Most Recent Question:

Q: One of your first blog posts is a link to a blog post on the “Attention Economy.” You describe it as “punk,” you are obviously interested in these ideas about a changing economy.

It’s interesting, because you are building a career on old media. You write novels, you have a contract with one of the names in publishing, and they print them on real paper and sell them on the web and at large chain stores. How do you get people to go to Amazon and Barnes & Nobles and buy them? It’s the old approach, yes? As you read this punk economics, are you getting a feel for how a story teller makes money in this changing environment that includes falling book sales?

A: Well, now that’s several questions. Lemme see what I can do.

First off, I think the idea of an attention economy isn’t separate from the old advertising question of how to get the most eyes on the ad, but it is a different perspective on the question. For as long as there has been mass media, there has been a competition for people’s attention. What’s new is the ferocity of that competition and the amount of entertainment available.

As we move into a world in which entertainment media are ubiquitous, what I’m doing — the old school gig of writing words on paper — becomes a niche market. It appeals to people who like non-interactive, long-attention-span entertainments that require a lot of work from their imaginations. The good news is that those qualities sound like a turn-off in an information age, *but* they’re also the things that make an entertainment experience stick. If you spend a lot of time with something, you remember it better. *And* if you put a lot of mental energy into something, you remember it better. Interactivity is the only one that may not be true for, though in my experience, the interactive things I’ve done (computer games, for instance) aren’t as memorable for me as books I’ve read. There may be a trade off between the flexibility of interactivity with the control of non-interactive structure. I haven’t really thought that through.

Anyway, what I was getting at is that it’s a niche with a fairly high activation energy (which sucks for me) and excellent sustainability (which rocks). So it’s a pretty big niche. And in fact there’s a real question about whether book sales actually are falling. Your friends and mine at that source of all things plausible, the wikipedia shows 172,000 titles published in the US in 2005. As compared to 68,000 in 1996.

Getting people to buy books — whether at Amazon or B&N or in stores — is a mystery. Everyone has an answer, and most of them are different. Some are probably mutually exclusive. The most recent and thoroughly informal poll among my circle of acquaintance shows that the biggest influence of folks buying books are knowing the authors previous work (see my comments about stickiness), recommendations from friends, and reading about it on a blog or website.

So how does a storyteller survive in this climate? My guess is two things:

1) Social networking — conventions, interviews on blogs or more traditional media, answering fan mail, setting up a website, etc. etc. etc. Being available and having as many friends and friendly acquaintances as you can manage. I’m looking at doing podcast interviews of New Mexico authors, not because it would make me any money, but just because it would be nifty. I’m going to be toastmaster at the 2008 Bubonicon. All of those things should help sales, assuming I don’t alienate a bunch of folks by being a jerk. Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor and Making Light told me he thought the next phase of publishing was going to be very hard on the reclusive author who can’t deal with people.

2) Write better books. Nothing is going to win word-of-mouth like writing good books. And that’s about as old school an opinion as you’ll get.

Got a question? Ask me.