Some bookshops may be thriving but that’s missing the point

Dom Knight’s piece on the ABC website (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-07/how-independent-bookshops-still-thrive-in-face-of-big-business/102937826) noted that many indie bookstores had been lost. Others survive. Some thrive. If your bookshop doesn’t have a loving community to support it, what is its future? It strikes me that publishing is, again, putting its head in the sand about change. 

As an advocate of digital, I have watched the publishing industry hamstrung by a nostalgia for print which is obscuring an important debate about how to improve returns to creators. The conversation about how to support artists, readers and our cultural heritage is not keeping pace.

There is still a divide in the book world which sees support for digital as a betrayal of the experience, or of the author. The book culture’s defence of the artefact rather than the artist is the change that needs to happen. If we want more returns to authors, to creators, we need a serious conversation about digital options, including different streaming models, preferably author-led, with major publishers onboard.

In thinking about more equitable returns on writers’ labours, I looked at the music industry. The digital transition – by artists, listeners and music producers – happened in waves over a decade or more, long before books and there are some valuable parallels. People who spend big on music are no less passionate about that art than readers are about books yet music has moved on from the argument about the format. Yes, there has been a niche return to vinyl and CD sales are still a chunk of the market but the retail ship has truly sailed. RIAA reports that streaming accounted for three-quarters of total revenue in 2018 in the United States. 

When music’s online streaming services such as Spotify, Amazon and Apple Music gained real traction, more services emerged to help artists navigate distribution and payments (such as kobaltmusic.com). These multiple layers between the artist and the fans created a ‘Kafkaesque’ industry, so described in a 2015 Guardian article. which returned a tiny fraction of profits to the artists. Musicians revolted. Now there is real debate about how to make sense of the digital realm and increase returns to creators. As Jamie Bartlett writes, ‘There’s no single bad guy here – it’s just not in anyone’s interest to make it easier.’ 

New streaming services which also provided outlets for emerging artists arose, challenging the third parties and industry behemoth streaming services. Bandcamp, established in 2007, grew out of frustration with the paucity of returns to artists. Its mission is to support the culture of music through a service that returns more than eighty percent of profit to artists, and described in a 2016 NY Times article as where fans find new music ‘without a third party in the way’. Buyers on the site can also use the site’s social media application to find out who else has bought what and allows you to connect—a community that can feeds further interest and purchases. You can also just listen, or ‘browse’ on Bandcamp, the artist allowing this at their discretion. 

Another key difference with the literary world is that music fans have also always supported indies, in a way that puts readers to shame. Unsigned artists, musicians putting in the work, believing in themselves and their music, are seen as standard-bearers, pioneers. If they haven’t got a record company deal yet, no one holds that against them. By contrast, indie authors are still seen as interlopers—surely if they were any good, they’d be published. That only a tiny fraction of books ever see the light of day in a publishing house, and the garbage that is often published, shows this as patently untrue. 

But it didn’t stop there. Independent singer/songwriter Imogen Heap took technology to a new plane with myceliaformusic.org, a new online commercial marketplace and network which uses encrypted blockchain technology to pay artists and the supporting creatives (cover art, licensing, instrument brands) directly. An individual ‘Creative Passport’ for music-makers will track and pay for services rendered. She told Ellen Peirson-Hagger in New Statesmen in September 2020 that “Right now we are individual musicians with no union. If we can prove that by having your information organised and being able to connect to all the different services that you use in your own micro eco-system…we can shift it around.”

Heap told the Guardian that she wanted to close the ‘gap between fan and artist and the journey of their music’, saying in, ‘in the data-driven era, the movement of music, money and feedback should be frictionless. A total rethink is in order.’ 

That call for a rethink hasn’t hit books hard yet. Authors are certainly not revolting against either their publishers, or the third parties, still in lock step with traditional models.  It is ironic that Knight’s profile on the ABC site acknowledges that none of his books are on shelves in any bookshop.

I don’t have enough shelf space to keep buying print books yet if I pass them along to them to bookfairs, the authors get no returns. Only well-known authors can afford to have their work shared endlessly without recompense. An author-led revival, with a ‘Creative Passport’ initiative like Heap’s would see authors with more control, taking on some of the risk of publishers. They may be signed with a publishing house which would provide or procure essential services of marketing, editing, and design, or unsigned, and the author would procure these independently and work with the bookshop using print on demand to serve the print book market directly. Or even reconfigure payment structures to allow bookstores to sell books digitally? People go in and browse, then buy on their device? 

Streaming services for books exist but the Big Five publishers have held out from signing: when Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster won’t play, there go most of the literary big guns. And authors are reticent, perhaps rightly so without decent returns guaranteed. The services I’ve signed for in the past, Scribd and Kindle Unlimited provide lots of juicy morsels but I want access to more. 

I can buy digitally directly from most publishers, but unless I buy and use separate ereaders for each of the big ebook services (Apple, Kobo, Google, Amazon), I’m only consolidating their stranglehold. Online bookshops like Booktopia have apps and I have read on my iPad and my phone but they’re not as good as my Kindle. 

Another author-led option is one provided by Tablo, an online independent publishing platform for writers to create their book which can then be published digitally, in paperback or hardback and distributed to affiliated bookshops world-wide. Tablo uses local printers to supply a network of 40,000 retailers, and 30,000 libraries, with print books on the platform using print-on-demand technology. The author receives all royalties and retains all rights, and can monitor their sales. CEO Ash Davies created Tablo out of frustration with antiquated traditional publishing models—painfully slow and complex with minimal returns to creators. 

With change, comes questions of access. Part of the inexorable move to digital is making sure no one is left behind. Policy mechanisms to provide a standard for universal service provision, to oblige publishers to keep information in the public domain, and to support libraries, are all key issues.

In an interview on. Triple J’s Take 5 with Zan Rowe, Norman Cook (aka Fat Boy Slim) evinced a certain wistfulness about today’s world. Has something been lost, he mused, now we can find anything we ever wanted? Has the passion gone? The dissonance between his teenage joy of buying a rare recording, loved all the more because of his struggle to find it, and today’s world with more music in it, was real. Nostalgia is fine, but keep looking to the greater good.

Imogen Heap says that while she doesn’t have a perfect view of how the future of the music industry is going to look, she feels that the answer is in the technology. Similarly with books and writing.

We need better, cleverer models which work with authors to distribute their work and allow for communities to share it.