More Social Networking Publishing

Following from my post on SlushPileReader.com, where readers can vote for unpublished manuscripts to get a publishing contract, Amazon.com and Borders are also getting in on the act with their own versions of the democratic publishing ideal.

See the January magazine article Looking for a New Publishing Paradigm

These business models all rely on one of the characteristics of social media - user-participation. On the bookmarking site, Digg.com, you can bookmark on online article that you like and it will appear in a public page on Digg. Other readers who then follow the link to read the article you bookmarked can then vote for that item - the more votes it has, the higher the ranking on the Digg page and more readers will see it. Wikipedia is dependent on users making and editing entries.

In general, experts take the view that only 10% of visitors on a site participate in any active way eg leaving comments or other action that contributes to the site or enterprise offered by the site. Digg is very technology and sports biased. I expect that the people who populate Wikipedia are serious fans of whatever topic they are writing about and enjoy the kudos of being an expert. Many other user-generated site I’ve come across has a strong bias towards the interests of young guys with a tecchy, gadget-, sports-, or auto-focused interest. While there are many book lovers who are young guys, I have a sense that the majority are women who love books, the physical things, and may not have such a passion for reading their novels online - and have less of a fervour about being an expert. I would be very interested to watch how these publishing business models pan out and whether there’s going to be a bias towards sci-fi, fantasy and male-readership genres.

I also note that these ventures are all US based. America is notoriously self-focused when it comes to book publishing and it is hugely difficult to get your book published if you’re not American - even if, as a non-native, you write about a US setting with American characters, it’s very difficult to get it past the US literary sniffer dogs. I wonder if these ventures will let in more non-American manuscripts or if we will still find only US books getting through. (I don’t know if there’s a condition of entry that rules out non-US manuscripts - does anyone know?)

Am I portraying gender stereotypes here? What do you think? Please add a comment.

Pic: thanks to art.com