And Why You Should be Thinking About Digital Now

by a Writer, for other Writers

This past weekend saw the New Yorker Festival book signings at McNally-Jackson. Get ready for some serious name-dropping: Not only did Sarah McNally ring up my purchases, but Jennifer Egan shook my hand, Gary Shteyngart invited me to email him, and Jonathan Franzen asked that I call him “Jon.” After the 2-day festival concluded on Sunday, I went to Williamsburg to hear Alexander Chee and Josh Mohr read at an event hosted by Jami Attenburg. We talked about everything from magazine industry frustrations to cookies. My weekend ended as I toasted the emerald-green Empire State Building across the river (Gatsby reference, anyone?).

Talking with literary writers, I often have trouble describing what I do. I’m a writer, it’s true. I’m a huge bibliophile—I love meeting authors and getting my books signed—but I’m also more interested in digital than print.

Why?

1. For one, digital is the future. We’ve all heard that eBooks are outselling print books—or “pbooks”—on Amazon.com, a retailer that already represents 15% (?) of a publisher’s distribution market.
2. Secondly, eBooks are wonderfully portable. The first Vook I read was ZMOT, by Google’s Jim Lecinski—as I waited in line for a concert in Williamsburg. As a writer, it’s important that I waste no downtime. In On Writing, Stephen King agrees.
3. Thirdly, you can do things in digital that simply aren’t possible in print. The second Vook I read was Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary’s a fine writer, but watching him speak at conferences (in the video in the book) was inspiring.

I think a lot of print natives may not yet understand how important eBook design is. As we saw with Neal Stepphenson’s Reamde scandal last week, it’s easy for production errors to ruin an experience. If you want to succeed in digital, you have to bring the same loving care to your eBook that you do to your pbook. Users notice and appreciate well-designed work.

I’m just glad that our Vook’s platform makes it easy for everyone—from designers to writers to publishers (to grandmothers?)—to do just that. That is, create a great-looking eBook in seconds, control the output, and distribute to all major channels. Vook makes ebook publishing as easy as working in Word. Now, as for the writing itself, that’s another matter…

Consumer response to our early titles was an immediate indicator that short form-useful content hit the sweet spot with mobile readers. Now we’re seeing that point of view reflected in the national media—check out this article from The New York Times that sports a Vook mention near the end. The writer says it’s been hard to gauge our traction, but we did have a recent rave article in The New York Times Magazine that highlights our success. We’ve had sales hits with our Pilates and JFK titles, and our goal to release a 1,000 titles this year means we’re feeling rosy about the future.

The jist of the article is that once the reporter downloads an e-book, she generally doesn’t make it past the first chapter. This conflicts with our personal experience of e-reading—one of us read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom entirely on his iPhone—but it’s definitely true that short form—what the industry calls “content snacking”—has a broad appeal on mobiles. If you look closely at our titles, you’ll see the efforts of a company constantly striving to master that space.

The author goes on to highlight some of the new digital ventures that have appeared this year, such as The Atavist, Push Pop Press and Cursor—all new players in the space who’ve definitely impressed us. The opportunity to enhance content, tell stories in new and interesting ways and reach new audiences is so clear and so present with the new tablet devices that we’re surprised that aren’t more enterprising startups jumping into the space.

We’re making the most of it, of course. We’re releasing a lot of shorter e-books this year, especially how-to guides with a focus on lifestyle content, and our TextVooks, which will present a short form educational experience. We encourage you to sign up for our e-mail list and follow us on Twitter (@vooktv) to stay aware of all of our new releases!

Feel free to share your input about what the kinds of digital content you enjoy reading by e-mailing me at jules@vook.com to see how we can integrate you better with your digital reading experience.