Guagua Pública

While we hear a lot about the future of publishing from the publisher's perspective, I don't hear much speculation on the future of publishing from the author's perspective.  Specifically, I don't hear anything about the gap between what the current publishing industry can accommodate and the large number of authors looking to publish.

While it's true that publishers have always curated authors and manuscripts to develop only the best possible bets, it still left many good authors with only vanity publishing as a recourse.  However, I believe the size of the unpublished author community has become much larger.  The rise in self-publishing is a testament to the explosion of unpublished authors.  In just 2009, 764,448 books were self-published, dwarfing the 288,355 generated from traditional publishing.  With Kindle, Nook, and iPad self-publishing options, that number must have exploded in 2010.

It's prudent at this point, to make a comparison between publishing and venture capitalism.  Each must keep their focus on the bets which have the biggest possible return on their investment.  With each industry, it's a numbers game; to get a few successes, they have to spread their bets across a large number of investments.  Most of those bets do not pay any dividends, according to Chris Anderson's research from Free he estimates that only 5% of books published are profitable. As with VC funding, the 5% of books which are profitable, are so profitable, they cover the costs of producing the other 95%.

Let's be clear what I'm trying to point out here:

• First, for the benefit of any unpublished authors reading this, your odds of breaking through and getting a publisher to back your manuscript have become exponentially smaller. As a whole, the existing publishing industry doesn't have enough money to bet on too many authors. Therefore, they are going to continue to back known authors and any breakout self-publishing phenomenons who seem like a good bet.
  
  By the way, it's also my opinion that as e-books reduce existing publishers revenues, their ability to fund books will diminish.  This is a point that many in the industry disagree with me on, but I don't know why they think that books will be different from any other industry which has made the conversion from atoms to bits.  Historically, once an industry is working predominantly with bits, revenues drop.  Yes, it's true that costs also drop, but it's never enough to make up for the shift to bits.  I'm sorry that is such a bitter pill to swallow, but it's the truth.
  
• Second, if you accept that authors hoping to get published dramatically outnumbers the authors that get published, then get ready for some really bad news.  If you self-published 4 books in 2009, the odds of anyone finding your books were 1 in 119,112.  Those, my friends, are some very slim odds. Unfortunately those odds are only going to get worse, exponentially worse. The greatest single challenge for any freelance self-publisher, independent film-maker, musician, or artist is reaching your fans or would-be fans.
   
• Finally, now that you know how slim the odds are that anyone will find and pay for your work, you might be stricken with inaction trying to decide what you think is worthy of making.  However, I think that would be missing the point.  Making your work better will not pay a very high return on investment. In IT when you discuss system availability, the discussion is about how close to 100% you can get. It can never be 100% because, you know, shit happens. Usually what is negotiated is the number of nines after 99.%, i.e., 99.9% or 99.99%. What most people outside of IT don't know is that with the addition of each 9 after the decimal place, the cost rises exponentially. In my opinion, the costs of going from good enough to great rises exponentially.
  
  Instead, what I believe any freelancer should focus on instead, is marketing your work.  I believe this to be true, because noone can guess, with any degree of reliability, what 3.5 billion (estimated # of Internet users by 2015) or even 1.5 billion (2010 estimated Internet user base) want.  In my opinion, the long tail suggests that it is impossible to predict anymore, what people are willing to pay for. 

I've been contemplating this for a while, and while I've done a lot of research and preparation for my first project, I've come to a decision about using Facebook for promotion. I'm not going to use Facebook.

Now this might seem ill-advised, but hear me out. One of the basic tenets of designing and implementing a transmedia narrative states that we should use each platform in the way it is best used. This raises the question, how do people use Facebook?

As with most technologies, I was an early adopter of Facebook. So I've seen it grow and seen what it has become. While I know there are social media experts who swear by Facebook, here's why I think it isn't a valuable promotional or story telling tool:

1. It's a closed garden - As a story teller, I have to consider the openness of each platform I use. The immediate implications are clear, whatever I can do is limited by Facebook's Terms of Service (ToS). One aspect of the new rules of entertainment, is that I should retain as much control over my story as possible, so agreeing to limitations from the beginning is not a good idea.
   
2. Facebook owns a limited license to all content posted within it - This is merely an extension of the closed garden argument. So not only am I limited by their ToS, but I also grant Facebook a limited license to use my content. This also does not seem like a good idea. The trend in story telling seems to be the just the opposite.
   
3. SEO is surprisingly poor - With the exception of your user ID or your Facebook Page name, your content is mostly invisible to search engines. Part of this is in part to the extreme confusion surrounding the privacy settings on Facebook content. In general, most content is severely restricted to only your Facebook friends.
   
4. Facebook information is largely unsearchable, except within Facebook - The corollary to the privacy settings on Facebook content, is that it hides content from search engines. It is therefore, mostly invisible to search engines. If it's invisible, then it can't be found, that is, except from within Facebook. To my knowledge making your content findable within Facebook is a grand unknown. In addition, I don't believe that people do much searching within Facebook.
   
5. Facebook is used to define our online personaes - What I've seen from the X, Y and millennial generations, is that Facebook gives them an environment where they can completely control "who" they are. While "liking" a Facebook Page is part of how they define themselves, I don't believe brands are able to translate that "like" into engagement. With the exception of showing up in the Facebook user's news feed, branded content is a needle which flashes by so quickly in a huge avalanche of hay (updates). In my opinion, that doesn't leave much of an opportunity to spread a story.
    
6. Facebook is about sharing Internet content - Even though we "like" things and they show up in our news feed, what most people share on Facebook is content brought into Facebook from the Internet. It is true that we also comment, and therefore share content posted by our friends, but in terms of what we share it is largely personal content and not brand related.
   
7. Facebook is about keeping in touch with friends, family, and celebrities - I will confess that most of these conclusions are based on my personal experience and intuition, so I might be off base. What I do and what I see other people do on Facebook is stay in contact with friends, family, and then maybe celebrities. While family might come first, then friends, without a doubt, everything else comes in a distant third. My guess is less than 10% of what is shared on Facebook is about something other than friends and family.

Think about it, have you heard of anyone being "discovered" on Facebook? YouTube clearly dominates the zeitgeist when it comes to breaking out of the pack. I think Twitter is also very valuable for interacting with fans, but I can't recall a Facebook success story. I guess that's ultimately the clue which lead me to reconsider Facebook as a transmedia platform.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: MSVG

For you kids, this is a rolodex...

A few days ago, inspired by a recent article on young new filmmakers in Puerto Rico, I became curious about this new generation. I wondered how well they were connected and how aggressively they were using social media. According to industry trends, and personal observation, I expected this group to be highly connected.

What I found was shocking! While they might be connected and very active within their group of friends and family, outwardly, they didn't appear to grasp the importance of social media for their careers. Of course, it's also possible that they have their career and personal lives separated, but that still flies in the face of the new rules of social media.

When I was a young upwardly mo-bile professional, I was told that my success would be directly proportional to the size of my Rolodex. Of course, with the advent of social networks, everything has changed. Now, I'm here to tell you that "your success is now directly proportional to the size of your social graph."

Now it's hard to be definitive about my informal search for these creatives, but I think that highlights a corollary to my new rule of thumb. Your success is also directly dependent on your findability. One of the things I've learned from Twitter is that it makes you very findable. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a great website (or preferably a blog), with a lot of relevant content.

It also helps to have content which cross references other content. Like for instance, I tried to collect as many local creative types as I could find, and I put them onto a new Twtter List called Puerto Rico Creatives. Follow it, for the latest from some of the leading creative people on the island. I just realized that I forgot to add the creative people that I already knew, to the llist. Doy.

This brings me to probably the biggest surprise of my hunt. Out of 12 I think I found three on Twitter.  These three provided me with leads to find many more creative people in Puerto Rico. However, many that I found in my search had their Twitter feed locked. I was like "What the...?" For me, this defied explanation.

I had never even heard of most of these Twitter users and based on their follow counts, not many other people had either, so what gives? In general, the percentage of Puerto Rican Twitter accounts that lock their feeds was significantly higher than any other community I have encountered. What could be going on here?

The only conclusion I could make from my experiment, was that, in general, there are too many people who still believe that they live and work in an economy built on scarcity. Of course, that would be a really disempowering belief. In my opinion, accepting that most of us live, work, and play within an abundant economy, is the hardest paradigm shift for people to accept. Unfortunately, it's probably the most fundamental change in the content industry since the invention of television.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: TOKY Branding and Design

I'm an expert writer. Don't laugh, it's taken me a long time to be able to say that. So I become frustrated when people try to downplay the worthiness of some text when they don't get it. As if they were actually able to predict whether something was quality art or worthy of your attention. They're the leftover gate keepers of a scare economy in charge of unwise gates in an abundant economy.

If I tell you that it only took me five minutes to write this, do you start to doubt it's worthiness? By the way, it didn't. :-/ On the other hand, if I told you that I had been working on that sentence for 10 years, do you start to question my sanity? What if I say, to be honest, it's more like 25 years. Ever since I was first tasked to write a report for the United States Army back in 1986, I've been studying the art of writing with the English language.

Of course, when you put it that way, it seems clearer that my writing might be worthy of your attention. Or does it? In my advanced theory of the "Tower of Babel," our minds are so unique to make it nearly impossible to expect that any one person will see/hear/say/feel things the way an artist did when they created their art. So we look for clues to help us see/hear/say/feel what the artist did. Unfortunately we continue to look to the gatekeepers for that help, instead of artists offering their own help.

We have a fundamental need to categorize things, if we can not find our own way to see/hear/say/feel what the artist did we must find help. If we don't find any help, we must rapidly discard it from our attention queue and route around the interference to the next item waiting. we are networked Homo Sapien.


I once again must state:

"It is impossible for anyone to predict with any high degree of accuracy what someone is willing to buy or pay for."

Two billion is such a LARGE number, it towers over any imagination. The complexity involved to increase your accuracy in such a large market quickly becomes cost prohibitive. As the costs of publishing or producing approach zero, it should decentivize anyone from investing in that effort.

As with the practice of any art, artistic freedom can only come when you detach any expectations of those who experience your art. Therefore, as self publishers and producers, we must focus on producing art with as much passion and precision as possible, then share the hell out of it. We've got to make personal connections with equal efforts. We must have a social graph with enough people in it to vastly increase our odds of finding enough fans willing to share your work and hopefully, give us the opportunity to ask them to buy something as well. This is the convergent economy, get used to it.

Photos Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: rita banerji & aurelio.asiain

There are many things in life that one can read about and successful accomplish without much practice. transmedia, entrepreneurship, and Internet marketing are not any of those things. No, all of these activities require you to get your hands dirty and keep them dirty until you are able to set expectations and reach them with any chance of success.

I'm constantly riffing off of Seth Godin, but there are others, like Kathy Sierra and Jono Bacon. Recently I've found people who discredit some of these leaders. What people try to do is minimize what these leaders do, saying anyone could match their results if they had the same email database, or their connections. However, I think this misses the point that they weren't always the leaders they are now. Each in the own way, blazed a trail of how things need to be done, and then did them. Even Guy Kawasaki, who's famous for saying "Ideas are easy, execution is hard!" When it comes to transmedia, entrepreneurship, and Internet marketing, that's just the way they work. The magic of anything these leaders say is in the doing. There's just no other substitute.

So if you've never produced a transmedia project, then you had better take the time to create a storyworld bible and launch a project. If you haven't used Rob Pratten's suggestion for documenting the transmedia timeline, then you better do it. Then launch the project. Now comes this intensely complex diagram for branding by Dubberly Design Office.

I haven't been able to take a deep dive into the diagram, but I bet that it is essential in understanding just how broad the plane is where a fan might encounter your story, everything is a brand now and must be carefully managed. And guess what, I bet too, that the only way to understand the diagram, is to step through the instructions and map out your brand.  I wish there was a short cut, but there is no substitute for first hand experience.

UggBoy♥UggGirl [ PHOTO // WORLD // SENSE ]

In another great keynote from the recently completed O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo, Amy Jo Kim (ShuffleBrain) presented "Beyond Gamification: 7 Core Concepts to Create Compelling Products." I've seen a few keynotes on gamification, and I think Amy's is the simplest explanation for adding gaming design to content. In her speech she highlights seven core concepts:

1. Know  your players: design for their personal and social needs.
2. Build fun/pleasure/satisfaction into your core activity loop.
3. Design for three key stages of your player lifecycle (novice, regular, enthusiast)
4. Build a system that is easy to learn, but hard to master.
5. Use game mechanics to "light the way" towards mastery 
6. As players progress, increase the challenge and complexity.
7. Embrace intrinsic motivators like power, autonomy, & belonging

And while I've read Flow, Amy reminded me of the flow channel, something every game design has burnt into their memories. I guess that means that I've got some studying to do, and if you don't have the image frozen in you memory, then if you hope to achieve flow and reach the highest level of engagement, you know what you have do...

Everyone I've ever suggested clicking on Ads as a way to compensate the owner of a website has responded with the same question, "Isn't that cheating?"

All I have to say in response is, when you pay for a newspaper, does it mean that your cheating everyone who runs an ad in the paper for which you have no need or interest?

What's the second biggest understanding about Internet advertising, just in case, your favorite didn't top the list?

Why do people think that running advertising on any website means that you're somehow sacrificing something in the process?

On the Internet, you're always enveloped by an environment which is nearly free. In so many ways the Internet is a vast waste land where information is free. Without an explicit attempt to create services or products, then advertising is the only proven business model that can sustain such abundance.

So along comes White Space Links, announced today by Seth Godin, with the creation of invisible links. It's not quite clear to me if this is real, it could be a April's Fool Prank. If it is then it's funny; it is so funny, that it just might work. "Invisible links," too funny. I'd use it if the revenue wasn't invisible too. LOL


Photo Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons:  mrhayata