Publishing

[gfish]

The Google book search settlement is raising yet another fuss over digital distribution, so I've been thinking about it recently. Base assumption: our goal as a society is to encourage quality creative production, but the exact method is irrelevant. I think everyone is focusing on the wrong things. What follows applies to just about everything, but books serve as a convenient example. Let's break it down vaguely in order of controversy...

Production/Distribution: It is, of course, blatantly obvious at this point that distributing data in a non-corporeal digital form beats the pants off everything that came before. It's many orders of magnitude faster and just about infinitely cheaper. Anyone can do it. Everyone can now publish whatever they want to a global audience. No one can claim with a straight face that we need large corporate structures in order to achieve this goal.

Content screening: One of the unsung advantages to the old system was that it provided implicit quality control. Because publishing a physical book was so expensive, publishers wanted to get their investment back. If something was published, it had a fair chance of being decent. Maybe not your cup of tea, but not absolute crap, either. You were protected from the horrors of the slushpile. One concern with the new model is that, omg, how will we ever sort through the tsunami of material available? (Students of Chinese history will recognize this concern -- and the dangers that come from centralized "solutions" to it.) Well, it turns out this isn't really a problem either. We've developed lots of methods for ranking and recommending material. And more importantly, it matters less when these systems fail. If you're not paying for something, you're only out whatever time it took you to realize it was crap before putting it down. How often do you watch the first 10 seconds of a youtube video before going eh and closing the tab? The problem is solved by the same thing that caused it -- massive reduction in costs and even more massive amateur parallelization.

Content creation: This is where discussions start to get all emotional and pear-shaped. The simple truth is, I see no evidence that monetary rewards drive creation. (Except when the production tools are expensive, which was never the case for writing and is true less and less for just about everything else.) How many authors ever make a living at it? And even those that did, how did they manage to write before they were famous enough to make a living at it? The whole argument is ridiculous. It's even more crazy when you look at the unpaid material being posted constantly online. People like to create! (And that's a really good thing. I'd much rather live in a world where we didn't need to bribe people to be cool.) They also like to be famous, which I will argue was always the real external motivator. So, even though I'm going to be accused of wanting authors to starve to death alone in the snow, there just isn't a problem at this step. Things will still get written.

Editing: Finally, at this obscure step in the process, we run into problem. Going from a manuscript to a final book takes editing. (Also typesetting and cover design and other such things, depending on the final target medium. The same arguments apply.) Real effort, doing something boring and tedious and decidedly unsexy. Writing is sexy -- everyone wants to be an author. There are people who want to be copy-editors, but not usually in the do-it-for-free-cause-it's-fun kind of way. No one ever gets famous for being a copy-editor. Despite all the popular hysteria around the previous steps, this is where the new system grinds to a halt.

In the end, the question I'm very interested in right now is how to incentivize this kind of labor. If you're concerned with quality books coming out after the publishing houses finally go bankrupt, this is what needs to be fixed. There is no guarantee that there is a solution, of course. The old model is permanently broken, though. In the long run, selling data is for chumps. It's time to get over that and start making sure the new world order will be as awesome as possible.

(What, you were expecting answers? Solutions? No, just trying to clarify the issues. Sorry.)

Comments

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

People start out writing by living very cheaply, in ways which are frequently unsustainable. They take a risk, the same as someone does when they run a startup. If they don't make money at it, they eventually go get a real job.

Book-length writing takes significant amounts of dedicated time. We don't need a pay-for-content model, but if we value book length content, or more generally content which has had a significant amount of thought and work done, paying authors is non-negotiable. We don't have to pay them superstar wages -- I'm with you there. However, if you want the kind of writing that you get when someone sits down to think about something for a year, you have to make sure they can eat. Free content does not do this on its own, ever.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The other point is that in order to get really good at something, you need a lot of practice. If you have to take time away from the thing in question (writing, say), in order to go do something else to make a living, that seriously cuts into the practice time in a given year. So it takes more years to get good, and good creators (authors, say) produce less work before they die.

I like living in a world where Lois McMaster Bujold doesn't have to go get a job as a fry cook; I'd rather have her writing.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

That's rather circular. How do you make a full-time living writing before you're good? The fact that every big name author you can name did NOT make a living writing before they were famous shows that people are quite capable of writing and still holding a day job.

In the end, if you like that world (and it certainly has benefits, no argument), find a business model that works under the current and developing technology. I don't think it exists, and I'm certainly not giving up the internet so people can get paid to write. Like I said in the preamble, I'm only interested in the goal of producing high quality works, not the means.

[hpapillon.livejournal.com]

The fact that every big name author you can name did NOT make a living writing before they were famous shows that people are quite capable of writing and still holding a day job.

A lot of people burn the candle at both ends for a while to try and pursue their dreams. It's generally unsustainable. Either you decide you can do it and make the leap, or you back off, or you burn out and go splat.

There's also the matter of slowly ramping up. It's possible to get lucky and have some success with something you put only a very limited amount of resources into (because that's all you had at the time) and then to use the resources gained from that success to be able to devote a little more to your next try, and so on and so on.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

This. And the issue that most writers have a couple of early tries that can be offered as next books by the time the first book hits the shelves. That keeps production flowing, but it's an non-sustainable situation--the writer is selling her built-up "savings" of writing. Then the writer makes the jump to writing full time, without an outside paying job, while living on the money--that's the key part here, the money---she has saved from her job and made from her saved-up writing. If she can write good stuff fast enough to live on the money, she goes pro.

And she can write more, over the long term, if she doesn't have to give up forty hours (or more) out of her week to the job that keeps food on the table.

Sure, she can still write some in her spare time--that's how she got started, I agree. But that means a lot fewer books. Lois McMaster Bujold has written 21 books; which 10 would you like to see cut? Jim Butcher has written 16 books; which 8 would you like to see cut? Patricia Briggs, 14 books; which 7 would you like to see cut?

Or fill in your favorite authors, which might not line up with mine.

But really, it's not like we would get to choose the best ones--the *first* half of the books are the ones we would likely get, since the authors wouldn't have gotten the kind of practice that led up to the last half of the books.

And I'm sorry: I respect the slushpile, really--everyone in the slushpile is someone who has the persistence and courage to actually finish stories and send them out--but persistence and courage is not the same as persistence, courage, talent and skill, and no amount of slushpile would make it up to me for missing out on those Bujold and Butcher and Briggs (pure coincidence that the first three I thought of are all in the B's :-) books.

[pielology.livejournal.com]

Freeing good writers from their day jobs allows them to write *more* - which means you get more good, less crap.

Historically this has happened through independent wealth and patronage, and there's no reason you couldn't continue that via a more modern model of grant-giving arts orgs. There is still a free rider problem, so in a theoretical sense you will still not get "enough" professional-level content... but if that pushes society away from pure consumption, and towards participation as amateurs, I think it's actually a net win. At least for the arts - journalism is a much more troubling case.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I don't claim it isn't a nice thing if writers don't need a day job. I'd rather like to not need one myself! That doesn't mean it will be possible given the realities of what technology allows in the way of business models. It's really hard to make a living as a blacksmith these days, too.

I agree, re journalism. I really don't see how we can have widespread local journalism without something like a local paper, and those are obviously dead. Some of the stuff that needs to be covered is just too mind-numbingly boring and un-sexy to draw enough of an amateur crowd. It worries me.

[hpapillon.livejournal.com]

It's really hard to make a living as a blacksmith these days, too.

Yeah, but that's because society in general has little need for them, and so no one particularly cares if it's hard to find hand-blacksmithed things, except for the few who go to the trouble of seeking them out.

Admittedly, some people *do* really think that content for money is wrong and evil and should die out and authors should be as rare as blacksmiths. But, unsurprisingly, that means a lot less stuff created.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

My analogy there would be that we do still need metal objects produced, we've just found better (if less fun) ways of doing it than heating up chunks of iron and hitting them with a hammer. And likewise maybe -- maybe -- we've found better, less restrictive ways of encouraging the production and distribution of works than by enforcing an artificial monopoly on the copying of data.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Fishie: Writing - creative or otherwise - is most emphatically not "data." Please see my more extensive note below.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid it is, in the same way that a customized, hand-forged item is, in fact, atoms. It can be copied like data, it can be transmitted like data. All of the economic and technological forces that work on data work on it, in the same way that mass-production changes the economics of blacksmithing.

I really must emphasize once again that I am not talking about what should be. I am not arguing here that one model is better than the other, or that one it more moral than the other. I am just looking at what I see to be historical inevitability and trying to draw some conclusions. Nowhere did I say authors shouldn't be paid, or don't deserve it, only that I think it will be increasingly less common over the next few decades. Sad, yes, and obviously very personal to you and many others. Business models being invalidated by changes in technology often are.

I see now that the snark I used in the "content creation" section, aimed at the argument that the only way to encourage creative expression is with financial rewards, has been misread to think I was attacking financial rewards for writing in general. This is emphatically not the case and for that I apologize.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Fish, for the apology. I appreciate it. :)

Still, this discussion involves some common misconceptions about not only writing itself, but about the publishing business as well. As someone who has made his living in that field for over 20 years - and whose day-to-day income is based upon the subject at hand - I really want and need to correct those misconceptions with hard-earned facts.

As for writing (about which I will post more shortly), it is not atoms. It is vision combined with labor. An ax can be hand-forged or mass-produced, but it is still an ax. Each written work, on the other hand, is a new invention. Although it employs certain technologies (language, syntax, devices, etc. - all technologies that have been, and continue to be, refined by writers), a written work is, in reality, a new invention each and every time. A book can be photocopied, but a photocopier cannot write a book. The book in question comes out of hundreds (often thousands) of hours spent on skilled labor, guided by an ability to envision and craft something out of nothing. The book may be atoms, but the work that went into it is not. And the reason this subject is so intensely debated is because Google is trying to profit from work it has not done, at the expense of those who have done it.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Not really.

One of the reasons Canada has so many promising young writers, according to Robert Sawyer, is that they have single-payer health care, which means that would-be writers can try to go full time earlier than in the US, because their health insurance is taken care of, and they don't have to have a non-writing job to be covered. Thus the ones with talent get their 100,000 hours of practice in early and start the flowering part of their careers earlier than in the US.

Under the system you're proposing, not only do writers need to keep their jobs until they make so much money off their writing they can afford to buy their own health insurance, they need to keep their non-writing jobs *forever* because otherwise how are they going to keep food on the table while they write? So they *never* start writing full time.

Like I said, I'd rather have my favorite writers able to write full time if that's what they want to do. If that means paying for content, well, I'd rather be able to buy 8 Bujold books (or wait and get them from the library) than get them instantly for free, but get only 4.

Sure I grant that there are pay-for-content schemes that are *outrageous* (there's one journal publisher that is charging $127 for each copy of each article--although that's different; the authors don't see a penny of that money) but I think we should rein those in without smashing the entire system.