 So let me introduce Brad. So I've known Brad for just a couple of years. And the first year when we were both fellows at the Berkman Center, Brad was also in the OGC, the Office of General Counsel, which means he was a lawyer for Harvard. Not just that Harvard, but for Harvard. And then we stayed in touch because we like each other, but also because Brad was working on a really important project, which was the making openly available of the metadata about Harvard's library collection, 12.3 million volumes. It's hugely important that this catalog, bibliographic information, got out. But it's also required a very particular type of lawyer to do it because it is a rat's nest trying to, was a rat's nest trying to get this data made available. Tons of licenses and IP issues. Requires a lawyer who is both committed to openness and is committed to social good beyond the questions of risk. And Brad was fantastic in pushing this forward. Our culture actually owes Brad and other people who are working on this, of course, a debt of gratitude. So I've always been really happy that you did that. I was an admirer of that. So when Brad sent out a notice saying that he had written and published a novel, I got a sinking feeling, nothing personal, saying, oh my god, here's a friend who's written. I didn't know he wrote fiction. And the chance is that it's good fiction. Forget Brad. Just in general, the probabilities are that it's terrible fiction. And so I'm thinking, oh, I want to come up with some innocuous ways of saying, acknowledging that I read it and finding something good about it. I really liked your use of cliche, Brad. I found the predictability of the plot to be really comforting. And I started reading it. I love this book. I think Brad is a brilliant, brilliant writer. The book is hilarious. It's unpredictable. It works at multiple levels. Its plot works thematically. And as a narrative, it's each character. And they're all a little bit over the top. Is that OK to say? Yeah, intended to be. Oh, good. Thank god. They're all a little bit over the top. They all have backstories that Brad tells us. And each of those backstories could be the beginning of another novel. It's a wonderful, inventive book that creates its own world with its own logic. It turns out to be tied in important ways to our own world. And it progresses as you discover the logic that Brad somehow has invented. It's a wonderful book. So Brad, tell us about the process. Thanks. I would walk into crowded rooms and confront people much more often if I had David alongside me. The lawyer in me won't let me start without a disclaimer. And the disclaimer is that I am very emphatically not a success story in this area. So if you were hoping that I could give you tips on how to make millions or thousands or even hundreds of dollars selling a book, on Amazon, you'd be out of luck. As best I can figure, the way that you do it is that you write books about how to sell books on Kindle. And here are just several. Or you write about vampires or some combination of the two. I haven't done either of those things. So what I thought I would do today is instead offer you some of my 11-year-old thoughts on a history and trajectory of authorship and publishing. And then from there, draw on my own personal experiences as a writer to test and form undercut as applicable that 11-year-old theory. So theory first, and hopefully this won't be too oppressive. As a third-year law student in 2001, I wrote a note for the Harvard Law Review. And I was a law student because I hadn't managed to sell any fiction. And I was a law student because my other idea was to be a professor of 18th century British literature. And my prospects for that were pretty bleak, too. So here I was in law school, a bit frustrated on those two scores. But nonetheless, I was able to make use of my aggravations as a writer. And my interest in history and literature to write this note, which I rather polemically titled I was in my 20s, so give me a break. Exploitative publishers, untrustworthy systems in the dream of a digital revolution for artists. And then I put the smith's quote underneath. So yeah, I was on fire when I wrote that. The notes object, at least in part, is to offer a three-phase trajectory of literary production and authorship that is based on sort of the Marxist historical theory and hinges around the two sort of significant disruptive developments in literary production, namely and obviously the printing press, movable type, and digital media and the internet. And so the first phase, as I would describe it, is sort of a pre-modern feudal phase of literary production that dates from antiquity to probably roughly the middle of the 18th century when industrialized publishing really started to get some legs under it. And during this era, which I call it sort of a feudal condition because I guess there's a pun there, feudal and futile probably for writers, because aristocratic patrons dominated literary culture. They were, of course, the folks in society with money and clout. And authors weren't really in a position to bring their works to market directly to readers. And there wasn't really a community of readers quite like there is today. And so writers depended upon their patrons for their living and for career advancement. And what the patron was able to offer was a stipend, perhaps, a living wage. A patron might commission a work. A patron might simply use his or her clout among the literati to bring interest and favor to a writer's works. And in return, the writer was expected then to give something back. And I'm oversimplifying things for sure. This was 1,200, 15, now more than that, 1,700 years that I'm covering. But two ways in which you could give something back to your patron would be to make an offering in the content of your work. That is, you could write a poem that would celebrate the valor, the good taste, the military victory of your patron. You could mount an attack on your patron's political rivals as Alexander Pope was particularly skilled at doing. You could do what Virgil did, which was write an epic poem that did the work of establishing the lineage of Emperor Augustus all the way back to the Olympian gods. Another way that you could win and hold the favor of your patron would be to offer the work itself as the deliverable in a dedication. And this is something that we see a lot now. And we don't take it to mean what it meant back in those days, which was actually really a dedication. Here's one that I particularly like by one of my favorite authors, Lawrence Stern. This is a dedication to Tristram Shandy. The author would write the dedication with great flattering words of presentment, lay the work at the feet of the patron and say, this is yours. I did this for you. And so in this sense, patrons really sort of owned and controlled literature. And as you can imagine, authors weren't particularly thrilled about this over time. A condition of dependence always breeds of resentments. An author certainly felt that they were the ones that were actually producing works, only to have the patrons sort of carry the applause and raise their hands and celebrate themselves at the end of the day. They may have felt compromised in the content of their work too, and surely at times they also felt neglected by their patrons. And so what I'd like to do now is read a quote to you from Samuel Johnson, who was responding to Lord Chesterfield, who at the 11th hour, without having given a substantial assistance to Johnson in his efforts, wanted to take hold of the dedication for Johnson's dictionary. And Johnson wrote to him, seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. It's not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help. It's a great line. So Johnson could be this frank and confrontational with his patrons because he lived on the cusp of what I would call phase two, which is the era of industrialized publishing. And of course, this industrialization of publishing was accomplished by the introduction of the printing press, and it took some time for an industry to organize. But the press ultimately delivered what I would call paraphrasing marks, the means of reproduction, into the hands of entrepreneurs. And this fact delivered authors from the dependency and control of their patrons, which is terrific. But it delivered them into the dependency and control, I would argue, of the publishers. And why is that? Simply because, and this I think is part of the human condition, it's something that I don't think is ever going to change, is that there was simply a superabundance of literary manuscripts on offer for entry into the market. There will never, I don't think, ever be a shortage of writers who are desperate to communicate their ideas, their stories, their poems and prose to the broader community. And so given this superabundance of manuscripts, you see actually that the bottleneck in literary production happens not at the point of composition, but at the point of publication. And so as a result, printers acquired, sort of incidentally, to owning the means of reproduction, the power of selecting what works would make it to market. And in that sense came to take hold of the literary culture in the way that we understand now is sort of, it's just how the world is. So publishers get to decide what works get lifted out of the slush pile, which is their word for the big corpus of works that we all work very hard on for many days and many months. And they lift works out of the slush pile, and they dust them off and look them over. And they decide whether they're appropriate to be copied and put on carts to the London Bookshelter or on trucks to the Barnes and Noble today. And these days we see a measure of sophistication and professionalism in this process. Publishing companies have sort of grafted onto their production apparatus divisions of folks who select and edit works for publication. And these folks may be very great at what they do. They may discharge this duty, this service to the literary culture with the highest motives. But the problem is that we didn't choose these people to be the gatekeepers to decide what subset of works we get to read. And they may care greatly for the literary culture, but ultimately their accountability is, of course, to shareholders. Does this condition work for writers? It's certainly better than the old feudal state of things. Certainly the criteria for success isn't that you've written something that is particularly appealing to the whims or biases of Lord So-and-So or Lady such-and-such. Rather, the criteria now is what will an editor think is going to sell. We see people able to make livings as writers and actually succeed and become very successful. But there still is a superabundance problem. And of course, I speak from the perspective of someone who has not been selected to participate in the market of traditionally published works. So the superabundance problem persists and is probably aggravated by the fact that more folks think that they can make some headway here and actually make a living as a writer. And we actually see in the context of fiction where I work there are two barriers to entry now that you have to clear because a no-self-respecting editor at a publishing house is going to review your work unless it arrives in hand from a literary agent. So now you have to get a literary agent to favor you and then take your cause to the publisher. And I really, really wish David Weinberger were a literary agent. So I'm going to untuck my shirt because I'm getting kind of hot up here. So you could argue that for readers, certainly we have more works on the market. This isn't working. OK. We have more works on the market. But the odds of making a living as a writer are very long. And I would suggest that if you want to be a writer, you're probably better off just writing for yourself and buying scratch tickets because it's not as frustrating when your scratch ticket tells you you've lost. So here I am now complaining about the state of things. I've complained about the fuel state of things. I'm complaining now about the modern state of things. I've done a lot of complaining. Is there any hope for writers? Is there a hope for someone like me? Can I believe that my works, which haven't been selected, are any good? And if I do believe they're good, what can I do about it? Well, there is something I can do about it. And as I wrote 11 years ago, digital media and the internet deliver that promise. Digital media and the internet invest all of us with the means of reproduction, of course. Any of us can, once we've composed a work, can very easily copy it hundreds of thousands of times over and send them off like a shot to the four corners of the world at negligible cost. We can make our works directly available to readers. So terrific. We don't need publishers anymore. So I feel it's not so fast coming. And I feel it largely because it's in my notes. The not so fast problem is, again, that we have this problem of a superabundance of manuscripts. Readers, and I'm one of them, have come to rely on publishers to do the work of winnowing away at the superabundance of manuscripts that we may or may not want to read into sort of a lesser abundance of works that we probably might like to read. And we're comfortable. We have grown comfortable with them doing that work for us. So what we do when we cut publishers out of the equation, and anyone can bring their work to market, is we move the slush pile around the ankles of the readers. And how are they going to find? How are they going to figure out what they want without, and there's a little bit you can sense, a little bit of sarcasm here, without publishers making that decision for them? And so what I would propose is the readers can decide for themselves that we can create a ground level reader-based, committed, critical culture where readers can read books, review them, and of course, using the means of reproduction themselves, publish those reviews, as David has on his blog, and based on, and they can accrue authority based on their success in recommending books. Well, boy, the things that David reads, I tend to like a lot too. I think I'm going to read them. Amazon does this, of course, a little bit with people who bought this book also bought. But we can actually be more substantive than that. You don't have to work for the New York Times book review to tell people what you think about a work. So, hooray, everybody has the means of reproduction. It's like Oprah, you get the means of reproduction, you get the means, everybody gets it. So why then did it take me 11 years to self-publish my own book? I talked, the talk in 2001 about how we can sort of kickstart a world in which publishers don't predetermine our literature, our literary culture. And the truth is that, I mean, I've got all sorts of excuses I can offer. I've got small children, I've got a day job. But the truth is that traditional publishing still offered a better prospect for me than self-publishing. And for a number of reasons. First, that publishing in a digital format has not presented an attractive prospect for readers. That's starting to change with the introduction of the Kindle, with handheld devices. People are a little more interested in taking something digital to the beach instead of their dog-eared copy of their favorite book. So that's some progress has been made since 2001, surely on that front. But the truth is that publishers, when they select something for publication, they put it on the fast track. It gets favored status. And I have felt very, very, very, very close to getting there. And I have convinced myself that if I just write a few more people, if I can just really get two people to like this book, the agent and the editor, then I'm there. I'm a better class of people than anyone else has written a book. I'm Hertz number one club gold. I can go to the front of the line. And for that matter, I would also have, of course, the marketing of promotional muscle and expertise that the publishers have put behind my work. And I certainly have, as you will see, very little marketing in promotional muscle or expertise. And so I continued over 10 years to try to sell my books. My first novel had three agents at various times. The last agent was very, very, very good at getting flattering and encouraging rejection letters from publishers for me. The kind of letters that made me think, all right, that's a guy who liked me. I can go back with my other book to him. And he'll definitely take the second one. You can convince yourself that the brass ring is within your reach. And by contrast, I had thrown my books out on the internet in the meantime and didn't get much of a reception for them. I don't know if any of you have heard of In Defense of CactusKelly.com. Probably not. That was the website that hosted my first novel in the late 90s. I blogged the second book. The second book is The Turnpike Witch. I blogged that book. And I thought, well, this is an opportunity now. I can nest this work in multimedia. I can have app cheerlings. I can have audio and video pop up. Images that will enhance the reader experience. That would be fantastic. And I did all this. And nobody came. I built my field of dreams and nobody came. So given the hope that traditional publishing promised for me and the realities I was confronted with self-publishing, it just didn't seem like something I was prepared to do. But time passes. And self-publishing becomes a more promising prospect because, as I said at the Kindle, but also because digital marketplaces emerge where people can more easily find works that they want to read and market the works that they want to sell. And so Kindle Direct Publishing, Smashwords, iBooks all offer ways for writers to make a bit of money selling their books. It just seems more appealing. So self-publishing became a more attractive prospect. The glimmers of hope in traditional publishing began to fade for me with this second book. And at some point, you just kind of have to cut the cord. I have a longstanding, codependent, not very constructive relationship with my term pike witch. And I felt that it was time at a certain point just to send her off. And rather than edit and re-edit and resubmit I could put it out and work on something else. So I banged the book into shape. I uploaded it, made my selections about royalty schemes and where I would make it available, and then I just pushed the button. It's up there. So now what? How do I get readers? Again, we have the superabundance problem. I don't know how many books are published on Amazon. I don't know how many titles are there. There actually seem to be pretty cagey about telling us. Or either that I'm just lousy at Google, but I tend to be actually not so bad at Google. But I can say, where is it on here? I can say that there are at least 164,296 titles out there because that's my ranking on Amazon. And I can also say that there's actually 340,000 because that's where I was a couple days ago. So it doesn't take much to bump you up 180,000 notches on their rankings. So given that fact now, I have to figure out how to get people to be aware of, interested in reading my book. So the obvious idea was social media. We talk at Berkman about how awesome social media is, how paradigm changing it is. And if you can overthrow your Egyptian dictator through social media, then you might be able to get people to read my book. They're probably comparably difficult projects. That said, I am not gifted at Twitter and Facebook. And I'm not very much practiced as a Twitter or a Twitter. And I'm not even sure which is the proper usage there. I can say things certainly on Twitter. I'm not as very good at selling them. So that said, there is a Twitter handle for the term pike witch. And it has 12 followers and onward and upward. Facebook, I'm doing a little bit better. Facebook posted some ads. I've worked with a friend of mine who's a pretty effective social media marketer. And I have some 421 likes. But what I've learned is that likes on Facebook don't translate to sales and reading of your book. It seems, or if they do, they translate at maybe a 1% rate. So I don't know that it's necessary that social media isn't the fittest or most useful tool to promote a book as a self-published writer. I know that it's not working for me, but I would think that at least 50% of that is my own sort of hand-handedness and half-assardness. So I'm not entirely sold on using social media to get where I want to be. Amazon makes it possible for you to do free promotions. And this is where things get, let me be a little more interesting. I am now going to show you proprietary information under the condition that you tell nobody else and that you don't laugh at me. These are my sales for the last month. And I want to say this is my worst of the three months, by the way. In the 28 days that the book has been available for a $3 charge, I've sold four copies. I've had three of them borrowed using Kindle Select. In the three days that I ran a promo, I had 350 downloads. So it gives you a sense of what people will pay for a self-published work. One sort of interesting thing about how this works is that the promotions themselves sort of get you channeled into Amazon's promotions. So rather than sitting back and hoping that somehow, someway, people will find my Amazon sales page, instead, when you start to make your book available for free, there's the potential that if enough people are interested in it, you might find yourself listed on their sort of top most popular free downloads. And for a period of time last week, I probably should have done this week so that I could show you the page, but for a period of time last week, I was in the top 20 among all sort of freely available literary fiction titles on Amazon. And I was right up there with great expectations. I was up there with Dickens and Jane Austen and the Brontes and everybody else. And right in the middle of the term Pike Witch. I felt good about that because there weren't as many other self-published, non-public domain works up there. And as I understand it, as best I can figure out the reason why I got the number of free downloads that I did and the reason why I was where I was on the list is that I have uniformly good reviews. I have three of them, but they're all five-star reviews on my page. And so as my page appears with the review stars beside it, people go, okay, people like that book. And so I make it a little further up that chart than other folks will. And so that gets me to starting to think about the review-based consumer culture that I was describing in 2001 and I'm still hopeful about now. Of course, on Amazon, your Amazon reviews can't take you terribly far because you have to find the person's Amazon page to see them. But there are people out in the broader community. There are book blogs. There are general interest blogs like David has where he might review a book. And those present the potential that people will... book blogs, people are looking for books to read. They're going to see a review, find that it's favorable, find that they might be interested in it, rely on the authority that the writer has accumulated over time in reviewing books and make a decision to pull the trigger to pay the $3 to buy your book and maybe put five or 10 minutes into reading the first chapter and go from there. So I don't want to go on for too much longer. I will say that even sort of the reviewing culture now suffers from... it's a little bit of a casualty of the superabundance problem that authors run into everywhere. By and large, if you want to find a good book blogger to review your book, you've got to ask them. You've got to make a pitch to them. It's not unlike a query letter that you would make to an agent and then they decide whether they're going to take it on or not. There are other sites that will absolutely do without requiring anything from you, do review of your book from your $425, which is about eight times what I've brought in in royalty so far. So I don't see myself working with Kirkus Indi. So I stand here, as I said, I gave you the disclaimer. I stand here fairly clueless about where to go from here, but I'm sort of hopeful in a general sense that we're on the cusp of something great. We're on the cusp of creating a situation where publishers aren't the final answer on what we're going to see and what people get to read. And I think what needs to happen to sort of carry that promise forward is that readers need to believe that a book that's not traditionally published can still be a good book. Readers need to look outside sort of the walled garden to see what might be out there. This, I think, is a tough one because I think about my own choices as a reader. I am perfectly content with what's available on Bookshelf. So I've got a backlog of books that I'm interested in reading that come from traditional publishers. Why should I be a pioneer? Why should I go out and look for that new writer that no one's heard about, the indie writer? So I think that's something that needs to be overcome. Readers, as I said, need to become critics and reviewers in their own right. And last, writers like me need to trust that readers will do these things. And if they do, I think digital media and the internet can sort of accomplish the separation of the powers that publishers have such that incident to them owning printing presses they don't necessarily get to decide what we all read. So I think that's where I'm going to leave it and take questions. Yeah, sure. How did you decide that you wanted the Kindle to be your platform rather than the Nook or one of the other things that's available? Right. Well, so it's not just one decision, but it's my initial decision. And principally because, so the way the free promotions work is you can, you're eligible to participate in the free promotions if you sign on to the Kindle Select program. To do that, you have to commit to exclusivity with Kindle for 90 days. And so I wanted to see what the free promos could do for me. Also, participating in the Kindle Select program allows your works to be made available on loan to people who are sort of Kindle Prime members or Amazon Prime members who can then borrow for free works that are in the program. And the way, and royalties can be paid, Amazon sets aside a royalty pool each month. I think it's 600,000 in the last couple of months that they will divvy up on a prorated basis based on the number of borrows your book has to Amazon Prime members. So I thought that's, I thought I would go with Kindle for those reasons. That doesn't rule me out from signing up for print on demand, which is something I'm thinking about doing now. My mother says, I'm not going to read a book that's on it. I'm not going to read a book on my phone. And then I deliberate about whether I want my mother to read my book. And so far I'm not doing print on demand, so there you go. I don't know too much about how fiction would be promoted on the web or elsewhere because I don't read very much fiction. I'm still trying to get through a Finnegan's wake, so I don't read too much modern stuff. But I know in the spiritual self-help area, which I guess you could call a subset of nonfiction. I'm not sure about that. There are a lot of people promoting their books via their blogs. And I'm not sure how they get the Google rating so that you click on their blogs originally. But they do refer one another mutually, so that once you run one, you hear about others. And they're constantly giving you glimpses into the wisdom of their books and giving you opportunities to purchase their books. And there's a huge number of people doing that. So I don't know if something like that could be worked out that would work for people who are writing fiction. So I should tell you also about my experiences as a blogger, which I've done a couple of blogs, some fictional, some blogging the novel, some entirely sort of real-time fiction, journal entry kind of stuff, and some just sort of general interest blogging. With Google Analytics, I was able to track sort of in real-time who was reading my blog because it would say, one person in Texas read your blog, and I said, I know that guy. That's my friend from high school. And the numbers tended not to go up. And occasionally you would. Occasionally you might write something that for whatever reason trips a Google trigger and is the work that comes up when you search for certain terms. And then you'd find that you had a lot of visitors for that particular entry. So there's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem in the sense that you got to get people reading your blog too. But that's one thing that I could probably commit a little more to. What I was trying to sort of do with the term Pike Witch page is I put blurbs up. I would put little commentaries that ostensibly came from this character who's the witch. And just they may or may not make it into someone's Facebook feed. I don't know that anyone understands sort of the arcane theories by which the things that people write on Facebook make their way into feeds. But that's one sort of plan that I've had and have maybe failed in the commitment and the execution too. But the idea would be to kind of keep her, this character, communicating with people in a way that might make people think they'd want to buy a book and read about her. Hi, Brad. Hi. It's so great to hear. I really appreciate the intersection here between the sort of emotional experience of what it feels like to be in this system and also the sort of analysis of how it works on a tech, you know, algorithmic level. I appreciate that. I have a couple of comments. One is to say that what you're saying about the publishing industry is basically the same in music. Basically the problems that you're laying out are the same in music, which is for those who I don't know in the room, is what I do. And I think a couple of things. One, there's a movement in comedy right now that's sort of analogous to what you're talking about as well. You have this, Louis C.K. came up with his own ticketing system and a direct-to-fan approach. But just a couple of days ago, the comedian, Patton Oswald, wrote this, he was speaking at a conference in his keynote, was a letter to gatekeepers. And what he was trying to do is kind of address these folks. It's not my favorite thing the way he wrote it, but his ideas saying to the gatekeepers, like, by the way, if you continue to think narrowly, you're going to kill your industry. And it was really nice to see sort of, we can work outside this gatekeeper industry. We can also, like, maybe talk to the gatekeepers and try to come up with something there. So I wanted to offer that comment. And in case people don't know on Facebook now, you can pay to have more people see your post. It's called promoted posts. It's worth checking out. And then the last thing I was going to say is, I think that there's this basic problem, I don't, maybe I'm not going to call it a problem or an advantage, but it's a basic piece of human nature that people just want to participate in things that other people are participating in. And I think that can work for us and against us in terms of trying to find something in this attention economy, right, that we start talking about. And I guess the last thing I'll say in terms of, like, strategy or something that I've seen work is this idea that sort of combination of all three of your phases, right, of your patron phase and your sort of gatekeeper industry phase and then this sort of outside of it are these fan funding things that people are doing, kick starters, where you get somebody in at the patron, literally the patron level and get them excited about the production of your work. And then they become evangelicals basically for you as your work comes out. And I guess that's what I wanted to add, but thank you so much for adding all this person, especially the emotional piece of it. Yeah, I think there's definitely what I had to account for was sort of the gap between sort of this is how I see the trajectory of literary production and I think it's all to the better and we need to get there. And it's going to be fantastic for writers when we get there, but at the same time sort of holding on to the hope that someone was going to dangle a publishing contract for me so that I could step out of that. So it's definitely, and what's nice about giving this talk is it gave me sort of the opportunity to work through why that gap is there. And I was thinking about it yesterday that they're very good at giving you hope that, and I don't think that's because necessarily they say, we need to perpetuate our paradigm where we are dominant. We need to give this author hope so that he doesn't go out and self publish. They're not thinking that way. They're being polite. And so this is one of the rejection letters. The ones that I got from editors, and again, these were written not to me but to my agent with whom the editor really wanted to sustain a relationship. They were fantastic. I felt like I was so very close. And interestingly, by the way, that same agent gave up the business to go back to school to study anthropology because I think it had greater prospects than selling books by the likes of me. And the editor took this extended leave of absence. So I thought, well, I'll go back directly to the editor with the turnpike witch. And the editor was gone. He's married to Molly Ringwald, which is an interesting sort of side note. And therefore decided he wasn't going to read books anymore for a period of time. And you find that you have, okay, I just need to hang on to this one person and that person evaporates. Where are you? Yep, am I choosing? I hope you don't mind. I'd like to return to a kind of a professional question. With the digital revolution, my concerns are mostly about copyright issues. And can you address that in any way? But the fact that digital is a lot easier to hack into than a printed book. So disseminate without your knowledge and so forth and so on. And again, this is also a problem for musicians. We're both authors and musicians, published. So self-publishing is something we're looking at because the royalties you get from traditional publishing aren't terrific. But at least you're protected in a lot of ways. I don't know if you are in digital publishing. Could you address that, please? Sure, yeah, so I would take the trade in a minute. Part of the side of the note that I didn't talk about because this was for a law journal was focusing on sort of the interplay between these sort of power dynamics and the development of copyright law. And it's not a coincidence that the first copyrights were privileges that were given, exclusive privileges that were given to the publishers, stationers privileges that were granted by the Crown because the Crown wanted to develop a printing industry and it understood that there was no dearth of manuscripts out there for people to publish. The problem was making sure that we organized this in a way that people weren't undercutting each other by publishing the same works. Also, they could keep an eye on what printers were publishing so there was an aspect of censorship there. But I think even today, you know, the copyright concerns are, you hear them most, they're most pronounced coming from publishers. And I think... I mean, I'm not going to say categorically that they're not, but I know that a lot of writers creative people are also content to circulate their works for free, to put them out there knowing that they could very well proliferate and it might not result in them making a living. But for someone like me who doesn't see himself making a living in the first place, it's livable for me, so... Yeah? I don't want to speak for both David Weinberger and I, but both of us co-authored a book, The Glutray Manifesto, 12 years ago, 13 years ago. The entire thing is available free online and it still sells well. That's just an interesting fact. I'm wondering, Brad, why not just... I mean, considering how little income you're getting out of it, why not just make it freely available with an open format and just put out a tip jar and see what happens that way? And related to that, though, is how comfortable you feel inside the silo that is Amazon because it's becoming... Amazon is now a monopoly, basically. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, what I'm trying to understand a little better is how useful it is to have somewhere like Amazon that you know people are going to to buy books and therefore looking within Amazon that they're going to be in position to find you and when they find you, they're the sort of person that's going to want to be buying a book. Yeah, I mean, I suppose I could set... You know, I have in the past set up... Here it is, download, download it, read it, read it with all the interactive features. And I didn't get... I certainly was in a position where I was getting 350 free downloads. So, yeah, so it might be a deal with the devil in the sense that, you know, this is the exclusive place where I can run free... If I want to run free promos, I got to give them exclusivity. And so, but I don't have to do it forever. I'm trying to see if I can sort of build up some interest and start to climb the curve, maybe get some positive reviews, and then move out, make it available in a lot of formats. Obviously, it's not possible on Amazon to just simply offer it for $0. I think $3, I think it might be the lowest that I'm allowed to offer it, at least at this royalty rate. Yeah, go for it. I have two questions. A question for the audience and a question for you. So, I'm going to ask the audience first. I'm going to stand up to do it. Please raise your hand if you are going to leave here and buy Brad's book. Raise your hand if you're going to buy his book. Be honest, yeah. If you're not one of the four who bought it last month. What the hell? Why aren't your hands going up? Okay. Three bucks. It would kill you to spend three bucks to support a local author? I'm sorry, I shouldn't. I don't mean to be abusive. It was during the free promo. There you go. Getting the free in this case counts as buying it. So, I defeated myself in that case. I think it's demonstrative, and it's not to say that it's a bad state of things, but it's the state of things. If you tell, I don't know how many people in this room, 60 people, 15, that this is a good book, people still have to care enough to want to buy it and put in the time to read it. The fact that that number goes from 50 to 5 doesn't surprise me or trouble me. That's sort of what I've been learning as I've been going along. If there are other people, I'm actually interested as a focus group. It's not price. There is the hardware. There's no problem. It's a serious issue. So, it's not that I'm necessarily going to go buy it, but I'm definitely going to look into it, and it's more or less driven by the fact that I'm here today, hearing him speak, learning about who he is, and feeling like a connection with it. Otherwise, I have no connection with it. Which is not the way it used to work. It used to get the review. So, this actually goes against your... It's not against exactly, but against your hope that a reader driven ecosystem of reviews is what's going to move when, in fact, at least in some instances, it's connection with the author, which is something that Kickstarter provides to some degree that may move first. You could sort of grab both. One thing that I've seen actually, and you did this after you did the review, and I've seen when I've contacted book bloggers and said, would you be interested in doing a review? They said, well, yes. And in fact, like if, once we do the review, we'll be in touch with you to do a Q&A so that we can learn more about you and communicate more about you to read. And of course, I jump on that, because that does, you know, it creates the possibility for that connection to happen. It can also turn people off terribly. I have, at least on one occasion, on the Facebook site, a woman came on and said something along the lines of, hey, I'm a witch. And I said... Oh, geez. And I kind of said, okay. And then my, this good friend of mine, who's the webmaster at Rice, and is the social media guru, he's like, you need to engage that person. Okay, so I tried, I did. I did what I thought I could do. And then that person unliked me. And deleted the post within minutes. And so I thought, okay, so not all interactions with people are going to be connecting. They're going to be alienating. And that's how it is when you talk to people. I think people are going to like you or they aren't. But there's risks in that, I suppose. Is this on why you're not buying the book? Oh, why the hell would you buy this book? And I'm sorry, you have some association with Amazon, I understand. Oh, the former, yes. I very recently came from Amazon, so happy to engage anyone on discussions about Amazon with such a company. But that's not what I'm talking about. I will reserve my other questions later. I'm curious, you know, I'm looking at the Facebook page and the Facebook page is the cover of the book. It's not you. I'm curious, you know, I feel in the online space, creators can very easily deploy, but not connect. And I think that's part of the issue. I'm curious how much, you know, are people going out there and doing live readings or going to open mic nights and reading a chapter or garnering, you know, a little bit more tangible, personal connection with people that would engage them. I mean, I know for me, I go into media overload. I don't know what to look at anymore, so I just stop and I quit, frankly. And this is from somebody who worked at one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world. And I was just like, I don't even know where to sift, where to look, which is where the curatorial factor of the publisher comes into play. I love the idea of circumventing the curatorial function of the publisher because I think they have become stead. They look for a formula in many cases. And they're looking at bottom lines that the self-published author doesn't have to adhere to. But I don't think just putting something online personally resonates widely because how do you find the needle in the haystack? Who do you look at? And I'm just curious if there's some interrelationship. Like right now, I just met you. I heard you speak. I'm interested in your book. I met others who read it. Suddenly, I'm going to go on Amazon, whether I get it for free or pay the three bucks. Oh, you've got to pay now. Awesome. I'm sorry. So I'm happy to support the book. And then if I like it, I'm happy to go on my Facebook page and say, read this book to all of my friends and hopefully proliferate it. I'm just curious where that interplay is. So I edit an online literary magazine. And one of the things that's really been great for us has been just that. Like finding folks who are already reading at open mics, like really already making a connection. And then we don't have to, those of us who are part of this magazine are also writers ourselves. So what we're able to do is still have gatekeepers of a sort, but the gatekeepers are made up of people within the community of writers and readers that's already present. You don't have to spontaneously generate it as an individual. And one of the other things that around New England is there's a bunch of these kind of independent publishers who are not primarily motivated by profit. And so getting a novel excerpt in a journal like mine or like many others that's an independent journal and has a community readership that like all of the readers that read these four poetry journals go to the New England Poetry Festival. And so poets know, go to the New England Poetry Festival, or the Massachusetts Poetry Festival every year and read in front of those people who include both the readers of those journals and the publishers of those journals. And finally I want to mention another project called Best Indie Lit New England. I've gotten together a group of about 15 editors of publications of this kind and ran a successful Kickstarter campaign. That can work. And again, we had an existing community. And then from there, you know, kind of publishing an anthology series. So I'm just saying there's independent, I just want to say it's not, there's something in between, self-publishing as a kind of lone individual and commercial publishing success. There are communities of independent publishers that are worth engaging with. Well, and I suppose that where we raised the funds for the initial printing of Best Indie Lit New England was on Kickstarter. Kickstarter? Oh, Best Indie Lit New England, byline.org. So I probably did, certainly did, speak to it narrowly when I talked about sort of authors in isolation, hoping that readers in isolation will sprout up and communicate something to other readers in isolation. And I think there is a, what I would hope for and what I probably didn't explain as well is exactly what you're describing, which is sort of making this something that's more of a than something that where the content is broadcast to you. And you can choose whether or not to receive it and react to it. Have you tried to do some readings, like in open mics, venues, or do you need also to be a published author to be invited at the stores? Right, so I got to follow my sword at a certain point. An answer for my own negligence. One of the reasons why I write is because I do it better than I speak. In fact, I worked for a judge out of law school and I was explaining something to her once and she said, you need to find a job where you write things to people instead of talking to them. And I thought of the two ways that you could take that and I elected to take it as a compliment. But given that fact, one of the reasons I write is because it's something I can do and it's just me. And I think I still probably see myself as someone who is going to put this out and broadcast it and then step away and pull this thing down and hide behind it and see what people say. And what I'm finding is that that's not getting me where I need to be. So I need to be if I want to commit to this. And one of my motivations in publishing this was okay, just get rid of it and work on something else that I can submit to a traditional publisher and I can brace myself and I can hope. But now I'm thinking, well, why don't I try a little harder? Why don't I do things a little more deftly with social media? And it's a question of time and commitment and something that I need to probably do a lot better than I have. My talent lies in composition and not so much in salesmanship but that's something and so what I've tried to do is actually generate media that does the promotional work in a way that is interesting and I think valuable to me. So what I've been doing is I've been supporting the content that I'm just throwing out there with more content that I'm just throwing out there. So something's probably got to change. Long-winded answer. I don't know. I won't make the choice. Hi. Let's see, I guess the first thing I want to say is that I think your expectations of traditional publishers may be overly optimistic because I have a friend who wrote a book, had it published by a traditional publisher. Now he's, I believe, living in Washington state, hadn't seen him in like 15 or 20 years and suddenly he was in Boston. Why? He was taking his vacation and essentially doing book promotions at bookstores around the country all of which he arranged on his own. Publisher did nothing for him other than put it into hard copy. So the other comment though has to do with although the first and second phase that you're talking about is certainly not good. We're arguing that traditional publishing is a good thing but I do think where digital has taken us at this point is equally bad if not worse. I don't know. There's a fellow I had never heard of before about a month ago. I think I read about this on Andy Orm's blog and then got pointed to an article by a guy named Charlie Stross who I came to learn from on his website. He's a science fiction author right now publishes exclusively digitally in a former life he was a software engineer and also spent some time working for a publishing house and he has an excellent analysis of what exactly Amazon's doing to the market. He describes it as monopsony which is sort of similar to Monopoly except that there's a single buyer rather than a single seller they've essentially taken control of all the publishers in the world by having this having a single outlet and having a proprietary format and I think locking everything into a proprietary format as a software engineer myself I'm very sensitive to some of the issues and I've seen companies usually with regard to publishing software but nowadays with regard to publishing literature do what I describe as seizing custody of a work and in the past they've done this via either data format custody or nowadays with the cloud they're doing it by physical custody where the thing only lives on their servers and in Amazon's case they have the ability to and in the past have reached out to people's kindles and removed things that have been there in the past so that's pretty much it I don't think where we're at is necessarily better than where we were before So a couple of reactions I don't mean to be sort of unequivocally critical of traditional publishers it has been it has worked wonders for us in many ways and people can make livings as writers maybe it's not me bummer for me and we do have certainly a much greater corpus of works available to us than we would if they weren't out there and they do the important work of helping us decide the questions whether you trust them whether you think that you're missing something so all those things I think are beneficial I obviously have a different angle on it because I have sort of cast myself against that wall and been repulsed a number of times the Amazon question it's one of trade-offs that I think I can sort of try to continue to make in real time as I decide sort of what are they offering me that I can't get elsewhere but over time, yes it's the place you go I'm aware of Smashwords I know people who publish on Smashwords but it's not necessarily where I go it's not going to be at the top of the search results one interesting thing that people are complaining about Amazon is that there's too much there there's just too much junk there one of the Berkman Fellows hours people someone observed that they complained that they had gone on to Amazon to buy what they thought was an interesting monograph of another subject matter only to find that it was a verbatim rendition of the Wikipedia article which was totally fine with copyright for people to carry over and sell on Amazon I was researching for this talk and looking through just reading some more about Amazon publishing and people were saying there needs to be some kind of spam indication that people can mark something as spam because there's just too much spam here or Amazon needs to do something because this is out of control of course one person's spam is another one's carnitas and I would go out tomorrow and I'd spam the daylights out of 50 shades of gray why not so rather than have an on off binary like spam why not have people contribute their thoughts about why they like this why they didn't one of the things that as someone who tends toward the long winded and prefers writing 500 page novels to tweets I don't necessarily see social media as a place where we can have sort of nuanced real sort of critical conversations about about literature it's and I'll know that that's happening either necessarily in the review section of Amazon hi Brad thank you I was interested in coming to the event today because I am in the process of writing a book with a publisher that'll be published next year and it's my first book and I was really curious just about using you know what means are available to create audience because even with big house publishers it's really up to the authors now the publishing house does very little compared to what they used to do what's been sort of interesting the book I'm writing it's a nonfiction book sort of memoir biography but it's about my father who in San Francisco in the 1970s was very much on the outside sort of queer writer and single father but poet and self published you know eight books and eventually became an editor at poetry flash but when I look back at what he went through in that process before the digital age it was all you know shoe leather materials you know printing like thousands of broadsides himself going bookstore to bookstore and organizing these readings and finding audience and it amazes me to see even the extent of what he did because at the time there was no money he wasn't even considering doing it for money it was just about finding community promoting other writers like himself and kind of and the satisfaction of sort of sharing those ideas and now you know I who hasn't put a nearly number of years that he did at the time with this book I'm getting him more eyeballs or you know readership than he would have ever been able to have in his time and anyway I mean I bring this up because I it's it's just like now today there are all these means obviously it's much easier to reach people but I feel like for him and what was successful or what was satisfying was like finding that niche of like who are the people who would be most interested and and like befriending them and really like very community oriented way of sort of approaching similar writers and and getting together and and doing those readings and and and even you know thinking that maybe 20 years after the fact you might find that audience anyway I just was appreciating that I mean I think that goes a little bit to the conversation we were starting to have about copyright which is that copyright is an incentive for people to to do something creative but I don't think it's anything close to the whole ball the wax I think I mean because when you consider the number of people that do create things and how hard they work at them and the extent to which any of them are able really to capitalize on the copyright that they acquire and then by creating them you realize that that really what we're doing what we're trying to do isn't to create a product so much that we can sell as to communicate something I've been largely content over the years and one reason why I went on for so long is I was communicating to the future iterations of self I would go back and I'd read this again I thought I kind of like that that was I enjoyed reading that part of the book that I wrote I was the reader I was communicating to myself for lack of any other real options but I think I think the reason why we do what we do or at least the reason why I do what I do is that I want to communicate something in the end and there's the questions of sort of commitment and energy and distractions and having another career and all those other things that maybe result in me not being as effective in the actual delivery of the communication as I'd like to be but I feel like that's that's why we do it and I'm starting to feel that more and more as I put it up here and I've made 70 dollars in three months so Hi Brad, my name is Fernando Alberto, I came here to see you I'm a co-founder of a new startup company based in Boston and actually we're trying to solve this exact problem by helping authors connect with their readers and powering the readers as reviewers as gatekeepers while we provide technology that enables to lend credibility to reviews to content and how that reviewer and that content influences within a community or within the more global scope of the internet it's clear that the problems that it has been talked about in the room first of all the publishing industry is going through massive transformation self-publishing is growing at an enormous rate 400% since 2010 and right now it's reaching a $14 billion market publishers are losing money it doesn't mean that because an author reached the publishing deal that they are going to be guaranteed a budget for the promotion and to tap into the promotion machine so it's very clear that in 2001 you've described exactly the problem that a lot of the independent authors are facing which is the ability to be discovered and for their content or their book to be passed along by readers themselves because I'm pretty sure that when people leave here they're going to find your book I'm reading your book right now and I'm actually really enjoying it but you're going to find that and pass it forward we're trying to take that and multiply it by thousands or if not even bigger so I'd definitely like to connect with you later on great thank you sounds good to me hi my name is Elizabeth and I'm intrigued actually by these two sides of your personality you know the button down guy who counts data and then the creative guy who doesn't believe he can speak very well I'm just wondering if this is a very readable book is there any possibility you could get someone with some celebrity to actually do the reading maybe on YouTube or whatever to make use of the media so that you could really get it out there and get some followers for somebody who's already got a whole bunch of followers Aaron you're the celebrity that I know could you perform this um yeah I mean I I'm increasingly feeling as though really that a lot of this has to do with I guess the term I use is authority and finding ways that people who have authority have sort of a broader authority in the community can take hold of something and recommend it I got a fantastic unsolicited review from a guy I think it's Bennett Gavrish from around here it didn't result in sort of a a meaningful I don't think improvement in my in my numbers but then again if he acquires and accumulates some kind of authority then you've got something and as you were saying sort of the celebrity is the person who has that sort of built-in authority and I think it's really it's Twitter where people are trying to get their their comments or their links retweeted by Ashton Kutcher because for whatever reason everybody including CNN.com is obsessed with Ashton Kutcher's Twitter feed and that's sort of the the fast track to try to get on is to get the person who's got mega authority as opposed to a modest amount of authority or as opposed to me who is negligible online authority so that's definitely that's sort of I see that as sort of part of the the picture is that maybe it's sort of beyond just having people review and comment having endorsement having you know having the same friend of mine that was was consulting with me on how to handle my Facebook like is a musician and he's we've talked about he said he's going to make a soundtrack he's going to bring his his followers on board by putting out putting out an industrial rock soundtrack to the book and so we'll see what comes to that that's maybe the closest I've got to celebrity access I wish that Amazon would let especially for a three dollar book I wish that they would let enthusiastic readers be crowd patrons because I certainly would put up ten bucks so that or nine bucks three people could could read it that's an offer I want to make to you if there are three people who otherwise would not have bought the book it's the three dollars that's holding you back I'm good for it seriously see me after that awesome thank you very much thanks