Case Area: publishing
Tom Reynolds: Blood, Sweat and Tea
Author: Suw Charman and Michael Holloway
Executive Summary
Tom Reynolds is an Emergency Medical Technician and blogger, who writes about his ambulance work on his blog, Random Acts of Reality. In 2005 he compiled some of his blog entries into a book, Blood, Sweat and Tea, published by The Friday Project, who specialise in taking content from the web and publishing it to a mainstream audience. Blood, Sweat and Tea has sold very well: it reached eighth in the Amazon.co.uk bestseller chart and has been in the top 100 almost continuously. It was The Friday Project’s top-selling title for 2006, and was nominated for Best Innovation at the 2007 British Book Industry Awards.
Tom decided to publish his book simultaneously in print and online, in full, under a Creative Commons “Attribution, Non-commercial, Share Alike” licence (CC BY-NC-SA) and The Friday Project agreed, hosting a PDF of the entire book and offering to host any derivative works created by readers. The Friday Project already knew about CC licences and felt that making the book available online would build interest and that downloads would translate into real sales. Rather than viewing it as a risk, they believed that the free electronic version of the book would promote the print version, and that sales would improve as people could ‘try before they buy’.
Technically, the project was very simple because the files were small enough to be offered as a direct download, in PDF or plain text formats, and CC licences are very easy to obtain from the Creative Commons site. The PDF was produced using the page files from the book, which were considered to be already very readable and user-friendly. The project incurred no additional costs for either Tom or The Friday Project; although Tom expected additional bandwidth bills, these did not materialise.
Neither Tom nor The Friday Project ran into any legal problems, although Clare Christian, MD and Publishing Director for The Friday Project said that distributors might have had objections, because they receive commission on sales and so may have felt that giving the book away was an unnecessary risk. However, given the small scale of the experiment, Clare believes they turned a blind eye.
Tom was keen to release the book under CC, so that others could make derivative works such as translations and plays. In reality, people converted it for reading on different e-book readers. These non-commercial reuses didn’t prevent Tom from selling commercial rights for TV, film and radio. Through The Friday Project, Tom has sold the BBC a radio adaptation, and a TV option to production company Mentorn. Tom has made about £7,000 in royalties from Blood, Sweat and Tea, and both book and blog have opened up many opportunities for him, including writing for newspapers, radio appearances and the possibility of writing for television drama Casualty.
The risk of releasing a free version was that people would not buy it, but read the CC download, thus cannibalising sales. Clare says that if there had been any evidence of this, she would not have gone ahead. Instead, she believes that Tim O’Reilly is correct when he says that obscurity is a far greater threat to an artist than making their works available online. Tom did receive some attention from the media for the book — on TV, radio, and in print. Most of the coverage was about his job; only print journalists seemed interested in the Creative Commons story. But according to Clare, the CC experiment prompted more publicity and discussion within the trade press.
Over a year after publication, it is clear that the free online book hasn’t damaged sales. Blood, Sweat and Tea remains one of The Friday Project’s best sellers, selling about 25,000 units. That would be a strong performance for any publishing house, but is very good for a small publisher. Indeed, The Friday Project saw a spike in sales when the CC edition was released, although it is difficult to be sure whether that surge was a direct result of the release of the free version, or just an increase in interest because of media attention.
Tom believes that one of the most important factors in the books success was the community that has built up around his blog, which is very popular and garners a lot of attention. He feels that it is important to have a community of readers before releasing a book, the same way that a band gigs before releasing an album.
Both Tom and Clare went into the experiment with very open minds, and have been pleasantly surprised by its success. The only disappointment for Tom was lack of engagement from his readers with the Creative Commons version. The licence Tom chose allowed for reuse, but very few people made derivative works. This may have been due to a lack of promotion of the CC version, but was certainly not helped by a server crash that lost many of the new e-book versions people had made. Clare would have liked to have spent more time and resources promoting the Creative Commons edition, and Tom has vowed to promote the CC edition of his next book more heavily.
The publishing industry is struggling to come to terms with the way that the internet is changing their business, and Clare believes that the only way forward is to accept it and adapt to it. She and Tom foresee the industry shifting to a new model where the author is more visible than they have traditionally been and are at the centre of a community of committed fans. Neither of them see Tom as a special case, and believe that any author or publisher can use the same model.
The future is not predictable, though, and there is the possibility that advances in e-book reader technology could damage this business model by making print books unnecessary in the way that MP3 players have made CDs unnecessary. But neither Tom nor Clare believes that the technology is close to achieving that yet.
Full Case Study
Background
Tom Reynolds is an Emergency Medical Technician level 3, blogger and author of Blood, Sweat and Tea [1], published by The Friday Project [2]. Tom started in the medical profession 13 years ago, training as a nurse. He gave up nursing to become an EMT and currently works for the London Ambulance Service, based in East London and working shifts either as part of an ambulance crew or on his own driving a Fast Response Unit.
He started his blog, Random Acts of Reality [3], in July 2003 and has been writing constantly ever since, mainly about his ambulance job. He carefully obscures patients' details to protect their privacy, but still provides an insight into what goes on behind closed ambulance doors. Random Acts of Reality is a popular blog and has won the Love to Lead [4] and Medgadget [5, 6] blog awards.
Tom decided to gather some of his blog posts into a book and, after discussions with a number of publishers, settled on The Friday Project, a new small publisher focused on Web content. Clare Christian, MD and Publishing Director, is responsible for sourcing material from the web and developing their book list. The Friday Project published its first three titles in October 2005 and Tom's book in August 2006.
"Our skill," says Clare, "is creating books from sites that have got a good online audience in their web form, and that would appeal to a mass market audience. There's still an awful lot of people that are not using the web in the same way that perhaps you and I are, and a lot of those people would enjoy the material that we enjoy online. So that's the appeal: bringing the Web to a much wider audience."
Blood, Sweat and Tea is a general interest book often filed in the biography section. According to The Friday Project's newsletter from January 2007 [7], it "reached number eight in the Amazon.co.uk bestseller chart", had "rarely been out of the top 100 since publication", and was on its third print run. It was The Friday Project's best-selling title for 2006 and was even nominated for Best Innovation, at the 2007 publishers awards.
Far from being the kind of niche product that you might expect for a book that was born on the internet, Blood, Sweat and Tea appeals to a wide range of people. "The fan mail I get comes from all over the place," says Tom. "All different people. The draw is that not many ambulance people have written a book, not many ambulance people blog."
A web veteran, Tom decided to publish his book simultaneously in print, and online, in full, under a Creative Commons (CC) [8] "Attribution, Non-commercial, Share Alike (by-nc-sa)" license. The Friday Project agreed with his decision, hosting a PDF of the book and offering to host any derivative works that readers created.
Making the decision to release under CC
So how did Tom convince The Friday Project to let him release the book under Creative Commons? After getting an initial offer from another publisher, Tom felt that he had little to lose when talking to The Friday Project.
"I said that I'd really like to release it under Creative Commons license," Tom explains, "so it's available for free download. And they looked at each other, and it was like, 'But, you charge for it like an e-book?' And I said, 'No, no, no, it goes out all on its own, as a free download.' 'Like, part of it?' 'No, all of it.' 'Ok, alright!'. And that was about it. Once I had explained it, it was just, 'Yeah ok. We don't see a problem with that.' So I was really impressed."
The Friday Project were already aware of CC, so for them it was "not something that absolutely terrified us," says Clare. "Whereas I think other publishers he'd been speaking to really did not have the first idea about what Creative Commons actually did or meant. The fact that we had kind of had a basic understanding, particularly my former business partner who was able to talk to Tom about it on a very sort of detailed level, I think reassured Tom.
"From a commercial perspective, publishers tend to think that giving stuff away is not necessarily a good thing, but we felt that making material available would build interest in Tom. I believe it translates into real sales every times because people will enjoy it and recommend it and it will help Tom build up a fan base. We were at a point where we could take what may be perceived by some to be a slight risk, but it was not necessarily perceived by us to be a risk, so it wasn't a huge decisions."
"With The Friday Project," Tom continues, "I'm one of the four or six books that they were releasing at that time. With Hodder, it would have been book number 2072 out of 6000 released this quarter."
For The Friday Project, it wasn't just about experimenting with CC, but also about learning more about releasing e-books.
"It was good," explains Clare Christian, "because it gave us an idea of the best way of format e-books, if we were to go down the e-book route."
The fact that everything in the book was already online was another factor in the decision. The material was already in the public's hands, and there was no way that Tom was going to take it offline. However, despite his own commitment to CC, Tom still had some butterflies himself.
"When it came to signing the contract, even though I'm vehemently for Creative Commons, I was still hyperventilating like a nutter. Saying 'Yes, it's going to work, it's going to work. My gut is saying it won't, but it will, it will.' And it did.
"I remember the good old days of using a text-based Linux browser, starting off at CERN as your homepage, and people were putting their websites up for free. I remember looking at The Complete Encyclopaedia of Babylon 5, nerd that I am, and it was all free. It's not been long enough to say that I've been raised to believe in free information, but it's been so long it's got under my skin."
A simple model
The model in this case is very simple: The free electronic version of the book promotes the print version, and the hope is that sales will improve because readers can take a look at the book before they decide to buy.
Technically, it was very simple too; the files were small enough to be offered as a simple download, and there were no technical challenges to be surmounted. "It was a case of just hosting it on the server," says Tom. And for the licence, "the Creative Commons website is really simple to use, even for someone with no legal knowledge like myself. You just click, click, click, submit and cut and paste. It was really easy."
Clare also found it easy, "It was pretty straightforward, just a case of uploading a PDF to the site … so we are trying to do it a lot more with other books. Although I don't think anything else is available in full, a lot of our books are available in part under the Creative Commons licence.
"You have to make sure you've got the right Creative Commons licence — there are several different types and you need to make sure you've got the right one. In terms of the presentation, we used straightforward page files from the book which are obviously the most readable and user-friendly. When you are publishing books, it is important to keep in mind the ease of transferring into different formats, because of course we don't actually know what formats are going to come out in future in terms of e-readers, so you need to store the files in the most easily adaptable way."
Neither Tom nor The Friday Project incurred any additional costs as a result of making the files available; although Tom was expecting some bandwidth bills, these did not materialise.
"If a huge author was doing the same thing," says Clare, "I don't know if there would be any implications then, but at the end of the day this is still quite experimental and only a relatively small number of people are downloading it."
Equally, The Friday Project didn't come across any legal problems. There were none with respect to the author, given that it was Tom's idea, but potentially there could have been problems with distributors. Clare says, "In terms of the sales and distribution arrangement that we have, they may have a different view of us effectively giving away a product that they are selling for us and receiving a commission on. But because it's on a relatively small scale at the moment, I think they've turned a blind eye, although when we first announced the Creative Commons edition, we saw a real spike in hard copy sales, so they can't complain too much."
One thing that Tom has not done is to have a donation button on his blog, to allow people to voluntarily pay for the digital version of his book. "I took the donate button off my website," he says, "because it didn't seem worth it. I'd get these donations come through, but it made me feel dirty, to be honest." Partly this was because Tom doesn't see writing as work, but as a hobby: "I've always had the sort of job where you go to work, do something physical and very intensive for 12 hours, and then come home. That's what work is. This is more fun."
Reuse
"People can muck around with it," Tom says. "They can translate it, they can turn it into plays. It's basically out there in the wild and, as long as people credit me, I don't care what they get up to. People have converted it to different e-book readers, like Mobi and Microsoft Reader."
Tom also made a plain text file available, to make it easier for people to reuse his book and convert it to different formats, but saw no need to provide any other file types. He did consider publishing it in Second Life [9], something that he may still do to promote the American version (to be released in 2008) and the UK sequel.
And some people did take the opportunity to reuse the content. Clare explains, "In the first couple of weeks of it being up there, we had people upload about five different versions, where they downloaded it and meddled and put it up in a different format. That was quite exciting. That was good." Unfortunately, a server crash meant that many of the versions put together by Tom's readers have been lost.
But these unofficial, non-commercial reuses have not precluded the sale of commercial rights for TV, film and radio. Through The Friday Project, Tom has negotiated a fee for the BBC to adapt the book for radio, and has been able to negotiate selling the TV option to UK production company Mentorn [10].
Additional lines of income
Tom has made about £7,000 in royalties from Blood, Sweat and Tea. Both book and blog have opened up many more opportunities than would otherwise have come his way, acting as promotional material for 'Tom Reynolds as writer'. He has been commissioned to write for newspapers and appear on the radio, and may also get the opportunity to write for television drama Casualty. This additional stream of income was unexpected.