"No swearing - no smut - no sex," promises the publisher's blurb for John J. Ackert's novel, Pedro and the Irish Treasure.
It's brief, and to the point, and it certainly cuts to the meat of the matter. Still, it's hardly the kind of rousing endorsement you'd expect from a big New York publishing house, is it? But then, that's just how Ackert wanted it. It must be — because he wrote the advertising blurb himself.
Ackert's publisher, Xlibris, is one of a new breed of online publishing houses that hand over the reins of book production to their authors. Writers send in their manuscripts on disk or CD-ROM.
Xlibris formats and packages them, provides the resulting books with ISBN numbers, places bar codes on their back covers, offers them for sale on Xlibris's Web site (with applicable discounts available to book stores and resellers), and then prints copies on demand for anyone who places an order.
The rest — including editing, proofreading, marketing, and promotion — is up to the author.
Xlibris is just one of any number of companies formed to capitalize on a field the Internet has transformed almost from Day One: writing. You often hear about how the Internet and computer technology will change the way movies are made, or revolutionize the music industry.
But to see a digital revolution fully underway, you need look no further than the words in front of your face. For writers, it's a veritable golden age.
Think about it. HTML itself is a markup language designed to format text. Before all the rich media and streaming content, before the Flash plug-ins and Java applets, the Web was about delivering written language. Despite the glitz and sparkle of today's media-heavy sites, that trend has yet to slow. In fact, it's accelerating.
Never before have there been so many potential markets available to writers, or avenues through which to see their work published. A proliferation of online magazines has appeared, on every conceivable subject.
Portal sites need unique features and columns to draw in fickle Web surfers. Even the most artless e-commerce site needs ad copy written for the products it sells. And now, hybrid businesses like Xlibris are using technology to offer new inroads into the world of traditional book publishing.
The cynical might suggest that what Xlibris offers is really little more than a new twist on an old game. While its "core service" is free, authors may also pay fees for more control over the end product — say, if they want to decide what the cover of their book looks like, or they want more interior layout templates to choose from.
Xlibris's Premium Service package, offering the most options, costs $1,200. While they'll tell you these are value-added services for authors with a specific vision, many writers have another name for it: vanity publishing.
Be that as it may, the mainstream publishing industry has its eye on startups like Xlibris. The new print-on-demand technology they use keeps a publisher's overhead very low, because it doesn't require the high volume runs of traditional printing.
If a book printed using traditional methods fails, that could mean warehouses full of unsold product for the publisher. With print-on-demand, they need only print as many copies as their customers order.
Another way to lower the costs associated with book publishing might be to get rid of the "book" altogether, in the traditional sense. Fully electronic document delivery does away not only with large print runs, but the paper and ink itself.
By presenting the text in a digital format, distributed over the Internet, the manufacturing and distribution costs to the publisher drop to almost nothing.
That's provided publishers can make it fly with the consumer, of course. So far, most people seem disinclined to do their reading on the current generation of computer screens.
Handheld devices have been developed for those who don't want to be chained to their desks while reading, but to date they've been expensive and no more legible than a laptop. There's no uniform standard for digital books, either, with companies like Microsoft, Glassbook, and Adobe all proposing competing file formats.
But technological growing pains haven't stopped a number of publishers from leaping into the fray of an all-digital marketplace. Simon and Schuster recently released a 66-page novella by horror author Stephen King, to great success.
Still other startups are rushing in headlong, skipping the print publication phase entirely. With names like eBrandedBooks.com, BookLocker.com, and iUniverse.com, these new companies are banking that they can carve out a niche for themselves before the big boys get up to speed.
The problem many see with these fledgling electronic publishers, however — as with Xlibris — is their lack of selectivity in choosing which manuscripts to publish. It's assumed the role of the conventional publisher is to select only the best of the material it receives, and to take an active role in honing that work to its highest quality before it reaches the consumer.
New online publishers, on the other hand, in their haste to build a respectable-appearing catalog, often accept anything a writer sends their way. Sometimes a fee is involved; sometimes it's all free-of-charge. All in all, about 500,000 new e-books are expected to be released over the next 18 months.
It's hard to respect a such a haphazard collection of books, lacking editorial judgement or clear publisher's direction, as being legitimate. But this is not likely to be a problem for long, as experienced writers begin to realize the potential returns.
One advantage of these new technologies for writers is that by eliminating costs, more of the post-sales profits from book sales are available to be paid to the author. Many online publishers offer their writers as much as 50 percent of sales in royalties.
Internet venture capital is also likely to provide an incentive to draw big-name talent to the no-paper book market. We've already begun to see this happen in the periodical market. While many online magazines use untried talent to pen their articles, other sites like TheStreet.com have concentrated on attracting top talent, in order to build brand recognition.
By offering a potent combination of six-figure salaries and pre-IPO stock options, these Web ventures have succeeded in luring seasoned writers away from venerable print publications like the Wall Street Journal.
On the surface, it looks like a win-win scenario for all concerned. New publishers can begin business with fewer risks than ever before, using e-book or print-on-demand technologies. And established publishers and authors alike can reap even greater profits from the works they publish.
But one question that remains unanswered is what effect these developments will have on the conventional publishing institutions in the long run. Suppose, for instance, that a Stephen King — or a Tom Clancy, or Ann Rice — chose to release their own electronic versions of their latest novels, without the assistance of a publisher?
For the New York publishing houses, it would mean a whole new ball game.
