Good Writing Isn't Enough

The digital revolution is not only changing how books are read—it is also changing the how they are written, produced, and promoted.

From an article in the Atlantic...

The overriding message in the articles is that books are an entrepreneurial exercise, combining the selection of a subject, the self-confidence to stay with it through the reporting and writing ordeal, and a commitment to marketing the results, which for many authors is an especially unfamiliar process. Among the multiple subjects covered, one of the most informative is how traditional sales strategies are adapting to the digital age. Here's one example: William Wheeler is a freelancer who has endured frustration in landing a book contract, but has the persistence and a resume (a recent New York Times story about Libya was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting) that should eventually lead to success. "What transforms journalists into nonfiction authors," he writes, "is the heft of their voice, the narrative arc of their idea and its marketability. These aren't lessons that tend to be reinforced on the way up the newspaper ladder... Marketing the idea—and selling you as its author—is everything in getting to write a book." With the support of an agent, Wheeler circulated a conventional proposal about environmental crises and collected rejections from publishers who said they liked the idea but felt that the genre was too crowded. Recovering from the disappointment, Wheeler then sold an expansion of another Libya story to Byliner, an innovative new e-book publisher whose founder, John Tayman, writes in his Nieman Reports article that "our idea was to create a new way for writers to be able to tell stories at what had always been considered a financially awkward length."