Pronoun

» see pronoun.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Writing a book is not a thing I have ever attempted, so this one reaches me only as a business story. It is a good business story. For two and a half years Pronoun handed out for free the exact service that everyone else in self-publishing was taking a cut of, and it did that while owned by one of the largest trade publishers in the world.

The company was nine years old by the end and had been two different things. It launched on 1 October 2009 as Vook, founded by Bradley Inman in New York, selling books with video and web links stitched into the text. Four titles came out that first day in a deal with Simon & Schuster. Investors liked it enough to put in 2.5 million dollars of seed money and another 5.25 million the same year, because this was the season when the iPad was about to arrive and everyone assumed the book was about to become something else. The book did not become something else.

By 2012 Vook had quietly turned into tooling: an editor and a cover builder sitting on top of a pipe into the retail stores. It bought Byliner in 2014 and then the ebook analytics company Booklr, and in May 2015 it dropped the old name and relaunched as Pronoun with Booklr's Josh Brody running it. The offer was blunt enough to need no explanation. You uploaded a manuscript and Pronoun sent it out to Amazon and the other major stores. You kept all of the royalty. There was no listing fee and no per-title charge.

The shape of that company is the part I recognize, even from outside publishing. A tool that costs the user nothing, funded by a conviction that the data coming off it will one day be worth more than the tool, is a pattern I have watched run its course in software for most of my working life. It ends the way this one ended more often than anybody building it expects.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what free actually meant ~

Pronoun made nothing on the transaction. Every cent the retailer paid out went to the author, which meant the business had to be somewhere else entirely. The somewhere else was the numbers. Booklr's tooling gave writers a dashboard of sales and pricing comparisons that nobody was handing out at that price, and the theory was that a publisher who could see the whole indie market in real time was holding something valuable.

Macmillan bought the eleven-person company in May 2016 on roughly that logic. Around ten thousand authors were on the platform by then. Whatever the data was worth internally, it was never worth enough to cover the cost of running free distribution for all of them.

~ the day it died ~

The announcement came on 6 November 2017. New accounts stopped immediately and no new titles could be published. Distribution of everything already out would end on 15 January 2018, which gave authors about ten weeks to pull their files and metadata and get them re-uploaded somewhere else. Macmillan's Jeff Seroy said the company had concluded there was no path forward to a profitable business model and would keep investing in the data and analytics side instead.

Ten weeks is not nothing, and by shutdown standards it was handled decently. It still meant that every writer who had trusted a big-five publisher with their distribution spent the holidays re-listing their own back catalog and watching their rankings reset to zero.

~ the long tail ~

Pronoun.com stopped being a place. The authors went back to Kindle Direct Publishing or over to Draft2Digital, which is where most of them had been before, and the free experiment closed without anyone stepping in to repeat it. Nobody has offered that deal since.

The lesson the self-publishing forums drew at the time was narrower than the one the company demonstrated. They said do not put your distribution in the hands of a service that charges you nothing. What Pronoun really proved is that a free service inside a large company is a line item, and a line item survives exactly as long as somebody senior believes in it.

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