Time simultaneously stops and speeds up.

Time stops for the backlist. It used to be that when a frontlist title pops out, the press would put a lot of focus into its visibility, its marketing, and its social media campaign (don’t get me wrong; I hate the term “social media campaign.” It’s more of a social media life, really). Without having to spend money on warehousing, digital titles can live cheaply in the ever-after. What happens then is that backlist titles don’t fade into oblivion when a new title hits the “shelves.” Instead, they stay put, and the publisher’s responsibility is one of constant care and upkeep. The publisher maintains its vigilance, making sure that any new marketing opportunities are taken care of, any new audiences are reached and communicated with. It’s liberating to not be as tied to the sell-then-pulp mentality so linked with traditional publishing.

Simultaneously with that, time speeds up, offering the Twitter response. Twitter maintains presence in a temporal vacuum, making things seen a lot for a short amount of time. If you create something worthy of virality, you can rest assured that it will be re-tweeted, but not for long. Marketing becomes a timely endeavor, but it’s all about the spike instead of the elevated terrain.

That’s where the new authorial response comes in. It seems that a lot of people think that successful authors write something, get it picked up by a publisher, and then retreat back to the sanctity and protection of his or her desk. That’s not the case, and the new realm of publishing seems to suggest that authors need to be interacting in a continuous basis with the very audience that they are writing for (instead of writing to, but that’s a different story for another day). Upkeep on the author’s brand becomes the responsibility of the author, and I would argue that it should be that way. There’s no guarantee that the next book the author writes will be picked up by the publisher, so the author should do whatever he or she can to up the stakes. And right now, that means social marketing.

The Monday after Turkey Day is always an insane day filled with a horrible mental and emotional hangover. For me that hangover is also attached to a longing to go back to the world of Star Wars. Let me explain (and probably get a little too personal in the process):

I have one of those personalities that equates buying things with love. I’m sure that some therapist somewhere would enjoy helping me unpack that connection, finding that the threads there are somehow intertwined with toys that I had to earn as a kid, my father’s insistence on spending all of his money on shit that he didn’t need, and society at large. Combine that with Christmas, that lovely consumer-filled holiday coated in a nice sheen of excess, and you have some really crazy stuff going on in my head this weekend.

Never mind the fact that this was the first Thanksgiving in eleven years where I didn’t either cook or host a feast. Never mind that my son was introduced to Santa in a frighteningly horrible experience (see above). Never mind the fact that I will be unemployed in less than a month and moving to another state in less than two months.

What really got my juices flowing this weekend was the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta testing weekend. I didn’t neglect my family (although I could’ve); I played a little bit here and there, mostly at night, and other than accidentally starting a character on a wrong server (stupid Bondar Crystal), I had a good time. If not a little isolated. I have friends on two different servers, but I found myself getting caught up in my own individual story on separate servers. Sad state of affairs.

Anywho, flash forward to Monday morning, and I was surprised to see the beta testing still going. I can’t wait to get home and play a little bit. But I’m also going to try to sell everything that I don’t want so I can afford to have that game in my life. It’s precious to me. My own. My precious.

God forbid we be able to create some sort of story like that as publishers. We manage words on paper, but I think that we should be managing ideas and expression. Intellectual Property managers, capable of finding and coordinating expressions of ideas in their myriad forms. What does an artist rendering of a character look like? What does a song inspired by a poem sound like? What does a film inspired by an art piece look and sound like? And yes, Electronic Arts, Bioware, and Lucasfilm all combined and worked together to make sure that The Old Republic is going to be the best thing ever. They have enough money to ensure that sort of fanatical devotion. But sometimes it’s about the idea.

Or so I’d like to think.

One of the things that strikes me about this article is about how obvious this seems to me. Amazon really isn’t necessarily just a storefront themselves, but a lot of times, they act as distributor for publishers, especially when thinking about how they (Amazon) basically distribute such a large percentage of the digital products out there already.

I know that they (Amazon) have the affiliate program, designed to help re-sellers and stores have their own storefronts on Amazon’s storefront, but this is a move that I think should potentially usher in a greater partnership between Amazon and publishers in general.

Now don’t get me wrong; I don’t think Amazon is the answer to all of publishing’s ills, but then again, why not embrace the fact that most of the people go here to buy the damn books instead of bitching about it?

*gets down off soapbox*

Don’t forget that Amazon used to lose a lot of money. They put up the big bucks; they gambled big; they won (as of now). A lot of companies want to keep doing everything precisely in the same way as it’s always been done *cough publishing cough * but maybe that’s part of the reason that things are always so melodramatic and apocalyptic for publishers.

In talking with students yesterday, one of the things that we discussed was the very nature that a publisher’s toolbox is changing. Used to be, we’d have to know a lot about offset printing, what a type foundry was, and possibly manual typecoding. Today, we need to know XML workflow, electronic rights management, and HTML5. We still need to know a lot about a lot of things, but the priority of knowledge is shifting, and with it, much of the business.

Now, I did a good job of not griping about the content within DC’s new relaunch (and go here to read some great stuff about them), or some of the potential problems of an Amazonian Marketplace Monopoly, but let us not forget the size of Ingram. It seems like no one bitches about Ingram these days.

Go on, make that Amazon storefront. Embrace the Dark Side. They’ve got the money, right? And isn’t that why you started publishing in the first place?

* sarc emoticon here *

True, tuition is on the rise. And true, there are probably problems in the tenure/adjunct/what-the-hell-am-I-really-paying-for-with-my-tuition issues. But I’m going to side-step these for the time being, and focus just on some of the benefits as I see them.

The world is a soul-crushingly corporate place, filled with bottom lines, ROIs, market-feasibility studies, and cubicles for our worker bees. There is this mentality of producing to the highest bidder, finding market demand, etc. It’s practical and centered wholly on the money. It’s what makes the world go ’round.

In college, though (and I’m speaking of the classroom, not the abstract noun “college”), we have students thinking, critically uncovering bias, learning concepts that anchor existing, future, and previous social, psychological, scientific, economic, and literary ideas. They use analysis, creativity, and research to create a more real map of the world. They find themselves, and they find their paths.

I was in a meeting the day before yesterday with the acquisitions group of the press affiliated with the college (Ooligan Press, from PSU). We were talking about a title that they wanted to acquire, but were hesitant because it is a genre that is sometimes difficult to sell. Concerns were raised, and we talked about how different it is from a lot of the other titles that we have done, but there were decidedly good parts, too: the editors were going to get to work on a developmental edit, slanted for literary fiction, the marketing department was going to have to go out and start to define the audience that we haven’t gone after yet, and the design team would get to work on fiction again, utilizing thematic concepts from the book into their cover and interior designs. But Sales wouldn’t be happy.

And then I had to say something about how sometimes the good thing about college is that value isn’t necessarily only monetary. Sometimes we need a safe-haven from the single-minded nature of capitalism. Sometimes we need a safe space to screw up without losing our jobs. Sometimes we need a guide, helping us to see things in a new light. Sometimes.

Right.

A couple of months ago, I told my wife to go ahead and start saving up for my Fire, ’cause come Christmas time, that’s what I wanted Santa to put in my stocking. And so the story goes.

As Amazon has released the thing this week, amid competition from B&N’s Nook tablet (am I the only one who hates that name? I don’t know why either.), and some of the reviews are in. It seems to be a mixed bag; some of the people are talking about the tablet in relation to its price (thereby forgiving some of the potential technical issues), while others only refer to it in the greater scheme of tablets at large.

Which got me thinking: if price impacts ratings, how far can we extend that mentality?

Do we buy a shitty car because of its near-disposable pricetag? Hyundai would say “yes.”

Do we buy those crappy DVDs that wind up in the bargain bin, beckoning us with their $1 price tag? My 80′s movie collection would suggest that is the case.

Does a crappy tablet, one that is basically a content-delivery device (as opposed to what, I wonder?) justify the $199 price-point? If not, what is the amount that we are willing to pay? I’m not sure if I want a not-quite-big-enough-to-enjoy-emagazines-tablet for 200 bucks. And growing up tinkering with the family’s 8088 computer back in the day (you know, the one that booted into DOS) has left with me a hesitancy to deal with technology that doesn’t allow you to manipulate it on the most basic level. You get a Fire, you go straight to Amazon for your content. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Amazon is probably losing some money on this, which should be a warning flag. Why would a company be willing to lose money on something like this, a product that might sell 5 million units? Well, the same reason why sometimes it’s okay to give away some chapters and songs and crack: it makes the consumer come back for more. And Amazon is hoping that the Fire is a portal to Amazon content, making people more easily consume consume consume.

So I’m not sure what’s going to happen after all of this. There’s a good chance that a lot of people (shit, around 5 million people maybe) will go out there and get their grubby mitts on the Fires as they sweep across the land. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because that’s 5 million more people who could potentially be buying books and reading newspapers and all that stuff. It’ll probably be 5 million more people playing Angry Birds or something, though.

But there are some of us who want tablets in people’s hands. Not because of some ultra-technophile reason, but because we have stories to tell, and there are more options than just printed text on page.

I like the idea of getting him stuff that he’ll enjoy, and I love thinking about him with all kinds of intellectually stimulating toys as he grows up.

However, things are expensive. I won’t go into a rant about the nature of consumerism (I don’t want to bore you with that), but it did get me sad a little bit that I don’t have enough income to buy him whatever he wants.

And then I thought about the conversation I had yesterday with a would-be author who doesn’t like my idea of low-overhead publishing. No risk, no reward; that was his mantra. All of these thoughts seem independent, but I don’t think that they are.

His take on marketing is the old, tried and true method of advertising, and exposing content to the masses (through ads mostly). I like that optimism, but that contributes the overall cost of the thing. If a book’s budget includes bloated costs of production, someone’s going to pay for that (and I would argue that it’s probably the consumer that ends up footing a lot of that bill). Now, if we were to be able to cut out as many of those costs as possible, each person in the production change willing to take an initial paycut (or investment cut), passing the savings on to the end-user, I think that might have sweeping consequences, consequences that could result in better loyalty and trust for all those concerned.

That replaces the old model of one-shot success stories, the idea that a book deal should be huge, resulting in a blockbuster of some sorts. It turns into a model of work and reward, a living wage that supports continued creation. And potentially, continued consumption.

Walmart has customer loyalty, not from its products, but from its prices. Therefore, they are able to make money because of volume instead of “that one product that everyone has to buy there.” Sure there are magnets (most publishers have something that acts as a magnet), but I wonder if our expectations couldn’t be that magnet…

I know that sounds a little harsh, but still.

Everyone is lamenting the death of the book these days. Everyone, meaning all the people who care about publishing. So I guess that means like 47 people in the world. Whatever. And there’s good stuff out there. There are tablets to reinvigorate storytelling (and no, I’m not going to link to Apple, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble. I mean, we all know who they are, right?), and there are platforms like the Atavist, helping publishers tell those new stories.

I love the Atavist stuff; I recently talked to them about working together for my future publishing projects, and while the terms weren’t mutually beneficial for the scope of my work, I still think that it’s some good stuff. I started thinking about a story I read a while back about Push Pop Press, who gave a pretty cool TED demo about their own publishing platform.

And so this morning I donned my interwebs spelunking gear and went searching for some prices for this platform that they were going to be releasing for publishers to help re-invigorate the industry.

Instead, they sold their platform to Facebook. Here‘s the release on Push Pop’s website. No biggie, right? Everybody’s gotta get paid; I can dig it.

But.

On the website, I noticed that Push Pop’s founders referred to Facebook as “the world’s largest book.” When I read that, I got up, went to the office, and started scrounging around for some Tums so I didn’t spew my breakfast all over the computer screen (and I share this desk with like seven other adjunct faculty members, so I didn’t want to be rude).

I thought Infinite Jest had to be one of the bigger books in the world. You know, besides the Bible. But there’s also this book, which apparently has 1460 pages, each of which is “three and a half feet wide, five feet tall and five inches thick.” So yeah, that’s pretty big.

Seriously, though: Facebook as the world’s largest book? Please. Only if the world’s largest book is a collection of what-we-eat-for-breakfast, funny looks our dogs make, and horrible pictures of us from when we were seventeen posted by that that girl from high school who we barely remembered but apparently has a helluva collection of pics of us with braces, gawky bone structures, and acne. But I digress.

The real concern in this story isn’t necessarily that the big guys bought up the fancy tech. It’s not that some really smart people who know their shit got paid. It’s that those of us who think that there is something valuable in working with books in all of its new potential forms wish the coming transition was going to be easy. Well it’s not.

I know nothing about making software and all that stuff, but maybe I need to start learning, because I don’t have the millions to wave at programmers, convincing them to let me use their knowledge to tell stories. All I got is way too much idealism. Mixed with some sadness at the thought of what could have been.

Oh Push Pop, we could have made some sweet, creative, and intellectual love together.

Maybe that’s a typical thing for people: eating before you can start to make. Not really sure.

But as I get ready to throw my own hat in the ring of publishing, ready to get my stable of creators out there to work in the world of content-creation, I can’t help but feel a tad reticent at the potentials waiting for us. Maybe it’s the fact that all of the press releases that I see these days all have something to do with the platform on which to access content. Maybe it’s the billions of dollars that go into the tablet war. Maybe it’s the fact that Amazon really seems to be out to get the publisher and the bookstore at the same time (which makes a lot of sense if you’re Amazon).

In the end, most publishers get into the work because they love books. Or the ideas of books. Or maybe the idea of loving books. Who knows… But I do know that most authors and artists do what they do because they love to do it. They want to communicate. They want to share. It’s probably a good and proper thing to pay them for it, allowing them the opportunity to make more and more (and this last “make” means “create”).

We want content, artists want to make content. It doesn’t seem that complicated, does it?

I am a big supporter of the rights of authors to protect their works from illegal use, and if an author trades his or her copyrights to the publisher for money, then I agree that the publisher has a legal right to protect its works from rampant digital theft.

My problem comes from some of the assumptions hidden within the article. The third paragraph starts with the sentence, “In the complaint, Wiley said losses from the pirating are ‘enormous,’ though it could not put an exact amount on the damages.” It seems straightforward enough, but my problem comes from the fact that Wiley simultaneously claims enormous losses but an inability to quantify the losses exactly.

I thought back to another time in my life when my own opinions on digital piracy were a bit looser than they are now. I would download a bunch of music or movies, sometimes never even opening the files on my computer. I once downloaded six albums from a band that I thought I liked, but later realized that there was only one of their albums that was any good (and I promptly went to the store and bought a shiny copy of the CD, complete with a little booklet filled with fascinating art). The point of that little story is that I didn’t download things instead of buying them; I downloaded garbage because I could. If there was a gem in there, I would certainly have to own the original, because there is something about having the original on the shelf, screaming to others as they walked in the house that I am in indeed cool enough to own it.

With that being said, I’m not going to blindly defend pirates. But I do think that there is a time for realizing that every download doesn’t necessarily mean a lost sale. It could mean that, god forbid, your product isn’t good enough to cause a reader to go out and buy your over-priced, crappily made, printed-overseas, waste of a book.

Additionally, and this is where I’m really going to start ranting if I don’t pull those reins in. One of the commenters to the article said, “Only when an intellectual pirate faces 20 years without parole will there be an incentive to find a more legitimate pursuit.” No, no, no. I understand the tenacity and emotion behind that comment. But when an intellectual pirate faces 20 years without parole, there will be a market for increased torrent privacy. It’ll be even harder to find them, because that kind of measure will undoubtedly create the need for increased secrecy. I’m not saying that we should cave and accept it, but we should also get off our high-horse and realize that there are much bigger issues out there that need legislation and mandatory minimum sentences.

Wiley, good luck in your pursuits. I hope you get what you deserve (and I don’t claim to know what it is that you deserve; I just hope that it’s fair in the most legitimate sense of the word), but I would also suggest that you re-think piracy a bit. If people can get what they need from your books online, maybe you should start to think about your business model a bit, incorporating a larger digital presence at lower prices. Your Kindle ebooks are around $15 a piece. That’s ridiculous. Maybe you could get some more impulse-buys with a lower price, thereby negating the impulse piracy.

Interestingly, most of the people that I’ve met who are wanting to get into the publishing business do so because they are drawn into the world of books, responding (at least in part) to a connection with the written word, sometimes as far back as early childhood. Maybe it was a particular story that transcended the words on the page, maybe it was some character that they identified with. Whatever the case, most of the people trying to get into publishing don’t do it because there is so much money out there just waiting to be claimed.

Because for the most part, there isn’t.

That’s the reality out there. Sure there are avenues out there that could be insanely profitable for publishers. You hear about it all the time. No wait, that’s authors. Maybe it’s the publisher that sells the books to the ereaders out there. Nope, that’s Amazon. Who is the publisher then?

The publisher is the driving force between author and reader. Even when the driving force between the two is the author him or herself (let’s face it: self-publishing is a possibility these days. It’s difficult, but it’s still there.), he or she will take on the role of the publisher, connecting the ideas to the page or screen, using distribution channels to hopefully get the words into the readers’ minds.

I think it’s time that we start to rethink many of the terms in the publishing world. I’m not sure if there is a tendency to think of publisher, editor, and agent as pejoratives, or if it’s just some of the jaded reflections on publishing that I’ve read recently, but I’d like to think that publishers, the ones that I know, would like others to know that they in fact don’t do it for the money.

I believe that a publisher is someone who recognizes the transcendant nature of a creative work (be it fiction or nonfiction) and dedicates him or herself to making sure that the work in question is presented in the most ideal fashion available (of course, it’s up to each publisher to define what the hell “ideal” means). One of the things that authors would be good to know is that if you have the privilege to work with a publisher, it is usually in their best interest to try to sell as many of those things as possible.

But here’s the thing:

Whenever you trade over the rights of a book to be published, you trade. over. the. rights. Authors who take money for the work and then complain about the publisher ruining the artistic integrity of the work in question are on shaky ground in my mind. The moment that you take money for your work is the moment that you are trading artistic integrity (a noble goal perhaps) for money. You are in effect, selling out.

Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, it’s good to get paid for creating content. But, and this is a big but here, I think that a lot of us want a cake and a fork to eat it with.

That’s what we hire publishers for. They are there to protect the artistic integrity of the author, as well as maximizing potential profit for the work. They are there to walk the line between art and commerce, and there are a lot of publishers who walk that line tremendously well (Go check out McSweeney’s or PropellerBooks or Tin House if you don’t believe me). Art and commerce, the yin and yang of the content world. Publishers are the integrators, the balancers, willing to think of the content in a new form, attempting to embrace that dichotomous relationship into a new, evolved form: the book.

Yeah, there are some crappy publishers out there. Some have lost that spark, that connection to the word that initially drew them in the magical world of books. But there are also some crappy dogs out there. I would never think to lump all dogs into some sort of label based on those few. I’ve known some great dogs.