Book Wars. John B. Thompson
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partner: Frances and her colleagues could use their platform and benefit from their technical skills, and The Atavist Magazine, as a hard-pressed start-up, would welcome a cash injection. And so, in September 2012, Atavist Books was born.
Given a free hand, Frances’s plan was to experiment as radically as she could with digital publishing – ‘I want to make, first and foremost, beautiful ebooks.’ The Atavist Magazine had demonstrated the aesthetic potential of the digital medium and she wanted to do something similar for ebooks – turn them into something beautiful. Don’t just take an existing ebook and ‘enhance’ it by adding a few bells and whistles – rather, think of the ebook as a digital project and create something entirely new, an ebook with sound and movement, something which barely existed at the time. It seemed pretty clear to Frances that these digital books, or projects, should be short – partly because, at that time, Byliner was already up and running and their style of e-singles seemed to be gaining some traction, and partly because The Atavist Magazine was working with a similar form, though in their case they thought of their stories as ‘long-form journalism’. But, apart from being short, there were no constraints: invent a new form – whether we still want to call it a book is neither here nor there.
Frances didn’t just want to do beautiful ebooks, however: she also wanted to do print and to experiment with the relation between print and digital – experiment with pricing, with timing, with how the print book relates to the ebook, and with the very format of print itself. Rather than printing a hardcover edition, for example, try printing an expensive paperback with flaps and see how that goes. This part of the plan quickly ran into difficulties, however. Frances wanted to sign up excellent authors and, as a former publisher, she knew this meant that she had to talk to agents and persuade them to go with her plan. So she made presentations to agents. They loved the fact that she was going to pay competitive advances – that was music to the ears of an agent. They loved the ebook royalties, which were considerably higher than the 25 per cent of net receipts that was being paid by most traditional publishers. They loved the involvement of Barry Diller and Scott Rudin and the substantial financial backing of IAC. But when she said that she wanted to publish digital first, print later, there were gasps of astonishment. They wanted the windowing reversed – print first, digital later. Frances reminded them that this had been tried and it didn’t work, but there was a lot of resistance nonetheless, so she had to drop that idea straightaway (‘that whole brilliant idea was going down the tubes’). Acquiring the print rights was far from straightforward – they managed it with some authors, but for some of the more well-known authors, the agents held on to the rights for print editions and sold them to their traditional publishers.
Atavist Books published its first title in March 2014 – a 110-page digital-only novella by Karen Russell called Sleep Donation. Russell was a well-known writer whose debut novel, Swamplandia!, had been published by Knopf in 2011 and had been long-listed for the Orange Prize. In Sleep Donation, she recounts the story of an epidemic of insomnia that sweeps across America and that can be treated only by collecting ‘sleep donations’ from healthy volunteers; the donations are stored in a sleep bank and given as transfusions to insomniacs who are in danger of dying from sleeplessness. The book, which had a striking cover designed by Chip Kidd with sound and moving parts, was very well received, with glowing reviews in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, and it did very well, selling more than 20,000 copies. While the success of its first book augured well for the new venture, it wasn’t long before problems began to mount.
Sleep Donation was a critical and commercial success but it was also a very straightforward ebook – this was straight text that could be bought from Amazon at $3.99 and read on a Kindle. Apart from the interactive cover, there was nothing technically complicated, or indeed experimental, about the ebook as such. As soon as Atavist Books tried to do something more complicated, they ran into problems. In May 2014, they published Hari Kunzru’s Twice Upon a Time: Listening to New York, described as ‘a unique, multilayered digital experience combining a beautiful prose essay on the sounds of New York with the extraordinary music of Moondog and binaural recordings of the city itself’. After moving from London to New York’s East Village in 2008, the British novelist had found the street noise oppressive. It kept him awake at night. Rather than trying to block it out, he decided to listen to it. He wandered through the streets with binaural microphones that amplified sounds as he recorded them. He also rediscovered the music of the street performer Moondog, aka Louis Hardin – a blind percussionist who dressed as a Viking and played on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 53rd or 54th Street from the late 1940s until 1972 – and wove his music together with the binaural recordings of street sounds to produce a rich collage of an ebook in which the soundtrack was synched to the reading experience. This was experimental, no doubt about it, but the problem now was distribution: how would readers read this multimedia ebook? Neither Amazon nor Apple would host a multimedia ebook of this kind, so they decided to use the Atavist app to make it available. If you wanted to read the ebook you had to download the Atavist app first, then you had to sign in, and then you could buy the ebook and read it in the app. It was a solution, but it was cumbersome. It was just too many steps, too many hurdles, and people didn’t want to do it – ‘if it’s not one click away, then, frankly, forget it’. So the more technically sophisticated the projects became, the more difficult it was to make them work. Distribution was overly complicated and the market just wasn’t there.
Then they faced another problem: creating awareness of the ebooks. Sleep Donation had not been a problem in this regard: it got lots of review coverage – partly because the author was so well known, partly because of the novelty of being the first ebook by a new, high-profile digital publishing venture and partly because Atavist Books had spent heavily on promotion, since it was an opportunity to promote the new venture as well as the new book. But Sleep Donation turned out to be the exception, not the rule; from that point on, it was much more difficult. With no print edition, review editors just didn’t want to know. It was only when a print edition was released by an established publisher like Farrar, Straus and Giroux that the book got serious review coverage: ‘When the book came out as a print book, which we edited and worked on, it got rave reviews. When it came out as digital, either people were completely traumatized by it, or confused by it, or it didn’t get reviewed at all because nobody knew what it was.’ Moreover, with no print edition in the bookstores, it was hard to get people to realize that the book even existed. Atavist did a lot of marketing for these books – ‘we did a huge amount of outreach, we did everything you can imagine, Facebook, this, that and the other’, explained Frances. ‘But I think the combination of it’s not in the bookstore, I’m not hearing about it from the sources I rely on, I can’t see it anywhere and now I’ve got to go to an app – are you kidding? Am I going to do all that for something when I don’t even know what it is?’
By September 2014, it was becoming clear to Frances that this wonderful venture in digital publishing was rapidly going nowhere. The splendid idea of producing beautiful ebooks that were not just replicas of printed text but digital projects sui generis was running up against the rocky shores of no review coverage and overly complicated delivery systems. How could the shipwreck be avoided? Two possibilities suggested themselves. One was to give up on the idea of doing multimedia ebooks with lots of audio-visual material and do straightforward e-singles that could be bought on Amazon and read on a Kindle, like Sleep Donation. But this was hardly consistent with the original idea behind Atavist Books, which was to experiment more radically and creatively with digital publishing. Moreover, by this time, Byliner was in trouble and the e-single model they had pioneered ‘was becoming slightly less fabulous’. Quite apart from Byliner’s fate, Frances had come to the view independently that e-singles, which had at first seemed like a good way forward, were not going to generate enough revenue to enable you to pay writers and create growth: ‘I looked really hard at the e-single thing and as a business model, it doesn’t work. It’s really hard to grow. You’re doing these little books and people think they shouldn’t be paying anything for them.’
The other possibility was to ramp up the print side of the business. At least with print, you knew that you could get review coverage and good distribution, and you had a tried and tested revenue model that would enable you to establish the company