Today we are launching a new service that allows writing contests, competitions, and festivals to use our technology to filter, sort, route, and display entrants’ submissions to judges or reviewers.  No more copying and mailing writing samples – Creative Byline manages the whole thing.  So, whether your contest judges are all in one place or halfway across the globe, we’ve got you covered.  You can find more about how it works here.

I’m very pleased that our first client for the new service is the 2010 Festival of Faith and Writing (press release).  Writers attending the festival are provided with the option of submitting a manuscript to attending editors, and this year we’ll be managing their process online.  We’ve  worked closely with the Festival to mimic a process that works for them, but we know that we haven’t covered all the varieties of contests and festivals.  Are you responsible for managing a flow of manuscripts or writing samples?  Would an online system to manage the entire process be helpful?  Let us know.

Or, as M.J. Rose says in this excellent post about the current relationship between authors and publishers, “After all, we’re doing more than writing our books, we’re business partners as well.”
 
Writers have and will continue to have more and more options for monetizing their writing. Understanding which options are best at any given time requires knowledge of the business and landscape of the ever-morphing world of publishing. To help, we’ve done some small things in our new site release: adding industry news to the writer’s home page and doing more articles, essays, and interviews about the business of writing. We’ll be adding features that help track what’s happening in the marketplace. 

That’s why I am so pleased with our announcement yesterday of a marketing agreement with Bowker’s PubTrack. Bowker is a well-respected information provider in the publishing industry. Their PubTrack data offers excellent insight (based on a monthly sampling of 12,000 U.S. consumers) into buying trends and the demographics of book buyers and readers. On the Creative Byline site, whenever a writer’s manuscript is presented to a subscribing editor, we’ll do a “mash-up” of PubTrack data on how that particular genre is performing in the marketplace and typical buyers in that genre. (The PubTrack information is fascinating, and we are presenting only a small portion of what is available from Bowker.)

Equally exciting is that this same data is available to our writer members! Being able to see the business side of the publishing industry—the shape of the market, typical readers—will help writers understand the kind of responses they can expect from editors, and to plan their next projects.
 
One of the other underpinnings of Creative Byline is that by getting the manuscript submission process online (versus snail mail), there are many “mash-ups” we can do to enhance the experience for both writers and editors. Stay tuned, as the Bowker PubTrack announcement is just the beginning.

Chicago Review Press also publishes under three imprints:

Chicago Review Press editors will have profiles available on the Creative Byline system in mid-August.  Welcome, Chicago Review Press, to the Creative Byline community.

When we interviewed writers earlier this year, we confirmed that most of them have experience writing in a variety of media (blogs, magazines, newsletters, scripts, and, yes, books).  They are writers first, book authors second.  Putting this together with our publisher client’s challenge with finding a writer with very specific experience led us to conclude that we could help our writer members (and our publishing clients) with a new set of tools on Creative Byline.

These new tools allow writers to develop a robust online portfolio of their writing background and experiences. This is matched with a sophisticated search capability for editors and publishers to find exactly the type of writer they are looking for.  There are a number of other “profile” capabilities on the web for book authors to create a platform and attract readers, but ours is focused earlier in the process… attracting editors who may be interested in acquiring a writer’s content.  We’ll roll out this and other exciting enhancements to Creative Byline soon.

Doctorow’s pitch (as well as other keynoters’) was that publishers should insist on no DRM on their products to prevent third-party intermediate platforms (like the Amazon Kindle, which has a propriety DRM) from controlling distribution. Will people copy electronic files without DRM? Sure, but they already do. Check out PirateBay.org. As long as there is technological curiosity and cheap labor, there won’t be a way to stop copying files (with or without DRM). Of course, it was the evolution of technology—the Internet—that made DRM an issue.

The accompanying rights issue that floated to the top of the blogs over the last few weeks is the fact that the new Kindle Reader has a text-to-speech converter that the Authors Guild claimed infringes on the audio rights of its authors (discussed in this New York Times op-ed piece).   After the initial tussle, Amazon backed down and said that the publisher/author could decide whether the TTS function is enabled on a per-title basis.

But the debate isn’t over. Cory Doctorow addressed the TTS issue, saying that you can’t stop the technology from advancing.  I don’t believe so either: The computer voices will continue to get better, voice inflection at the right place in the text will evolve, and so on. Before long you’ll be able to pick the “voice” you want to “read” your book—James Earl Jones or Pee Wee Herman—which will raise a completely different set of rights issue. But I digress.

Neither publishers nor the Authors Guild will be able to stop the march of technology that consumers want; they’d better get in front of the freight train and put some energy into redefining what traditional rights mean, instead of clinging to past thinking. That’s what happened to the music industry. Let’s not let it happen to word publishing.

• On her blog, Gretchen McNeil featured an interview with agent Ginger Clark about the trends in the YA fiction arena, and why writers should care about trends.
• Author Hope Vestergaard makes a guest appearance on Alice Pope’s CWIM blog. Publishing professionals typically provide advice to writers; she turns the tables by providing dos and don’ts to editors, and then to agents.
• Although I don’t agree with everything in this TheBigMoney article, it’s a good read on why devices like the Kindle Reader can have a significant influence on the industry.
• According to The New York Times, a new alternative-incarceration program “allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club.” No comment.

All but the largest imprints are a thing of the past. For those of us who came to the publishing industry from other industries, the whole imprint thing was a puzzle. Classic brand management suggests that the more brands you maintain, the higher your costs and the more you dilute your important brand(s). And in publishing, the end customer (the reader) could generally not care less about which imprint produced a book. In these tough economic times, publishers are consolidating imprints to reduce organizational redundancy and focus the brand dollars. Recently MacMillan consolidated their six children’s imprints into one division, under a brand (MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group) that will likely mean something to the end consumer.

At the conference, Michael Hyatt, CEO of Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, said they consolidated their twenty imprints into one (Thomas Nelson Publishing) two years ago. In addition to the cost and brand-focusing benefits, he has recognized that their organization is benefiting from being more clearly all part of the same team.

So, what brand is important to consumers in the post-imprint world? Authors’ brands—or, as many of the conference attendees called them, “author platforms.”  That makes a lot of sense to those of us who read books. We buy authors, not imprints. To this point, Simon & Schuster launched a new website in January; you won’t find any mention of imprints, but a lot about authors. And look at this quote from the press release announcing their new site:

“Additionally, the site serves as a curator for the author’s brand, aggregating author-related content from around the web so fans can follow activity either by or about the author, whether it is news, Twitter, or blog posts, national and local appearances, and much more. Fans can also be notified about such author activity via an email alert.”

This is great news for authors, but with it comes responsibility to work to build their own brands. As published authors have known for years, the responsibility of promotion of books (and brands) is falling more to authors (and less to publishers) all the time. Writers need to use the web, blogs, and other social media tools to build their brands and create networks of followers who will pay to consume their books and content.

With these additions, we now have more than 50 editors open to manuscripts submitted through Creative Byline! You can find out more in our press release.

Don’t wait to sign up—it’s still free! Once you’ve uploaded a manuscript (or even just the title of your project and the genre) to Creative Byline, you’ll automatically receive an e-mail telling you which editor is looking for the kind of manuscript you’ve written. Sign up now, work on your profile, and get your manuscript into the system so that when the editors are ready, you are, too.

Speaking of publishers, we work only with legitimate publishers, not vanity presses. And if a publisher is listed on our site, it means we’ve met with them personally and have a contract with them. It means they agree we might have built a better way to handle submissions and they are willing to try it.

Writers, too, are trying it. Before we even started advertising, they somehow found us on their own and started signing up. Clearly, everyone wants a better way to submit and handle submissions. Here’s to that better way, Creative Byline, in 2008!