Branding Authors Causes Pain

This article by Jill Priluck in Slate's The Big Money is all about authors becoming brands. Publishers and people within publishing clearly have a conflicted notion about this concept, and Priluck does a nice job unpacking why that is and what branding means in the changing landscape of publishing: "In the book world, where the word "brand" is either sacrosanct or dirty, there's little consensus."

The article demonstrates the kind of classic doublespeak employed in publishing, where commercial publishers want a strong product but also want respect from the literary community. I mean, can we really not refer to Mitch Albom as a brand? Really? His agent says no, but the marketing department at his publisher has already made the bed. Sorry, buddy.

But Priluck also shows the downside of being branded - the pigeon-hole effect: "In their desire to fulfill the dictates of a brand, authors can compromise their integrity as writers, especially if they cubbyhole themselves." And this is where you see the ongoing problem in publishing that many of us online have discussed, even ad nauseum. Publishers want a reliable product and they want to put it out quickly, and writers who get sucked into the system can wind up with the very short end of the stick. As Priluck explains,

With limited choices, [authors] trade depth for instant gratification, visibility, and higher advances. Ironically, their longevity, supposedly the marker of a good brand, falls by the wayside. It seems that unlike a detergent or a car, an author who is branded too quickly will often fizzle out just as fast.

This is when the speed of publishing runs into the commitment a writer must show to a topic or idea to execute it well. Delivery dates get pushed up, demands increase, corners get cut. Sometimes an agent is in on it, sometimes an agent is helping the author carve out necessary space and time.

Somehow we need to find the balance with high-speed communication - Twitter being the at-times comical example - and smart, thought-out, patiently crafted writing. Even cellphone novels, much buzzed-about right now though they scream of lame trend to me, can be crafted rather than hammered out. (See a nice parody of this idea blogged here by Peter Hyman.)

I do like when newer technology meets older writing, as with the George Orwell blog. So are we going to see classic novels translated into text messages and serialized, or twittered? I'm sure we are, just as we now have an LOLcats version of the Bible (egads, man). I'm not opposed to this kind of serialization, which could drive readers to great books. And authors can let readers into their process to some extent through Twitter, as long as it doesn't lessen their discipline to the actual writing (or result in leaked manuscripts, as famously happened with Stephenie Meyer last summer).

I'm all for sharing writing quicker and in various formats. The formats are not going to give the writing a shelf life; the quality of the writing is, so writers should keep that in mind even as they stare down demands from publishers in need of that product.

(Thanks to JasonB at Galleycat for the branding link.)

Hating on Hardcovers

I'll admit it: I don't buy many hardcovers. Even as someone who loves books and bookstores and authors, it pains me to part with $27.95 + tax. I know Christopher has a strong stand against most hardcovers. And now I know that the ever- knowledgeable and punchy Pat Holt dislikes them too!

I previously covered Holt's "Things I'd Love to See" 3-part sequel, and now she's added a fourth: "Stop Starting with Hardcovers." In this post, she rails against the old publishing model in which publishers bring out hardcover editions first to get some money to offset printing and to get review attention, and then bring out the more affordable paperback later. Holt points out that this model is particularly hard to maintain in our current ever-shrinking economy, and suggests we change things up:

Publishers could print enough sheets to cover a small hardcover printing for the institutional (library, etc.) sale. They could release the trade paperback with pride as the first and most affordable horse out of the starting gate. The more copies it sold, the more it would become what we used to call permanent backlist (trade talk for a long-term spot in every reader’s heart). As people began to buy the hardcover edition - for gifts, or for their personal libraries (yes, readers still have them) - the title would begin to earn its way into increased hardcover publication.

What I like about Holt is her realism, that she doesn't suggest band-aids or just think aloud, but rather offers thoughtful responses to problems.

I also appreciate her ability to weave some historical context into her arguments. In this case, she mentions that publishers in the 1980s tried out original fiction in paperback editions to start, and they failed, and publishers still recall that failure and cringe at the idea of replicating it. But Holt dismisses their concerns: "As I recall, the experiment was a disaster because the process became so labor intensive (just to build up sales from ones and twos) that publishers decided the whole procedure got too costly. What they missed was that too many houses went after too small an audience at the same time. "

I have been at the meetings where we are all trying to figure out if we should go paperback original to capture a younger audience - students, activists, etc - or hardcover for review attention. Sales reps, without looking at production costs but particularly sensitive to pricing, would cry out for paperback originals, while the business department, looking at little more than our bottom line, would cringe when we presented the margins for paperback originals. But Holt's idea to go back to simultaneous publishing, something done quite commonly at university presses, is a smart one. Also as she points out, what review attention? With the Washington Post Book World the latest casualty in the war on book sections in newspapers, maybe publishers need to worry less about old-fashioned print outlets for reviews and more about bloggers and other online venues.

Soon I'll follow up Christopher's smart post on reading to show that both of us here at SoTB are NOT anti-technology, but would like to see books survive in some form. For now, I'll just side with Pat Holt in saying we need to rethink this hardcover business model. I'm still thinking through how booksellers can weather this change, however. It's hard to make money in a store full of $15 products. See this BusinessWeek article by Stacy Perman - and the accompanying comments - to start your thinking on how indie bookstores can survive. Clearly we need to factor e-books into the equation - again, for a future post. (I have no problem with e-books at all but I have a hard time imagining reading something like Emerson "incidentally," while in line at the grocery store, the way Robert Gray does. More tk.)

Before I sign off, I'd like to link to a nice if quiet behind-the-scenes article from Peter Osnos, the editor of Barack Obama's Dreams From my Father. See the value in editors? Enjoy!

New Year, New Ideas

Here at SoTB, we try to balance the good with the bad, the exciting with the mundane, the intellectual (Christopher's "currently reading") with the trashy or at least common (Brian's). So today, I wanted to share a project that is fun and kind of exciting and if nothing else, optimistic. My apologies for being a bit late to this game - this project kicked off closer to the actual new year, on January 5th.

The project in question is freelance publicist Lauren Cerand's "The New Your Project." She explains in this post that kicked off the project and the blog that she decided to take on a project she normally would have had to turn down: doing publicity for a novel published last January by a publisher that has since gone out of business. The novel is Jonathan Baumbach's YOU or The Invention of Memory. (Sidenote: this "____, or ____," repetitive, old-fashioned title formula seems to be making a bit of a resurgence, which is interesting as one of the books I acquired and edited last spring uses just this formula, at least in the subtitle, and will be published this summer.) Merand loved the book and the author so much that she decided to take on this challenge by starting a project to spread word about this book.

Here’s how it works: email me (correspondence at laurencerand dot com) between now and February 14 to request a free copy of the book (limited to the first 365 requests) and I will send it to you in the mail. Free. You can read it. You can give it away. You can sell it to the Strand or Powell’s, depending on your coast. Whatever. The point is, this is a book that I believe in. I believe it belongs in the world. I believe it belongs with you.

Now that's a believer! I admire her passion, as do the commenters to this initial post. And I also admire her promotion of smaller literary endeavors that are supporting this book, in subsequent posts.

I'll follow this blog, sure, and I wonder if this is yet another example of what has to happen as we enter this supposed new age of publishing. But I should point out that Cerand states her credentials up front as she starts this project: "I’m fortunate to be highly selective about my projects, probably pickier than the college that gave me my degree. I book most of my projects 6-12 months in advance, sometimes more, sometimes less, and I only take on a handful a year." She is saying "trust me, I know what I'm doing," just as editors must do in-house. As we move to get authors to the finish line quicker, with self-publishing or cutbacks to editorial departments, we will lose one gatekeeper, even if we have others like Cerand down the line.

Galleycat referenced this issue recently, linking to Lev Grossman's article in Time magazine about how novels are getting published, how the landscape has changed, and how it will all lead to the novel turning "into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever." Grossman's lede is somewhat obvious: the story of the novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova, which was ignored by the publishing establishment, then self-published, then noticed by the publishing establishment, and then a bestseller. Fine. We always love to hear these stories, right? (iUniverse really loves when reporters tell these stories - they must see a bump in business.) So Grossman goes on to say why publishing is changing, and makes good points about the f'ed up system we have now:

Consider the advance system, whereby a publisher pays an author a nonreturnable up-front fee for a book. If the book doesn't "earn out," in the industry parlance, the publisher simply eats the cost. Another example: publishers sell books to bookstores on a consignment system, which means the stores can return unsold books to publishers for a full refund. Publishers suck up the shipping costs both ways, plus the expense of printing and then pulping the merchandise. "They print way more than they know they can sell, to kind of create a buzz, and then they end up taking half those books back," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of PW. These systems were created to shift risk away from authors and bookstores and onto publishers. But risk is something the publishing industry is less and less able to bear.

Amen.

He then goes on to say that self-publishing is no longer the death knell is once was: "Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball." Fair point.

And then Grossman hits me where it hurts:

And there's actual demand for this stuff. In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But Genova and Barry and Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn't serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one--an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.

Hm. I appreciate the point, and I appreciate the historical perspective he goes on to offer. (Really, the article is definitely worth a read.) But first of all, I worry when we rely too much on "the market," and secondly, I don't know how everyone - writers, editors, publishers - will be able to survive in this New Publishing world he describes, "promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste." I am ready to jump in, folks. Perhaps my recent reading of Walt Whitman's biography has made me more appreciative of all tastes, high and common. But how can we proceed in a way that doesn't favor those with resources, some of which from questionable (ie corporate) origins, behind them? I don't want a moneyless sytem that is only moneyless in that it doesn't generate money, as those who put in will be those who can afford it.

And this is where my brain blows up. Maybe more on another day...

Oxford University Press joins the trend

More cuts were announced in the publishing world today. Oxford University Press has laid off 60 employees from their New York and North Carolina offices, according to Galleycat. Out of 700 employees in the US, that's a significant number - and for each employee laid off and for the coworkers around them, that's a serious loss.

Sorry to hear it.

Part of me can't help but wonder where all this publishing might is going as people get laid off? All this knowledge and ability has to go somewhere, into some industry that is more profitable and sustainable. Where are the start-ups? Are smaller presses getting better candidates for open positions?

Where do publishers go when they get laid off?

Stop the Returns!

So I was looking through the posts on Google Reader from the blogs and papers I read, and while places like MobyLives and Galleycat had interesting news, nothing really inspired me to post. Then Galleycat posted a link to Scott Esposito's interview on Conversational Reading with Declan Spring, Senior Editor at the outstanding literary independent publisher, New Directions. The interview was part of Con Rdg's series on publishing into a recession. Esposito plans to interview players from smaller, independent presses to see how "publishing beyond New York's giants is faring." This is a great idea for a series, so I'll be sure to keep an eye out for his other interviews.

Spring is a worthy first choice, and he makes some useful observations from his position at a venerated press like ND that still needs to work hard to survive in this financial climate. He is less convinced that ND will increase acquisitions based on authors not getting picked up by big commercial houses, and more concerned about how badly returns will ultimately hurt the company: "The biggest factor for us hasn’t been so much big drops in actual sales, but the enormous amounts of returns from booksellers, primarily the chains. " He goes on to explain the incredible value of ND's backlist and the strategy of repackaging some of those classic titles with introductions by big current names - a fairly common and wise publishing practice. They then "are absolutely making sure that on each list we have important backlist reissues that will have a guaranteed sale." His fears of digitization make sense, then: readers won't need these backlist titles in hardcopy if they can just download the text itself. Spring admits,

Coupled with the economy is at least MY rising fear of the digitization of text and the popularity of downloading books on computers, ipod,s and digital readers like the Kindle and the Sony Reader. Riding the subway to work, I see less people reading and more listening to their ipods. Fewer of my friends are reading in the evenings, more are emailing friends and surfing the Internet.

I think many of us have seen this trend. This statement was not followed up by Esposito, unfortunately, leaving it isolated so Spring seems more resistant to technology than I'm sure he actually is.

Excessive orders that are then returned in bulk are killing independent presses - that's the message here. It's a bit boring and pedestrian, but it's a huge problem that I've written about before. Authors should appreciate this problem. As Spring later explains further,

As I said above, the greatest damage due to the economic downfall this year has been due to the fact that the chains aren’t buying as many books up front, they’re reducing their shelf life (our author Eliot Weinberger says books now have the shelf life of yogurt), and in response to the climate, they’re returning more books. That’s incredibly damaging for a small company like New Directions. It effects not only our sales, but how many we decide to print off the bat.

Okay, folks, so time to head over to ND and get to buyin'. I recommend Tennessee Williams' Memoirs, with a foreword by John Waters. Fantastic reading!

PS For those wondering either what was up with Elizabeth Alexander's poem (note: I'm not linking to the poem itself b/c I'm not convinced there are authorized versions online, but maybe I'm wrong...) at the Inauguration or what is up with all the whining happening about it since, check out this wrap up over at BookNinja, with useful links to discussions elsewhere. He doesn't include the NY Times Opionator, which has many interesting comments and links. All the references to Whitman certainly made me more forgiving of the poem...

Insider baseball - Agency Finances Revealed!

Galleycat over at mediabistro is getting nitty gritty, talking about agent-agency splits!

First they posted this news in which they revealed that an agency that, I suppose, shall remain nameless, was adjusting their splits with the agents they employ - and employed previously. When the agency gets 15% of royalties from a deal, as is customary, they will no longer give 10% to the agent and keep 5%. Instead, they will drop the agent share to 8%, allowing current agents to somehow work their way back up to 10%. Former agents at the agency are stuck at the 8/7% split.

What's more important than percentages is the reasoning, according to a leaked memo from this agency: "we... had to re-evaluate this because of the recent and unprecedented surge of industry panic, editor and other firings, collapsing of imprints, and general slowing down in the delivery of owed payments to clients." Later, management is quoted as saying, "publishers are, in effect, using the delays in paying agents such as you and us to help balance their books."

Today, galleycat posted new information. First of all, agents current and past are apparently revolting, and second of all, one insider anonymous agent refuted the management's attempt to blame publisher delays in payment, saying: "We haven't really noticed a slow-down in payments from publishers. At least not any slower than usual." Oops!

This could be a case where all this internal bickering will have a general impact on writers getting turned off by agents, as there is already plenty of skepticism out there. Having worked for an agent, I would recommend them to aspiring writers, but I don't envy the search. Don't pay fees, look at who else they represent, follow your gut instinct, and find a good match, someone who takes the time to speak with you and work with you, not someone just looking to turn something around and sell it. That's all easier said than done. And then let them bicker amongst themselves and their bosses about percentages - as long as you, young author, get your own fair share.

The reality is, many interests are fighting over pieces of a tiny pie (ie, incoming money from your book!).

Remember that optimism and whimsy I tried to offer in previous posts? Here's a much more pessimistic reading of the NEA's report, from Caleb Crain, the blogger at Steamboats are Ruining Everything. I would argue he's getting a bit in the weeds here, which is valuable for some but should not take away from the momentum that may be building around reading since the release of this report.

So new kinds of reading are leading to new kinds of publishing, including Melville House's "Live Book" project, which I'm quite enjoying. A brief description to whet your appetite:

In urgent response to the occupation of Republic Windows & Doors, Melville House has commissioned journalist and author Kari Lydersen of the Washington Post’s Chicago Bureau to write a ‘live book’ tracking unfolding events in what Jesse Jackson has called “the beginning of a larger movement for mass action to resist economic violence.”

Go take a look!

And please blame the extreme cold for my scattered order in this post... thanks.

Whimsy with your recession?

More happy responses to unhappy times...



















And the much-shared Macmillan marketing department clip...

Happy recession, readers!

Good news for the survival of books!

(not for the Survival of the Book (tm), necessarily...)

As many of you now know, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report with startling news: adults, especially young adults, are actually reading books! Hurray! Before you mock this enthusiasm, please note: "For the first time in the history of the survey - conducted five times since 1982 - the overall rate at which adults read literature (novels and short stories, plays, or poems) rose by seven percent. " So yes, worth celebrating.

And to continue on this wave of optimism, there's Boyd Tonkin's piece in the UK Independent in which he wonders whether this economic downturn, like the 1980s recession, might just produce some incredible literary voices.

Might the flight of big – or even middling – money from literary publishing prompt a quest for bolder choices and wider horizons from authors who know that their finely-finessed debut now stands no chance of reaching the Richard-and-Judy sofa or the Waterstone's front table? If slimmer cheques and smaller expectations force some novelists to give up altogether, surely they might inspire others to thumb their noses at a deep-frozen marketplace and go – as it were – for broke.

Tonkin points out that online commenters - mm-hm - "have effectively done their print ancestors' old job, charging into battle for the overlooked visionaries and the unsung avant-garde – who write for print. " He then mentions something I must look up, which has folks buzzing apparently in the UK: Paul Griffith's Let Me Tell You, a novella composed of words spoken by Ophelia in Hamlet.

So let's go forward with good thoughts - more readers, better writers, and an exciting literary future in the midst of a dismal economic reality! (Um... do I sound at all convincing?)

Editor Fired, Editor Re-Hired - Go Authors!

Well color me impressed. It seems veteran editor Drenka Willen was laid off from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in December only to be re-hired now, thanks to outcries from authors, including Gunter Grass, Umberto Eco, and Jose Saramago. Every editor's dream!

See the Galleycat scoop here.

Mourning for Publishing?

As this is Survival of the Book, perhaps I shouldn't post an article that reads as a kind of elegy to publishing and books as we know them. But alas...

Andre Bernard, former publisher at Harcourt, wrote this article in the Washington Post late last month, using Robert Giroux's funeral as a jumping off point to discuss publishing's "Black Wednesday" and the larger state of books. (Thanks to BookNinja for the link, as well as another link to an article on Giroux and publishing.) It's a dreary article by Bernard, admittedly, with an argument I don't entirely buy, but it's a nice summation of what's happened recently and a worthy addition to the endless discussion on where to go from here.

Bookselling Legend

I noticed on the NYTimes' PaperCuts blog some news about Gotham Book Mart's stock going to Penn, to archives there. It linked to a larger story from the other Times' blog City Room, which linked (and borrowed heavily from) the obituary of the Gotham's founder, who started the history bookstore in 1920 and passed away at 101 in 1989. The founder's name was Frances (Fanny) Steloff, and she sounds amazing, like the kind of integral individual figure, often overlooked, who makes reading, publishing, and bookselling important, exciting, and historic.



First, this is one of her most important contributions:

She championed the experimental and challenged the censors. Her courage in purchasing shipments of the banned ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' directly from D. H. Lawrence in Italy in the late 1920's and in ordering smuggled copies of ''Tropic of Cancer'' from Henry Miller in Paris during the 1930's led to lawsuits and landmark decisions on censorship.

But what's of larger importance is her creation of a kind of literary greenhouse that allowed such figures to prosper. Tennessee Williams lasted less than a day as a worker there - "he couldn't get here on time in the morning and, also, he wasn't very good at wrapping packages.'' Allen Ginsberg and Leroi Jones worked there, while Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Stephen Spender, Marianne Moore and Saul Bellow shopped there regularly.



And her story is an incredible one, as someone who came from poverty, stopped formal education in 7th grade, and went on to create this landmark. Her thoughts on it show her true satisfaction with what she created:

''I used to feel bitter and cheated about not having a formal education. But why should I? How could I, no matter what my education, ever have had the wonderful chance to have Thornton Wilder and other people talk to me personally, and right here in my shop! As if they were in their classrooms! I couldn't ask for anything more.''

Amazing! According to the Anais Nin website (yep - another buddy), there is an autobiographical essay by Steloff in the Winter/Spring 1972 issue of Confrontation, but they do not provide a link. Instead, they have a link to a profile of her by Adele Aldridge. I suppose she may not demand a full-length biography, though I'm definitely intrigued.

The photo above had this caption:

The Gotham Book Mart was famous for its literary eminences. A December 1948 party for Osbert and Edith Sitwell (seated, center) drew a roomful of bright lights to the Gotham Book Mart: clockwise from W. H. Auden, on the ladder at top right, were Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Charles Henri Ford (cross-legged, on the floor), William Rose Benét, Stephen Spender, Marya Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart, Gore Vidal and José Garcia Villa. (Photo: Gotham Book Mart)

It's a shame that obituaries lead us to these amazing booksellers. I had a similar reaction reading the obituary of Provincetown Book Shop owner Elloyd Hansen in 2007. This is a wonderful bookstore with charming employees, and Hansen's partner who took over after Hansen's death also had some great book and town stories for me when I chatted with him the summer after Hansen's death. But the obituary tells the story of the man who bought this store and ran it at an exciting time, and it led me to further research the store. At that point, I found this interview with John Waters, a personal favorite of mine and a mainstay still in P-town, in which he talks about working at the store one summer in the 1960s:

The third summer,1967, I came back and Elloyd Hansen and Joel Newman offered me a full-time job, which was weird because they were kind of competitors.They sought me out, I don't know why, but probably because I was passionate about books. I decided to work there because it was the only way I could afford the outrageous summer rents.

It was great because, as part of the job, you could have any book as long as you read it. I didn't abuse the policy, but I got free books that I'd never heard of in my life. I also got $100 a week, which was really a fortune then, more money then anyone I knew. But the greatest thing was that every winter they closed up, and I could go anywhere in the country and collect unemployment, and some of the early movies were financed by that.

When I showed my movies in P-Town, the Bookshop let me turn the window into a billboard. Elloyd and Joel were such good bosses they didn't care if my friends hung out. Mary Vivian Pearce and David Lochary would come in every single day.

These stores add more to culture than just sell books. That's important to keep in mind as we struggle with a new economic downturn. Support your local independent!



(It's also of interest to see this line in her obituary from 1989 regarding the store, technically open until 2007: "It is still thriving at 41 West 47th Street in Manhattan, an anachronism in a time of failing independent bookstores." Yep, that was 20 years ago, folks, and these stores are still going!)

Links to Occupy You

My apologies for keeping SOTB so quiet in the last nearly two weeks. I headed down south to warmer climates and then came back and lazily sat around and read about Walt Whitman and got ready to read my new book (gift from partner) and played trivia with Christopher et al (2nd place!).

For now, please accept these links while I think about what I have - or have not, as it were - done.

~ Bookseller John Schulman at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wonders if the book is dead. Kudos with the graphic that went with the article! Can I keep it?

~ Now where has Pat Holt been all my life?! California, I suppose. She has posted three terrific recommendations for publishing on her blog:

1) Online royalty accounts for authors - "If royalty statements stay the way they are, bogged down in nineteenth-century thinking, the industry appears to send out a negative statement: Authors, who used to be respected and honored as the driving force in publishing (i.e., the people behind all our paychecks), have been tossed to the bottom of the heap. They are expendable and replaceable, and they’ll be sorry if they make a fuss about their royalty statement."

2) Publishers leaving New York - this one is in two parts. The first part includes a fantastic take-down of the NBA dinner, while part two has a good comment from Tim Brown plugging the Independent and Small Press Book Fair.

3) Returning Editorial Power to Editors - First she reels me in, and then she rips me out of the water! Fantastic post giving a bit of historical perspective to this reality:

"Nobody wanted editors to live in a bubble without knowing about P&L statements, but waking up to commercial reality happened too quickly, and terms emerged that made veteran editors cringe: Don’t take a chance on an unproven concept, they were told. Wait until other editors lose their shirts risking The Next New Thing. Then acquire something safe – i.e., the exact duplicate, but cheaper. With our marketing muscle, we’ll elbow the competition out of the running."

Holt's vision of editors getting out of NYC and away from the marketing folks does give me hope and puts ideas into my head, as someone who recently left my job as an editor but is still looking to freelance. I love finding new, original, and powerful voices, and maybe I can find an opportunity to continue this pursuit without the confines of a publishing house led largely by marketing demands (which is not to say that of my former employer, for the record).

I will definitely keep watch of Holt Uncensored! There's few things I enjoy more than a smart, tough, punchy broad (with all due respect).

~ As I may have mentioned here, author Carleen Brice had a brilliant idea for December that got a fair bit of attention: buy books by black authors to give to white readers. Brice was honestly one of the best authors with whom I worked as an ed asst - she was kind, thoughtful, quick to respond and even quicker to show gratitude, so I'm thrilled things are going well for her (Orange Mint and Honey, her novel, moved off the shelf this year! see her blog for great reviews). She even created a blog to help white folks find the best in African American literature. I love the tagline: "Your official invitation into the African American section of the bookstore!" In many ways, that says it all...

So those should keep you busy, folks - and my apologies for the nightmare formatting. (I had to actually do some html myself - yikes. Still a mess.) More to come soon - I promise!

Think on it

Not much time but I wanted to post two links, with a bit of commentary.

First is the fantastic Citizen Reader offering something to cut through the syrupy and stupid sweetness offered by magazine year-end top ten lists. Yes, CR has instead posted The Worst Books of 2008 - with nice summations following each title. Scott McClellan's a weenie, Thomas Friedman's a jackhole, and that person creating so called "buzz"? "I'm thinking he and I don't share the same taste in books." Well done!

Second is this rather irritating but often right-on op-ed from author Lawrence Osborne (*not* actor Laurence Fishburne), in which publishers are given the what-for. Osborne makes some good points. For one, he lists the problems editors are reporting, with his own critique of their reports:

Industry insiders provide a depressing catalog: a failure to acquire the kind of franchise authors now topping the bestseller lists, a lack of editorial insight and supervision (resulting in longer, sloppier books that bore readers stupid), extravagant author advances, agents all too happy to sacrifice the long-term interest of authors for short-term profit, incompetent management at the top and a lack of books that have commercial impact.

Then he offers some nice feedback, often in blunt form:

But just as newspapers are dooming themselves by cutting the very thing they alone can provide--in-depth, on the spot reporting--so publishing houses are dooming themselves by trying to run in somebody's else's rat race and cutting the very thing we turn to them for: writing itself.

Amen! The problem is in fact commercial publishers who are not even going after "the next big thing," but instead are chasing "the big thing to follow the last big thing."

He ends by suggesting publishers reach the post-college, literate folks like, oh, the author's son.

My son and his friends, who are in their early twenties, read Houllebecq and Bolaño and Sebald and Coetzee without any problem at all. Those writers speak easily to their anxieties and concerns. And yet none of these writers would have found American publishers if they hadn't first succeeded in their countries of origin.

We the readers, the people, are not dumbed down media serfs obsessed with celebrities, dosh and movie rights. You are.

This man has the leisurely tones and metaphors of a posh English dandy lazily blabbering in a hotel tea room, but his points are true. I fear they may not reach the needed audience, however - especially seeing as this was published by Forbes!

Publishing slowly moves forward

If we're going to be trapped in some recession or depression, we best make the most of it, right? So we need to institute some changes to publishing that will make it a more efficient industry.

Shelf Awareness is linking to a Wall Street Journal article (sorry, think it's subscription-based) by the ever-reliable Jeffrey Trachtenberg on news that Borders will buy books from HarperStudio on a non-returnable basis. This is unusual, for folks not in the know:

Under the terms of the deal, the nation's second-largest bookstore chain by revenue will get a deeper discount on initial orders of books published by the new imprint of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers -- 58% to 63% off the cover price, instead of the usual 48%. In exchange, Borders won't return any unsold books to HarperStudio, instead probably discounting them in the store.

Borders needs the discount and probably assumes it can use the inventory, if it doesn't go under, and HarperStudio can send off the books without having to worry about them coming back. The return system in publishing is archaic, so this is progress.

"Returns have never made sense in our business, and with the recent economic downturn, publishers and booksellers are more open than before to experimenting with models that might decrease waste and increase profit," said Robert Miller, president and publisher of HarperStudio. When he started the imprint earlier this year, Mr. Miller said he intended to shake up traditional book-publishing economics.

Shelf Awareness added their own two cents with the link, noting: "If selling nonreturnable spreads and everyone isn't too exhausted by the effort, perhaps the industry will then re-examine another of its 'quirks': the manufacturer's suggested retail price printed on the book."

PS I wanted to add a worrisome update, also posted in Shelf Awareness, regarding a place I've mentioned before: the Bookstore Restaurant in Wellfleet, MA. I have not been here still, but I want to go now more than ever after reading this story in Cape Cod Today about its struggles - not over the ever shrinking economy, but because of their inability to update their septic system. If it's not one thing, it's other! The place still looks amazing.

Going forward or looking back?

As the publishing industry squirms in the pressure cooker created by an ever weakening economy, blogs and other media outlets are scrambling with how to portray this unique world of editors and publishers.

I was less impressed with Ethan Hill's article on Barney Rosset than I wanted to be, in Newsweek. Actually, I should say that if I came across the article in Newsweek, I would have just been impressed that they were devoting so much space to someone in publishing, but coming across it as a link posted by The Casual Optimist, I was less impressed. For those who don't know and don't have the time to click through, Rosset purchased Grove Press for $3,000 in the early 1950s, when it was nothing to speak of and he wasn't much either, and turned it into the leading home for avant-garde and popular literature, fighting seemingless endless obscenity laws with writing from Bertolt Brecht, William S. Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, and many other white guys (sorry!). I appreciate the article's objectivity - Rosset's no hero in some ways, but he's fascinating and important - but even with the article's length, it still seems to be skimming on the top of this topic, not delving into it in an intriguing or particularly useful way. It's worth a read as this kind of history in publishing is often quite fascinating, but it may leave that bad taste in your mouth that said history often does - rich white guys being rich white guys, isn't this one rich white guy great because he "took such a chance."

And then looking forward, we have all these open forums for discussing what will become of modern book publishing. The Penguin blog (yes, that Penguin) is looking forward by "inviting authors, typographers, cover designers, printers, technologists, retailers, literary agents, publishers and geeks to come along and consider if and how technology can transform and perhaps improve on The Book." Don't know how much "buy-in" will happen there. I mean, they have a vested interested in hosting such a discussion that makes the use of their blog or somewhere else on their website a less-than-desirable venue for a frank discussion. And in a truly mainstream but strikingly pedestrian manner, over at the Huffington Post, Hugh McGuire asks about "hybrid readers" - those of us who like printed books but are open to e-books and other digital creations. I don't think the name works, quite frankly, and I am shocked by how basic this article is given McGuire's other work (namely, LibriVox AND the Book Oven Blog). I blame the Huffington Post, which is publishing too fast and loose, having contributors churn out light content written up on the fly.

So the best plan is to look back as we go forward, but where to look and then where to go?

Brother Can You Spare a Dime?

There is a whole lot of crash-and-burn talk going on with writers these days. I was just talking to one author I edited who is a freelancer, and he was talking about places - magazines, websites - wanting more for less. And the big problem is, it's not even a matter of the publishers holding back necessarily! In many cases, no one is making money. So if you go chasin' it, you might end up staring down a big empty hole.

So what to do? Call Obama!

Two new articles have come out about whether President-elect Obama should revive a Federal Writers' Project like the one that we had in the 1930s following the Great Depression. Are we ready for a literary bail-out? (So asks Jennifer Schuessler at the NY Times' Papercuts blog.)

Paul Greenberg's piece will appear in this Sunday's NYTimes, arguing not to resuscitate the old FWP model, but to instead model the AAA - Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which worked to lower the production of produce. Why? Well...

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. “There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost,” she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.

I'm always amazed at the number of people who claim to be or want to be writers, versus the smaller number of people who really and truly read books.

Greenberg's piece is somewhat tongue-in-cheek but still of interest to those of us who worry about just how much garbage clogs your modern corporate bookstore.

Greenberg ends with a biting quote from Graham Greene:

“Are you prepared for the years of effort, ‘the long defeat of doing nothing well’? As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily effort will grow harder to endure, those ‘powers of observation’ will become enfeebled; you will be judged, when you reach your 40s, by performance and not by promise.”

Yowser, huh?

The other article considering this idea is by Mark I. Pinsky over at The New Republic. A bit more straight-forward, this article includes a nice brief history of FWP and does at least imagine, if not call for, a resuscitation of the federal program.

This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media. At the same time, the multimedia fruits of this research would be open-sourced to all media, as well as to academics.

Interesting concept to consider. However, try to sell this idea to anyone who gets a whiff of the blog Daily Routines, which chronicles "how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days." Some show discipline, sure - Toni Morrison writing before dawn, when her children would start to wake, or J.M. Coetzee writing seven days a week - and then you have the others who are a bit more... eccentric? Says Truman Capote:

I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.

Can you imagine the conservative reaction to that man getting a federal subsidy? Not so much, but I'm certainly glad his writing made it into the world.

Back to the drawing table perhaps...

More Discussions on the Future of Publishing

Given "Black Wednesday" in publishing, how should we go forward in the book world? This conversation is occurring around water coolers, online, in papers, etc..., and most of it has been said before.

But I was intrigued by the ideas offered up by David Nygren over at The Urban Elitist, in a post titled "The Future of Publishing (Maybe)." How humble. (I will admit I have not followed his blog, so I don't really know his usual p.o.v.) His vision of what publishing will become is actually quite promising, without being extreme or nihilistic.

I appreciate his point about the end of corporate publishing dominance - appreciate in that I'm pleased by this forecast, but also that I agree with its logic. He posits that theory while still allowing for gatekeepers - but these gatekeepers, egotistical or not, will not necessarily be driven by profit, or by shareholders looking only at the bottom line:

I expect the rise of “super readers,” such as Oprah has become (though not on that scale). Each super reader will have his or her own following. Many of them will be mini-tyrants, but at least the power will have moved from the profit-centered board room to those who truly care about and appreciate the content. As we have currently, various reading groups, online review journals and bloggers will also drive readers to content that might otherwise have been ignored.

This is exciting to me, and offers more promise for writers than counting on editors at corporate publishers who have marketing people and shareholders breathing down their necks, shouting to find the next big thing.

I also agree with his not-so-shocking concept of independent publishers needing to build a community, to know their niche. The concern there is always profit, or even staying afloat (forget making money), but Nygren explains that production costs and even marketing will be lower and the royalty arrangements we now have will change, so cash will flow differently. There also won't be the same warehouse costs.

I do worry that this new arrangement means less labor, as in fewer people employed by the publishing industry. Everyone can get published but no one can get hired. With print culture moving online, and being more accessible for less money, are we just discarding manual labor in the world of books and magazines and newspapers? Will there be unskilled labor jobs created? Like the discussions around environmental changes, with green collar jobs now becoming a real expression with meaning, I wonder if we need to discuss this aspect in the culture of writing and disseminating information.

Sorry I can't post as much, this week and running up to the holidays. Christopher has an idea for the top books of 2008... only I don't read many new books. If mine can be old books read in 2008, I may be better off?

Publishing News Flash II - Random House re-org

Publishers Weekly is reporting some changes at Random House, which is being seriously reorganized. See the letter from Markus Dohle, RH Chairman, here. Welcome! to the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group!

This document is interesting to read just to get a sense of how many imprints exist under RH, which has gobbled up a number of publishers over the years. But have no fear! Dohle says: "I want to stress the fact that all the imprints of Random House will retain their distinct editorial identities. These imprints and all of you who support them are the creative core of our business and essential to our success." Ah, what a relief...

Lines like this - "Because of the current economic crisis, our industry is facing some of the most difficult times in publishing history" - are scary indeed, though. And best of luck to two departing bigwigs - Irwyn Applebaum and Steve Rubin, freshly out of work with the re-org.

I hear PW and Publishers Lunch email alerts are filling inboxes all over the publishing world. Corporate publishing employees must feel under siege!

Publishing News Flash - More Houghton Trouble!

It seems Houghton's publisher has gone and resigned! This just in from the New York Times' ever-reliable Motoko Rich:

In a sign of further setbacks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which represents authors like Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer and Günter Grass, the publisher of the company’s adult trade division has resigned.

The publisher, Becky Saletan, who took the job in January, will leave the company Dec. 10.
Last week, the publisher temporarily stopped acquiring new books as its parent company, Education Media and Publishing Group, an Irish private equity concern, said it was not allocating as much capital to the consumer book business.

Josef Blumenfeld, a spokesman for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, confirmed that Ms. Saletan had resigned. Ms. Saletan did not return calls or an e-mail message, and Jeremy Dickens, president of Education Media, did not return calls. The news of Ms. Saletan’s resignation was first reported by The Associated Press.

Literary agents who knew Ms. Saletan were upset by the news of her departure. “I think that Becky is a woman of extraordinary integrity and had quickly become a terrific publisher,” said David Black, whose clients published by Houghton include the cookbook author Dorie Greenspan and the sports columnist Ian O’Connor. “It’s a significant loss.”

Ms. Saletan became publisher earlier this year after the merger of Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt, edging out Janet Silver, who had been at Houghton Mifflin for 24 years.
Houghton Mifflin, based in Boston, was acquired in 2006 by Riverdeep, an Irish software company backed by what is now Education Media. The next year the company bought Harcourt, an educational publisher.

In an interview last week, Mr. Dickens of Education Media said Houghton had about $7 billion in debt and that other publishers had expressed interest in it.

Obama and Publishing

Lori L. Tharps over at the Root offers an article about President-elect Obama's impact on publishing, specifically for black writers. (Via her blog, she directs readers interested in the topic of "Black people in the publishing industry" to the blog WriteBlack, run by Anika, which I hadn't read before. Looks like a fun spot worth visiting.)

Tharps doesn't make any definitive point in the article but nicely opens up this conversation, which is about publishing and of course more, in terms of a national conversation. How do we all discuss race with a black president coming into office? Publishing gets pulled out from other media because it's slower, and Tharps (and many others, myself included) feels it's also slower to publish by and for black people:

In the past month, those of us who make our living from the written word have started to ponder the possibilities. We are imagining the different ways the incoming president might inspire the overwhelmingly white publishing industry to get a clue about our stories... In the world B.O. (before Obama), publishers seemed to operate under the impression that black authors appealed only to black readers. Even worse, that those black readers were interested only in books that involved a lot of sex and ghetto baby-mama drama. For the past decade, support for authors of color with literary ambitions, or even those who just wanted to tell a different kind of story, has been dismal.

Fair play. She gets into the ghettoization of black writing and how publishers only seem comfortable with black authors writing "street" or "gangsta" lit, but what she doesn't address is the problem with corporate booksellers and how they truly segregate black writing separate from other writing, even black fiction versus "literature." That's definitely a part of the equation. When does a writer get to the point where she's next to Toni Morrison rather than Lisa Lennox?

I do appreciate the point Malaika Adero of Atria Books makes: "Sometimes there's this notion that publishers introduce the hot new thing," she says, "but we don't lead, we follow." I don't know if this has to be the case, but I do know, especially in this point in time with the economy shrinking and publishers less willing to take risks, it's gonna be the case for awhile.

But here's another possibility: maybe when the dust settles on this recession, as our economy reorganizes itself, with banks and sellers restructuring credit and consumers shopping in more educated ways - locally, sustainably - maybe there will be an opportunity for a publisher or publishers to go out with a new direction and challenge the kind of thinking that says every new project brought to the editorial board as an acquisition has to have 2 or 3 or 200 precedents, that every new book has to fit the XXXX meets XXXX model. If national, independent publishers are not desperate to make enough to stay open, maybe they will be able to lead - like Soft Skull has done with fiction in recent times. And maybe this can bode well for black writers wanting to break out of the segregated publishing AND bookselling world.

I return to a phrase I find myself saying or thinking a lot these days: Here's hoping!