Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (60 page)

The only public-policy argument that can be made in favor of draconian opposition to fair-use sharing of work online is that if too many people share it, more won’t be created.

Copyright is part of the U.S. Constitution NOT because the founders were trying to make Ira Gershwin’s great-grandchildren happy, but because they believed that the entire community would benefit if authors of creative works benefited.

Go check out
Gimmeshiny.com
. One stunning photo after another. Or consider the new WordPress plug-in for the brilliant Compfight tool, which makes it easy to find and use Creative Commons photos in your blog posts.

Or take a look at all the previously unknown artists fighting to give away their music on YouTube.

Or the countless free or nearly free ebooks on the Kindle.

Is there a shortage? I think it’s trivial to show that more interesting photos are being taken and published by more photographers than ever before.

And probably more interesting music is being made as well.

Sure, there’s more junk than ever before, because without a curating filter, the obvious junk gets through. But you know what? In addition to
junk, that conservative curator also kept us from seeing and hearing things that today we are amazed and delighted by.

Once we start running out of photos or music or writing or poems, then yes, please alert the authorities! Until then, the facts speak for themselves—sharing fair-use content (and making it easy for authors and musicians to share)
increases
the quantity and interestingness of what’s out there.

It might not be fun for those that have committed to making a living at this, but that challenge only pushes us to find new ways to monetize our passion. And back to my point: making it fun for those in the field isn’t the point. The point is creating a useful and interesting flow of creative works. And that’s precisely what’s happening.

Has a nonfiction book ever changed your mind?

For me, it has happened literally dozens of times. Books have changed the way I think about sales, evolution, marketing, governance, interpersonal relationships, mindfulness, the invention of the Western world, government power, and more.

Next question: How far into the book did you get before your mind was changed?

Not a facetious question. I’m serious.
The Communist Manifesto
is 80 pages long. Certainly long enough to make an impact.

It has never taken me beyond a hundred pages to be persuaded. Sure, there are times when the pages after page 100 help me pile on, give me more depth and understanding. But a hundred (and usually fifty) is enough to get under my skin.

On the other hand, a tweet has never once changed my mind about anything.

Writing a tract that works is significantly more difficult than writing a long book filled with defensible facts and stories, which I think is one reason why authors do the latter so often. And when we finish a tract unconvinced of the author’s point of view, our instinct is to point out that it just wasn’t long enough! (In fact, that’s rarely the problem—the problem is that it wasn’t good enough, not that it was too short.)

What if the great authors of our time were challenged to rewrite their favorite works? Let them ignore the price, ignore the bookstore, and merely focus obsessively on arguing their point … imagine how powerful those arguments would be.

I think ebooks bring us to a new golden age of polemics, tracts, and nonfiction short works that will actually change things. Without the pressure from an editor trying to justify a $29 price point, the author can go ahead and do the work she’s meant to do: change our minds, not kill as many trees as possible.

If we accomplished one thing with the twelve books at the Domino Project, this is what I was hoping to achieve: we made the world safe for manifestos. Every one of our books has changed (at least a few of) the people who experienced them.

They’re not longer, because we took the time and effort to make them short. That’s what I want to read next—another short book that will change the way I think.

Some would argue that books need to evolve into apps or other forms of multimedia—that books won’t be appreciated by large numbers of people until appreciating a book ceases to involve reading it.

While this may be an accurate discussion of the public’s habits (far more people saw
The Hunger Games
than read it), it ignores the key part of the production question: books work as an art form (and an economic one) because they are primarily the work of an individual.

One person with time but no money can produce a first draft that is substantially similar to what the public will end up reading.

It doesn’t matter that the technology permits animation and color pictures and hypertext and JavaScript. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s feasible.

When we turn the book into the work of a committee, one that costs a million dollars to create and months or years of pre-pub review and planning, the medium ceases to function. The long tail doesn’t work—because it’s impossible to create such a huge variety if each book costs that much. And the very notion of surprising, outlying ideas
can’t survive the committees that those AV books would have to go through.

For a long time, we’ve seen popular books turned into other sorts of media, and that trend is going to accelerate. But the core driver of the book business is going to remain lone (and lonely) authors bringing their ideas to a small segment that cares.

The following things are so commonplace that they are almost beyond noticing:

A visit to Costco turns up quite a few items produced by a brand called Kirkland, which is owned, naturally, by Costco.

Check out of Barnes & Noble in many large cities and you’re likely to see the
Zagat
restaurant guide near the cash register. Zagat pays a fee for this. Not to mention the huge stacks of books in the window and near the door—that display costs the publishers.

The end cap at your local supermarket features a deal from Pepsi or Coke, but never both at the same time. And the deal is paid for by the soda company. Slotting allowances generate millions of dollars a year in revenue.

These merchants have the power to increase sales of a given item (sometimes by 100% or more), and they’re not afraid to use it and to sell it.

When we shop in the real world, we take it for granted that end caps and promotions and speed tables and other interactions will be there not because they are in the direct interest of us, the shoppers, but because they were placed there by the retailer to help generate income. It’s a store, for goodness’ sake—of course they’re trying to maximize their income.

So that speed table that’s covered with Maybelline eyeliner near the checkout—it’s not there because it maximizes our shopping enjoyment, it’s there because someone got paid to put it there. We’ve been trained to respond to promotions with our attention and our dollars.

Online, where stores are more like tools than like stores, this behavior rarely transfers successfully. You bristle when Twitter starts inserting irrelevant tweets in the stream you see, because you didn’t ask for them.

Online merchants have done an extraordinary job of honestly presenting relevant information and drawing a bright line between editorial and merchandising. Which means that they’ve given up a huge amount of power. Since online merchants can’t
make
a particular item sell, they have far less leverage. They make up for it by selling everything, indifferent to which item you choose. In short, they’ve traded their power to you, the customer, in exchange for volume.

There’s no comparison between the way Macy’s makes a profit merchandising shoes at the store and the way Zappos promotes shoes online. Online merchants have learned the hard way that they must take an obsessive user-first approach. This is the secret of the long-tail online merchants, including eBay, Amazon,
BN.com
, and others: they don’t care what you buy, as long as you buy something.

This isn’t a bad thing, and for most shoppers, it’s actually welcome.

Which leads to the conundrum facing Amazon as they become a publisher. It’s hard to make a
particular
book a hit online by using traditional merchandising tools, which means that authors (whether they’re published by Harper, S&S, or Amazon) have to conclude that it’s up to them (and their readers) to make books sell, because the online merchants have voluntarily ceded that power. The merchant doesn’t pick the winners any longer.

Publishers have been nervous about moving from a powerful merchant that they know and understand and can motivate with cash to a set of online merchants where it appears that a bunch of power is up for grabs—they want their share. In fact, the move is to the long-tail universe, where the power isn’t with the merchant but with individuals and their tribes.

Amanda Palmer (leaving out her middle name, which is a story for another day) didn’t used to be a superstar.

She is now.

Her Kickstarter project is instantly oversubscribed. Her concerts sell out, wherever she goes in the world, and she goes everywhere.

Her Twitter account (@amandapalmer) has more than half a million followers.

Classic overnight success. Of course, it isn’t that at all. Just a few years ago, Amanda was posing as a statue in Harvard Square, collecting dollars and quarters on the street.

And a few years after that, she was building her fan base, one listener at a time, one CD burned for one fan, and then another CD burned for another fan.

Amanda is a wonderful character, a warm and optimistic friend, and a killer ukulele player. But that’s not her secret.

Amanda is an impresario in service of her art. She understands that her job is to earn the permission of her audience, to make them big promises and then to keep them. She’s aware that she needs to put on a show, and she does. And most of all, she doesn’t merely sell to her audience—she leads them and connects them. Amanda F. Palmer is a touchstone, the center of the circle, a living, breathing experiment in audacity, in challenging the status quo, and in having a good time while she does it.

The most amazing thing about this path is that it’s open to just about anyone willing to put in the extraordinary sweat and tears it takes to be this powerful and this remarkable.

For books under $20 (which means just about all ebooks), all that matters is volume. Not margin, but volume.

A book in the hand of a reader is far more likely to lead to another book sold. Bestsellers become bestsellers largely because lots of other people are already reading them. I know that sounds silly and self-referential, but it reflects the social nature of books.
We like to read what others are reading
.

So, if you sacrifice half your volume so you can make twice as much on every copy sold, you’ve done nothing smart.

Second, for more and more authors, the book is a calling card. It leads to a movie deal or a speaking gig, or another book contract, or
consulting, or respect, or a better class of cocktail party. Which means that the true margin on each book is more of these external benefits, not the dollar or three made on each copy.

Yes, you can make a living writing books. But you need to either write a lot of them (Asimov wrote 400) or sell a bunch of each title. Even better—make a margin on each book that has nothing to do with the selling price. The price of the book and the profit margin made on each book are secondary to this goal of making a dent in the conversation among your chosen audience.

One mantra heard often is, “in a world with a million ebooks, readers need curators.”

Of course, traditional publishers are good at curation, because traditional books are expensive to publish, so publishers had to be picky, merely as a method of self-preservation.

That pickiness leads to widespread rejection of books like
A Confederacy of Dunces
and
Harry Potter,
but let’s set that aside for a moment.

The challenge of curation by an individual publisher is this: readers have no idea who publishes which books.

If the marketplace is wide open, an infinite, endless bazaar that anyone can access, the game theory behind an individual publisher’s voluntarily publishing fewer books is pretty hard to see. If the readers don’t understand where the books are coming from, one organization (or even thirty) holding back isn’t going to have any impact at all.

No, the only way to make curation work is to have it in place alongside permission. If the publisher has direct contact with the reader, THEN she can build trust, build a brand, build an identity, and be rewarded for her curative (curationitive?) powers. Once you associate a publisher with high-quality choices, then (and only then) the curation pays off.

One more reason why publishers have to urgently build a permission asset of readers who actually want to hear from them.

As I was finishing this manifesto, a friend invited me to visit the Harlem Village Academies, a network of charter schools in Manhattan.

Harlem is a big place, bigger than most towns in the United States. It’s difficult to generalize about a population this big, but household incomes are less than half of what they are just a mile away, unemployment is significantly higher, and many (in and out of the community) have given up hope.

A million movies have trained us about what to expect from a school in East Harlem. The school is supposed to be an underfunded processing facility, barely functioning, with bad behavior, questionable security, and, most of all, very little learning.

Hardly the place you’d go to discover a future of our education system.