Does Your Book Have DNA? The Technology of Storytelling
By Cindy Layton
This January marked the expiration of copyrights extended an additional 20 years by the “Sonny Bono Act of 1998.” Works from ee cummings, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, films from Charlie Chaplin and animation by Disney, will be released into a world undreamed of 95 years ago. And yet, many of the trends in book publishing and selling of 2019 are based on principles from the past.
While it’s claimed in book writing that there is a finite number of stories to be told and they vary only in their execution, is the same true for book selling? The execution in book sales is now largely steered by technology. So, what are the trends and how will they be played out?
Audio
Media has responded in a big way to the portable device. While eBooks continue to trend, the popularity of audio books has outpaced them for the fifth straight year. Expanding this trend are offerings that are audio in nature but combine the best of a podcast with the best of audio-fiction. Serialized book readings hearken back to the original “soap-operas’ and radio-based theater (i.e. Orson Wells War of the Worlds) except now it’s all content on-demand.
What’s new is not the concept of audio, but the convenience, portability and technological advancement of the device, not just mobile, but voice-controlled, (Google Home, Amazon Alexa) which will grab the next audio file and read it to you while you cook, clean, or otherwise continue living your life in multi-task mode.
Subscription Services
In the 1920’s, the Boni brothers launched “Charles Boni Paper Books,” a mail order book subscription and precursor to the Book of The Month club. Like music services such as Spotify or Apple Music, the subscription-based model for media is now trending for magazines, literature, and newspapers. Not only was Book of The Month re-booted in 2015, the “club” idea is rampant in reading circles who favor Reese Witherspoon, Emma Watson or, the queen of the book club, Oprah. Again, technology is the culprit here. Instant and easy access to large groups, either coordinated by celebrity endorsement (not a new idea) or through the application of memberships (either advertising or fee-based, again not new - see the Boni brothers above) the key to selling books to groups is by using online methods to assemble participants via their affinities (i.e. books, reading) and then market to those masses. (See also Book Bub). A ready-made group makes it easy for authors and publishers to identify markets and, again, technology’s role changes the way in which the groups organize but not the fact of the organizing itself.
Technology
If you like to read on your mobile device know this: through the magic of a sim card embedded in your phone you may subscribe to the publication of your choice and have the fee charged to your mobile phone account. Using PayRead is kind of like adding a pay-per-view movie or a premium channel to your cable bill. Of course, the digital publishers will now have access to your mobile phone and will “push” various additional offerings via text messages and the like. So, there’s that to think about.
Machine learning technology is now being used to determine which manuscripts deserve to be published. This, via the New York Times, from Wattpad, a “storytelling app’ now launching a publishing division:
The company will use what it calls Story DNA Machine Learning technology to take “the guesswork” out of the publishing equation, said Allen Lau, the company’s chief executive and co-founder. Whereas traditional publishing is based on individual editors’ tastes, Wattpad’s technology will scan and analyze the hundreds of millions of stories on the app to find themes or elements that might determine a story’s commercial success, Lau said. Wattpad will combine this “data driven” approach with human editors’ critical eye.
Interestingly, its aim is to take the editor’s bias out of the decision-making process and to publish what the public is truly asking for, based on an analysis of reader activity. Is this technology’s way of addressing the gate-keeper methodology that so many indie-authors rail against? Will data analysis identify and funnel to the top the best and most marketable writing? Turns out, according to MIT, machines, like humans, are subject to bias themselves, based on variances in data input.
Maybe readers will stick with Reese and Oprah to guide their interests.
And by the way, if there truly are only seven stories to be told, why would we need data analysis?
