This essay about life on the road is provided by Jaret Ferratusco. Jaret is the founder of Patient, Folded Hands Publishing, and author of the novellas I Grew Up In Amaltherey Hill and Please Don’t Leave Me. Jaret was recently featured on W + K Entertainment’s Story Time program, where he read from one of his short stories. Upcoming releases include a revised edition of Please Don’t Leave Me for rerelease through Patient, Folded Hands, and a new short-story collection titled To Make This Easier, which focuses on very lonely instances of personal horror and hopelessness in the summits of love and loss.
In early 2009 the groundwork was laid for a new Portland publishing company called Patient, Folded Hands. I started this venture in an attic, basically while drinking large amounts of energy drinks (the kind with high alcohol content), quietly getting myself prepared and excited about starting something all my own, with the only rules I would have to follow being those of finance. It took a bit of time to get the first publication off the floor, and that work is a story called I Grew Up In Amaltherey Hill, now available through my website. Although this book is the first breath for P, FH as a company, it was my second published book as an author, so I considered that I had a marginally accurate view of how it would probably go, moneywise. Which meant I’d better save up, because it takes much more money to do it than what you’re apt to make doing it.
What I figured is that I would probably (hopefully) end up getting out a good amount of books at first, then I could reasonably expect sales to slow a month or so after the release after initial promotions had been done. That was pretty accurate. I wasn’t able to save any of that money from the first month of sales for building the company up any little higher, because all of everything I made that first month went to paying off my investor.
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This is the second essay on the future of the book industry, which began with a look at the future for readers, and will continue with a look at publishers and authors. Again, I invite your disagreements in the comments below, as these essays are primarily meant to spark a discussion.
Indie Bookstores of the Future
I started off the last essay by saying that there has never been a better time to be a reader. I wish I could say the same for today’s independent bookstores. Unfortunately the news of closures seem to come daily, and the advent of eBooks as well as increasing pressure from online sellers and the mega stores, puts indies directly in the cross hairs of the literary firing squad. There are a couple bright spots however. The push for shopping local is growing, and social media tools are helping independent bookstores connect with their patrons like never before. But few business models can subsist on these movements alone, and indies will have to get creative if they want to prove the doomsayers wrong.
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I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about what the future may hold for Reading Local, and since that future is in a way intrinsically linked to the future of the book industry, it’s inevitably led to pondering what lies ahead for said industry as well. These thoughts have been further provoked by Matt Briggs first post for Reading Local: Seattle, an article in the latest Fast Company on how Amazon is embracing their inner Apple, and an article on how the Espresso Book Machine is being used in a Vermont Bookstore. I’ll post these essays as a series organized by sector, starting with the reader and then working backwards to the bookstore, the publisher, and then finish up with the author. What follows is nothing more than my thoughts put to paper, or screen if you will, and I invite you to explain why they are entirely off-base. That’s the essential function of the blogging platform, to provide a vehicle for an ongoing discussion on some topic or another. With that preemptive strike out of the way, here is where I think the future for readers may be headed.
The Future of Reading
There has never been a better time to be a reader. We have a multitude of different ways to access and enjoy the literature we desire. The standard hard cover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback are still the primary vehicles through which we quench this thirst. But this will be less so for today’s youngest generation of readers, and is already diminishing at an increasing rate for the current reading population. If Amazon has it’s way the Kindle DX will be used in the majority of classrooms, instead of the backpack full of textbooks assigned today. In the process, generations of readers will shift their reading habits away from print and towards digital, with Amazon there to fill their ever-expanding terabyte libraries. The eBook’s, as we refer to it today, found on those Kindle’s will look less like the digital version of the book found in the store, and instead will be something akin to the extras found on your latest Blu-ray purchase. As the Fast Company article put it, along with your download of the book you may receive “a blend of text, video, audio interviews, 3-D maps — an entire ecosystem of content built on top of the book.” They use Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series as the basis for an example of how this could play out: Read the rest of this entry »
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