Dunlap Dabbles

I made a judgment call to miss a few panels this morning and focus on getting some work done. But when I heard that Wil Wheaton would be participating in a panel on new media and publishing I packed it in and headed out. It should be noted that I didn’t see him listed in the paper and my attendance is the direct result of my following him on Twitter. He announced his participation about two and a half hours beforehand and I was able to see that while out and about and restructure my plans for the day. It was that easy. It’s that type of powerful flexibility (not to mention immediacy) that publishers are trying to harness.

In all honesty, it’s easy for people to walk away from these discussions unhappy. No one is going to give you the answer of how an industry is going to heal itself right then and there. Most panelists will tell you that right out. As Dana Goodyear put it, if she had the answer she’d be on a private jet to New York instead of at the festival. The truth is that these issues are too large to be definitively put to rest by any one individual or even a room full of qualified people. It can be incredibly illuminating to hear about experiences that people who are involved in pulling industries into the future (or present) have though. And it’s not just heads of companies who have been trained to fear changes in their industry. Many of the questions the panel fielded showed how pervasive big business thinking is in our culture. One question Wil received, for instance, relied on what Wil referred to as an assumption of a binary relationship between new media and free. He gave a great explanation about how no matter what medium your creating content in there will always be thieves. There will simply always be someone who doesn’t want to pay for what you’ve made and will figure out a way to take it from you. No matter how much you punish the people who want to pay you. That is, after all, what companies effectively do by making it difficult to use their downloads on your devices with DRM. He went on to talk about Valve trying to match the quality of customer support that pirates give. Wil made the excellent point that everything should be considered an aspect of customer service; from the speed of delivery (pirates often beat products to the streets), to meeting demands for the quality of a product, to the ease of consumption, to the guaranteed lack of malware or data collecting software. Pablo Defendini and Wil both pointed to author Scott Sigler who has released free e-book and podcast versions of his books prior to any official print version and still achieves huge sales rankings. Wil cited his experience trying to watch BBC’s Jekyll, which featured edits that fans considered detrimental to the story’s effectiveness. He was forced to find what was, in this case, the premium content on the “seedy underbelly” of the web.

This talk really boiled down to two things. First, if companies spent as much time thinking about the people that wanted to give them money as they did thinking about the people who weren’t giving them money, we wouldn’t be in nearly as bad shape as we are now. That should hold true for all time. However technology changes distribution, however trust relationships between official media outlets and social networks shift, a focus on the consumers you have is always going to be most important. That’s not new at all. That’s marketing 101. It is always more expensive to convert new customers than it is to maintain a relationship with a current customer.

The second point was that you can’t just try to hop in, treat new media like a classical advertising technique, and sit back waiting for your money to poor in. If you look at anyone who has been successful in new media you’ll see that they have embraced it and used it to add value to the content they were already making, without trying to hedge their bets.

Pablo Defendini had an absolutely fantastic example of this during his time at TOR’s community site. The publisher apparently tried to employ pretty standard loss leading strategy by giving away the first installments of series in e-book form. It sounds pretty smart right? They have an active online community with a proven fondness for consuming content digitally. There are low production and distribution costs for these versions so the “loss” part of “loss leading” is minimized. However, they were hoping to convert these customers to paperback sales. (Defendini didn’t say it in regards to this example, but he noted later that publishers still make more money off print copies.) They tried to exploit the digital media and convert it to sales in a different (pricier) arena. But your core purchaser of that e-book downloaded it because it was in a form that was already palatable to them. They didn’t want to finish it in the print form. They wanted it in the e-book. Defendini was getting e-mails asking for the rest of the series. From people who wanted to buy it. With money. They were in effect slapping the money out of their customers’ hands and telling them to go somewhere else. Those fans had to scratch their itch via piracy.

That’s the customer service coming back again. You can’t just set something up on the web and have it be a quick ploy. You can’t spam links. You can’t chop video and make the user experience crap unless they pay for a full version. You’ll see this idea taken forward by people who make good “lite” apps. They don’t butcher user experience for people using their free version. They add features that are nice, and necessary for what some people want to do, but not integral for base functionality. Certain Twitter apps have done an amazing job of this by adding geotag support, or the ability to save tweets for later or set them on automatic timers. The note taking service Evernote is a favorite example of mine. It is totally conceivable to work in Evernote’s free version. But the bonuses of PDF search and expanded security and storage make their premium service a reasonable proposition. Instead of trying to hamstring the service by placing incredibly restrictive upload limits on users, they made their product so good, and uploading so easy, that users want to use it at an accelerated level which increases demand for storage.

It’s all about adding value. You may have seen a guy who looked a lot like Wil Wheaton but more evil on The Big Bang Theory recently. Apparently you could have seen a lot more of him. He lobbied for permission to take his Flip HD around the set during the filming for some behind the scenes web clips. Approval came four days later, at which point they were already done shooting his part of the episode. He and the online promotions guy had to fight for an embeddable promotional web clip to show before the episode aired. As he put it, that’s the whole point of promotion. You want to get the word out. Preferably before your product comes out. Especially when your working with something time sensitive like a television show. If I hadn’t heard about that show, you’re damn right I would have found it online instead of waiting God knows how long for the DVD to come out or betting on the off chance that I’d catch it on T.V. as a re-run. Continuing with this example, just take a look at Wil Wheaton’s Twitter. He live tweeted the entire episode. That’s the definition of adding value to your content. His stream was full of fun facts and jokes from the set that made his product more enjoyable. It also enhanced his reputation among fans as someone who is accessible and cares about them. That’s never a bad thing.

The general criticism of adding content is that the industry is being forced to increase production costs while still charging the same price they would have in the past. That’s just an excuse from people who don’t want to think. It doesn’t cost anything to live tweet. A Flip camera is a couple hundred bucks. The reason those little DVD documentaries that came on music CD’s a while back didn’t increase sales is because consumers know that the music execs and a lot of the bigger bands involved in those projects were half assing their efforts. It was a scam. A quick hop in. And the internet has a way of seeing right through those.

But how do you add value to a book Thomas? Well, if you look at Scott Sigler’s work, you’ll find that he changes his versions significantly and that he has repeat business as a result. I wasn’t aware of how drastic some of his revisions were but the panelists claimed that he changes who dies in some versions. Podcasts are a great way to keep an author’s voice in his audience’s head as well and drive home the idea that he’s full of ideas and constantly working. Authors in particular run into the problem of getting lost in the mix between projects due to their long incubation periods. Do you have any idea how much content gets cut out of a book? It doesn’t cost anything to post a funny exchange between your characters that didn’t quite fit with your final vision. If you were to make your next book an iPad app instead of a straight format e-book you could update your book with new content or notes from the author at any point through the app store. The question of whether we can add value to a book seems to be based on an assumption that there isn’t any value there in the first place. We need to stop thinking along the lines of “no one in their right mind is going to read or pay for a book” and start thinking about all the people who want to read and want to buy.

Additional interesting ideas

Pablo Defendini asserted that publishing is still largely a business to business industry. When a publisher talks about their customers they’re talking about the professional buyers at Amazon or Borders, not the people reading their books. These companies aren’t talking to their fans and assessing buzz so that they can take that data to the buyers and build a case for a project.

Dana Goodyear talked about the idea of a print book as a sort of sculpture or souvenir for an online experience you’ve had. Especially for collaborative or particularly underground works. I’d have to agree. Even if Bike Snob just picked a few of his favorite posts to publish I’d buy it in a second in order to have a piece of a blog I like so much.

Wil Wheaton really wants there to be one standard publishing format…. Amazon……