Anyway at the risk of raking over old coals I thought that their story highlights some interesting points about the move into digital in a fairly neat and comprehensive way. There are two strands to this:

1.) No record company wanted them. It was just too weird, different and didn’t fit into any of the neat demographic slots and sounds beloved of record A&R. It certainly didn’t seem to have mainstream appeal. Faced with blanket rejection the band decided to set up their own record label, Ambush Reality. Unlike massively well established Radiohead, or even the Arctic Monkeys who promptly got snapped up by indie label Domino Records (although there was a controversy about EMI distribution), Enter Shikari were just a bunch of guys no one had heard of. They realised that all it would take to get them going was the web, a bit of nous, hard gigging and decent tracks. As the risks in publishing new writers grow, and so do complaints that publishing is becoming an ever more closed shop, then the lesson is clear: get out there and make your market. The internet allows authors as much as bands a space and the tools to have their writing seen (Authonomy, Scribd, blogs, etc etc). Enter Shikari now have a major deal with Warner Music in the US, but retain their independence in the UK. And they have sold a shed load of records. Increasingly, I think, first novels and albums will be found outside the mainstream, with successful examples then getting picked up.

2.) My relationship with this band has often orientated itself around free content. At first I would listen to the Youtube videos, then also on Last.fm and latterly Spotify. When the new album came out the band gave away a download of one of the singles; the music was free to listen to all over the internet, including on the bands own website. I never would have gone and bought the cd of the first album, but I knew the tracks well. Enter Shikari have always made sure their music is seamlessly available everywhere on the web. With no marketing spend, no big reputation and nothing to lose, they had to.  After consuming all that free content I was primed for the new release.  As well as the basic cd they also released a special bundle comprising premium cd, a signed DVD and a t-shirt for £25. In the knowledge that I will never ever live this down I’ll fess up: reader, I bought it. From £0 to £25 via a load of free content. This surely is now the business model of the record industry in a nutshell, be it from ticket sales, t-shirts or a drunken session on iTunes.

In short Enter Shikari can be seen as emblematic of the new music industry. Existing both within and beyond standard business, giving tracks away yet still selling very well, this represents the future of content where everyone ultimately gains.  Surrounded as we are by Friday Project style books of blogs and handsome new special editions rolling off the presses what seems like more and more, we in publishing are already well advanced on this journey.

Picture copyright manu_el_o_matics!

Well, you can read more about it on panmacmillan.com – then come right back!

Cliffhanger is published today, and it’s great fun – I did homage to the spirit of the book by reading it on or near the best coastal cliff I could find, which was Coverack headland in Cornwall, where I was on holiday last week. (I didn’t go so far as to try and push my wife off a cliff, though!)

Now, perhaps you’ve heard of another, very similar ebook, Cliffhanger: the Other Text? No? Well, let me tell you more… or you could read about it on the Guardian.

We’re very pleased to announce an exciting new addition to our special edition ebooks programme – Cliffhanger: the Other Text by T.J. Middleton is the first complete, unedited version of the book that is also published in hardback today.

As with all previous special editions, Cliffhanger: the Other Text is release DRM-free – that is, without the ‘wrapper’ that ties the ebook file to a specific device; this is a deliberate choice on the part of the author and Picador.

Cliffhanger: the Other Text is our most experimental special edition so far, revealing an alternative ending, a missing love scene, and other small changes not yet changed… character names, details of plot, and so on. To give us a broader understanding of why it’s an exciting accompaniment to the print book, we asked the key people involved in its creation to give us their perspective on the idea.

First, the author T.J. Middleton (aka Tim Binding):

Two and a half years ago, with nothing better to do, I wrote the opening chapter of something that I thought was entirely frivolous. Once written I read it a couple of times, tightened it up a whiff, and put it away. It was time to go back to Tim Binding. But the bastard wouldn’t leave me alone. I kept thinking about it. Cliffhanger, eh? It was more interesting than I thought, and it made me smile too. A month later I wrote the next chapter, a week after that another. The third chapter took me three times longer to write than the first. This was not good. It was taking me away from Tim Binding. Time to put it away again. Four months it lay in the dark. When I pulled it out again it was blue in the face from the screaming. So I relented. I pushed Tim Binding aside and let Cliffhanger take over. What you find here is the first complete version. It has a number of differences – not the opening, that never changed, but the ending and some important bits in the middle. But it’s still Cliffhanger, just Cliffhanger with a different drop over the edge.

Another key person involved in the creation of both the printed Cliffhanger and the ebook ur-text is Nicholas Blake, Editorial Manager for Picador and digital:

Like most good things in publishing, the idea for Cliffhanger: The Other Text came about during a long lunch. The author and I were talking about the difference between working with Tim Binding, whose books I’ve copy-edited since Island Madness, and T.J. (not T. J.) Middleton, and I was suggesting that much as I admired Tim Binding, T.J. was a better writer, because Tim had given himself, or been awarded, a licence to experiment. I’ve been to Tim’s house while working on my favourite of his earlier books, On Ilkley Moor, and it’s an attractive country residence where he leads the attractive life of a respectable country gentleman; T.J. I imagined as an Indiana Jones figure with a leather hat and battered Remington portable, sitting in the corner of the bar seeing everything and saying nothing, a contemporary Strider in Bree. I had the right storyboard: when Tim delivered the preface to the special edition, he’d written ‘Two and a half years ago, with nothing better to do, I wrote the opening chapter of something that I thought was entirely frivolous. Once written I read it a couple of times, tightened it up a whiff, and put it away. It was time to go back to Tim Binding. But the bastard wouldn’t leave me alone.’ Tim, or perhaps T.J. (we were at the pudding stage), began talking about the experience of editing Cliffhanger (the edition we were going to print), and about some of the material that had to be changed or cast away – characters’ names, a lesbian sex scene, the ending itself – and we wondered whether, in a born-digital text, these sloughed-off palimpsests acquired an existence of their own, beyond the shadows of an HFS hard drive; in a library run by Veet Voojagig, perhaps. Then, just before the coffee, came the creative idea, and this is why authors are better at lunches than editors: why not publish the original ur-text as a book of its own? A moment’s thought revealed the idea was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

My role as editorial manager in the process was straightforward. The printed edition was well underway, so the first step was for Tim to ease T.J. aside and deliver a file. In fact it wasn’t an absolute ur-text; both Tim and T.J. revise constantly as they write, and the delivered edited files contain lacunae, overwrites, and suppressed drafts, so Cliffhanger: The Other Text is a carefully selected blend of several early drafts. (Selected by Tim? By T.J.? I didn’t ask.) There was of course no editing involved (and by that time his editor had become an agent anyway), and no copy-editing; I tidied the formatting, watermarked the pages to prevent confusion and sent it to be typeset. The text design and the cover image are the same as Cliffhanger the printed text, except for the added subtitle, so there was no extra work there; the proofs were produced and read, and a few of the corrections for Cliffhanger 1 were carried across to Cliffhanger 2 at the author’s request; the design department attended to both editions with their usual care, and the final files were delivered. Metadata was created and the job was sent to the conversion house to begin the process of becoming an ebook.

The special editions ebook programme, just to remind you, now includes Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, Sid Smith’s China Dreams, and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Empire in Black and Gold (this is an ambitious ‘bloglishing’ project – you can read more about that here and here, and visit the ‘bloglished’ site).

[This post has been cross-posted to the Picador blog - link]

We’re offering this eBook DRM-free; this is a deliberate choice on the part of both Pan Macmillan and Clive James. What we hope is that this will be a positive experience for our readers as well as contributing to the growing body of evidence that DRM-free is the way forward for digital publishing.

Anyway, I’ll stop blathering on about this wonderful new package here and point you to the Picador blog, where you can read more about it from Clive James himself and get all the juicy details.

You can browse inside the eBook using the widget below – just click the cover to get started. There is also an audio excerpt to listen to. Please feel free to add the widget to your own blog or site.