5 Myths About the New Era of Publishing

Three weeks ago, The New York Times reported that . Last week, their .

It’s upsetting news for anyone working at the intersection of digital media and literature.

We still don’t know what exactly went wrong at Byliner, though speculation points toward a poor engagement strategy and a . Fair enough. These are common problems for startups. When you’re a new player in the game, messaging is your lifeblood.

But following Byliner’s story got me thinking about this thing we call

What if it’s not just messaging that tripped Byliner? What if some of our common beliefs about how to marry digital media and literature, beliefs that form the basis of the Byliner model, are misguided?

When I read and talk about digital publishing, about how innovation and technology can grow and change the business of literature to the benefit of writers and publishers alike, I hear the same few convictions over and over again…

And I’m beginning to think they might all be dead wrong.

Myth #1: Spotify and Netflix are Strong Role Models

I hear this a lot: publishing should look to the music and film business, to platforms like Spotify, Pandora and Netflix,

But maybe these companies are tenuous role models at best. For now, at least. Or forever.

I love Spotify and Netflix as much as the next person. Their success is appealing. Then I remember being thirteen. I remember Napster and Kazaa. I remember Winamp, torrents, Pirate Bay. I remember that Spotify didn’t materialize overnight. It was the result of more than a decade of struggle between powerful music companies, music fans, and artists. And it’s still not perfect. Spotify has been criticized by, among others, .

Just last year, Godrich Tweeted:

The numbers don’t even add up for Spotify yet. But it’s not about that. It’s about establishing the model which will be extremely valuable. Meanwhile small labels and new artists can’t even keep their lights on. It’s just not right.

So the notion that we can take an imperfect model and product that resulted from a protracted struggle and simply lay it on top of the business of literature, a very different business, is simplistic, myopic, and certainly not disruptive.

Napster was disruptive. Spotify is the still flawed evolution of that disruption. The business of literature must have innovation that scares the status quo before it can have innovation that comes even close to working.

It also must have innovation that swells from the ground up — not top-down models imposed on books and readers because it worked for music and film.

Spotify and Netflix are successful because long before they existed legions of people traded and downloaded music and movies on the web, often illegally. They provide all the value of a Napster to the end user with none of the negative consequences, while solving some, but certainly not all, of the problems for musicians/record labels/film companies.

Piracy isn’t a large enough problem in the business of literature for the same model to work now, especially an imperfect one.

And it might never work because the problems faced by both industries are different.

Which leads me to myth #2

Myth #2. We Will Find A Solution

The fact that so many people think a Spotify/Netflix model can work for literature worries me. It’s indicative of a pattern of thinking that goes something like this:

1) Discover a solution that works in another media industry.

2) Try that solution on literature.

This process leaves out an important step: identify the problem.

What problem, really, did Byliner solve? Richard Nash, the VP of Partnerships at Byliner, writes in his essential essay :

Any experienced entrepreneur or venture capitalist will warn you not to be a solution in search of a problem.

He’s right. But I’m not sure the business of literature, or Nash himself, has followed this advice.

Here, we can look to the music business for guidance.

If we’re to take any advice from what’s happened to music over the past two decades it should be that innovation begins by solving a problem for a very large group of people: fans (or readers). The second most important group? Mid-List writers. Solve a problem for readers, solve a problem for writers struggling to find exposure, encourage widespread use of those solutions, demonstrate over and over again your value, and then and only then will you have a viable solution for the business of literature.

But I’ll ask again: What’s the problem? Or are our solutions stuck searching for one?

In Byliner’s case, is it that longform journalism isn’t easy enough to access? That’s not true. You can find longform all over the web. Is the problem that Jodi Picoult and Jon Krakauer need another venue to publish longer pieces online? I doubt it, but, even if that were the case, this is only a problem for a small group of elite writers. Do I, the reader, need a place where I can access pieces by these writers? Nope. Especially not if I have to pay for it. I can easily find work by the Atwoods, Picoults, and Krakauers elsewhere on the web, or at my local bookstore, or on my bookshelf at home.

The point is that innovators in digital publishing have to identify and articulate the problem that needs solving before dreaming up solutions, and the recent struggles at Byliner suggest that, maybe, that hasn’t happened.

Myth #3: Longform Journalism Should be The Backbone of Digital Innovation.

No one has really said this, but, for some reason, longform journalism has become the de facto content for digital publishing experimentation, so it’s implied. Byliner, Longform, Longreads, and a number of other emerging platforms focus primarily on narrative journalism.

Most of these services make a case for the value of their back content, too. Byliner boasts that it has more than 30,000 stories. That’s a lot. But journalism has a shelf life. Certainly, seminal pieces exist that retain their value for decades and longer. In general, though, that content stales over time because it is, by nature of its form, dated (a byline, by traditional definition, is one part name of the author, one part date, one part location).

I’m not saying that it isn’t valuable to have access to longform pieces covering events that occurred a decade or more earlier, but they certainly won’t be my top choices if I’m looking to read something topical.

Longform journalism is still journalism. More often than not, its value peaks immediately after publication, and diminishes over time, like a new car. So why do we rely on it so much?

Myth #4: Big Names Matter

The business of digital literature loves name brand writers. Byliner advertises work from Margaret Atwood, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jon Krakauer, among others. made a big splash with (which is great, by the way). The implication seems to be: we are a successful venture because we work with established writers that you know. Or: we publish high quality work.

I’m aware of why companies like Byliner and The Atavist are compelled to make this association. It’s a form a validation. It says to your new, skeptical audience: we’re legitimate.

But it’s a risky tactic for two reasons:

1) The company needs the writer more than the writer needs the company. In short, Karen Russell could’ve successfully published Sleep Donation without The Atavist, but the Atavist could not have gotten all that attention from a publication without Karen Russell.

2) It generates an illusion of success and engagement that cannot be separated from the powerful brand of the author. What I mean is: sales for Sleep Donation could be fantastic, engagement in The Atavist’s app could have blown through the roof following its publication, but, at the end of the day, you have to account for the Karen Russell factor.

The funny thing about this is it’s a very conservative approach for so called innovative digital publishing ventures to take. For a long time, we’ve bemoaned the over dependence of traditional print publishing on multi-million dollar writer brands like J.K. Rowling, whose sales make up for the losses publishers take on mid-list titles.

Why risk replicating this trend in the digital space?

There are other, better ways to convince people that the work we make available through our platforms is worth reading than associations with name brands.

Myth #5: We Are Publishers

The New Era of Publishing. Digital Publishing. Publishing on the Web. Whenever we talk about technology and literature it’s assumed that we’re operating as publishers.

There’s just one problem. The web, Kindle, ebooks, everything digital makes publishing, well, not that special. I can publish a book tomorrow. I’m publishing this piece in a few hours. Publishing belongs to everyone, and if everyone can do it themselves, then there’s no strong reason for your service to exist. Not if it’s primarily for publishing.

, a company I like with a beautiful publishing platform, recently issued a statement , with some qualifications.

Why?

Why embrace a label that makes you just like everyone else? I’m not sure that Medium is really a publisher, but they said it, and that alone points to a tension. I’m certain Medium is aware of the limbo state in which their platform resides. and this recent statement is full of equivocation. We’re a publisher. We’re a platform. Well….

I’m beginning to wonder what it means to publish anymore, and I’m not sure that those of us working to usher literature into the digital space should be so quick to give ourselves that label.

Are our publisher forefathers in the traditional arena really that much to admire?

If we’re to look to the traditional publishing model for services we might provide in the digital space, don’t we serve our causes better by thinking of ourselves as distributors, as publicists, as social lubricators? Aren’t these the functions that not just anyone can provide for themselves?

Between Facebook and Twitter, between all the clickbait and all the quizzes and all the lists, the average person reads a ton every day.

There’s room for literature in that reading.

But it will take a special platform to make it a more visible option in all that clutter — a platform that, maybe, isn’t a publisher at all.