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Via Tranversalinflections and Loewak I heard about the possible decline and fall of Salt Publishing, the poetry, short story and literary criticism publisher set up by Australian poet John Kinsella (who also launched Salt Magazine) in the 90’s. The financial crisis hit them hard, and they were on the edge off going overboard. In a final swan song however, Salt is fiercely fighting off its nearing end. They cried out help. And help came to the rescue. Not the kind of help you get from the bank or from raising book prices or from necessary cutbacks… No, help came from the community. Salt engaged the public, their customers – possibly the best thing an independent publisher can do in our present-day online network culture. Booktwo.org wrote about their efforts and gave them little chance, saying that ‘sadly, appeals for philanthropy are not a sustainable model’. I dare to differ. As I wrote about before whilst discussing Open Access business models, the Maecenas model, in which the community actively supports an artist (or a publisher in this example), might in some cases turn out to be quite profitable and in the case of Salt publishers perhaps even life-saving!
So what happened? Salt used the combination of a community-cry-out-viral-tactic (nicely summed up in this Guardian blog post), using all kinds of social media sites to get attention, with the all-time favorite business technique of the discount (a one-time, one-month 33% discount on all titles), to gather enough money.
Their viral centered on a great idea (please buy just one book, right now) and a great WWF style video which you can see underneath.
And they got some famous supporters like Griff Rhys Jones helping them out, saying:
“Support the good work here. Don’t let Salt fall. If the recession is going to take things down, let it be motor manufacturers, let it be bad banks, let it be chains of fast food restaurants. We can lose a few of them, but we don’t have enough small independent and daring publishers like Salt. I think I can be a little more forthright than Chris and say ‘Just six books’. Buy dozens why don’t you? It’s a great list. And apparently you will help the economy in many subtle ways too complicated for studious folk like us.”
And then it happened, in one week more than a 1000 orders poured in from all over the world. Salt is not out of the red figures yet, but it is getting there!
My advice (and keeping in the spirit of the Maecenas model): add a ‘please donate money’ (any money you can spare!) button to the site (you never know…) accompanied by something like the title heading this post. To survive future drawbacks and to keep on profiting from the newly established community and client base, I would try experimenting with Open Access business models. Although not yet very common outside non-fiction (notwithstanding that SF, Paulo Coelho and Cory Doctorow seem to be doing fine), poetry seems to be an excellent genre to apply new experimental business models to. Your books will be better findable, the free online (or any form of hybrid model) can work as a marketing tool, it can gather enthusiasm, buzz, and, again, community. And since a lot of poetry lovers are, I would say, the kind of consumers of culture and literature that still feel a deep commitment to ‘the book’, to reading and to possessing the print book (of course not all of them, just think about all the forms of digital web-based poetry that no longer needs any kind of paper carrier), your print sales probably won’t go down and perhaps will even go up. Special editions, collectors items…, my mouth is already watering, spread the word. And, come on, did you ever see people printing out a poem or collating their own poetry readers? Could you imagine shelves with black-and-white print outs of poetry books, like those burned CD’s we all have lying around? Nah, I think that, at least for the near future, just like vinyl, a nice edition of a quality poetry collection can still be a money-maker.
But first, let’s go and help out Salt by buying that one book. Since I am both greedy and zealous, I’ll use that discount and will go for two: McKenzie Wark’s Dispositions (author of GAM3R 7H3ORY) and Louis Armand’s The Garden.
To end with the words of Chris Hamilton-Emery, director of Salt Publishing from The Bookseller:
“What I’ve learnt this week is that a small family business with a super team and a deep passion for books can use the web to unite very disparate communities. Tell the truth and you can build a global brand that personally unites people and, through literature, celebrates what it is to be human.”
Word.
As I visited the Frankfurt Book Fair last week, Ebooks and Ebook services seemed to be omnipresent. From E-readers to E-publishing experiments and from POD and software services to E-braries, the publishing value chain finally seems to have lost its fear when it comes to the embracing of the Ebook. This has lead to the rise of new digital service and platform providers, which I will reflect upon in a later post.
The opening speeches of the book fair can now be found online here. Two of them, one by Prof. Dr. Gottfried Honnefelder, the Director of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association and one by the famous Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, specifically talked about Ebooks. Interestingly enough, both of them see it as inevitable that in the future digital book content will be available for free. As Professor Honnefelder states:
“The existing business model doesn’t apply any longer. The publishers, who have worked with digital content for some time now, know this of course. The others have to learn how to handle it and accept that “Open Access” prevails time and again, and that Internet users don’t have any patience when the “free flow of information” runs into walls. A development towards this new openness is the future job of publishers and bookstores. In doing so, one must be ready to adopt new financial and publishing models and not always insist on copy being paid for. We are talking about new book-minded financial models which reward the publishers’ work in new, perhaps indirect ways. “
Paulo Coelho envisions a similar future:
“There’s an important element to this which most people are not fully aware of: people are sharing what they deem pertinent in a free way and they expect the same thing to occur in all systems of mass communication. (…) Yet, given that books as media are still widely used, why not share the whole digital content of books for free? Contrary to what common sense tells us – and common sense is not always a good guide, otherwise publishers, booksellers and writers would probably be doing something more profitable – the more you give, the more you gain.”
However, although Honnefelder thinks free will eventually prevail, he does seem to be afraid of the exploitment of online digital content, fearing piracy and copyright infringements:
“Education, knowledge, content – these are the resources of a modern society. But how do we keep it this way? These resources must be protected! Anyone who steals a book out of a bookstore can expect consequences. Why should there be different laws on the Internet? Simply because this book is not printed on paper and bound?”
On the other hand, Paulo Coelho (or his alter ego “The Pirate Coelho”), sees more creative (and economic) possibilities in the sharing of content and information on the net:
“Yet, there are still two problems to tackle: copyrights and the sustainability of the publishing industry. I don’t have a solution, but we are facing a new era, so either we adapt or we die. However, I did not come here to share solutions, but my own experience as an author. Of course, I make a living out of my copyrights, but at this very moment I am not concentrating on this. I have to adapt myself. Not only by connecting more directly with my readers – something unthinkable a few years ago – but also by developing a new language, Internet-based, that will be the language of the future: direct, simple, without being superficial. Time will tell me how to recover the money I myself am investing alone in my social communities. But I am investing in something for which every single writer in the world would be grateful: to have his texts read by a maximum of people (…) The Internet has taught me this: don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas. Don’t be afraid of engaging others to voice their ideas. And more importantly, don’t presume who is and who is not a creator – because we all are.
This discussion clearly reflects how important it is to think about new ways to create revenue from free and in this respect the book business has a chance to create a progressive system, learning from the experience of the other digitized media (music, film). Before giving pirates the overhand, we should try to create a system that creates value of and that benefits from free, at least we should strive to do so. At least to me this seems better than fighting a movement that claims to follow the main mechanism of the Internet, based on the free sharing of information, and in this respect has already won beforehand.
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