The "Free" Model: Concord Free Press

I learned of the Concord Free Press when my husband, Tony Eprile, placed a story in their latest book IOU: New Writing on Money. (Tony's story, Entrepreneurs, tells a tale of money, work and witchcraft in an emerging South Africa.) The press's "business" model is giving books away. In lieu of buying a book, the reader gives to charity. So far they've steered more than $140,000 to good causes. I thought, hey, I write about new ways of looking at money and new ways of looking at publishing -- I need to talk to these guys! So I caught up with Founder/Editor-in-Chief, Stona Fitch, author of several books, most recently Give + Take.

JDS: Given your publishing model, doing “IOU”, an anthology about money, seems, well, almost inevitable. Were you hoping to spark more discussion about the role of money in our lives? How have people responded?

SF: Yes, IOU is a great fit with our renegade approach to publishing, which makes readers reconsider the value and core purpose of books. Instead of just charging $12.95 for a trade paperback like everyone else, we ask that they give away money to a cause they care about or someone in need. The reader is empowered to figure out the value of the project, book, and overall experience of being part of our experiment in reading and giving. Similarly, the writers in IOU are all rethinking money and its role, and coming up with new insights in their poems, stories, and essays—some dark, some hilarious.

We’ve had an overwhelming reaction to the book—thousands of requests and ongoing donations from all over the world. I think people tend to savor IOU slowly. The editor of IOU, poet/critic Ron Slate, rounded up a remarkably diverse collection. But IOU definitely gets people thinking about money—good, bad, and beyond.

 


JDS: To what extent is your publishing model a critique of the current publishing industry?

SF: Good question. It’s important to point out that we’re a band of writers, not publishers. The Concord Free Press is about writers taking control and creating a new way to engage with readers. Our writers see their work triggering generosity throughout the world. And they find that extremely rewarding. Plus, our books can (and do) go on to second, commercial lives that make money.

We’re reminding the industry that books have incredible power beyond their ability to generate profits, which most books fail to do anyway. We’re pointing out how a radical rethinking of publishing can work (just a look at our home page confirms that). And we’re sending a positive message about books in a time of doom, gloom, and hand-wringing.

 


JDS: Do you think some good can come out of the turmoil in the publishing business — the concern that there’s no longer enough money in it? If so, what might that look like?

SF: Publishing has this desperate end-time quality to it now, like fishing with dynamite. I’m hopeful that the turmoil and change will leave the industry stronger, though smaller. There will probably be fewer books, but better published. They’ll be available via multiple channels, in different formats, and at varying price points. Publishers will be leaner, taking advantage of every efficiency-enhancing breakthrough available. And they’ll have to use social networking and other great online resources for establishing real connections with readers vs. simply generating hype. Making money on shorter press runs is a big challenge. But smart publishers can do it.

That said, more and more writers are going to leave the mothership of traditional publishing entirely and simply create and distribute their own books directly to readers. There will be online communities that aggregate fiction writers linked by genre, style, and other common traits. If these writers can continue to provide compelling, original work that attracts fans—without the infrastructure of traditional publishing—they’ll thrive. A fair number of name-brand non-fiction writers are already leading the charge. Fiction writers will follow.

No matter how a book is published, it all comes down to one question—is the work compelling, original, and necessary? Ideally, by asking that question vs. “Can I move 20,000 units at WalMart?” books can become more culturally relevant and important again. 



JDS: From scrolling around your website, I get the sense you’re having fun with this. Do you think having fun is important to the creation of good books?



SF: Publishing is fun, from collaborating with writers to designing and packaging the book to sending it out into the world. But making money at publishing is hard. At the Concord Free Press, we’re thankful to be free of the burden of profitability. We don’t envy the editors and publishers who have to struggle with this challenge every day, every book. So yes, we have a lot more fun. And a certain punk-inflected, subversive humor shows through in all aspects of the Concord Free Press—from our website to our books to our media coverage. We’re Billy Bragg to the mainstream publishing industry’s Electric Light Orchestra. We’re the Diggers to their Democratic National Committee. We’re the gentle thumb to their anxious eye.


JDS: The notion of giving away books for free challenges many of our assumptions about “value” and the nature of transactions. Would you say that people are rethinking their approach to material goods? If so, do you attribute this to the recession? Environmentalism?

SF: Yes. While the motivations vary, I sense a lot of people are giving up on conspicuous consumption, probably because it just isn’t that rewarding. Giving away something beautiful and original—for free, to someone who appreciates it—has an incredible power to it. Seeing our books out in the world, inspiring generosity in so many different ways, is really exciting to us. And much more rewarding than any paycheck we could be taking home at the end of the week by selling our books.

More On My Double Life: E-Book Sale! Version

Sometimes I amuse myself by the extent to which I go back and forth. I talk about Slow Money, but what I’d really like is to sell a zillion books for some fast money right now. One minute I’m reading about ways that soil can absorb more CO2, and then I’ll pop over to the Northshire website to see how many copies I’ve sold.

So, I interrupt my note-taking on matters of great ecological and economic significance to announce that the e-book version (any format) of The Therapist’s New Clothes is on sale at Smashwords—26% off! (How’d they figure on 26%? There must be a reason...) This special offer only runs through July 31, so make sure you’ve got your reading for August when your shrink goes on vacation! (Or, if you are a shrink, you need some beach reading for your Kindle, iPad, whatever—and you’ve really gotta read this!)

I'm still going through my Israel photos, and found this one of my son squinting in the bright Mediterranean light. If he had read what I've written above (or, for that matter, anything else I've ever written or said) he would be rolling his eyes!

The Revolution Will Be Blogged...And Maybe Published

As visitors to this blog know, I lead something of a double professional life. (What can I say, I’m a Gemini. As is most of my family. When I was a child, we had “Gemini parties”. I thought everyone did.) On one side, I dwell in the literary world, exploring the overlap of writing and psychotherapy through The Therapist’s New Clothes and continuing similar preoccupations in a novel, a love triangle in Freud’s Vienna (based on my grandmother’s psychoanalyst who was a member of Freud’s inner circle. My grandmother, Charlotte, was a gifted painter who dabbled in alternative healing. Yes, she was a Gemini.) Then, I’ve been writing and reporting on new economic models, looking at the nexus of the environment and economics. I’ve linked to some of my pieces, but didn’t know how to make topics like the social cost of carbon and ecosystem services relevant to therapy or my publishing experiment.

Last week I attended a conference on Slow Money, a growing movement I wrote about last fall. Let me try a flash explanation like I gave a friend earlier on the phone: Today money is rushing around the world becoming increasingly abstract and chasing bigger and faster profits. Money, which is simply a unit of measure and means of exchange, needs to be slowed down and brought back to earth so as to build actual, as opposed to illusory, wealth. Buy or invest locally, and the money stays local and provides jobs. Buy or invest in chains, etc. and the money gets whisked out of town to corporate headquarters and into the speculative market. Profits go up while our communities, health, and quality of life languish. The Slow Money approach is to keep money real, starting with investing in small, local food enterprises that nurture the soil and communities.

The event, at Shelburne Farms, VT, gathered a group that you never would have seen together ten, even five, years ago: financiers, investment professionals, environmentalists, farmers, chefs, and community organizers. I was struck by how folks from such disparate universes milled about affably, chatting and exchanging ideas. I felt a camaraderie borne of a shared understanding of just how out-of-whack our economic system has become, mainly because what’s most important to all of us is outside the market, and thus not valued. I mean, would BP have been so cavalier about drilling if it were common knowledge that the Mississippi Delta’s natural assets are estimated at between $330 billion to $1.3 trillion? As this piece in The Solutions Journal notes, that greatly exceeds BP’s market value before the spill. There is a kind of exhilaration that occurs once you stop denying a problem, which releases energy for solutions—solutions that are beginning to spring up and which make me feel more optimistic and inspired. I’ll post articles as they’re published.

One challenge is that my success as a writer depends on the system—even as some of my work is critiquing aspects of it. I think this is where my ambivalence about marketing sometimes comes from. Do I want to wear myself out to get my message heard, and shout along with everyone else trying to get heard? If money has gotten too fast, marketing has gotten too “loud”. As usual, the only satisfying answer I can come up with is to do my best. In my fiction (the novel I described and another I’m working on) I like to write about people trying to figure out their lives amidst tremendous change. If I could choose, I’d rather write novels about people in times of upheaval rather than grappling with upheaval myself. But we don’t always get to make those choices, do we? As a writer and as a person, the best I can do is to be open to it.Tony found this Luna Moth outside our bedroom window. Once they sprout wings, these beautiful creatures only live for about one week.

Marketing As Theater: Meet Kevin Daum

So I’m in a marketing funk, and then I remember this guy from a panel at the American Society of Journalists and Authors Members Day, Kevin Daum, author of Roar! Get Heard in the Marketing and Sales Jungle. He radiated such energy and enthusiasm about marketing I felt if I could bottle a fraction of it, I’d be in great shape. Clearly this fellow was a marketing maniac—and of course I mean “maniac” in the very best sense. I caught up with Kevin while he was on the road (where else?) and tossed him a bunch of questions.

JDS: Your book, Roar!, an Amazon #1 best-seller several times over, is, improbably, a business parable based on the four sons we meet at the Passover Seder. I’ve always wondered what they were about. Who are they?

KD: The four buyers you as a marketer need to reach: the Wise Buyer, the Cynical Buyer, the Simple Buyer (who just knows what he wants) and the Buyer Who’s Unwilling to Ask Questions. Your job as marketer is to draw these buyers by offering them an Awesome Experience—which is the convergence of need, entertainment and the unexpected.

JDS: You have a degree in Theater Arts and have been involved in numerous theater productions. When I learned that you found a connection between theater and marketing, I assumed you were referring to marketing as a kind of acting or performing. But it seems that’s not it.

KD: No, for me it’s not about getting in front of an audience. I’m not interested in the validation of me. What matters is the validation of the book. If I have ten standing ovations, that would do nothing for me. If I die and have ten best sellers to my name, then my life would have been complete. My point was that what you learn in theater, compelling messaging, intentionality and delivery, are crucial to marketing. Everything you need to know about marketing is taught in every college in the country, but in the theater department, not the business school.

JDS: You seem incredibly driven. How do you keep yourself motivated?

KD: I love sharing my ideas. There’s also fear: I’ve got to earn a living. In addition to writing books I had a very successful company, and in the 2008 downturn got completely wiped out. Twenty-five years of work gone. I had to reinvent myself. I knew it would take two years before I had money, and I thought: if I’m going to get myself up every morning, I’d better love what I do. When Wiley published Roar!, I decided that more than anything in the world I wanted to have a NYT bestseller. So I got a tattoo that says “NYT bestseller”. This way I’m always reminded of the challenge I set for myself. Recently a CEO wrote to me and said, “We love this book. Can you talk to us?” I drew up a proposal and just sealed a $10,000 deal. And I’m talking to a Major League Baseball team. Now, I started from scratch. I had nowhere to go but up. And the fun of having a Major League Baseball team wonder, “Where the heck did this guy come from?” It doesn’t get any better than this.

JDS: Unlike many writers, you don’t seem cynical about the publishing industry. Why?

KD: I’m passionate about the publishing business—whether or not the publishers actually know what they’re doing. One of the problems is that most people under 45 don’t know anything about marketing in a down market. It’s about how do you use the tools available to you, and getting the people at the company energized about that. The publicist says, “You can’t do that—no one’s done it before”. My reaction is, “Great! Then we don’t know that it doesn’t work.” I like to think of the publishing industry looking at me and saying, “Where did this guy come from?”Kevin and his awesome tattoo--designed so he can read it in the mirror.

(My) Last Word on Numbers

I don't know anyone who's published a book during the last few years who's happy with his sales numbers. I'm often surprised to hear this, as it includes writers who have sleek, professional websites and big-brand publishers and have done the kind of media that has other authors thinking, "If only I could be on that show..." It's tough out there and we know the reasons for it and yet we each take lower-than-hoped-for sales as a personal shortcoming. We've gotten the message that, once we've written a good book, if we just get out there, becoming marketing machines and creating this nifty new entity called "Brand Moi", we will be successful authors. But not everyone is suited to the on-all-the-time salesperson mindset, particularly once you reach a point of diminishing returns (and these days diminishment seems to come before the returns even begin.)

I'm lucky in that I have a gregarious streak that does lend itself to marketing, at least for a while. But it's liberating to acknowledge that it can get tiresome. The Web has given authors many new vehicles for marketing their work; however it has also created a situation where you're potentially marketing all the time. You've always got to be ripe for that adrenalin surge; at any moment of the day, you can see how well you're doing -- or, more typically, not.

Since my small, personal artistic/publishing experiment does not lend itself to by-the-numbers success, I'm going to come up with my own metric -- one that allows me to succeed. And that would be...the "Raves to Readers Ratio". My book isn't out there in major commodity-level quantities, but I get a lot of phone calls and "wow" emails and even the occasional person stopping me on the street to say, "I have to tell you what your book meant to me..." This amounts to a high Raves to Readers Ratio. I can feel pretty good about that, right? And the world is so full of figures and statistics and ways to measure this or that, what's wrong with adding one more?

Here I am on top of a sand dune in Israel, about to dash down.

Resisting the Numbers Game

As with so many things, “success” as an author is determined by how many books you sell—at least according to publishing’s business institutions. But sales are determined by so many factors that may not have anything to do with the quality of a book (the publisher’s marketing and PR, timing, distribution, etc.) And I believe what happens between a book and a reader is too personal to reduce it to mere figures. If you’ve written a book and someone reads it, loves it, thoroughly embraces your literary vision, isn’t that meaningful in a way that transcends a mark on a sales statement? I think so. Or at least I wish I felt that way. For if I really believe that, why do I reflexively check sales rankings a zillion times a day? Readers have reached out to me and said those things that an author dreams of hearing: “Your book is everything I want a book to be”; “I want to personally thank you for writing it”; “The writing is beautiful”; and, one of my favorites, “I kept thinking throughout—I wish you were my therapist!” Shouldn’t that be enough?

When I write “resisting the numbers game”, it’s not that I have resisted, but that I’m actively in the process of trying to resist. I straddle the two sides: part of me believes that connection matters more than cold figures, while another part says, “Darn! Can’t I just sell more of these things?” A part of me looks for integrity in a work of art; a part of me is impressed with plain old success.

So I’ve sold, I don’t know, a few hundred books. That’s pretty significant, and the thought of all those people investing their attention in my work should, more than anything else, humble me. True, when I know someone has bought my book my first thought is to hope it proves worthy of his/her attention. But as much as I fight it I was born into a world dominated by numbers, and so I look to the numbers to validate me.

When I feel myself sinking into the numbers trap, I often turn to the memory of a friend and writer who I admired hugely, Lynn Luria-Sukenick, who I got to know in California and died fifteen years ago now. Her work was never commercially successful—no big numbers there—but she had a unique sensibility and her writing stays with you, like a heartfelt song. In one prose poem she writes, “A deer leaps her slanted script over the field.” Touching a dolphin at Sea World is “like stroking a giant olive”. To me her writing is still alive, and a reminder that beauty and meaning can’t be measured.Here's Brendan, ecstatic, tearing down a sand dune in the very South of Israel.

Geographies of Writing and Reading

This long break between posts is thanks to a trip to Israel followed by conferences/book fairs in NY and, finally, the literary festival in Manchester, Vermont. I’m always heartened by the creativity and enterprise that lurk in these mountains – especially in the spring when people finally emerge from wood-heated rooms and find each other again. We had great organic pizza from Mach’s Brick Oven Bakery of Pawlet, VT (pop. 1,400), award-winning cheese from Consider Bardwell Farm, and fine music from Red Heart the Ticker, which I hadn’t heard of but apparently was once on Prairie Home Companion. (I've got their CD on now.) Writing is definitely happening up this way. The festival organizer, Clemma Dawson, is thinking big for next year, noting she’s hoping for work that pushes boundaries since, she says, “there are plenty of venues for denial.” As Clemma also says, “We Vermonters are quiet but revolutionary.” Amen.

I read a snippet from The Therapist’s New Clothes. It went over quite well, with listeners chuckling and smiling over lines I chuckled and smiled over when I wrote them. As much as I appreciate it, getting laughs make me shy and I tend to read through the moment rather than milking it. Maybe I should get some coaching from actor friends.

I realized that I’ve posted photos of Brendan and tons—even repeats when I couldn’t resist—of Thembi but none of my husband. Here’s a shot of Tony in Israel, where you can see Syria in the background. Syria's not unknown turf for him. The last time he was in the Middle East he was part of a cultural diplomacy group through the U of Iowa International Writers Program, a whirlwind tour that included Israel and the West Bank, Syria, Jordon, Greece, and Turkey.Note the South African flag patch on his knee.