Tag Archives: innovation

Business Models, Markets and Communities, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Why do reader/user communities build?

We used to call them ‘the audience’ but now they don’t behave as we expect audiences to. They’re active, they’re vocal, and they’re engaged. They have multiple options and channels, voices and media.   They want do everything and have a say in everything on  their terms. And many of them don’t want to pay for it by following the traditional publishing business models.

We are all the audience for something. We live in exciting times as an audience, we are being courted and sought after with suitors from all forms of media. We are encouraged to enter and explore created worlds through multiple entry points. Using American TV show Fringe as a case study Mélanie Bourdaa discussed how audiences engage across multiple media  to follow story arcs in ‘Following the Pattern’: The Creation of an Encyclopaedic Universe with Transmedia Storytelling.’ A key, and very influential strategy and theory she suggests  is Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling . It allows us to engage with a writer/designer’s vision on multiple levels, as much or as little as we want. The key thing here is that we can choose to become really involved, going beyond the ordinary level of engagement for an audience.

It is not all about the audience, these are equally exciting times for writers and creators. You can imagine your story in people’s social media, in games, in books and on the TV.  A story can have an active following, conversations happening in real time, apps can help access it and live experiences can draw in a completely other group of people or enhance the feeling of belonging that a community has.

Authors can choose how they want to share their book experience with their audience; they can choose to have their characters tweet, such as Goran Racic tweeting as his hero Thomas Loud from his book ‘Loud Evolution.’ Not stopping there he has created a whole district in Minecraft where visitors can explore his world. Little by little the book world that we enjoy enters into our real world, to come with us to the office, the gym or while we wait in a Tesco Metro queue.

But at what point does this audience become a community? A dedicated group of people that are interested enough not just to buy the story in its multiple forms but to spend the  time to influence the plot on many of these digital platforms, following the success that gaming has enjoyed where players can influence or even change the storylines within certain parameters . Let’s face it, those of us that are old enough to remember them loved those old multi-branching adventure books where you could make decisions and those choices took you to different pages of the book.

The main problem that authors, designers and marketers face with all of this participation is money – where does all the money come from to create these great experiences. Audiences want so much for free now. The kickstarter model has proved a great launch pad for creative projects. The backers are the people that actually want the creative product and so are happy to fund it. The audience becomes the backers becomes the community.

I enjoyed Naomi Alderman’s, Rebecca Levene’s and  Adrian Hon’s Zombie Run! in this way, an audio adventure while you get fit. I like the idea,  backed it through kickstarter and then became part of a community of runners, though not the fastest of runners I am a happy runner  enjoying a story and getting a little fitter along the way. Intriguing a potential audience sufficiently that it then becomes a community and is prepared to pay for it is a hard model to follow and necessitates creating work with no guarantee of return. This is only one of business model out there that author/ designers/ filmmakers and publishers are using.

Fallen London with its steampunk aesthetic is equally captivating, a browser-based game in which every choice you make changes the storyline. It is free to play but the business model choice to keep it that way means it is delivered in little chunks. However, the community that Failbetter builds through this sharing will potentially go on to buy Sunless Sea, or The Night Circus or buy pure narrative premium content such as The Gift.

For the upcoming Creative Conversations panel on March 2nd , the next part of our Creative Conversations New Space of Publishing series, we start to tease out this very subject. ‘Building Reader Communities’ will question what distinguishes a community from an audience, and if writers and publishers need to build such communities and what they could gain from doing so.  We also want to unpick what the implications are for the writer-reader and publisher-reader relationship when the business model changes and the community is so much more in control of the creative product.

Our panellists will include: Auriol Bishop & Alex Pheby, co-directors of Greenwich Book Festival; Meike Ziervogel, novelist and founder of Peirene Press; Alexis Kennedy, CEO of in interactive fiction studio Failbetter Games; and a commissioned video featuring Kate Russell, tech reporter and author of ‘Elite: Mostly Harmless’, a sci-fi novel based in the Elite Game World.

It promises to be an interesting evening of discussion and places can be reserved through Eventbrite.

Featured image Winter Kaleidoscope by Dr-Wolf0014 on Deviant Art

Markets and Communities, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Top 5 trends changing the world of publishing

Guest post by independent marketing consultant, Katrina Hopewell

 Let’s turn the clock back five years. A time when the large publishing houses were controlling the industry. A time when printing presses were regulated. A time when there was no public access to retail distribution. A time when the publishing process was kept a secret and only known by a select few. A time when the books you ‘chose’ to read were actually carefully selected and curated for you.

Fast-forward to today and the lines are now blurred. The conventions and preconceptions that were the ‘norm’ for books have been challenged. Technology has democratised the industry. Self-publishing platforms have arrived giving everyone the creative freedom to publish their own work, on-demand printing giving us an affordable copy of one. How we consume content has changed, we read using our mobiles, eReaders and iPads. Brands now have to compete against everything that demands people’s time and attention. We live in a 24/7 fractured media environment. Content vs. apps vs. gaming vs. video. Constantly choosing and consuming content in bite-size chunks. We now take ownership of what we want to read and are able to fund exciting and diverse stories. Our digital lives have taken over. And publishers are no longer essential to the process.

  1. Technology is still democratising the industry

Self-publishing is now mainstream thanks to the growth of independent digital publishing platforms like Createspace, Lulu and Blurb enabling the creation of eBooks, making the process simple, efficient and affordable. E-readers have got consistently cheaper and better since the first Kindle shipped in 2007, giving customers instant access to millions of titles. And the behemoth that is Amazon has made retailing these titles too easy. The launch of sites like Goodreads, has assisted the industry in becoming more social with over 43 million reviews on the platform to date, helping help people find and share books they love.

  1. Opinion of self-publishing is changing and progressive

Have you heard anyone say, ‘I will only read that book if it’s published by Penguin?’ Thought not. Readers are led by reading commendations and reviews, and they more often than not, will give a new author a go if the price is right, regardless of whether it’s been traditionally published or self-published. This mind-set is also changing for writers too – we’re continually seeing traditionally published authors becoming open to exploring self-publishing – to generate revenue from their ‘out of print’ backlists or to publish work that falls out of their traditional genre. New York Times bestselling author Eileen Goudge self-published Bones and Roses last year after she failed to find a publisher for her novel. And now authors are looking to social media to help them connect with their readers, reach new audiences and promote their work too.

  1. Arrival of content serialisation has revitalised how we consume content

The ‘on-demand’ generation has changed how we consume content. Readers have new expectations about the content they wish to read and how they want to read it. Out go printed books; in come mobiles, eReaders and iPads to suit our lifestyle. Wattpad has carved out an incredible niche for itself in the online reading market and become the world’s largest community of writers and readers, with over 40 million members and an average of 30 minutes reading per visit. 85% of users access the platform via mobile, promoting reading on the go, and writers have adapted to this, releasing their work a chapter at a time to serialise their content, keeping their readers hooked and in turn increasing the revenue they make from fans. Serial, a real-life crime story turned podcast, completely captured the zeitgeist last year, after it was released on a weekly basis and downloaded over 20 million times on iTunes. The Pigeonhole take a different approach, commissioning and serialising fresh digital content and classic novels from authors like Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations through their app. Audible, has a library of over 150,000 audiobooks accessible across multiple devices. We not only read, but also listen and interact socially with the content we consume and this will only increase as we multitask through our day-to-day lives.

  1. Crowdfunding is enabling diverse content to find an audience

We now find ourselves overwhelmed by a massive abundance of content and we have entered a period that is all about content relevancy. The digital revolution is all about finding your niche and capitalizing on it – and publishing your own content enables you to become an influencer in your chosen space. Until recently, books that fell out of the mainstream were rejected because they would only appeal to a niche audience. A traditional publishing house with big overheads would not be able to sell enough copies for that book to pay for the overhead costs they would invest. For those who need funding or want to test an idea out to captive audiences, platforms like Unbound and Indiegogo are available to help surface and fund great books that we wouldn’t ordinarily get the opportunity to read. Love obscure 80s and 90s video games? Check out Stuart Ashen’s synopsis. This book will be a must have on your shelf.

  1. Long live the printed book

The argument over the last few years seems to always be about the proclamation that ‘print is dead.’ It really isn’t. We’re increasingly using different mediums dependent on the content that we read – for fiction, we typically go digital, downloading content onto our eBooks and iPhones to read at home, on the move or away on holiday. We leave print for the content we wish to keep: mementos, memories and personal keepsakes. And brands are increasingly using the medium to create limited editions. My bet is that our bookshelves will increasingly diversify over the coming years and include a wealth of different content, the classic stories we’re unable to tear ourselves away from as well as photo books from major events in our lives, and perhaps even an autobiography of our own life to pass onto future generations too.

Katrina Hopewell, Independent Marketing Consultant

www.katrinahopewell.com

@kat_hopewell

 

creativity, Markets and Communities, Past Events, Research, Uncategorised

Can Design get to the Heart of what Matters for Communities?

To begin to answer this question we first need to take a step back and consider what design actually is? Design is one of those funny words that talks both about process to design and products the design within the same word.

We are surrounded by design but our experience of it is often limited to the way we use, own, buy and even desire products. However it is the way these products are created and the reason why they have come to be that is often the more compelling story. These reasons (or insights) are developed during the design process and can exist even without the product themselves. They impact the way we understand people’s values and needs, allowing us to design for specific groups of people. If we take this insight and use it to develop new systems, experiences or even new relationships to our needs, it can be a powerful tool for social change. When we look at design as a process, an engagement or an interpretation, its potential is also much wider. This is not something new; there are entire sectors of the design industry devoted to this kind of process-based design thinking, design research, or even design making. Fields such as social design, experience design, service design or systems design are all examples of the way that design can be used across a wide range of industries to rethink everything from health care to politics to technology & innovation.

However understanding what design means is only one half of the question. To drill deeper we should next consider how design can be used, by both designers and non-designers, within a specific community to tackle complex issues that need a range of expertise and experience. The key to this is giving everyone an equal playing field and language to communicate. In order to do this a community-based design process must be both intuitive and reproducible. If it is not intuitive, people will spend so much time trying to work out how to apply it that they will not be able to drill deeply into the issues they originally wanted to tackle. If it is not reproducible then – as soon as the original designer leaves – the network could collapse and no further action would be possible. One approach is to use a design toolkit. These can be useful if a community wants to try a design process for the first time. There are many available on the market but, although they can be useful in getting to solutions fast, they also (through their design) fix the level of response you can give and peoples roles within the process. This is charted in great depth by Lucy Kimbell in her blogpost Mapping Social Design Practice: Beyond the Toolkit.

Another approach to working with communities of designers and non-designers is to use Metadesign. Metadesign is a process that aims to flatten hierarchies and develop methods which allow everyone within the group to actively learn from the knowledge and expertise of one another. Within the article Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding: Enriching Participatory Design with Informed Participation Fischer uses the term underdesigning to describe the focus of metadesign. It aims to limit the control of the designer and allow flexibility and evolution of ideas by creating conducive “environments and not the solutions, allowing… [people] to create the solutions themselves” (Fischer, 2003). This allows for the fusion and fission between individual and communal goals and gives the design process space and flexibility to evolve within any given community in a specific and clearly situated way.

DESI_ROAST_EVA

From a design perspective, this is what we are aiming to do with Making London. By breaking down some of the boundaries between the University of Greenwich and the local community we can use design to help understand our social role as an institution and the challenges we are all facing in an ever-evolving London. The event aims to weave individual needs and values into a collective understanding and to co-create ideas for how the creative industries can continue to innovate in an increasingly corporate and financial capital. This will be challenged within three distinct workshops and framed through a large-scale mapping exercise. We will draw out these design ideas in order to be further developed within subsequent events. The workshops will give everyone the opportunity to engage deeply with what matters to them about living and working in London, mapping out the intersections and points of crisis within their local area. The workshops will use design processes to explore how metaphor can be used as a tool for rethinking problems, help us to imagine the fabric of the city in order to envision uses of data for the near future and try out some fun methods for making complex things simpler and influencing peoples’ decisions towards the social ‘good.’

The first of our #MakingLondon events is this Saturday the 18th June, join us by registering at: https://makinglondon.eventbrite.co.uk

View our MakingLondon Programme here!

creativity, Markets and Communities, Research, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Experimental publishing, copyright laws and Mix03

 

I have had a fascination with publishing and its potential most of my life, so much so that I was Head of Art for a small publishing company for nearly four years alongside my teaching commitments. I am very interested in the new space opened up by the advent of digital publishing and all of the new business models that are emerging.

It could be argued that everything nowadays is publishing: the social streams in which we document every part of our lives for a variety of audiences as well as our blogs. We need to be careful about what we write in these digital spaces as we are just as responsible for the comments we make, defamatory statements or intellectual property infringement as the traditional and mainstream press. As Alex Newson with Deryck Houghton and Justin Patten point out, we can’t cite ignorance of these laws as our defense. Even high profile comedian Alan Davies had to pay £15,000 in damages to Lord McAlpine to settle a libel action over a tweet relating to false child sex abuse allegations in 2013. We are all fast becoming published authors, even if we are not very good ones.

It was with this interest and an awareness of the published nature of our modern lives that I went to Mix03. Co organised by one of our key Creative Conversations  The New Space of Publishing speakers, Kate Pullinger, the Mix Digital Conference at Bath Spa was held over 3 days and explored the various worlds of publishing looking at transmedia, ambient literature, reader participation, moving from analogue to digital, pedagogy, interactive forms and digital poetry to mention only a few areas.

Mix03 had speakers that explore and innovate in this fast growing sector. I was able to listen to exciting key note speakers, such as award winning novelist and game creator Naomi Alderman, Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen of Visual Editions and Ju Row Farr from Blast Theory. There were also interesting projects presented such as Colin Thomas’s Making Digital History and Claudio Pires Franco‘s research on new media forms of the book: both experimenting with the more interactive components in the digital publishing space.

It is the copyright laws, and their relationship with fan fiction and participatory writing projects that I find particularly interesting and while not under the remit of this conference, as it was more experimental and creative, they have an impact on all of us amateur journalists/authors/commentators/artists.  In particular Fan Fiction as described by Ciaran Roberts has interesting and complex issues around copyright. For experimental participatory writing projects such as Sarah Haynes’ The Memory Store mutual respect and recognition is a pre-requisite as the project requires participation in order for it to evolve  ‘Participatory projects are about both process and product.’ and so the copyright laws need to evolve in order to protect and not hinder these new projects and participants. 

The great joy of such conferences is not only to meet like minded people but also to meet people that have a viewpoint at odds with your own, or come at a subject from an entirely different angle. This allows you to reflect and think more deeply about your subject. For me new collaborations and new projects were sparked and new ways to think about existing projects were suggested. I came away feeling wonderfully invigorated, as though my brain had taken a much needed holiday to somewhere new and exciting. It is a conference that I would heartily recommend and I will be booking myself in for next year’s when the option arises.

Markets and Communities, Past Events, Uncategorised

The Marketisation of London – 3 ideas for change

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In a recent article in The Observer, Rowan Moore provided an incisive and sobering analysis of the ever increasing marketisation of  London, which he diagnosed as ‘suffering from a form of entropy whereby anything distinctive is converted into property value’.  The resulting landscape is one in which more and more land is colonised by new builds designed ‘not to make homes or communities but as units of investment’. Nor is it only homes that are under threat, businesses and social amenities are being evicted from land that is then redeveloped as yet more luxury housing, whose absent owners will not sustain the shops and businesses that remain. As Moore points out, this process is destroying social and commercial life, the very markets, pubs, high streets and communities, that make London desirable and attractive to outside investment. ‘London is eating itself’.

What can be done? The problem is immense, the issues are numerous and there are many potential solutions. Here are three ideas, from three different sources, on how to do things differently:

1) Change the monetary system

According to Positive Money, a not-for-profit organisation based in London, the money that we’re actually using for most of the economy is money created by banks to fund loans. That money only comes into existence at the moment that the loan is created, but from that moment on it starts to create profit in the form of interest for the bank.  In the words of Positive Money this means that ‘the entire money supply is on loan from the banking system’. It relies on the creation and perpetuation of debt and ‘transfers £200 billion a year from the public to the financial sector’ in the form of interest. So, while many consumers and businesses are struggling to service unsustainable levels of debt, ‘if we all paid off our debts, the current economic system would collapse’.

The solution Positive Money proposes is to remove this power to create  money from the banks and give it instead to ‘a transparent, democratic, accountable body’ with the result that money is created in the public interest and spent into ‘the real economy (i.e a broader range of business and other economic activity), rather than into property bubbles and financial markets’.

2) Don’t leave it to the politicians, join a movement (or start your own).

In his book How to Change the World, John-Paul Flintoff makes clear that we cannot and perhaps should not expect the government to provide all the solutions. He points out that history is created through everyone’s actions and not just those of a few well known and important people. He stresses how important it is not to fall into defeatism or to passively accept things as they are, if we feel they should be different – something that it is quite easy to do, as long as our situation remains uncomfortable, but not actually unbearable.

Instead we need to recognise our own agency and the full significance of the fact that democratic governments are meant to enact the will of the people, not the other way round. People need to make their will known, which may involve action, as well as reaction. Movements may grow into political parties, but political parties rarely start movements. Flintoff has lots of practical suggestions as to how act on these insights. Community organisations, such as those that belong to Reclaim London and projects like The November Project are already acting.

3) Frugal Innovation

In his book, The Frugal Innovator, Charles Leadbeater explores the possibilities of innovation that is lean, simple, social and clean. His view is that ‘innovation needs to be recast and rethought… a new ethic, less about a proliferation of products and features, more about meeting basic needs well’ and adds that ‘frugal innovators… do not seek to create from scratch a product which might bring them fame and fortune. Instead their frugal approach to innovation relies on ‘ ‘re’-thinking: reuse, recycle, repurpose, renew’.  This is the kind of innovation that is providing radical solutions in healthcare, housing, education and arts and culture in developing economies where there is no private or public money to invest in the kind of complex and expensive approaches that ‘the developed world’ is used to. In these societies, necessity is the mother of frugal innovation.

However, Leadbeater makes the point that the developed world also needs frugal innovators, both to address the need for sustainability, which current systems cannot meet, and also because society is becoming more and more unequal:  ‘the share of economic growth that goes to workers and wages rather than investors and capital has fallen… even if economic growth were to return to pre-recession levels, it would not materially benefit those on median incomes.’ If economic growth is not the answer for the poor and the squeezed middle classes, frugal innovation might be. Leadbeater provides many examples, from a range of sectors and countries, to show how this might work.

For more ideas and to share your own join us at #MakingLondon on the 18th July. Register at https://makinglondon.eventbrite.co.uk