31 October 2005

A new literacy initiative

The plans for next year’s World Book Day, on 2 March 2006, are becoming increasingly ambitious. Gail Rebuck, CEO of the Random House UK Group, is spearheading the initiative and wrote recently in Publishing News about its importance: ‘I am dismayed by the statistic that 33% of the population never buys a book… 26 million people have levels of literacy and numeracy below those expected of school leavers with a reasonable grade at GCSE.’

Research from the Adult Basic Skills Agency shows that seven million adults in the UK have serious problems with reading and that two million can barely read. The figures speak for themselves and are not only appalling in terms of seven million people’s limited access to the world in a literate society, but also have serious implications for the book trade. Some European countries have better figures than these, the US is even worse.

The World Book Day initiative is primarily addressed at this semi-literate audience. The first twelve titles in the Quick Reads series will be launched in March, with ten more to follow in May 2007. Written by well-known writers, they will be accessible, fun and easy to read, tempting those who do not read with ease or at speed to try them.

The hope is that another audience will also be captured by these books, the large number of people who can read but don’t have time for it in their busy lives. Rebuck’s argument is that it is vital for the book trade to find these readers and to persuade them that they can make a place for books in their lives: ‘If we can get fans of Maeve Binchy, Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters, Joanna Trollope and Conn Iggulden, for whom a 400-page novel is not an option, back into the shops and libraries, and put a Quick Read into their hands, we will remind them of the great joy of reading for pleasure and get them back into the reading habit.’

The average Briton spends 17.5 hours a week watching television and 16 hours a week listening to radio, but only seven hours a week reading. It is vital for everyone involved in the book business to stimulate more interest in reading and to develop or reinstate the reading habit. Otherwise is will remain a pleasure many people will never have had access to, or which is effectively gone for good.

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24 October 2005

Frankfurt Book Fair 2005

This has been the weekend of the Frankfurt Book Fair, rather later this year than usual and, with 7,223 exhibitors from 101 countries exhibiting 380,655 titles, the biggest ever. The Frankfurt Book Fair intends to concentrate on the three pillars of business, culture and politics, according to new Fair director Juergen Boos: 'The very existence of publishing companies and of the Book Fair as well, is based of course on freedom of expression and of the press.'

But how much can change and affect the new freedoms in such a short space of time. It’s only a year ago that Google launched their Google Print initiative at last year’s Frankfurt, but just this week the Association of American Publishers has marked the anniversary by filing suit against Google Print for Libraries on the grounds that ‘Google commits infringement when it scans entire books covered by copyright and a court order preventing it from doing so without permission of the copyright owner.’

AAP president Patricia Schroeder says: ‘While authors and publishers know how useful Google's search engine can be and think the Print Library could be an excellent resource, the bottom line is that under its current plan Google is seeking to make millions of dollars by freeloading on the talent and property of authors and publishers.’

Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented in the Wall Street Journal: "The program's critics maintain that any use of their books requires their permission. We have the utmost respect for the intellectual and creative effort that lies behind every grant of copyright. Copyright law, however, is all about which uses require permission and which don't; and we believe (and have structured Google Print to ensure) that the use we make of books we scan through the Library Project is consistent with the Copyright Act, whose "fair use" balancing of the rights of copyright-holders with the public benefits of free expression and innovation allows a wide range of activity, from book quotations in reviews to parodies of pop songs - all without copyright-holder permission.’

It looks as if Boos is right to include politics amongst the Frankfurt Book Fair’s themes. With increasing globalisation in publishing and the Internet now nothing less than a global resource, authors’ copyright needs careful protection. Or is the AAP just burying its head in the sand?

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17 October 2005

The Man Booker - triumph or disaster?

The result of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction this week was a surprise to everyone. In a year when the heavy hitters were there in force, the Prize has gone to a relatively obscure Irish writer who was first named as a Booker contender in 1989. His book, The Sea, was the one which was selling least well from all those on the shortlist. Booksellers were disappointed that the Prize did not go to the distinguished favourite Julian Barnes, the hugely accomplished Kazuo Ishiguro or the glamorous young contender Zadie Smith.

It’s the first time an Irish writer has won the Booker since Roddy Doyle in 1993. John Banville said: ‘One of the things about the Booker is, it’s very good for publishing. Literary publishers can go to their money men and say, look, good literary publishing can make money too.’ To support this, Picador has already reprinted 50,000 copies of the book and there has been a 1900% increase in its sales at Waterstone’s.

Clearly the judges had a hard time choosing the winner and it is rumoured that the chair, Professor John Sutherland, had to use his casting vote. He said: ‘it was an extraordinarily closely contested last round … the judges felt the level of the shortlisted novels was as high as it can ever have been.’ He called The Sea ‘a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected. It is an incredibly written piece of work if very melancholy. But if you can’t tune into it, it won’t work for you.’

The book is not universally admired. In an extraordinarily strongly worded attack, Boyd Tonkin, the Literary Editor of the Independent, said: ‘Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest. By choosing John Banville’s The Sea, they selected an icy and over-controlled exercise in coterie aestheticism ahead of a shortlist, and a long list, packed with a plenitude of riches and delights.’

But of course there’s really no right and wrong relating to judging panels’ choice of winners. In the end they are simply a group of people with individual views, and, whatever anyone else thinks, it is entirely unpredictable what the outcome of the judging process will be. Anyone who’s ever judged a literary prize knows this is true. There’s no doubt though that over the years the Booker Prize has established an international reputation and that it really does sell books. So perhaps John Banville’s comment highlights the most important element of all this – the massive public interest in the Man Booker Prize - and the huge publicity and sales it generates for literary fiction.

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10 October 2005

Still working on saving our short story

Perhaps surprisingly, it looks as if the Save Our Short Story campaign may actually have had some effect. The length of the short story may have become a virtue, when everyone has become so pushed for time. In the UK a new site, Story, has been set up by Booktrust, with Arts Council funding, to support the form: ‘We believe that the short story is one of the most exciting and important literary forms, that can and should reach the widest possible readership.’

Jackie Kay’s eloquent article on the site in support of the short story ends:

‘A story should stay with you long after you have put it down. A good story should change the way you see things, the way you think. It should help you know yourself better... It is an exciting time for the short story. It is the perfect form for our times.’

On 25 September the inaugural Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest short story prize at €50,000, sponsored by O'Flynn Construction, was presented to Yiyun Li for her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Later this month Legend Press will publish The Remarkable Everyday, a volume of stories each based around a single day in a character’s life. There are many authors focusing on writing short stories, such as Leigh Rowley who publishes them on her website.

But does anyone want to read them, or are short stories something writers want to write but no-one wants to read? There are very few outlets for individual short stories, now that women’s magazines have reined right back and there are fewer more literary magazines to send them to. It rather remains to be seen whether this rekindling of interest will lead to improved sales of short story collections - the evidence of the past is, sadly, against it. Alison Samuels, publishing director of Chatto and Windus says:

'Publishers are often blamed for telling authors to concentrate on novels because short story collections don't sell, but that is the truth - they simply don't.  You can market novels and stories by the same writer in exactly the same way and the stories still won't sell.  It's a question of changing people's perceptions.  This prize is the best thing that could have happened to writers of short stories because it's got everybody talking.'

So can all this interest change people’s perceptions, create a new audience and make readers reach for short stories? Right now, the jury’s out.

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3 October 2005

Making poetry fun

This week sees a great outpouring of poetry in Britain’s schools, many of which will be celebrating National Poetry Day with a visit from a poet. These visits have brought poetry to millions of children, making them realise just how much fun it can be.

The Poetry Society invites everyone to vote for the poem they would most like to send into space, to be read in 100 years’ time. The 'Poem for Space' poll is launched to tie in with this year's theme of The Future, and to mark the twelfth National Poetry Day on 6 October.

The Poetry Book Society reworks its children’s book club, the Children’s Poetry Bookshelf, with the launch of a new fun-filled, child-friendly website, www.childrenspoetrybookshelf.co.uk. It’s reaching out on a global scale to new audiences of parents, grandparents and libraries, providing a selection of the best new poetry and wonderful backlist books. The CPB is also stepping up its educational activities to provide teachers, and anyone else who wants them, with activity sheets to help adults encourage children to read and enjoy poetry.

Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, and poets Wes Magee and Valerie Bloom will be taking part in the relaunch of the Children’s Poetry Bookshelf in a jamboree of poetry in London on Sunday 9 October. This is the first of four family events which will provide fun for the children and encourage parents and grandparents to join in and get the best new poetry books sent to their children.

The children’s poetry scene is jumping in the UK, as many of the wonderful poets writing for children – Adrian Mitchell, Ian McMillan, John Hegley, Brian Patten, Grace Nicholls and Roger McGough, amongst many others – have inspired a generation of children to discover for themselves that poetry is fun.

National Poetry Day is embedded in Children’s Book Week, with many more activities designed to bring the joys of books to children. The new Children’s Laureate, bestselling author Jacqueline Wilson, is just beginning to use her two years in the job to focus on the joys of reading aloud and encouraging children to find out – and enjoy – the great classics of children’s literature.

And does all this activity make a difference? Well, yes, it really does. A whole generation of children is being encouraged to find that books are not just for school. They are straying outside the confines of the national curriculum to discover that poetry can be great fun, and that a book really can be the gateway to another world.

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26 September 2005

Authors Guild sues Google for copyright infringement

The Authors Guild of America, with four authors, has taken the extraordinary step of filing a class action suit against Google over its unauthorised scanning and copying of books through its Google Library programme. The suit alleges that the $90 billion search engine and advertising juggernaut is engaging in massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers. It says that through its Google Library programme, the company is reproducing rights still in copyright from the University of Michigan’s Library.

Nick Taylor, President of the Author’s Guild, said: ‘This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law. It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.’

In the strict sense it looks as if the Authors’ Guild may well be right. Although Google has agreements with four academic libraries, those of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford, to create digital copies of substantial part of their collections and to make those collections available for searching online, the Internet giant has made no attempt to clear this with the authors of those works which are still in copyright.

The Authors Guild website (which is currently curiously hard to find through Google) points out to its members that: ‘Google is a commercial, not a charitable, enterprise. Google is worth roughly $90 billion (£50.68 billion), making staggering profits through its online advertising programs. Its investment in Google Library is intended to bring even more visitors and profits to its website and ancillary services. The Guild is all for profit, but when the profit comes from the works of authors, the authors should be properly compensated… Google is digitizing countless texts, your books, in their entirety - every sentence, every carefully chosen word - without your permission.’

Ranged up against the Guild are many who feel that the huge potential of the Internet is its ability to deliver information globally and instantly. Its most powerful search engine gives authors a chance to have their books made available to the world.

The Los Angeles Times, well-known for its excellent book pages, expresses this other view:

‘If the paranoid myopia that drives such thinking penetrates too deeply into the law, search engines will eventually shut down. What's the difference, after all, between a copyrighted Web page and a copyrighted book? What if Internet entrepreneurs could sue Google for indexing their websites? What if the law required search engines to get clearance for every Web page? Even a company as large and well-funded as Google couldn't pull that off because what's on the Internet, and who owns that content, changes constantly… Technology that makes it easier to find, buy and read books is good for everyone - even the authors suing Google.’

This is a debate which cuts right to the heart of copyright, what it really means for authors, and the vast possibilities opening up for them the web.

Authors Guild

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19 September 2005

TV promotion gets authors published

Richard and Judy’s book club has been one of the great successes of the past two years, showing, as Oprah Winfrey has done in the States, how television can really help to bring books to a wider audience.  the authors involved have seen huge increases in their sales but publishers have also been pleased to find improvements in their sales figures as a whole, although the benefit has of course focused on the titles chosen.

Richard and Judy’s latest promotion has had an interesting outcome. Their How To Get Published competition has been a huge success. The plan was straightforward – to find a really good new writer who would get a £50,000 advance and then to promote the book on air through Richard and Judy. The pent-up desire of thousands of authors’ to get published was such that the competition had no less than 46,000 submissions, which had to consist of a first chapter and a synopsis of the rest.

Anyone in the book business would expect to find a lot of unpublishable material amongst such a large number of submissions, but in the event what has actually happened is much more cheering than anyone could have imagined. The winner was Christine Aziz, whose book The Olive Readers will be published on 7^th October. But the publishers, Pan Macmillan, were so impressed by the entries that they have awarded not one publishing contract but seven. So for seven unpublished writers their dream will come true.

Although the R & J publicity will help, the publisher says that it is only doing this because it thinks that the books are worth publishing. Maria Rejt, publishing director, says: ‘I hope we have bought authors who will stay with Macmillan and go on to have wonderful writing careers. I’m not interested in publishing one-off books. I’m interested in building careers.’

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12 September 2005

The battle for Ottakar’s

At the time of writing the battle for Ottakar’s still rages. It all started with the bookselling chain producing worse-than-expected trading figures for the year to date, exacerbated by Ottakar’s getting a smaller slice of the Harry Potter 6 cake than had been anticipated. Irked no doubt by the wringing of hands in the city, James Heneage, founder and MD of Ottakar’s, and two other directors decided to take the firm back into private ownership with a management buyout. Ottakar’s has expanded successfully over the years and has always been respected in the trade for its focus on branch autonomy and a clear and successful strategy of building a family market for its shops, many of them in British market towns rather than cities.

So far, so good, and in spite of the recent dip in sales growth Heneage and Co had no difficulty in getting venture capital backing. The buyout team even recruited the well-regarded David Roche, Waterstone’s Product Director, as chief executive, with a brief to sort out the systems side which was thought to be holding Ottakar’s back in its growth plans. The MBO team even went back and upped their offer to shareholders to make sure that the bid would be fully supported.

Enter the big bad wolf, in the form of major competitor Waterstone’s, with an offer of 440p ($8.09), pitched 40p ($.735) higher than the MBO offer. Although any other parties have until 20 September to bid, this looks difficult for the MBO team to improve on. One might expect some interest from American giant Borders, which has been building very successfully in the UK, but they may be unwilling to invest this kind of money, in spite of the rapid growth in their international division.

Since Waterstone’s and Ottakar’s are the two biggest bookshop chains in the UK, the deal might be challenged by the Monopolies Commission. This looks unlikely though, because in spite of the great power this acquisition would give Waterstone’s, the two companies together would represent only 23.6% of the market and the monopoly figure is 25%.

If the Waterstone’s bid does scoop up Ottakar’s, many will feel regretful about this further concentration of book retailing power. The Ottakar’s chain is much liked by book buyers and publishers. Its focus on branch-level decisions and serving a local market has been quite different from the increasing centralisation of Waterstone’s. There is a real difference in culture, which has pitched Ottakar’s closer to the independents, whilst Waterstone’s has definitely become imbued with big company culture. Sadly though, it seems there’s little to stop the onward march of the big battalions, as the giants of the book trade become bigger and bigger. Book publishing and selling are big business now and their inevitable focus on bestsellers will continue to dominate the scene.

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5 September 2005

Big deals for new children's authors

A couple of big deals for newcomers writing for children show that a lot of the action in the publishing world continues to be in the children’s area.

Worldwide publishing deals have been achieved for an author who is still only sixteen. Catherine Banner was lucky enough to encounter the then-children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo, who was impressed by her work. She met agent Simon Trewin at the Cambridge Wordfest and he rapidly took on her novel, The Eyes of a King, which is the first of a trilogy and centres on three 15-year-old characters. Banner is not only still at school but has not yet entered the sixth form.

The other sensation is a first children’s book from Frances Hardinge, a graphic designer who was made redundant and decided to travel the world. Her children’s book, Fly by Night, which is another fantasy novel about a trio, is in other ways quite different from The Eyes of a King, although both exhibit the originality which publishers say they are looking for.

Frances Hardinge says: ‘When I started Fly by Night I wanted to write a book that I’d enjoy writing and which I though people would enjoy reading. I have a huge enthusiasm for words and the eccentricity of them, and that became a strong theme in the book.’ Hardinge, currently in Thailand, will take up her life as a full-time author when she returns to the UK for publication this autumn.

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22 August 2005

Dog days dispute threatens book supply

In what the UK reckons to be the dog days of summer, the most extraordinary dispute looks headed for open warfare. W H Smith, purveyor of books, stationery and newspapers, is currently struggling to wake out of its long slumber. The company wants to become the effective force in retail that it used to be. Given the chain’s enormous number of branches, their power – for good or ill - in the book trade is considerable. For years they have punched beneath their weight, but now a well-regarded retail specialist, Kate Swann, is trying to reshape the organisation to meet the newly competitive world in which it finds itself. Given what‘s going on in the shops, this is now against the background of a major retail downturn.

All this makes it even more amazing that Smith’s should join battle with its major suppliers over an issue on which the publishers cannot give way. But that is exactly what the chain seems to be poised to do. It is endeavouring to push through a new Conditions of Purchase contract, which will fine publishers for late delivery. The fines are being deducted from accounts and thus imposed in a summary fashion. If publishers deliver late this may seem fair on the face of it, but WHS itself if famed for its poor compliance. Publishers are threatening to retaliate if the retailer does not fulfil its side of the bargain in terms of paid-for promotions.

The core of the problem is WHS’s stock system, which remains unable to talk to the Nielsen BookData system on which the entire book trade operates. This includes the chain’s major competitors Waterstone’s and Ottakkar’s. Large amounts of manual update, which is impractical in practice, would be the only way of keeping abreast of all the book information Nielsen BookData updates weekly. The result is chaos.

In the meantime tempers are getting decidedly frayed. ‘If Smith’s don’t back off, there will be legal disputes’ one senior figure in the trade told Publishing News. This looks like a battle no-one can win, and it might be a last straw for Smith’s in the current shaky retail situation.

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2 August 2005

Babies get a Bookstart in life

The British Education Minister, Ruth Kellly has just pledged £27 million ($48 million) to turn the ‘books for babies’ Bookstart scheme into a reality for every child. Generous funding from the Chancellor has enabled the wonderful Bookstart scheme to be extended on a national scale and will fund three book parcels being provided for each child.

Starting in 1992 with 300 babies, the scheme has grown over the years, reaching 650,000 babies by 2000 and over a million since then.  Now the funding will allow for greater distribution to more children and the talk is of 9 million books.

At their 8 month health check the babies receive their first pack, which consists of 2 baby books, a nursery rhyme placemat, advice on sharing books with children, a book list and an invitation to join the local library. At around eighteen months the toddlers received a satchel-type bag containing two books, a scribble pad and a library invitation.  At the age of around three, the children will get a Bookstart treasure chest, a box with hidden compartments containing books.

Throughout this distribution of government-funded largesse, the emphasis has been on helping babies to enjoy books from the very earliest age and to encourage parents to read to their children and take them to the library.

Jacqueline Wilson, the children’s Laureate, said: ‘I had my daughter when I was very young – just 21 and with no money – and I would have loved it had the government sent me a pile of lovely, coloured books. It is fantastic that the government is trying to encourage parents to read aloud.’

The 20 publishers involved in this initiative have supplied books in increasingly large quantities, often at close to cost.  Many parents have responded with enthusiasm and the feedback from the children has encouraged parents also to focus on reading to their children and making books part of their lives from an early age. 

The results show clearly that Bookstart works.  A study carried out by the University of Birmingham in 2000 showed that Bookstart children showed a significantly increased interest in books.  A further study in 2001, by the University of Surrey, showed that Bookstart youngsters were six times more likely to be library members and confirmed that the effect of the early exposure to books lasts and helps with the children's attitudes to reading throughout their schooldays. And thus the children are turned into readers for life. It really is a fantastic scheme!

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25 July 2005

Amazon powers along

Amazon is steaming ahead and making good progress with its aim to become the biggest Internet shopping site. Robin Terrell, until recently MD of Amazon UK, said: 'We want to be where you can discover anything that you want to buy.'

Recent figures from the international division, which comprises the company's UK, German, French, Japanese and Chinese sites, grew 33% in the three months to end June.  Given its dominant position in the US, these international sites must be where the Internet retailer is looking to expand.

Amazon’s Marketplace scheme, which shows used books alongside the new ones, ranked in price order, has been a great success for the company.  It is beginning to cause serious concern to publishers, agents and authors, who feel it must be affecting new book sales.  Search inside the Book, which has just been made available in the UK, is also thought by publishers to be a step too far, even though big publishers have largely accepted it in the States.  Unlike the recent Google Print initiative, only a small portion of the book is made available, more of a taster, but Amazon's wish to digitise the whole book is still causing friction.

In spite of the fact that Amazon supplies goods at close to shop prices, once the discount has been balanced against the postage, it has managed to achieve and maintain a reputation for offering value for money, which is attractive to students and to heavy book-buyers.  Many demanding readers find it invaluable as a source of backlist and obscure titles.  As compared to trailing round the shops, it takes no more than the click of a button to check if the title is available and what it costs.  It's not surprising that many publishers now rate Amazon as their most important outlet as far as backlist is concerned.  It is believed to account for up to 75% of Amazon's book sales.

As a consumer, one can only be grateful that so many backlist titles are available from Amazon, but what makes you uneasy is the memory that backlist was always the strength of chains such as Waterstone's.  The territory seems to have been ceded too easily by terrestrial booksellers to an international giant which may have started with books, but now has its eyes set on international domination of internet sales.  The book business, which produces so many new models each year and keeps so many of the old models in stock, is particularly open to the seduction of the web - and particularly vulnerable to it too.  But there is no turning the clock back.  The Internet - and Amazon - are here to stay.

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25 July 2005

'Something really special'

J K Rowling has done it again. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince or HP 6 as it is known in the book trade, has once again enthralled millions of children, continuing the trend which has seen sales rocket with every single book. The sales have made the author the 36^th richest person in Britain. Harry Potter has become, as Robert McCrum of the Observer commented: ‘an international literary brand of almost unprecedented power that stretches from China to Peru, taking in some 90 countries’.

After all the book trade sniping about pricing and discount (see News Review 11 July, Here comes Harry Potter!), publication night itself was pure magic for many children, with great inventiveness at many bookshops, especially the independents. In the UK Bookscan estimated that 2.01 million copies were sold on the first day. W H Smith said that in the first 24 hours it was selling at 13 copies every second, as opposed to 8 copies a second for the previous book. The American publisher Scholastic reckoned that 6.9 million copies were sold in the first 24 hours and immediately ordered a reprint of 2.7 million copies.

Even though the translated editions of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will not be available till October, there were queues to buy the book in non-English speaking cities as far apart as Beijing and Mexico.

Although there have been criticisms in the past about J K Rowling’s lack of originality, the new book won high praise from many. Rosie Jenkins, the 10-year-old who won a competition to review it in the Observer, said it was ‘a much darker, more frightening and unsettling book than the previous ones… and I love it.’

It’s interesting to look back and contrast the Harry Potter phenomenon of today with its starting-point – an unpublished ms produced by a single mother writing in cafes to keep warm. This was not so very long ago. The book is rumoured to have been rejected by eight publishers before being taken on by Barry Cunningham, a highly inventive children’s publisher who had left Bloomsbury by the time it was published. Christopher Little, J K Rowling’s agent, described how the first sale had gone:

'I wrote back to J K Rowling within four days of receiving the manuscript. I thought that there was something really special there, although we could never have guessed what would happen to it. It took a long time from there to get to the stage where we signed with the publisher.'

Rowling has had many critics and many imitators, but none have managed to surpass the sheer page-turning quality of her books. This is the magic which keeps children coming back for more.

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18 July 2005

Londoners get back to work after bomb blasts

It’s been an extraordinary couple of weeks in London. It’s felt like a real rollercoaster as we have swung from the excitement of Live Aid, to the hopes of African debt relief, the Make Poverty History campaign and the G8 conference in Scotland. Then there was the astounding news that the Olympic Games were coming to the city. Whatever one’s personal view of this, the outcome is a fantastic tribute to the amazing campaign which showed London as the vibrant, creative, multicultural city it has become.

Then, the very next day, there were the bomb blasts in what looked like the fates taking their revenge but can only have been a carefully planned act of terrorism relating to the G8 summit. Thursday 7^th was a day of terrifying anxiety, as I can testify, having spent the day in an office very close to the bus blast. This was followed by a week of working in cordoned-off offices, a constant reminder of what had happened, against the gruesome backdrop of the identification of the dead. Then there was the news that the first suicide bombers in Western Europe, who had set off the first-ever terrorist explosions in the Tube, were born and bred in England.

All this makes it hard to concentrate on the book business and the concerns of writers. One freelance picture researcher working for Transworld is amongst the dead and a Pearson employee is still missing. Many in the publishing business reported close escapes, as the bombs were timed to go off at the height of the morning rush hour, to kill as many people as possible.

Londoners, hardened to terror by the IRA campaigns of the past and the clear knowledge that the city was a likely Al Qaeda target, were mostly stoical. Most people were back at work by the Monday after the bombers hit. The prevailing feeling was that getting on with life was the right thing to do, a mixture of British stiff upper lip, pragmatism and the view that that letting oneself be frightened would be a victory for the bombers. Although many were frustrated by the long journey to work during a hot week, the streets of London were busy and life rapidly regained a semblance of normality.

We are grateful for the concern and good wishes we have received from our friends around the world.

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11 July 2005

Here comes Harry Potter!

As the clock strikes midnight and Saturday 16 July begins, thousands of excited children will seize their copies of the new J K Rowling novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, join in the festivities surrounding its publication and race off to start reading the latest instalment of Harry Potter’s story.

The last title, Harry and Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was a worldwide hit, selling 250 million books worldwide. It was translated into 61 languages. The films based on the books have taken £1 billion ($1.737 billion) at the box office and also sold £430 million ($747 million) worth of DVDs.

Last time the UK sales went very much in the supermarkets’ favour, with half of the copies sold in the first week of publication going through the supermarket chain Tesco, which opened 367 branches at midnight. But it was Amazon which took 1.1 million advance orders online.

There has been a lot of discussion in the UK book trade about the supermarkets’ plans to slash the price of this lengthy book from its published price of £16.99 (nearly $30), making it very difficult for independent bookshops to compete. There are rumours that Tesco will at the last minute drop its price to undercut, or at least match, that of Wal-mart-owned Asda, which is currently pricing at £8.96 ($15.55) Outrage has been expressed in the book trade about the ‘wasted’ discount that all book retailers are giving away on a book which is so much in demand that many feel there is no need to cut the price.

The children playing Harry and his friends Hermione and Ron in the films are now quite big teenagers, but there’s a new crop of children to add to the existing fans for each new book. Sales of the adult editions of the Harry Potter books are substantial now.

A just-published survey has shown that teachers believe the books boost children's reading abilities and encourage them to read more widely.  They are also credited with triggering much greater interest in children's literature in the media and in bookshops.  Harry Potter is like a runaway train. It looks as if nothing can stop the sixth instalment being another extraordinary and record-busting success.

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4 July 2005

Globalisation hits publishing

Sad news about redundancies and an Australian bookshop chain going bust show how the way books are sold is changing. This will affect everyone, from writers right down through the book chain to readers.

In the UK HarperCollins have just announced that they will be slimming down their sales force by seven, hopefully mostly through voluntary redundancy. This will take the field sales force for this large publisher down from 16 to nine. Penguin UK went through a similar exercise in March, again with the loss of seven jobs, merging their children’s and adult sales forces.

Big publishers are taking this step in order to benefit from economies (it is extremely expensive to keep a rep on the road) made possible by increased central buying on the part of the bookshop chains. The chains are moving to central buying in order to force through more discounts at group level to support their very competitive promotions. If you as a book-buyer are beginning to get the impression that the chains all feel the same, because they’re all carrying the same 3 for 2 promotion as each other, you’d be right.

Not everyone thinks this is the right way to go. Reducing your sales force and thinking you can sell through wholesalers may be a very bad strategy. One independent bookshop manger commented that: ’The influence of reps is wide-reaching. If you’ve got a longstanding relationship with a rep, they can push your case in getting author events and selling lots more copies of their books.’ But economies of scale and cutbacks in sales forces mean that even the biggest publishers have given up selling directly to most independent bookshops; they just don’t have the manpower to do so. For authors this is a deeply worrying trend, as big publishers deal with big chains and both focus more and more on large promotions and bestselling authors, freezing everyone else out of the action.

Meanwhile in Australia the bankruptcy of Collin Booksellers, with 23 stores across the country, shows that, once you’ve figured out what to do, it’s essential to do it quickly and change with the market. In the sixties Collins opened up stores in shopping centres and their business boomed, but in the current decade they have been outsold by their competitors’ superstores. It’s the same picture as in the States, where Borders and others have made the smaller shops, including many independents, uncompetitive. But the net effect is fewer bookshops and more power concentrated in the hands of fewer big groups, both booksellers and publishers. Books, like other businesses, are suffering from globalisation.

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27 June 2005

Here comes the big bonanza

As the bookselling world gears up for the big bonanza surrounding the publication of the sixth book in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, there seems to be more and more focus on children’s books. Its publisher Bloomsbury has forecast a £20 million pre-tax profit and is even the subject of nervous city reports because of its dependence on the Potter books.

A massive number of bookshops will be opening for midnight sales of the book on 15^th/16^th July. Borders will open all 32 stores and has even set up a ‘Wizards Workshop’ designed to brush up employees’ knowledge of the Harry Potter books. There is expected to be frenzied price-cutting from the official published price of £16, with many bookshops selling at £12.99. The chains looks like discounting to £9.99 and the supermarket chain Asda is offering £8.95 on pre-orders. There’s also been persistent criticism of the savage discounting ‘giving away’ the profit on the biggest sure-fire bestseller of the year.

This immense wave of excitement on publication of the new Harry Potter title will be repeated across the world, but J K Rowling is far from being the only children’s author who can stir up such passionate loyalty. Jacqueline Wilson, who has recently taken on the role of Children’s Laureate in the UK, has a huge fan following and is currently the most successful author in Britain in terms of overall number of books sold (News Review 37 12 April 2004 Unofficial Laureate of the Sleepover Generation).

Roald Dahl, thought by many adults to be a bad influence on the young, was adored by his legions of child fans. At the recent opening of the Roald Dahl Museum, complete with chocolate doors, Cherie Blair said that his legacy had been to get children involved in reading and writing. This dedication to their child readers marks out many children’s authors, including all the children’s laureates (News Review 14 February Boom in children's books and News Review 21 February Children's writers hit the headlines).

We have recently reported on developments in the children’s book world. The liveliness of the children’s market has been reflected in other initiatives, such as the launch of the Waterstone’s/Faber competition, The Wow Factor, reported on this week.

"There's never been a better time to be a children's writer," says George Grey, Head Children's Buyer at Waterstone's. "The country's top three best selling fiction authors are all children's writers and UK leads the world in children's fiction. THE WOW FACTOR is giving new writers a unique chance to get the financial and marketing support needed to become a successful children's author."

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20 June 2005

Transatlantic synergies?

Two of the panel discussions at the recent BookExpo came up with interestingly diverse views on selling globally.

Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury expressed a positive view about the advantages of being able to publish a title across the company’s three branches in the UK, US and Germany: ‘The single most difficult part of publishing is selecting the big winners. Why not get three bangs for your buck, and leverage the acquisition across the world?’

But Stephen Page of Faber thought that this was good publishing, rather than corporate synergy: ‘I want to take a big baseball bat to the idea of global publishing. It is fantasy.’ He said he felt that global partnerships ‘make you feel great when you have access to resources, but miserable when you’re forced to publish.’

Nonetheless the pressure on editors in UK and US publishing houses to work with editors in their sister companies across the Atlantic in the acquisition of world rights is a real old chestnut, high on the corporate wish-list and not likely to go away. Anyone in the business knows that you can only work with editors in other countries who share your taste, and these may or may not work for your sister company. Because the corporation is incapable of seeing something as intangible as individual taste as an important factor in all this, it is all too easy for the view from above to be that working together is just a matter of sending out an instruction to your editors.

Agents hate world rights deals anyway, as these deprive them of the chance of selling overseas and they think, with some justification, that publishers’ rights departments will not do as good a job. This view was expressed in another BookExpo panel discussion. For a book to go automatically to another part of the same large company in another country may not be a recipe for the best publishing, which often comes through individual editors reacting with passion to a ms and working together to publish it well.

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13 June 2005

US new titles soar to 195,000

BookExpo America, the biggest book fair in the US, seems to have been the usual heady mixture of author breakfasts, panel discussions and bookselling. Booksellers are wooed by publishers and do the rounds collecting large numbers of early proof copies of the big fall books.

For the US book trade the fair is a must and a chance to meet up with old friends. ‘There's a lot of schmoozing going on, but real work gets done and you can really set up books coming down the pike,’ was the view of Suzanne Herz, a publisher at Doubleday. But BEA, although still important, is getting smaller, occupying around 270,000 square feet of floor space, some 50,000 square feet less than it did in the late 1990s, as publishers cut back to reduce their costs.

BEA is an intensely American book fair, with international subsidiary rights business very much less important than the business of selling the big books to American booksellers. In that respect, the London Book Fair, heading in 2006 for a new, out-of-the-way venue in London’s Docklands, has already stolen the crown of the big spring rights fair. It’s so much more welcoming to rights business and London is much cheaper for European publishers to get to.

On the domestic front the American book business has much to think about. Bowker’s recently published figures show that last year the number of books published raced up to 195,000 new titles, an increase of 14% over 2003. The largest print on demand companies catering for self-publishers account for 20,000 of these titles, but the figure is still quite astounding. Poetry and drama show increases in the number of titles published of over 40% in a single year; presumably many of these titles are self-published.

Book Industry Study Group figures point to a drop of 21 million units in the number of general trade books books sold, although rising prices mean that revenues increased to $28 billion. Within these figures there are startling trends. Sales of children’s books, surprisingly, given all the hoop-la, are down, as are mass market sales. But trade hardcover sales of fiction are up, and so most of the big trade houses are publishing more.

The biggest change is in college textbooks, where the sudden increase in used book sales brought about by companies trading in secondhand books is thought to have taken $2 billion a year out of the market. Since students are a particularly price-sensitive market, this trend is likely to continue, and may yet have a more radical effect on other parts of the book market.

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6 June 2005

The Dark is Rising

Susan Cooper is the latest author to be acclaimed as the ‘new Rowling’. Her The Dark is Rising sequence of children’s novels, published mostly in the 70s, is been taken up by Hollywood in a deal worth £2 million.

But Cooper is far from the usual stereotype of new writer makes good. About to celebrate her 70^th birthday, she is an Englishwoman who has spent most of her adult life living in the States. As well as the quintet of children’s fantasy novels, she has written fiction and non-fiction for adults, with her late husband Hume Cronyn, TV screenplays such as The Dollmaker and a number of children’s picture books, including Danny and the Kings, Frog and the Magician’s Boy.

The Dark is Rising is set in rural Buckinghamshire – and still will be in the films – and is about the battle between Dark and Light, introducing Celtic and Arthurian legends into the mix. Susan Cooper did not intend to write a sequence when she produced the first book:

‘The first of the five, I suddenly realized, was Over Sea, Under Stone, which I had written without knowing it would ever have a sequel, and now there would be four more. I sat down, on this astonishing idea-filled day, and wrote an outline of the sequence and the last page of the very last book. And then, over a period of six and a half years, I wrote The Dark Is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King, and Silver on the Tree.

This prolific and talented author is still writing, mostly for children, and she has strong views, as expressed on her website, about children and books, views which apply equally to child and adult writers:

‘Read, read, read, read, read. Of course you must learn English grammar, and something about the way stories are put together - but reading, endless general reading, is the only way to develop the sense of rhythm and language which enables a writer to 'hear' good prose inside his or her head and write it down. For writers under the age of about 16, reading is more important than writing. And the great peril, to be treated as if it were a drug, is television. Although I write for television, I feel passionately that children should watch it very seldom; that they should be encouraged whenever possible to turn off the set (or not to turn it on in the first place) and instead read a book.’

Once in a while fame and success goes to writers who seem most particularly to deserve it. Susan Cooper is one of those authors. We can look forward to a splendid sequence of films – and to the chance to read the books which have now been plucked from the obscurity of the backlist.

Susan Cooper's site is at: www.thelostland.com/welcome.htm

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30 May 2005

Web sales take off

Last month figures were released which showed that in the UK internet shopping overtook purchases from mail order catalogues for the first time. Last Christmas web sales in Britain rose by 20% over the previous year to £3 billion. In the US the trend is changing even faster and the comparative figure was 28%. Visa International recently estimated that global e-commerce sales grew last year by a whopping 56% to £79 billion ($150 billion).

Jeremy Warner, writing in the Independent, pointed out that: 'In growing numbers, customers go to the shops only to browse and select. They then return to the home and at the click of the mouse buy their pre-selected goods online... For how much longer will the high street be willing to act as just a shop window for the online purveyors? The internet always had the power to undermine traditional retailing. There's some evidence that it is now beginning to happen.’

Books have always been in the forefront of web selling, so perhaps the book business, already used to accommodating the meteoric growth of Amazon, will be less obviously affected by the growth in Internet retail. Clearly, book buyers do like to browse in bookshops and for those who still feel that this is a treat, Amazon, for all its online reviews, ‘if you liked this, then you’ll like this…’ and ‘Look inside the book’ does not compare.

As long as bookshops compete on price, they can avoid the fate of purveyors of computer equipment, for example, who seem doomed to a decline in their big ticket business by the ease of comparative pricing and purchase on the Internet. But certain kinds of bookselling, such as student textbooks, are acutely sensitive to Internet selling, particularly as regards secondhand books. For others, there’s a new opportunity. The trail blazed by Amazon can be followed by niche booksellers of all kinds, who can use cheaper technology and a global market to sell to a specialist audience.

There’s no room for complacency though, and fortune will continue to favour those who are quick on their feet and prepared to adapt to technological developments, a changing market and the ever more demanding requirements of their customers.

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23 May 2005

How good's your spelling?

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16 May 2005

New deal for authors

The British publisher Macmillan’s New Writing initiative may have been missed by those who don’t read either the Guardian or the Bookseller, but it does present an interesting comment on the current state of publishing. Macmillan will look at directly submitted manuscripts and from them choose a small number of books to publish on the new list. They will not pay the authors advances, but will give them a 20% royalty and a half share of subsidiary rights income. They will only accept manuscripts which need ‘light editing’ (presumably copy editing) and will tie the author in to the same deal on their second book. All the books on the list will be published at £15 in hardback format with a standard cover design.

What does Macmillan get out of this? Primarily potential access to some good new authors at very little risk to themselves, although the author can ‘escape’ after the second book and option type arrangements are notoriously difficult to enforce in practice if the author is unwilling. It’s also presumably good for the publishers to be seen as the champions of new writing.

From the writers’ point of view, it looks as if many of them, having been unable to get published elsewhere, have very little to lose. The lack of an advance is not in itself a deterrent and the royalty is generous by any standards. The authors do not have to take the publishing risk and their work will get into print and get some attention.

Agents, predictability, are scathing about the new scheme. In a memorable phrase, agent Natasha Fairweather described it as ’the Ryanair of publishing; it’s like having to pay for your own uniforms.’ Jonny Geller, said: ‘I don’t think there is a hope in hell of this succeeding… It’s clearly not in the writer’s long-term interest: this does not protect them in any way.’

The scheme does of course circumvent the agents’ virtual stranglehold on the submission process. It takes publishing back to an older model whereby authors are paid royalties for what they sell, rather than an advance which may not be earned out and is therefore often more like a purchase price. At a time when many writers are desperate to get a publisher to take them on, this could make sense.

But the real problem is the question of sales. Top agent Deborah Rogers drew attention to this: ‘What worries me is where are these books going to land in a bookshop? To make any book work you’re got to support it.’

Fellow-publisher Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape should have the last word: ‘If a book takes off Macmillan will be doing fantastically well – and they won’t lose much if they don’t. But will retailers want an influx of yet more new books – which could be a glorified slush-pile?’

Getting the New Writing books into the bookshops and selling them will be the real challenge. But writers should watch this new initiative, which may in the end offer a way forward.

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9 May 2005

Google Print under attack

There are growing signs of concern amongst UK publishers and authors about the Google Print project reported on in News Review 10 18 October 2004.

At the recent Booksellers’ Conference in Glasgow Nigel Newton, CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing, expressed his concern about Google’s plans to digitise book content: ‘We have all seen what happened with Napster and its devastating consequences for the music industry. While there is nothing now inherently wrong in what (Google) is suggesting, my concern is ten or twenty years’ time. In allowing our books to be scanned for free access we are opening a Pandora’s Box and we have no idea where it will lead. It is a short-sighted decision that could see our content the subject of battles between multi-national companies. I have no doubt about the good intentions of the company in question, but I am worried that more sales in one year could lead to fewer sales in twenty years.’

Google Print is currently planning to let users view only about five pages at one time and 20% of the text at the most in a month, but publishers can alter the restrictions. Random House US has recently signed up to a pilot project and there is no sign that American publishers or authors are currently feeling the same concern about the eventual outcome.

Speaking for authors in the UK, Mark le Fanu, General Secretary of the Society of Authors, has written to publishers expressing its concern about Google’s plans: ‘Controls against extensive use of digitised books and against the downloading of substantial amounts of material are in due course likely to be circumvented… Some publishers may be inclined to assume that they are free to allow companies like Amazon and Google to digitise texts, by virtue of electronic rights clauses in authors’ contracts, or under terms allowing promotional/publicity usage. We think that digitisation of whole texts goes way beyond ‘publicity’ and many contracts will not include the relevant electronic rights. In any event, we believe that authors’ consent should be sought individually, regardless of the contractual position.’

It’s always hard to see into the future. Digitisation of text and the power of the Internet offer undreamed-of opportunities to change the way text can be stored and retrieved. No-one wants to be a Luddite in the face of new technology, but Google Print’s plan will make the actual content of books available free online. It seems reasonable that authors, as the copyright holders and creators of the material, should share in the income produced. Newton’s concern therefore seems valid: ‘It is the exploitation of copyright for financial gain, and the publishers and authors should benefit from that. It is about giving away for free what we used to sell, and it doesn’t get more fundamental than that.’

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2 May 2005

Children's books go global at Bologna

The recent Bologna Children’s Book Fair has focused attention once again on fast-paced international growth in the children’s book market.

Picture books are proving hard to sell and most publishers have cut back their lists sharply to accommodate only the very best titles. HarperCollins UK’s right director said: ‘We still care deeply about them, but have cut back by almost 50%. That said, I have sold everything we’re doing… because it’s stronger.’

There are new initiatives relating to board books for babies, with Bloomsbury launching a new list of baby books in four series at Bologna. Perhaps this greater interest in books for the very young is influenced by the major funding for the brilliant Bookstart scheme. This will shortly involve sending every child in the UK a set of books not just soon after birth, but also at eighteen months and three years. Booktrust, which runs the scheme, produced research showing that it really did help to develop on children’s reading and their interest in books.

Bologna has always been key to the illustrated coedition market, and this year was no exception, with steady business on many deals which will extend the print-run of individual titles and series, making them commercially viable for everybody.

But fiction for older children was where interest was focused. Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother sequence has now been sold into 29 languages, including Hungarian, Finnish and Turkish deals signed at the fair. On Hand of the Devil, the powerful and chilling horror story written by Transworld’s postboy, five international deals were agreed within 24 hours of the fair opening.

US publishers continue to buy strongly from the UK and European publishers were as usual also interested to see the new books on offer from British publishers. Lina Sion of New York scouts Franklin Segal commented that ‘most of the big books of the fair are from the UK.’ Growing markets were Eastern Europe, Turkey, China and the Far East, where children’s books are seen as an important element of the drive for better education.

More than ever before the scouts and producers from the big Hollywood studies were out in force, having realised the importance of getting early information about future children’s bestsellers, especially books that will translate well to the screen.

Children’s publishing is becoming increasingly international, as new markets open up. In this ever more global market British writers do spectacularly well, as children’s books from the UK are reckoned by many international observers to be the most innovative and the best.

See  also in News Review:

Boom in children's books

Children's writing hits the headlines

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25 April 2005

'Grey is the New Black'

This was the title given to a session at the recent UK Booksellers' Association conference in Glasgow which focused attention on the growing importance of grey readers. Steve Bohme of Book Marketing Limited showed the increasing importance of this market, as the baby boom generation hits retirement. He said they represent ‘a huge opportunity, particularly for independent booksellers’. Henley Centre research already shows that in the past five years the value of UK book sales to 55 to 74 year olds has risen by 31%.

The increasing size of the grey market is a worldwide trend, shared by the US and by northern European countries where the population is ageing fast and living longer. US figures show that no less than 75 million live births were recorded between the years 1946 and 1965. The oldest cohort in this baby boom generation is just hitting retirement.

Henley figures show that spending by the over-fifties in Western Europe has increased three times faster than for any other group. In the past the baby boomers have crashed through each age group, imposing their own view of what that age represents. Now they are approaching retirement age with an unprecedented amount of money and the determination that they will enjoy their retirement.

In the UK the Saga organisation has made a huge success out of selling a wide range of services to the growing market of over-fifties. Emma Soames, the influential editor of Saga magazine, identified two core parts of this older market. There’s the ‘war old and the new old. The war old are probably the last generation who would prefer to borrow rather than buy. The new old have been consumers all their lives, baby boomers who have been buying since the days of the Beatles and Biba. They are much more like their children than their parents and many of them will go on saying they are middle-aged long into their seventies.’ But 95% of marketing spend in the UK is aimed at under fifties, according to the Henley Centre, and business seems terrified of openly approaching this huge market which is rapidly presenting itself.

As regards the book business, Richard Samson of Chrysalis cautioned against clinging to long-held assumptions of what this older market might like to read: ‘The 55 to 74s are buying less romance, cookery, health, business and DIY, and more crime, travel, sport, fitness and diet, humour and entertainment books.’ In short, the new greys are carrying their interests and reading tastes with them as they get older and have more time to devote to reading. Unlike the generations before them, many of them will have the money and lengthy retirement to indulge their interests. They are already starting to redefine retirement and it looks like this powerful group will present a completely different set of older readers, many of whom are keen book buyers.

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18 April 2005

Employers embarrassed by blogs

The story of Joe Gordon, fired by Waterstone’s in Edinburgh in January for writing about them in his blog the Woolamaloo Gazette, has had a happy ending. In it he referred to them as ‘Bastardstone’s’ and his superior as the ‘Evil Boss’. After an internal investigation, Waterstone’s have offered him his job back. Gordon decided he preferred to stay at SF and Fantasy specialists Forbidden Planet, where he is now happily running the their blog.

Other blogging employees have been less fortunate. Ellen Simonetti, a Delta Airlines flight attendant, lost her job after including photos of herself in her uniform in her blog. Google employee Mark Jen, in a mysterious case headlined ‘Curse of the Blog’ left Google afer a month because of his innocuous blog. This must have been a bit embarrassing for Google, with its company stance as crusader for the freedom of the web.

The problem of employers firing their staff for blogging is now becoming so serious that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has produced a guide to blogging in the workplace. It says:

‘Anyone can eventually find your blog if your real identity is tied to it in some way. And there may be consequences. Family members may be shocked or upset when they read your uncensored thoughts. A potential boss may think twice about hiring you. But these concerns shouldn't stop you from writing. Instead, they should inspire you to keep your blog private, or accessible only to certain trusted people.’

The readership of blogs in the States increased by 58% last year and 7% of American adults now have their own blog, so it looks like blogs are here to stay.

Back in the world of regular old books, people are also getting fired for what they have written – or plan to write. Jeramy Fine was an American employee of Guinness World Records in London, owned by Hit, which employs 400 people worldwide. Having decided to fictionalise her life in a novel, Fine was suspended after doing a deal with HarperCollins in London, even though she had received clearance for outside writing projects from the legal department.

HarperCollins has backed off and Fine’s New York agent, Ted Gideonse, said that his company had also been threatened with legal action. It’s probably been magic for her career though. Gideonse said: ‘They don’t own her life or her memories. They’ve made the book much more valuable.’

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11 April 2005

Small is 'almost always more passionate'

The role of small publishers in the publishing mix seems on the face of it to be declining as they are edged out by the big boys (see News Review 4 April). In fact as corporate publishers become more risk-averse, this is where we can look for innovation and new ideas. The London Book Fair started its life as a small publishers’ fair and has now grown so busily international that next year it will relocate to a larger site in London’s Docklands. Throughout its existence, small publishers have attended the Fair and done important business there. Meanwhile big publishers, for many years disdainful about its usefulness, eventually moved in and ended up dominating it.

The shortlist for the Van Tulleken Company Small Publisher of the Year Award, to be awarded on Tuesday, shows the range and vigour of the sector. The shortlist includes John Blake, which sold 750,000 copies of Katie Price’s Being Jordan, Short Books, for whom Simon Barnes’ How to be a Bad Birdwatcher was a surprise seller and White Ladder Press where Richard Craze’s own The Voice of Tobacco provided a leg-up for the company. The most obvious recent success in the UK is Profile’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a phenomenal word-of-mouth bestseller.

Martin Ellis of Zymurgy Publishing, writing in the Bookseller, put it this way: 'Many believe that small independent publishers are weird, esoteric and on their death bed. But members of the Independent Publishers' Guild regularly win awards across all genres, and their books are available on every high street. Customers in bookshops do not know - or even less care - if a book is published by a large multinational or a small independent.

Small can be beautiful, innovative, entertaining, informative - and is almost always more passionate.'

Recently independents in the UK have clubbed together under the banner of Faber and Faber to address an area of possible weakness - the difficulty of maintaining an effective sales operation. Operating flexibly, the new sales force will sell books for a number of independents, including Profile, Atlantic and Canongate, and will be a force to be reckoned with.

It is to publishers in this consortium, the many other members of the Independent Publishers Guild and small firms worldwide that we can look for the innovation and growth which small companies can offer within publishing.

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4 April 2005

Are big publishers going to get bigger?

The increasing conglomeratisation of publishing is worrying if you are trying to sell rights, as it simply reduces the number of publishers you can sell to. Agents have expressed increasing anxiety about this over the years, An acquisition model which allows different imprints in a conglomerate to bid against each other up to a certain level, or until they are only competing against each other, is one effective answer. Random House UK’s superb 2004 results, with sales rising 20% in a single year, are partly at least the result of nurturing a number of relatively competitive imprints where the editors are given the space to build their lists.

However the corporate approach is here to stay. In a session at the London Book Fair entitled Publishing - the Next Decade, Tim Hely-Hutchinson, Chief Executive of the newly created Hachette Livre UK group (made up of Hodder Headline, the Orion and Octopus Groups and Watts) said further consolidation was inevitable: ‘Trade publishers feel squeezed competing for authors and retail space. Increased publishing strength in relation to retailers will redress the balance of power. I see the number o