A-ha!

The Dickens you say . . . Texting a Novel?

The changes in how technology is affecting writing are not limited to blogs and other social media. My friend Seth over at the Cup 'O Books blog recently posted exploring one of the inevitable outgrowth of the increasing popularity of text messaging is that someone would apply it to other forms of expression—in this case a texted novel.  Textually.org reports that the novel "The Last Messages" by Finnish author Hannu Luntiala strings together about 1,000 of the texts and replies to tell the story of an IT-executive in Finland who resigns from his job and travels throughout Europe and India over 332 pages. Although admitting that he hasn't read any of the novel (I can't read Finnish either).  As usual, Seth's post is thoughtful and asks some interesting questions about this use of language and expression, but he comes down to the following:

Unfortunately, I think texting a novel will really turn out to be like writing one in crayon; nothing more than using a tool for creating words out of its expected context.  I haven’t read the book, but I suspect that it is more novelty than serious undertaking.  Of course, that doesn’t mean it won’t be fun.

The links in the post by Textually.org, which focuses on texting and SMS shows that this is the tip of the iceberg.  There are reports on authors who are sending novels out to cell phone users as serials and even mainstream publishers (well...Harlequin) are getting in on the act.  I've been reading blog posts on my cell through Google Reader for a while now and, other than the eyestrain, it works for me (and would work better if I had a slightly larger screen) [the part in italics was added a couple of days later--I just couldn't let the sentence hang there . . .]  Of corS,  dEz R not RitN n SMS lngwij (follow the link at the end of Seth's post to translate if you need to).

Google's Unbound Conference Tells Publishers "Embrace the Change"

On January 18th, Google brought together "thought leaders and publishing industry veterans who are taking advantage of our increasingly digital world—from blogs and social networks to print-on-demand and online access." It was an "all-day love-fest for book publishers", as Kevin Newcomb over at Search Engine Watch notes, with Google "trying to persuade publishers that [it] could be their friend, and not a book-stealing upstart that just won't follow their antiquated publishing standards." There is a lot of fear in the mainstream publishing industry of Google's BookSearch. 

The conference included many luminaries of the new media, including Chris Anderson (author of "The Long Tail"); author and marketing guru Seth Godin, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing (and according to Godin, the Michael Jordan of data overload skill, and Tim O'Reilly.  The innovators from the Institute for the Future of the Book, who blog at If:Book, thought that through the conference Google was taking a sort of a carrot and stick approach, telling them that giving away content will, in the end, lead to more sales, while making it clear to mainstream publishers that that if they don't embrace this change it will happen without them.  As Seth Godin closed during the conference (based on one account): "In five years you're either going to be the center of the universe, or you're going to be ... Pluto."

I've found a few more links out there discussing the Unbound conference.  I'm sure there will be more, but thought I'd collect those I found for you here (with some money quotes):

• Publishing Unbound, Google-Style over at Galley Cat.
  
  • "...what especially hit home was how publishing is not best served by a conglomerate approach - because how can one model be applicable for education, science/technology/medicine, non-fiction and fiction? Answer: it can't.")
• Google opens dialogue with book publishers over at CNET News.com.
  • "At "Unbound," the tech-savvy authors, publishers and analysts more or less agreed that to grow and profit in an increasingly digital world, the publishing industry will have to expand its boundaries."
• Free is the New Paid over at On the Turning Away.
  • "As befitting the zeitgeist, the power of the user will dictate the future of the publishing industry. Three segments are emerging in today’s publishing world – printed works, print-on-demand and inventive entertainment – in which authors create personas through multimedia channels, all of which are marketed by search, social communities both on and offline and workflow. The challenge for publishers will be to leverage these channels to create books that users will engage."
• Change is Now, and Free Sells over at The Long Blonde Tail.
  • "The time for (big) change is now. For an incredibly conservative, slow-to-adapt, traditional industry, this is no small feat."
• Four posts over at WebMetricsGuru, who blogged about each session here , here, here (Seth Godin) and here (Cory Doctorow).

They're Out There: A Fifth of Readers Visit Author or Publisher Sites

[Note from Tom: I know no other bloggers experience this, but with our book publishing work directly with authors at WME Books and our other blog work, Yvonne and I feel like we don't get enough time to post in this blog and engage with our A-ha! readers. So we're very happy to have some more help ...

New to A-ha! ... introducing ... Posts by Greg!

Greg Bell, our new A-ha! blogger, is a partner in D.S. Leach Consulting, with his wife Dianna Leach. Both of them will be posting about book publishing here and about blogs at our business blogging blog, WME Blogs. Greg has much to share from his experience both in book publishing and in building and publishing blogs (check out his Jazz@Rochester blog), so let's just dive right in with Greg's first post on A-ha!]

According to a recent report on the Publisher's Weekly website, a survey of a sample of 813 readers conducted by the New York advertising agency Spier-New York found that 18% of readers have been to a publisher's Web site and 23% of those polled had visited the site of an author. A higher percentage of those who visited authors' (35%) or publishers' (21%) sites were under the age of 35 (which as the post notes, is not surprising). The survey also found that 50 percent of those asked said they purchased a book as a gift within the past year. While 89% of those who bought books as gifts apparently bought from a brick-and-mortar retailer, there were still 28% of them bought their book gift online. Also encouraging is that 86% of those buying books as gifts bought at least two books. Using the total number of books sold in a year (it was over 709 million units in 2005) the actual numbers of readers involved could be pretty impressive.

So, is there anything to take away from this survey? To start, it shows that people are still buying books as gifts. And, most importantly for A-ha! readers, an author's or publisher's website (or blog) is becoming increasingly important in driving those sales.