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Opposing Views: Two Publishing Moguls Explain the Future of Publishing

What's up with publishing these days? What is a book? How are author-publisher relationships changing? To help find the answers, we spoke with two Internet publishers with two very different viewpoints--John Feldcamp of Xlibris and Patrick Seaman of Timbe

by Jim Barnes

During a lull in the action in Chicago, I sat down with John Feldcamp, CEO and co-founder of Xlibris, the Philadelphia-based print-on-demand publishing company. Xlibris had received recent notoriety with a large injection of capital from Random House and by announcing FREE publishing through their website. Feldcamp conceived the core concepts of the Xlibris way of publishing in 1996, and remains chief owner and flag carrier of the author-centric vision of the company today. With an easy-going attitude and broad knowledge of the publishing industry, he tried to sort out the tumultuous changes that have occurred over that past few years.

IP: What is the future of publishing according to Xlibris?

JF: I'm not Yoda, but I will say that the future has many elements in motion. In our world there's a new kind of publishing enterprise that looks like an ISP (Internet Service Provider) and acts like Borders. Self-publishing is the center of this universe, and what we're doing giving anyone access to publishing on demand. We enable instant low cost publishing, and you keep ownership of all your rights. This Tuesday we had 50 books in one day. Most days look something like that. We're expecting to get up to more than 1000 books a month, including previously published works being revived. There are half a million books published in the US every year. The trend of the future is the destruction of barriers to enter the world of publishing. Instantaneous access. Gonna make a hell of a mess.

IP: Can you describe how this trend is being carried out?

JF: The whole book business is in flux, in great part due to print-on-demand. You've got Lighting Source plugged into the Ingram distribution environment, printing 100,000 books a month right now; Replica books plugged into Baker & Taylor; B & N building a printing operation into their Cranberry distribution center, and Borders doing the same thing down in Atlanta, and you also have Amazon plugged into Ingram for that service, and you also have the technology evolving on a micro-scale that's gonna get plugged in right at B&N and Borders stores. Instant books. Cost of entry-zero. Can you dig it. That's a real "come to Jesus story" that's gonna change the world.

IP: How does the trend of electronic publishing fit into this?

JF: E-book technology is going through the ceiling and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Rocket/Softbook bought by Gemstar, and they're gonna be a strong player; a new deal with Phillips will drop a half million readers on the market in the fall.

To make things even more interesting, all the major publishers have figured out what's happening and are starting to pay attention. Random House Ventures was established to invest in and pay attention to companies like us. B&N has iUniverse; TimeWarner just announced iPublish; plus a tremendous amount of other activity going on-the whole publishing industry and the whole book business is in flux.

IP: How does Exlibris stand out from the competition?

JF: They're all strong and they're all smart, and they have different approaches and strategies, thinking about different businesses, so we're competitors, but not totally. We are utterly author-centric. We're interested in enabling individual authors to access the market, period. There are a million things to do in that world: design services, production services, and marketing services-children's book, audio book, and a ton of things no one has even thought of yet that I could spend five years developing and not finish. Mainly, we are very focused on authors.

IP: What will you give the author to help them succeed?

JF: Basically, we give authors the ability to access the market without risking their homes or their automobiles. The minimum cost to publish a book with Xlibris is nothing, you can keep your rights, you can be in the market, it's never gonna go out of print, and it's a nice looking book. We do demand that the author work pretty hard to help market and sell their books, and their success is largely dependent on that. We are doing a lot of development to assist in a lot of marketing-related activities to help drive sales, but even these are controlled by the authors' awareness of their own products. We can build the services, but the author has to decide to make use of them.

IP: How to you deliver this message to authors?

JF: We don't force anything on authors, but we advise and educate them that they have responsibility to their own works, which doesn't end on publication date. That's true at Random House and it's true in our world.

JF: How do you respond to the criticism from the press on the quality of POD books? We're gonna publish a lot of pretty darn bad books, but we're gonna publish a lot of great books that might not otherwise have seen the light of day. We can't judge every book. The only unbiased judge of a work is the market, and we're strong believers in the ability of the market to sort out who will succeed and who will fail. In some ways, I think that is all the author wants: a reasonably fair, democratic shot at success. The way things work today is just way too arbitrary; first you have to hope and pray you find the right literary agent-and hope you don't hit 'em on a bad day; then you hope and pray the agent finds the right acquisitions editor. The whole chain of events is very very fickle. Very random; very arbitrary, and we'd like it to be a little more fair. That doesn't mean that people won't have different levels of success, but nobody will be turned away. One our objectives is to "give books away," to royalty publishers. The rights to the books remain in the authors' hands. The whole objective will be to try and create a continuum of success, whereby books can move to another level, to the traditional world of publishing, where it can receive another level of custom service. At this point our objective is to get it to the right publishing house, and I've just added an editor to do just that, to operate as a filter and act as an advocate for books we believe belong elsewhere.

IP: What brought you to this point?

JF: Too much to drink (laughs). Actually, a combination of things. If you go back far enough, I'm a writer-that's the only thing I really wanted to do. I wrote a novel while I was in school, everyone I knew was a writer, and none of us could really succeed. It was a wonderful time of my life, but a really lousy experience in terms of understanding how publishing works. The other saleable skill I had was how to manipulate content on computing technology on computers, so I went over to the corporate world, and worked on large projects here and abroad dealing with computerization of production and publishing operations. I eventually had enough and wanted to do something that had more value to individuals. I still had those same two skills, and I'd spent a lot of time thinking about publishing and content processes, and I also knew a lot about writers and their processes. I realized that the fundamental problems of authors are based on the economics of printing and publishing, and I also knew that digital technologies were developing that would reduce the cost to publish a book to profoundly lower levels. This would allow the number of people able to publish a book to skyrocket, and we set out to help make that possible.

IP: Where can we find that book you wrote in high school?

JF: No thanks, I didn't do all this to publish the book I wrote in high school. It was a seminal experience for me, though. It taught me to write, to think, to edit. It may have really taught me to read. In some ways this whole business is one big writing project-it's an act of observation, and then communicating to someone else what you see. I just don't get to write anything fun anymore. Now I'm writing business plans. "I walked around BookExpo, checking out all the 'dot.com' publishers, and they're all going in the wrong direction." says Patrick Seaman, president and publisher at Timberwolf Press, the progressive "new media" company based in Dallas.

Those are pretty strong words from a publisher with just four titles under his belt. But that is something you learn about this thirty-eight year-old Texan right away: he's confident in his abilities and of his sensibilities.

Seaman comes from a technical background, having worked for various hi-tech companies and pioneering Web-based sound transmission. He became the first employee of the company that evolved into Broadcast.com, from which he retired after the multi-billion dollar merger with Yahoo! Along with co-founder Jim Cline, Seaman is putting his knowledge and resources to work, trying to redefine the way we experience books. For example, Cline's A Small Percentage, which they produced as the first Internet audio book in 1995, became the first project at Timberwolf, and they released it as an unabridged, 42-episode dramatic production.

Currently utilizing a staff of ten, Seaman expects to have 25 employees by year's end, and then doubling that by the end of next year. His goal is to have 35 titles by that time. As you can see, this guy doesn't think the same way as the rest of us. I asked Seaman to set us all straight...

IP: Another bookstore closes just about every day, and a lot of publishers out there are struggling. What's wrong with the book business today?

PS: The problem we're all facing in the entertainment industry is distribution. We're not providing the content quickly enough for the modern consumer. Hence Napster, and the MP3 situation the music industry finds itself in today. Now the book publishing industry is looking at this and thinking, "we need text text text, and lots of it." The result is that if you want to get a book published today you can do it, very cheaply and easily.

IP: What's so wrong about bringing "publishing to the people?"

PS: They're publishing anyone and everyone, regardless of talent. I call it 'SlushPile.com' because they're putting thousands of books out there and expecting the buying public to sort them out and find the gems in a huge pile of rocks. I think they are trying to draw too much of a parallel to the music industry. With music, there's a much quicker trial situation, which doesn't even require your total attention while you're listening to new music. The problem with books is that they aren't so easy to sample.

With books, you're putting your trust in the author, and while you're reading that book, the universe stops. It's an intimate relationship that requires a leap of faith. How many times can you expect people to take the disappointment of starting a bad book? The reader feels betrayed, and you lose him.

I feel that you have to do more, not less. What we're trying to do at Timberwolf is to simultaneously produce each title in multiple formats, from print to audio, and also present it as a drama serial that we broadcast weekly. We get this whole dynamism going, with lots of people directly involved in the promotion, including the author. This goes on for about six weeks, and pretty soon you've built up a cult following.

IP: Aren't you giving away the audio book for free?

PS: Not really. We feel the serial listeners wouldn't buy the book anyway. But they would go see the movie, or rent the DVD. Different people have different styles, whether they prefer a book, a tape, an MP3. We try to reach them all. We think it's going to be big--nobody else is taking the same approach.

IP: How about television?

PS: I think what we do is better than television. I call it "theater of the mind." It engages your imagination, rather than allowing you to sit there passively watching the screen. The problem with television is that the episodes can't tie in completely, because if the watcher misses an episode they can't go back. So you usually end up with writing that allows each episode to stand up on its own. On the Web if you miss an episode, you can get if from the archive.

IP: It sounds like you're trying to capture the spirit of the old radio and movie house serials that people listened to and watched so religiously in the '30s and '40s, adjusted to today's lifestyle.

PS: That's exactly right. Things have changed. You have to give people choices, you have to give them efficiency, and you have to give them adaptability. But one thing hasn't changed--they still want good old-fashioned action. All of our titles, whether it's sci-fi, fantasy or thriller, have that in common: they're fast moving, action-based stories with lots of things happening. We do make it clear to our authors that we also want characters with dimension.

IP: How are you attracting this caliber of author that can deliver both action and character?

PS: We're going out and finding award-winning authors, we pay them well, and even give them stock in the company. We make our authors part of the team, which I think makes a big difference. I recently got a call from a well-known author who had his title taken out of print and remaindered, just 90 days after it was released. Of course, it was 91 days out that he started getting great reviews and even won an award. That kind of thing shouldn't happen, and it won't happen here.

We want close, intimate relationships with our people like you had during the roots of American publishing. At the same time, we're trying to redefine the author-publisher relationship. If you're an agent, this should be gold, because you know we're investing heavily in your author's work, and it will be presented in different formats that can lead to movies, etc. So, it's a different approach than anyone has taken. It may be a gamble, but we sure are having a great time doing it.

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Two publishing entrepreneurs--two widely varying styles. Not surprisingly, both are writers who have put that part of their careers on hold. Seaman: "We're waiting to publish my stuff until we've built up more credibility." I guess there's some humility in even the boldest of visionaries...