Feb

27

Touch – Pause – Engage

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

This invocation, spoken by the referee to initiate a scrummage in the English game of Rugby Union, has been echoing through what remains of my mind in a weekend where, as ever in my place at Twickenham, I have watched England eke out a gritty victory against the French. American readers may jump a paragraph if they will at this point, or join with me in wonderment at the glories of time transfer (my son and I came home to analyse the game in painstaking detail using slow-mo on a previously recorded version, and then spent this afternoon joyously alternating between coverage of Scotland v Ireland from Edinburgh and India v England at cricket, live from Bangalore). Masters of Time and Distance, and only beholden to the Laws of Commerce (I was unable to see previous games in the US since ESPN hold the rights for excerpts and summaries!). But when this wonderful sporting escapism shrugs off the constraints of territoriality and becomes a live factor on my Tablet the dynamics of daily life change again (phone call from my daughter at university this evening: unable to complete essay because too much distraction on time-lapse internet TV). We must bear in mind that it was sports coverage (in the soon to end days of geographical exclusivity) as much as anything else that built the House of Murdoch, so this is no trivial subject matter. Nor is my concern that my children may never qualify for anything at all if they have to shrug off a barrage of media possibilities and temptations never made available to me.

And this is a futuristic conversation in another sense, and perhaps I should now make an alarming confession. I do not own an iPad. I can defend this and increasingly often have to do so, by saying that “I never buy before 6.0” (makes one sound smugly superior instead of poor and outdated) or, even more often “I am waiting for the HTC Flyer”! This usually throws the inquisitor off the scent – either he does not recognize the Taiwanese industry wunderkind, whose smartphone is so readily promoted by Google at present, or he has heard of the Flyer, due to launch later this year, and can debate with me on the merits of  having a 420 gramme machine (same weight as a paperback, half the weight of an iPad), on which you can draw or write as well as use touch screen access. By this time I have covered my tracks on the ownership issue, and we part agreeing on how clunky the iPad really is. Until next Wednesday, that is, when Apple unveil iPad 2.0 and the pressure mounts again for me to come aboard.

I have been having some excellent debates in recent weeks about this unrefereed scrummage which is technology innovation, and its impact on the rapidly moving world of  business and professional information. At the moment so many of our preconceptions are built around the consumer uses of the tablet world and around the access advantages that the devices provide in business and elsewhere for travellers, that we are not yet tuned into the impact that this mobile computing power could have on our workflow activities and the integration of still separate elements of our intranet and extranet worlds. In my view, carrying your connectivity on a Tablet will place renewed pressure on improvements in voice-text transliteration, and at last begin to move machine language translation from the esoteric to the standard. Words spoken will need to be stored and subject to textual analysis, as well as being copied to third parties. Documents exchanged will need to exist multi-lingually where necessary. And nothing will be stored that cannot also be heard. All of this will ready the tablet to its eventual role, as portended by the laptop releasing us from the desk, as the complete personal assistant – the PDA  comes to fruition at long last. Then I will discard my Blackberry, throw out the Netbook that loyally travels thousands of miles with me and embrace the Future. But, since you ask, I am currently at Pause, and not yet Engage.

Finally, some updating of previous efforts here. In the first instance it is always good to remind ourselves of past worlds and where we came from, and the trading statement of Yell, the yellow pages publisher who named itself after its online service but never really invested in it does that splendidly.  Pre-tax profits in the nine months to December were halved and revenue was 11.8 % off target. In its UK businesses print revenue went down 22.3% and online went up 1.8 %. Recovery is proving worse than recession. Like much of the newspaper world, this advertising sector is now dead wood, in my view. While it remains interesting to see who can recreate in digital services the hyperlocal environments that once gave rise to local newspaper publishing, the heirs to  classified advertising directories are now fully entrenched in network marketplaces. Time to write the history here.

And can the same be said of consumer book publishers? Not quite yet, perhaps, but since I wrote about Ms Amanda Hocking (26 year old care assistant from Minnesota with 4 paranormal romances in the USA Today bestseller list last month), other evidence of successful self-publishing comes to light. This time it is British thriller writer Stephen Leather. Although an established conventionally published author, his latest novellas were rejected by Hodder and Stoughton (Hachette) as being too short. So he published them, like Ms Hocking, on Amazon. One, a gritty everyday tale of a serial killer in New York, has topped the Amazon bestseller download list for 7 weeks, and his other works have been at the top, he estimates, for 90% of the past 3 months.  He claims in interviews to sell 2000 books a day, and to be earning £11,000 a month from this activity, but this is not what interests me most. Like Ms Hocking, his works are short, and sell for $0.99 /£0.70. I smell a trend – short enough and cheap enough to read on the train!  I don’t commute and don’t have an iPad, but I do see that survival as a publisher may mean moving one’s focus to where the buyers are going. Or is that just old-fashioned consultancy talk!

Feb

9

“I Can’t Tame Wild Women…

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

…but I can sure make a tame woman wild”. After an evening in the splendid bars of Nashville’s HonkyTonk district, odd things float to the surface of a disorientated brain. I do not, for example, know if Ms Amanda Hocking can be categorized as a wild woman, but book publishers have made her mad and she is well on the way to getting even. More of that later. This note is intended as a three part meditation on Format, and those who live- and die- by it.

Lets start with Mr Murdoch’s shiny new The Daily, published for iPad. I caught up with it this week and whatever its qualities – and it has some – it is an attempt to create a newspaper in a format not intended for newspapers. “New Times calls for New Journalism” it stridently proclaims, so I invite you to glance at these extracts from Sunday’s editorial:

“…Here you will read reviews of books that matter. Pieces that explore religious faith. And history stories that illuminate where we come from.”
“You will also find The Daily’s own point of view. We will crusade for reforming America’s broken schools so that we can remain the world’s pre-eminent economic and technological power. We will fight for sensible immigration reform and smart environmental laws. We will push for policies that give Americans the maximum possible freedom in their personal lives. And we don’t believe that expanding government is the solution to most problems.”
“…We believe America is exceptional, and that it must retain its unique role as global leader.”
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/06/020611-opinions-editorial-day1-newlede/

This sounds to me just like an old-fashioned newspaper claiming an audience in the old-fashioned way. Far from the global opportunity to allow readers to create what they want to hear, in threads that agglomerate into stories, Mr Murdoch’s people have taken what has failed already and reconstructed it digitally. Did they think that the fall in advertising was somehow unconnected to the formatted functionality of the newspaper? What if advertisers left because newspapers  no longer worked? They no longer influenced people or enlarged brands. What a pity no one at News seems to have studied social media at all (despite owning MySpace and running it into the ground). Because in social media you find people who do influence others, and guess what, they are people just like us.

So lets go over to www.Klout.com. This site measures that interest in influence which Mr Murdoch missed. It enables people to run campaigns by influencing key influencers – people whose following in tweets and social sites and blogs adds up to influence that affects opinions, and buying decisions. So maybe the newspaper of the future will be built not around “new journalism” but what opinion formers think is important. Only it won’t be called a newspaper. Here is what Klout (and it could equally well be its rival, PeerIndex) say to companies  about using this influence:

“Your business needs influencers. They’re already talking about your industry and maybe even your products. Find and engage these influencers and they can become evangelists for your brand. Klout allows you to find influencers based on topic or hashtag. Do you know the value of your customers? Historically lifetime value has been measured based on purchases, but with Klout you can understand their network value. People trust recommendation more than advertisements; Klout allows business to tap into that power.

Your Business should:

You can also connect directly with influencers through Klout Perks.”

So, in other words, you pay the influencers to favour you. Was this where your advertising went, Mr Murdoch? And then your publishing house. Harper Collins (and all its rivals, to be fair) rejected Ms Hocking and forced her to self-publish. Here USA Today takes up the story (http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-02-09-ebooks09_ST_N.htm?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter):

“Fed up with attempts to find a traditional publisher for her young-adult paranormal novels, Hocking self-published last March and began selling her novels on online bookstores like Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com.

By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000 books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital downloads.

More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of her nine titles. More than 99% were e-books.

“I can’t really say that I would have been more successful if I’d gone with a traditional publisher,” says Hocking, 26, who lives in Austin, Minn. “But I know this is working really well for me.”

In fact, Hocking is selling so well that on Thursday, the three titles in her Trylle Trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend, the latest) will make their debuts in the top 50 of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list.

A recent survey shows 20 million people read e-books last year, and more self-published authors are taking advantage of the trend.

(Self-publishing is done without the involvement or vetting of an established publisher and uses a publishing system such as Lulu, Smashwords, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing or Barnes & Noble’s PubIt! Many traditional media outlets do not review self-published books.)”

Ms Hocking got even rather than getting angry. But what she did should not happen in the regular media world. She should need big name publishers  to get her name about. Only Harper Collins could get her the shelf space, the book plugging session on a Fox TV show or the exposure to create national demand. But they didn’t and she didn’t need them. She used the influencing power of early readers to create a brand presence, and I bet that her readers don’t think they are reading a book as much as a thin strip of ever-changing exciting narrative. “Its an eBook – oh, you mean that used to be a book?”

I imagine with interest how my favourite book publisher will tackle this. After a great deal of flim-flam about quality control (did you ever hear a publisher say “this is badly written rubbish and though I know it will sell in millions I decline to publish”?) he will point to the price. We could never do anything at 99 cents, he will say. Funny, that. Mr Murdoch’s The Daily costs 99 cents – per week. Its a new business. Lets get used to it.

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