Final Shepherd Press Sales for Twitterers

Twitter followers of BDHouse will have two final 24-hour opportunities from Shepherd Press.

Monday, November 9
Paul Tripp's Lost in the Middle: Mid-Life and the Grace of God, is free when you buy Broken-Down House.

Monday, November 16
50% off any audio or video product at shepherdpress.com.

Here are the details on these sales, and a bunch of excerpts from Broken-Down House.

Story is King...in an unruly democracy

I link today to this typically insightful Joel Achenbach piece from the Washington Post on the state of publishing and the power of narrative. His primary focus is the news business, but his comments apply to the book world, too.

So, I can urge publishers to reinvent themseves from the ground up, as in this post, but the constant is that great writing and editing are still at the heart of everything. In fact, as the market gets ever more flooded, quality will only become more important.

Writing is still King, but the monarchy is gone. The King does not rule as before. He's a richly bedecked figure, wise and genuinely worthy of honor, but his context is a democracy. And not even a republic, but a one-person/one-vote, massive ongoing self-aggregating opinion poll of what's hot and what's not.   

Here are some excerpts from the full article.

There's a furious adapt-or-die mentality among media organizations. Researchers say we're becoming a "society of scanners." They say the Internet is a "link medium." We find ourselves abandoning stories in mid-sentence. Newspaper executives have embraced a new format known as "charticles," which are, in the words of the American Journalism Review, "combinations of text, images and graphics that take the place of a full article." The Orlando Sentinel, for example, now has a front page crammed with graphics, columnist head-shots, bulletins, story keys, headlines, bumpers, tags, indexes, an advertisement -- a cartoon! -- and lots of pleas to check the Web site.

There is much confusion about what, precisely, should vanish in this broad media makeover. Is it print? Or just long stories? Or just bad, boring, dishwater-dull stories? Complicating the situation is that the online world is both increasingly dominant and, for many media organizations, stubbornly unprofitable. If you're a media exec, wrap your head around the paradox that print is dead and online news a bust.

***

Good stories take time to craft. Good writers, editors, copy editors, photographers, etc., all expect a living wage. The real question in the months and years ahead is whether there's a business model that can support good stories. Norman Sims, journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst: "The great stories will survive. But the question is who's going to pay for them. . . . This is not fast food. This is slow food. And it's expensive."

***

Storytellers will have to be more disciplined or get a new line of work. This is not a crisis, this is progress. Fewer "jello ledes," quote-dumps, the whole notebook disgorged upon the page. Less overwriting by frustrated novelists. Sorry, we don't need to read Proust's version of the zoning hearing.

***

The best feature of print is that it doesn't interrupt you. It doesn't try to link you somewhere else. It doesn't talk back. That's a killer app in and of itself these days. Interactivity is a great virtue sometimes, but there are other times when you want to read a story that doesn't try to heckle you as it squirms in your lap.

Shepherd Press offering Paul Tripp bargains

Twitter followers of BDHouse will have two special 24-hour opportunities from Shepherd Press.

Monday, November 2
Starting at 7:00 am ET, and running for 24 hours, they will be able to buy Broken-Down House for 55% off, a better deal than Amazon's free-shipping option. Limit: one per customer.

However, anyone interested in Paul Tripp's Lost in the Middle: Mid-Life and the Grace of God (http://bit.ly/1NXXwN), probably should wait...

Monday, November 9
Starting at 7:00 am ET, and running for 24 hours, you could get Lost in the Middle free when you buy Broken-Down House at full price. This is also a better deal than what Amazon is offering. Limit: one per customer.

Excerpts from Broken-Down House (15 of them and counting) and more details about the sales are here.

Death of the Book Review

Helpful perspective from Fast Company. Excerpts:

Good reviews help, at best, incrementally, and bad reviews hurt, at worst, incrementally. They're published then they disappear, living on as pithy testimonials on authors' Web sites, or on the back covers or in the fronts of paperback editions.

                                               * * *

....Like news, book reviews have become crowd-sourced, with bloggers and Amazon readers leading the way. But these reviews, unlike those that appear in publications, do have an impact on sales, because they appear right next to the product being sold and persist in online perpetuity. Would you buy an electric razor at Macy's if the department store listed a bevy of complaints from dissatisfied customers next to it? Indeed, an academic paper by Yale Economics professor Judith Chevalier found that while positive reviews increase a book's sales and negative reviews dampen them, "the impact of 1-star reviews is greater than the impact of 5-star reviews."

                                               * * *

...But the dirty secret of book reviews is that they have always been rife with abuse, even when left to the ostensible pros. Every author knows what I'm talking about, the reviewers (most of whom have never written books) that use their pulpit to settle scores.

Strategic Decision Tree for Book Publishers

I don't mean to make light of the huge challenges faced by book publishers. But I think the options before them may essentially come down to this.