Digital Book World

In Publishing, ‘You Are All Women.’ No, We Are Not

March 18, 2016 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Image - iStockphoto: sjale — Image – iStockphoto: sjale

Can We Support Women Without ‘De-Supporting’ Men?

That’s a fairly ridiculous term, of course. “De-supporting.” Not an inaccurate one, though. And the reality is that we’re not questioning this these days.

Digital Book World's panel on women in publishing. Image: Tweeted by NYU Publishing — Digital Book World’s panel on women in publishing. Image: Tweeted by NYU Publishing

During the Digital Book World Conference + Expo (DBW) earlier this month in New York — the first of the major industry-facing conferences of the year — one of the most anticipated panels was called Women at the Intersection of Publishing, Finance, and Tech. It featured five very strong women leaders in publishing today:

Charlotte Abbott of Abbott Communications,
Dominique Raccah (Sourcebooks CEO),
Susan Ruszala (NetGalley president),
Joanna Herman DeSilva+Phillips managing director), and
Katherine McCahill (Apps Channel director with Penguin Random House).

The panel was predicated on a couple of things. DBW director Mike Shatzkin mentioned the swamp of shame and backpedaling that South by Southwest slogged through last year when it first tried to avoid and then embrace issues of women’s struggles online, particularly in the tech world. And Abbott then opened the panel by positioning women in publishing through the recent Lee & Low diversity study.

While the tech world is male-driven and does indeed present awful problems for many women trying to work that field, Lee and Low in January confirmed that publishing looks gratifyingly different:

Lee and Low puts women at 78 percent of the US industry. Slow down and get your head around this, it’s a key point: More than three out of four publishing workers in the States today are likely to be women. This reflects, in fact, the standard number of 80 percent cited in the UK. What’s more, as Abbott pointed out, Lee and Low sees 59 percent of leadership roles being held by women, so it’s incorrect to believe, as some do, that all executive-level jobs go to men in publishing.

Here is how Lee and Low reports it.

As an industry, publishing is white and female. At the executive level, publishing is 86 percent white, 59 percent female, 89 percent ‘straight/heterosexual,’ and 96 percent normatively-abled. At the editorial level, those numbers are virtually the same, except it is even more dominated by women. When 2015 Man Booker winner Marlon James controversially stated that ‘we writers of colour spend way too much time pandering to the white woman,’ he was more accurate than he knew: The ‘archetype of the white woman’ setting the tone for the industry is sitting behind 84 percent of editorial desks.

So the two major markets in the big English-language publishing world industry are, for the most part, deeply dominated by women. Nothing here is going to say that this is bad, far from it. But it’s important that we understand this, as you’ll see.

And none of this negates what the panel was doing at DBW. Its main focus was a bit different from ours today, but fully valid. As Kristine Hoang reported for the Digital Book World site, the DBW panel featured “female publishing executives discussing what it takes to grow their businesses while encouraging gender equality in all sectors of the business world.”

This touched, for example, on issues of discrimination when it comes to venture capital. Sarah Weinman at Publishers Lunch (paywall) highlighted Herman’s commentary on VC from her experience of founding the startup Librify. Weinman quotes Herman:

It played out most strikingly with the final fundraising round, when I was pregnant. I would get comments like, ‘You’re the first pregnant woman who has ever presented to us!’ That makes sense. It’s a reflection of who runs startups. Very few women do, and when they do, they aren’t necessarily having kids. All issues of pregnant women were brand new to [these men.]

And I liked the tack, especially, taken by NetGalley’s Ruszala (who is just this week launching the company’s new NetGalley.de in Germany). Ruszala said:

Work needs to change for both men and women. Our company is completely virtual. Families have a place in our business. When I think about what women can bring as leaders, I think of the creation of small cultures and developing something good for both men and women.

I’ve said to both Abbott and to Ruszala that publishing at least has the “right problem.” In a world in which most industries are under-representative of women, ours is over-representative of them.

But here we come to my provocation for you today. In an industry that has such a handsome lead in place for women in the workforce, do we not need to speak urgently about how this may impact the readership and consumer base?

Update: In response to some of the comments below, I think it might be helpful for me to take special care to clarify something. Causal blame is not part of this article. I do not mean that we should blame the dominance of women in publishing for the fact that men and boys don’t read more than they do. What I do mean is that the dominance of women in the publishing workforce may mean that the books business is not responding to the lag in male reading as aggressively as it could. Here’s a comparison: The UK industry is discussing whether entirely-female books divisions for children can produce material that will attract very young boys to reading. Could all-men departments get it right for girls? I doubt that, don’t you? That’s a good, healthy discussion, an important one. And if you simply must find blame in things, blame men who are not applying for jobs in children’s divisions, considering kids’ books to be “women’s work.”

Here is the point I’m actually making: Publishing desperately needs new readers. Digital has exponentially increased our output, I call it the Wall of Content. How will we find new readers for our glutted marketplace if we don’t reach out to the half of the population that isn’t reading at anything near the rate that women and girls are? That’s what I’m talking about. As children’s author Jonathan Emmett in the UK says, to be pro-boy is not to be anti-girl. Please try to think past the “blame” element. If you find it here, it’s all yours. I haven’t written it.

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Who’s Afraid of Reader Analytics?

August 21, 2015 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Image - iStockphoto: janulla — Image – iStockphoto: janulla

Like A Wolf, They’re Tracking You, Virginia

On the way to the digital disruption of the industry! the industry! we online news people (remember news people?) realized that advertisers were asking for — and getting — more and more data based on how our readers were using our work.

Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh

In the Ante-Digital Era: At a newspaper, the staff (in hoop skirts) would place your ad and assure you that our circulation rate on a Thursday was 600,000 or more. But could we tell you how many of those 600,000 fine recipients of our newspaper actually saw your ad? Of course not. We didn’t even know how many people had opened the paper at all that day. Dogs were seen running away with at least four copies and were not expected to be highly reactive to advertising therein.

In the Post-Digital Era: At a news site, the staff (in body art) would watch the clicks. At least one luminously GUI-ed software provided heat-mapping on selected pages so that a newsroom could see where on that page the most cursor clicks were occurring. A headline with the word “sex” in it always glowed much pinker than breaking news about the Security Council.

[pullquote]There is one trend that is striking more fears in publishers’ minds than any other. And that is the fear of data. — Andrew Rhomberg[/pullquote]

This was reader data, pouring in. And a heartbeat later it became reader analytics as someone parsed it.

To be sure, coded ads had been in play for quite awhile, both in print and on radio and TV — call a given phone number or provide a certain code from the ad and the advertiser could tell that you were watching or reading this or that. But those old-media “call-response” ads were nothing compared to what could be done in the online environment, where user movements could be monitored in real time. Advertisers might find out that no one had clicked on their expensive brand message. We were all over it like a cheap suit.

And does that reality today ever, in some news setting somewhere at some time, affect choices about what news is reported, where and how it’s reported, when it’s reported, maybe with “sex” in its headline?

You didn’t come here to talk about the news industry. How silly of me. Step this way, please.

Publishers And The Fear Of Data

There is one trend that is striking more fears in publishers’ minds than any other. And that is the fear of data.

For me, the fear of Andrew Rhomberg’s London-based company name — Jellybooks — is a lot worse than the data scare. The very thought of jellied books, it’s like something out of Roger Corman, isn’t it? But poor Andrew has listened to me carp about his start-up’s name so long that I think he counts it as useful PR. As long as I spell Jellybooks correctly, right?

And he’s onto something in his latest aria at Digital Book World, The Fear of Data. Kind of grabs you like The Edge of Night.

He’s asking this: won’t data-slinging publishers pass up good books because the analytics will prove that Our Fine Readership really wants schlock?

The fear is that, in the future, worthy books of high literary quality will be shunned. Yet titles are getting acquired by editors even when sales data point toward the reality that they are never going to deliver a positive return. What those who have reservations about data fail to see…is that data will make it easier to find the audience that appreciates these books. Rather than support an expensive marketing campaign across mass retail, publishers can tailor their campaigns to the relevant audience by virtue of an improved understanding of who likes to read a certain kind of book. And just as important, publishers will also discover the optimal approach to reach that audience.

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So Shall You Reap? Success and ‘Investment’ at #DBW15

January 16, 2015 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Image - iStockphoto: PazzoPhoto — Image – iStockphoto: PazzoPhoto

Shot Out of a Cannon

I’m told that there are people who find the holidays restful. I have yet to meet one of these extraordinary creatures, but I think they would find holding the publishing industry’s first grand-slam conference of the year in the second week of January to be a dandy thing. Bright-tailed and bushy-eyed, they’d dash out, we must assume, tinsel still in their hair, ready to take on the rigors of Digital Book World’s (DBW) day-and-night glad-handing and info-processing with “Happy New Year!” energy.

Those of us who find the holidays something less than restful are cheering the news that Digital Book World next year moves to March 7 to 9.

[pullquote]What do we expect in return for heavy investment in our work? What do we expect a publisher to invest?[/pullquote]

For now, the sixth annual doing of Digital Book World in New York City — the 2015 edition — has just closed, with the Avenue of the Americas’ face-freezing winds to slap us out of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

Expertly mounted and run like clockwork at the Hilton Midtown by David Nussbaum’s F+W Media staff — led by David Blansfield, Gary Lynch, Beth Dean, Taylor Jacobs Sferra — Digital Book World drew more than 1,200 attendees this year, plus a lot of industry folks who needed to meet those attendees. I can’t remember a conference with so many requests for private chats with start-up personnel and key services outfits. Many of them “surround the conference,” as one observer put it, meeting harried attendees for coffee and a deal on West 53rd, 54th, 56th. We gave nearby cafes, restaurants, and lounges a lot of business.

Mike Shatzkin once again programmed the event, somehow achieving 12 keynote events, a DBW record, I believe, including an impressive conversation with Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti and a rare sighting of an Apple exec, the iBooks chief Keith Moerer.

[pullquote]Is it possible that we assign a causal effect — “the more I invest, the more I’ll get back” — to this kind of work, more as a common way of thinking than as an accurate view of market conditions?[/pullquote]

#DBW15 to its Twitter friends is an industry conference, not a writers’ conference. That distinction may not be the one everyone would prefer, but the event — focused on business movements, trends, and perspectives — throws off all kinds of energies and implications for writers, of course.

One annual element that directly involves writerly talent is the delivery of the Digital Book World author survey. This year it has a small novella of a title: Authors Facing the Industry: Data and Insights from Authors on the Publishing Business, Author-Publisher Relations, and Marketing. It’s for sale, as you can see, but I’ve talked with DBW editorial director Rich Bellis, and he’s going to be making available some insight articles about its details soon, from the survey’s author, the sociologist Dana Beth Weinberg.

My close colleague and WU icon Jane Friedman — also known as Porter’s Brain — was with us this year at DBW, looking good in her cannon helmet and ably moderating a panel discussion that was prompted by the new survey.

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Between a Blog and a Hard News Cycle

October 17, 2014 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

How Do You Know If You Can Say No to NaNo?

The Internet has mutated reasonable people into wannabe writers…We are blind to the harsh truth-light-radiating facts such as ‘half of self-published authors earn less than $500’, facts written about in newspapers by professional writers.

That’s Tom Mitchell (@tommycm on Twitter) writing an essay at Medium, War on #amwriting. I must thank my colleague in London, Sheila Bounford, for reminding me of it. It could have been lost in the Bavarian Ether: Mitchell’s article came out during our always intense Frankfurt Book Fair week in Germany.

Bounford joined us for Authoright’s half-day conference there for English-language authors. I moderated two of the panels during that afternoon at BuchMesse’s new Business Club — a true haven at a Book Fair that drew 270,000 people. Every one of them was in my train car from the Hauptbahnhof to the FestHalle/Messe, too.

[pullquote]The Internet on most days looks like a clothesline for all the dirty linen we once knew it was incorrect to display to the world.[/pullquote]

And as our panelists took questions from the floor, I was struck, as I am time and time again, by how basic those inquiries were. So many members of the audience were asking what they should have known from their own research as would-be professionally productive writers (whether self-publishing or traditionally published). Of course, they weren’t doing any research. That was obvious. And that is the problem. We see it everywhere, in this world in which, per Mitchell, the Internet has “mutated reasonable people into wannabe writers.”

Everyone has decided that he or she has a book in them, right? Mitchell:

There’s lots of stuff we all have in us, a spleen for example, but decide not to share.

Mitchell won’t win, of course. We’re likely to see the spleens come out, too. The Internet on most days looks like a clothesline for all the dirty linen we once knew it was incorrect to display to the world. I was recently told by a regular reader and friend that it was great I seemed to be “sharing more personal stuff” about myself in my writing. I pulled back at once. I’m Southern. Bubbas don’t share. We’re better bred than that.

Grant Faulkner in his NaNoWriMo headgear

Mitchell’s special target in his essay is NaNoWriMo, which looms once more on the calendar’s horizon. I had dinner in Frankfurt with Grant Faulkner, executive director of NaNo, immensely likable guy. We enjoy talking. He didn’t wear his horned helmet at table, just to answer the question I know is eating you alive. He’s aware that I have my qualms about kamikaze writing efforts, although many writers I respect think the NaNo dive-bomb is a good one.

As I told Faulkner, my worry isn’t about the NaNoWriMo month of November. It’s December. Mitchell says it well:

NaNoWriMo must be the worst thing that’s happened to literary agents since alcoholic lunches fell out of fashion. I almost pity the bespectacled bastards, receiving thousands upon thousands of unedited manuscripts, their December inboxes overflowing like knackered toilets, the only merit to the majority of these ‘novels’ being that they were completed quite quickly.

It’s not NaNo’s or Faulkner’s fault that so many NaNoWriMo participants ignore the instructions saying for God’s sake don’t submit your NaNoWriMo draft for publication (or self-publish the thing) in December.

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When They Talk About You at #DBW14: You’re Branded

January 17, 2014 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Image - iStockphoto: Mysh Kovsky — Image – iStockphoto: Mysh Kovsky

NEW YORK—The Digital Book World Conference & Expo (DBW) isn’t designed for authors.

And that’s fine. Various sectors of the industry! the industry! have every right to get together by and among themselves to consider things from their own viewpoints and on behalf of their own interests.

At Digital Book World Conference & Expo 2014 - Photo: Porter Anderson — At Digital Book World Conference & Expo 2014 – Photo: Porter Anderson

As good as our authors are at contorting themselves, day by day, in the search for how to exercise their craft and genius in a world that keeps changing, I’ve wished many times that our writers could be along on these occasions to see and hear how the establishment talks to itself.

Then again, at other times, I’ve been worried at how many authors don’t seem to think it’s important to listen to publishing’s internal dialectic. So much to learn there. But our entrepreneurial author movement may at times be just as guilty of dissing the suits as the suits can be of denying the rising force of authorial careerists.

In its fifth anniversary stomping of the hotel carpet — held this week in New York — #DBW14 was again led by longtime publishing wonk Mike Shatzkin as a show the business built. Shatzkin’s elevator pitch was ready at the outset of his comments: “The purpose of this event is to provide the information and insight publishers need.”

At times, the 1,500-person, three-day conclave was gently rocked with corporate consolation, as in Sourcebooks publisher Dominique Raccah’s talk on reframing failure as opportunity and even inspiration.

At other times, #DBW14, as we hashed it, crackled with inquiry: consultant Joseph Esposito revealed that some library book suppliers will ship faster—indeed with Amazonian efficiency—if librarians place their orders through “our friends in Seattle”; and so, he told us, many librarians are doing exactly that. Prime stuff, baby.

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