The Business

The Digital Future

The future is now. And it’s digital. We live in a globalised age, which demands immediacy. Blogs, live journals, social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and, for the younger generation, Bebo, have become a day-to-day fact of many people’s lives. Businesses have recognised the potential to be exploited from these phenomena, commonly grouped together as they are under the umbrella of ‘Web 2.0’. From advertising and marketing opportunities to trendspotting, from reputational management to connecting with clients…Engagement with Web 2.0 is crucial – its influence and reach is only likely to increase.

Smart literary writers and publishers are also becoming ever more alert to the ways in which Web 2.0 can help promote themselves and target their work, and enable them to reach international audiences that were once unthinkable. And Blogging and social networking sites offer a further advantage: they are completely free. Updates and additions to blogs or profiles can be achieved at the touch of a button. If you’re a published writer – either via the traditional route or self-published – or if you’re a writer working towards publication, then blogging tools and social networking can play a great role in helping you to connect with, establish and widen an appreciative audience. If you’re an independent publisher, then social networking in particular can help you spread the word on readings, launches, author news and so much more without incurring any of the costs associated with website maintenance. In a competitive and often aggressive market, with so many now out there vying for an audience and sales, it is a fatal error for any author or publisher to ignore the digital future. Leave it alone and you’re certain to be left behind.

‘Blog’ is an abbreviation of ‘weblog’. The blog is an online publishing platform that enables a writer to do everything from maintaining a journal to posting details of events or readings, from actually publishing work or some extracts of work in progress online to plugging your latest book – or, very often, a combination of all of these things. It provides the opportunity to connect with others and build a community through links to your favourite blogs and websites. You can use blogs as an individual or you can share the management and editing of a blog with others (a particularly useful tool for writers groups or organisations to share news, information and work). You can made your blog public (and available to be searched for on the net and read by anyone) or limit access to a group of selected individuals. Blogs allow comment, too, and you can set moderation, which will enable you to approve comments before they are published.

The two most popular free blog hosts in the UK are Blogger and Wordpress. Both allow you to upload images, and post youtube and other media clips. And you can choose and customise templates, fonts and backgrounds, too – at the touch of a button. The good news is you won’t need to be tech-savvy to set up and maintain a blog – it’s easy and requires no IT know-how whatsoever. Even better, by setting up a blog you’ve achieved a web presence at no cost – and one that you can edit, delete or add content to within a matter of minutes. Sitemeter is a great, free add-on tracker tool, which will enable you to view the number of visitors to your blog by day, week and month, and allow you to view peak times for visitors. You’ll also be able to see where in the world your visitors are based.

Blogging has come some way since its early days, with the top bloggers on the web attracting literally thousands and thousands of readers every day. Some elite bloggers, such as Julie Powell or the infamous Belle de Jour, have even landed book deals. Publishers like Picador have even got in on the act by incorporating blogging by their authors on their sites. Many magazines such as Mslexia and New Welsh Review now maintain an editor’s blog as a great way to keep in touch with their existing readership and to develop their audience still further.

If you decide to create a blog to promote you and your work, and to share views and information, do remember that blogs – unless they are set to limited access – can be viewed by anyone who happens upon them. A surprisingly large number of users forget that they are being watched. Think twice before posting information or opinion you would be uncomfortable sharing with strangers in the ‘non-virtual’ world.

Social Networking Sites such as MySpace and Facebook were, until fairly recently, largely dominated by teens and students. But they have since become genuinely popular across a wide range of ages and with people from all walks of life. While many continue to use them to connect with families, maintain friendships or to catch up with old friends or colleagues, they are being increasingly used to establish and develop business relationships and contacts.

For both writers and publishers MySpace and Facebook are an invaluable way to network, share news, develop a profile and market work. Registration is free and simple. You set up your profile page, which will enable you to upload pictures and some information about yourself and what you do, and begin seeking out friends and acquaintances on the site to connect with. As your friends network develops, you’ll find that you begin to connect with other like-minded individuals or organisations – some on the other side of the world. The more ‘friends’ you connect with, the more you are likely to connect with again.

Facebook has latterly taken the edge over MySpace (which still remains nonetheless the favourite of bands and musicians, partly due to the ease with which media can be distributed on the site). No doubt Facebook’s great games and novelty greetings have played their part in its rise in popularity. But practical features, such as the ability to create and join groups and the ‘People You May Know’ tool, which lets you easily identify friends of friends within your social network, has increased information sharing and the simplicity with which contacts are developed on the Facebook platform. Writers and book publishers – particularly the independents – have recently developed a significant presence on Facebook, with new profiles and groups being set up all the time. Facebook allows writers and publishers to send out invitations to launches, readings, to post youtube clips from events and even set up Fan pages.

A presence on social networking sites is a great way to become part of a potentially vast virtual community and stay in the current. But social networking sites are not without risks to privacy and security. As with any presence online, you should be guarded in the amount of information you share with people you don’t know well. Recent controversy over the amount of personal information available on Facebook and MySpace, which may potentially be used for fraud or even for intimidation, has meant that both sites have improved privacy controls. You should read information available on these sites about how to protect your privacy very carefully and take the appropriate measures.

The Digital Future: the Way Ahead and Challenges

The digital future has brought with it great gifts to the author and publisher through the development of Web 2.0. But it brings with it questions over the long-term future of the print magazine and the book and, as the recent controversy over the National Library of Wales’s Digitisation Project has proved, over issues surrounding copyright and intellectual ownership.

It seems likely that over the next decade we will witness an increase in all manner of magazines and journals being available solely online, particularly literary journals. Most tellingly, all the major UK newspapers now offer their product both in print and online; their print sales have continued to fall, while their online audience continues only to increase. Admittedly, in the case of newspapers, the online experience has the categorical advantage over print: it allows for updates and breaking news. In terms of being in the current – which is what ‘news’ must be to be relevant in an age of rolling media coverage – the online experience will always prove superior. But the increasing development of material made available solely for online users would suggest that online editions of newspapers will, in the not too distant future, no longer supplement print editions but completely replace them – and that they will also allow for a more interactive relationship with readers. The Guardian, in particular, seems to have already been making preparations for the eventual transition, with its sophisticated site already incorporating blogging, debate and comment from readers. And the trend is not limited to newspapers. Many of the big-selling lifestyle magazines have slowly but surely increased the content available on their websites – and with it their advertising revenue.

For literary magazines and journals the matter is, of course, somewhat different. They do not enjoy the wide, large audiences of newspapers or the commercial magazines. But like newspapers and commercial magazines, they have seen their sales decline or remain largely static, while coping with the inevitable rise in printing costs – and the inherent financial risks involved. And, then, the matter of staying in the current is also shared – albeit for different reasons. The increase in virtual communities and the growth in literary-minded, sophisticated and influential bloggers who even review books on their sites, together with the demand for immediacy and currency, mean that the literary magazine or journal has taken something of a knock. In the culture of Now, the literary quarterly can seem increasingly out of the loop. Reviews may appear many, many months after a book has been published. In the intervening period between each new issue, from the audience’s perspective, the magazine is dormant – despite all the work that is being done behind the scenes. Exciting news on the literary scene may be old hat by the time the next issue appears. It can become a genuine struggle to retain relevancy and even harder, therefore, to opinion form – arguably one of the most important functions for the literary magazine.

In the longer term, it seems likely that many of the bigger literary magazines will assume a fully online presence. They will very possibly transform themselves into purveyors of rolling arts coverage, opinion and reviews, as in the case of the Canada based but internationally popular Bookninja site, as well as providing a platform for new work. They will obtain their revenue in the virtual world in much the same way as they achieve much of their revenue in the print world – through subsidy and advertisements. They may choose to go down the subscriber route. It won’t happen quite yet - but it is certainly on its way. In the meantime, the bigger literary magazine has to make its way in the digital future by working hard and plugging into new technologies such as social networking sites and blogs – not simply to develop audiences but to keep existing ones alive and to retain currency. For the smaller magazines, the web has for some time been seen as a refuge – a means of avoiding the exorbitant costs involved in print, and possibly accessing a potentially huge audience in the process. But without subsidy and advertising, and therefore without funds available to pay major writers, the web can be a place of near invisibility. Many small magazines continue to fold online just the same as they do in print. Despite the opportunities the digital future offers now and can promise us, the fate of the small magazine remains precarious all the same.

The cachet of print will probably never die – and if it does, then that’s a long way off. It is likely that most dictionaries, encyclopedias and many reference books will, however, go online in the very near future, with print editions made available several times a year solely to libraries and academic institutions. By their very nature, reference books need to be fully current – which is difficult to achieve in print in these fast-paced times. They are cumbersome, too, and their user-friendliness could only be enhanced through the online experience. But while many cite the model of other media, such as music and films, which have moved into purchase and download on the internet, books retain a cultural significance beyond their contents. The book is an icon of civilisation. It is a physical thing. Authors and readers alike have a great emotional attachment to it. And then, it is convenient. You can put it in your pocket, you can read it in the bath or in bed, or leave it on a train.

But the problem facing publishers remains – and has a knock-on effect for writers. How to get good work out there, particularly that of a less immediate commercial nature, and reduce the inherent financial risk? One clear way is to avoid a print run. E-books, which allow you to purchase, download and read books onto your computer, although an exciting development, have suffered from their lack of portability. E-book readers, which have promised to solve this problem and offer the public a handheld, fully portable, electronic library at their fingertips, have been around for some time but have failed to make in-roads into any tangible market to date. Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader was released in 2008 and has, despite the fate of its predecessors, exceeded sales expectations, although critical reception has proved mixed. Problems still surround Digital Rights Management, too. DRM technology prevents e-books from being shared between media – for example between your desktop PC and your laptop – or being printed out. This quite rightly protects authors and publishers from being ripped off and prevents content possibly being plagiarised and disseminated elsewhere. But it only serves to compound the inflexibility of the e-book for a modern lifestyle. While it seems probable that the e-book will never dominate the book market, as technology rises to the challenges many independent and commercial publishers will perhaps gravitate towards this route – making much of their classic back catalogue available through this medium. As well as allowing them greater funds to increase their output of new writing, it will also mean that many books will be able to remain available to readers possibly indefinitely, rather than simply sadly falling out of print.

Another phenomenon in e-publishing which potentially affords opportunities for new writers and will help to keep existing work alive is Print on Demand (POD). POD has been made available due to advances in digital printing technology, which now allows one or only a few books to be printed at a time (according to demand) at a low cost. POD means that publishers can actually still carve a respectable profit by printing fewer books. Reduced costs and risk for publishers mean that openings for new writers are likely to increase – commercial pressures, rather than a lack of quality talent out there, still play the biggest part in limiting publishing opportunities. And with the launch of Faber’s recent POD service Faber Finds [www.faber.co.uk/faberfinds], classic books, which have long since fallen out of print, have been brought back to life and to new audiences. Yet the difficulties presented by POD are all too obvious. POD books are still more expensive per unit than those printed on a run – and that is reflected in their cover price. It is very difficult to get stocked in bookshops or to achieve a presence with the online sellers like Amazon, as POD would lose its financial benefits for the publisher if returns were allowed – and all commercial booksellers insist on returns before they stock books. All significant sales must therefore be dependent on the quality of the online shopping experience on publishers’ websites. And, perversely, a book that overcomes the obstacles and becomes a word of mouth runaway success nonetheless could potentially leave a cash-strapped publisher with a very real problem in meeting the demand. A bestseller might even bankrupt them. Though potentially able to save publishers money in production, POD unfortunately limits sales and marketing opportunities, and brings with it new risks. Pressure on all publishing houses – large and small – to meet profit margins means that the future, as ever, will almost certainly be defined by negotiations with the commercial booksellers. For the present, POD, together with the e-book, is largely favoured by self-publishers [link to Self-Publishing] and specialist academic presses.

Finally, the digital future brings with it anxieties for the author and their publishers. The internet is vast and is largely characterised by a ‘free for all’ culture. And admittedly, one of the great things about the internet is that it offers a huge, largely free resource of information and entertainment to users. But not everything in the virtual world – as in real life - can or should be free. Controlling the unlawful dissemination of copyrighted work on the internet is a very difficult business, sometimes near impossible - even for organisations with billion-dollar turnovers. Witness the amount of copyrighted material - including very recent films - often posted in its entirety by users on the video-sharing site Youtube. Or consider the continuing furore over illegal music downloads. Copyright holders have taken action, of course. But by then it is largely too late. The material has been enjoyed by many thousands of people for absolutely free – but at cost to its creators. What appears to be harmless entertainment is, in fact, theft. Although Youtube, for example, has introduced checks to ensure that videos posted on its site do not breach copyright law, the problem persists.

The matter is even more difficult in literature. Look up work by a well-known contemporary poet on the net and you’ll probably find a fair amount. But chances are, they haven’t given their permission and are very probably not even aware of the fact that their work – and their revenue as a result – has been stolen.

Many people who post and view this material are particularly unwilling to accept the fact that what they are doing constitutes theft. In fact, most would tell you with a straight face that it’s a tribute to an author they admire, despite the fact that they are actually eroding that author’s financial interests in the process, not to mention their intellectual and moral rights. There still seems to be a tendency to regard even professional writers as amateurs who are happy to share their work for nothing – but for the love of it. But professional writers do expect something for the labours and this is why they publish books that cost money. It seems particularly poignant that literary authors – eternally cash-strapped and entirely dependent on an audience who will buy their work before they read it – are among the most vulnerable to this kind of abuse and the least able to combat it. If anything, the future promises even greater problems for both authors and their publishers in controlling the unlawful dissemination of creative material on the internet.

But aside from issues of piracy, there is another difficulty for writers. Digitisation of academic and creative material looks set only to increase dramatically by libraries all over the world seeking both to make efficient use of space and to share material on the net with both a specialist and general audience. In theory, using the digital future to create enormous educational repositories of this kind – virtual libraries – which can be accessed by anyone in the world, would seem like an excellent idea from both an academic and literary, not to mention a cultural, perspective. It preserves and shares valuable work, and, as is the case with the arguments in favour of the National Library of Wales’s controversial Digitisation Project, it can potentially promote a national writing and its creators. But there are justifiable concerns. To maximise access, the National Library of Wales’s Digitisation Project will offer 600,000 pages from the most significant Welsh journals from 1900 onwards for absolutely free. This means that there will be no revenue available to pay creative writers, literary estates or academics for the republication of their work – and there has been no money set aside for this purpose from the project funding. In addition, no Digital Rights Management technology (DRM) will be used to protect against the reproduction of work elsewhere on the internet or the printing out of material. Leading Welsh authors, literary estates and periodicals have come out in force to criticise the NLW Digitisation Project over both non-payment for the republication of their work and the issues surrounding the protection of their material from further unlicensed dissemination. They have refused to have their work included. The loss of their work – for now – significantly undermines the aims of the project in promoting the diversity and excellence of Welsh Literature. Meanwhile, discussions on the way forward continue unabated between all parties. The digital future presents the chance to democratise knowledge and increase access to great literature for all – but at what cost to its creators?