In nature big fish eat little fish, but in business the opposite is often true: the small destroy the large.  Small, nimble, clever, aggressive startups with nothing to lose are able to undermine staid, clumsy behemoths burdened by overhead, bureaucracy and legacies.

Hmm. Are we thinking of any small, nimble industry in particular? Of any staid, clumsy behemoth industry in particular?

Clayton Christensen is a student of the rise and fall of big companies, and he’s coined a wonderful phrase to describe the cycle: Disruptive Innovation. He describes it as “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.”

In the space of a decade we have seen the digital book industry (that is the small industry you were thinking of, isn’t it?) soar from novelty to dominance, absorbing in the process a far larger publishing business like a snake unhinging its jaw to consume a sheep.

But there’s a corollary to the rule of disruptive innovation, for, after battening on its huge prey, the smaller company itself becomes fat and soft and susceptible to the predations of the next generation of hungry young businesses.

A recent New York Times editorial, Remember Microsoft?, exemplifies the concept. “Technology upends companies in different ways,” itl stated. “It allows new firms to deliver better products and services in a more efficient way; it also creates new goods and services for consumers to want. Eastman Kodak, the fifth-biggest company in the S.& P. 500 in 1975, was almost destroyed by digital cameras and is no longer in the index. General Motors, fifth biggest in 1985, was hobbled by rivals that could make more fuel efficient cars. Microsoft still rules the PC desktop. But that will matter less and less as users migrate to tablets and more computing takes place in ‘the cloud.’”

Which brings us back to e-books. It’s hard to imagine that they may simply be a bridge to a far larger media world, but if Christensen’s theory holds up, a day may come when the hegemony of giants like Google, Amazon and Apple becomes vulnerable to a fast-moving aggressor, and the cycle begins all over again. Don’t believe it? Just yesterday we wrote about powerful new programs like ePub3 and HTML5 that will make e-books look positively Gutenbergian.  Let’s hope we’re all around to see the day.  Or maybe some of us would rather not.

Read Disruptive Innovation and watch the video.

Richard Curtis

E-Reads recently posted a piece commenting on a speech given by Smashwords founder Mark Coker in which he seemed to be saying that when publishers turn down books they are depriving the authors of their freedom of speech. (see Smashwords Publisher Wants a Revolution Too)

Coker has posted a comment on the E-Reads website which we feel deserves a full airing. It is reproduced below.

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Richard, the correct link is http://blog.smashwords.com/2011/05/upon-gears-of-big-publishing.html Ironically, you linked to a site that lifted my blog post, modified words to the point of incomprehensibility, and used it as SEO-optimized link bait to draw traffic it monetizes with Google ads.

I posted my Berkeley presentation here: http://www.slideshare.net/Smashwords/upon-the-gears-of-big-publishing-asja-may-15-berkeley-ca

I’m a big fan of yours, but I think you twisted my message.

Writers are entitled to publish, but they are not entitled to a Big Publisher contract.

I did not state or imply publisher rejections are calculated to curtail free speech. I’m simply arguing that Big Publishing is incapable of enabling it.

Big Publishing cannot take a risk on every author. Smashwords takes the risk because this is our business.

Smashwords provides authors and publishers the tools to reach readers with ebooks. Authors who honor the best practices of the best publishers will out-publish and out-compete the big publishers. Readers, not publishers, decide what’s worth reading.

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If our remarks were based on an incomplete or distorted version of Coker’s speech we certainly regret it, and we leave it to readers to weigh the difference between the original and the one we used.  As we said originally, Smashwords provides an invaluable service to authors and a viable alternative to a traditional publishing industry that is badly in need of fresh ideas and approaches.

Richard Curtis

If you’re not sure what ePub is, don’t worry. It will soon be history.

This digital format, which has done as much in its own way as the Kindle to hyperdrive the e-book business, has been the industry’s workhorse ever since ePub 2.0 was officially adopted in 2007 as the standard for production of reflowable digital books. It is the building block for Sony, Apple, Google and other e-book formats.  Even Amazon, which has its own proprietary format, accepts submission of ePub files, which can then be converted to Kindle’s unique language. (See What is ePub and Why Is It Important to You?)

EPub is still a superb tool if all you want to do is read – or publish -  an e-book in English or another western tongue. But what if your native language is Chinese or Japanese or Arabic or Hebrew?  EPub is not up to the task of handling symbols and pictograms or languages written up and down or right to left.

Or what if you want to “read” a vook or an app replete with videos, music and other enhancements? The ePub format is simply inadequate to the challenge of creating these complex multimedia works.

Enter ePub3, a more global, complex, interactive, media-rich format perfectly suited for the demands of the next generation of book (if after it is completely enhanced it will be recognizable as a book). EPub3 is currently being reviewed and tested by publishers, developers and other interested parties with an eye to rollout in 2012.

In an interview in O’Reilly Radar, Book Master executive Bob Kasher highlights three significant features of the new format: language support, greater accessibility, and increased multimedia functionality.

1) Language Support. “Language support, Kasher explains, “will allow ePub3 to save and search non-Roman scripts — such as Japanese, Chinese and Arabic — as font characters rather than jpegs… It will truly internationalize ePub.”

2. Greater Accessibility. By “greater accessibility” Kasher means that the new format will be far friendlier to the visually impaired, employing so-called “DAISY” (Digital Accessible Information System) standards for digital talking books, according to the DAISY Consortium, the official international organization.

3. Support for Multimedia Applications. Finally, and foremost, “ePub3 will be much more adept at supporting multimedia capabilities for both HTML5-based devices and the coming generation of tablets supporting both Flash and HTML5. It is hoped that in doing so, ePub3 will help develop an enhanced ebook standard that can be used across a variety of media and content.”

HTML by the way is the language that governs most Internet websites, and HTML5 is being designed to accommodate the same demands of multimedia and interactivity for the Internet that ePub3 is designed for text. (See What is HTML5, and Why Should You Care?)

For those of us who are perfectly happy settling down with a plain old conventional bells-less and whistles-less e-book, don’t worry: ePub version 3.0 will be “backward compatible” with 2.0, the current standard, even though it will one day be looked at by our grandchildren as primitive and one-dimensional – just like us.

Read What to expect in EPUB3

Richard Curtis

Slippage, a collection of what Harlan Ellison calls “precariously poised” stories, is available for the first time in e-book format. It was previously published by Houghton Mifflin and, if you prefer it in printed format, E-Reads makes it available to you on paper, too.

This critically acclaimed, wildly imaginative and outrageously creative collection is Ellison’s seventieth (E-Reads has more than thirty of them). The award-winning novella “Mefisto in Onyx” is the centerpiece of the collection which also includes screenplays, an introduction by the author, interspersed segments of autobiographical narrative and such provocatively titled entries as “The Man Who Rowed Columbus Ashore,” “Anywhere But Here, With Anybody But You,” “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich,” “Chatting With Anubis,” “The Dragon on the Bookshelf, “The Dreams a Nightmare Dreams,” “Pulling Hard Time,” and “Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral.”

Add Slippage to your collection of Ellison’s works, and visit his author page to make sure you haven’t missed any.

Paradox Alley is the thrilling and long-awaited finale of John DeChancie’s Starrigger series.

If you’re not familiar with the trilogy, it starts with Starrigger when independent space trucker Jake McGraw, accompanied by his father Sam, who inhabits the body of the truck itself, his “starrig,” picks up a beautiful hitchhiker, Darla, and a trailer-load of trouble. One of the best of the indies, Jake knows a few tricks about following the Skyway, which connects dozens, or maybe hundreds, of planets. Nobody knows how many and nobody really knows the full extent of the Skyway and much of it remains unexplored. But, somehow, a rumor gets started that Jake has a map for the whole thing and suddenly everybody wants a piece of him.

In the sequel, Red Limit Freeway, Jake stumbles on what seems to be the fabled roadmap to the stars, then must outrun the most detestable vermin and roadbugs in the galaxy. The only thing separating him from them is his tattered starrig. In the lawless region of space Jake must keep his rig running if he knows what’s good for him. He has something that everyone wants and they will stop at nothing to get it. But how long can he keep going on the road where there is no relief for light years?

In the concluding novel Paradox Alley, Jake and his crew are plucked off the Skyway by a creature of unknown power. Now on an alien planet where most of the rules of the regular universe don’t seem to apply, Jake confronts the builders of the Skyway once and for all. Will he and his crew make it out alive?

When you finish the trilogy you’ll want to plunge into DeChancie’s Castle series, which you can find on his author page.

John Norman (credit: Gorchronicles.com)

In response to birthday greetings extended to him by his fans and posted on gorchronicles.com, John Norman, creator of the bestselling Gor science fiction/fantasy series, asked his agent Richard Curtis to post the following response:

Some remarks by John Norman, on his having been apprised of his 80th Birthday

Dear Richard:

Thanks so much for forwarding the thoughtful birthday greetings from the staff and members of Chronicles of Gor. And thanks, too, for your kind wishes. All this is much appreciated.

When much younger I had two ambitions, the first was to live to be forty years old, with no objections to living longer, and the second was to live to see the year 2000, though I learned later it should have been 2001, as there is no year zero. As one can see, my ambitions were relatively modest, and would have been unlikely to satisfy a Caesar or Napoleon. On the other hand, some nice things have happened to me over the past several years, which I would never have dared to include among my ambitions. I met, fell in love with, and married a wonderful woman who changed my life. I have known the joys and tribulations of fatherhood, and beyond. I had some wonderful teachers, and, over the years, have had the privilege of sharing the joys of philosophy with a great many students, some of whom understood what I was talking about. Then, later, I began to understand the lies endemic in my culture, what was being done to the young, and why it was being done, the veiled march of a narrow, demanding, unhappy, alien will to power, dating back to the Nineteenth Century, the program of a smug, zealous, bigoted minority, drunk on its ersatz religion, to impose its will on a planet, determined to create a world in its own short-sighted, constricted, historically refuted, pathological image, a rosy image now so familiar that the bright fever of its illness, still hysterically denied, is almost invisible. It is not so hard to do this, to change things, provided it is not obvious what is being done. How is it to be done? By the enforcement of attitudes, by the employed arsenals of social engineering, by means of incomplete and distorted information, by means of social coercion, smiling upon and flattering mindless conformity, frowning upon and execrating even suspected skepticism and independence. The free mind is its greatest danger. Let one who thinks without permission be denounced; let him be insulted and slandered. Decry authentic difference. Do not neglect guided policies in hiring and promotion; be certain to replace education with indoctrination; seize the devices of mass communication to promote an agenda; do not neglect to disguise statism in the garb of benevolence, to cloak totalitarianism in the rhetoric of liberty; forecast utopia but be unclear as to its details, that every uncritical fool may rejoice and read into it whatever he wants; fear the free mind; it is dangerous; why point out the stone walls and iron bars of the future? You hope to be its warden and jailer; but there may be others, less scrupulous, more clever, and more ruthless, who may profit from the path you have laid, who will climb the ladders you have built, who will capitalize upon the mindless dependence you have fostered and steal the future you thought would be yours.

Ah, dear John Norman, beware. Surely you know by now how unwelcome. particularly to arsonists, is the cry of fire in a burning theater.

What are they afraid of, the teapot tyrants, who would control what you may and may not read, and would thereby control what you may and may not think. Do you not understand, John, the battle is finished, the war is lost. Continue to cry out, John. Tell them that nature is not evil, that humans are not evil, that happiness is not evil, that bodies, and needs, are not evil, that joy, and fulfillment, are not evil. And perhaps one day there will be new battles and new wars. Who knows? It may be that truth is hardy, that it has good genes.

If any might read this, somewhere, somehow, sometime, suspect at least that you need not take your values and virtues from strangers who bear you no good will, from those who are alien to your heart, from the haters, the bigots, the power seekers, the betrayers of life. Your values and virtues are your own, as is proper. Love them and be true to them.

I suppose I should apologize for all this, but I am now eighty years old, and am out of practice. It is too late to start now.

It is pleasant to have sneaked out from under my bourgeois camouflage, if only briefly.
I thank all my friends for their good wishes. They mean much to me. Long ago, I climbed a mountain and beheld a mighty sea, and beyond that sea a new world, a fresh, green, unfamiliar world, with glowing horizons. We went down to that sea and built our ships. And together we have voyaged to far shores. Remember there are always lands which you have never seen, and adventures you have not yet lived.

I wish you well,
John Norman

Kudos to Harlequin for getting proactive in the war on infringers. The romance publishing behemoth has engaged Attributor, an outfit that monitors and combats piracy, to help authors chase file-sharers and other leeches out of the content pool.

“We ask that authors and their agents submit their takedown requests through Attributor’s online portal,” says Harlequin’s release.  “The online portal will provide you with directions on how to enter and submit information regarding infringing pages or sites. We anticipate enforcement will be undertaken more expeditiously and effectively through this service.”

For the complete statement click here.  And to read more about Attributor, click here.

Richard Curtis

To All Authors and Agents: New Process for Reporting Suspected Book Piracy

As you know, Harlequin shares our authors’ concerns about the adverse effects of piracy in any medium, particularly online, and undertakes to actively protect copyrighted materials. To date, thousands of infringing pages have been taken down. This level of success has only been possible with the co-operation of our authors in bringing potentially infringing pages and sites to our attention. Historically, authors have done this by forwarding information to a dedicated e-mail box at Report_Piracy@Harlequin.ca.

Going forward we are streamlining and enhancing the enforcement process through the use of an online portal for the reporting of suspected piracy. We have chosen an online portal operated by Attributor Corporation, which provides copyright monitoring and enforcement services to a number of publishers.

Effective immediately, we ask that authors and their agents submit their takedown requests through Attributor’s online portal available at http://book.attributor.com/portal/submiturl.php.

The online portal will provide you with directions on how to enter and submit information regarding infringing pages or sites. We anticipate enforcement will be undertaken more expeditiously and effectively through this service.

Please continue to keep in mind the following points before you submit information through the new online portal:

* Confirm that a result on a search page is an actual link to an infringing download on a hosting site. In particular we ask that you double check before submitting pages where links are listed under the heading “Sponsored Links” and make sure that the download has not already been removed. If you need further clarification, Attributor has a helpful webpage that will assist in identifying legitimate infringing links – http://booksupport.attributor.com/identifying-legitimate-takedowns;

* Please ensure you include the author name and title for each link to be removed. If the book is in a foreign language, please provide the title and author name in English;

* Do not submit repeated requests for removal of results from a search page. The infringing download link on the hosting site will be removed, but will not necessarily be removed from the search index. For example, if you do a search on Google.com or Ineedfile.com and find a link to an infringing download on Rapidshare.com, the link to the infringing download on Rapidshare.com will be removed, but the reference to it on Google.com or Ineedfile.com may not be removed. Verify that the infringing download link really exists by clicking on the link before reporting results from a search page;

Please do not send e-mails reporting infringing links to Report_Piracy@Harlequin.ca. Going forward, messages to Report_Piracy@Harlequin.ca will result in a response redirecting the sender to the Attributor online portal.

We also continue to encourage you to contact the operators of websites directly, in your capacity as a rights holder, to have infringing material taken down. Many authors are already doing this with good results. In some cases, content is removed more quickly when the request comes directly from the author.

Thank you again for your continuing assistance in the fight against book piracy.

The Report Piracy Team

The idea guy in Poughkeepsie

Harlan Ellison does not suffer fools gladly. In fact he doesn’t suffer them at all. He particularly has no patience for fans who want to know where he gets his ideas from. His answer?

Poughkeepsie.

There is, he confides in conspiratorial tones to wide-eyed autograph-seekers, this guy in Poughkeepsie who, for a fee, furnishes Ellison with ideas for stories. If the fan seems particularly gullible Ellison will write down an address in exchange for a pledge of complete secrecy.

Although most “civilians” are not as credulous as Ellison’s fans, the process by which authors find inspiration for stories is shrouded in mystery. It may therefore come as a surprise that the last thing professional writers need is ideas and that most of them have enough to last a lifetime.

They may need time, yes. They may need money. They may need peace and quiet. They certainly need love. But the one thing professional writers have more than enough of is ideas.

To learn about the true – and mysterious – process by authors get their ideas (besides Poughkeepsie), click here.

Richard Curtis

The idea guy in Poughkeepsie

Most publishing people can relate to the following scenario: You are attending a party and are introduced to another guest. “So, what line of business are you in?” the guest asks, a respected opening social gambit.
“I’m in the publishing business,” you reply. “I work with authors.”
“Hey, that’s great. You must lead a really interesting life.”

He then goes on to explain that he is a postal clerk, a fabric salesman, a dishwasher repairman, a sanitation worker. Your companion suddenly brightens. “Hey, you may be just the guy I’ve been looking for!” He then takes you by the arm and furtively escorts you to an isolated corner of the room. Your stomach begins to sink, because you know what’s coming.

His eyes dart suspiciously from guest to guest as he takes you by the lapels and puts his mouth close to your ear. “You got any writers looking for a great idea? Because I’ve got one! I would write it myself, but I don’t have the time or the talent. But if you got somebody, I’ll go in with him, fifty-fifty.”

You look past him, seeking your host to rescue you, but it is hopeless. The fellow has an iron grip on your lapels. “Okay, I’ll tell you the idea if you swear not to tell another soul.”
“Stack of Bibles,” you say, raising your palm to the sky.
He leans even closer. “Okay. What it is, is . . .”

What it is, is usually awful. But even if it isn’t, the truth is that I cannot help him. For how can I explain to him that the last thing that professional writers need is ideas, that most of the writers I know have enough ideas to last a lifetime? They may need time, yes. They may need money. They may need peace and quiet. They certainly need love. But the one thing they have more than enough of is ideas.

Most people who have never seriously attempted to write books subscribe to what might be termed the Big Bang theory of inspiration. They perceive artistic ideas to be stupendous epiphanies that are visited once in a lifetime on a chosen few, like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from God.

There is no denying that many sublime works of art, music, and literature are born that way. Most of us take ideas for granted, and why shouldn’t we? We have dozens of them every day, and seldom do they seem to be of such moment that we pause in wonder to contemplate their splendor. Only when we examine books, pictures, and other artistic endeavors closely do we think about the intellectual processes that gave birth to them, and if these works are truly great, we may well be reminded that the generation of ideas is a phenomenon worthy of genuine reverence. By what occult mechanism they originate is surely as unknowable as how life itself was first created. Indeed, as the word “inspiration” literally means the entering of spirit into that which was hitherto lifeless, it could well be said that at no time are humans closer to divine than when they are inspired with noble ideas.

But ask a professional writer about his ideas and he may well respond as inarticulately as my friend at the party. In all likelihood, he’ll ask, “Which ideas?” because he’s got a million of them, and his biggest problem is choosing one. His next biggest problem is finding the time and money to develop it. For this kind of writer, the real inspiration comes when he is writing. It magically flows from a remote region of his unconscious into his fingertips and seems almost unfailingly to illuminate every character description, every plot twist, every metaphor, perhaps every sentence.

Big Bang? No, the image of a water tap is probably more apposite. Turn it on for an hour or two and out comes a daily ration of good, maybe great work. I hesitate to say “inspired” because most professional writers are too modest and self-critical to call it that. But the creative process by which literature—even popular literature—is produced may legitimately be described as miraculous.

At first glance, most people would say that literary agents operate far from this ethereal realm of ideas. After all, we make our livings appraising the value of the commodities known as books, and helping the producers of those commodities turn them into hard cash. But look again. Unlike rug dealers, car salesmen, or bond brokers, the merchandise we traffic in is intellectual. Our stock in trade is ideas, ideas that have been smelted and fashioned by authors into the precious metal called literature. A manuscript may be no more than a pound or two of paper, but when an agent pitches that book to an editor, it isn’t the value of the paper he’s describing. It’s the value of the idea.

As I talk with an author about ideas, I ask myself some very pragmatic questions. How do those ideas fit in with the author’s career goals and financial circumstances? He may have a magnificent vision that takes my breath away, but where is he going to find the forty thousand dollars he needs to write that book under the tranquil conditions he requires, particularly since he is currently getting five thousand dollars a book!
Another thing I look and listen for is energy. An author may well have dozens of ideas for books, but he does not hold them all equally dear. When writers relate their ideas to me, do their eyes kindle with fire and their voices resonate with passion? Do they gesture frenetically with their hands or seem to lapse into a sort of trance? Do they speak in a singsong tone, as if it’s all the same to them which book they write and which one they abandon?

The agent who encourages an author to develop the wrong idea, or who doesn’t help him realize an idea fully, or who doesn’t take into account that idea’s appropriateness for its intended market, or doesn’t consider an idea in the context of an author’s talent and skill, or doesn’t calculate the time and money that the author will require to fulfill his idea—that agent may inflict serious harm on his client’s career.

It’s a very big responsibility, and my fellow agents and I worry about it a lot.

Once we are satisfied that we have the right idea, and that we have it where we want it, we must help the author develop it into an outline form that is useful both as a scenario for the writer to follow and as a sales instrument we can pitch to publishers. The two functions can differ vastly, however. The key difference is that in the latter, the idea is presented with as much intensity as author and agent can possibly endow it with. We try to boil a book’s complexity down to its very essence, and to articulate that essence with words that stimulate associations in editors’ minds with such abstractions as beauty, as well as with less abstract values like profit. We strive (and sometimes slave) to make every word of description pique an editor’s imagination.

Obviously, many and perhaps most books are more complex than any one-line summary can possibly convey. And many of them are not half as good. One agent friend of mine is fond of saying that his idea of a book is usually a lot better than the book itself. “I don’t sell the book, I sell my idea of the book,” he says.

The process doesn’t stop with the agent’s pitch to the editor. It continues down the line as the editor tries to conceptualize the book for his or her colleagues. The publisher’s sales force must in turn transmit the idea to the bookstore buyer, and the store’s sales staff must get the message across to its customers. And because no one in this chain of people has a great deal of time (including the customer), the idea must be expressed in the pithiest possible way, otherwise attention may wander and the sale will be lost. So we all practice refining our descriptions of books into concepts that are so concentrated and potent they are practically radioactive. And we use a wide variety of audio and visual aids to get the idea across: good titles and subtitles, eye-catching covers, arresting dust jacket blurbs, intriguing advertising copy, plugs by celebrities.

What concerns me is that the publishing business is becoming entirely too idea-driven. In our frenzy to encapsulate concepts so that we can sell them to each other effectively, we may well be forgetting that it is not the idea that excites us when we read a book, not the idea that makes us laugh or cry or stay up to the small hours turning pages raptly while our hearts thunder with the thrill and suspense and tragedy and comedy of it. It’s the way the author realizes that idea and evokes it in our own imaginations. To put it succinctly, it’s good writing. But there is a tendency today to presell great ideas—we call them “high concepts” in the trade—then develop them in predictably formulaic plots and package them for an audience that has been conditioned for formulas by television.

But remember, if you’re really stuck for a good idea, there’s always that guy in Poughkeepsie…

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It’s reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.