Publishing Is Changing: Giving Away Your Content?

Mur Lafferty posted a blog entry to Storytellers Unplugged about her view on the changing winds in the publishing industry. She is a podcast author that has given away much of her content in an effort to grow an audience, and as a result has become a published author for her Playing for Keeps novel. I became a fan of hers after hearing the first of her Heaven novel series.

She discusses how publishers could be taking some lessons from those who are on the forefront of this change in the industry; struggling new authors like her are focusing on growing an audience through free content. Larger audience means more people have heard of you, more people hearing of you means more sales. It's worked pretty well for names like Scott Sigler, Cory Doctorow, J.C. Hutchins, and of course Mur Lafferty.

There could be a flip side to this too. These are people who aren't just authors. They're promoters and marketers. They are learning how to brand themselves. For example, Scott Sigler isn't just a podcast author. He's a brand that promotes himself as the FDO, the Future Dark Overlord. His fans are self-branded Junkies that need their Sigler 'fix. He tirelessly puts out content into his feed, including the Bloodcast, short stories that are leading to other stories and novels, and he has written most of his released work in a way that they tie together like a more overt version of the Stephen King works that make subtle nods to one another across novels (for the FDO there are hints that aliens in the Rookie have made multiple appearances in novels like Infected and Contagious, for example, and there's a shared character name in the Rookie that is a descendant of a certain hornball in Nocturnal...) Sigler has also recently concluded his tour around parts of the country while holding Junkie contests to determine where he goes next in order to draw crowds.

Most people who want to be authors want to write. What Mur seems to be pointing to is a future where that may not be really possible except for the really fortunate authors; publishers expect authors to brand themselves and promote themselves rather than investing in the author. This picture is saying that a career as a writer is as dead as becoming a teacher.

I have relatives that are teachers. They can't be just teachers as they thought teaching would be when they went to college. Instead teachers become mentors, surrogate parents, guidance counselors, psychologists, babysitters, hall monitors, politicians, and students having to complete "continuing education" credits. The idea that you go to school to learn about a topic and then go out to mold young minds is complete bull. It seems that actually teaching fills about thirty percent of their day. The rest is unrelated politics and crud that people outside the field have no clue about and people inside the field know burns out most new teachers within the first few years.

Indeed in the future painted by that blog post authors will need to focus on building an audience, interacting with their audience, updating websites and twitter accounts and facebook pages and podcasts and cross promoting with others in the podcast community. The new wave of authors will need to be savvy in using tools like the Internet to track their Google ranking and set up notifications when their names appear online so they can move to other blogs where people mention their names and interact with potential audience members on other blogs.

And this may work for many. The problem is that I see this through a myopic lens; I am a podcast freak who likes listening to audio on the iPod and have discovered some of these authors like Mur and Sigler. As a result I get a lot of my information from this insular community for whom this approach to gaining sales works. They are author/marketers.

I can't help but think there are others who want to just be authors that won't be able to do this. In the comments for that blog, a commenter with the name Joe Cottonwood posted that he podcast 3 books on podiobooks for free but already has 9 books in print with major houses. He said that he has increased his audience by a huge number and has had great fan mail and he really enjoyed going back to storytelling roots by doing the podcast. But he hasn't seen much in the way of sales being generated; his podcast of Clear Heart had about 10,000 listeners and the book sold about 200 copies, according to his comments. "One problem, of course, is that I suck at marketing. Apparently I’m a pretty good writer and a popular podcaster, but I’m a terrible publicist. I can live with that."

I appreciate Mur and Sigler's advice to new authors. To paraphrase, "Write your book. Just plant your butt in the seat and write. Clean it up. Try everything you can to get an agent and get it published the traditional route. Podcasting your content for free isn't for the faint of heart and should be a last resort." They aren't giving up entirely on the old way of publishing but rather are acting as pioneers on a new approach to doing things at a time when the traditional houses are starting to see a storm on the horizon and in the process authors will end up having to roll with the punches or change careers.

Will the podcaster-free-content-author-turned-marketer become the norm? Only time will tell. In the meantime it looks like the curse of living in "interesting times" is coming and everyone in the industry will be waiting to see just how interesting things get.