But aren’t we simply talking about jazzy new ways to sell the good old book, to get buyers to travel to brick-and-mortar stores to purchase those familiar manufactured objects called hardcovers and paperbacks? For now, yes, because printed books are still the reading devices of choice. But for each generation that succeeds ours, the definition will continue to shift to the virtual spectrum.

This is not some futuristic reverie. The medium exists now. It’s called blogging, and writers are making money from it.

Enter Blogs

A blog (contraction of “weblog”) is an online chronicle or scrapbook of a person’s thoughts, views, experiences and passions, enhanced by an almost limitless variety of computer-imported text and graphic material ranging from quotations to pictures to lists to hot links connecting viewers to the blogger’s favorite web sites. The currency of bloggers is called “memes,” bits of cultural content that define the personality of the blogger and the shared interests of his or her community whether it be politics, sports, entertainment, or hobby. The transmission of memes in the “blogosphere” is exponential and almost instantaneous. The term used to describe it is “viral.” One source defines memes as “the cultural counterpart of genes.”

Unlike conventional diaries, blogs are dynamic, multimedia, and public. Indeed, it is their public aspect that provokes fascinating speculation about their potential to become the 21st century’s answer to the book. They satisfy the classic criteria for books: they are printed, distributed, and publicized. But they are not printed on paper, they are not distributed in stores, and they are not publicized in traditional ways.

Blogs in one form or another have been with us for as long as the Internet, but until recently were associated with geeky information-sharing web sites belonging to special user groups. However, the medium got a big boost after a team of San Francisco programmers, Blogger.com (now a division of Google), simplified and commercialized the process for creating one’s own blog - “organizing the world's information from the personal perspective,” as Blogger.com’s web site puts it.

Blogs exploded into our consciousness during the 2004 national elections when the web sites of strongly opinionated writers attracted large numbers of visitors. The bloggers’ popularity came to the attention of magazine and book publishers, who offered contracts to some of them for articles, columns and books. This wasn’t just a trendy tie-in to the transient event of an election: publishers found the writers’ voices fresh and entertaining, their looks appealing and their web sites stimulating.

Best of all, these bloggers come with two guarantees that publishers crave: built-in sales numbers and built-in platforms. Their popularity is not a matter of speculation. It is a function of virally infectious appreciation, an audience voting with clicks of its mouse. It can be measured precisely and analyzed by the number, concentration, and demographics of “hits” on their sites.

Even with advances in market analysis such as BookScan, traditional book publishing is at best a speculative venture. Publishers can compile information about readers ‘til the cows come home, but when the time comes to decide how many copies of a book to print, the best they can do is an educated guess. By the very nature of blogs, however, precise and real-time market research is embedded in the medium, research that can be used to create pinpoint-targeted advertising campaigns. And therein lies the answer to the question of how writers can make a living writing in the new paradigm.

The New Commercial Model of the Book

AdSense, a service created by Google, is one of a growing number of marketing service companies that access personal web sites, instantly analyze their content, then (in the words of AdSense’s own site) automatically deliver “text and image ads that are precisely targeted, on a page-by-page basis, to your site’s content-ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful. And that means more clicks. And every click earns you more money.”

Steven Johnson, writing in the January, 2005 issue of Discover, described blogs as “a global platform for personal wisdom.” “Most of us,” Johnson says, “…have a passion about something.” By creating a blog around that passion, a writer can locate a community of like-minded souls that advertisers are able to quantify.

And to quantify is to monetize. Google tabulates a fee every time a viewer visiting an author’s site clicks on an ad, and sends the author checks on a regular basis. A growing number of bloggers who have signed with AdSense and similar services are not only receiving compensation, but are extending the use of their blogs to develop related business and promotional opportunities.

One such business is branding, and new firms are emerging to help promote books and authors utilizing the full range of media resources - text, video, voice, and music. A flash-animated, interactive multimedia “trailer” produced by a company called VidLit was employed to hype Little, Brown’s “Yiddish with Dick and Jane,” sparking what Publishers Weekly described as “a viral marketing campaign” that materially contributed to the book’s success. PW cited VidLit as “one of the few companies to grasp the significance of pure entertainment value in marketing books online.” The firm’s founder, Liz Dubelman, produced her own commercial, “A Blog Apart,” that exemplifies the multi-dimensionality of blogs: “It starts with the written word,” she says in her narrative, but “transforms the words on the page into a compelling form of entertainment.”

How will we “read” this new type of “book”? Though the technology for on-screen text display has vastly improved, the original vision of e-book pioneers - a dedicated reader like the Rocket Book - has yielded to the reality that most consumers want their portable devices to incorporate a multiplicity of functions of which reading is only a minor component. In the next decade or two we will see a convergence of such tasks as pager, text messenger, book reader, cell phone, Global Positioning System, music player, writing tablet, laptop computer, digital organizer, radio, television, camera and game player. The all-in-one device about which futurists have speculated, the “Personal Media Player,” is rapidly becoming a reality. Perhaps our children will continue to call it a book, but the PMP will not be Grandpa Guttenberg’s book.

Goodbye, Gatekeepers

When traditional publishers talk about author platforms, they often refer to circumstances that have little to do with whether or not the author is a good writer - indeed, with whether he or she is a writer at all. Does he own a chain of fitness salons? Does she have a hit television series? The appeal of blogs from a literary viewpoint, however, is that many of them feature interesting thinking, entertaining writing and other literary values intrinsic to authorship. Theoretically, at least, in a blog universe interesting writers will be better rewarded than uninteresting ones because more readers will click on their web sites. For this reason, it’s not fanciful to predict that the next generation of bestselling authors will come not from Big Publishing but rather out of the turbulent processes in the blogosphere, which, like superheated gases in distant galaxies, produce young stars.

But wait! This sounds great for writers, but where do publishers fit into this new world?

It’s a good question. As authors assume the roles traditionally performed by publishers such as distribution and publicity, the laws of disintermediation - the elimination of middlemen or agencies of any kind - render publishers less and less relevant. And that goes for editors, reviewers, critics, bookstores and libraries. “Gatekeepers” - the priestly class that tends the holy flame of literary taste and tells us what is gold and what is dross - may have little place in a world where the best judges of taste are readers themselves.

And agents? (A question close to my heart.) Agents are no more exempt from these forces than anybody else. Indeed, it’s hard to find better candidates for disintermediation.

As Big Publishing becomes more and more dysfunctional and authors grasp the capabilities of the new paradigm, the transformation of the book from a three-dimensional object to a dematerialized but richly sensory experience will accelerate. And so will the redefinition, the reinvention, the repurposing of the author, as we progress - reluctantly but inexorably - on the road to virtual.

Copyright 2004 by Richard Curtis

Richard Curtis, president of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., is a leading New York literary agent and a well known author advocate. He is also the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including several books about the publishing industry.

He graduated from Syracuse University in 1958 with a BA in American Studies and from the University of Wyoming with a Masters degree, also in American Studies. He joined the ScottMeredith Literary Agency after graduation, and was foreign rights manager there for seven years. In 1967, he launched a freelance writing career, and has had some fifty books published by many major houses. In the early 1970's, he began his own literary agency, and in 1979 incorporated it. Richard Curtis Associates, Inc. currently represents close to 150 authors in all fields. The agency reports millions of dollars in annual sales for leading authors in every area of nonfiction and in such categories of fiction as romance, westerns, thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy.

His interest in emerging media and technology has enabled him to help authors anticipate trends in publishing and multimedia. He has lectured extensively and conducted panels and seminars devoted to raising consciousness in the author and agent community about the future of communications.

Early in the 1980's, he started writing an advice column for Locus, a science fiction newsletter, and out of his articles several books have been published including HOW TO BE YOUR OWN LITERARY AGENT, BEYOND THE BESTSELLER, MASTERING THE BUSINESS OF WRITING, and THIS BUSINESS OF PUBLISHING. He has testified as an expert witness in several publishing trials.

He was the first president of the Independent Literary Agents Association and was President of the Association of Authors' Representatives in 1996 and 1997. His company served for over a decade as agency for the Science Fiction Writers of America. In 1994, he received the prestigious Romance Writers of America Industry Award for Distinguished Service to Authors. In 1998 he was invited to serve on the editorial advisory board of Writer’s Digest. In 2000 he was invited to serve on the Publishing Master of Science advisory Board of Pace University.

Late in 1998, Richard Curtis announced the formation of e-reads, a publisher dedicated to reissuing, in e-book and print formats, previously published books in such popular categories as romance, fantasy and science fiction, and thrillers. The company commenced operation in 1999 with over 1200 titles, many by famous names in their fields, and concluded strategic alliances with all a dozen major distributors including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Ingram Book Company. As a byproduct of his e-book activities, he collaborated with a programmer to create the Royalty Tracker, a program designed to quickly convert vast amounts of royalty information generated by e-book vendors into simple royalty statements. In 2002 Writers Digest Books published his HOW TO GET YOUR E-BOOK PUBLISHED co-authored by William Quick.

Richard Curtis is married to author Leslie Tonner and has two children. He currently resides in Manhattan. His hobbies are sports, music and painting.