Earlier this week, I came across an article by Patrick Kingsley in the Guardian that introduced me to a new book format gaining popularity in Europe.
The Flipback opens horizontally, is small enough to fit in the front pocket of your stylish new skinny jeans, and doesn’t have a battery that might conk out in the middle of Chapter 32.
Kingsley reports that these minibooks have become quite a success in the Netherlands, where over a million have been sold, and that there are plans to expand the market from Holland and Spain to France and the UK. I wouldn’t be surprised if the new format soon appears in the US, as well.
Of course, the question in Kingley”s title–”Could This New Book Kill the Kindle?”–is posed in jest. Nothing is going to slow down Kindle sales any time soon. Not with Hachette Livre announcing this week that its e-book market now makes up 23% of its US sales. Nor with the possibility that Amazon might create its own Android tablet and predictions that the Kindle itself will be given away for free as early as this November.
But the Flipback is a fun new option for readers. And pot smokers will enjoy rolling a spliff with an onionskin page of Stephen King’s Misery. (Nothing like getting high while Annie sledgehammers Paul’s fibulae into shards, eh?)
Reading about Flipbacks took me back to my days at the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz, Germany, the town where the famous inventor built the first movable-type press and started a revolution in literacy rivaled only by the Information Age. (To this day, each summer on Johannisnacht printer’s devils are dunked in ice cold water in the Mainzer Marktplatz.)
I used to spend hours in the university bookstore around the corner from my tiny cell in the Internationale Wohnheim, Forum 5, trying to improve my German and amassing a stack of books to send back home. As they were cheap and remarkably compact, my favorite line of books soon became Reclam‘s Taschenbuch: little yellow books with Bible pages and ridiculously small type that would fit in my back pocket far better than France’s so-called Livres de Poche.
I still have a few dozen of these tiny books on my shelves–from a copy of Plotinus’s Enneads to Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie to a compendium of German Expressionismus.
Given the enduring popularity of Reclam’s series, I expect the Flipback will become a more popular format in the near future. (And I hear they don’t fall apart after a couple of reads, either!)
“‘Cause It Doesn’t Matter How Good Your Book Is If Nobody Knows About It”: Kameron Hurley’s comments on writers (natural introverts) marketing their books (an inherently extroverted activity) are particularly useful to independent authors.
This post on Brainpickings.org expands on the last post here on Elemenopic on Amazon’s Kindle Singles and TEDBooks as the revitalization of long-form journalism and the chapbook.
Even more interesting, though, is the update on Seth Godin’s Domino Project launch and the release of Poke the Box on Amazon.
Finally, the Brainpickings post reviews John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture:
Hovering between a serious academic text and an Entourage for the publishing business, full of high-rolling agents and drama-ridden deals, Merchants of Culture is as much a how-to for the everyman author as it is a what-now for the digitally paralyzed publisher, as well as an all-around treat for anyone interested in the future of the written word.
Remember the chapbook, that specialty of small presses that has all but died in the contemporary publishing market? Well, they are making a comeback… in new digital formats.
Two new lines of e-books attempt to revive the lost art of short-form fiction, journalism, and nonfiction: Amazon’s Kindle Singles and TEDBooks are both welcome additions to the literary marketplace.
Kevin Smith and Jon Gordon are taking a novel approach to the distribution of their latest film, Red State.
Rather than “‘buy’ an opening weekend by pouring millions of dollars into TV spots, billboards and print ads” their start-up studio, The Harvey Boys, will “instead use our creative abilities that resulted in a film in the first place to also creatively SELL that film directly to our public…”
By independently releasing the film, the Harvey Boys “will not spend a dime on old world media buys (such as TV/Print/Outdoor) as we self-distribute our film, Red State, in an admittedly unconventional, yet extremely cost effective, word of mouth/viral campaign.”
In their “Red Statement,” the filmmakers note that “it’s apparent the traditional distribution mechanism is woefully out of touch with not only the current global economy, but also the age of social media.”
The Harvey Boys’ solution: “Don’t hate the studio; BECOME the studio.”
Poster for the Hardy Boys' independently released film Red State
The other day, I came across a piece about independent author Amanda Hocking, who is reportedly making a killing in the independent book market. Eli James at Novelr followed this up today with a very optimistic post about the future of the independent book market.
You can click the links above to see the original post about Hocking and the follow-up. I am reposting my response to the latter below.
I love your optimism about all of the exciting new options available to authors. You are right that it all starts with disruption–and the more the traditional modes of distribution are disrupted and other channels opened, the more opportunity there is for everyone.
Even in the traditional book market, it is up to the community of readers to decide what “quality” is and invest in what they like. Moreover, just because a book is published by a traditional publisher does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that it is any good. As a proofreader in the traditional publishing industry, I edit books all the time that are of no literary value whatsoever. (Such titles are, however, marketable.) So, again, it’s up to the community of readers to read, judge, and advocate for their favorite authors.
However, Isa’s comment that independent authors must invest in editing is spot on. The next step for authors is to organize and form their own imprints using these new means of distribution–to build a brand that signals the authors’ standards of quality. My colleagues and I at Elemenopic Books are trying to develop a model for this–and like any open-source organization, we love the idea that other authors and freelancers might follow our model if it happens to work for them.
Jane Friedman of Writer’s Digest’s There Are No Rules blog offers some great advice on how to use social media marketing successfully to promote your work.
The CliffsNotes version: Don’t be a shill; take part in a community!
Surprisingly, the inspiration for this collective was not literary but musical.
After reading Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback, a fantastic history of hip-hop I edited for Penguin Group (USA), I began to realize that the same business model that gave rise to hip-hop music in the 1980s could be applied to the book market.
Just as music in the early days of hip-hop was revolutionized by new voices that the mainstream ignored, so too can authors come together to build their own brand in defiance of a similarly moribund, middle-brow, and overly profit-minded book industry.
Maybe one day Elemenopic will be the Jay-Z of the book world… Hova!
Elemenopic Books is an authors’ collective bringing unconventional, high-quality works of fiction and nonfiction to the marketplace.
We need authors, editors, cover/interior/Web designers, programmers, and video experts to get Elemenopic started, and we would love to have you come in on the ground floor!
