When I first met Nick he was a fresh faced blogger who wore hooded sweatshirts. Now he’s a bearded blogger who plays (what looks to be) speed-bananagrams while wearing suits.

Early Friday morning, I reblogged Nick Douglas and contributed my thoughts on making mistakes as a writer in the wake of the throw down between Mike Monteiro, Mat Honan, and Caroline McCarthy.  It got me thinking about my own mistakes.  I’ve made a few.  The most publicly embarrassing was probably being called out by the happiest man alive, Andrew W.K., for making an absurd amount of typos in an interview I did with him.  In terms of personal shame, my interview with Nick during the promotion for his book, Twitter Wit, holds the top spot.  I had just moved to Berkeley and was starting to land gigs.  I was simply brimming with confidence and held the always dangerous belief that I knew exactly what I was doing.  This piece was analogous to the time I crashed my car after saying that there really wasn’t all that much to learn about driving.  I have no problem admitting that I fumbled the submission process terribly.  More embarrassing is the fact that I put my own interests before the interests of someone who took a fairly large chunk of time out of their day for a complete unknown.  As time drifted by and people grew more Twitter savvy I found myself at a loss for how to proceed.  The piece was cannibalized and redone several times and simply got away from me.  I doubt that the lack of progress even registered on Nick’s radar.  Shortly after we spoke he appeared on Martha Stewart’s show so I’m pretty sure some people heard about his book.  You can also find his writing all over the web and he is currently an editor and blogger at Urlesque. I’ve had different jobs and new deadlines in the interim but I can’t help but be distressed by the fact that he gave me a great interview and I botched it.  At least once every two weeks I pull out my notes or the transcript and sigh.  The web’s climate has changed a great deal since we spoke.  Favrd is down, Twitter has multiple monetization strategies, Facebook proved that they are more than willing to compromise user experience for money.  But Nick was saying all this in August ‘09.  He noted the value of archiving tweets and now they’re in the Library of Congress. I’m not saying Nick went to James Billington, Librarian of Congress, slapped him in the face with Twitter Wit, and screamed, “Do you see!” until he included every bit of content the site produces.  What he did do was give me a bunch of insightful comments about Twitter that he expected me to promulgate as widely as I could.  I failed to do that.

This is not a straight “from the vault” type post but I have kept the first introduction I worked on in the hopes that it might provide a sense of how much things have changed in the last year alone in respect to Twitter being a completely accepted service.  It took me two Thanksgivings to make my family and our friends understand what the damn thing was and now they love explaining it to me.

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While some focus on the transformative potential of Twitter from the news to education, its detractors have deemed it an expression of our nation’s self absorption and attention seeking behavior taken to their extremes.  As parents complain that the youth is losing their ability to spell and compose a proper sentence, Nick Douglas sees a renaissance in the art of the one liner.

Twitter is unarguably a growing force in almost every aspect of our lives.  A Twitter ticker on news stations is now almost as common as the stock ticker or additional story updates and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to read a paper or watch a sitcom without at least some mention of the service.  Even the next iteration of Xbox Live will integrate Twitter functionality.  Although there has been a great growth in interest and usership, many people still don’t understand exactly what they can be getting out of Twitter.  Nick Douglas has put a lot of thought into that very subject.  As a founding editor of the tech industry site Valleywag (of Gawker Media) it was practically part of his job to try every online service out there and examine their encouraged user behavior and effectiveness.  Nick has been on Twitter since the beginning when “it was just something the geeks played on,” and while he can talk at length about things like Twitter’s lasting power and competitive edge against Facebook, his most recent project focuses on the unique way that Twitter lends itself to humor by collecting some of the funniest one liners across genre and subject.  While Twitter Wit itself may be seen as a “joke book” it is clear that to Nick Douglas the existence of this book is a reflection of a significant transition taking place in how we communicate and our humor itself.

Although his career brought him into contact with countless services that originally promised great change and tiny, focused, revolutions in user behavior only to fizzle out, Douglas saw something evolving on Twitter.  “I noticed more and more people specifically trying to entertain instead of just fulfilling the basic purpose of saying what they were doing.  These were people who were thinking about the audience they were writing to instead of, ‘I’m writing something for myself,’ almost as a personal diary.  Twitter Wit works in a way that Blogger Wit wouldn’t really or Facebook Wit doesn’t even work, even though they’ve got some very similar features.  You just don’t get huge numbers of people on Facebook trying to be really funny.”

The beautiful thing about Twitter is its simplicity and the almost absolute lack of direction its creators give users.  While feature happy third party apps abound for the service, the actual web UI looks like it might have been designed by an ascetic hermit.  (If ascetics had internet.)  Conventions like the hashtag and even the RT are all derived from user invention and implementation.  The genesis of this book depended on the integrated “star” or “fav” feature and the user communities that arose as a result.  “Favrd definitely changed the game for me,” says Douglas.  The now defunct service tallied the number of stars users had been awarded for their individual tweets and displayed them in rank.  “It changed how people were tweeting because suddenly there was a goal in mind: get the most stars, land on the top of this page, and be commemorated for that day as the funniest person of the day.  Turning it into a little contest, like so many things online, really upped the ante of how people were going to behave.”  In addition to encouraging content creation, it presented a more manageable way to find that content.  Previously, Nick had simply been starring tweets he liked by reflex but he was still limited by the fact that he had to depend on his own follow list or hope that his friends retweeted material they’d enjoyed.  Sites like Favrd and Favotter allowed users to increase their visibility.

This democratizing aspect of Twitter that allows everyone from housewives to college students access to their own audiences has been touted much in the same way people pointed to Youtube celebrities a few years ago.  “I do see Twitter as an equalizing platform.  Granted, the same network effects are still in play.  A famous person is always going to get more followers by default, versus someone who can be funnier than that famous person that just doesn’t have an audience.  People aren’t just reading to be entertained purely by what the tweets are, they also want that feeling of connection with whoever’s behind them.  There’s nothing magical about Twitter that would override that.  And yet, at the same time, like with Shit My Dad Says, you can see that a good idea does get a lot of attention in a way it deserves.  [More than followers] What really is important to me, as far as a sign of attention on Twitter, is whether people are saving your tweets.”

Perhaps even more importantly, the favoriting system has turned Twitter into something greater than a broadcasting tool.  “I’d like to see starring become more of a standard thing on Twitter that people know to do.  You start being able to track what’s good and what your audience likes and actually hone your craft.”  The conventional comments system on a blog will typically skew towards the negative but Douglas notes that it doesn’t necessarily present an honest picture of audience response.  “More people are going to want to explain in words why they don’t like what you wrote than why they did.  It’s always harder to say a coherent positive response when you really just want to go, ‘Yay! I agree.’  Having the “likes” and the stars which are integrated on Tumblr, Flickr, Youtube, Amazon etc. gives people a chance to show their appreciation without having to rack their brains for specific nice things to say.  It’s also important to get followers who are interested in talking to you.  I think that’s one of the really valuable things here; you’re not just doing standup in front of a crowd, you’re doing something that’s participatory.”  Instead of chucking dead ends or throw-away jokes out into the Twittersphere, comedians should be viewing Twitter as a testing ground or joke incubator.  It is increasingly common to see conversations start on Twitter only to be followed up by full length blog posts or articles.  Similarly, there is potential to select excerpts from longer works as a sort of “proof of concept” for the premise of a joke or story.

And here we enter the realm of craft.  The development of characters and a commitment to voice are probably the best argument anyone could offer for Twitter developing into something recognized for having literary characteristics or properties.  It is an interesting time, as writers on Twitter are still shaking out various approaches for creating accounts that invite investment from followers.  Writers must decide to create an account for a singular type of joke, to create an account using their own persona or a fictional one, to stick to perhaps a limited number of subjects or let fly as ideas come to them.  Authors like Arjun Basu, who tells self contained short stories in 140 characters or less, are something of an anomaly but that is not to say that there isn’t an abundance of story driven tweets.  Particularly interesting is the way that behavior is evolving.  While Douglas said he observed that writers developed characteristic voices early on, as personal style is almost impossible to keep out of creative work on Twitter or any other service, it took quite a bit longer for the now popular character accounts to develop.  “I’d say those cropped up almost a year after Twitter started.  I’m sure there were some but they were primordial.  The really good ones took a while.  Darth Vader was an early one but that’s a much simpler account.  It’s very much the standard jokes for someone impersonating Darth Vader because that’s been a trope for decades.  It’s a very easy persona for someone to get into.  Fake Michael Bay is the first [sophisticated] one I can remember, or Fake Sarah Palin might have come first.  The really interesting part about those characters is that they’re always better when the person goes beyond the first, immediate, joke.  It’s the sort of thing they did at MAD magazine a lot.  They would push beyond the obvious thing you could say about a celebrity.  What the Fake Sarah Palin account got was not just that she was ill equipped for her political career, or not just that she was a dumb bible thumper, but that she was so self-assured about how right she was.  It wasn’t just that she didn’t realize how dumb she was, it’s that she thinks everyone else is dumb when they disagree with her, and that’s what was magical.”

When confronted with the conventional wisdom often taught in creative writing classes that an author should find their favorite line or scene and kill it,[1] Douglas doesn’t hesitate for a second, dismissing the advice as “simplistic.”  Much of the comedy taking place online experiments with the short form, he says.  Shorter formats like video sketches or tweets reward artists who can come up with one or two of those killer lines.  Twitter is arguably the shortest of forms.  Whether working in puns, like Jay Hathaway; mimicking conservative politicians, like Avery Edison; or simply being diabolical, like Joshua Allen, each tweet produced is inextricably linked to the negative space around it.  The form’s brevity requires cues from the authors that hint at a world outside the tweet.  Douglas describes Allen’s skill in being able to “imagine an entire short story and taking the one killer line from it.”  The whole story is still there, he’s just let it fall away.  The seemingly instantaneous aspect of Twitter also makes readers wonder about the physical context of the tweet.  While a writer my go through numerous drafts of a tweet before publishing, the fact remains that it is a one off, created at a specific moment to be enjoyed by an audience as soon as the author deems it ready.  Since a tweet can be sent from anywhere, and generally carries a tone of observation, it is not unlikely that a reader might wonder exactly what went on behind it.  Was Jay Hathaway really making a hot pocket at the exact moment you read his hot pocket joke?  The fact that a tweet can be multifaceted and create so many different types of associations in the mind of readers makes the case for tweets as compelling art.

Consider @firleand’s tweet from May 10^th “— end of side one — ” There is a visual component to the composition of the tweet that sets it apart from anything else in the reader’s feed and replicates the sense of separation from content that these messages used to carry.  While the tweet receives a significant boost in meaning to those who follow Allen’s Tumblr as being something relating to his own life, the tweet still works as a message from a fictional character or the last line in an imagined novel.  These four words are rife with dramatic tension and gain in poignancy for every moment that they are not followed by another tweet.  If we were to view the entirety of this feed as an artistic endeavor, this tweet, and the space surrounding it, would be the best exercise in pacing I’ve ever seen on the service.

How important then is the 140 limit, the restriction that creates the form?  140 has become something of an arbitrary hot number these days.  You may have seen the 140 Second Film Festival that limited films to 140 seconds of footage.  While it is true that the limit was adopted to leave room for the user names of those who submitted by SMS, or text message, which brings a limit of 160 characters, this was not always the case.  Initially, there was no character limit at all.  Any overflow would be separated into a second message and submitted subsequently, just as a normal text message sent to another cell user would be.  Similarly, there is nothing to stop someone from writing a story or joke in 10 consecutive 140 character long segments.  I asked Douglas what he thought about users simply ignoring the limit.

“It could be less elegant, maybe,” He said.  “In any format, people that can work within the structure of the format are often going to produce more immediately elegant things.  But, if you can tell a story over several tweets by paying attention to when you’re breaking up the narrative then you can do something really interesting. You can put the punch lines in the second tweet.  You’re forcing comedic timing in a medium that usually seems bereft of any timing.  What’s more artless to me is when people abbreviate.  I’d much rather someone go into a second tweet than type in rebus language.  It distracts.  That definitely kills the feeling of humor, and I had to edit a few of the tweets in the book because they were brilliant except they left out a couple of punctuation marks, or shortened a word too much, just to fit in the character limit.  It’s always better if you can, instead, change your actual words.  If you want to be Hemingway you can’t just make the words look shorter, you have to actually use fewer words and still manage to get the idea across.”

Even if they were to get past the invention of the internet, the old guard would doubtlessly still be shocked at the concept of such brief stories.  Even Henry Youngman, king of the one liners, would have a hard time understanding how Twitter could usher in a new type of one liner joke.  Twitter’s hash tag system allows users to track all the tweets associated with specific tags.  For example, you could search #presidentialdebate and follow the entire community’s reaction to a debate.  Douglas points out the value of such a feature not just for academic purposes but for humorists as well.  The jokes based on memes and trending topics are “a unique form of humor that wasn’t technologically possible without this one tool.  Someone just starts a joke with a simple and easy to replicate formula like, ‘mashed up movie titles,’ or, ‘things I’d never say,’ and you can follow the tags and read hundreds of variations of a certain type of joke.”  Twitter seems to be making everything new again.  It’s not too long ago that a book of crowd sourced one liners would have seemed an unlikely pitch at best.  Now Douglas predicts that before long, we may very well see entire books based on a single day’s jokes from Twitter.   I sure hope so, there’s an empty spot on my bookshelf next to F U Penguin.

[1] Attributed to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the form of “Murder your darlings.” from On the Art of Writing

As the Bike Snob gained notoriety (which is like gaining notariety in that it involves a lot of signatures but differs in that they’re yours) some people began to ask who he was.  It’s a silly sort of question for silly people but eventually even people I know who don’t ride bikes were in on it.  A friend of mine told me she’d heard he was actually some guy in the financial field.  If you actually read the blog you know plenty about him.  He favors practicality and a lack of pomp while still appreciating that some things are simply fun to do.  Although he spends much of his time telling people what to do with their bikes he freely admits that no one should follow his “dictats” if they are enjoying themselves as they are.  (Within reason. See bike salmon.)  He pokes fun at everything, including himself.  He rides his bike often and emphasizes the activity over the maintenance of both body and machine.  What else is there to know?  As a skateboarder I used to run into the same people regularly at “spots” but only interact with them peripherally.  Of these recognizable strangers, there were some I liked and some I disliked based on their comportment.  Knowing someone’s name wouldn’t make me think they were any less of a dick for snaking runs and it wouldn’t make me like anyone who was courteous any more.  What I enjoyed about this book is that it lets us know RTMS better in the ways that count.  Those ways being his relationship to cycling and the joy it brings him.

However, I should note that if you think a band sells out when they use a recording studio instead of etching their disc format of choice with a rock by themselves, you probably won’t like this book. This book is certainly not the affront or slap in the face that many hardcore fans claim when their favorite artists create projects for consumption by wider audiences.  However, it is not a “paper back blog” and may be different than what you expect if you haven’t been following the Snob’s interview circuit.  While I personally feel that the blog holds up over time, at least looking back two years, I understand his point perfectly that a book should be more timeless.  They are composed (and consumed) over a much longer period of time and should have a greater cohesiveness than a collection of posts that are meant to stand alone and have been composed over what was probably sometimes a lunch break.  A blog is topical in the way we mean topical humor, this book is topical in that it is about the topic of cycling.  Period. Complaining about the lack of the Lobster God here would be like complaining that his Giro d’Italia blog doesn’t make fun of anyone on a fixed gear.

A legitimate complaint would be that there isn’t a whole lot of stuff you didn’t know before. While I found all the content based on the history of cycling, why the bicycle was a great invention, and pretty much all of Snob’s personal stories to be engaging, there was quite a bit of rehash. Which is to be fully expected. The man has covered quite a bit of ground in the last couple of years. In general, he does it in a clever and concise way and it’s still fun to see him collect the various themes and categories he has developed over the course of the blog and consolidate and refine them. I particularly liked the part about the myth of bike culture where he skewers the notion of any “thing” culture and distinguishes that idea from the subcultures within cycling.

Back to stuff you already know. There are huge portions of the book dedicated to introductory maintenance and advice for navigating the mean world of bicycle commuting and ownership. Snob maintains a welcoming tone throughout these portions that reminds me of college orientation. There is certainly humorous content that the experienced cyclist will enjoy but in this book the novice or interloper is king.  It’s like Snob is on a long ride with an unsure friend he’s brought along and keeps looking back to make sure he’s still there, smiling encouragingly to tell them to think about it for a second and realize how much fun they’re having.

If you’re like me, you might question the logic of a man who loves riding bikes and has built an audience of people who also love riding bikes writing a book for people who don’t love riding bikes.  The truth is that this book is for people who don’t know they love riding bikes yet. And in that way it is very much for people who love riding bikes.  He has given sold you something that you can give or lend to those around you that are, metaphorically speaking, constantly hovering above a saddle or standing next to a bike.  I agree with him that the best form of bike advocacy is riding your bike.  If you want better bike lanes you have to show that people use them. Once more, if you want to be treated better by drivers you have to get out there so they can get used to the idea of treating you any way at all.  Snob makes the point that every time you let someone see you on a bike you’re helping to show them that cycling is accessible and easy.  Without being snarky, I’d like to suggest that the best form of reading this book is letting it be read by other people.  Think of this book as the guest bike you keep for enticing non-cyclist buddies and the blog as your daily commuter.

Notes:

I borrowed the term “paper back blog” from Sean Bonner. You can download the e-book here.

Yeah, the book is pretty on the inside. Christopher Koelle has done a great job illustrating and you can buy some of work here. It’s actually almost surprising because of how much the Snob avoids flashiness on the site.  He hasn’t even opted to register his own vanity domain like I have, opting instead to stay a dot blogspot.  Readers often take pleasure in his low quality photography and photo editing “skillz.”  No blog to book could be completely bereft of pictures though and Chronicle and Bike Snob oblige with a 16 page insert full of images from the blog.  The handlebar condom makes it in there, as does the lone wolf and the lime green rim heard around the world.

Things have come a long way since then and Amazon now tells you within about a day when you’ll be receiving your next novelty item. Didn’t you know? Dead tree books are like sculptures of blogs. It’s a kind of origami that uses stitching. As you may know, I am a huge fan of a certain blog that is written by the previously mysterious Bike Snob NYC. Ever since I began reading it I have said that I would like to compensate him for his work somehow beyond sending him links to things for his quizzes. So it was that I went to sleep last night comforted by the knowledge that I would most likely rush home from work today and find the most recent Snob x Paper collabo waiting for me. I slept the sleep of a child who has already peeked at his Christmas gifts but has parents that are clumsy enough to misplace them during the transition from their closet to the tree. Well, they made it. Here is what I saw when I got home.

The first thing I noticed after I ripped this book from it’s protective covering was that it is small.  Perhaps that is because it was built for performance.  I immediately decided to take some measurements.

Like succulent homarus americanus meat ripped right out of a claw

In keeping with convention I opted to use sunglasses and improvised as necessary.

As you can see, the book is about one pair of sun glasses wide.

And one and a half eyes wide.  I couldn’t take a picture of the most important dimension, width, because I had to measure it in cell phones and I was capturing the images with mine.  It was two HTC Ozones thick FYI.  I tried to weigh it but since my scale is set to babies, it wouldn’t register.

This bodes well for a quick, snappy read.  I expect it to accelerate great in the bathroom.

There is something really compelling to me about this program.  I like pretty much everything about it actually.  Flattr is a service that seeks to let fans make (almost) direct payments to content creators.  In this case both Paypal and Flattr get a percentage (Flattr’s is 10%) for their trouble and you don’t get to select the precise amount that you pay.  In my mind, this is distinguishable from the truly direct payments I’ve seen at signings where people just walk up to guys like Wil Wheaton, hand them a fiver, and say, “Thanks for everything.”

There is something called “consumer surplus” that describes the amount of money over a purchase price a customer would have been willing to pay for a product.  This number is especially relevant (in my mind) when it comes to media items that adhere to a standardized pricing structure.  Comic books are one example of such a product.  Comics generally all cost about the same per issue to buy but there are some I buy that strike me as just barely worth the cover price and some I buy that I would pay at least 50% more for.  (I owe Kirkman a lot of consumer surplus money.)  I have actually considered popping a couple of bucks in an envelope and sending it to ol’ Robert Kirkman, but then I think about how impractical that is.  I think about how strange it would be to ask him to take half of that amount and give it to Charlie Adlard.  Some sites support themselves with Paypal donations but I feel that there is an extra obstacle to overcome in getting people to decide that this time is the time to donate.  There’s also the problem of the micro-payment form itself.  Making a one time payment that is so small feels strange, not to mention meaningless,when you consider the processing fee.  With Flattr, you upload a lump sum and set a monthly amount to be distributed amongst the “things” or content you flattr.  For each time you click a button, the content’s creator gets one equal sized piece of your monthly allotment.  If you like one thing during that whole month, its creator gets the whole piece of the pie.  If, somehow, you are incapable of finding anything on the whole internet that is deserving of two bucks, you still end up paying your monthly allotment, but it goes to charity.  It’s like subscribing to the internet except it’s subscribing to content instead of the network.  The only problem at the moment is that Flattr doesn’t encompass all the content on the web. As it stands now, you still have to sign up for an invitation and much of the content appears to be in Swedish. (Flattr is a Swedish start up.)  I hope that they consider prioritizing applications because I sincerely believe that membership will be driven by a desire to pay major content creators and not out of attempts to monetize tiny blogs.  (However, the fact that I have received an activation code hints that there is no such strategy in place.)  The reason I say this is because any creator attempting to get money out of the system must have an active account. Meaning, they must be paying at least €2 a month.  Most people know that they are not going to recoup that amount via micro-payments.

The only other quick addition I can think of that would be nice is the ability to keep track of what you’ve Flattred by month. I’d like to see how I’m spreading my money around. Right now, the dashboard displays the number of things you’ve Flattred and does the math on how much each creator will get.

People I would like to Flattr:

• Tiny Mix Tapes (Yeah, I write for them. I do it because I like them.)
• Sean Bonner (@seanbonner)
• Bonnie Burton (@bonniegrrl)
• Bike Snob NYC (I know he has a book coming out.  He deserves his own separate pie.) (@bikesnobnyc)
• Wil Wheaton (@wilw)
• Ramona Emerson
• Twitter (All of it)
• Nick Douglas (@nick)
• Pure Pwnage
• Joshua Allen (@fireland)
• Brizzly
• The OK Cupid blog
• Glass/Border Stylo blogs

Not to mention countless bands I would like to support or individual posts that I might find incredibly helpful.  I really hope that this, or something like it, takes off.  I was reading on the Border Stylo blog a little while ago that it would only take a subscription fee of $1/year from its users for Facebook to meet what it brings in from advertising and data crawling. With all the concern over Facebook owning us, you’d think that people would be willing to pay that much to sleep a little easier at night.  Especially since, evidently, despite all these concerns the bulk of us are unwilling to give up our profiles.  If that’s not proof that stuff on the web is valuable to people I don’t know what is.

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……