Mark Coker, founder and CEO of dynamic e-book publishing company Smashwords, is asking “do authors still need publishers?”

In his article for The Huffington Post, Mark argues that an author with the fanbase and platform of Stephen King, or J.K. Rowling or  Dan Brown, could get a much better return from the marketplace by self-publishing. Certainly this is true. I’ve often wondered why more authors of this level of sales success don’t go down the self-publishing path, the same way many successful music acts are producing and distributing their own albums.

Says Coker at his Smashwords blog:

If publishers are going to remain relevant, they need to do what Stephen King can do for himself, only better.

But it’s a bittersweet thought-experiment for the majority of writers who don’t have King’s following, or even a modest platform. Barriers to entry to publishing have reached almost zero, sure. But being able to publish isn’t the same as being able to profitably publish. Production is easy. Distribution is not. Even digital distribution, while frictionless, is not easy to convert to sales without the ability to engage a readership who’ll fork over money for your product.

But the biggest challenge of all is that alchemical mix of promotion and platform, the ability to gather around you a community of willing fans who will sustain your core income and be your best sales force. Stephen King and his frontlist colleagues could easily commercialise their platform now, but I wonder how effective they’d be at it if they had to build up a following from scratch today.

And this is the essential problem with the idea that authors can go straight to the market. Of course they can, in many cases they should because they’ll earn a better income. But are they capable of it, and do they want to?

The author that can make a self-publishing project successful is the author who is an entrepreneur, a small business manager, a savvy marketer, a tireless communicator, and that’s assuming effective distribution is in place. Many of the authors I work with aren’t interested in these things. They are interested in their craft, their artistic practice. They fight for every minute of writing time they can get.

Somehow I feel Mark’s conclusion – that publishers need to do what Stephen King can do for himself, only better - doesn’t quite hit the mark. Instead, I think publishers need to determine what authors don’t want to do for themselves and offer a fair partnership for how they can share both the risks and the rewards of publishing.

Some authors, especially those with established online fanbases, won’t need their publishers to play all the traditional roles a book publisher has played in the past.  And their contracts should reflect this. But others will be willing to cede more rights and receive fewer royalties in exchange for not having to worry about the commercial functions of professional authorship.

The challenge for publishers is that they are no longer the only ones who can offer such services to authors, and will have to think differently about how they offer value to get access to content. In this way I think we’re headed for more bespoke publishing contracts, more customised agreements that reflect the strengths and weakness of each party for the benefit of both.

Oh wow. I’m currently reading The Gutenberg Revolution: How Printing Changed the Course of History by John Man.

Here are some staggering numbers I came across in just the first few pages:

Today, books pour off presses at the rate of 10,000 million a year. That’s some 50 million tonnes of paper. Add in 8,000 to 9,000 daily newspapers, and the Sundays, and the magazines, and the figure rises to 130 million tonnes. This is mountainous. It would make a pile 700 metres high – four times the height of the Great Pyramid.

For a bit of Australian flavour I did my own maths. 130 million tonnes of paper is more than four times the metric tonnage of steel in the Sydney Harbour Bridge. That’s what we’re printing every year. Consider how much of that is pulped or thrown away, not even recycled.

Every now and then someone lists environmental sustainability as a key argument for a faster shift to digital. But given these numbers perhaps sustainability should be a much higher priority.

Richard Nash has a great round-up of the conversations and opinions about digital that took place all over this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

…we’re not replacing one static-priced unit (pBook) with another static-priced unit (eBook), but finding that our single massive unidirectional pBook supply chain is now just one component of a tremendously variegated set of producer-consumer relationships and each producer is therefore going to need to offer the consumer a range of pricing models: subscription, rental, per unit download, advertising, serialization, fewer or more guarantees of ownership (as opposed to personal license) rights. And other yet to be named or thought up!

Nash gives us some pretty clear advice to take away:

This is happening now, the future is already here.

Everyone can benefit, no-one is exempt.

The transformation is irrevocable, continuous, multivalent, and potentially asymmetric.

All of which underlines something that’s been reverberating around in my skull lately. We keep talking about digital publishing like it’s a bolted-on addition to our traditional business practice. If publishers, authors, booksellers and other actors in this industry are going to embrace, even transcend, the tenets above, we have to stop differentiating digital from other parts of our business.

Digital media now flows through our organisations the same way information does, the way money does. It is spread through our daily practices in ways many are not even aware of, from the literary agent who tweets to the editor who reads manuscripts on an e-reader, from the bookseller using Facebook to promote literary events to the author moderating a social network of fans and readers.

It’s not about digital publishing anymore. It’s just publishing. Maybe not even that. It’s media. It’s one professional and commercial facet of human communication. Perhaps thinking within this framework will help us find the new business models we’re looking for.

Today at the Melbourne Writers Festival I had the happy task of announcing that my organisation, Queensland Writers Centre, will launch a new affiliate of The Institute for the Future of the Book in Australia in 2010.

if:book Australia will promote new forms of digital publishing and explore ways to boost connections between writers and audiences.

if:book Australia is the third centre of excellence for digital literature in this network after the Institute for the Future of the Book was established in New York by Bob Stein, and if:book London developed by Chris Meade.

From the media release:

The first project for if:book Australia will be a national seminar series delivered next year called Writers and Digital Markets. Supported and funded by the Literature Board of the Australia Council, the program will inform Australian writers about new opportunities to create and publish digital content.

if:book Australia will function as a ‘think-and-do tank’ and QWC is seeking partners from across the publishing, education and media sectors who are interested in collaborative programs and research

Click here for the media statement and more info

I’m currently travelling on the Writers Train. Or more specifically the Q150 Steam Train with authors Nick Earls and Kim Wilkins and the Arts Queensland Poet in Residence Hinemoana Baker. As I write this, I’m in the town of Roma in western Queensland. We have travelled approximately 500km (at about 30km an hour which is why it has taken us three days so far) and passed through dozens of towns, with people madly waving to us all the way down the line.

From my perspective this is pretty damn cool in and of itself (it’s a pristine 80-year old steam train, people!) But the reason I get to mention it here on a publishing futures blog is that we’ve got an interesting little side project going in partnership with Radio National’s Pool.

As we travel, we are uploading text, images, audio and video to Pool, all of it under Creative Commons licences, so you can not only read but participate as well. Kim Wilkins is travelling with her son Luka, 7, who is also blogging the trip on Pool so his classmates can tag along.

Pool makes use of a number of open source frameworks and Creative Commons licencing to provide a rich publishing platform that is capable of a thousand different uses, probably more.

As a publisher or author, how could you encourage engagement with your audiences by thinking about collaborating and sharing, instead of printing and selling?

Mike Cane at The eBook Test has published eleven aphorisms, all of which are sensible and all of which modern publishers should take note:

1 – All publishers are information engines, not producers of objects

2 – A book is no longer a thing in itself

3 – Connections between books add value to all books

4 – A non-fiction book is only the beginning of its story

5 – Even fiction books connect to all other books

6 – A book’s deep metadata is worth more than the book itself

7 – Every dollar invested in deep metadata is worth a hundred dollars in future sales

8 – A book’s function dictates its file container

9 – Readers are no longer passive customers

10 – Readers sell more books than any publisher

11 – To see only today is to forfeit tomorrow

Thanks to Hugh McGuire for the link.

Over at Techdirt, Michael Masnick has applauded Sony for supporting the open ePub format on its ebook reader. Masnick points out, and he’s right, that openness can be a competitive advantage, especially against an established competitor with a closed system, such as Amazon Kindle.

It always gives me a moment’s pause when tech or publishing commentators describe the dominance of the Kindle. It sure has enjoyed a lot of splashy media attention and web commentary, but I can’t help but be sceptical. For one thing, we just don’t have enough data on the number of Kindle units sold and the amount of content being purchased/downloaded for Kindle, especially not comparative data with other platforms. And secondly, for those of us who don’t live in the United States, the hype over the Kindle is hardly seductive when it is not available in our markets. Meanwhile, smartphones continue to multiply at astonishing rates.

But if we accept for the moment that the Kindle does have a leadership position in the ebook market, Masnick makes a compelling point. Competing manufacturers of ebook readers may be best served by strengthening and supporting an open platform. It could be the only way to provide an alternative offer to consumers that has sufficient value to lure them away from the leader.

But an open platform is only half the equation. For this to work, consumers also deserve access to open content. The ability and right to move their content between devices is a valuable benefit publishers can offer their customers. And without any additional investment, it opens publishers up to new markets that are created when manufacturers, software developers or online retailers create new applications and buying opportunities. This was elegantly demonstrated when Lexcycle launched Stanza for iPhone.

Not only is there a competitive advantage for publishers in supporting open formats, but there’s a business risk in not doing it. Publishers should be cautious of favouring Kindle or any closed format lest they find themselves locked in without any kind of negotiating position on terms of trade. Cory Doctorow already warned you of this months ago.

More publishers offering more content in open formats, and more manufacturers supporting open formats on their devices, makes for a virtuous cycle.

If there still exists a publisher sceptical about the market growth of eBooks, perhaps the latest sales statistics released by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) will turn them into believers.

Michael Smith, head of IDPF, reports that June 2009 trade eBook sales were $14m, an increase of 136% on the same month last year. The overall sales are up 149% for the calendar year to date.

Wholesale eBook revenues for the second quarter of 2009 were more than $37m.

You can view the revenue data and sales graph here.

For me the most interesting thing is that these figures are likely soft, and the true market performance of eBooks is probably much stronger given that this data is for the US only, is wholesale revenue and comes from only 12-15 trade publishers (excluding education and academic sectors) What consumers are actually spending in the retail sector is somewhere above these figures.

Jamie Byng and his publishing team sure are a bright bunch. The release of Nick Cave’s new novel The Death of Bunny Munro brings with it a basket of goodies to satisfy fans, true fans and even ordinary readers. In addition to the hardcover print book, there will also be a deluxe CD audio edition featuring Cave reading, with a soundtrack created with the perennially-hip Warren Ellis, and a download version that comes with an enhanced edition so the book can be both read and listened to on iPhone. Finally, there will also be a signed, numbered, limited-edition slipcase version.

Kevin Kelly defines True Fans thus:

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

There are some exciting business models around the idea of producing multiple versions of an artistic product to cater to audiences who have different levels of engagement with your content. The music industry has been doing this for years with limited editions, and book publishers do it too (special blood-red edged Twilight saga, anyone?)

But Canongate has done two really smart things with Bunny Munro. First, it has recognised that in Nick Cave it has a cult artist with an established fan community that will cross media boundaries to follow him. Hence, Canongate is not really just his book publisher. Canongate is a producer/promoter. Second, it has understood the power of different digital channels to bring this book to audiences.

It would never have been enough to simply prodce an e-book edition of this novel. Canongate’s digital strategy is not a marketing campaign but an integrated approach to publishing multiple versions of the book in different media. Each version is capable of making sales to a niche, but collectively they reinforce each other to create a value-packed “basket of goodies” for fans and collectors. Smart. Very smart.

Annie Proulx was 58 when her debut novel was published. Image: Flickr/embajadaeeuubuenosaires

There’s a common category of many government-funded arts programs in Australia: “young and emerging.” This is for programs aimed at artists of a fairly arbitrary age range, typically 18 to 25 years, sometimes up to 30. It’s prevalent throughout all tiers of government and whole systems of funding, arts infrastructure and public programs have sprung up to support the “young and emerging” as though nurturing these artists will naturally lead to “middle aged and established.”

The idea is that young artists are typically emerging artists. I have no argument with that. Though there are many authors I could name who established professional careers in their late teens or early twenties, the majority of writers under 25 are still in the early years of their craft. Nobody could deny that young artists face hurdles that older artists do not. They are yet to establish a regular income stream, either from their artwork or secondary sources. They may lack control over their living arrangements and are yet to complete their education. They are still developing confidence and professional networks.

The problem lies in linking the term “young” with “emerging” as though the two always go together.

The truth is most emerging writers are not young. Writers can emerge at any age, and frequently do so in their later years when income stablises, when children are grown and independent, when decades of living smooth down the geological layers of observation and experience that all writers mine for their stories. But in Australia, the landscape of funding and support for emerging artists between, say, 35 and 65, is a wasteland. There are now more opportunities, funding streams, and publishing markets for young Australian writers than nearly any other group.

As the director of a writers organisation this has always been a source of immense frustration for me. The majority of my members are between 30 and 50 years of age, and there are some very fine writers among them. But they are excluded from some of the most innovative programs in Australia because they are not in a priority demographic.

Enter Scribe Publications and fiction editor Aviva Tuffield, who has just announced the launch of the CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript by an Australian over the age of 35. Scribe’s media release accompanying the announcement says:

While athletes, for example, peak in their youth, writers can develop at any stage of life and often come of age later and write their best work after a few attempts. This year’s Orange Prize for New Writers in the UK had a shortlist of three debut women authors, none of whom was under forty.

This is brilliant, rational and long overdue. Aviva Tuffield and publisher Henry Rosenbloom deserve every gushing email of thanks from over-35 writers that will be flooding their inboxes in the coming weeks. Hats off to you, Scribe, I can’t wait to read the first book published under this new award.