By Edward Nawotka
Today’s editorial by Jesse Potash of PUBSLUSH offers his vision of a crowdsourced, non-profit publishing model. The business is simliar to that of other crowdsourced publishing models, like Unbound, which ask readers to essentially pre-order a book before a decision is made to publish it once it has enough guaranteed readers. In the case of PUBSLUSH, readers are asked to judge a ten-page submission and the book will be published after it has 2,000 supporters.
This is certainly a good deal for the author, who writes knowing they have an audience, and the publisher, who knows they have customers. But what about the reader, who has no guarantee that they are getting a good book. Then again, this is nearly always the case.
Readers typically use a few criteria on which to base their book purchases. Recommendations from trusted sources, such as friends, critics and booksellers precedent — books they’ve previously read by the author; or else a small sampling of something they’ve read in a bookstore or online, perhaps an excerpt or a story.
The fact is that the reader nearly always has to take a gamble that a book will live up to whatever expectations they might have built up. The question of how to present book sampling has never quite been answered, though as Kevin Smokler noted here, “trust me” is a pretty lame sales pitch and publishing needs to find a better way of enticing readers.
So, for you, is ten pages enough? Or maybe the Page99 test works for you, as it does for critic Robert McCrum (“It’s fine with me,” he says, “plus it has the virtue of plunging the casual reader deep into the middle of the book.”)
Tell us what criteria you rely on when sampling a book. Can it be done better? If so, how?
5 Comments
i usually read the first page only — if i can get through the first page and i am still intrigued — 99% of the time i usually love the book! the first page tells me whether or not i am attracted to their style of writing as well as whether or not the story itself has potential to keep my attention
First impressions count….in meeting someone for the first time or the first few pages of a book. If either are unable to hold your attention at the start, it’s unlikely they will for any length of time.
If I have to struggle with a book in the beginning….or for that matter with a new friendship….chances are there will be no middle, much less ending.
Isn’t that what agents claim to be able to do?
The first 10 pages? Page 99? Any page anywhere? I have to confess that’s what I do when I walk into a real bookstore and search through real, printed books: first the back cover blurb, then page 1, then a bunch of pages anywhere in the book, at random…I can spend whole afternoons like that, happily lost in books!
With the digital revolution, that has changed. Now the equivalent browsing is provided (more or less) by the sample downloaded to your Kindle or the “take a peek inside” feature. Surely more could be done and I appreciate PubSlush’s effort to involve readers in book discoverability – a laudable intent! Plus the idealistic objective of helping to spread literacy in the world. Congrats!
Surely yet other ways could be thought up? I rather liked the “test” that a bookstore runs (I think it was located in Mass.) to try and identify customer tastes and come up with book suggestions (sorry I forgot the name of that bookstore). But I took their test and it provided me with a surprisingly interesting book that I would have surely bought if it had been available digitally…
So why doesn’t Amazon devise such a test to help its customers find the sort of books they like to read? Because unfortunately searching for keywords (and tags) doesn’t necessarily work: a keyword is only effective if it correctly describes a book genre (but what about books that are cross genre?) – and then, it’s still too vague, too general to help zero in on what one really wants…
It strikes me that 10 pages randomly selected might be fine for a book of poetry and perhaps even for a novel. But for a work of serious non-fiction? For an academic treatise? For the latter, a 5-page outline with an annotated table of contents and 5 pages of writing from a sample chapter might be adequate. This is often all that an acquiring editor needs to reach a preliminary judgment about a book prior to inviting submission of the complete manuscript. In academic publishing houses, of course, this is only the first step in decisionmaking, which also involves reviews by experts on the subject of the book. The Pubslush model could be adapted even for academic publishing, though i suspect it would work better in the form of a library acquisitions collective than a random set of individual “subscriber” readers.