Is anyone familiar with Seth Godin and his Domino Project? He’s a very smart, forward thinking guy, and while his books are all non-fiction, here’s hoping there are other hip geeks who are committed to making the most of digital publishing.

If the world was a better place we’d all be celebrating YOUR return to writing.

You’ve been missed. 🙂

The only Big Six publisher I know who’s trying to go digital straight on (without first printing the book) is HarpersCollins with the new twist they’ve just put on their Authonomy site. Go check it, it’s quite interesting.

They say that the ms that gets the most votes in a month will get published as an ebook, an if it sells well, then it will be published as a printed book!

They’ve reversed the traditional process! That’s quite revolutionary really.

I hope they’re also better than most at avoiding conversion errors. They probably are since they’re already running this virtual community, Authonomy, with very few glitches (I participated for a while and found it rather well run).

Speaking for myself, I self-published some of my back titles (originally published in Italian, I translated the books myself, a lot of work!) using BookBaby and I must say they are very professional. As far as I know (and can see) they haven’t done any conversion errors at all…

@ Alan — I believe this is the time for authors to make the best possible decisions for themselves. Each author must decide this based on career goals. And, yes, there are publishers who are trying digital first/print maybe options. Slow going, I think, but it’s happening.

@ Nicola — Feeling like a warped Sally Field here! Workflow is going to be *the* issue of the next few years. It’s going to be ugly, and it’s going to be expensive. Ain’t no way around that. The digital problem comes from what we call the duck beaver process (I have been told duck beaver is what some Canadians call the platypus). A platypus is an ungainly, weird animal that looks like it has been cobbled together. It shouldn’t work. It does. Digital publishing is the same way. It has been grafted onto the traditional process. This, I will note, is understandable. It’s really, really hard to justify undergoing a massive culture and process change when you do not know how the business will shake out.

Which, I will say, is not excuse for not doing the basic job of publishing books, but it does help explain why this hasn’t happened yet. It makes me sad, but the current process is more expensive. You are right that it shouldn’t be conversion. We should be talking about one master file that is in a format capable of being output to all other formats (including print). Alas, this dream has snags galore! (hint: so much easier with narrative fiction, non-fiction than highly formatted text).

Customer service. Oy. Readers have not traditionally been the end customer of publishers. They (publisher) are learning how to communicate in an effective manner, and it’s not always as easy as it looks. For example, HC does not necessarily have a direct relationship with all the people who bought Reamde from the Kindle store. The tweets relating this post were interesting: some called it Amazon’s problem, some called it HC’s mistake. Depends on your perspective. I think this is going to improve. It has to. But talk about culture change!

I thought this was a great opportunity for HarperCollins. I clearly think it was a missed opportunity. And I am — obviously — angered by the price drop.

I don’t count BookCountry, which I think is absolutely freaking amazing. But it’s not a publisher project, at least not in the way we think of it. It’s a Pearson thing, which allows the entire BC team to experiment and play without worrying about what “Penguin” needs. I think this is critical. Which, yeah, means we should talk about this more detail.

@ David — I am big believer in great customer service (have the scar on my arm to prove it). A bookstore — digital or physical — is only as good as the experience it offers. That is a complex concept; what customers want from their bookstore varies from person to person, situation to situation, location to location. Luckily, consumers can vote with their feet (or fingers). Personally, I feel a store that doesn’t honor all customers is doomed to failure, but I don’t know the actual dynamics here.