site that was actually making them money. (It has since gone back up.) In 2010 The Guardian observed that in the United States, “Declaring the death of the novel is now almost as much of a literary tradition as the novel itself,” and since then I’d say the balance has shifted.

 

Irritable. Pessimistic. Beset by feelings of worthlessness. There’s a term for this pattern of emotions. It’s called “depression.” We, as fiction writers, are collectively depressed. We might not be depressed as individuals; but we have become depressed as a group.

How did we get here? According to a dominant theory in psychology, it was probably through a process called “learned helplessness.” Faced with our seeming inability to prevent an undesirable outcome (to wit: the death of our chosen profession), we turned to despair. But we can prevent this undesirable outcome. And we should. In the face of learned helplessness, doing something is everything.

There are those who already are. Novelist Steven Elliot launched an indie book club through his online culture magazine, The Rumpus. Like a handful of other indie book clubs –Emily Books, The Nervous Breakdown – his club tries to fill the gap left by neighborhood bookstores by hand-selling the kind of literary gems that tend to get overlooked in the blockbuster culture of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Ann Patchett has thrown herself bodily against fate by opening one of those brick and mortar bookshops that are so endangered and so missed. Novelists such as Jess Walter, Nicole Krauss, and even Margaret Atwood are experimenting with new forms through the creative digital publisher Byliner. And there are countless more examples.

Me, I’ve paired up with former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee to found a company calledPlympton, which is reviving serialized fiction as a popular medium. I have many reasons to think this is a good idea: television shows such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men have gotten us in the habit of ingesting our big stories in bite-sized chunks; the serial is a form that demands compelling plot; and digital serials have the potential to add a social element to both reading and writing.

Others seem to think it’s a good idea as well. Byliner just launched their serial imprint with Margaret Atwood’s Positron. In October, St. Martin’s and Movable Type will be jointly rolling out Jamie Brenner’s serialized novel The Gin Lovers. And Amazon has just unveiled their new Kindle Serials program, which sends new installments of a serial novel directly to your e-reading device. (Full disclosure: three of the initial eight Kindle Serial titles are products of Plympton.)

But whether reviving the serial is a good idea isn’t really the point. Nor is the point whether any one of these literary experiments succeeds or fails. The point is that doing something is an antidote to learned helplessness. It feels good to do something. Far better, certainly, than watching and waiting in existential dread.

And the point is also: we owe it to readers to pull ourselves out of learned helplessness. A little bit of depression may come with the territory of being a writer; but too much, and paralysis sets in. At the extreme, some of us might find ourselves unable to write at all. In our pessimism we might give up on fiction, like poor Thomas Hardy whose despairing decision never to write another novel impoverished all readers to come. But even for those of us who keep on going, bogged down by fear and helplessness our writing is apt to sag – to become less inventive, less playful, less exuberant. We owe it to everyone who loves books not to let that happen.

Creation is what fiction writers are good at. We create psyches, able to draw readers in to seeing the world in entirely new ways. Hell, we invent worlds. We try to reinvent language every time we lay our fingers on the keyboard. Surely we can invent new ways to get our stories into the hands of an appreciative audience.

Innovation has never been easier to implement, and hundreds of thousands of book-lovers are on the other side of your laptop. Reader networking sites such as Goodreads can lend new power to word of mouth. Lean companies such as Plympton can take the risks big publishing houses are increasingly shunning – on heady novels, experimental novels, novels not easily classified in traditional marketing terms. This is an exciting time to be a fiction writer. But only if you’re willing to let it be.

Hopefully,
Yael Goldstein Love

Introducing Plympton

Welcome to Plympton!

 

Plympton has officially launched with its first three serialized novels. Each is a compulsively readable, genre-bending good time. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we do.

But more than that, we hope you’ll find yourself excited about the revival of this delightful and sensible medium for fiction. In the 19th century, few books were published without first being serialized in newspapers or magazines. Serialization was a great way to test-run a story’s viability and to build an audience. It provided writers with a means to earn a living on an ongoing basis, and readers with an intimate and immersive relationship to the stories they read. Readers lived inside these stories day by day, wondering and speculating between installments, growing with characters over the course of months or even year.

But don’t take our word for it. Take the word of dismayed clergyman Thomas Arnold who in 1839 decried the runaway popularity of the ungodly serials this way: “The works of amusement published only a very few years since . . . not being published periodically, did not occupy the mind for so long a time, nor keep alive so constant an expectation; nor, by thus dwelling upon the mind, and distilling themselves into it, as it were drop by drop, did they possess it so largely.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Digital readers offer a unique opportunity for the revival of this devilishly addictive medium. And the changing market for fiction grants some urgency to the effort. The major publishing houses are continually cutting their fiction lists and most magazines have stopped publishing fiction altogether. Online self-publishing offers an alternative, but without the support — editorial, financial, and more — that writers need if they are to take the risks that literature requires of them.

We believe the time is right for a third layer in the publishing world, a nimble alternative to the major publishers and the online markets. And we believe that serialized fiction, with its competitive digital price-point, its capacity for generating audience, and its built-in emphasis on strong storytelling, is the perfect medium for creating this third layer.

Happy reading!

Love, Plympton