Real Readers Reading

Michael Jensen | 04/01/2009 | Digitization

There is no exact definition of a “real reader,” but let’s imagine one, of indefinite gender. Se is finished with school, but is still involved in the world of ideas. Se is interested in the topics you publish in, and wants to understand it, not just know about it. Se wants a book on the topic, not just a review, or a distillation, or an article.

Se can be anywhere—which is really at the heart of this post. In fact, it’s likely se is *not* in Canada.

In a world of 1 billion Web-enabled people, Canada represents only 28 million of them—the highest penetration per capita of any top market, but still only 1.9% of total world users (http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm).

Cory Doctorow, the Canadian writer and freedom advocate, has used a great analogy. He knows that his work won’t appeal to everyone. But he makes his entire ouvre free and completely open and reusable (even translatable) because he understands that.

His analogy was of a tremendously thin, worldwide layer of paint, tenuously connected, with three molecules in Yellow Knife, a lot of molecules in Ottowa, a few molecules in Zanzibar, a few molecules in the Internet-connected aircraft carrier in the North Sea, a few molecules in Toledo….

This layer of paint was his readership, and correspondingly, his market. For him, openness is a means of finding his market.

He knows that people who read one or two things of his, and *really like it*, are his market. They are his “real readers,” not unlike Kevin Kelly’s “1000 true fans” (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php), a seminal essay on niche audiences in the Web-abundance world, Doctorow is trying to find his audience by taking advantage of the possibilities of communities, cohorts, Vonnegut’s “karasses,” and other descriptors of collections of like-minded individuals.

“Real readers” in general are a small percentage of readers; “real readers” of your particular kind of publication are a smaller percentage of that share. Our challenge is to find the real readers and attract them.

I almost wrote “and monetize them,” but I think that’s shortsighted, not to mention jargonish. Doctorow hopes that free readers end up, at some point, purchasing something from him: his time talking at a conference; his time writing a commissioned piece; his time serving on a board; his time consulting on a project; or his product, a book he’s published; his product, a website he’s producing…. he’s looking at the next decade and beyond, rather than trying to maximize a specific publication’s profitability.

For his publisher, this means that they are the intermediary of a print product almost exclusively (apart from aggregators like GBS, Amazon, and others); it’s in their interest to keep him in their fold, because of his strategy.

This “real reader” (the author of this post), will buy any fiction Doctorow publishes in print—because I want to own it in that format. I’m willing to pay the premium for the work in my format of choice, for his kind of fiction. For other people, the ascii-printed or digital version is sufficient (especially if you’re on an aircraft carrier for months at a time).

But many a Navy private will end up buying something else Doctorow has written, in print, next time se has shore leave.

That’s that thin coat of paint he talks about—building an audience. For a publication, or for an author; for a book, or for a press.

We need to be thinking of the 98.1% of the Web audience that is *not* Canadian—perhaps 432 million of whom are English speakers, 63 million French speakers—and how to reach the thin coat of paint that cares about our kinds of publications: our “real readers.”

For any single publication, Doctorow’s open approach is daunting, and full of fear of sales cannibalism, and lost individual sales. But as an overall longterm strategy (for an author, and for a publisher who keeps the author), it’s very smart.

Authors want to be read. Readers want to read. Our job (if we’re not to be a barrier, a topic of a later post) is to find a sustainable strategy that facilitates that relationship.

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