RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU + IMMERSIVE
Molly Barton of Serial Box
MY HOPES for the future of independent publishing involve three major elements: stronger “channels” of interest that drive better visibility for writers, particularly fiction writers; more collaboration among writers to create these channels and gather power; and deeper experimentation with format and delivery.
Fewer and fewer novels are making their way through the gauntlet that is traditional publishing success today— a process that typically requires getting an appropriate agent who has the time, focus, and influence to sell your book. At which point there begins a new complex and lengthy process that involves igniting a small fire of interest in the book inside the publishing house that results in lots of galleys being printed, lots of anticipation, starred reviews, and championing by booksellers.
There is much talk about how fiction sales have declined over the past five years. I don’t believe that the numbers indicate a change in reader and listener appetite; the falling fiction sales are a result in the shifting landscape of book distribution. As a higher and higher percentage of book sales travel through Amazon, there are fewer points of discovery for all but the most engaged readers and listeners. And it’s much easier to find nonfiction books through a keyword search.
Presuming that declining fiction sales means people are more interested in nonfiction is like saying in the early days of BuzzFeed that people seemed to want listicles instead of articles. Listicles were prioritized by search algorithms, just as video was preferred by Facebook algorithms.
So what kind of corrective measures are required to make the discovery of great fiction easier for the casual reader? There’s a tremendous effort going into building newsletters, which can certainly help. We need to work on building and strengthening “category channels” that place stories and excerpts from books in front of interest groups of readers—I’m thinking about reinvigorating firstserial excerpts in partnership with relevant websites, podcasts, and Facebook groups as one simple example. Publishers could get a lot more active about placing first serial in these highly relevant places. They could even compensate partners who drive engagement. Or agents and authors could retain first serial themselves and place it (probably for free) in the channels where their most likely readers are already spending time online.
More generally I think the relationships between magazines and weeklies (and their contemporary descendants the Skimm, Brain Pickings, the Athletic, etc.) and book publishing should be reinvigorated. Any ad-driven website needs to prioritize “time on site,” and engaging readers with a highly relevant piece of book content could be a great way to increase session length.
This brings me to my second hope, which is that writers will collaborate more on creating or significantly strengthening these category channels. I remember when Peter Sims helped start the Silicon Guild, a group of future-focused business writers who decided to pool their audiences for group benefit. They agreed to promote one another’s work through their social channels and their newsletters. Just by combining their individual followings, they suddenly had a direct collective audience of millions. I was very excited by what they’d done, the power that they suddenly held, and thought that they could create their own publishing imprint or even their own publishing company. I hope to see more of these kinds of collectives taking hold of their power to attract readers and listeners.
The third big theme is format experimentation. Attention is the new oil, as my brilliant friend Linda Holliday, founder and CEO of the content operating system Citia, said. In order to hold attention we need to be creating experiences that are more immersive. I remember the start-up the Atavist best for its immersive reading experience, featuring auto-scrolling with synced audio of journalists reading their own work. So you got audio and text, and you didn’t need to tap or swipe to progress through the content. Now we’re seeing experiences like the chat fiction start-up Hooked and Inkitt’s Galatea, and at Serial Box we offer the ability to switch seamlessly between reading and listening. There is also the muchdebated Audible Captions experience,
which publishers are understandably upset about.
Our bet at Serial Box is that people do want flexibility in both reading and listening, and they want stories they can weave into their week and finish, so we deliver installments that you can listen to or read in a commute or two. These aren’t short stories but rather installments within a longer series, structured in a way that’s very similar to premium television.
So much venture capital investment has already gone into improving the delivery of video to mobile phones, but there is still a long way to go toward nailing the digital presentation of reading and listening content. If you’re a fiction writer who wants to experiment with serial delivery of your work, please reach out to me.