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There is certainly more than one way to build a conference program. I have been putting them together since long before I learned about the concept of “crowd-sourcing”. I’m a bit of a plowhorse about some things so the Digital Book World conference program comes together pretty much the same way as the first digital book conference aimed at trade publishers I organized, Electronic Publishing & Rights, back in 1993. I put together a list of topics for panels or presentations and a roster of people who could either speak or lead me to speakers. Then I engender a lot of conversations between the conference-creation team and the potential speakers and audience to craft the topics, the framing, and the ultimate presentation.

Two other important conferences which appeal to an audience that overlaps Digital Book World, O’Reilly’s Tools of Change in February and SXSW in Austin in March — seem to take a different approach. As near as I can tell, they do crowd-source a lot of their programming. It appears to me that Tools of Change throws out suggested topics and requests that panels and speakers put themselves forward as components of the show. Then, presumably, the people in charge at O’Reilly (the heads of the conference are Andrew Savikas and Kat Meyer, and both of them are smart, knowledgeable, and discerning) choose what will comprise the show. At SXSW it appears that the candidates are selected by an online vote. It seems to me that you therefore guarantee that you’ll get the panels sponsored by the best campaigners, but not necessarily what would give your ultimate audience the best show. But I guess it works for them.

I should declare myself here. I am a fan of Tools of Change. I participated in a day-long brainstorming session several years ago which O’Reilly Media organized to plan the first conference. I missed that one, which was in California in the summer of 2007, but I’ve attended the three annual February conferences in New York, 2008-2010. It’s a great show and a great rendezvous for people thinking about technology and publishing. As this piece makes clear, we can’t handle every worthy subject in two full days of conference programming at Digital Book World; there’s room for lots of other conversation and TOC is a useful one. On the other hand, I have never attended SXSW. The program didn’t look like it had much relevance to commercial trade publishing (although it covered a lot of other things that neither TOC nor DBW does.) Plus it comes in the same month that has a chunk taken out of if for me by baseball spring training. There are things in life besides digital change…

As I think through what we do and how it all works, it is hard for me to see how we could produce nearly as good a show without the conversations. We are helped considerably in our work by a Conference Council of more than 30 top players in the industry from across houses large and small, agents, members of industry bodies like BISG, Association of Booksellers for Children, and the Frankfurt Book Fair, and some other consultants. We talk to literally dozens of other people as we put the show together, getting advice about whom to contact to speak and shaping and re-shaping our formulation of the panels and presentations.

This does, indeed, start in my head. I wrote a post in May outlining what I thought might be the major topics. We got comments on the blog and then we pushed the list out to the Conference Council in formation to get more input.

Once the Council was formed, we put the topic list up on Survey Monkey for them to give us feedback. What we were mainly looking for is “of what we postulated might be on the program, what’s essential and what’s a yawn?”, but we also got thoughts about things that could be combined or reframed. Then at the end of June, we had an exciting and rigorous 2-hour meeting with many of the Council and a number of our F+W colleagues at which we solicited even more ideas and honed our thinking further.

This process eliminated a number of topics that were on my initial list. Some of them were dropped because the group thought interest would be low (usually because they were too narrow or specialized); for others we couldn’t see who could speak to them effectively. But among those we knocked out were:

* Will non-US publishers start to establish a virtual sales presence in the US as ebook sales grow?

* How do publishers deal with image rights for old titles becoming new ebooks?

* What changes are on the horizon for publishers’ relationships with the library market?

* Are trade shows becoming an anachronism in the age of digital communication?

* How much of the solid print backlist is still locked up by rights issues?

* To what extent do publishers view single-title marketing as a practical endeavor?

All of these topics are “worthy” but, against very stiff competition, they didn’t make the cut.

The survey and Council conversation also helped us refine how we’ll approach a number of subjects.

Author royalties for ebooks will be handled as a survey and presentation, not, as first occurred to me, primarily through a panel of agents.

Our Council felt that how publishers make the business decisions to acquire content not necessarily intended for first use in a book was worthy of discussion. A subsequent conversation with potential speakers convinced us that “making books out of content that started another way” would be a relevant extension and should be in that same discussion.

Marketing and metadata were identified as topics that I should have included but hadn’t. As a result, we will have two metadata panels (one on core, one on enhanced) and we’re getting great help from BISG Executive Director Scott Lubeck (on the Conference Council, of course) putting these together. Although we have several panels that touch on marketing, I’m still thinking about the best way to tackle how single-title promotion has changed (which it has: profoundly).

What I had imagined as “The Tools Every Publisher Must Have in 2011″ morphed into a conversation about “industry solutions” — such things as Edelweiss and NetGalley and Filedby. A further refinement from our first idea is that we’ll have a panel of publisher-users discuss these, rather than go with my initial idea of inviting the companies themselves to present their solutions.

We knew we needed to discuss the future of bookstores. Our Conference Council meeting yielded the suggestion that we have analysts who follow industry stocks discuss that topic (and a hat tip to Michael Cader for that idea.) We’ve recruited Marianne Wolk, a market analyst who follows Amazon and Google, to speak, and she’s helping us look for other analysts or investors to join that discussion. And we’re also putting together a panel of independent bookstores; we’ve already talked to more than half-a-dozen and will talk to several more to pick the three or four that can deliver the freshest, most relevant, and most articulate content for our conference. (I would hate to leave this to self-selection.)

A panel I’d thought we needed on “ebook first” was dismissed as old news and too narrow.

We lean heavily on expertise that we know and trust.

Apparently, sometimes our technique gives us the same result as our counterparts’ crowd-sourcing. Liza Daly is the most compelling thinker I’ve encountered on ebooks. Last year we had her do 20 minutes on “ebook basics” which was one of the most-praised components of our program. I knew we had to have her back and a fast conversation with Liza quickly yielded the subject. She’s going to talk about “cost-effective development of enhanced content: how to display on multiple platforms without multiple headaches.” I’ll bet many attendees will find this the most useful 20 minutes at the show. I see that O’Reilly has her on their Frankfurt TOC program. That’s a good decision no matter how they arrived at it. (And I’d advise SXSW to make sure the ballot box is properly stuffed for Liza if she’s a candidate for their event next March.)

We had outlined three different research projects we wanted to present. Two are follow-ons from last year. Verso Media has a panel of “book” consumers and Bowker, working with BISG, has a panel of “ebook” consumers. This year, Digital Book World is sponsoring a follow-up effort with Verso and so the reports from both of those groups of consumers will be updated. (The BISG-Bowker effort was already ongoing.)

But then we discovered a new data-gathering opportunity with a company called iModerate, which does both surveys and online qualitative research, and we put them on an assignment of studying in depth a particular subset of ebook readers: those that read on multi-function devices like iPads and smartphones. Michael Cader suggested some ways to help the audience get maximum value from the data. As a result, we put those presentations together on the program, will distribute some data to the audience in advance, and have the presenters join in a panel after they say their own pieces. We thought that was a great idea; we’re doing it.

Maria Campbell, the veteran scout who has been on the foreign rights scene for decades, knows the players trading international rights better than anybody. So we drafted her to help us find the right person to lead a discussion of how the growth of ebooks will affect territorial rights. That right person is Cullen Stanley of the Janklow and Nesbit Agency, with whom we’re now working to craft the right combination of agents and publishers, American and foreign, to make this a balanced and informed discussion. The inclusion of agents is a key point of differentiation between Digital Book World and just about every discussion about the digital future I’m aware of. There are many aspects of the conversation about the digital future that simply can’t be sensibly conducted without the involvement of agents.

Lorraine Shanley, a member of our Council, is not only a consultant but also one of the leading executive recruiters in publishing. We wanted to examine how skill sets are changing in publishing. I thought I’d put together a panel of recruiters. Lorraine suggested that it made more sense to create a panel of executives who came to publishing from other industries. We liked her idea better and we now have Charlie Redmayne of HarperCollins as the first of the executives who will join Lorraine for that conversation.

I don’t mean to suggest we’re unique in doing things the way we do. Mark Dressler, who puts together programs for BookExpo America and for the Frankfurt Book Fair (and who will interview me about the Digital Book World program at a Halle 8 stage on Frankfurt Wednesday), is also a micro-programmer and very highly consultative and interactive in his program creation. I am sure some of what you see at TOC and SXSW resulted from interaction, too. I just can’t help thinking when I hear “calls” for programming how much the conversations we have inform and improve what we offer. Although I’m the proud Conference Chair who gets credit for putting together the Digital Book World program, it’s consultation with the most knowledgeable players in town that makes it what it is. Perhaps it is “crowd-sourcing” of a different kind.

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We had a very successful debut annual conference for Digital Book World last January, even though we didn’t conceive the idea until June, put together a group of helpers (which we now call our Conference Council) until July, or draft the initial program until August. This year we’re way ahead of that schedule. We’ve put together a fabulous Council to advise us this year and we’re having a meeting of many of them next week to discuss the agenda and to start getting suggestions for speakers.

The Council gives us wide exposure and connections to the trade publishing industry. That way we make sure we don’t miss any ideas and we don’t miss knowing about any talented people whom our audience would want to hear.

We have several publishing company presidents and CEOs (Sara Domville of F+W, Marcus Leaver of Sterling, Maureen McMahon of Kaplan, Brian Napack of Macmillan, Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks) and some presidents and CEOs from other companies and support organizations in the industry (Kristen McLean of the Association of Booksellers for Children, Tracey Armstrong of Copyright Clearance Center, Peter Clifton of Filedby, David Cully of Baker & Taylor, Joe Esposito of GiantChair, John Ingram of Ingram Content Companies, Scott Lubeck of The Book Industry Study Group, and Steve Potash of Overdrive Systems.)

We have other senior level executives, many with specific digital responsibilities (Peter Balis of Wiley, Ken Brooks of Cengage, Mark Gompertz of Simon & Schuster, Madeline McIntosh of Random House, Thomas Minkus of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Larry Norton of Borders, Kate Rados of F+W Media, Charlie Redmayne of HarperCollins, Adam Salomone of Harvard Common Press, John Schline of Penguin, Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press, Michael Tamblyn of Kobo, Maja Thomas of Hachette, and Tom Turvey of Google.)

We have agents (Sloan Harris of ICM, Simon Lipskar of Writer’s House, and Scott Waxman of the Waxman Agency) and industry consultants and commentators (Michael Cairns of Persona Non Data, Ted Hill of THA Consulting, and Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International.) And because he is our media partner, we have help from Michael Cader of Publishers Marketplace as well. And we also get great input from others on the F+W team: David Nussbaum, David Blansfield, Cory Smith, Guy Gonzalez, and Matt Mullin.

So we have all the Big Six represented, as well as small publishers, industry-wide associations and service providers, wholesalers, digital distribution partners, retailers, and agents. All of these people have real input into the topic list and speakers. Many of them are joining us for a meeting next week to review our ideas for the program, which we previewed on this blog about a month ago.

Because Digital Book World tries to be at the cutting edge of trade publishing and digital change, we often face one or both of two challenges. Sometimes we believe something should be happening, or be about to happen, but we may not know where or whether the publishers leading the charge will talk about it. Several topics come to mind that fit that description: vertical efforts inside general trade houses; what houses are doing to adjust to reduced expectations for print sales in bookstores; how houses are gearing up or changing their sales efforts to compete in and serve a growing list of digital intermediaries; how enhanced ebook and ebook first creation change the traditional order of things in product development.

The other challenge we have to work around is when people can say things privately but not publicly. One topic that is very tough to talk about is ebook royalties, which is a major point of contention between publishers and leading agents at the moment. The big houses are pretty adamantly trying to hold the line (publicly) at a royalty of 25% of net receipts. But upstart publishers like Jane Friedman’s Open Road appear to be willing to pay 50%; publishing through Smashwords yields 85% (but sells the books without DRM, which would frequently scare the copyright owners of valuable properties); and self-publishing through a distributor would deliver a yield somewhere in between. (Remember: self-publishing ebooks carries no inventory risk.) In that environment, some agents are able to wring some concessions from some publishers. But the agent can’t talk about that without jeopardizing her ability to get concessions for her clients and no publisher will volunteer to reveal the isolated concession and start turning that into a policy.

Some things are just hard to discuss. Do booksellers, or even the publishers and wholesalers who supply them, want to talk about the possibility of their impending demise? But how can one plan for the future and ignore that elephant in the room? If a publisher suddenly sees the necessity of developing direct selling relationships with end users, after years of telling booksellers he was against it, does that publisher want to talk about those efforts in public?

When competitors participate in industry education initiatives, they must draw lines around what they will reveal and what they won’t. One ebook-responsible executive we know at a major house is persistently reluctant to reveal what he’s doing or what he’s thinking. But he has a boss, one who is proud of what he does and what their house does, who pushes him forward as a speaker.

Frankly, I think these challenges are greater for us than they are for other conferences on digital change that focus more on technology than they do on business practices. Very few publishers are masters of tech; usually they’re working with outside suppliers who are happy to share best practices. But business practices are different; they’re more sensitive. Sometimes the reluctance to share them is sound. Sometimes constraints are even legally required. Since our job is to focus on business practices, we’re glad to have relationships with very knowledgable players who will candidly engage with us on these challenges so we can figure out the best way to protect true proprietary knowledge but still disseminate valuable information.

We’re really proud of the illustrious group we have gotten to advise our efforts, and we get great value from them even though their first responsibility is to the company they work for. We feel confident that this group helps us cast a net that is wide and broad enough to assure us that any major development in the trade book world will hit our radar screen and that we’ll know if there are informed people willing to talk about it.

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Several very recent conversations have come together for me.

1. Joe Esposito, the new CEO of GiantChair, says metadata is the key to publishing in the future; he describes metadata as the modern equivalent of Allen Lane’s discovery that cheaper paperback books sold in mass merchant locations could boost book sales. Of course, Giant Chair is very much involved in metadata as a way to help publishers find marketers and customers.

2. F+W and Ingram have come together to make a deal enabling niche web sites to sell the full range of applicable ebooks to their community. Of course, finding “applicable” ebooks will be dependent on the quality of the metadata that publishers provide to Ingram. I really liked seeing this happen, because it is the first significant example of something I’ve predicted and advocated: that publishers who want to go after communities should sell the books of their competitors and that all web sites should deliver curated ebook stores of the titles of interest to their site visitors.

3. A list discusses whether the publisher has a role in the future, what it is, and how the spoils in a new world should be divided between the publisher and the author. One observer points to the nuances in royalty rates: the royalty implications of the wholesale model versus the agency model, whether or not the commission paid to the agent is or isn’t deducted from “receipts” for purposes of calculating royalties, and what the competitive implications are for publishers going after authors. This gives rise to the next question: are publishers differentiated on royalty rates alone, as though each publisher would sell the same number of books? And that gives rise to the next point: understanding, quality, and richness of metadata can determine how successfully publishers can sell a book.

4. One of the biggest issues for publishers in managing and providing quality metadata is associating all the works and editions of them for each author with that author, and while that challenge intensifies when they look at the author’s books published by others, the fact is that most current royalty systems have plenty of problems keeping track of the multiple titles and editions of any author that they themselves have published.

5. Filedby, the directory of author web sites I co-founded with Peter Clifton, has a new metadata clean-up service called Author Data Advantage that makes it simple and economical for publishers to organize their works and edition data properly tied to each author and to keep it that way as new works and editions are created. Filedby’s service, which any publisher can avail themselves of, can tie all the editions of a work together, relate them accurately to each author or other contributor, and provide each of the authors with a unique ID. That allows the publisher to tie the marketing, reviews, conversation, community, rights, and digital promotions back to the right work and the right author.

Metadata work for publishers is, really, a bottomless pit, since it is, in effect, “information about the book” and there is no limit to that. There will be no end to the categories of quality, interest, and association each book can have attached to it. How many books published in years past, for example, should now be associated with “Gulf oil spill?” If you published one discussing whether using chemical dispersants is a good idea or not, I think you’d probably want somebody googling “Gulf oil spill” to find it, wouldn’t you?

The list conversation referred to above was really about the difference in royalty rates offered by publishers and how the authors cents-per-copy is affected by the agency versus wholesale model. My own hunch is that this won’t matter much in the short run because dollars offered in the advance will still be far more important to the authors’ and agents’ decision than selling policies that can change between signing and publication. In the longer run, differences in the ways publishers handle metadata might be relatively more important because it will affect how many copies they sell.

In an earlier post, I made the point that we’re approaching the day that half the sales of new books will be made online. All the sales of books online are highly dependent on metadata. Very robust metadata can enable a book and author to get discovered when more minimal, even though correct, metadata would omit it from the conversation. Incorrect metadata can prevent a book from being found even if the customer knows pretty much what they’re looking for.

Metadata, what it is and how it affects discovery and sales, is a subject that every book professional will find increasingly important to understand and master in the days to come.

Last year I wrote a post suggesting that one way publishers might deal with piracy is by posting sabotaged files on offending sites, rather than just playing whack-a-mole. This triggered more than a few hostile reactions. I found it ironic to see yesterday that the new Stephanie Meyer ebook could be the occasion for software mischief-makers to come into conflict with copyright mischief-makers, using infected PDFs of a book many people want as a way to gain entree into people’s computers with malware. So now the hackers who want to attack your operating system are the allies of the publishers who want to discourage people from downloading ebooks from anything but clearly-authorized sites.

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I lost a very dear friend who was a unique figure in the publishing world two months ago when Caroline Latham died in Novato, California. I am pretty sure she was 68 or 69; her close friend Joan was sure she was 70. Even Caroline didn’t know for sure.

I met Caroline in 1978 when my family’s Two Continents Publishing Group, a distributor along the lines of PGW or NBN, and her Latham Publishing Company, a packager of college textbooks, were in their last days. Two Continents was desperately looking for more books to distribute; Caroline was desperately looking for additional ways to monetize content assets she held. We couldn’t solve each other’s problems then, but we became friends and I got to know one of the most extraordinary people on the planet.

Caroline had been raised in an oil-industry family; her father was an engineer. She had grown up in various places in the US and in Iran, and went to Oberlin College very young. She graduated from Oberlin at the age of 16 or so (later events established that she didn’t really know) and, as she put it to me, married the richest young man in town who had a job as a college traveler for Macmillan, putting Caroline in touch with the college textbook business. For several years, Caroline lived a relaxed life, bearing a son and daughter and indulging her lifelong passion for the written word. She read extraordinarily fast and could literally devour several full-length books a day. By the time she was in her early 20s, she had read more books than most well-read people consume in a lifetime.

Then, after they had moved to New York so he could move from sales to being an editor, her husband suddenly disappeared from her life. As I recalled the story, he was discovered a few years later, having had a total emotional breakdown, in Detroit. Caroline abandoned his family’s fortune to him for a variety of reasons — one being that she knew he would need it to live out his life — and immediately shifted to writing textbooks to earn a living in New York for herself and her children, Scott and Sarah Bridge. Her kids were just about grown and out of the house when I met her and she began to work in trade publishing.

The first project we worked on together was for a Warsaw Ghetto survivor named Jack Eisner, who had made a fortune in the US after World War II and then, in the late 1970s, was underwriting the telling of his story through all available means. Caroline ghost-wrote his book, “The Survivor”, and Abby Mann was hired to write the play of the same name (which closed very quickly despite Jack’s efforts to build a success on Broadway.) Caroline and I together made a deal for the book with William Morrow; then she supervised a team following scripts I wrote to augment the house’s sales efforts with calls to bookstores all over the country, an effort that seems rather quaint today but actually produced measurable results back then.

Caroline was really good at the ghost-writing thing. She could “become” any person and produce an appropriate style or voice. She never violated the trust by telling me his name, but I know that she ghost-wrote many of the books and articles signed by the head of the business school of one of the country’s better-known universities. She also ghost-wrote a sociology 101 textbook that became a standard in the field.

From ghost-writing and a brief unsuccessful stint as a literary agent, Caroline moved on to authoring. She wrote celebrity bios of movie and pop stars (many of them penned in a few short weeks): her bio of Michael Jackson hit the bestseller list. She co-authored “Life with Rose Kennedy”with Kennedy secretary Barbara Gibson, another book that hit the lists. She did a bio of David Letterman 20 years ago. Our Filedby web site has pulled together the biggest list available of her credits, but I’m quite sure it isn’t complete.

Of course, the Eisner book doesn’t show up on Filedby under Caroline’s name; it was ghost-written. Another project we worked on together that was ultimately published was a book to reveal the duplicity of Nixon and Kissinger in the Vietnam War by a Denver lawyer and peace activist name Joe Amter. There were others…

By 1990, Caroline’s kids had moved to the West Coast: Scott was pursuing a career in Seattle as an agent for exotic travel and Sarah was in the real estate business in San Francisco. Caroline moved to the Bay Area and, with Sarah, started a new business called RealFacts. RealFacts is a database surveying rents and occupancy in multi-family housing, a business Caroline grew and ran — sometimes with Sarah’s help and sometimes without — until her death.

But none of this — not raising two kids without a husband; not writing dozens of books; not even picking up, moving on, and starting a completely new business at about age 50 — describes what made Caroline so extraordinary. You see, she couldn’t. That is: she couldn’t see.

From the time I met her, I was aware that she had trouble with her vision. She wouldn’t know me if I passed her on the street (we lived not far apart in New York, so that happened.) She had to hold written material very close to her face or look at it through very thick glasses. She drove a car, but admitted to me that she probably shouldn’t (she drove slowly and, as with everything she did, with a huge application of intelligence.) Apparently she had an accident earlier in life that rendered one eye absolutely useless; the stark worsening of diabetes in her 50s, concurrent with the ailment that compromised her heart, robbed her of much of the rest of her vision and for the last years of her life she was legally blind.

But, somehow, she read; she wrote; she built and ran a business.

It was in the late 1990s that Caroline suffered an infection which lodged in her heart and induced congestive heart failure. The Mayo Clinic branch in Phoenix told her in 1998 that she had three months to live. She then took over the custodianship of her own health care, pretty much telling the doctors what to do from that time on. A few years later her kidneys also started to fail, which is when I learned (from her) that just about everything that helps the kidneys hurts the heart, and vice-versa. She was managing a very sensitive balance, which she did — for years.

Her health issues became further compounded with a digestive malfunction that, as far as I know, was never successfully diagnosed. But it meant she was deprived of one of her great pleasures — eating. What used to be a source of great joy and amusement became a chore and a challenge. But she persevered and, although she went from being a rather large and round lady to a lean and frail one, she cheerfully lived with the condition for the last several years of her life.

Caroline was a totally unique mixture of a brilliant intellectual with eclectic tastes that ran from very middle-American to quite sophisticated, the former being perhaps a product of her family’s tight connection to a little town called California, Missouri (she called it “CalMo”) right in the center of the state. She could parse professional material in business, science, medicine, statistics, and real estate. But she loved gossip about movie stars and celebrities, spending time at the beach (when I met her her “ambition” was to own and run a small hotel on a Caribbean island), sports, and pop culture. (A CD of her favorite music that she gave out at her 65th birthday party was testimony to that: it starts and ends with Ray Charles and in between you find artists as diverse as Frank Zappa, Leonard Bernstein, and the Beatles, and June Carter Cash!) She was not a beautiful woman, but she usually had an affectionate and caring boyfriend, often a Caribbean man with a limited education. She related to everybody.

And she cared about everybody. She not only wrote more books than any two people I ever knew, she also lent a personal helping hand to more people than anybody I ever met. Over the years, RealFacts had employees who were down on their luck or otherwise found themselves in dire need. Whether through fault of their own or not, Caroline was always there to help them. Sometimes they let her down and she had to let them go, but if they got on new meds or turned a corner some other way, she’d take them back.

I found out that Caroline didn’t now how old she was when she had her 65th birthday party in Novato in 2005. She celebrated the party because she found out that Social Security thought she was 65, even though she thought she was 64! I remember getting that party invitation in about January and her birthday was in June. We wondered whether she’d make it; she was already frail, it was years past the 6-month death sentence from the Mayo Clinic, and she was on the heart-and-kidney teeter-totter that was the story of the last decade of her life.

But she did make it; she made it to that party and for several years beyond, including a wonderful 1-week trip back to Manhattan, along on which she brought an entourage and took an apartment on West 55th Street. She continued to consume books (by audio now, with the help of a friend named Don Christensen in New York who remotely picked out the books to be delivered to her for her from the local Marin County Library System.) She put a program on her computer that blew type up to a huge multiple of its normal size — so big that you had to move the type across the screen with the mouse to read more than a word or two at at time, and she continued to read and write. (I know because she answered my emails!)

Being Caroline’s friend for the past several years has meant knowing a phone call delivering news you don’t want could come at any time. I got the call last May from Caroline’s friend Joan Winer Brown, who told me Caroline was about to die. She had been taken to the hospital with blocked intestines, unable to take in any more food. Doctors were telling her there was no point to surgery; Joan felt they were about to stop heroic efforts.

But a month later the news had changed. Caroline had, from the depths of her illness, mustered the strength to tell the doctors and her caregivers, “yes you will operate. Do whatever you can that might save my life.” And they did. Caroline moved to a rehab facility by the end of June.

I last spoke to her on the phone when she was in that rehab facility and about to go home. Talking on the phone was something Caroline always loved to do. Her voice was weak, but her mind was clear. She knew the odds against her were long, but she was determined to manage things toward a solution as long as one was possible. She was happy to be going home.

I’m glad she got that last couple of months in her own house and the feeling, to the end, that she was in some ways at least the master of her own fate. She leaves a daughter and granddaughter and son and brother and countless friends who will never forget her and her kindnesses, and will certainly never meet another like her.

I am indebted to Caroline’s close friend Joan Winer Brown for some key information that is in this post.

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Because I am giving a keynote talk at the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York on September 18, I am thinking about “what do you tell a writer about digital change in publishing?”

The view of the media world that I proselytize, which is that it is “going vertical”, is hard to accept if you are “general” (i.e. horizontal) and it is hard to accept if you are small. Both general publishers and small publishers have always depended on aggregators to create a large enough offering to be commercially viable. General publishers need bookstores, primarily, and general book review media (pre-pub and to the consumer) as well. Small publishers have required wholesalers and distributors to organize a large enough product offering to be effective with bookstores and libraries. The intermediaries have always found it difficult to deal with offerings of a small number of titles.

The vertical vision says that aggregation is not just necessary at the “book” level, but also at the “subject” level. If the vision is accurate, publishers of just a handful of titles — even if they are in a niche — will find it prohibitively difficult and expensive to reach their audience.

One reason why life is getting so much more difficult for general trade publishers and small publishers is that the capital barriers to entry for publishing, particularly ebook-first publishing, have dropped to near zero. The aspiring book author 10 or 20 years ago needed somebody to print a run of books, hold them, and distribute them — mostly one-by-one — to points of distribution (called bookstores, libraries, and wholesalers) all over the country. That took capital and it took scale.

This isn’t true anymore. Anybody with a computer and an internet connection can be a publisher. You can publish a blog on a free platform. You can publish ebooks through Smashwords by sending them your Word file. You can publish a document for download through Scribd by sending them a PDF. You can make your property available as a printed book through a number of services — Author House being the largest — without any investment in inventory and only a modest set-up cost.

This ease of entry is part of what bedevils the established publishers. They’re still gatekeepers, but the gate isn’t attached to a fence or wall anymore so aspirants just walk around it. That doesn’t mean that getting published by a real publisher is of no value; it is still the only way to sell significant numbers of copies, and it will remain that for some time to come.

But most books, even those published by legitimate publishers, don’t sell large numbers of copies. And it is increasingly the case that the self-publishing of various kinds is the best way to get on the publishers’ radar screens and it has the additional benefit of beginning to build an audience and a response loop that are essential components of any successful writer’s platform.

In fact, when we discussed with a leading agent a panel we’re planning for our January Digital Book World conference called “Stalking the Wild Blogger: Scouting Blogs and Self-Published Content for Fresh Voices”, which is about agents and editors finding authors through blogs and self-published books, he said that is now something that “every agent does.” He explained: “it is now the standard way to find new clients.”

That means that blogs and self-published books using ebook and print-on-demand models are now part of the overall commercial structure of publishing. They are not something separate and inferior, as “vanity publishing” was in the past.

The best thing that can happen to a writer is still that an established agent takes on and sells their project to an established publisher for an advance large enough to constitute adequate financial compensation to the writer for her work. Most books published by mainstream publishers still do not earn out their advance and yield additional royalties, so getting paid upfront is still the best financial situation for the author, in the short run. (In the long run, failing to earn out advances and sell books will catch up with an author; it’s a trick getting harder and harder to repeat in a world where BookScan numbers tell each publisher how prior books have performed.)

So here’s a starter list of tips I’ll be offering writers on September 18, a list that would grow between now and then even withoutthe help I may get from readers of this blog.

1. Understand your vertical world on the web, and participate in it.

2. Blog. And build a following for your blog.

3. If you have finished book material, and it is not already in the hands of a capable agent managing the process of selling it to publishers, self-publish it in ebook form at least and promote it the best you can.

4. Join PublishersMarketplace for at least one month and use the deal database to find the agents that handle material like yours. Reach out to those agents and listen carefully to their feedback.

5. If you have a book with an ISBN, self-published or not, take advantage of your free web site at Filedby.com to promote yourself. (I am a proud co-Founder and shareholder of Filedby.)

6. Google yourself and find and fix your presence anywhere on the web where you can influence it, particularly bookish sites like GoodReads, Red Room, Shelfari, LibraryThing, and, of course, BN.com and Amazon.

7. When you talk to agents, try to discern how aware and conversant they are of ways an author can promote his or her own career. Can they coach you on using social networking and blog touring and your own posts to promote yourself? If they can’t, they might be a great 20th century agent and not right for you in 2009.

8. Link, link, link. When you write each blog post, link out to other sites. Have a blogroll of your favorite sites an encourage them to link back to you. Build your connections on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And remember that the people you are linking with have their own agendas, which is not about helping you. Respect that.

I know a lot of readers of this blog specialize in helping writers; I don’t. I want the additional thoughts for writers that I’ve missed. You can post them here or send them to us at info@idealog.com.

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I had the good fortune to spend a couple of days last week in Toronto to speak at a conference on “Giving it Away”, how the culture of “free” is affecting the book business. My workshop sessions were called “Giving It Away with a Purpose”, by which I meant using content as “bait” to build community.

Since this was a workshop, most of the 90 minutes in each session was spent hearing from my audience about their publishing and marketing challenges and trying to help them see how the concepts of vertical and community applied to their particular examples. One of the many pieces of wisdom I’ve picked up from Mark Bide over the years is that we often “learn what we think by saying it”; questions from the audience force me to articulate things that might have been lurking in the back of my mind but had been left unsaid, even internally.

And what I learned that I already knew from these exchanges has to do with “critical mass” and its role in the shift from horizontal to vertical.

I read a piece about a month ago (who knows where, but I think I was originally steered to it by the ReadWriteWeb daily email) about the “X of Y found this review helpful” found on Amazon. What the article explained is why you don’t, and won’t see this employed effectively on any other bookseller’s site. Of all the people who buy books on Amazon, only a small percentage of them write reviews. (Many books don’t have reviews on Amazon; you are often invited to be the “first” to review a book.) Then of all the people who read the reviews, only a small percentage of those will comment as to whether the review was helpful. And a small percentage of a small percentage is an tiny, tiny percentage.

So only when you start out with the number of book customers Amazon has, which is a multiple of BN.com’s customer base (which is, presumably, in second place), can you get enough reviews and enough ratings of the value of the reviews to get a meaningful “Y” for “X of Y found this useful.”

And that was not what we talked about in Toronto.

In the course of my presentation, I talked about FiledBy.com, the new venture offering authors free web sites of which I am a co-founder. Carolyn Pittis of HarperCollins, a very acute thinker about digital strategy, pointed out from the audience that FiledBy is totally horizontal: it’s about book authors of all kinds. She wondered if my own new venture might contradict my own theory about verticals.

Temporarily, it might, although the initial “vertical” of FiledBy is book creators (there are sites there not just for authors, but also for illustrators, editors, and others who are credited with creative contributions to books that have ISBNs.) But the creators of FiledBy are very aware that as the number of authors registered with us grows, we will be able to put authors together by interest, creating sub-communities of mystery authors or history authors or knitting authors. And we intend to do that.

Earlier in the presentation, I had expressed the thought that Facebook and Twitter are like AOL for Internet 2.0. AOL (and Compuserve and Prodigy) made the online world, and then the internet, easy for everybody to use. As the internet itself got easier to use, the on-ramp wasn’t necessary anymore and, in fact, the parts of AOL that are healthy today are the verticals they created in the early part of the 21st century when they (belatedly) saw this coming. Soon we will see social networking and short messaging tools everywhere and we will be more likely to employ them in verticals, among people of similar interests, than in the world at large, which is what the horizontal communities are.

Communities require critical mass. It’s great be able throw out a question for the community to answer, but if nobody’s there, it is ineffective. If only 20 editors and 10 agents were on PublishersMarketplace, the deal database wouldn’t be worth much.  By the same token, growth in a community enables niching to get more and more narrow and deep.

Soon, publishers are going to see that they that they require critical mass by vertical in order to do cost-effective marketing. That is going to lead to a reshuffling of publishing portfolios, which will be the topic of a subsequent post.

Another big piece of ebook news landed this morning. ScrollMotion has announced that one million titles are on their way to them from LibreDigital! One always presumes that publishers want every title they have on every possible platform so that similar announcements will come from other ebook players soon, but this is another huge stride forward for the ebook business. And for ScrollMotion.

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Michael Cairns has a really good post today that distills a lot of thoughts I have had over the last several years into a clear formulation: that the publisher needs to serve as a “digital concierge” for its author.

Three years ago, Brian O’Leary, Ted Hill, and I did a study of marketing spend for a mid-sized trade house. At that time we articulated the notion of a “new marketing partnership” between publishers and authors. We urged then that publishers do what is necessary to make it easy for authors to promote themselves on the web because, in the modern world, that marketing energy would be indispensible.

What was a fairly forward-thinking suggestion in 2006 has become a common understanding by 2009. Harper has launched several author-centric initiatives. Sourcebooks just unveiled a suite of tools and advice for authors to promote themselves effectively. And, of course, I’m a co-founder of Filedby, Inc., and the filedby web site is all about delivering web promotion capabilities to book authors, photographers, and illustrators at scale.

I guess it won’t surprise any frequent readers to hear that I believe that the success of this concept depends on…verticalization!

The swingeing volume of detail that Michael points out is impossible for authors to navigate (Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed are just the start, really) is also really impossible for publishers to navigate as well. I believe that is becoming increasingly obvious in many houses. The web worlds of knitting and beading are quite distinct, even if books on either subject would go into the crafts section at Barnes & Noble. The web world of parenting is one thing; the web world of parenting an autistic child would be quite another. Publishers who don’t specialize, focus their specialization, and learn the web world for the fields they are in are trapped in marketing that is massively labor-intensive and yielding no advantages of scale.

Publishers (anybody, really…) gains expertise by repeated use, involvement, familiarity. Publishers have had credibility telling authors what will work with a B&N buyer, a NY Times book critic, or the booker for Oprah or Today. They’ve worked with these outlets many times before and the author hasn’t. The digital concierge, in order to really help me, has to be able to tell me which of the sites for my book on summer night stargazing will take my posts, link to my blog, generate followers on Twitter. Otherwise they’re just giving me general advice a bit more easily, but no more personalized, than I could get from a web site dispensing advice. Or a book.

This is very much a transitional need. Ten years from now, most authors will have arisen from the ranks of the digital community for their subject. We’re very much in a transitional time (one very important point that will be made in my “Stay Ahead of the Shift” talk next Thursday), and the concierge will be characteristic of the transition.

I’m working hard at BEA. Please join me. “Stay Ahead of the Shift”: Thursday 5/28 at Javits Center at 11. “StartWithXML for Editors”: Thursday at 3. And “Digital Debut Tool Time” Friday morning 5/29 at 9:30.

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I was flattered to be asked to speak to the AAR last night as part of a very distinguished group. My fellow panelists were John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan; Morgan Entrekin, the CEO of Atlantic Monthly Press; the agent Larry Kirshbaum, who was CEO of TimeWarner’s book division (now Hachette Book Group);  and Susan Katz, the CEO of Harper’s juvenile division. The topic was the “future of publishing.” We each got ten minutes to introduce our thoughts about “the future of publishing”. I went feeling the need to make three points:

1. The shift from horizontal to vertical is inexorable, unstoppable. People need to understand what that means and, as uncomfortable as it is for many leaders of today’s trade, they need to start adjusting their business to meet that shift. I wasn’t expecting any agreement, or even any recognition of this fact, from my fellow panelists. It’s still sort of my own private little point in trade publishing circles (but I’ll keep making it).

2. The impression I was getting from our BISG research for “Shifting Sales Channels” is that a) big publishers are feeling the pain more than smaller ones, b) people are seeing backlist erosion they hadn’t seen before (although that was contradicted at a lunch I had yesterday with a publisher who follows BookScan numbers closely and said backlist was holding pretty firm); and that the pain was much worse in Q408 than in Q109. Publishers are feeling excess pain at the moment, of course, because they’re taking returns from the Fall against smaller frontlist buys. But, in any case, books are down a lot less than a lot of other discretionary things.

Short conclusion: books may not be recession-proof, but they might be recession-resistant.

3. Trade Books live in an ecosystem. The publishers and agents in the room last night were mostly in the business of fiction and narrative non-fiction and juveniles. But if sales of travel books, craft books, and cookbooks go down, it hurts the stores. And if a store loses 10% or 15% of its business, it could close. Whatever publishers are seeing in growth of online sales, they should never forget that retailers give priceless exposure of their books, and only fullline bookstores give that exposure to just about all their books. The agents and writers and publishers can be just as smart as they’ve ever been, but if the bookstore shelf space shrinks, and it is doing that, the results will not be the same as they’ve always been.

All of my fellow panelists had useful contributions to make but I took most note of John Sargent’s points. He made it clear that big publishers are in troubled times. He pointed out that all big publishers work with borrowed money and want to be working with less of it. So they’ll be “de-leveraging.” That means smaller advances to authors, smaller printings, and tighter financial controls all around. He also reported that Macmillan had invested many more millions in ebook infrastructure last year than they had realized in ebook sales (in response to suggestions from some, including publisher-turned-agent Kirshbaum, that perhaps ebook royalties should rise.)

I made one point at the end that I was a bit surprised seemed new to just about everybody. Very few had taken on board that the difficulties in the trade book business are partly due to the Long Tail: the fact that Amazon’s retailing and Ingram’s Lightning Print (particularly) is making it easy for people to buy books that would have been dead a decade or two ago is just increasing the competition for every book that is newly published tomorrow. (And, of course, throw used books in there too, part of the Long Tail and largely enabled by Amazon.)

This is the same phenomenon that has made it harder for new bands to break out for years: a kid today can still “discover” the Beatles or Bob Dylan and have dozens of songs to listen to and learn without any regard to what is “new”, because the Beatles and Dylan are new to them! We haven’t (yet) had the situation where a multi-book novelist from the 1880s or the 1930s becomes a new addiction, but we’re bound to eventually. And in the meantime, all those Long Tail units are just making the slope to success a little steeper for every new book.

I also told the agents (and, because I did, I want to tell you) about a brand new business I’m involved in called Filedby which, I’m happy to say, is addressing the Long Tail question from another direction. Filedby is now live with a web page for 1.8 million authors — every single one with a live ISBN in the US or Canada. The pages, already mounted, are “claimable” by the authors, providing a big head start on a personalized web page that Filedby has provided largely through  automation. We see an enormous opportunity in helping authors help themselves. There are a lot of them not getting much help from their publishers. Frankly, except for Morgan Entrekin — who explictly spoke about working the internet finding the audiences for books that would sell between 6,000 and 25,000 copies — nobody was offering much hope that the publishers would be doing more for the authors in the days to come. Everybody seems to be looking to authors to do more for themselves. I think my co-founder Peter Clifton and I picked a very good time to be starting this business.

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