Steve Lieber is a comic book artist. He drew Underground, a graphic novel (written by Jeff Parker, drawn by Steve, and colored by Ron Chan).  The story follows Park Ranger Wesley Fischer as she tries to save Stillwater Cave – and then has to save herself.

On Sunday (3 days ago, as of time of writing) a fan posted scans of every single page onto 4chan (EDIT: archive of the 4chan thread on Steve Lieber’s site), a well-known discussion forum.

Yup, all Steve’s work is now out there for free. Steve found out via a message on Twitter.

He didn’t go mad.

He didn’t call in the lawyers.

Instead he went to the forum and joined in the discussion:

Techdirt have a much-used phrase for this: “Connect with Fans“.

Yesterday Steve posted a blog post – Whole book for free; or learning from 4Chan – explaining what had been happening.

What happened next? Well, today Steve posted a graph of his sales of the very same comic book (which he sells on Etsy):

I don’t think that anything can really illustrate Tim O’Reilly’s argument that “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy” (and various other points in his seminal 2002 article) than Steve’s experience.

This has all happened in the past 3 days: a huge surge in sales thanks to “piracy”.

Steve Lieber is currently discussing this series of events on Warren Ellis’ WhiteChapel discussion forum if you’re interested to hear more of his experience and thoughts.

And you can buy Underground on Steve’s Etsy store.

I’m starting to wonder when we’ll see a “Dummies Guide to Getting Your Work Pirated” on the desk of every artist, writer, musician … and marketing executive.

One of the things that she and Warren Ellis are doing is using the various print-on-demand (should that be produce on demand?) services that have been around for some time. For example, they’ve set up a CafePress store to sell a variety of branded items along with the tongue-in-cheek “t-shirt of the week” (TOTW).

From Warren’s blog:

…Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

Ariana expands on the subject in her first blog post (which has since, sadly, disappeared from the web) about TOTW:

But the salient point here — just in case it’s not sticking out quite enough to stick you in the eye — is that it took no. time. at. all. to toss together a shop and a bit of fun. I cannot imagine that you’d have that hard a time of doing what-ever it is that’s been kicking around in your head. And, yes, it is totally fair for you to say “but I haven’t got 3billion followers on Twitter to tell about it…!” and it’s also quite fair to say “But MY fun side project involves supplies and an Etsy shop and will likely take FORTY minutes to set up.”
…
The thing of it is, you don’t need to be thinking “well how many of whatever would I have to sell to make it worth my blah blah blah” — you’ve just got to think “would I rather spend the next hour looking for neat stuff online, or would I rather, you know, make something neat. And maybe someone buys one, and that’s one more person noticing me than right this second. And also, hey, I get to make something!”

Both Warren and Ariana are enthusiastic proponents of the cause of getting off your backside and making something – not fussing about whether you have a 20-page marketing strategy document or an army of Twitter followers beforehand.

And this is most definitely the right approach. You need to make something first, then start getting it out there. It’s simply impossible to have an army of Twitter followers unless there’s a reason for them to follow you, and if you’re an artist/writer/musician then that means that you’ve got to have made your artwork/writing/music available – even if it’s only a few preparatory pieces or a demo or two.

Footnotes

1. FreakAngels itself is an interesting experiment (as well as being a damn fine graphic novel) in a business model that involves giving content away for free. It’s published online on a weekly basis, absolutely free of charge and accessible by everyone, and the graphic novel collections of these weekly strips are sold in the usual printed format (it’s important to state that the weekly online episodes remain online for free even after print versions have been published). I could probably dedicate an entire blog post to FreakAngels, and probably shall one day in the not-too-distant future.

This got picked up in a blog, then spread like wildfire across Twitter under the hashtag AmazonFail with just over 27,000 posts last night.

Amazon finally responded and blamed it all on a “glitch”.  A “glitch” implies a technical mistake, but Amazon had already replied to author Mark Probst saying that this was their policy. It’s not a technical glitch and to try to pass it off as such is an insult to Amazon’s customers (and the customers know this).

So what does Amazon need to do?

• Immediately reverse this policy change.
• Explain truthfully why it happened.
• Apologise.
• Make sure it will never happen again.

Amazon will have lost some customers permanently due to its actions – it can’t reverse that.

Trying to pass the whole thing off as a computer glitch is just insulting.  It’s clearly not a computer glitch – it’s the result of a human decision based on personal bigotry. The person who made the decision needs to be fired.

Rebuilding Trust and Reputation

Then Amazon needs to work hard at rebuilding trust and reputation with the people it’s pissed off.  One way to do that would be to prominently promote the very books that were affected.

The big problem for Amazon is that, in a world where an online petition can get nearly 10,000 signatures in less than 12 hours over a weekend, they should have done all of this yesterday.

From http://www.lulu.com/content/2709735:

“Dear Lulu” is a test book researched and produced by graphic design students and Prof. Frank Philippin at Hochschule Darmstadt, Germany, during an intensive two-day workshop with London-based designer James Goggin (Practise). The book’s intention is to act as a calibration document for testing colour, pattern, format, texture and typography.

Exercises in colour profile (Adobe RGB/sRGB/CMYK/Greyscale), halftoning, point size, line, geometry, skin tone, colour texture, cropping and print finishing provide useful data for other designers and self-publishers to judge the possibilities and quality of online print-on-demand — specifically Lulu.com, with this edition.

The book’s price is set at Lulu.com’s exact printing cost per unit.

The paperback version (96 pages, 5.83″ x 8.26″, perfect binding, full-colour interior ink) is £10.47 and the ebook version (62501 KB) is downloadable free-of-charge.

A great resource to see the quality of printing that Lulu.com can offer the artist wanting to self-publish books of their artwork.

Dan was obviously ignoring the phenomenal success of new business models made well-known by pub bands such as Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails etc.  But hey, he’s only a journalist repeating what he’s been told by the music industry. (The thrust of his article was that the draconian nonsense of having your broadband connection limited was better than the draconian nonsense of having it cut off completely – it’s not like he was intelligently investigating viable alternatives).

Anyway, poorly thought-out press pieces like that frequently incite commentators such as myself to write long, detailed explanations of why the original article is wrong.  Not anymore. Nope – I’m officially giving up on the nay-sayers in the music & publishing industries and their pet journalists.

There’s now more than enough theory published on the web about the viability of the new business models available to musicians, writers and artists.  The argument is never going to be won by an endless succession of arguments and rebukes.  The argument is going to be won by the success of musicians, writers and artists using these new models.

To facilitate this I’m going to concentrate in this blog on writing practical articles about how musicians, writers and artists can use the new business models rather than debating theory.  I’ve been moving towards this position over the past few months so it’s probably no big surprise to regular readers, but I thought I’d be clear and open about it.

But you know what I’d really love?  A website where innovators & commentators could record practical tips for musicians, writers and artists in using new business models.

Imagine a website where the likes of Chris Anderson, Mike Masnick, Kevin Kelly, Seth Godin et al (and numerous not-so-well-known commentators and innovators) could post practical articles for musicians, writers and artists.  That would be more powerful than any argument.

Would this be a useful resource for you?

I’ve been interested in using print-on-demand for some time, so I contacted Lauren who kindly agreed to answer my questions about her experiences (and for me to publish her answers here – thank you, Lauren).

Lauren, how did you go about promoting your books on Lulu?

“sorrow…and the end of sorrow” by Lauren Simonutti – available on Lulu.com”

Promotion is always difficult for me. I would rather work than spend time on marketing and I have very few outside resources so I have to find them myself.

Initially my promotion always begins with imagery/layouts that I create and post on deviantart and flickr. The majority of my sales have come via deviantart.

My work seems to hold much greater appeal in Europe and Australia than it does in the States, and in my home city of Baltimore I have been refused for every single thing for which I have applied and just this week was actually refused as a volunteer to work a photobooth at an arts festival (Artscape).

It’s become rather amusing but I have been told in no uncertain terms that here I simply do not fit in.

I mention all this because that is what brought me to the web in the first place. I make considerably more sales in prints or handmade artists books but Lulu.com does provide an alternative.

How easy was it publish your book with Lulu?  What did the process entail? Were there any problems?

Lulu is free which was its first appeal as I have no money.  The process of signing up was simple, it is best to give them a PayPal account for revenue payments as they are faster and require no minimum amount.  I had no problems.  I am adept at design so while it was time consuming that was because of my pickiness.

Now here’s the main issue.  When I signed on and for my two extant books there was the issue of starting with a blank slate – a simple white or black page.  Your picture placements were somewhat limited but not beyond reason and I opted to include the text into my JPEGs as opposed to using their text option.

They have since changed their options to themes – they have pre-ordained themes from which you can not alter page colour or even have a blank background.  This also leads sometimes to unwanted cropping.  I wrote them about this change (they do answer questions quite readily) and replied that the themes were greatly preferred by their clientelle.

Now keep in mind they keep good records, they pay revenues directly and without fuss and their Calendars which I make seasonally are really very nice.

After trying another option I have since gone back to Lulu and believe that using their ‘Portfolio’ book option I can get what I want, it will just take some tweaking and again the text will have to be incorporated in the JPEGs.  But I think it will work and there is the option of hardcover.

Important Note: I have noticed, not just with Lulu but with overnightprints.com and a few others that you should lighten your JPEG in levels about 15 to 20% lighter (using the midtone arrow) than you want them to look.  Digital printing tends a little towards the dark side.

So that has been my experience.  I am working on the new portfolio book selection at this time.  Again, there is no financial outlay and no obligation and if you use the themes it is very fast and easy.

You can see Lauren’s work on her deviantArt account, her Flickr account, and, of course, her Lulu account.

Today ACAP is completely dead in the water.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (see those links for details) today jointly announced their backing for the existing Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) which comprises robots.txt, the Sitemap protocol, and individual page meta elements.

The people behind ACAP are probably still claiming that they have the backing of the world’s 4th largest search engine Exalead, but in the words of Bill Hicks “Yeah, maybe, but you know what, after the first 3 largest armies search engines, there’s a REAL big fucking drop-off.”

The decision by the three big search engines to back the existing REP standard—and to clarify exactly how they implement it—is a great example of these three competitors working together to the benefit of both website owners and searchers.

UPDATE – 4th June 2008: I just heard from a colleague that the whole ACAP debacle could have been avoided.  ACAP was primarily conceived as a way to convey rights/permissions metadata when feeding data from one partner organisation to another (for example, from a publisher to Amazon).

For some unknown reason the people behind ACAP decided to try to roll it out as a website technology.

This was obviously a huge strategic error, and it backs up my belief that the people behind this technology just don’t get the web. As a protocol for communicating permissions information from a publisher to Amazon or Google Books (not Google Search!) in a data feed it’s probably fine.  But ACAP has no place on the web.

What prompted the people behind ACAP to try to force it onto the web is unimaginable.  This ill-conceived idea was doomed from the start, especially when combined with their secretiveness (they have a forum on their site, but it’s hidden from view and they only give out logins to selected partners) and their attitude when replying to the tidal wave of criticism they received from bloggers.

Instead of money, the bottleneck becomes the time required to find content they’re interested in – this is where Google leads the field by providing an ever-improving and expanding search facility for finding the content, whether it’s webpages, books, news, academic articles, images etc.

Free distribution of digital content is slowly being embraced by—and will benefit—creators (artists, musicians, authors etc.) because it allows their work—and reputation—to be distributed to a much wider audience.

Musicians such as The Charlatans and Nine Inch Nails are making headlines with new ways to make money while giving away MP3 files of their music for free (and unsigned bands have been doing it for years).

Authors such as Suze Orman and Dan Solove are giving away free ebook versions of their books, in the knowledge that the wider distribution this gives them helps to sell more paper copies of their books.

So where does this leave publishers? The book publishing companies and music companies seem to have been left out of this equation. You could argue that they’ve left themselves out of the equation by desperately attempting to pretend that the business model of content creation hasn’t changed while vainly suing fans for the crime of being early adopters of a new economy.

Actually, there is a role for clued-up skills-rich publishers. It’s just a slightly different role than they’re used to. The clues can be found when you examine the new business model summarised above and look for the holes. That’s what I’m going to try to do now (but not exhaustively – I’ll leave that to people much smarter than me).

Publishers can provide instant attention

As mentioned above, one of the biggest benefits to both creators and consumers is that content is more widely distributed and available to all. But in a world where a huge amount of digital content is free, finding that content is hard – it’s like finding a few choice needles in a field of haystacks.

Obviously search engines provide front-end interfaces for finding that content, but that’s not enough. Search engines such as Google need to interpret the searcher’s requirements and display the most relevant results first. Google’s algorithm relies on correctly interpreting the relevancy and reputation of each piece of digital content in order to give their users the right results.

Publishers can provide a huge amount of relevancy and reputation because Publishers’ old-business-model reputations have been translated into high rankings for their websites.

A record company specialising in hip-hop music has already built-up a reputation and many incoming links from hip-hop-orientated websites, whether they’re sites belonging to hip-hop musicians, fan-sites, hip-hop forums, etc.

A publishing company specialising in a particular niche—whether it’s an academic subject area, a particular genre such as science fiction, or a particular service such as news & current affairs—will have built up a reputation (and the accompanying relevant incoming links) from other websites in their particular niche. If I was publishing this blog post in the Freakonomics column of the New York Times then the chances are that it would get a lot more attention!

This reputation and the resulting links are incredibly valuable because they’re both numerous and extremely relevant, and can take years to build up. So Publishers are already well-positioned to take on the role of distributing instant reputation and relevancy to creators. After all, that’s one of the things they’ve been doing for centuries.

So publishers need to revalue their business models so that the bestowal of reputation and relevancy (and therefore attention) is seen as a major service that they can offer to creators. In order to better leverage this service, publishers need to work closely with relevant communities. That means actively engaging in conversations with their niche communities on email lists, discussion forums, social networks, and blogs (and in the non-digital world at conferences, gigs, book-signings, etc.).

Publishers can provide quality control and specialist technical expertise

Creators are not perfect, and most are grateful for help.

An author’s work frequently benefits from the skills of their editorial team, which is why you’ll often see the editor thanked in the author’s acknowledgements in the front of their book. The book production team use their amassed knowledge of design and typography to turn a word-processed manuscript into a professionally laid-out book that is a pleasure to read.

Musicians benefit from the editorial and technical skills of the producers & engineers who spend a huge amount of time coaxing the best performances from them, then expertly mix the raw sound into a polished—or artfully unpolished—finished track.

Moving back to the web, authors or musicians are unlikely to be their own web team. I’m not just talking about being able to throw a website together, I’m talking about a full web team consisting of ecommerce programmers, web developers, web designers, SEO experts, and emarketing strategists. Sure anyone can put a small website online (and that’s one of the great things about the web) but as the web has evolved the skills necessary to create and maintain a good website have both multiplied and increased in their complexity.

Any content creator—author, musician, or artist—can’t be expected to have all these expert skills, and hiring them individually (and project-managing the coordination between them) would be expensive and a huge consumption of valuable time and effort that would be far better spent doing what the creator actually excels at: writing, composing, playing, or painting.

That isn’t to say that the author or musician shouldn’t be directly communicating with their fans – they should. But managing the framework that enables and amplifies this communication is a job for a dedicated team.

So, publishing companies should be positioned to provide services that greatly enhance both the book/music and the online presence of the author/musician.

Again, this is already something that publishing companies do, but they need to emphasise this aspect of their service and market it as a suite of valuable services that they can provide to creators.

But publishers need to make money

Obviously publishing companies will want to be paid for providing these professional services – they need to make a profit. At the moment they get this money by charging for content, but as more digital content becomes free then this particular revenue stream will start to dry up.

I think that paper copies of books will continue to sell, as will CDs & DVDs. Returning to Nine Inch Nail’s recent release of Ghosts, even though Trent Reznor made the first 9 tracks available free of charge, he also released various paid versions from a full digital download of 36 tracks for $5 to a $300 ultra-deluxe limited edition package.

The $300 Ultra-deluxe limited edition package has already sold out, despite there being multiple cheaper (and even free) versions available. This utilises the generative of “embodiment” coined by Kevin Kelly which I’ve already talked about in a previous blog post. Hardback bindings of paperback books are another long-standing example of this strategy.

So higher-quality (higher revenue) non-digital formats are one revenue stream that could be added to sales of non-digital content in “standard” formats (paperbacks, CDs etc). This strategy can also be expanded to cover revenue from supplementary material such as subscription elearning software for textbooks or t-shirts and posters of musicians. Again this is something that is already happening (especially within the music industry) so the groundwork has already been done.

But to offset this, expensive traditional marketing (direct mail advertising, broadcast television ads) is going to have to be drastically reduced. I can’t think of any way to recoup the huge amounts of money spent on direct mail and mass-market broadcast ads in this newly emerging marketplace – it’s just not viable. Certainly not when you can better reach a more carefully-selected market (i.e. with a much greater percentage of potential customers) by spending much less money online.

The traditional marketing model of throwing a huge amount of cash—in the form of TV ads, billboards or direct mail campaigns—at an undifferentiated mass of people can only be sustained when you (artificially) control the scarcity of your product. When your product loses that scarcity (i.e. it can be easily copied and redistributed online) then you simply can’t keep following this old dogma. I’m not going to go into more detail about this because it’s been explained before by the likes of Chris Anderson, Kevin Kelly, Michael Masnick, and Umair Haque (amongst many others).

Unfortunately this is where many companies in the publishing and music industries “don’t get it”. They do understand the ideas of new revenue streams and the benefits of free content, but they can’t imagine not having to shovel vast amounts of cash into the raging furnace that is the traditional (obsolete) marketing system – they don’t understand that the potential cost of their marketing is plummeting for exactly the same reasons of efficient distribution and connectivity.

Once they accept this (and realign their marketing strategy accordingly) then the equation will balance and they’ll see the profit.

Underpricing, they say, devalues the products (because, as Chris Anderson pointed out recently, they make the mistake that “the only way to measure value is with money”).

This “underpricing=bad” argument might have some mileage for products made of atoms, but when your products are made of ones and zeroes it becomes obsolete. That’s why it’s a nonsense to charge the same price for your ebook as you charge for the paperback (or, even worse, the hardback).

Of course, the ultimate underpricing is to make something free. Making something free doesn’t devalue it. I find a lot of value in Google, Flickr, Slashdot, numerous other websites and blogs, the Kubuntu installation on my computer, Mozilla Firefox, the WordPress software this blog runs on, PHP5 & MySQL, the NHS, Channel 4, free-entry to the collections at the Tate Modern (where I can gaze, without paying, at the Bacons, Picassos, Matisses…), even the free copy of the Metro newspaper I read on the bus every morning on the way to work. I value these things.

Telling people that you believe some things should be free can generate some aggressive criticism (as you’ll know if you’ve ever read the comments on, for example, Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog). You can feel like you’re being accused of being a communist/hippy idealist with no idea about business models in the real world. I’m sure that those naïve hippy idealists at Google—who are making a killing with their business model in the real world—would disagree.

Why is it that so many people who see themselves as “traditional hard-nosed business” types are completely clueless when it comes to the internet, especially the more recent trends in social networking?

Because they’re desperately trying to impose yesterday’s business models on today’s business. Umair Haque points to the twin obsessions of “product” and “monetization”:

When you try and “monetize your users”, you accept the almost obscene assumption that people are meant to be pimped out, sold to the highest bidder, resources to be slashed, burned, and exploited.

Umair is certainly not against businesses making money. In fact he highlights the fact that many businesses’ attempts to make money on the internet can’t make any sustainable income (because they are so clumsily contemptuous of their customers in the pursuit of profit).

Actually he summarises his argument most succinctly while replying to a comment on that same post:

as for figuring out how to capture value – the point of the principle is that when we figure out how to capture value, we must do it in a way that doesn’t destroy any value we create.

How long would Google remain the search engine of choice by such a huge margin if it sold out its users and “monetised” its clean, clear, front page (which must be the primest piece of real estate on the net) by cluttering it with ads?

Meanwhile earlier this week Trent Reznor just grossed $1.6 million in the first week of sales of Nine Inch Nail‘s new album. My friend Barry examines the pricing policy in more detail, but the pertinent point here is that Reznor gave away a 9-track download of the new release for free.

$1.6 million says that his fans didn’t think that the free tracks devalued his music…

Random House and Hachette, which together control just over 30% of the British book market, are to offer downloadable versions of titles by authors ranging from Delia Smith to Ian McEwan and Michael Parkinson. Every other major publisher is drawing up plans to follow suit, pitching the books at just below the price of a hardback.

The bold emphasis is mine – to highlight the catastrophic error of history repeating itself (when the recording industry finally started trying to sell MP3s online, greed got the better of them too. They priced the files far too high. Now, their profits devastated by their rapacious pricing strategy, they’ve been forced to accept more realistic—i.e. much lower—prices).  Let’s make this clear: you’ve only got a viable business strategy if your ebook version costs less than your paperback version.

Another alarm bell rings when Fionnuala Duggan, head of the digital division at Random House, makes a passing comment:

“We hope that there will be inter-operability,” said Duggan, “in other words, that the ebook will work on any device.”

It’s simple, Ms Duggan: don’t release them in proprietary ebook formats and/or shackle them with DRM.

A PDF with a simple digital watermarking system (to be able to trace any “pirated” copy of an ebook to its “pirate”) is enough to fulfil all your requirements. You will only have inter-operability problems if you choose a proprietary ebook format and/or DRM.