Unlocked Locks

Electronic publishing, in all of its varied forms, has freed us from the tyranny of packaging. How much longer can the remaining tyrants hold on to their traditions?

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A Tangled Past

Keisa Sharpe and I have been professionally woven since 1996. We were part of the startup ABC affiliate in Birmingham, and worked together for nearly eight years. I left for the Red Cross, and three years later she joined me in the regional office, where we served five states with communications counsel. When those field offices were in danger of being wiped out in layoffs, I tipped Keisa off to a position with Alabama Power, and landed another one there for myself. We’ve been here together for two-and-a-half years, and it’s been a blast working with her. However well we got along, Keisa always kept some parts of her life very close.

Early in 2009, there was a problem, and I didn’t know about it for a long time. I just knew she was missing work. It was much later that I found out about The Accident.

Somehow, in ways I will never truly understand as a white male, Keisa endured a colossal chemical assault in the beauty parlor chair. Her hair and scalp were fried. The next few months brought wigs, treatments, and a slow re-emergence of the personality I remembered. It took nearly a year for Keisa to let me know what had happened, and what she planned to do about it.

Fresh Start

Keisa told me she was approaching a year of chemical-free hair, and wanted to do something to tell others how it could be done. Again, this is my own cultural blind-spot showing, but I had no idea that African-American women spent hours every week soaking their heads with chemicals, nor the potential for disaster. I get out of the shower, towel-dry, then sweep mousse straight back through my hair. I spend maybe six minutes per week on my hair, when you add in shampoos.

To spend that kind of time to achieve “the Look” only to have it backfire in a dangerous manner was too much for Keisa, and she wanted to spread the word. I mentioned another word: “Blog.”

What started as an online diary for coping and recovery has turned into a resource for other women who wish to explore other options for more natural hair. “My Own Hair” has blossomed into something great. Now working on the side as The Natural Hair Diva, Keisa did her first in-person seminar in Homewood, at 3 o’clock this past Sunday afternoon. She set up for as many as 75, and more than 100 people showed up. (Score one for Facebook event marketing.) She had to turn people away. And what was she selling?

A story. A personal story that she didn’t know she had.

Roots of Authorship

I told Keisa early on that she had the makings of a book, but that a blog was a great way to get there.

In the past, you had to know how to write the book first. You had to have a solid idea, you had to have your key organization, and you had to have knowledge that a publisher would be interested. Many manuscripts went nowhere, because the author didn’t know what sort of notes to leave himself along the way. Some were abandoned, because the author’s thesis drifted midstream, and it’s hard to re-create the thoughts that sparked the points. Even more books never get started, because the process is too intimidating.

When you’re passionate about a subject and write about it several times a week, you’re unlocking the keys to your own subconscious. I’ve found that certain themes drift in and out of my content. For a while, it might be complexity. Then community. Then journalism. Then economics. Then whatever. I don’t run into it with an editorial calendar that tells me it’s Adventureland Tuesday. Maybe I should, but that would defeat the organic discovery of what I find interesting.

What Keisa has in “My Own Hair” is a resource that lets her mine her own thoughts and feelings. She doesn’t have to determine the structure of a book in advance. She can just wait until later and decide there were six major periods of adjustment instead of four. She can let her own experience define the length of those periods, because she has personal and copious notes to guide her. She can do the analysis after the fact instead of on-the-fly.

In other words, she can write a book without writing it, and organize her thoughts later. Keisa’s locks are now unlocked, in every sense of those words.

Publishing at Split Ends

The great technology disruption that is the internet has broken many containers. I’ve written about them quite a bit lately (and rather unintentionally.) Books are as long as they are because they had to be big enough to justify the expense of production and distribution. Television shows are the lengths they are because they have to fit in certain blocks of time to fit regular appointments, and they have to have the same “holes” for the ads that support them. But electronic production and publishing changes that dynamic, because I can write a 5,000 word manifesto and put it online. Too short for a book, too long for a pamphlet, perfect online at any length (as long as it’s compelling and not boring.)

Lo and behold, Amazon gets it. “Kindle Singles” is meant to be a marketplace for interesting material that would have fallen in that dead zone: too short for a book, too long for a white paper or article.

“Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” Amazon’s VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti said in a statement.

At the same time, other aspects of the publishing business doesn’t get it.

Several friends have been told they won’t get a serious look from a publisher until they have a blog or a Facebook presence with a certain audience. “Show us you can get 2,000 hits a day,” and the agents will actively shop your work. In this case, the blog isn’t a means of discovery or communication, it’s merely a proof-of-concept that an audience exists for the work.

Show me that 55,000 people are interested in becoming circus clowns, and then we’ll let you write a book.

(Of course, that thinking is short-sighted — with that many people interested, forget the book and start a chain of Clown Colleges…)

That outlook is lazy on the publisher’s part. They don’t want to have to put their gut and their reputation on the line to predict sales. They want the prospective author to do the work of drumming up the audience for something that doesn’t exist. On-demand publishing, on a larger-than-vanity-press scale. And it misses the best advantage for a blogging wanna-be author: it makes organization and editing so much easier. Blogging your book is great, because if you decide it’s not a book, no big deal. If you decide to proceed, your material is better organized and thorough. And if you land a publisher, you have a great vehicle to sell the book.

The same thing is happening with music and with video, and with anything else that resolves down to ones and zeros. Those who cling to the artificial containers are about to get scalped.