Prize. In Sleep Donation, she recounts the story of an epidemic of insomnia that sweeps across America and that can be treated only by collecting ‘sleep donations’ from healthy volunteers; the donations are stored in a sleep bank and given as transfusions to insomniacs who are in danger of dying from sleeplessness. The book, which had a striking cover designed by Chip Kidd with sound and moving parts, was very well received, with glowing reviews in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, and it did very well, selling more than 20,000 copies. While the success of its first book augured well for the new venture, it wasn’t long before problems began to mount.
Sleep Donation was a critical and commercial success but it was also a very straightforward ebook – this was straight text that could be bought from Amazon at $3.99 and read on a Kindle. Apart from the interactive cover, there was nothing technically complicated, or indeed experimental, about the ebook as such. As soon as Atavist Books tried to do something more complicated, they ran into problems. In May 2014, they published Hari Kunzru’s Twice Upon a Time: Listening to New York, described as ‘a unique, multilayered digital experience combining a beautiful prose essay on the sounds of New York with the extraordinary music of Moondog and binaural recordings of the city itself’. After moving from London to New York’s East Village in 2008, the British novelist had found the street noise oppressive. It kept him awake at night. Rather than trying to block it out, he decided to listen to it. He wandered through the streets with binaural microphones that amplified sounds as he recorded them. He also rediscovered the music of the street performer Moondog, aka Louis Hardin – a blind percussionist who dressed as a Viking and played on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 53rd or 54th Street from the late 1940s until 1972 – and wove his music together with the binaural recordings of street sounds to produce a rich collage of an ebook in which the soundtrack was synched to the reading experience. This was experimental, no doubt about it, but the problem now was distribution: how would readers read this multimedia ebook? Neither Amazon nor Apple would host a multimedia ebook of this kind, so they decided to use the Atavist app to make it available. If you wanted to read the ebook you had to download the Atavist app first, then you had to sign in, and then you could buy the ebook and read it in the app. It was a solution, but it was cumbersome. It was just too many steps, too many hurdles, and people didn’t want to do it – ‘if it’s not one click away, then, frankly, forget it’. So the more technically sophisticated the projects became, the more difficult it was to make them work. Distribution was overly complicated and the market just wasn’t there.
Then they faced another problem: creating awareness of the ebooks. Sleep Donation had not been a problem in this regard: it got lots of review coverage – partly because the author was so well known, partly because of the novelty of being the first ebook by a new, high-profile digital publishing venture and partly because Atavist Books had spent heavily on promotion, since it was an opportunity to promote the new venture as well as the new book. But Sleep Donation turned out to be the exception, not the rule; from that point on, it was much more difficult. With no print edition, review editors just didn’t want to know. It was only when a print edition was released by an established publisher like Farrar, Straus and Giroux that the book got serious review coverage: ‘When the book came out as a print book, which we edited and worked on, it got rave reviews. When it came out as digital, either people were completely traumatized by it, or confused by it, or it didn’t get reviewed at all because nobody knew what it was.’ Moreover, with no print edition in the bookstores, it was hard to get people to realize that the book even existed. Atavist did a lot of marketing for these books – ‘we did a huge amount of outreach, we did everything you can imagine, Facebook, this, that and the other’, explained Frances. ‘But I think the combination of it’s not in the bookstore, I’m not hearing about it from the sources I rely on, I can’t see it anywhere and now I’ve got to go to an app – are you kidding? Am I going to do all that for something when I don’t even know what it is?’
By September 2014, it was becoming clear to Frances that this wonderful venture in digital publishing was rapidly going nowhere. The splendid idea of producing beautiful ebooks that were not just replicas of printed text but digital projects sui generis was running up against the rocky shores of no review coverage and overly complicated delivery systems. How could the shipwreck be avoided? Two possibilities suggested themselves. One was to give up on the idea of doing multimedia ebooks with lots of audio-visual material and do straightforward e-singles that could be bought on Amazon and read on a Kindle, like Sleep Donation. But this was hardly consistent with the original idea behind Atavist Books, which was to experiment more radically and creatively with digital publishing. Moreover, by this time, Byliner was in trouble and the e-single model they had pioneered ‘was becoming slightly less fabulous’. Quite apart from Byliner’s fate, Frances had come to the view independently that e-singles, which had at first seemed like a good way forward, were not going to generate enough revenue to enable you to pay writers and create growth: ‘I looked really hard at the e-single thing and as a business model, it doesn’t work. It’s really hard to grow. You’re doing these little books and people think they shouldn’t be paying anything for them.’
The other possibility was to ramp up the print side of the business. At least with print, you knew that you could get review coverage and good distribution, and you had a tried and tested revenue model that would enable you to establish the company while you tried to figure out how to make the digital experiments work. By this stage, they had quite a few print books under contract and they could add more. That might have been a sensible way forward if you weren’t in business with IAC. IAC was a digital company, they owned The Daily Beast and a host of other internet-based companies: why would they want to tie up resources in warehousing and inventory? It’s not a business strategy that would’ve made sense for IAC, nor would it have furthered in any obvious way the original aim of the investment in Atavist Books, which was to experiment with digital publishing.
So six months after the first book was published, it was clear that Atavist Books had reached a dead end. Digitally elaborate ebooks were not going to work anytime soon, e-singles were not going to generate enough revenue to be viable on their own, and ramping up the print side of the business wouldn’t make sense for IAC. It was time to throw in the towel. In October 2014, Atavist Books announced that it would close at the end of the year. Authors whose books had not yet been published were found homes with other publishers. In total, Atavist published half a dozen ebooks, including some that were very creative and beautiful, but this bold new experiment in digital publishing was over shortly after it had begun.
The failures of Byliner and Atavist Books demonstrate how difficult it is to create something new in the publishing spaces opened up by the digital revolution. The digital medium makes possible new ways of creating texts and engaging with them, new ways of creating ‘books’ whatever they might be, and both Byliner and Atavist Books were bold attempts to experiment in this space. But their short lives attest to the difficulty of creating something that is both new and sustainable – that is, that has sufficient support, institutional as well as financial, to enable it to survive beyond the initial fanfare of excitement that greets the invention of the new. They created new forms but they were unsustainable – forms without a viable business model and without a large enough audience to make them work.
Of course, this does not mean that the new forms with which Byliner and Atavist Books experimented are of no enduring value and have no role to play in a diversified publishing programme and a mixed ecology of digital and print. On the contrary, as the experience of Tom at Mansion House showed, digital-only shorts can work well for different purposes – for example, as a kind of ‘monetized marketing’ for new books by brand authors. But in this case, digital shorts are parasitic on pre-existing structures and formats of the publishing world: they are a new and innovative publishing format that existing publishers can use to generate supplementary revenue streams and to build demand for new books by their bestselling authors. Understood in this way, digital shorts are not so much a radical re-invention of what ‘the book’ is but rather a format that supports and feeds into more traditional formats, serving as a kind of prequel that appeals to existing fans and primes the pump for a forthcoming book. Similarly, the experience of Atavist
