I’ve been looking forward to this panel for a while. Author and prof Clay Shirky is an icon in the new-media punditry scene, and I’m keen to hear what he has to say not about newspapers, but books.
Again, I’m from the school that says the specific medium is unimportant, so the lessons here will be broadly applicable. Other panelists: John Fagan and Ivan Held from Penguin, Peter Miller from Bloomsbury Books and Deborah Schultz, a new media marketing consultant.
There’s a lot of Penguin types here, so they’re surely using this event to make a splash with some big interactive plans. Oops, nope, they’re apparently here to learn, one of them just said. (Update: The audience later yells at them for the misleading title: New Think for Old Publishers, and on Twitter someone calls it “audience-funded brainstorming”)
Update 2: Great exchange between disgruntled author in the audience (”publishers are like record labels — they’re no longer relevant”) and Shirky, who says “publishers are just a filter. And the internet means we’re not going from Filter A to Filter B, but from Filter A to Filters A through Z. So if the publisher filter doesn’t create good signal, it doesn’t deserve to exist”.
Schultz begins with an overview of how knowledge and storytelling has changed over time, and how technology is changing it now. Storytelling used to be interactive, when communication was oral (and the Talmud, with content in the middle and comments in the margins, might be the first blog!). The internet’s interactivity may help recouple what has been decoupled.
What are new and interesting ways to discuss literature?
They put up a slide, important enough that I’m putting it here in bold and italics: The internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history.
Shirky says what we’re dealing with is the lateral transfer from what people are thinking and writing to what people are reading and saying about it.
He reframes the question: What do we do in the online medium to make long-form writing resonate?
Search vs. serendipity: Finding stuff you didn’t know you were looking for is still lacking with search engines, Shirky says. There have to be serendipitous methods of making people aware of this. What can we do to bridge the gap between what the people in the publishing houses know about what’s coming and what the people in the world want to know? How do we duplicate the moment of the serendipitous bookshop book find in the online medium?
Most of the good advice comes from the audience:
- Cater to affinity groups
- Encourage audiences to cheer about the stuff they like; music and film do it well, book publishers do it poorly;
- Pair music with books with movies and other cultural products and don’t deny the convergence of media and the public’s affection for multiple media
- “Shortcovers”, a scheme by Canadian book publishers: first e-chapter is free, and subsequent chapters are $1
