Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center's giant candle replica

It’s clear that virtually no one earns a decent living off blogging, so revel in the liberty of being beholden only to your interests. And when that interest flags and you begin to repeat yourself, as Guy LeCharles Gonzalez forcefully argued, quit and move on to the next thing.

At a conference like SXSWi, that was a rare but incredibly valuable sentiment. The Web has been through so many iterations that we now take it for granted. In the advent of social media, bloggers seek to distinguish their thoughtful commentary from the chat junk pile of Facebook and Twitter.

–“At SXSWi: Does blogging matter? How about Twitter?”

There was a funny moment during our “Why Keep Blogging?” panel at SXSW Interactive last weekend, when the home page of this blog was up on the screen during my introduction, clearly showing my last post was over a month ago, on February 14th! Despite that awkward moment, the panel went pretty well and we received a fair number of compliments, both in person and on Twitter, which I was watching closely during the discussion, an absolute must nowadays.

[Check out another write-up of the panel by Magnet Media.]

The point I made “forcefully” that Miller was referring to was my belief the best blogs are driven by passion, not obligation, and that you can tell when someone is just feeding the machine to maintain their traffic, a la Seth Godin, for whom I often use the hashtag #bloggingtoohard.

The lack of activity here lately has nothing to do with a lessening of my passion for publishing and marketing, but rather a necessary redirection of that passion to Digital Book World, where I already posted my initial SXSW highlights last week and where all of my publishing-related writing lives these days.

When asked during the panel what was next for loudpoet.com, I didn’t have a clear answer other than to say whatever else I’m feeling passionate about at the moment, and I certainly left Austin (and San Antonio) feeling passionate about a number of things, including going back to visit both next year! I already have a few ideas for panel proposals — some specific to publishing, some taking a broader view of new media — and my poetry gig at Lupe’s Art Blend gave me a taste of that familiar adrenaline surge that comes with performing on stage.

The next few months here will likely be kind of random as 110% of my energy will be going to Digital Book World, and I’m trying to catch up on some analog reading, too, as my to-be-read pile is spilling over with 2666, Oscar Wao, Finch and Steampunk (the anthology).

Plus, there’s my Tumblog, a new experiment I’ve started at Snake Oil Review, and a couple of poetry-related sekritprojects in the works.

If you’re still reading along here, thanks! I’ll be back!

You’re losing control of your own destiny. Authors, distributors and readers are getting closer to each other.

–Shiv Singh, Engaging Readers in the Digital Age

Three weeks ago, when I last posted something here, I was on the verge of completely disappearing into Digital Book World, both the conference and the community that spun out of it, the latter now representing my day [and night, and some weekends] job.

So I’ve been pretty busy.

Thankfully, it’s been a good busy, and the next couple of months are going to be very exciting.

Digital Book World

The conference was a huge success by pretty much any measure — I had the extreme honor of giving the closing remarks, “The Future of Publishing is Bright” — and the community platform is quickly coming together, starting with a series of free WEBcasts; in-person seminars (Digitize Your Career); and more to be announced.

Our weekly WEBcast, The Roundtable has been especially fun, a 30-minute interactive talk show where I get to talk shop with some of the smartest people I know in publishing, while making good use of Twitter. It started out as a bit of a lark, but it’s turned into one of the most enjoyable parts of my job, not quite on the level of starting a basketball league, but definitely in the same ballpark.

One side effect of my being so deeply embedded in DBW is that this blog will suffer a bit, as most of my publishing-related writing will now be over there, and I haven’t yet figured out how to balance the two. Somewhat ironic considering…

SXSWi

I’ve been intrigued by SXSW for years (partly because I love any excuse to visit Austin), and after last year’s New Think for Old Publishers debacle, I was hoping to figure out an angle to attend this year’s conference. Thanks to the wonderful Emily Gordon, I’ll be participating on her panel “Why Keep Blogging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple“. I’m planning to attend the full Interactive conference, and am REALLY looking forward to seeing Jaron (YOU ARE NOT A GADGET) Lanier’s presentation.

I might also be squeezing in a poetry gig down in San Antonio before heading back home, thanks to Vincent Toro.

Empire State Book Festival

I was invited to participate on a panel at the Empire State Book Festival in Albany, “The Future of the Book”, with Richard Nash, Jami Attenberg, Don Linn, Andrew Albanese and Ron Hogan. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz will be hosting a poetry slam as part of the Festival, too.

I’m also hoping to meet Patrick Boegel in person so he can introduce me to some good regional craft beers.

MORE CONFERENCES

I’ll also be attending Tools of Change and Publishing Business Conference & Expo, both here in NYC. After this flurry of conferences, I’m going to need a serious vacation!

STEAMPUNK

Later this week, I’ll have an update on my 2010 Genre Tour, which got off to a good start as I discovered steampunk… but I may never get to another genre as it feels like I’ve discovered home! Check out my “steampunk” tag on delicious for a glimpse of the world I’ve stumbled into and might never leave.

Enter The Matrix by kirainet

“The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

I’m knee-deep in final preparations for Digital Book World next week (look for the new website to relaunch by Tuesday, built by me!), but I wanted to give a quick shout-out to two people who are blowing my mind right now.

First, to Jaron Lanier. I’m in the middle of reading and enjoying You Are Not a Gadget, not just because it elaborates on my own thoughts about tech fetishism, but because it does it so intelligently and convincingly. Kudos to Stephanie Anderson for bringing it to my attention with her excellent, must-read review.

Second, to Chuck Wendig, blogger extraordinaire, who writes engagingly and entertainingly about writing practically every day, with a unique energy and style that so few writing bloggers can match. I anxiously await his first novel.

Chuck gave me the opportunity to stretch my legs on his blog while he was out of town last week doing very cool things, with a guest post about The Future of the Blog that went up this morning.

Here’s an excerpt:

[The Cluetrain Manifesto is] the only book about the Internet that’s worth reading, because most of the other ones that have been published ever since are crap rehashes of what Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger had to say way back then.

Back then, in 1999, before blogs really existed and AOL ruled the Internet.

Today, blogs are everywhere. Like assholes and trolls, they’re everywhere and everyone has one. (Or is that vice versa?)

The Huffington Post is a blog.

The Atlantic is a blog.

The NY Times has a bunch of blogs.

CNN wants to be a blog.

Even William Shatner has a blog. (Very loosely defined.)

I should have included AOL instead of CNN, as it has effectively morphed into a collective of blogs of dubious quality and questionable need, existing primarily to attract bottom-feeding advertising revenue, which circles back to Lanier’s excellent point I quoted above.

Please go read the whole post and leave me a comment there so I can beat out the hilarious “Penis,” by Eddy Webb for the most popular guest post in the series.

Don’t let the robots win!

The Pirate's Dilema by browserd

There are millions of books on amazon.com, and on average each will sell around 500 copies a year. The average American is reading just one book a year, and that number is falling. The problem (to quote Tim O’Reilly) isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Authors are lucky to be in a business where electronic copies aren’t considered substitutes for physical copies by most people who like reading books (for now at least).

–Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma

The op-ed I wrote for Publishing Perspectives earlier this week, “E” is for Experiment (Not E-books), got an unexpected amount of attention and I’m pretty sure it’s the most I’ve ever seen a post of mine fly around the Twitterverse. Writing for someone else’s site is much harder than blogging on your own, so full credit to Edward Nawotka for a great job of editing it, helping me bring forward my main points and carving away the extraneous content, most of which went into my previous post!

One of the comments I got on the article allowed me to elaborate a bit on one of the points I made, that “e-readers will never have their ‘iPod moment’ for one very simple reason: books are not music.”

Dan from BookLamp mildly disagreed with me, making a point about the potential benefits of cost-savings and discoverability afforded by eBooks and eReaders, making a subtle pitch for his own platform that purportedly “matches readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music.”

I replied to him there, but am posting it here, too, because it’s a point I’ve made several times in recent conversations but have never actually included in any of my posts about eBooks:

The first iPod came out 1.5 years after Metallica sued Napster for copyright infringment. The demand for digital music was already there, and Apple capitalized on it by coming out with a better MP3 player than anyone else had at the time. The iTunes store launched 1.5 years after the first iPod. The expectations that one of these new eReaders or even the Unicorn might do the same thing ignore the fact that a) the current demand for eBooks (legal or otherwise) doesn’t come close to the early days of Napster, never mind the iPod; b) Amazon’s ability to sell print and eBooks to a huge and loyal audience gives their “good enough” Kindle the advantage; and c) the kind of multimedia content the Tablet would be best suited for is currently limited, especially from book publishers.

Discoverability is another challenge for eBooks, especially as the relative “ease” of producing them will flood the market, much like blogs have flooded the Internet. BookLamp sounds intriguing, but what advantage does it offer over Amazon’s recommendations, or those from growing communities like Goodreads? Music sites like Pandora and Last.fm are passive, low friction tools; the latter’s scrobbling feature is far easier to enable than manually adding every book I read into Goodreads. Even Amazon’s recommendations can work off of purchases whether I ever review a single book or not.

It’s funny how the zero-sum mentality of most eBook discussions tends to make me feel like a Luddite when, in fact, I’m really a mild gadget freak;  I have a practically new HP iPAQ from several years ago, and two Flip video cameras that I’ve used twice to-date. I’m more early tester than early adopter, but I “get” the appeal of eBooks and eReaders much the same way I get the appeal of jetpacks and teleporters.

In theory, they sound awesome; in reality, we’re still pretty early in the prototype stage.

NOTE: A funny story about discoverability in the digital age. The picture and quote above are not an endorsement of Mason’s book. I was searching “book pirate” on Flickr and found the picture, loving the irony of a print book about piracy on the beach where most eReading devices fear to tread. Intrigued, I checked out Mason’s site and thought the quote was apropos, but the negative reviews on Amazon make a pretty compelling case for not reading it.

PS: I prefer the UK cover (above) to the US cover, which sports a very boring business book look that, coupled with the negative reviews, pretty much killed my interest.

SciFi Hall Of Fame by TahoeSunsets

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

–Sidney J. Harris

It’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of eBooks or eReaders, but there’s no question they’re growing in popularity… at least amongst technology companies. While the hype coming out of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show was so over-the-top it’s difficult to take any of these new devices seriously, it does make you appreciate a bit more the huge advantages Amazon has with its Kindle.

Publishing Perspectives’ editor Edward Nawotka stirred up some controversy last week with his opinion that the current breed of eReaders were good enough, noting, “My septuagenarian mother is delighted with her first-generation Kindle.”

My thirty-something wife – an avid reader, elementary school teacher and generally a late-adopter – also enjoys her Kindle (a birthday gift from me in November 2008), mainly to read books she’s either unfamiliar with or unwilling to buy in hardcover. But it’s not going to become her primary reading option any time soon. Among her criticisms are the limited selection of books she wants to read; inelegant navigation and annotation functionality; and, in her words, “Everyone talks about portability, but what’s more portable than a book?”

She’s not a big bestseller reader, so release timing isn’t a significant factor for her, but she does love the one-click ability to purchase whichever books she wants in whatever format she prefers via her existing Amazon account.

A loyal customer in hand is worth two tech fetishists at CES…

In my first sustained Kindle experience, I just finished reading Book View Café’s e-book-only steampunk anthology, The Shadow Conspiracy, and was frustrated by an inability to easily jump back and forth into the loosely threaded stories, or to even know how far from the beginning or end I was in any particular story. I’m actually having difficulty writing a solid review of it because of those issues.

Twitter Review: The Shadow Conspiracy/@BookViewCafe: #Steampunk e-anthology deftly weaves poet kings, mad science, immortality and revenge. #booksin140

The underwhelming experience solidified my opinion that – if the e-readers we have now are indeed “good enough” – e-books are still not ready for prime time.

I have an op-ed going up on Publishing Perspectives on Thursday [link updated] that touches on this, suggesting that 2010 will be the year of “e”, but that “e” will stand for experimentation. I also attempt to make the case that eReaders will never have their “iPod moment” because books are not music.

If you’re not a regular reader of Publishing Perspectives, I highly recommend that you subscribe to their daily enewsletter and RSS feed. Their model of one strong article or op-ed and a separate bit of commentary each day focuses on quality over quantity, a wonderfully contrarian online strategy, and their international focus allows them to introduce many different voices into the mix.

Two of my favorite posts were Nawotka’s own “Falling In and Out of Love, with E-books” op-ed, and the interview “Grupo Planeta CEO Jesús Badenes: ‘We Must Not Undervalue Publishers.’”

In the latter, Badenes makes some great points, including:

Asked what most excited him about the future, he remarked: “Convergence is the word on everybody’s lips. It remains to be seen how this will play out in the book world, but it is worth watching and, in some ways, is a very exciting opportunity for the publishers.”

Ultimately, he asserted, publishers still have an important role to play in our newly digitized world: “We advance payments in order to give writers time to write. We finance the professional book experience; we fight for space in the bookstores. We make the market for books and have interdependence with the content creators. It would be a grave mistake to undervalue the publishers.”

I remain optimistic about the future of publishing. What about you?

Sanctum Sanctorum, 01/10 by glecharles

“Publishing was never a business based on Wharton standards. It was a rich boy’s hobby.”

–Steve Wasserman (Kneerim & Williams)

Working in publishing isn’t for the meek. Neither is writing for that matter. They’re two things I’m really passionate about, though, and I’ve always counted myself lucky to work in the publishing industry, despite the ever-present danger of familiarity breeding contempt.

Over the past couple of years, though, it’s been particularly tough; like playing on a solid defense for a football team that has a terrible offense, constantly watching the QB get sacked, the RB get stuffed, WRs getting manhandled… and running on fumes by the 4th quarter as a result.

I consider myself a pragmatic idealist with an optimistic lean, but when you see colleagues and friends losing their jobs due to reasons beyond their control and underlying problems they didn’t create, it can be tough to feel good about the good things you’re involved in.

One of the reasons I’ve decided to pull back a bit on this blog, other than a desire to focus on my own writing, is that the “day” job is kicking my ass up and down the field like Bill Parcells getting ready for opening day. I’ve had to remind myself several times recently that Digital Book World (DBW, aka the “day” job) didn’t even exist prior to last August, and the work we’ve done to get it established and be a success out of the gate has been monumental.

It’s also been monumentally rewarding, though.

I got to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair last year to spread the word about DBW, and in the process met some great people, including Dominique Raccah (SourceBooks), one of the smartest publishers I’ve ever come across. Not only did that meeting lead to a friendship, it also looped me into her latest project, PoetrySpeaks, possibly the coolest thing to happen to poetry since Bob Holman brought the poetry slam to the Nuyorican Poets Café.

Through DBW, I’ve curated three great webinars, and in the process connected with some more really smart people, like Joshua Tallent, Debbie Stier and Stephanie Anderson.

Earlier today, I launched our new weekly webcast, The Digital Roundtable, and am thrilled and honored to be working with Laura Dawson, Pablo Defendini, Kate Rados and Bridget Warren.

Next week, I’m co-hosting our PechaKucha event, 7×20x21, with the fabulous Ami Greko, featuring an impressive roster of presenters I’m seriously looking forward to hearing from, including Ryan Chapman, hopefully riffing off of his great Mad Men post. In a wonderful example of full circle/worlds collide, we’re doing it at the Bowery Poetry Club, and the after-party/#tweetup will be at Botanica. (Just announced right here!)

Personally, 2010 is looking some kind of wonderful, but in the big picture, I have no doubt that it’s going to be as challenging a year as 2009 was for the industry I care so much about. And yet, by surrounding myself with smart, optimistic people who are similarly passionate about it, I’m confident that I’m going to do everything I can to “be the change I want to see”.

As Herm Edwards famously said,

“You play to win the game. Hello? You play to win the game. You don’t play it to just play it. That’s the great thing about sports: you play to win, and I don’t care if you don’t have any wins. You go play to win. When you start tellin’ me it doesn’t matter, then retire. Get out! ‘Cause it matters.”

Even if the QB keeps throwing interceptions, I’m going to have to find that second third next wind, get back on the field, and try to force a turnover of my own.

Working in publishing isn’t for the meek, and it’s definitely not for quitters. I see it as a community service, one that needs its most passionate optimists to pull together and do everything they can to help change it for the better, before it becomes “a rich boy’s hobby” again and fades into irrelevance.

Not unlike poetry did for so many years when it was hidden away in ivory towers.

Two Cents by Skez

“You can make this year, this day, this moment a demarcation and declare that this will be the best year of your life, or you can continue down the same old road you’ve been down so many times before.”

–Debbie Ford (via 2010 Indiebound Eat Sleep Read Page-a-Day Calendar)

I’ve been blogging regularly since the end of January, 2003, when I launched the first iteration of this site on Blogger with a few posts about what happened in 2002 — without question (excepting the birth of our daughter), the worst year of my life. At that point, I’d spent a year out of publishing, working as a financial advisor for American Express, and had completely disconnected from the poetry scene that had been such a critical part of  my life for the five years prior.

Back then, Blogger didn’t have built-in comments; Google had slightly less than 1/3rd of the search market; and I’d never heard of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Over the seven years since, this blog has gone through several changes in focus, the most recent being on marketing and publishing, and from a professional perspective, 2009 was without question my best year ever. I’ve connected with some incredibly smart people, learned a lot about the publishing industry, and on several occasions have added my own two cents to “the conversation”.

Unfortunately, the conversation has gotten rather repetitive and stultifying, and I’ve never been a fan of blogging just for the sake of adding my own two cents — that’s what Twitter’s for now! — so in the spirit of Debbie Ford’s advice, I think it’s the perfect time for a change.

With the day job, I’m knee-deep in the subject of the conversation and the bleed-through has started taking some of the joy out of it, something I didn’t quite realize until halfway through a much-needed vacation last week. No work email, no blogging, minimal tweeting, a lot of reading (Boneshaker and Things We Think About Games were great, and I’m almost done with The Shadow Conspiracy) and spending time with family, including an impromptu trip to Ithaca, where I fell in love with one bookstore, and found a 1st edition hardcover of my favorite novel, Fool on the Hill, in another.

During the vacation, a realization that had been creeping up on me for weeks finally set in: I want need to start writing again.

And so, without further ado, pomp or circumstance, that’s exactly where I’m going to start directing my loudpoet time and energy in 2010, back into my own writing, effective immediately.

The secret to my strategy:

“Sit. Your. Ass. Down. Write. There’s the secret.”

Some of that writing will likely be public, either online or in-person at louderARTS, and most of it will likely be pretty terrible as I chip off several years’ worth of rust and procrastination. One specific goal, once I get into the groove, is to start participating in FridayFlash at least once a month; another is to hit the open mic with something new, poetry or fiction, also at least once a month.

I’ll still blog here, but the focus will be squarely on topics related specifically to writing, including reviewing books, as well as posting some of  my own work for feedback and critique. For those of you who come here strictly for the publishing industry insight and commentary, you might want to update your bookmarks as I’ll start posting that kind of content over at Digital Book World within the next week or two.

For the seven of you who stick around these parts, thanks for the support! 2010 is going to be the best year of my writing life ever, and I look forward to sharing it with you and your writing.

Happy new year!

#32 be the change by the8rgrl

I’m not usually one for making predictions — the only thing I hate more than gurus and pundits are self-proclaimed futurists! — but I couldn’t pass up offering my two cents to Folio: for their 2010 round-up of magazine and media predictions:

Consolidation and debt restructuring will continue apace. More niche brands will focus on ‘communitizing’, with magazines becoming part of a larger ecosystem that will include virtual events and books, both print and electronic. Advertising will finally stabilize, but “growth” will mainly come from search and custom initiatives, including some ill-conceived “conversational marketing” programs that imagine Twitter as a viable hub. Digital magazines and mobile apps will be a bust for all but a few brands as the ROI fails to materialize. The Apple Tablet will be more horse than unicorn, becoming a major player in portable gaming but with minimal impact on publishing.

New Year’s resolutions have never been my thing, either, but in light of all of the negativity and DOOM! surrounding the “future of publishing”, I thought it would be fun to make a few public resolutions, if for no other reason than to see which ones I can stick with, and how long before I break the others.

1) I will read at least two books from every major genre — one print, one eBook — and write reviews of them. (Bring on the recommendations! I’m starting with steampunk, and Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker.)

2) I will champion 3 independent publishers and/or collectives who are doing interesting, innovative things. (There’s strength in numbers, people!)

3) I will maintain my skepticism about eBooks, but avoid letting their more vocal advocates skew my take on them. (You are not the benchmark!)

4) I will continue to be optimistic about the future of publishing, and direct more of that optimism into this blog. (I believe in the publishing community.)

5) I will either start writing fiction or go back to poetry (or do both!), and stop using this blog as an excuse for doing neither. (Writers write. Period.)

Considering 2009 has been an unpredictably amazing roller coaster ride for me, I have no idea how realistic any of these are (#5 in particular), but a goal unspoken is like a poem unread — it effectively doesn’t exist and has no power.

PS: To all the readers of this blog, thank you for your attention, comments, feedback and support this year. I’ve learned much from all of you, and look forward to continuing to do so in 2010.

Happy holidays!

mediabistro.com eBook Summit in New York by Mediabistro

“I suppose we could sum up this entire two-day conference under the headline ‘too early to tell.’”

–Steve Wasserman (Kneerim & Williams)

I attended MediaBistro’s eBook Summit this week and Wasserman’s summation is perfect; consumer book publishing is smack in the middle of the digital transition, and solid answers about how it will all play out are hard to come by. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t plenty of people willing to throw their two cents (and millions of VC dollars) into the conversation.

While ostensibly a competitive event with Digital Book World, my sense was that both the program and attendees were very different from ours — the former more theoretical and broader; the latter… well, just different, I’d say. There’s clearly room for both events, which I was actually glad to see, because I’m a fan of MediaBistro and I don’t want the wonderful Carmen Scheidel getting mad at me after we just became friends!

I live-tweeted both days of the Summit — Day 1 and Day 2 (sorry LiveJournal friends!) — and after cleansing my palette by reading more of the latest issue of Monocle (an absolutely beautiful example of what can and should be done only in print), here’s my top five takeaways:

1) If Jane Friedman weren’t involved in Open Road Integrated Media, no one would be talking about it. The underlying business model isn’t revolutionary, and at this point is largely theoretical. I was particularly surprised to hear her say that they weren’t going to do direct-to-consumer sales, especially on the heels of announcing Rachel Chou as their CMO, but someone representing them in the comment section of the announcement on eBooknewser suggested it’s in their plans.

Takeaway #1: Jeffrey Sharp’s presence, and DTC not being a priority, suggests movie deals, not eBooks, are their real angle, a la the infamous Scott Rosenberg and Platinum Studios. (Hopefully, for their authors’ sakes, they’ll have a smoother ride.)

2) Of all the new ideas presented at the Summit, Lisa Holton, Founder & CEO of Fourth Story Media, was the only one I was really excited by and wanted to learn more about. She also offered one of the best quotes of the Summit: “My audience right now, they’re not reading on a Kindle, so I don’t care.”

Takeaway #2: Know your audience. Know both who they are and where they are, and then focus your time and resources accordingly; don’t be distracted by every new shiny that comes down the pike.

3) Corporate execs are rarely exciting, or excitable, speakers. Also, self-identifying as  “an outsider” can backfire if you really are an outsider. Alternatively, executives who are closer to the ground are often the most exciting speakers. Exhibit A: Sony’s Steve Haber. Exhibit B: Books on Board’s Bob Livolsi.

Takeaway #3: Haber was a classic example of old school PR and corporate communications — arms-length, vague, stay on message — while Livolsi was the perfect example of having a flesh-and-blood human representing a company.

4) Steve Wasserman was perhaps my favorite speaker over the two days, both for his excellent soundbites and his pragmatic perspective on things. I want to see him and Richard Nash on a panel together, in a no-holds-barred conversation about the past, present and future of publishing. I’d pay good money to see that. (Or, perhaps that’s an idea for a future DBW webinar…?)

Takeaway #4: “Publishing was never a business based on Wharton standards. It was a rich boy’s hobby.”

5) It’s feels like technology, not readers, is driving the conversation about the future of publishing. There’s far too much emphasis on the never-ending supply of tools and not nearly enough on the actual demand for them. Too many new ideas with no business model or revenue plan being touted as “the future of publishing”. From Haber’s “Gee whiz! eReaders are cool!” (not an actual quote) to obsessions with Twitter, the mythical iUnicorn, and [insert new shiny du jour], it was refreshing to hear Livolsi offer some specific data, and I’m really looking forward to hearing more about the Bowker/BISG study on “Consumer Attitudes Toward eBook Reading“. (Though, really, can we stop referring to readers “consumers”?)

Takeway #5: It’s not about the tools. Kindle beat Sony Reader primarily because they had the direct consumer connection and trust. One-click. Done. Tech fetishists overlook the power of a direct relationship with customers. That’s Amazon’s real advantage. (Apple’s, too.)

The final takeaway, and always the best part of any good conference, is the people you meet, and I was glad to have met a number of smart people; some I already knew from Twitter, some I met for the first time. The conversations that happen between sessions and over drinks, away from the microphones (and webcams and tweets!), are where the really innovative ideas are being discussed, shared and shaped. A good conference sparks those conversations.

Kudos to MediaBistro on a successful inaugural event!

And now, the countdown to Digital Book World hits the home stretch…

Stool, Sunlight by Voxphoto

They show me and tell me about stuff I would never think to look for myself. They take me to places in their pictures that I will never get to but so enjoy looking at. I’ve turned down the corners of many a page after finding places I want to visit, books I want to buy, or stores I want to shop from (online). There is an open copy of Garden and Gun sitting right by my computer right now.

Why Magazines Won’t Die, Maria Rodale

I love magazines, and Garden & Gun is one of a handful of favorites — along with The Atlantic , Harvard Business Review and Writer’s Digest — for many of the same reasons Rodale notes in her optimistic ode, not the least of which is that “sometimes, I just want things to FIND me.”

Like my favorite writers, the magazines I truly value introduce me to new things, or show me new angles on the familiar, that I’d not have come across on my own. In my own series of posts for Folio: a few months back, I made the point that content + context = value, declaring that magazines that nail the equation will survive. That same math is also valid in the conversation about the future of books.

I’ve worked with magazines for the past 15+ years, most recently as Advertising Sales Director and Publisher & Editorial Director for Horticulture, and over the past year of learning the book side of the business up close, I’ve noted 5 key things it could/should learn from its periodical siblings:

1) Be diversified. The most sustainable magazines are not primarily advertising dependent, but offer enough value that their subscribers are willing to pay a premium for them, whether on the newsstand or via subscription. Magazines that chose to play the high-stakes ad game, giving away subscriptions and bundling online ad inventory as a value-add, devalued themselves and ended up in a vicious cycle of deeper discounts every year, a disastrous race to the bottom that didn’t work out so well.

*** For book publishers, being overly dependent on major retailers like Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon is akin to being primarily ad supported. Treating eBooks as value-adds instead of their own distinct format reminds me of the early days of online advertising. Factor in half-hearted outreach to independent booksellers and almost no direct relationship with their readers, and it means their fate is largely out of their own hands, especially when the economy takes a nosedive.

2) Be distinctive. Pick a notable topic of interest, and there are likely more magazines serving that niche than you can name, few if any offering truly distinctive editorial features. In that scenario, pricing often becomes the distinction, for subscriptions and/or ads, and advertisers often end up deciding who survives.

*** For too many book publishers, it’s all about trends. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was surprised by the number of Twilight derivatives, official and rip-offs, that are being published around the world. Business books are another copycat category, the most personally annoying segment du jour being social media, where every doofus with a blog is putting their own spin on The Cluetrain Manifesto (available free online) and getting their five minutes on the NY Times Bestseller List. Being niche isn’t enough; you also have to serve that niche with distinction.

3) Be confident. Good magazines have strong personalities, both figuratively, via their tone, and literally, via their editors and contributors. I can’t stand Chris Anderson, but credit where due, he is an excellent representative for Wired, a magazine that arguably should have been one of the first victims of the Internet and its thirst for “free content”. Check out Mediaite’s ranking of 97 magazine editors, the majority of whom most people have heard of and have a vague sense of what they represent.

*** For book publishers, can anyone identify even 10 editors with ANY name recognition or influence at all outside of the industry? Every author is expected to have a platform, why not editors, too?

4) Be relevant. Being distinctive and confident isn’t enough; unless it serves a really small, passionate niche and has no competition, a magazine needs to be relevant, too. Knowing your audience, existing and potential, is critical to setting realistic expectations for success and meeting them.

*** For book publishers, relevance is a tricky balance of trendspotting, advocating new ideas, and most importantly, distinctive and confident curation. None of this can be done in a vacuum, though.

5) Be connected. Long before email, blogs and Twitter came along, magazine editors were connected to their readers via mastheads and Letters to the Editor sections. (In comics, there were also the fanzines.) Subscriptions solidified that relationship, both psychologically and financially. As new channels became available and popular, many magazine editors have embraced the opportunity to more effectively, and more frequently, engage their readers.

*** Other than Twitter, where they mostly talk to each other, when and where do book editors connect to readers on a regular basis? How can they position themselves to be influential curators, someone readers can trust to help good books find them instead of always having to seek them out?