Writers Should Think Like Bono
I continue to wonder, like the rest of the world, whether books will go the way of music. Is the whole author/agent/publisher/bookstore industry really just like the music industry before Napster and the iPod changed the way we buy and listen to music forever? A lot of people seem to want to focus on whether or not the Kindle, or various other electronic readers, are better than paper books. But I keep pulling back from that narrow question to ask the broader question about the industry as a whole and how books are written, published, and sold. The juxtaposition of two recent events opened my eyes to 21st century media in general and books as a case in point.
First, I was nominated by my college (I won't tell you which one, but you can figure out easily enough) to herd a group of quite famous authors onto a panel to talk about something to do with writing and publishing. Every single one of these award-winning authors returned my emails immediately, which told me something about how desperate they are for promotion. Then I tried to convince the assembled group that the subject of our illustrious panel should be about the impact of the changing technological landscape on writing itself. I might as well have uttered a dirty word. The emails back and forth flew like some Facebook chain run amuck. It turns out that at least this group of novelists and non-fiction book writers of note, not unlike many others, demand to keep their heads placed firmly in the sand. The are purists. Artist of a certain type who refuse to soil their craft with commerce.
Then I went to the U2 concert.
The contrast could not have been any starker. It was perhaps the best concert I had been to, not because of the music (which, let's be honest, is amazing ... thanks to the Edge) but because of how it was presented. We know the songs because they have been played on apple commercials over and over again. We care because Bono makes the music relevant. He has volunteers on stage and gives away the revenue from the most expensive tickets to his Foundation. We go crazy because of the wildly cool high tech stage, the strength of the music itself, and the added meaning of feeling like we are all part of a movement towards doing good.
Which brings me back to books, or rather what used to be called books. I am sure electronic readers will get better and better and we will all read on them more. But that isn't the real point. The way we write and think about writing books has to change for them to remain relevant in the 21st century. The head-in-the-sand-I-am-an-artist-don't-bother-me attitude won't work.
The books of the 21st century will no longer be sold by an agent to a publishing house who tries to sell them to chain bookstores on consignment at a tiny margin. That was a broken system decades ago and is now officially dead.
The most successful books of the future will look more like the U2 concert. At the core will be great writing on a topic of interest.
But the book will be published by the author, or an investor group, who assembles a team of professionals -- editor, book designer, brand marketer, social media guru, event planner, web master, film maker, even charitable foundation -- to create a multi-media experience around the book and sells them directly to consumers without all the intermediaries taking their cut. The most successful will, like Bono, attach themselves to a cause that resonates with readers. The book may be paper or electronic, but everything else about the process will look more like the release of an independent film or a new album. Writers, and the cogs in the old school publishing machine, may be the most resistant to the 21st century media world. But they will have to accept the future or get run over like so many vinyl LPs.
Follow Tom Matlack on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tmatlack
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If writers thought like Bono they wouldn't be writers.
They would be self-promotional marketing wizard pop stars.
Wonderful.
But would they actually write any decent literature?
U2 are a very nice live act. But they are part of the pop music continuum which ceased being a forum for original vision and musical genius sometime in the early 70's. Some very enjoyable pop bands have appeared since then.
But if you think that U2 have offered a degree of artistry comparable to Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" or the Beatles, "Sgt. Pepper's" please pass the pop Kool Aid. Pop music has been on the recycling/sampling button for quite some time now.
Real writers have to think like real writers. And they must follow their own twisted crucibles in order to elevate our world without second guessing and disrupting their creative flow with marketing concepts.
You are talking about pop culture and, yes, in that sense, everything should be like a U2 concert - books, films, painting, poetry, and even pop music.
Let's leave writing to the real writers, though. We need our Faulkner's and Voltaire's.
"The most successful books of the future will look more like the U2 concert. "
Expensive, noisy, and droningly repetitive?
I like your vision of future book marketing but, for me, it will never replace the experience of spending an afternoon digging through the bookstore. In fact, I probably won't pay any more attention to those marketing campaigns that I do to the over-blown campaigns that are currently running for every other product on the market. However, anything that puts more of the profits into the writers' hands can only be a good thing.
Writers don't have the head in the sand about technology, but when it comes to the business of writing, most non-writers certainly do.
Comparing a concert by U2--one of the most financially successful bands in history--to a book is head scratching. Who do you think paid to put that concert on? A tech firm. If publishers vanish, who do you think will pay to produce a book? No one.
As far a creating a "multi-media experience" for books, what would that look like exactly? A smoke machine, video screen and a few dancers behind an author while he or she reads? Yeah, that's the ticket. And that investor group? You just described exactly what a book publisher does for authors.
On the subject of tickets, were you planning on 60,000 to 80,000 attendees at your panel who were willing to shell out a few hundred dollars to hear your famous authors? And then take that on the road for 50 or 60 nights? I just checked ticketmaster--2 tickets to see U2 in Atlanta are $562. If that's the plan, sign me up.
Is it OK if I hold on to my worn copy of Make Way For Ducklings?
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