Sunday, June 14, 2009
Good Grief, We’re Actually Doing This (and you can play along at home)
Whoa. Just a few weeks ago, Quartet Press was still a gleam in our collective eye, but after much conversation and debate, we’re off to the races with our new digital publishing venture. It’s equal parts exciting, terrifying and overwhelming in the number of things that need to be decided, planned and executed. Because we made a conscious decision early on that we’d only work with people who shared our sense of enthusiasm and fun, it’s also tremendously energizing. We hope you feel that energy now and going forward.
One of Quartet’s core values is being as transparent as possible in our relationships with readers, authors and the entire bookish community. As a part of that, I’ll post periodically about what it’s like to do a startup in the rapidly evolving e-reading space and covering our trials and travails as we rush toward our Fall 2009 launch. I come to the venture with the perspective of a traditional print publisher, and from running a number of bookish and non-bookish businesses for nearly thirty years, so I’m hopeful we can blend the wisdom gained with experience with the innovations that technology makes possible today. I understand from hard experience what’s broken in the traditional publishing/distribution model. And I understand that professionalism on the business side and great storytelling are not mutually exclusive. We’ll experiment and adapt our business model and practices as we learn and grow. We hope you’ll comment and offer your suggestions so we can avoid some of the mistakes you’ve seen (or made) and so our end product is what you as members of our bookish community are looking for.
We’ll be talking here about everything from grand plans (“What is Quartet trying to accomplish anyway?”) to the nitty-gritty details (“How do you get ISBN numbers and why are they so doggone expensive?”) of a new digital publishing venture, but for now, let’s talk about a few things we’re focused on in the context of our “Big Idea” – building a viable business around the notion of connecting readers and authors with great stories, making it easy to discover, purchase and read terrific digital books in any format (DRM-free), and creating a community where readers, authors, bookish types of all stripes, and those interested in the sea-changes underway in publishing can gather to talk about these things and whatever else interests them.
With that in mind, four things are priority projects for us right now:
Outstanding Book Discovery and Shopping Experience: You just want to find and buy the book. We get it. We’re convinced finding and buying e-books is too hard right now and this is one thing deterring many readers from moving from print to “e”. Kirk and the rest of the tech team are designing a discovery and shopping experience that’s easy, fast and doesn’t require jumping through hoops to get out the door.
Read Quartet Books Wherever You Want: We believe when you buy our books they’re yours. You should be able to read them on any device you have and share them as you see fit. We’re working with some terrific consultants to make our books available in as many common formats as possible and to serve them up without the hassles of DRM, (We believe DRM frustrates paying customers and is not particularly effective in deterring piracy anyway, so why bother?) Converting a manuscript to multiple formats that display properly on the wide variety devices out there today (not to mention those on the horizon), like loving, isn’t easy, so we’re spending lots of time and resources to get it right.
Great Authors Mean Great Books: Kassia’s already begun to receive manuscripts and expects to be seeing many more. We’re firm believers in creating an experience for our authors that makes it easy, enjoyable and profitable for them (you?) to work with us on an ongoing basis. Right now it means developing an Author Contract that’s fair to each of us and is explicit about what we expect from the author and what the author can expect from us. It’s not only good business—it’s the right thing to do.
A Comfortable Place for the Community: The only thing more fun than reading books is talking about books and we want Quartet to be, if not a formal literary salon, at least a place where you can kick back with friends, have a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and talk about what you’re reading, digital publishing and ebooks, or anything else that’s on your mind. We’ll be everywhere you are (conferences, book fairs, Facebook, Twitter and pretty much everywhere else bookish types are hanging out) but Kat and her team are working hard to make Quartet the place you and your friends want to spend your time.
There are a bazillion details behind each of these broad projects (and a bazillion other things happening in parallel) that we want to get right. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how we should do it. It’s our business, but it’s all about you, so chime in and help us make Quartet Press all you want it to be.
A thought, as I’ve toyed with putting my unpubbed novel up at places for people to read. Formatting is a flipping pain in the ass. It has occurred to me though, that pubs typically ask for documents in particular formats, usually .doc files. Is this the easiest document format for conversion purposes? If your pubbing to Kindle or epub format, there are issues here. Simple things like smart quotes instead of straight quotes, ellipses, emdashes, and the like don’t covert terribly well. It might behoove you as a pub to determine more specific formatting requirements that make multiple conversions easier on your part, because I know from experience that going through a novel to change a lot of minor formatting issues is very time consuming. Given you will have a lot of ms’s to deal with, screening out the issues upfront may save you a fair amount of editing time down the road.
Oh, another thought, if it hasn’t been considered. In your store, it might be beneficial to include links to the various apps and programs people would likely use to read your books so they don’t have to be searching form them on their own.
Great idea on the links to reading apps Jim.
Re: formatting. It seems most of the world uses Word (for better or worse) so that will very likely be our preferred submission format.
We’re working on some super-secret ninja conversion processes that will minimize many of the issues you’ve noted.
We’re also working on a Word template that authors will be encouraged to use. That should greatly simplify conversion to HTML, EPUB, and other formats.
Since you’ve talked about transparency and doing what’s fair for everyone–and your mission seems to be all about having a win-win positive relationship with business partners (readers & writers) I’m impressed and hopeful as a writer.
I wonder if you plan to give advances to writers you contract with and share in the marketing of books (unlike many e-publishers).
This is important for many writers who might otherwise not bother to send submissions to an e-publisher.
Good luck!
Hi Stephanie — I’m going to be frank: while we’re in start-up mode, we will not be paying advances to authors. We will be paying royalties that compare to other digital publishers (we’ll be releasing details once the base contract is finalized). As we grow, we may revisit this policy. I know this can be a sensitive issue for some authors, so I want to explain the logic a bit.
We made a concerted decision to focus our initial investment on building the best possible infrastructure. While we’ll be talking in more detail about this over the next few months — hopefully dispelling the myth that anyone with a laptop and Internet connection can create a viable digital publisher! — this investment includes building a good process for converting your manuscript file into a clean EPUB file (which will then be converted to various file formats for customers), ensuring we have a good title management system in place (essential for making sure books have good metadata and other information for selling), editorial (I am a firm believer in good editing!), and even a robust royalty system (making sure authors get paid in an timely and accurate manner is essential!).
Oh, and marketing. You asked about that specifically, and I’m going to answer what I believe is your question (if it’s not, shout out and I’ll give it another go). It makes no sense of us to publish a book and then not market it. We plan to focus our efforts on marketing that sells books. This means trying different approaches and making sure we get out to where readers are. This marketing effort is a key part of our initial and ongoing investment.
That being said, it’s important that authors participate in marketing efforts as well. Nobody cares about your career more than you do. We’re building tools to help authors learn more about social media, social marketing, and other online efforts (websites, blogs) — we want to make sure you understand this media, how it works, and how to use it to your best advantage. We have no intention of throwing you out there and saying, “Here’s your book, go sell it.” Your success is our success, and we want to make sure you get all the support we can offer.
If you have any more questions, please ask. While we won’t offer up Social Security numbers, but we’ll answer as fully and honestly as we’re able.
You may have already addressed these points, but two suggestions that have popped into my mind are:
1) Make sure the e-books are in a format that allows them to be read aloud by a computer, and also allows the font size to be enlarged if the buyer chooses. Lots of vision-impaired people are buying e-books but find it incredibly frustrating if they can’t read them in large type or can’t have them read aloud to them via their computer.
2. Have the first chapter available as free-to-read on the website where the e-books are sold.
Thanks for raising these issues Fran.
I’ll be writing about this at more length soon, but the short answer is that our books will be completely accessible. We will not be using DRM of any sort, so the read-aloud feature should work on your device or application of choice.
Likewise, our books will be reflowable, so you’ll be able to adjust the font size while maintaining readability.
We’re also planning to make samples available for each book. At least the first chapter, but very likely more.
Have you looked into the Atlantis word processing program? It has a feature that converts a file to epub format, and the program is only $35.
http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/