Nathan Bransford: It’s the end of publishing as we know it: do you feel fine?

In essence, it’s the best of times and the worst of times. If you’re an enterprising author there is a world of opportunity out there. Never before have we had a book publishing world where truly anyone could publish and potentially find their readers. Before there was a fundamental obstacle: distribution. That’s going away. Anyone can publish. It’s a massive, groundbreaking shift! I suspect soon there will be even more opportunities for collectives and online communities to boost sales, build brands, and become real players in publishing. Out of chaos comes order.

Bransford also links to Peter Olson’s article A long winter, which sparked his own post. Peter Olson predicts a major shift toward e-books and digital readers.

Well, in my opinion there are two meta forces at work in book publishing at the moment. With the closing of bookstores, fewer titles being ordered by the bookstores that are left, and more people buying their books in stores where there are fewer titles available (i.e. box stores like WalMart), there is tremendous pressure on publishers to invest in the few books that can reliably sell.

Both posts seem understandably ambivalent — ebooks may democratize the publishing process, but the writers self-publishing their work may be struggling to win over a smaller body of readers, and fighting against even larger blockbuster monoliths.

Also: I’m curious about the Kindle. The few people I know who have one seem to adore them. I hear the Kindle 2 is coming out soon, and it sure looks cuter than the first one. Thoughts?

The New York Times takes them on. Actually, the article’s about book websites, particularly the sort of shiny Flash extravaganzas produced for books with big marketing budgets (see: The Da Vinci Code) or authors who are willing and able to shell out for a popular web designer. I have to admit that I haven’t seen many book trailers, though I did watch a few of the ones linked from the Times article. My very favorite book trailer is for a small press fantasy anthology called A Field Guide to Surreal Botany:

I remember seeing the call for submissions for this anthology and thinking about how neat it sounded, and I think this book trailer (by Living Jacket) really captures that.

This morning I spent a little while playing around with Animoto, a site that generates animated slideshow-type videos from user-provided photos and their own music stable (or your uploaded mp3). I made a few super-quick drafts of a trailer for Alcestis. The process isn’t quite as satisfying as I’d hoped — the application tends to eat some of the images you choose, even if you mark them as images you want “spotlighted” — but you can remix the videos by running them through the Animoto engine again. All in all, a fun way to waste twenty minutes, and rather pretty for a free tool.

Any thoughts on book trailers? If you’ve seen any you loved (or hated), recommend and/or diss them in the comments.