From generative writing tools to augmented publishing processes, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing and challenging the landscape of creative writing and publishing. To respond, MyWorld and Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) and Narrative and Emerging Technologies (NET) Lab have developed a series of free webinars, Writing with Technologies, to offers an in-depth look at AI’s emerging influence across writing and publishing in multiple fields. 

Watch the first of our new series of webinars, writers James Bradley, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and Mujie Li explore the impact of artificial intelligence on the craft of writing. We discuss how AI tools can enhance the creative process through the practical applications of AI in research, editing and idea generation. We explore ethical considerations, copyright issues and the environmental impact of AI tools as well as the limitations of AI for capturing human emotion and nuance and the risk of losing our unique voices. Presented in collaboration with the University of Adelaide and chaired by Professor Patrick Flanery.   

Speaker Bios

Dr James Bradley OAM is a writer and critic. His books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, Clade and Ghost Species, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and a work of non-fiction, Deep Water: The World in the Ocean. He is currently an Honorary Associate at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, and his new novel, Landfall, will be published in 2025.   

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is an author, data scientist and journalist from Sri Lanka. He is also the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Watchdog Sri Lanka, a factchecker, investigative journalism hub and community tech builder. His fiction includes novels like Numbercaste, the Wretched and the Damned, and The Salvage Crew, as well as short stories and the occasional bit of game design. His work has won the Gratiean Prize, been nominated for the Nebula and Independent Games Festival awards, appeared in venues like Wired, ForeignPolicy and Slate, and been Washington Post and Audible bestsellers. He has also shown up on Forbes’ 30 Under 30, been a Dangerous Speech fellow, and spoken at TEDx. He has several cats who care about none of these things and spends most of his time on his homestead in the mountains, learning the care and feeding of potato plants. 

Mujie Li is an experimental writer and a researcher of digital media and culture. Her research explores how literary aspects (such as writing, reading, text and language) in digital and computational technological conditions work together to shape digital aesthetics. She is the author of the novella Mirage Time (2017, published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Recent article: ‘Media Language and the Technological Imaginary’ (2024).   

Chair: 

Dr Patrick Flanery is Chair and Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of the novels Night for Day, I Am No One, Fallen Land, and Absolution, which was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Granta and Zoetrope: All Story. His work has been supported by fellowships at MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.

This article was previously published as a blog post on Bristol & Bath’s Creative R&D Amplified Publishing pathfinder website. 

Home of rebels and revolutionaries, Shelby x Studios is an online platform to connect with other people who want to create a world with community care at its core. By imagining the world without binaries and chains we hope to envisage and enact the dismantling of systems of oppression on the ground in our communities.

Late stage capitalism means we are facing extreme poverty, systemic racism, environmental crisis and if that wasn’t enough, the global pandemic has deepened inequality and made injustice ever more apparent. In order to move towards futures of freedom and joy, it is important that we focus on caring for ourselves and those around us. I believe that collective care is necessary ammunition in the fight against capitalism and that collective creativity is the foundation of our freedom.

My experience of chronic pain and burnout led to no longer being able to participate in activism in the ways that I used to. Shelby x Studios, which uses art to make social justice campaigns more accessible, was built in response to this and connecting with others with similar experiences. Through this platform, I recently launched a digital zine: ART X ACTIVISM = REVOLUTION. Inviting artists and activists to create content spanning illustration, written articles, film and audio, it aims to amplify radical messages from the perspectives of those with lived experience.

Short for ‘magazine’, zines have a long history rooted in radical politics, starting out as political pamphlets and DIY sharing of educational resources. Their low cost, the minimal experience needed and materials required mean zines tend to be made by people excluded from conventional forms of publishing. They have been particularly popular in feminist, punk, anti-racist, anti-imperialist and queer communities.

Countering the often violent and misinformed portrayals presented by mainstream media, zines allow us to tell our own stories, to reclaim our cultures and express the rich nuances of our identities. They are a vehicle for storytelling that seeks to preserve radical history and resist the erasure of marginalised narratives. Zines exist to make art, spread awareness of issues, engage and connect communities and subcultures and elevate voices that otherwise don’t get heard. 

Being able to share information without censorship feels increasingly important in digital spaces. Providing a catalogue of infographics, interactive worksheets and visual notes, Shelby x Studios is building a digital archive of educational resources, using history to inform current activism. Creating a space where anyone can tell their story has resulted in the building of an incredible community and generated some inspiring collaborations.

Shelby x Studios is aligned by four core goals: Community, Art, Revolution & Education, with CARE perfectly becoming an acronym that underlines everything we do. 

(Amplified Publishing Live Drawing by Camille Aubry)

As a fellow on the Amplified Publishing pathfinder of the Bristol + Bath Creative R + D Programme, I will be exploring how the radical roots of DIY zine-making impacts the future of publishing and how we can use digital publishing to:

• Make activism more accessible
• Amplify radical messages
• Share educational resources
• Build communities of care

My core questions are:

1. What is the role of digital publishing in making social justice work more accessible?
2. What is the impact of using creativity in digital publishing to engage audiences?
3. What is the relationship between the digital and the physical?
4. How do we create genuine communities of care online?

I will explore these questions through a series of zines titled*:

1. The Radical Roots of DIY Zine-Making
2. TAKE CARE
3. Revolution = Love (Part 2)
4. Motherhood & The Movement
5. Choose Your Own Adventure
6. The Sound of Revolution

*Working titles

Both the radical history of zine-making and my roots as a printmaker have played a big role in how I have approached this research. Digital publishing has generated new ways of reaching audiences but due to its often intangible nature, something which digital publishing can lack, is the ability to ignite our senses. Combined with human imagination, the advancements in technology continue to go beyond expectations and I am interested in how perceived parameters around this can be challenged. I’m especially keen to explore the role of traditional techniques used in both the creation and distribution of zines and what this looks and feels like when reimagined and applied in digital spaces.

With the aim of making activism more accessible, amplifying radical messages, sharing educational resources and building communities of care, I plan to experiment with different forms of creativity to develop hybrid digital and physical experiences. Disabled artists and artists who experience chronic pain have for a long time found new ways to come together and connect within and beyond our networks. Having entered wider consciousness in response to the pandemic, new possibilities around access, such as collaborating with people across the country and internationally, have opened up. Holding my research discussions with people in both physical and digital spaces will inform how content is produced and shared across the different spaces we navigate, with a focus on exploring frameworks for embedding care.

The opportunities that come with digital publishing allow us to push the boundaries of what a ‘zine’ could be and therefore how people access the content that Shelby x Studios offers. Through this process, the current zine will continue to shapeshift from static pages to recorded discussions, interactive worksheets, visual notes, moving images and other forms of creativity I am yet to imagine. 

The process of collaboratively creating content can be healing and allows space and time to reflect, connect and develop ideas. This space for discussion between artists and activists will enable us to challenge one another, raise new questions and highlight the importance of sharing ideas and resources. By celebrating the role that community plays, I hope to engage new and diverse audiences, whilst strengthening existing relationships. 

In order to overcome barriers to participation, I seek to push back against the ways in which current systems can prohibit us. This series of zines will unpack what activism means, challenge stereotypical associations of particular identities and bring hidden topics out of the shadows. 

If you are interested in anything this blog has gone into, I would love to hear from you. You can contact me via hello@shelbyxstudios.com, check out more of my work via www.shelbyxstudios.com or instagram and support the zine here.

In introducing my new novel, author Ryan O’Neill puts it most succinctly:

This is an introduction to a novel you will never read.

He adds hastily that he is referring not to the book in your hands, the one he hopes you’re about to begin, but the novel that inspired his words, the novel he read.

The novel in question is Ex Libris and regardless of which copy you read it contains twelve chapters that can be shuffled into any order. The number of variations possible with such a structure is a little over 479 million. It has been published in both standard paperback and ebook editions, each copy a newly shuffled order of chapters unique to that copy alone. The manuscript that Ryan read in order to create his introduction is different to the finished copy now in his possession, which is in turn different from every other copy ever made.

I have written about Ex Libris previously where I noted that this kind of storytelling has its precedents, the most significant of which all hail from the 1960s. Nanni Balestrini’s Tristano was conceived and written using early computer programming to randomise its content between copies, though it wasn’t published as intended until print technology had caught up in 2007. Other similar books were housed in a box, either as loose leaves (Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta) or as chapter booklets (The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson). Of these, Johnson’s novel provided the most direct influence on the structure of Ex Libris: the fluid pieces of the story are defined not arbitrarily by the size of the page, but by the narrative itself. The story is broken into discrete, meaningful components that combine to form a larger picture.

What Ryan alludes to in his opening statement is that any work structured in this way presents a challenge to critical reading. How can readers universalise their experience if the texts they read are never consistent? You may disagree with someone else’s reading of a text, but you do so on the fundamental understanding that both of you have at least read the same words in the same order. John Bryant’s scholarship on textual fluidity through editions, translations, and adaptations demonstrates that texts are never as concrete as we might assume. But variation between editions is a long way from a narrative that changes by design between individual copies. Although it is possible to arrange Ex Libris in approximate chronological order (some events in the story clearly happen before others), each of the novel’s fluid chapters is a vignette, dependent on the others for context, but not for prior knowledge. I have used the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle to explain this to readers: smaller narratives link together to form a larger picture. The order in which the pieces are placed changes the individual’s progress but doesn’t change the ultimate picture.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

It can be difficult to get past the structure itself and the mathematics behind it as many contemporary and more recent reviews of recombinant works demonstrate. Umberto Eco in his introduction to Tristano, focuses almost exclusively on the novel’s number of permutations with only a cursory nod to the story. This might be understandable for a novel that, though beautiful, has a deliberately tenuous grip on character, plot, and setting. But the same approach is repeated in reviews of Saporta, Johnson, and other similar works. It is as though the flashy acrobatics of the novel’s physical construction obscure what the writers are doing within. And the critics’ resulting performative bewilderment or pithy dismissal of a wacky experiment seem to me like missed opportunities.

When the assumed shared experience of an audience is modified or removed altogether, how does their engagement with a narrative change? Some clues may be found in my own experience on both sides of the reader/writer divide. How I initially read and thought about a fluid novel like The Unfortunates, for example, is very different to how I have come to think about Ex Libris and that change in point of view has been illuminating.

My experience with The Unfortunates suggests that a first reading looms large in one’s perception of story. While reading, I had to keep reminding myself that the clever positioning of two adjacent scenes was attributable not only to the author’s craft but also to sheer happenstance. We’re trained to read stories as linear and it’s a hard habit to break. When I return to The Unfortunates today, no matter how many times I reshuffle its contents, the story is always coloured by that first reading and how the chapters initially unfolded. That first reading has become my definitive version of the novel from which all others deviate.

Readers of Ex Libris may have a similar experience, perhaps moreso given their copy cannot be physically reconstructed. Information that colours the perception of the characters and their actions may come earlier or later and its impact will undoubtedly shift. Readers who see more of a particular character earlier, for example, may centre the story around them in a way others won’t. Several of the fluid chapters also contain crucial pieces of information that change a character’s image or motivation and cast events elsewhere in the story in a different light. Reviewing the chapter order for each copy, I frequently pay attention to where these chapters fall, wondering how their precise location changes the tenor of the story.

I say I wonder because, primarily, I must rely on guesswork. My perception of the novel is not of a puzzle but of narrative pieces in constant motion, a true fluid state. As I worked on it, Ex Libris formed a kind of web, a set of interlocking shorter narratives that fed into a larger complex. For me there can never be a definitive version of the story, only discrete narrative chunks that cross-reference, echo, or contrast, but never line up precisely.

Unlike The Unfortunates which can be endlessly reshuffled, Ex Libris is presented to the reader as a single, fixed manifestation of the narrative. But it’s also a window, a viewport through which you might catch a glimpse of what I see. Without the capacity to physically manipulate pages, the reader must instead imagine that fluid state and the differences in emphasis that come with changes in how the story unfolds. With Ex Libris, like with all fluid texts, a critical reading should regard not only the text as it’s presented, but also with the text in every conceivable other version. The success or otherwise of any one version of the narrative is merely a subset of nearly half a billion possible narratives in the aggregate. Though difficult to fully conceive, this is something I suspect many readers instinctively know. A common reaction from those who have finished the novel is to seek out other readers to compare notes.

But what readers who squint to catch glimpses of the author’s view may not realise is that they have experienced the story in a way I cannot. I can cast an eye over any number of versions of my story, but I can never see the flow of a linear narrative, only a single path running through that fluid web of chapters. For better or for worse I can never have the experience I had reading The Unfortunates.

I suspect that’s why the story that emerged turned out far more self-reflexive than I had originally intended. Maybe it was inevitable that a narrative featuring a band of literary misfits reconstructing a library from fragments in a dystopian world would eventually turn in on itself, a comment on how fiction can become a vehicle for revealing how we construct our own truths. In the same way the story’s characters can never truly reach the author, so too a reader’s and writer’s experiences always remain tantalisingly out of reach for each other.

Ex Libris is out now.

Reference

Bryant, J., 2005. The Fluid Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

In the run up to the launch of RadioBook Rwanda in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, the three young creatives behind the international publishing project reflect on the digital journey of their new imprint.

Louise Umutoni (Huza Press)

Lily Green (No Bindings)

Otieno Owino (Kwani Trust)

RadioBook Rwanda is a multimedia literary imprint showcasing creative voices from Rwanda and East Africa. It’s first output is a triptych of bilingual pocketbooks with complementary podcasts and audiobooks. The imprint is the brainchild of three independent international publishers: Huza Press (Kigali, RW), Kwani Trust (Nairobi, KE) and No Bindings (Bristol, UK). It was supported by the British Council East Africa Arts Programme. 

Photo by Jo Hounsome

Proposal Stage

What intrigued you to create a multimedia imprint to showcase Rwandan writing?

Louise Umutoni: In Rwanda, radio has has always been really far reaching with many Rwandans tuning in to listen to different radio shows. It has not been the same with reading. The reading culture is still relatively poor. So, we thought, ‘how do we reach people with these texts?’, and turning them into audiobooks seemed like an obvious solution at the time. Just having the material as audio content, online, we anticipated greater reach without having to worry about the hassle of getting the printed texts across borders and oceans and so there were practical reasons too. We also wanted to experiment with this new content and ask, ‘can we go beyond the book, can we have a much wider effect?’.

Otieno Owino: The reasoning for us wanting to create a multimedia imprint came out of us wanting to extend the possibilities of what a book is and how people consume stories. It was also a genuine interest in meeting our audiences in ways that are ‘cool’, essentially because the target audience was younger people (18-35). To speak of Nairobi, there had already been a rising popularity of podcasts as a medium of storytelling and a lot of young people were turning to audiobooks as a means of experiencing stories. This new imprint was to contribute to an already growing fan base of audiobook enthusiasts but offering fresh new writing by Rwandan writers not already well known in Kenya.

Lily Green: With No Bindings, I specialise in combining audio, community and print. Oral storytelling, whether it be ancient epics, or contemporary spoken word, allowed and allows for a different kind of access to literature. Back in 2016, when I started No Bindings, I very much saw podcasts, and to a certain extent, radio as the digitised version of that oral tradition.

The popularity of radio in the East Africa region, the growing demand for podcasts in Kenya, and the publishing community that Huza Press has been building, meant that working with No Bindings was a good fit.

The intrigue for me was learning from the other two publishers and working internationally. Within the collaboration, we all had something to offer: my approach to form, Louise’s ongoing work building up a literary and publishing infrastructure in Rwanda, and Kwani’s long-standing work publishing new literary talent from the continent. The ‘new Art new Audiences’ afforded us the chance to take the risk to create something novel and ambitious.

Knowledge Exchange and Research Trip to Kigali, Rwanda

What did we learn about digital consumption in the UK/Rwanda/Kenya and what were we inspired by?

Louise: For us at Huza, we already knew that Rwandans consume a lot more audio content than they do print. However, I think what was interesting was actually producing the audio content. There were quite a few challenges getting our heads around how to produce an audiobook and getting people who understood what it entailed to work on the product. However, we were really impressed with how quickly people caught on and were willing to experiment and learn. The result was some really fantastic content. There was a lot of learning for us but that’s expected when you are doing something that has not previously been done.  People aren’t accustomed to experiencing books through the radio, so it will be really exciting to see the response when they are broadcast here in Rwanda.

Lily: What didn’t we learn! In March 2019, myself and Eloise Stevens, the audio producer, visited Kigali for for three weeks to learn about what our target audience, 18-35 year olds in Kigali, wanted from books and audio. Louise and Huza’s literary producer, Lucky Grace Isingizwe, already had a lot of understanding around consumption of audio, so we grilled them over many teas and coffees. They also connected us to other digital innovators in the city.

Jado Castor at Radio TV 10 was able to give us insight into what languages to use. Kinyarwanda is spoken by all, but there is a growing demand for English language content among the younger generation

The Girl Effect run Ni Nyaminga, a quarterly magazine and weekly radio show for young girls. It is insanely popular and they have an interactive element through a mobile messaging service.

It became clearer and clearer just how much mobiles and smartphones were the go-to for personal and professional communication. For example, Moto drivers use the uber-like app, SafeMoto. All our meetings were set up via WhatsApp and it felt so intimate to be contacting the leading creatives in the city in that way.

This usage of digital technology got me interested in other ways that we might distribute the audio content besides radio and podcast platforms and I pitched the idea to Louise and Lucky Grace, how would people respond to receiving the audio content through WhatsApp? They were both excited by that idea and Louise put me in touch with her sister, Clarisse Iribagiza, the CEO of tech company, HeHe Limited. The issue we discussed was data. Would there be capacity for 20 – 25 minute audio to be sent from phone to phone? Clarisse introduced me to, ARED, a social enterprise where vendors, the majority women, are given training to maintain solar powered charging kiosks in the city, and make a living off selling charging time. The kiosks also have a WiFi radius of 10m or so, where users interface with a free webpage, with advertisements, before accessing other apps and websites etc. It seemed to me that ‘digital’ in Rwanda was all about the mobile and the smartphone. And, although we found a similar network for fixed internet shops, that also help with government paperwork, this also taught us that digital content was being accessed in places that encourage people to gather in real spaces. Much like an audience gathers around a storyteller, people huddled around WiFi hotspots.

Photo by Jo Hounsome

Publication Stage

Where and how have people experienced the audio so far?

Oti: There was a very positive but mixed reception to the audio elements of the radiobooks in Nairobi. While the dramatized stories brought the print work to a new life and was really well received, it is the conversation podcasts that have been most well talked about by people who’ve listened to the work. People I have spoken to laud the new dynamic brought on by the conversations with the artists and writers involved in the creation of the work and those whose voices depict similar experiences to those in the stories. These readers/listeners say the mix adds to the mood, and gives a glimpse of the collaborative relationships taken in the creation of the stories. The universe of the stories widen, so to speak, and many people were very excited about this. To them, it is as if the very act of the conversations invite the readers into the creation process.

Lily: At the UK launch of RadioBook Rwanda in Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio, the digital content was presented in both an installation and an impromptu cinema like setting.

To realise the former, I teamed up with my fellow Pervasive Media Studio residents Liam Taylor-West and Emma Hughes from Roomsize. Using the platform, Open Space, VR technology allows for the geolocation of sounds around a physical space. A phone in the pocket, headphones and a tracker, means participants can walk around in a space, handsfree, to discover different sounds. I’d experienced this with their Digital Catapult funded prototype, which used music and wondered how this could transfer over to story.

I proposed setting up the room with three focal points, one for each pocketbook. As the user approached the pocketbook, they begin to hear the dramatised narrations. They could choose to stay and listen or move through the other stories. With some cleverly positioned lighting and a view over the harbour lights, guests explained that they left the experience really moved. Much like the the solar kiosks in Rwanda, they had gathered together around digital focal points.

Photo by Mikael Techane.

The Future

What can we do next with RadioBook Rwanda audio?

Louise: We’ve partnered with Ubumuntu Arts Festival and we’re trying to use the audio content during the festival to allow people to engage with the literature. Ubumuntu haven’t had a literary element before and they have asked us to create some literary events and content. This is going to be quite interesting because when people think we’re going to be introducing the literary part of the festival they’ll think books but actually we’ll also be using the audio content and the podcasts.

We are also working on engaging with literary podcasts across the continent and trying to see how they can incorporate the content. What’s really good about this content is that it sets the stage for conversations on themes addressed in the books. We’ll also continue to push the audio content on radio.

Oti: From the outset, we’d thought it would be possible to get the audio featured in local radio stations. That has not been possible in Nairobi, but is something we can still pursue. I do think we can also approach established podcasts in our regions, those that have some following to talk about, as well as play the audio content to their dedicated audiences. I think anything going forward has to be to ensure as many people as possible get to listen to this beautifully produced work.

Lily: For me, I’d certainly like to do more live installations with Roomsize, as well as audio cinemas. The other major line of inquiry I’m pursuing is looking into how pre-existing everyday applications like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger might serve as a means to access the audio content. Through a Network for Creative Enterprise bursary I’ve been able to contract creative technologist Tim Kindberg to investigate how image recognition might mean people can simply take a snap of their book, send it to “RadioBook Rwanda” and receive the audio content in return, thus creating a little library of literary content through interactive conversation. Or, I might look at creating a oral literature on demand telephone line for those who aren’t so digitally literate.

Reflection

What’s been the most interesting or surprising result of creating aural content  in conjunction with publishing a book, especially a book that has hand crafted roots and individually sewn binding?

Louise: Through the production of the audio content there was a coming together of so many people from different creative sectors; the artists and writers, the people involved in the production of audio content, actresses, poets and the translators and editors. It was almost as through a community came and as such there’s been a kind of collective ownership of it. In more traditional publishing a lot of what happens is that internally writers work with editors, whereas with these books it’s been quite outward facing. People, especially those in the Rwandan arts scene, know about RadioBook Rwanda because there’s so many touch points with professionals from a wide range of creative disciplines. I would like to do this kind of collaborative work in the future because we’re bringing something quite Rwandan to the rest of the world.

I would also like future publications to incorporate stories from the region and from the UK. Something more collaborative, maybe RadioBook Kenya, RadioBook UK. The question is, how do we push this platform that we have created a little further to ensure wider collaboration. To use it as a meeting point for our stories and experiences.

Oti: Speaking for Nairobi, I think a lot of people were much more excited about the aural content than with the print book. That was surprising because at Kwani we are well-known for our print work and also because the books were so beautifully done, as most of the participants who bought the books at the launch were quick to say.

Lily: It was the Huza team who really pushed for audiobooks to be made. Previously I’d stuck to creating audio that linked to printed texts more thematically. The use of voice actors was a revelation and breathed life into the audio content in a way I had not been expecting. And the dramatised narrations became the staple resource for the installation and the audio cinema.

I’d say the other interesting aspect was seeing how digital, both as an experience and a practical necessity can gather people in the physical realm, much like a performance. This gives me much encouragement when thinking about developing more digital oral literature.

Access the audio universe of RadioBook Rwanda

Online at radiobookrwanda.com

On Spotify

On Apple Podcasts

On SoundCloud

Buy the printed pocketbooks

In the UK:

Online from No Bindings

Max Minervas, Bristol

In Rwanda:

Online from the Huza Press webstore, Pages Rwanda

In Kenya:

Online from Kwani? via DM on Twitter to @kwanitrust

Pay Attention, it’s 2019.

All of this has been written before, and all of it will be written again, because that’s how the world works.

A little context. I was invited to speak on a panel at Futurebook Live 2018 (November 30th, 2018). Expertly chaired by Macmillan’s Sara Lloyd, the discussion ranged from ‘what we’ve seen that showed us what new forms of storytelling could do’, through the value (or not) of consumer research, and finished with a spirited examination of story as world, world as story, and the value, and process, of innovation. Hence this article, which is going to pin some of those things down as words on a screen.

The first thing I want to say is that innovation isn’t a bad word. I’ve read articles about publishing and its relationship to innovation that have made me wonder whether the word is verboten in the upper echelons of this industry. Innovation, as I see it, is not the expectation of failure, is not driven by data-analytics that won’t let you make a decision until it’s been sense and market-tested to oblivion, is not… (I could go on, but will stop there).

You want to know what innovation is? 

Innovation is passion. Trust, and joy, and permission, and faith. Courage, beauty, and invention. Innovation is a conversation that has the sense to not know where it’s going. Sara said that innovation is about people, not technology, and she’s right. But how we approach and understand that is the difficult bit. How we think about people, how to prevent ourselves from being distracted by shiny things, and how we allow ourselves to have passion, faith, permission and courage.

Passion, faith, permission and courage are things that publishing has in spades, has in every fibre of its being. A belief in the power of reading to change the world. However it is evident (to me, at least) that the curatorial expertise that goes into creating books and the ability to make innovative things that can complement books are not necessarily the same thing.

We still, despite some politicians’ claims to the contrary, live in a world where expertise is a good thing. So here are my suggestions for how innovation might find its way into publishing in 2019.

The first thing. Talk to people who aren’t you. Really. It seems to me that the reason publishing exists as an industry is that it’s actually incredibly difficult to edit, produce, market and distribute a book if you’re not an organisation that’s geared around doing just that, and publishing does do that rather well. And that’s the offer to an author; that a publisher knows what they’re doing. The people you need to talk to about innovation might be experience designers, or technical producers, creative designers, or coders. What matters is that they have something to tell you, but you have to ask first.

The second thing. Marketing is not just about driving sales to a book. Marketing is also about the halo around a book, or an organisation (an imprint, for example). It’s about demonstrating to a reading public, or an author, or anyone involved in the book trade, that you are creative, original, clever, ethical, responsible (again, I could go on)… Those things are just as important, and they will, indirectly, drive sales and attract attention, but those sales will be the result of courage, permission and faith, not metrics.

The third thing. Innovation will cost you money. It isn’t free, and it isn’t cheap. If you want free or cheap, then stop asking for innovation. That said and established, there are plenty of ways to have this not fall entirely on your shoulders. The most obvious one (because I’m also an academic) is to partner with a university. We have access to Industrial Strategy funding that you don’t, but we make a stronger case for some of that money if we have a commercial partner. There are also funding opportunities that need to be led by a commercial organisation, but that are more likely to be awarded if you have an academic institution in the mix too. Working between the university and commercial sectors is how I’ve been able to make a lot of the work I have, and it generally makes everything more interesting. You need to be prepared to commit something – usually time, money or a combination of the two – and you need to share, but the rewards are considerable.

Finally, the fourth thing. If innovation is passion, then talk to artists. Who know more about creating something because they believe in it than almost anyone else in the world (authors aside). They will be mad, most of the time, and they might scare you a little, but they make the things they do because they they’re a little bit driven, because they’re passionate about new ideas and new audiences.

And one more thing, linking back to a piece I wrote here over a year ago. Failure is not what you think it is. Failure is getting better at something because you believe in it, and are given (or have given yourself) permission to keep doing, and to keep trying. Failure goes away when you start thinking imaginatively, when you think about what you’re really trying to achieve in the long term, and stop being quite so focused on the immediate measures of success. Not everything is going to work, but if you’re committed, and stay true to a desire to see change, and to challenge yourself, then if you do stumble, you pick yourself up again and get on with it.

Maybe though, it’s simpler than all of the above. These are all factors to bear in mind, concerns to be considered and advice that is well meant. But maybe innovation is just saying ‘yes’.

The Writing Platform offers a unique environment to publish academic writing that focuses on non-traditional research outputs and non-traditional research methods.

We publish at the intersection between technology and writing and support sharing knowledge that is underrepresented in traditional academic publishing.  TWP connects you with your community of scholars and provides the capacity for high impact publishing outside academia.  Contributors include well-known writers and thinkers such as Margaret Atwood, Philip Hensher and Naomi Alderman, and industry heavyweights like Porter Anderson and Richard Nash.

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Nicola Solomon, Chief Executive of the Society of Authors, has kindly allowed us to reproduce the talk she gave at the Futurebook Author Day conference in London on 30th November 2015.

I have been asked to talk to the state of the author in traditional publishing but I must say that I do not recognise the dichotomy. The SoA represents about 9,500 authors. They write in vastly different genres and vastly different media: from novelists to textbook writers, from poets to ghost writers, from broadcasters to academics, from illustrators to translators, from spoken word artists to journalists. Some are traditionally published, some are self published, some are hybrids and some don’t publish in any traditional sense. What they have in common is that they are professional authors. They may not be full time but they are writing in the hope of making a profit. Samuel Johnson famously said ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’. I don’t agree. There are many reasons to write if not for money – from personal pleasure and creativity to making the author’s opinions heard – but those are not the people the SoA primarily represents.

So what is the landscape for professional writers today?

First: there’s precious little money about for professional authors these days, and what there is concentrated in the hands of fewer authors. The results of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) survey, What are Words Worth Now?, tell a story that many authors know only too well: authors’ earnings are falling fast.

Only 11.5% of authors now earn their living solely from writing. In 2005, this figure was 40%.

The typical annual income of professional authors has fallen to £11,000, a figure far below the level identified by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as necessary to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living (£16,850). And that is the median figure but for many it is far worse – and more of the money is becoming concentrated in fewer hands: the top 5% earn over 40% of all the money earned by authors.

The picture is even worse when we look at those for whom writing isn’t their main profession. In 2000, the typical annual income of ‘all writers’ was £8,810 in real terms, in 2013 this figure had fallen to £4,000.

These figures are replicated internationally: recent surveys from Canada, and America show a similar picture as do reports from France and Germany.

We are concerned but not surprised by the findings in this survey. Authors are not receiving a fair share of the profits from book publishing – particularly in relation to digital. While authors’ earnings are going down generally, those of publishers have remained stable – and intermediaries like Amazon and others are also pressing for an ever larger share of the pie.

Many authors would still see a traditional publishing deal as the gold standard. It has its advantages: there is no financial outlay, a good conventional publisher pays the author an advance, takes the commercial risk, works out all the costings, provides editing, design, printing and the expertise of its legal department; it chases payments, copes with bad debts, can carry loss-leaders, sorts out returns. It sets up and negotiates subsidiary rights deals and special offers. The approval of a highly-regarded publishing house gives public endorsement that someone significant, not related to the author, thinks the book good enough that they are prepared to back it. It reassures retailers, reviewers and readers that the work has merit.

There are still some fantastic publishers out there and some wonderful books are being published both traditionally and in ebook. People are still reading and book sales are holding up well, despite the competition from other media. We have seen a welcome rise in translated books.

However, all is not well in the traditionally published arena. Traditional publishers and agents are becoming increasingly picky about what new works they take on. They are also using independently published books as a slush pile: why should publishers take the risk of paying a good advance for an unknown work, when they can rely on the author to test the water first?

Moreover, the terms publishers are demanding are no longer fair or sustainable. Professional authors are asked to do far more than previously in the way of publicising their work and getting far less in return. Authors are often not paid a commercial rate for appearances. Advances have tumbled. A publisher will take all control and a vast chunk of the book’s earnings, typically 90% of the cover price of a printed book or 75% of the net receipts from an ebook. A detailed analysis of the contract often shows that they are not tied down to much at all – not even to actually publish the author’s book as any more than print on demand. The fact that publishing is now very cheap, particularly of ebooks with no need for warehousing or physical stock, has brought a slew of new publishers into the industry. They range from the good to the bad and the frankly ugly. And size is no indicator. Some smaller publishers are great – some of them are doing exciting and innovative things. Others are little more than vanity publishers.

So what is the answer?

The first is fairer contracts. And this applies not only to contracts with publishers but also with platforms like Amazon and with service providers for independent authors.

Publishers readily accept that publishing is changing and that they do not know what may be coming along next. Their response is to take as many rights as possible from authors in the hope that they may be able to exploit them and only to offer authors a small share until they are sure what the business model will be. Publishers tell authors that they need those rights to properly exploit authors’ work but unless authors hold on to them or build in reviews and escalators, publishers will not increase authors’ share when the outlook becomes clearer. They are running businesses, despite their protestations that the author is at the heart of everything they do. When I hear publishers talking about author care I tell them we are more interested in author share.

We tell authors to check carefully what promises publishers are making. Those representations should be reality checked and authors should ask them to be put in the contract or in an agreed marketing plan.

We also suggest that authors consider other options such as going independent or crowd funding. Some do, with varied success. Others are concerned at the cost, the need to bring in expert skills they do not have and the well publicised risks of discoverability. We strongly advise that authors get detailed and impartial advice before signing any publishing contract. The Society of Authors offers members (even on joining) an amazing free contract checking service and we advise authors to use it.

But authors are not in a strong negotiating position. Publishers are often large multinationals while authors typically work alone. Especially at the start of their careers they may have little or no advice and are thrilled to be offered publishing contracts. They frequently need to negotiate with monopolies or with dominant players in highly specialised markets, such as scientific publishers. Authors are therefore at an inherent disadvantage when negotiating the terms of their contracts. Many contracts are offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Advice from a lawyer is unaffordable for most authors. While agents, unions and professional associations, such as the SoA, seek to address this imbalance the situation remains unsatisfactory for the majority of creators.

Here’s what David Vandagriff, an experienced US media lawyer, has to say about publishing contracts:

‘After having reviewed many, many agreements and proposed agreements between traditional publishers and authors, I am prepared to say these contracts, as a group, stand apart from the general run of business agreements as conscience-shocking monstrosities. They’re simply designed to screw authors and to give publishers control over their work that is far beyond what is regarded as reasonable…’

The SoA vets over 1,000 members’ contracts a year and from some of the contracts I see this might even be an understatement. We see many contracts where authors hand over all their rights for no advance and with no guarantee of exploitation by the publisher.

To take just one example – reversion clauses. Last week I saw the requests for assistance from our Pension Fund, which offers a bursary of around £2,000 a year to authors who have fallen on hard times. I was struck by the number of once well-known writers who apply. And yet, some of them could perhaps be earning more if they could have access to their own work. The ALCS study showed that 70% of authors who relied on a reversion clause went on to earn more money from the work in question.

Catherine Gaskin was a novelist who left her estate to the SoA. When she died all her work was out of print. We reverted the works and are earning around £7,000 a year per title from republishing them. That’s far more than we are offering in pensions – yet many of our authors are unable to persuade publishers to revert the rights to even quite moribund titles. That means that works are out of commerce which could be earning money for authors and for the economy.

We are addressing this both through lobbying Government and talking to publishers, suppliers and platforms.We are urging Government to pass legislation to protect authors, and indeed all creators in the area of contracts. This is in line with the Consumer Rights Act and legislation which protects creators in many European countries.

What are we asking for? The Magnificent 7, for CREATOR contracts.

C: Clarity. Clearer Contracts, including written contracts which set out the exact scope of the rights granted.

R: fair Remuneration. Equitable and unwaivable remuneration for all forms of exploitation, to include bestseller clauses so if a work does far better than expected, the creator shares in its success even if copyright was assigned.

E: an obligation of Exploitation for each mode of exploitation. Also known as the ‘use it or lose it’ Clause. This is the French model.

A: fair, understandable and proper Accounting clauses.

T: Term. Reasonable and limited contract terms and regular reviews to take into account new forms of exploitation.

O: Ownership. Authors, including illustrators and translators, should be appropriately credited for all uses of their work and moral rights should be unwaivable.

R: All other clauses be subject to a general test of Reasonableness including a list of defined clauses which are automatically deemed to be void and a general safeguarding provision that any contract provision which, contrary to the requirement of good faith, causes a significant imbalance in the parties’ rights and obligations arising under the contract, to the detriment of the author shall be regarded as unfair. (This is in the Consumer Rights Act) One example would be Indemnity clauses which put all the risk on the author.

So that’s it. CREATOR. These laws are not radical. They already exist throughout many European countries.

Why is it the time for platforms and publishers to address it?

The European study urges a ‘dialogue among stakeholders towards more flexible contracts and exchange of best practices‘. We call upon the Publishers Association (PA), the Independent Publishers Guild and individual publishers as well as Amazon and other service providers to talk to us and to sign up to the CREATOR principles. The PA already has an excellent Code of Practice and we ask that all publishers abide by the letter and spirit of that document and meet with us to negotiate terms to deal with the digital age.

Why should organisations be interested in signing up? There are three reasons:

1 .  Because it is fair – When Allen Lane created the paperback 80 years ago in 1935 he calculated the author share of royalties by working out the publisher’s expenses and then sharing the remaining profit 50/50. These days authors typically get far less than 50% of the profit on the sale of their work and they are increasingly bound by onerous terms that prevent them from taking their work elsewhere.

2 .  Because without it the industry may be killing the goose that lays the golden egg. The fact remains that authors are the only essential part of the creation of a book yet their revenues are falling drastically and, as we see from the ALCS study, they are leaving the industry in droves. If unchecked, this rapid decline in the number of full-time writers could have serious implications for the breadth and quality of content that drives the economic success of our creative industries in the UK.

3 .  But also because authors have a choice – they can go independent or have their books traditionally published. Authors are businesses – they can consider what is best for them by way of contract terms and likely revenues – and if publishers and others don’t offer fair terms then they will vote with their feet.

I have focussed on contracts and terms but there are many other things we should do together to support professional authors:

Skills and information sharing: The knowledge needed by a professional author and the professional marketing and publicity skills can be bewildering as can the plethora of agencies and services on offer. We should all work together to offer informed, impartial and low cost or free advice to authors.

Diversity, inclusiveness and equality:  Spread the Word’s recent report on Black and Minority ethnic representation in publishing showed how far we still have to go to provide a culturally diverse industry. We are also solidly middle class. We all need to work to ensure that we have the widest possible range of voices in our books and in our industry.

Grants and prizes: The SoA administers charities that give away about half a million pounds a year in grants and prizes. There are many other prize and grant givers and competitions available to authors. These are very important in buying time to write and increasing a writer’s reputation and discoverability. We are looking to ensure that our own awards are as widely advertised as possible and that there are no unnecessary barriers to applications and are working with the Writing Platform, the Arts Council and others to consider how we might better publicise awards and other opportunities for writers while sorting out those that are just rights grabs from the genuine awards.

Appearances: ensure that authors are paid properly for appearances – we have just carried out a survey of festivals and will shortly be publishing the results and writing to them with best practice guidelines.

Lobbying: We can lobby together as an industry both nationally and worldwide through organisations such as the International Authors/ Forum to ensure that publishing does not face unnecessary barriers. Important points include:

• VAT on ebooks – it is entirely illogical for this to be at 20% when books are zero rated.
• Protecting copyright. We need to lobby constantly for a strong copyright regime and protection for copyright licensing and argue against copyright exceptions. As our President, Philip Pullman, says: ‘The principle is simple, and unaltered by technology, science, or magic: if we want to enjoy the work that someone does, we should pay for it’

More widely, creating a reading environment. There is a heartening interest in reading, all the more encouraging when we consider the many other media competing for time and attention. It is very important for all of us to create a cultural environment that supports reading and writing. We need to ensure that readers are not an endangered species. In particular we should:

• Read to our children.
• Read to other people’s children.
• Support libraries- the cuts to Local Council budgets in last week’s spending review bode badly for libraries and we need to speak out at every opportunity.
• Fight for PLR- particularly PLR on ebooks.
• Fight for school libraries: it is extraordinary that while prison libraries are compulsory by statute school libraries are not- and many schools do not have a library.
• Support bookshops. Bookshops are an essential showcase for books. We need to work hard to keep bookshops on our high streets.
• Support proper book pricing. Amazon says that it only seeks a lower price for its customers but, as we have seen with supermarkets and milk production, constantly driving down prices can mean that producers can no longer create their goods economically – and writers, unlike farmers, do not receive government subsidies.
• Educational funding-ensure that Open Access doesn’t prevent authors from a continuing share in the success of their work.

And finally, we all need to shout for freedom of speech. Ashraf Fayadh is a poet who has been condemned to death in Saudi Arabia for apostasy for a collection of poems ‘Instructions Within’. We should work together with PEN and others to fight censorship and promote freedom of expression. You can sign the Amnesty petition here.

We all need to work together as the SoA has been doing since 1884, to ensure a fair and vibrant landscape where authors, independent or traditional, can continue to flourish and receive a fair share of reward for their talents and hard work.

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https://twitter.com/Soc_of_Authors

Like many writers who have been around the block a few times, my backlist was spread across a number of publishers and territories, including the UK, USA, and Canada. In 2013 my Canadian publisher ‘ceased to trade’ and my agent and I took this as an opportunity to pull my backlist rights back to where they belonged – with me. I decided to create ebook editions of four of my backlist novels, Where Does Kissing End?, The Last Time I Saw Jane, Weird Sister, and A Little Stranger, and to time this re-launch of my backlist with the trade publication of my new novel, Landing Gear in the spring 2014. My 2009 novel The Mistress of Nothing remains in print and e-book with traditional publishers across a dozen territories.

I worked on this project with Joanna Ellis of The Literary Platform; to be sure, I would not have been able to get this off the ground without Jo’s help. Despite what you might read elsewhere, self-publishing is not easy. It’s time-consuming and it can be costly. Several months into the process, it became clear that while my new novel, Landing Gear, was coming out with Doubleday, Penguin Random House in Canada and Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster in the USA, it was not going to secure a UK publisher. So we decided to add a UK-only e-book edition of Landing Gear into our publishing programme by buying the e-book file and cover design from Doubleday.

We learned a few things in the process which we thought we would share.

1. Expect to spend more than you are expecting to

I was working with four novels that had already been published, so there were no costs around editing, copy-editing, and proof-reading, all of which can be expensive. If you want to produce ebooks that are a pleasure to read and resemble those that a large publisher would create, attention to detail is key.

2. Update and save, save, SAVE!

Make sure to update your writing documents and files regularly, and store latest/ final versions in more than one place. I had print copies of the four backlist titles, but no digital files for three of them, despite having been written on computers – perhaps not all that surprising given that one of the books, Where Does Kissing End?, was first published twenty-one years ago in 1993. If you’re in the same boat, getting books re-keyed to create digital files will be an additional cost.

3. Go broad…

It’s easy to think that it’s all about Amazon, and don’t get me wrong, Kindle accounts for a significant proportion of sales of my books both in the UK and internationally, but we were pleasantly surprised by the sales through other channels, especially the library sectors in the UK and North America.

Our strategy was simply to not cut off any sales avenue open to us. The ebook retail ecosystem is more diversified in territories outside the UK and, despite what anyone might proclaim, no one really knows how it will shakedown in the next few years.

We did identify and prioritise the retailers who offered the best opportunities for my books. As a Canadian, with Canadian and US deals for my new book, we wanted to harness the interest in my new book in these territories to direct readers to my backlist. Practically this meant prioritising Kobo, a significant player in Canada and supplier of ebooks to Canada’s biggest book retailer Chapters Indigo; iBooks, the second biggest ebook retailer in the US; and Nook, suppliers of ebooks to Barnes and Noble; alongside Amazon.

4 … and go direct where you can

Our advice is to go direct with as many retailers as you can feasibly handle in order to maximise your margins and retain flexibility and control over metadata and pricing. But, as well as that, use a distributor to help with access to retailers and aggregators who don’t deal directly with individual authors, and for platforms where the process is, frankly, finicky.

We used a distributor for iBooks (Apple’s terms and conditions are labyrinthine), Overdrive (who distribute to Waterstones.com and libraries in US, Canada and the UK but don’t deal directly with individual authors) and, as of the end of 2014, subscription services Oyster and Bookmate. In retrospect we should have used them for Google Play too – the publishing process on this platform is far from painless.

Most distributors charge a per title/ per year fee, a cut of sales or some combination of the two. We went with Ebook Partnership who supply a large list of retailers and aggregators and who have been very supportive and helpful. They are also reasonably priced, the only downside being that they charge to change metadata and prices. Retailers Ts & Cs require you to supply the same price to every retailer, so if you change the price of your books with the retailers you supply directly, you have to change them with your distributor, which for us means paying a fee every time we experiment with pricing.

We also went for a direct sales platform on my own website. I decided to do this as it seems to me a logical extension of the idea of having control over my backlist – why not sell the books directly to readers via my website as well as via the retailers? This entailed yet more expense: we used Digital Product Delivery, which is a neat, cost effective solution for selling ebooks online, the main outlay was paying my web developer to integrate the shopping cart into my existing website.

I began to doubt how worthwhile selling direct would be for me soon after it was all set up. Sales from my website have almost entirely been to people I know who were buying directly because they a) knew me and b) wanted me to get a larger cut of the sale price (thank you!). Building and maintaining a network of readers who are loyal enough to buy directly from you is hard and time-consuming work, especially if, like me, your books are very different from one another, and therefore your readers are likely to be too.

If I was already having doubts about selling directly then the new VAT regulations on e-services (which includes online ebook sales) have confirmed them. I won’t go into detail, for that I refer you to Suw Charman-Anderson’s excellent, sweary post, but suffice to say these new regulations place an additional administrative and financial burden on individuals and small businesses selling ebooks. The upshot is I’ve called a hiatus on my short-lived online shop. This isn’t to say it won’t worthwhile for you, just that in retrospect it shoudn’t have been a priority for me, and my advice would be to consider carefully whether you have the time (and patience) to do it justice before you fork out your cash.

5. Play with price

Which brings us to pricing. We took what many indie authors would consider a conservative approach to pricing, with backlist titles at £3.99 for the most part, and the UK ebook edition of my new novel at £5.99. While these prices are high in the current ebook market, I sometimes wince at how low they are when compared to buying print books in bricks and mortar bookshops. But we have remained flexible with pricing, experimenting with lowering the price of different titles at different times. For example we lowered the price of my new novel to coincide with Canada Day and Summer Reading season, and we lowered the price of my gothic novel, Weird Sister to coincide with Hallowe’en.

In my case there has been little evidence to show that lower prices drive an uplift in sales. However many indie writers are also genre writers, publishing Romance, Mystery, Crime and Science Fiction/Fantasy, and price might be more of a draw for readers of those genres. Literary Fiction does not have a great sales record in the world of self-publishing, in fact literary fiction suffers in the online retail environment because the descriptors – keywords and tags – that are used for searching for books online are much more difficult to figure out for literary or general fiction than they are for, say, a ‘teenage vampire love story’.

6. Have a plan, keep active and don’t forget the old levers

We don’t mean stay fit, though that’s a good idea too. For Jo and I, activity seemed to be more effective in driving sales than price: we ran a pre-publication give-away of my new novel on GoodReads, a Hallowe’en give-away of my literary horror novel Where Does Kissing End? on Noisetrade, and a Facebook advertising campaign for Landing Gear – which has a gloriously sunny cover – over the summer, and I wrote blog posts and did interviews and sent newsletters to my email subscribers.

With the UK-only ebook edition of Landing Gear we were lucky enough to get reviews in Stylist and Red as well as a substantial review and podcast interview in the Guardian. We did not attempt to get reviews for the new editions of the backlist; all of the (modest) publicity budget went on Landing Gear, and the effectiveness of established media outlets was borne out with spikes in sales.

On a practical note, we found an activity calendar really helped to keep us focused and tie-in with other relevant events, and to ensure a good spread of activity throughout the year. We created a simple excel grid detailing month, events (e.g. Summer Reading, Black History Month, Hallowe’en, Cybermonday, Christmas etc.), focus title, price drops, promotions and PR.

7. Expect things to change, fast

Don’t become too reliant on any one outlet or tool and try to keep abreast of any major developments (especially the legal ones!). For instance, Vook established a fantastic author portal that enabled authors to draw all their sales data into a single user-friendly dashboard. Due to factors beyond Vook’s control, this dashboard stopped working and was pulled. Retailers change their terms and conditions; for example, we didn’t participate in Amazon’s Kindle Select programme, but if we had, the books would have been added to their subscription programme without our direct consent. Then there were the changes to the VAT regulations on ebook services which came into force in January 2015, which meant we had to rethink direct sales. Keeping abreast of it all can be a challenge, keep a close eye on notifications from the platforms you are using and check the Alliance of Independent Authors and The Bookseller sites regularly, they will cover any major  news affecting independent authors.

8. Get friendly with Excel

As an independent author you have access to more granular sales data in a more timely fashion than do most publishers. This is fantastic as it enables you to identify which of your activity is most effective and do more of it!  However pulling that sales data together so you get a handle on which titles are selling through which platforms in which territories is a laborious affair which involves downloading sales data from individual platforms plus your distributor, if you’re using one. We would strongly recommend setting a regular schedule for downloading and saving your sales data for safekeeping as it becomes unavailable from some platforms after 2-3 months.

9. Print still reigns in some settings

We’d always planned for the backlist editions to be digital-only and haven’t spent any time at all investigating print options. However, with Landing Gear in the UK, it soon became clear that not having a print edition can put you at a disadvantage: mainstream press and many bloggers want reading copies in print, you can’t offer ebooks in a Goodreads give-away and at readings and festivals print copies remain the only way to proceed. We were lucky enough to be able to use US and Canadian hardcover print editions to send out,  if reviews, Good Reads, and readings/ festivals figure prominently in your promotional plan it might be worth exploring the print options available to you. One thing I found useful on my Canadian tour for Landing Gear was having a bookmark that featured my backlist titles which I slipped into print copies of my novel at signings to serve as a reminder to readers once they got home.

When Doubleday brings out their paperback of Landing Gear in 2015, I’ll give them the right to distribute in the UK; I don’t expect this to mean it will be displayed in shops but, at the very least, UK readers will be able to buy the print edition online.

10. And finally… be in it for the long run

While sales have spiked around activity, even during quiet periods the books still sell. Although it will take some time to pay off my investment in the backlist, I feel a good deal of satisfaction in the knowledge that these four backlist titles are available to readers once again, and hopefully for good this time.

You can read about the digital genesis of Kate’s novel, Landing Gear, in this article.

The publishing industry has undergone many changes over the last few years, many of which can be attributed to the disruptions brought about by digital technologies. Alongside the rise of self-/ indie- publishing we are also seeing new types of publisher emerge, publishers who are turning traditional models and methods on their head and finding new ways of doing things. In our ‘New Publisher’ series we interview some of them about their approaches and what they hope to achieve by doing things differently.

We speak Lucy Chamberlain of Legend Press

1. Can you tell us a little about Legend Press and how your work differs from more traditional publishing models?

Legend Press was founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Tom Chalmers aged just 25. We are a traditional publisher, focused primarily on publishing mainstream literary and commercial fiction. We also run a newly re-launched non-fiction publisher Paperbooks and successful business book imprint Legend Business.

I think what sets us apart from other traditional publishers is the passion and drive we have to work differently and rebel against the sometimes stuffy nature of the book publishing industry.

We are a young, dynamic and committed team, who are passionate about creating fantastic and individual books that really stand out in the market. Our boss Tom has been shortlisted for UK Young Entrepreneur of the Year, UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year, UK Young Publisher of the Year and for the Enterprising Young Brit Awards. Myself and our Commissioning Editor Lauren Parsons have been working at the company since 2008 and it is the shared commitment to the company brand that really drives the company. We believe in our books and hopefully our passion is infectious!

2. What does Legend Press offer writers and readers that other traditional publishers don’t?

We are passionate about championing new and high-profile authors and ensuring that the book remains a product of beauty, enjoyment and fulfilment. Our list is varied, from strong commercial crime writers to literary authors who take risks and push boundaries.

We work very closely with our authors throughout the publishing process: through editing, design, publicity, events and sales. We publish a select list of novels each year, so unlike larger publishers every book really counts. We really get behind every novel we publish and approach each book individually according to their readership, to ensure maximum exposure and longevity. We are keen to develop the career of our authors and provide great author care to help our writers develop and evolve with each book.

3. Publishers have traditionally acted as cultural mediators. Self-publishing has challenged that role. What do you think is the main purpose of publishers now? And do you think that there is still a need for cultural mediators?

As a traditional publisher we may be biased, but I truly believe that publishers offer invaluable skills that many self-published authors do not recognise: from one-on-one editorial advice and direction, access to global sales channels, the knowledge to sell the book’s rights internationally and from my perspective, as a publicist, the ability to pitch the book and the author to national and global media. That being said, I think there is a lot traditional publishers can also learn from self-published authors, and sadly more traditional publishing houses are often too stubborn and self-congratulatory to recognise this. There are many talented self-published authors out there and that is why we have run projects in the past, including our recent competition with the Guardian to find the ‘Best Self-Published Novel of the Month’.

4. What do you see as the main opportunities and challenges for writers today?

I think many traditionally published authors can learn a great deal from the big-hitters in the self-publishing market. No longer can authors be reclusive and unwilling to interact with their readers, it is important for authors to be working closely with their publicist to maximise potential, not wait for literary editors to sing their praises from the get-go. There is so much potential to be gained from social media platforms including Twitter, blogging and Facebook, where authors can speak directly to their audience.

On the other hand online activity also presents major challenges for writers: in seems obvious to say but authors must actually remember to write, and juggling the time between the two can often be difficult. Readers will not wait forever for the second and third novels and this is what many authors need to be aware of.

5. What advice would you offer to writers weighing up their publishing options?

Research, research, research – if you would like to get your work traditionally published make sure you find a publisher that will be a great home for yourself and your book. We still accept unsolicited submissions and we often get approached by authors who submit with a scattergun approach, not knowing anything about what we publish or how we work. Ultimately you need to be happy where your book is placed, and you can only be happy if you research.

6. What’s next for your company? Are there any exciting developments that you can share with us?

We have an exciting and varied publishing list for 2015 and we are looking forward to sharing the books with our readers. Key highlights of the year include the return of our best-selling crime writer Ruth Dugdall. After a two year hiatus we are thrilled to be publishing two stunning new novels Humber Boy B and Nowhere Girl. In terms of our overall business we have lots of exciting new projects in the pipeline including: Books & Beans – a new initiative to work closely with businesses in our local area of Shoreditch. We are currently broadening our export channels to Central and Southern Europe, USA, Canada and India, and working with subscription companies on the digital side of the business. Last year we ran an project with Virgin Trains with an on-board giveaway of books, and we have lots more secret projects like this in the pipeline, so watch this space!

Other interviews in our ‘New Publisher Series’:

Scott Pack at The Friday Project

Tom Chivers, Director of Penned in the Margins

Matthew Crockatt of And Other Stories

Nikola Richter of  Mikrotext

‘Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why this was’. — White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) 

In spite of the above quote, 2000 may well now appear to have been a golden age in terms of information. In those long gone halcyon days, none of us had to worry about terms like big data, discoverability, feeds, and, quite possibly the scariest of them all, metadata.

All of us are awash with information now, drowning in an ever expanding sea of data. But it’s worth remembering that one school of thought, Clay Shirky’s, holds that there’s no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.

Let’s focus on metadata: What is it? Why are people always talking about it? And what’s it got to do with me anyway?

Definitions are never easy. But actually, in this case, it is. Metadata is simply information that describes your book, things like the ISBN, the price, the title, the author, the publication date, the description, the format, etc.

These things can be about identification (ISBN), they can be bibliographic (author, title, format) or transactional (price). What they have in common is that they’re all pieces of information that describe your book. And that’s it.

A key thing to remember is that metadata isn’t new. We’ve always needed this sort of information (think Advance Information sheets, the humble forerunner of the data feed) and we’ve always had people who care about it (the even humbler Information Manager).

But why do I hear so much about it now?  

To help answer this, let’s pause for a moment to think about iTunes. Here’s an iTunes library below. (It isn’t mine by the way, before you silently condemn my taste in music).

We’ve all seen this before and it’s familiar. But what are we actually seeing? Well, we can see information about artist, song title, album, genre, length of song, etc. You can probably see where I’m going with this: we’re looking at information that describes this collection of music. We’re looking at metadata.

And as we know from using iTunes, it’s incredibly useful. It allows you to group together genres, find favourite songs, create playlists, sort, filter, remove. The list goes on. So imagine your iTunes library without any metadata. You wouldn’t be able to do any of those things. In fact, your library would be pretty much unusable.

Let’s carry that analogy over to books. Imagine walking into a large bookshop and finding that all the book covers on all the shelves were blank and none of the shelves were marked.

If you had a book that was among all this, how would you possibly find it? The simple answer is, you wouldn’t. And neither would anyone else.

Now take that bookshop, and imagine it to be 1000 times bigger with 1000 times more books. And imagine it to be open to practically anybody in any country in the world at any time.

That’s the internet. And the miniscule needle in this gargantuan haystack is your book.

Without good metadata, you’re effectively putting your book with a blank cover up against hundreds if not thousands of competing titles in the biggest bookshop you can imagine. In 2000, when high streets bookshops were plentiful and ebooks a distant glimmer, metadata was important. Now, in the online environment, it’s life or death.

This is a good time to bring in another one of those scary words. Discoverability. Many publishers spend huge amounts of money and commit vast resources on complex methods of boosting discoverability for their titles.

This isn’t necessarily misguided, but having good metadata is the first step towards discoverability, which is ensuring that your book can be easily found online. It’s a step a surprising number of people skip. Making sure your metadata is in order is quick, easy and incredibly effective in terms of helping your book reach its intended audience.

So how do you do that? What is ‘good’ metadata?

A really good place to start is Book Industry Commission, the book industry’s supply chain organisation. They have developed a standard called BIC Basic which outlines the minimum metadata requirements for a title.

The information you need to supply to Nielsen, ideally four months ahead of publication, is shown in the example below. If you are self publishing you will also need to supply the information to your distributor and if you are publishing directly with platforms such as Amazon KDP or Kobo Writing Life, you will need to enter it onto their systems too (they provide step by step guides).

Title: Azar’s Brilliant First Novel

ISBN: 9780000000000

Product Form: Hardback

BIC Code: FA (Modern Fiction)

Publisher: Azar Classics

Imprint: Debut Dazzlers

Publication Date: 26th March 2015 (This might slip)

Supplier: Wonderful Warehousing

Availability Status: Not Yet Published

Price: £9.99

Territorial Rights: World

Description Copy: A day in the life of a beleaguered information manager, the digital Ulysses for the 21st century.

There are other things you can do, but the above is the bare minimum. If it’s the one thing you remember from this article, you won’t have wasted your time. Supplying the book jacket in good time is also highly advisable. We do all judge books by their covers and a blank placeholder will impress no one.

Many people think metadata ends there. You send it out  pre-publication and the job’s done. But metadata should be thought of as evolving and it often needs revision. For example:

Have you sold US rights? Don’t forget to change your Territorial Rights statement so retailers in the US know they should stop selling your edition. Forget to do it, and you could have a lawsuit on your hands.

Has publication date slipped? Make sure you update your metadata. Unless you want to confuse your would-be readers by making them wonder why they can’t have your book when you said they could.

Have you won a prize? Been shortlisted? Add it to your description copy. It all helps.

Want to experiment with pricing? Have you got a promotion on? Make sure the right price is visible at the right time (and in the right place).

The above examples all lead to a final point which is equally important:

There’s only one thing worse than having no metadata, and that’s having incorrect metadata.

Sending out the wrong price is the equivalent of having your reader pick up a book for £7.99 in a shop only to be told at the till it’s actually £12.99. Or telling your reader that their book will be in tomorrow only for them to return and you to say it actually won’t be in for another two weeks.

If you’re in any doubt about any of your metadata, you’re actually better off making no statement. Because as a number of celebrities, politicians and users of social media have discovered, once you’ve released information online, you can’t claw it back.

Metadata is the lifeblood of your title. And all you have to do is make sure you cover the elements of BIC Basic as above and maintain them as necessary. I hope the above has convinced you that metadata is vital to the success of your book, but if you ever need a reminder, just look at this:

Some useful links:

An Introduction to ONIX – The industry standard for communicating metadata

BIC Basic – The minimum requirement for your metadata

BIC Codes – Find the right BIC subject code for your title

Book Industry Communication – The book industry’s supply chain organisation

Book Industry Study Group – BIC’s US counterpart