Brandon Sanderson just published an FAQ in part addressing why he used Kickstarter for his new books. A very large portion of his FAQ addresses his problems with traditional publishing and with Amazon as an “indie publisher”.
I have several friends and considerable second-order acquaintances who are authors. My brother is very close friends with many. Years ago, when I was still working with my dad in our IT company, he came to me with this idea to build a publishing platform for indie authors that competed with Amazon. We didn’t do anything about it then and it fizzled out because of where we both were in life.
About a year ago it came up again, only much more forcefully that time. Many authors were getting concerned about Amazon cancelling authors with which it didn’t agree. Conservative authors already have a hard time in publishing, and many of them saw the writing on the wall. Some called for the creation of a parallel platform and a couple of brothers and I got to work interviewing and building. It again fizzled out after several months because we overestimated our availability and underestimated the work. I also think we didn’t focus enough on the epicenter of the problem and didn’t embrace the constraints of being a 3-person very-part-time team. (Can you tell I’ve been listening to Rework lately? Great business advice.)
After reading Brandon Sanderson’s FAQ, I’m feeling antsy to try again. Indie authors need an alternative, and the publishing industry can be so much better than it is. The things he said in his FAQ are things we talked about a year ago, and things we heard from every author we interviewed. I don’t know if we can manage it, but I would very much like to try.
Some thoughts on how to approach it better this time:
- Simplify the technology. Don’t build like a Silicon Valley company, build like three guys in a garage on a washing machine.
- Build less. We’re not going to have feature parity the first time someone logs on to the product. We shouldn’t have all the features we think they want. We probably shouldn’t even have all the features they think they want. Please see this
- Get something done fast. Nothing is more demotivating than having nothing to show for your work. Get something out for someone to start using.
- Then get it out there. If we accept it’s not going to be perfect, and we need to get the validation to maintain motivation, then we need to get people using it as soon as it has something usable. Are there a million users to buy the author’s books? No, but as soon as an author can upload a book, we need to have authors on the platform uploading books so they can get excited about it and also tell us what needs fixing.
Author Sarah Hoyt often talks about “building around” systems or industries that we think are a problem or are fragile. This is both, so building around couldn’t be more important.