Writing in the Digital Age: It’s All About the Platform

A cou­ple of weeks ago, crime writer Seth Har­wood wrote a very pop­u­lar piece here — How I Sold My Book by Giv­ing It Away. Now he’s back and telling us about the new chal­lenge of writ­ing in the dig­i­tal age. Take it away Seth (and check out his new book JACK WAKES UP )…

The num­ber of ebook read­ers and read­ing devices is grow­ing rather than shrink­ing these days. We’re enter­ing a world where indi­vid­ual read­ers will decide not only what books they want to read, but how they want to read them. And here there’s some­thing to think about for authors: As read­ers choose the read­ing plat­form they like best, they’ll see a cer­tain set of books in that space. Dif­fer­ent books show up at Wal-Mart than at your local inde­pen­dent book­seller. On the Kin­dle there are dif­fer­ent books—with dif­fer­ent prices—than on the iTunes App store. And even with­in the iTunes store, you’ll find dif­fer­ent books in the Audio­books sec­tion (owned by Audible.com), the Podcasts»Arts»Literature sec­tion (where many of the titles are free), and in the App store.

As an author, I want to be wher­ev­er a read­er can look. On every plat­form and every new plat­form, I want my book to be avail­able. My nov­el JACK WAKES UP start­ed out as a pod­cast (via iTunes, RSS Feed, & MP3). Peo­ple liked it. It got to print on demand, and Ama­zon sold it in print and Kin­dle for­mats. Guess what? It did pret­ty well. Now, it’s out from Three Rivers Press, a divi­sion of Ran­dom House, and read­ers can find it at all the online out­lets, as well as brick and mor­tar book­stores nationwide—both big box and indy. But that’s still miss­ing part of the mar­ket: soon more and more peo­ple will be buy­ing their books on their iPhones as Apps—both audio and text—or on Kin­dle, Scribd, eRead­er and who knows where else. All I can do is work toward mak­ing JACK WAKES UP avail­able in as many places and ways as pos­si­ble.

At the Pub­lish­ing 3.0 pan­el ses­sion dur­ing April’s LA Times Fes­ti­val of Books, the experts spoke about the prob­lem of pub­lish­ing in the 20th cen­tu­ry being demand—how do you gen­er­ate the inter­est in your book and get peo­ple to buy it—and that the new prob­lem in the 21st cen­tu­ry is sup­ply. With so many books pub­lished, many will fail. There’s lit­er­al­ly just too much, a glut of books that no one has a good idea how to fix.

The oth­er sup­ply-side issue is plat­form. As the pub­lish­ing game steams quick­ly toward dif­fer­ent plat­forms, vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed choic­es for read­ers, dif­fer­ent pric­ing mod­els, read­ing expe­ri­ences, and pref­er­ences, my duty as an author now involves mak­ing sure my work is offered on as many plat­forms as pos­si­ble to ensure my book is an option for the great­est num­ber of read­ers.