Barnes, who started her UK-based small press, Snowbooks, in 2003, has become one of the industry’s strongest proponents of technological fluency in publishing. She goes so far in some of her writings as to encourage publishers themselves to learn to code so that they can learn—as she has done—to create the specific tools they need for their operations and to appreciate the importance of tech in the digitally driven world that publishing is becoming. To that end, she also founded and operates Bibliocloud [now Consonance], a company that designs and creates tools for publishing houses’ needs.
Barnes spoke with typical candor on Monday. Because she’s uniquely positioned as both a publisher of her house’s own authors and as a technologist looking deeply into the industry’s operations, Barnes can speak to authors about how to spot publishing companies’ tech-operations shortcomings.
Barnes made a suggestion that authors—and their organizations—become the owners of coveted audience data. This, as far as we know, is the first time a proposal has been issued for author-advocacy organizations to take control of the kind of reader data that has become so sought after by commercial publishers.
Here is an extended excerpt from her commentary to Author Day. The full text will be published at a later date at The Bookseller’s The FutureBook digital-publishing community site.
In the author’s world, technology has changed the way you work to an extent you might not even recognize. You might use Scrivener to organize your plot and character development rather than Post-it notes, or Google to look up spellings rather than a printed dictionary or to research backgrounds and stories rather than an encyclopedia. Our lives are shaped by access to tools of a world that simply didn’t exist when we were kids.
Publishing companies operate in this same changing world, but I don’t think all of them have caught up with it. Some have, but you can spot the ones who are lagging.
- If the royalty statement you receive is an Excel spreadsheet, or looks suspiciously like a hand-typed Word document, or if it’s late, you know that they’ve not adopted the appropriate royalty-management systems.
- If they ask you to resend your address every time they need to post you something, they’ve not adopted the right CRM [customer relationship management] tools.
- If they say that Jane’s on holiday this week and she’s the only one who can get back to you, they’ve not got a central repository for their project management.
- If you need to chase them for triggered advance payments, their systems aren’t telling them it’s due.
- If your biographical note refuses to update on Amazon despite you asking a hundred times for it to be changed, they’ve not adopted ONIX [online information exchange] management tools.
It’s when publishers and authors try to work together—to join up the bits of the supply chain—that we’re all doing a pretty bad job.
In my decade and a bit of experience, the proper use of character and paragraph styles in Word is still a challenge, and that hinders the ability of publishers to have a smooth production workflow. Some authors have cracked this and more, such as the folk who write in XML markup, or who use cloud-based project-management tools to stay on top of their deadlines, but they’re in the minority. This is basic craftsmanship, the basic ability to use the tools of your trade. These are things all professional writers should be paying attention to: not just the words, but the way you work.
So there’s a lot of work to do. And once the basics are in place, I would challenge the authors’ representatives—the agencies, the societies—to focus on owning audience data, to get the swing of power back towards authors. Because those that own the customer data own the balance of power. And the tools exist.
- Google Analytics lets you see which named network has looked at your site.
- There’s HubSpot that automates marketing campaigns.
- You can use Amazon APIs to allow you to extract and chart sales ranking data.
- There’s MailChimp reader analytics.
- Goodreads’ API lets you harvest and rank all sorts of data and reviews over time.
- You can ping Twitter’s API programmatically to get all mentions of all your authors’ names and books, globally, over time.
- Google Books’ API gives you the power of Google’s search to collate, collect, and query all sorts of book data and show patterns of review, use, buying, and promotion.
- Instead of a microsite for one book, or a rubbishy Blogspot page, why don’t agencies create author-specific transactional websites that would allow authors to be in control of their brand across their whole career, and assign them the rights to take that site with them regardless of publisher or agency?
There’s no technical impedance. It’s a matter of strategy.
Bottom line: Barnes’s insights are critical for author career building; even if you can’t use or access the tools yourself, you should know what tools exist and what data is available to aid in decision making for marketing, promotion, publicity, and long-term reader outreach. Knowing what’s out there, and how it gets used, can improve the questions you ask your publisher and help you raise the bar for what gets done and how it gets done. It also helps focus everyone’s energy in the right place: good data shows what efforts have worked, and where efforts might work in the future.
Editor’s note: This issue of The Hot Sheet is dedicated to coverage of Author Day in London. Author Day took place on Monday (November 30) as part of the fifth annual FutureBook Conference, Europe’s largest publishing conference.
Author Day was not focused on writing tips or inspirational goals, but on industry and business challenges, and it was limited in size to about 100 delegates, 20 speakers, and 15 staff members.
The concept of trust is the fundamental issue that arose from the Author Day discussions. From many trade authors’ mistrust of royalty statements they can’t read to many indie authors’ mistrust of agents and editors, we witnessed severe—even crippling—gaps in trust between virtually any parts of the industry you might study.
The stories and comments in our coverage from Author Day have not yet been published elsewhere and point to key issues that affect the author experience.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
