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News stories from the book world 2008You can check older stories in our archive. News archive 2007 Archive 06 Archive 05 Archive 04 Archive 03 Archive 02 Archive 01
The end of the line for print encyclopedias?Are print encyclopedias dead? It rather looks as if they might be. The mighty German encyclopedia Brockhaus is about to put all its content online. It's the paper death of a classic, as the company has been printing its encyclopedias for nearly 200 years, and anyone who's had the money has boasted a collection of the handsome volumes on their bookshelves for all the world to admire. Brockhaus will be putting online all 300,000 of its articles, which have been vetted by scholars over 200 years, and hopes to produce revenue by selling ads on its site. In a sense the German encyclopedia company is well behind the curve in reacting to the online developments which have spelled the death of the print version. So will this new initiative work? The omens are not good but the company may feel it has little choice. Encyclopedia Britannica has passed this way before. This venerable encyclopedia dates back even longer, to 1771, when the complete set with its 2,659 pages cost £12 (which is almost impossible to equate to a dollar value at the time). In 1998 the print version was abandoned and a web portal was set up to offer a free version online. At that point the competition was not the web but Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia on CD Rom for home computers. Britannica led the pack in coming to terms with the fact that the public no longer viewed owning a multi-volume encyclopedia as a mark of middle-class status. The company fired its legendary 1,000-strong sales force, already down from 2,000 in the 1970s. But revenues generated from advertising proved disappointing, the approach seemed suicidal in business terms, and the print version was re-established three years later. The printed Britannica set currently retails for £995 (nearly $2,000), a substantial amount even for a library (or perhaps especially for a library, given their funding shortfalls). Mostly they now take the £39.99 ($782) CD and make it available through the libraries’ computers or subscribe to the online version). The company has successfully reinvented itself by using its massive database to produce many different products. The content is sold to overseas distributors, often for use in a local encylopedia or co-branded website. And print is now firmly back in the equation. The current print version comprises 32,000 pages in 32 volumes, but around 50 books are now derived from the database and this number is set to double in the next two years. The publisher’s hybrid site, Britannia Online, has a certain amount of free access and the option to subscribe to get in-depth information. Since it is online, it can all be updated weekly. The current edition has a massive 65,000 articles and 44 million words and it is still a byword for reliable information. Perhaps this success story negates the New York Times pronouncement that ‘the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encylopedia is well on its way to becoming one of the first casualties in the end of print.’ Reference publishers undoubtedly do have Wikipedia to contend with and next week News Review will look at the web encyclopedia and how it has transformed the world of reference.
Is this 'wholesale theft'?J K Rowling’s argument against the publisher which is intending to publish a Harry Potter Lexicon written by Vander Ark seems a clear one. The case, which was in court in New York last month and is now awaiting a verdict, raises a number of issues relating to copyright. Warner, which owns the Harry Potter trademark through its acquisition of the film rights, is actually fighting the case, but the author clearly feels threatened by it in a very personal way. Although sales of the seven Harry Potter books have now topped 375 million, part of the reason that J K Rowling feels under pressure is that she herself planned to write a Harry Potter encyclopedia, and to give the royalties to charity. Worse still, the Harry Potter Lexicon has come out of a free fan website with the same name, which claims 25 million annual visitors. So, is it just a case of a rich author turning on her fans? Well, not really, as the publishing project comes from publisher RDR Books, a Michigan-based independent. Rowling claims that 2,034 of the book’s 2,437 lines are lifted straight from the Harry Potter titles, saying: ‘I believe this book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work. It adds little if anything by way of commentary; the quality of that commentary is derisory; and it debases what I worked so hard to create. What particularly galls me is the lack of quotation marks. If Mr Vander had put quotation makes around everything he had lifted, most of the book would be in quotation marks.’ The case rests on two distinct alleged offences. The first of these is infringement of copyright, which should not be hard to prove in view of the amount of material taken from the books, as the law requires publishers to seek permission when reproducing substantial amounts of copyrighted material. There’s also the charge of ‘passing off’, in that the book misleadingly implies that it has been officially endorsed, which may be harder to prove. The judge may consider that the author’s support of this and other Harry Potter fan sites in the past implies endorsement of unofficial guides. Rowling takes the whole thing very personally: ‘These characters meant so much to me, and continue to mean so much to me, over such a long period of time. It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand. The closest I can come is to say to someone, "How do you feel about your children?' On the other side of the equation, there are concerns that the outcome of the case could cramp freedom to publish, particularly reference and scholarly works. The publisher is being represented by lawyers who are working pro bono and their view is that Rowling ‘appears to claim a monopoly on the right to publish literary reference guides and other non-academic research relating to her own fiction. This is a right no court has ever recognised… It would threaten not just reference guides but encyclopedias, glossaries, indexes and other tools that provide useful information about copyrighted works.’ The Internet and the changes it has brought continue to put copyright under threat and to throw up new challenges such as this. We await the verdict with interest. The protection of copyright is essential to authors, if they are to have control over their work and the reassurance that they will receive the income from the fruits of their labour.
'Two upbeat and lively book fairs'April has seen two big book fairs, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and the London Book Fair. Bologna was buoyant this year, with demand for rights in good projects strong internationally and the East European and Asian publishers proving keen customers. Fiction is still a very strong genre, with increasing interest in horror, described as ‘the new fantasy’. Non-fiction is holding up well however, with solid business on a large number of projects. Publishers had selected only their best picture books to take to the Fair and interest in them was stimulated by the announcement by the UK Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen of the results of The Big Picture, Booktrust’s campaign to find the UK’s 10 best illustrators. British publishers have long been known for their terrific picture books, and this showed that the recent downturn in international demand for picture books may be past, although only the very best projects are selling. Two high-profile launches showed the way the children’s market is going. Scholastic announced its 39 Clues, a ‘ground-breaking’ ten-book series for 8-12 year-olds teamed with an elaborate online game and sets of cards packaged in book form. HarperCollins presented Bella Sara, a horse-fantasy property for girls. The cards and website launched last year, and it already has 2 million registered online users. Digital innovation was also in evidence in the new e-book playbook for Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler’s Room on the Broom, which delivers a ‘slightly animated’ story with audio and three games. The London Book Fair also had an upbeat feeling. The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, made a surprise visit to the Fair and pointed out that Britain’s creative industries represent 8% of the economy and are growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. Margaret Hodge, the UK Culture Minister, took part in a seminar and praised publishing as ‘our most robust creative industry’. There weren’t many signs of the credit crunch hitting the book world, although the pace of company acquisitions seems to have slowed down at present. With the added impetus of a series of seminars organised by Publishing News, digitisation was the theme of the Fair, with a strong feeling that the tipping point for the e-book may be close. The major publishers are investing heavily in digitisation and increasingly promoting their books online, with a blurring of roles between publisher and bookseller. Co-edition sales held up surprisingly well, although traditionally important markets such as the US and Western Europe were weaker, being offset by strongly developing markets in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Far East. In summary, these were two lively and upbeat book fairs, showing that the global book business is in surprisingly strong shape. Authors can take heart from this, and from the traditional view that books do well in recession, providing a relatively cheap form of entertainment. However there’s no doubt that it remains hard for new authors to find a publisher, unless their work seems destined for the bestseller lists.
Agents and 'an industry blood-lust for new things'In the weekend before the London Book Fair it is agents, not publishers, who are in the news. With the launch of United Agents and a new agents’ forum established in the UK, and an American agent heavily criticised for her author’s fraud, agents are very much under the spotlight. No author who has struggled to find an agent to represent them should be indifferent to what is happening amongst the agents’ ranks. New York agent Faye Bender was taken in just as much as the rest of the world by imposter Margaret B Jones, aka Peggy Seltzer, whose Love and Consequences was a smash hit. Although Bender has been heavily criticised, the author/agent relationship relies heavily on trust and cannot withstand a determined and thorough fraudster. Agents rely on publishers’ contracts with the author to enshrine warranties relating to accuracy. Gail Hochman, President of the US Association of Authors’ Representatives, says: ‘Every contract has a warranty clause and an agency clause. Those are my protections… It’s the author’s job to turn in honest copy.’ In the meantime, times are tough in the agenting world. Peter Cox of Redhammer has criticised the long-established UK Authors’ Agents’ Association and is in the process of setting up Agents Talking Shop, intended to be an informal discussion forum. He says: ‘This year is going to be horrible for most authors… And obviously, if our clients’ income drops, ours does too. As agents, we have to take an increasingly assertive approach towards revenue generation, and there has never been a better time to carefully examine our options in developing multiple income streams.’ The biggest news in the agency world is still emanating from PFD. Last week the book department heads of breakaway agency United Agents gave their first interview in the Bookseller. The new agency is a really big affair, with 35 agents and 75 staff in all, working across books, actors, film, tv and theatre. The book department claims that 99% of their authors have transferred to the new agency. The break with parent group CSS Stellar has been a long time in the making, and the agents have been unhappy for some time. Top literary agent Pat Kavanagh says it is ‘inappropriate’ for a literary agency to be owned by a third party or to be publicly listed ‘because you can’t be thinking about what’s happening to the share price, or whether shareholders are going to be cross with you. All that matters is doing the right job for your writers, even if it means turning something down that’s very lucrative.’ United Agents is based on an unusual model, as the start-up costs have been raised by staff taking a share in the company, although no single individual has contributed more than £100,000 ($197,000). Agenting is not as cash-intensive as publishing, but 75 heads represents a big salary bill in a difficult year, especially since the lucrative backlists of the PFD agency have had to be left behind. Contracts negotiated whilst the individual agents were at PFD will stay there and the agents’ commission will not follow the agents (or authors) to United Agents. Peter Cox’s comments warn of a difficult time to come, and the rumour mill is full of stories of small agencies facing problems. How can such a big new agency survive without the cushion of a backlist? Simon Trewin says: ‘Publishers are still as excited about new authors as they ever were. The challenge is to get them to take a duty of care over the third book if the first or second haven’t taken off. The danger is an industry blood-lust for new things.’
The Friday Project crashes/Borders US for saleThe collapse of The Friday Project with debts of £360,000 ($718,000) has startled the book world, especially since their turnover in the last year was only around half of their costs. Child of the Internet, it commanded the headlines and seemed to have a golden halo of success. Set up to source book projects from the web, the company was based on an idea whose time seemed to have come. Scott Pack, formerly of Waterstone’s, joined the original founders and proved a controversial and highly visible figure, guaranteeing the company a stream of publicity. But this week The Friday Project went into liquidation and many unhappy creditors will see little of the money they are owed, although it looks as if the skeleton of the company will be bought from the liquidators by HarperCollins UK. So where did The Friday Project go wrong? Anthony Cheetham, a major investor, said this week: ‘In retrospect, you can say the company was overvalued, but in my view they never raised enough funds in the first place to be able to invest enough in the bigger projects that would have pulled their profits up.’ Small can be beautiful in publishing, but only if a publisher has small ambitions and is very carefully run. If you are trying to play with the big boys you need the deep pockets of the corporation to buy potential bestsellers and promote them heavily. Meanwhile the world credit crisis is beginning to affect the book world. Borders, the second biggest book chain in the US, has been forced to put itself up for sale and was valued recently in the stock market at only $30m (£15m), 8% of its total annual sales. Group sales in 2007 were $3.8 bilion (£1.9bn), but it made a loss of $157m (£787m) and the total group debts were $554 million (£278m). The company sold its British and Irish arm to the entrepreneur Luke Johnson for £10m ($20m) last year, incurring a charge of $125 million (£62.6m) in dong so. It seems unlikely that Barnes & Noble, Borders’ major competitor, will be able to raise the cash to buy Borders, even if they wished to do so. Perhaps Amazon, which has had a considerable effect on Borders’ sales, will seize this opportunity to marry clicks with bricks. Unfortunately the current instability in the bookselling world does not bode well for authors or for readers, both groups being extremely dependant on the bookselling chains’ continued ability to get books to readers.
Agency launches POD plan as number of books published soarsWon’t anyone stick to what they’re good at? The latest instance of everyone trying out everyone else’s roles is big London literary agency PFD setting up an agreement with print on demand printer Lightning Source to bring their authors’ work back into print. It’s easy to see why this is an attractive idea, as plenty of good books are out of print and PFD have access to the rights, so they can present it as a service for authors. The only problem is that publishers and bookshops do perform a useful function, which can be summarised as getting books to readers, and that’s a job that PFD don’t have much experience of doing. Kate Pool of the UK Society of Authors says: ‘An agency sitting back and saying "you can find this book listed on a website" is very different to trying to find a publisher who’ll take the titles on and bring them back into print.’ You’d have thought that PFD are in enough trouble already. Not only have nearly all of its agents departed to set up another agency, but most of their authors have gone with them. The backlist usually stays, as the rule is that under the terms of any contract negotiated through an agency payments continue to be made to the author through that agency. A new threat has just loomed though, as Evelyn Waugh’s estate has been lost to PFD, after the Waugh family decided they were unhappy with the turmoil at the agency. The notorious American agent Andrew "the Jackal" Wylie made a successful lightning strike and the estate has decided to move all the Waugh titles to his agency. But what of print on demand? It’s flourishing, as many writers realise they can self-publish, and publishers finally get round to using it as a way of keeping their backlist in print. As a result the overall number of titles published in the UK soared last year to 118,602, up a whopping 36% on 2006, with backlist titles (published before 2007) also jumping by 28%. Lightning Source is opening a new plant in Milton Keynes shortly, equipped with the latest new machines to cope with the increasing demand. Very soon they will be able to produce colour books in the UK, as they do already in the US, and that will transform many areas of publishing, especially children’s books and the illustrated book market. WritersPrintShop self-publishing service Inside Publishing on Print on demand Print on demand –
and how it can make more money for you - an article by Morris Rosenthal
in the WritersServices site.
Writers' income under pressureWriters’ income is under increasing pressure. The recent meanness of the British government in cutting the amount paid to authors whose books are borrowed from libraries as part of the Public Lending Right scheme has highlighted this trend. The real situation is obscured by the fact that those authors who strike it rich tend to mop up most of the money. A study by the British Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society last year showed that although £907.5m ($1,798m) had been earned by the 55,000 authors in Britain the previous year, 50% of that money went to just 10% of the authors. This means that 5,500 bestselling authors got an average annual income of £82,500 ($163,509), while the other 49,500 authors shared the rest, earning an average of just £4,000 (nearly $8,000) each. The moral has to be ‘Don’t give up the day job’ until your earnings are substantial and secure, for it has become harder than ever to get your book taken on by a publisher because their focus is on bestsellers. The fantastic sales generated by the Richard and Judy show in the UK and by Oprah Winfrey’s show in the US show that books, even sometimes quite challenging ones, can have a mass sale if they are well-promoted. Conversely, it has become harder to build a novel from a new author if they are not included in one of these shows or in one of the big chains’ promotions. The pressure that the Internet has placed on copyright is another threat to writers’ income. People feel that everything on the web should be free and attempts to get them to pay for content through micro-payment systems or subscription models have proved hard going in the fiction and popular non-fiction areas, although academic and specialist publishing are having more success with this. Perhaps paid-for e-books will provide the answer. There are three positive things about this rather depressing situation. Firstly, the dynamic growth of creative writing courses in both the US and the UK has offered many established writers the opportunity for paid employment. Many poets, in particular, pay their bills by teaching others how to write, an opportunity which did not exist fifteen years ago. The second thing is that print on demand has now made self-publishing a real possibility at a reasonable cost and given every writer access directly to the market. Even though the hard work involved to make a success of this should not be underestimated, at least writers can now take things into their own hands and for some self-publishing has proved the route to sales success or to a deal with a publisher. Thirdly, the Internet itself offers fabulous opportunities to reach a global market in a way which would not have been possible until recently. This low-cost means of getting to readers has transformed book publishing and will continue to do so, as the publishers themselves are now realising with their website developments and viral marketing campaigns. Few authors will have the deep pockets of publishers and be able to commission videos for online use, which are the current fashion. But individual authors can use their ingenuity and imagination to make their book visible on the web, as Russell Ash has done in this week’s Writer’s Success Story. WritersPrintShop self-publishing service Back to Top
Half of all book sales at a discountThe Friday Project, which was set up to ride the crest of the Internet wave by adapting material from that medium into book form, is shortly to go into liquidation after a pretax loss for the 13 months to 31 December of £705,713 ($1,425,632), and sales for the same period of just £357,000 ($721,186). This dispiriting news doesn’t necessarily mean that their publishing venture was a bad idea, although it may well mean that their costs outran their sales growth. But this was also the week in which Gail Rebuck, CEO of Random House UK, gave a major speech extolling the virtues of the book and saying that it did not matter whether it was delivered via a traditional paperback or a hand-held device: ‘As a publisher I am happy to supply either to customers, and the essence of what I am selling will be the same, whatever the technology transmitting it. I think there is an irreducible quality to reading that means the book will never die.’ Book sales through the Internet continue to grow, as was shown by the UK’s annual Books and the Consumer report this week. In this market they now amount to a fifth of all book sales by value, less than the US but more than most of the rest of the world. Growth in 2006 and 2007 came mainly from supermarkets and the Internet, and the value of purchases through each of these channels has doubled since 2004. Perhaps more notably, the volume of books bought at a discount last year was greater than those bought at full price for the first time. The UK must be one of the most heavily discounted book markets in the world and this shows the fundamental effect that deep discounting is having on book sales. However we should not despair just yet, as the survey showed that consumers aged between 12 and 79 years bought 6% more books in 2007 then the previous year, 342 million books at a value of £2.454bn (nearly $5bn). The discounting, especially three for two offers and deep supermarket discounts, meant that more books were sold. In spite of dour prognostications, a very large number of people in this difficult market are continuing to buy and read an increasing number of books. Scott Pack of the Friday Project on paperback sales in our Comment column Back to Top
Do reading promotions work?World Book DayLast Thursday, March 6th, was World Book Day in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. 23 April has been designated as UNESCO’s World Book Day for the rest of the world. In the UK the 2008 promotion included a competition for Great Books to Talk About (won by Boy A by Jonathan Trigell), a Schools Short Story Competition and a Schools Pack which is mailed to schools with free £1 book tokens for the children. There’s also the money raised for the book charity Book Aid International and 10 new Quick Reads, designed to provide short, exciting books specifically for adults who struggle with reading. National Year of ReadingIn the UK 2008 has been declared National Year of Reading and there are ambitious plans to spread the message across the country. Bedtime reading campaigns, campaigns for teenagers, reading places and much more kick off in April with the first monthly theme: ‘Reading is everywhere and it’s not just about books: you can read anything, anywhere and anytime.’ The campaign will use co-ordinators working for each local authority and bring in ideas and contributions from organisations across the country to create a critical mass of reading initiatives. After all, as Dr Seuss said: ‘The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go.’ So, do these big generic campaigns work and can these ideas be picked up for use in other countries? The answer seems to be yes. Although it’s too soon to measure the effect of the UK’s National Year of Reading, there’s a lot of energy and some great ideas going into the campaign, which should make a real impact. As for World Book Day, it does make a real difference in the schools, many of which have supported it for several years. Quick Reads have some solid evidence of the improvement in adult literacy the programme has brought. In a survey they conducted, 90% of adults using Quick Reads said that improving their reading has made them feel better about themselves, 57% of these learners had never read a book since school and 90% of them said that, following Quick Reads, they now enjoyed reading. What’s more, a remarkable 57% said they felt their job prospects had improved and 39% said they felt more confident at work. Reading is a fundamental and essential skill in contemporary society. These initiatives to encourage children to read and to help adults find their way into books deserve everyone’s support. UNESCO World Book Day 23 April Back to Top
C S Lewis tops pollC S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the best children’s book of all time, according to a recent poll of 4,000 people aged 16 to 65 conducted by the British charity Booktrust. The second book in the list was The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, a classic picture book which is said to have sold a copy a minute across the globe since it was first published in 1962, and which has influenced a whole generation of children’s picture book authors. Perhaps it’s no surprise that third place goes to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five Series, the first of which came out in 1942 and which consists of 21 books. (The Bookseller recently pointed out that Blyton earned £3.8m ($7.56m) in 2007, edging out many more recent authors.) Fourth was Winnie the Pooh by A A Milne, written in 1962, and the list also contained six of Roald Dahl’s titles. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince only made it to sixth place, but this is probably because the adults polled were reaching back into their own childhoods, long before the Harry Potter phenomenon, for their favourites. The survey also found that four in five parents read their children bedtime stories every night – a very encouraging statistic, although it does make you wonder how the sample was recruited. Perhaps though recent Children’s Laureate Jacqueline Wilson’s efforts in campaigning to persuade parents to read aloud to their children have borne fruit. In the US the first children’s laureate has recently been announced. Jon Scieszka, author of the much-loved The Stinky Cheese Man, has become the first American Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. No doubt his influence will be all to the good, as it has been in the UK, where a succession of children’s laureates, culminating in the current Laureate, the energetic and opinionated Michael Rosen, have been creating fantastic publicity for children’s books for a number of years. We’ll report on World Book Day on March 6th next week, but it’s sad to see that the site has just been hacked into, as anything which promotes books and reading, especially to children, has to be regarded as a good thing for writers. Back to Top
Amazon grabs AudibleThe recent news of the $300m (£153m) Amazon purchase of Audible, the digital audiobooks site, has made it the market leader. At a stroke this gives the Internet retailer a ready-made subscriber base and access to 80,000 spoken word titles which it can sell through all its channels, including its new Kindle e-book reader. Audible deals exclusively with downloads but it has deals in place with over 250 content providers. Although many publishers will welcome the increased sales opportunities this will bring, they are also nervous about the lack of competition in the spoken word download market. Jo Forshaw, chair of the Audiobook Publishing Association in the UK, said she thought the acquisition would ‘put the welly’ behind the audiobooks sector. But she added: ‘My only concern is that there will now be a massive push towards downloads. I think we shouldn’t kill off the CD yet, there are still a lot of legs in it.’ Her own company, Audiobooksonline, has developed a CD rental model, based on DVD rentals, which should be a good way to reach audiobook consumers. As News Review noted in its audiobooks coverage on 21 and 28 May 2007: ‘Traditionally audiobooks have appealed to bookish people with popular tastes, with a leaning towards older purchasers.’ There’s a huge gap between the predominantly older readers who buy audiobooks now and the new markets can be reached through downloads. It’s a bit like the traditional argument in publishing about whether you should target heavy book-buyers, encouraging them to buy more, or go for light buyers, a potentially huge market, if only they could be persuaded to buy more books. It looks like publishers have to do both, especially when the market is moving so fast. Writers for their part should seize the opportunity that audio offers and start recording their own material, as audio is an important way to market their work, as well as providing sales opportunities in itself. The rise of the cellphone novel, mentioned in last week’s News Review, shows how rapidly new markets can grow. In Japan If You, a cellphone novel by Rin, written during her senior year in high school, was voted number one by cellphone readers. It was turned into a 142 page hardcover book which went on to sell 400,000 copies, and became Japan’s fifth bestselling book of 2007. Rin tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them to a website for would-be authors, suggesting also that the cellphone novel may offer new opportunities to unpublished authors. WritersServices audio section with step-by-step instructions Back to Top
The e-book arrives - or does it?This week has seen two big publishers announcing initiatives to prepare for the e-book world. At the same time, battle has been joined on e-book royalties. HarperCollins is to post entire books online for anyone to read. They believe that this will stimulate demand for e-books, but that no-one will want to read an entire book on screen. CEO Jane Friedmann says: ‘The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of the content.’ Joel Rickett, Deputy Editor of the Bookseller, said: ‘HarperCollins is gambling that people aren’t comfortable reading for an extended period of time on screen.’ Random House, for its part, is making a business title by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath available online for $2.99 (£1.50) each chapter. In the meantime a battle is looming on e-book royalties. The US and current UK norm appears to be 25% of published price, but Random House and Little Brown in the UK have just announced to agents that they are going to press for 15% of net receipts. Their argument is that it is expensive to digitise books and make them available as e-books. Random House worldwide claims that it will not break even on its investment in its digital warehouse until 2013, but this obviously depends on the speed of take-up. Once set up, e-books will be very cheap to deliver, especially if they are sold online. No-one knows how they will sell. The very nature of potential e-book sales means that different royalties for different territories is a very dangerous concept for publishers, as there’s nothing to stop book-buyers downloading the book from a website anywhere in the world. Authors will want a decent share of the action and will not want to accept lower royalties from UK publishers. It’s been quiet recently on the Amazon Kindle front (see News Review 26 November), but e-book possibilities depend on the development of a universally marketed e-book reader at a reasonable cost. Readers of HarperCollins’ new e-books will not be able to download them to laptops or to an electronic reading device. In that sense their experiment is more akin to Amazon’s promotional Search Inside programme, which is thought to have increased sales. But whilst big publishers slug it out competitively with their digital developments, readers in Japan have already jumped ahead of them. Last year cellphone novels, composed and read on tiny cellphone screens, took five of the top ten spots in the bestseller list. More on this and on Amazon’s takeover of Audible next week. Back to Top
Striking writers winIn News Review of 5 November we noted the beginning of the Writers’ Guild strike in the US. Since then there have been occasional stories in the media about tv companies being forced to put out a diet of reruns and American audiences deserting their tv screens. The writers have stood firm through what must have been a very difficult time, and they are just about to settle after achieving their objectives. Two deadlines are looming which have forced the tv companies and studios to come to terms. February 15th is seen as the deadline for new material to be produced for the 2008-9 television season. On a longer timescale, the Screen Actors Guild contract expires in the summer of 2008 and studios must have been keen to settle this dispute well before that negotiation, as the actors could really stop the entertainment business in its tracks. So what was the dispute about and what has been gained? The writers were concerned about DVD residuals and, even more importantly, about the huge potential for new media, using such techniques as streaming. The tentative agreement became possible when it was agreed that writers would be paid a fixed residual amounting to about $1,300 (£668) for the right to stream a television program online. In the third year of their contract, they will achieve one of their major goals: payments amounting to 2% of the distributor's revenue from such streams. Writers will be paid a percentage of the distributor’s revenue rather than the flat fee for web-streamed television shows granted to the directors. The writers had insisted on this to ensure that they did not lose out on any new-media windfall the studios and networks may get from web video in the future. So what has been the effect of the strike? Its financial impact on writers, who have been on strike since early November, has been considerable. The strike is generally reckoned to have cost about $1 billion (nearly £514 million), with a particularly devastating effect on Los Angeles, the home of the American entertainment industry. As for the long-term effects, writers will now get a share in the income from dvd and new media. In a Gallup poll conducted six weeks into the strike 60% of Americans sided with the writers. TV viewers may not all return to their screens, as the aftermath of the 1988 strike was that around 10% of tv audiences were permanently lost, and there are more alternatives to tv now. But the writers have fought their corner and established their importance to the entertainment industry, as well as their key role as content-originators who must be paid for their contribution. Back to Top
Boom time for creative writingThis weekend has seen the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference in New York City. It’s a sold-out event with 7,000 attendees. The Association was founded in 1967 with 13 members, at a time when creative writing was in its infancy, to support the growing presence of literary writers in literary education in the US. It now has 400 colleges and universities as members and there are 720 degree-conferring programmes in creative writing in the US. AWP says it has ‘helped to establish the largest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen’. It was founded by 15 writers who represented 12 writing programmes which had been set up in the teeth of fierce opposition from scholars, who felt that the study of literature should focus on the greats, and should not involve actual writing. Expansion has not been quite so fast in the UK, but there are now around a hundred university courses for creative writers, as well as a host of evening classes and privately run courses. In the meantime this is a booming area across the globe, with many new courses being set up to satisfy demand. The huge expansion in creative writing is a response to soaring demand from a wide range of aspiring writers. This is part of the booming world of writing, but it’s also a result of the growing realisation that knowing how to write well is a really useful skill. It would be interesting to know how many of the students on these courses go on to make careers as writers, but perhaps that isn’t really the point. Creative writing courses are very lucrative for the colleges and universities, with full student rolls and plenty of demand, including a large number of mature students. On both sides of the Atlantic many universities have well-known authors teaching their courses and attracting students. In the States Wallace Stegner’s course at Stanford was highly influential and the pioneering University of Iowa course was once taught by Kurt Vonnegut, amongst many literary luminaries. In the UK the Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway is the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. The search for celebrity has recently hit the headlines with the news that novelist Martin Amis will be paid £80,000 ($157,258) a year to teach 28 hours at Manchester University, a stupendous £3,000 ($5,897) an hour. Another example is recent T S Eliot Prize winner Sean O’Brien, who is Professor or Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Now that many writers, especially poets, support themselves through teaching creative writing, the courses are making an essential contribution to the creative economy by helping writers to support themselves so they can go on writing. Back to Top
Can fumes make your writing more lowbrow?Joan Brady, the distinguished author of Theory of War, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1993, has made the astonishing claim that the fumes from a factory next door to her home made her writing more downmarket. Brady is an interesting writer. An American who started out as a ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet, she married a writer and moved to the UK in 1979. Her Whitbread win in 1993 was with a novel about a little white boy who was sold into slavery when only four years old, and was based on her grandfather’s life. As the first woman and still the only American to win this coveted award, Brady was assured of a secure place as a literary novelist. But then the local council in Totnes in Devon gave permission for a shoe factory to be installed in a one-time theatre next door to her house. Brady started suffering numbness in her hands and legs, which she claimed were caused by solvents used by the shoe manufacturer, Conker. Doctors later confirmed that she had suffered neuropathy, or nerve damage, which was likely to have been caused by chemicals. She fought the council and the shoe factory through two and a half years and no less than 15 court appearances, and finally received an out-of-court settlement of £115,000 last week. Whilst all this was going on and unable to concentrate on the literary novel she had been writing, Brady started working on a thriller with a friend. And there’s no doubt that Bleedout, her eighth novel, is quite different from her earlier books. But can the quality and type of writing a writer produces be affected by chemicals? Could the fumes have made her ‘go lowbrow’ and write a violent thriller, putting her literary writing on one side? It seems a unusual claim but the evidence certainly suggests that the battle with the council may have contributed to her state of mind. Her website says: ‘Their relentless pursuit of me through the courts took on an almost messianic quality and focused my attention as never before on issues of justice and injustice.’ In an interview with Matt Craig for Shots Ezine, the author said: ‘My reactions seemed way out of proportion, although I’ve found out since that they’re pretty standard in people who are cornered, especially people unjustly accused of crimes. All I thought about was blood and destruction. I kept watching Terminator. I wanted to kill people. I was too agitated to complete the literary novel I was working on, so a friend suggested I try a thriller instead. Bleedout was the result.’ Brady is now working on the second thriller of a two-book contract and Bleedout has been well-received. The Daily Mirror said: ‘Buy it… brilliant… move over John Grisham’ and it looks as if the author might be set for commercial success. At least her battles have given her a good story to tell and an absolutely unique way to publicise her book. It seems only fair that she should get lots of attention from the media and that Bleedout should hit the bestseller lists. Back to Top
Indies in the ascendantThe New Year has brought some welcome news on independent publishing and bookselling, both of which are especially important to writers. The UK figures for 2006 show that 96 stores closed and only 64 opened. This has been turned around in 2007, with 81 new independent bookshops opening and only 72 closing. Meryl Halls, Head of Membership Services at the Booksellers’ Association, said: ‘As one of our members has said, 2007 saw the renaissance of the independent bookselling sector, and this story would seem to be borne out by both new shops opening and sales performance.’ Book Marketing Limited’s figures showed a 2007 increase of 6% in volume sales from independents, compared to a 3% fall at the chains. More people seem to be valuing their local bookshops, and the stores that have survived the cull of recent years have worked out how to retain their customers and are now fighting fit. This doesn’t explain the phenomenal optimism shown by those opening the new stores. Michael Neil of wholesaler Bertrams said that people ‘like the idea of being a bookseller. It’s seen as a noble thing to do. As the chain bookstores have consolidated over the past 18 months, there are opportunities for good local indies to step in’. You can see this in action in a place like the city of Bath, where high-profile bookshop casualties have been succeeded in the past year by high-profile successes, such as Topping & Co. On the publishing front there is the success of the Independent Alliance. This powerful group of mid-sized independents has shown that banding together to support a really good sales operation is a good way to build independent publishers’ sales. The Alliance reckons that it is now the right size, and will not be adding any further publishers. Its success has inspired others to follow and will hopefully lead to further groupings involving other small publishers. Since big publishers concentrate on the chains, smaller ones have a real opportunity to sell more effectively into the independent bookshops. All of this is encouraging news for writers. It is big publishers’ and bookshop chains’ focus on bestsellers which has cramped the opportunities for new writers to get published. But independent publishers and booksellers can focus on individual books and authors, and back their hunches, if they choose, provided that they can survive and run successful businesses. It’s good news that book-buyers have responded to this more bookish approach. It may not be helping independent booksellers directly (although many have developed effective websites) but the web also provides a brilliant way for a huge range of books from publishers of all sizes to find readers. Back to Top
Should publishing be publicly funded?The current controversy surrounding cuts in grants to regularly-funded organisations by Arts Council England has raised the interesting question of whether publishing should be publicly funded. If it is, which is the case in the UK and many other European countries, how do you decide what deserves funding and what doesn’t? The American model presents a stark contrast, providing very little public funding for literature, and that mostly at state rather than federal level. But Americans have a strong tradition of philanthropy to the arts, and individual donors provide most of the funding for literature. The situation is complicated in the UK by the fact that large amounts of public funding have recently been diverted from the arts to support the 2012 London Olympic Games, although there will be a cultural Olympiad, hopefully featuring literature, to accompany them. In the recent spending round it was widely expected that the Arts Council would have its own funding cut, so when in the end it received an uplift, the funding body had already worked out where to cut what it gave to its regularly-funded organisations. It decided to wield the knife in any case on the grounds that a general review was overdue. The problem for literature funding is that, unlike most of the arts, the funded sector sits alongside a large and relatively flourishing commercial sector. So the question arises, what should be funded and what can stand on its own feet? Most publishing of ‘literary’ novels takes place as part of publishers’ commercial activity. The literati may complain, but literary fiction is fairly well-received in the UK and a number of prominent prizes, most notably the Booker, help to focus readers’ attention on the books. Publishing is a relatively cheap operation to fund. It does not need buildings - theatres, concert halls or art galleries - unlike the rest of the arts, and also does not require large salary bills, unlike orchestras for instance, in order to make an impact. Its relationship to the commercial sector means funders assume that literature doesn’t need support in the same way. So what do the UK Arts Councils actually fund? It’s mostly poetry, with some support for literary translations. There certainly is an argument for saying that poetry badly needs the help. With the honourable exceptions of Faber, with its long tradition of poetry, and the small poetry lists at Jonathan Cape and Picador, big publishers do not support poetry. So, if the funding was taken away, there’s little doubt that many fewer poets would get their work into print. But poetry is managing to hold its own. It has been featured on the flagship BBC Today programme every day this week in the shape of the T S Eliot Prize contenders and many people enjoy it. Its practitioners scramble to make any kind of living and mostly fund themselves by teaching creative writing. Poets don’t expect to live off writing poetry, but (like all writers) they certainly want it to be published. The other genre which is state-funded is literary translation and this is mostly what has just been cut, affecting the publishers Dedalus and Arcadia. Dedalus is threatening to sue the Arts Council o the grounds that it has not followed its own procedures for withdrawal of funding, and is also trying to make this into a class action suit. Translation has high costs and a relatively small market in general. But literary translation has never been more popular in the UK and is always going to be a minority interest amongst readers. So does it deserve to be funded, more than science fiction for instance? Is it inherently more worthwhile? This debate will run and run. For now, the answer to these conundrums seems to be that funded publishers owe it to their funders, as the recipients of public investment, to make as good a job of their publishing as they can. In particular they need to reach as many readers as possible, and – for their authors’ sake as well - to make a decent fist of selling the books they publish. Back to Top
A good Christmas for booksIt is good to be able to follow up last week’s story on the continuing strength of reading with a report that Christmas 2007 was not the disaster that had been feared in the book trade. In the UK sales for the four weeks up to 29th December were up 5% on the same period last year. In the US the independents reported solid sales, although the chains continued to consolidate their lead, accounting for 33% of unit book purchases in the January through September period, according to figures compiled by PubTrack Consumer. While the US chains had the highest market share, purchases made through online retailers represented 20% of book purchases and the UK showed the same trend towards increasing internet sales. The Christmas holiday falling on a Tuesday meant that shoppers had an extra three days to visit bookstores, at a time when it was generally thought too late to order from Amazon. The internet giant is nonetheless expected to show record figures. In the UK it was a ‘range’ Christmas, with no one book dominating the bestseller lists. This is actually much better for booksellers, as it’s easier to keep a range of books in stock and also there was more of a feeling that books offered something for everyone. Overall, the year to 29th December showed growth of 6.2% by value in the UK, which even after inflation is 3.2%, a solid achievement. Perhaps these results are not particularly remarkable, but they have to be seen against the background of a year in which the demise of the book was widely discussed, with fears about the dangers implicit in the rapid rate of change and possible fallout from digitisation. January 2008 shows the business pages full of gloomy predictions, and the consensus is that the consumer boom is over in both the US and the UK. The expectation is that the credit crunch is going to affect everything, even if both countries manage to avoid sliding into actual recession. And how would recession affect the book trade? The received wisdom is that books do well in times of economic downturn because they are a relatively cheap form of entertainment and gift purchase. Previous recessions have not always shown this to be the case, and there’s no doubt that the growth and prospering of the chains internationally have been attributed to a consumer boom which relates very directly to people having more discretionary spending power. But at least the book trade is dealing with books, to which many heavy readers are addicted, and have become used to buying rather than borrowing. The international book business will not emerge unscathed from the likely downturn in 2008, but it looks much better placed than most. And this means that new authors will continue to get their books published, even if it is gong to be tough getting through to publishers and agents. Back to Top
'Why we read books'An article in a recent edition of the New York Times was headed: A Good Mystery: Why We Read Books. At a time when the book seems more than ever before to be under pressure from the competition of the Internet, TV, computer games and so on, it is important to remember that millions of people across the globe still read books. In third world countries they thirst for them, seeing them as part of education and a way out of poverty. Some of the best charities working to assuage this hunger, such as Book Aid International, are doing terrific work to shift some of the books we take for granted in the West to countries where they will be better appreciated. Their inspired Reverse Book Club means that a donation of just £5 ($10) a month can provide no less than 48 books a year to readers in the developing world. Reading is a uniquely private matter. Sara Nelson, editor in chief of the US trade journal Publishers Weekly, says: ‘Why people read what they read is a great unknown and personal thing.’ Alan Bennett’s novella The Uncommon Reader imagines the Queen suddenly becoming a voracious reader late in life through reading Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. For many children it was Harry Potter which turned them into readers, but whatever it is, the pleasure of reading is that it is something which will stay with you throughout your life. As long as your eyes hold up, books will continue to offer a fantastic range of experience, stimulating your imagination, extending your horizons and taking you to another world of fiction or fact. Dean Koontz, who sells about 17 million copies of his books a year, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the web is ‘a low-cost way of generating a connection between writers and their audience’. The Internet does indeed provide wonderful ways of linking the very private world of writers, readers and the books they read. The success of sites such as BookCrossing, which enables people from 130 countries to liberate books into the world, show the strength of the urge to share. Bookmooch is a new means of international book exchange facilitated by the web. American bibliophile John Buckman got the idea when on a visit to the English city of Norwich in 2005. A local community centre had a book-sharing corner with a sign that said ‘Leave a book. Take a book.’ He managed to recreate that sense of community online and Bookmooch already has 40,000 members around the world. Participants create an inventory of what they have and a wish list of what they are looking for. So can we move into the New Year with confidence that readers will still clamour for books? In richer countries bookshops are thronged with keen readers and the Internet is offering new ways to find them and share them around. In spite of all the concerns about literacy, the thirst for books remains unabated. We are a long way yet from seeing anything which will replace them.
Clash of the titansWikipedia has been squaring up to Google with its plan to create a major new search engine called Wikiasari. The plan is for it to utilise the large community that has helped to build Wikipedia into the eighth most visited site on the Internet to help determine search engine rankings. An astonishing one thousand servers to host the new search engine were delivered to the Wikimedia Foundation in St Petersburg, Florida, last week. Jimmy Wales, its founder, said: ‘We are close to launching this new project. This will differ from, say, Google, as with them it is hard for a computer to make an editorial decision, and their real procedures are secret. There is no public accountability and a lot of spam with their results. This will be an open source model. It sounds tough, but then nobody would have expected us to create a free encyclopedia and we achieved that.’ Wikipedia, founded in 2001, has more than eight million articles in 253 languages. It has taken the moral high ground, in contrast to Google, refusing to alter its policies to operate in certain countries, which has led to it being blocked in China. Google has been quick to react to Wikipedia’s news, announcing a new knowledge service. Called ‘knol’ this will invite people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it and it will be free to read online. It will have a commercial element though, as knol’s authors will be able to attach advertising to their work and take a share of revenues. Google says: ‘We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.’ As well as being ranked by readers, the content will also be ranked by the Google search engine. The two will differ in that contributors to knol will not be able to edit each other’s work or contribute anonymously, both of which are hallmarks of Wikipedia. In October Wikipedia, which relies on donations for funds, was visited by 107 million people, or a third of the global online population, making it the eighth most-visited site on the web. Google’s search engine was the world’s most popular site, with more than 260 million users. These astonishing figures give the clue to what is at stake here. So it will be interesting to see how this battle of the titans develops. They do represent two very different approaches to the web. But if you think you’d rather go for something more traditionally book-oriented, Encyclopedia Britannica, the much smaller stalwart of the old-style encylopedia business, is now available online. For just 11p a day you can get access to its riches, although it’s a bit hard to work this out from either its UK or its US websites, which are a bit coy about the actual cost of a subscription.
China - a breathtakingly big marketThe recent announcement that Chinese author Jian Rong has won the inaugural $10,000 Man Asian Literary prize for his novel Wolf Totem focuses attention on China. The book has sold more than 2 million copies there and won the largest-ever foreign language advance for a Chinese novel, with Penguin paying $100,000 (£50,000) and planning to publish in the spring. But publishers from across the world were already focusing on the giant book market China represents. The recent Beijing Book Fair saw major international publishers increasing the size of their displays and staff delegations. Lynette Owen, Copyright Director at Pearson Education Ltd, reported in Publishing News: ‘Trading in rights remains the key to this market in terms of both language and price, although over-enthusiastic publishing and strong competition in some areas has led to more caution on the part of Chinese licensees… Interest in Western publications remains wide-ranging.’ Publishers are piling into this potentially huge market. As well as planning to publish Wolf Totem, Penguin has launched a classics series and a bilingual website www.penguin.com.cn, which will have a Chinese language blog. HarperCollins is also very active in the market and has recently signed a major deal to bring the bestselling Naughty Ma Xiatiao children’s series, 12 million copies of which have been sold in China, to the West. At the Beijing Book Fair HarperCollins’ author Neil Gaiman held the Fair’s first-ever author signing, which was a great success. Gaiman was struck by the enthusiasm of the visitors: ‘People don’t have that weird jaded quality that they do in Frankfurt, when everyone has grey faces.’ Publishers are naturally keen to sell their books into the Chinese market and there is a huge interest in books from overseas as the country opens up and the economy develops at breakneck speed. Around 31% of all trade sales in China in 2006 came from titles translated from abroad. Of the 2006 translation licences 37.8% came from the US and 20% from the UK. In 2006 Chinese publishers acquired licences for 10,950 book projects and 540 journals but they sold rights in just 2,050 Chinese publications. The Chinese are naturally keen to redress the balance so that more of their titles go to the West and they are offering translation subsidies to encourage this. One book from abroad looks unstoppable though. Although at the time of the Cultural Revolution Bibles were burnt, demand is now soaring and the 50 millionth Bible has just rolled off the press of China’s only authorised Bible publisher, Amity Printing.
Secrets of the ghostwriting fraternityGhostwriting has been very much in the news recently, with the host of celebrity memoirs fuelled by the public desire to read the inside story of the lives of the rich and famous. In October last year the Bookseller reckoned that five of the ten bestselling hardback non-fiction titles in the UK to 9th September were written by someone other than the named author, and that they had sold 533,485 copies altogether. Ghostwriting is a term penned by Irishman Christy Walsh, who set up the Christy Walsh Syndicate as long ago as 1921 to control the literary output of American sportsmen. Publishers have found it a useful practice as many celebrities, whether from the sports or show business arena, cannot write, but the books need to written in the first person to have the full impact of a personal story. You've probably never heard of the most successful ghostwriters – and you never will. Discretion is everything. The ghostwriter needs to be absolutely trustworthy and has signed up not to go and blab to the papers about the salacious details they couldn’t put in the book. At the top end of the scale Mark McCrum, who ghosted Robbie Williams’ Somebody Someday got £200,000. Ghostwriting the first part of British footballer Wayne Rooney’s autobiography earned British writer Hunter Davis £80,000. Andrew Croft, author of more than 50 books, and most visible of the ghost-writers - if not necessarily the most successful - says: ‘As with every other type of writing, there are books that earn millions in royalties and others that earn nothing. If you ghost enough books, the big earners will compensate for the labours of love and the more speculative ventures.’ Crofts’ view is that: ‘The job of the ghostwriter is to write the book that the author would produce if they had the time, inclination and ability… The publishing industry uses ghosts for projects where there is a marketing advantage to having a ‘named’ author, such as a celebrity book or an autobiography, but a requirement for someone else to do the writing.’ In case ghostwriting is a role you aspire to, it’s worth bearing in mind that there are downsides. Obviously the first of these is that the celebrity in question may be appalling to deal with, or totally boring, or may not remember anything. (There’s a probably apocryphal story in publishing circles that Mick Jagger had to return the huge advance he’d received for his autobiography because he couldn’t remember anything. Pity the poor ghost!) And then there’s the problem of envy. British writer David Baddiel’s advice is: ‘Don’t be a ghostwriter, or even a biographer, unless you are absolutely convinced that the person you are writing about hasn’t lived a life that will make yours look shite by comparision.’
Is the Kindle the future of the book?So have we arrived at what Evan Schnittman, Oxford University Press’s VP of Business Development, called this week in Publishing News ‘the most significant moment in the history of e-books’? He goes on to say ‘the Holy Grail of e-books – Kindle + Amazon = the first consumer e-book success story’. But it is he right? It may still be too soon to tell. The book world anticipated that the Kindle would be delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair (see News Review 22 October). Is the Kindle the future of the book?). Presumably Amazon weren’t quite ready, so here they are launching it with a full fanfare a month later. What it delivers is extremely impressive and even the non technically-minded can immediately appreciate its virtues. The Kindle offers electronic paper display, which gives an experience much closer to that of reading a book than previous e-books have achieved. It weighs 10.3 ounces (292 grams), which Amazon claims is lighter and thinner than an average paperback. Of course you can adjust the type size, making it especially attractive to readers who are having problems with small type. The device holds over 200 books. It has a small KWERTY keyboard which enables you to make annotations and to bookmark your place. The Search function will enable you to find material on the device and it comes with access to the 250,000 word New Oxford Dictionary. But the killer application is that it links to Amazon’s own new Whispernet wireless network and you can download a book direct from Amazon onto the e-book in less than a minute. The Kindle shop currently offers 88,000 books, but Amazon intend to make it many more. For many an attractive feature is that you can download and look at the beginning of any book for free before buying it, just as you would be able to do in a bookshop. You can also sign up for book and magazine subscriptions which will automatically be downloaded to your e-book. This may mean that the trip to the newsagent or waiting for the paper version to be delivered are over. For many web enthusiasts news already arrives online, but now you don’t even have to turn on your computer – although you will of course need to pay for the subscription. Similarly audiobooks can be downloaded direct. The Kindle is currently selling in the US only for $399, and is already sold out and awaiting new deliveries. On the Amazon website opinions are mixed, with 685 customer reviews giving an average of only 2.5 out of a possible 5 stars. David Pogue of the New York Times said: ‘So if the Kindle isn't a home run, it's at least an exciting triple. It gets the important things right: the reading experience, the ruggedness, the super-simple software setup. And that wireless instant download -- wow.’ Our webmaster Chas Jones says: 'Kindle is another step towards making e-books viable. Perhaps the e-format needs to deliver more, such as integrated music and images, to make it worth investing in a reader. You can now download the software required to convert your writing to run on Amazon's Kindle at http://www.mobipocket.com/' Many will say that the printed book is good enough for them and will always be the way they like to read. Nonetheless, the many add-ons Amazon have given their new e-book, together with the immensely easy delivery of books from their Kindle shop, suggest that this may well be a seismic moment of change in the way books are sold and read.
A paperback revolution - at last?Picador, the literary imprint of Pan Macmillan in the UK, has just announced that it will in future launch its new fiction in simultaneous hard and paperback editions, in response to the very poor sales of hardback literary fiction. The majority of its titles will be released in a 1,000 copy hardback edition, with some of these ring-fenced for review purposes. The logic of this move is clear. New hardback fiction can subscribe in less than 200 copies into UK bookshops and the new plan will enable the publisher to get press attention for new books at the time when most people who are interested in the book might go out and buy it in a paperback edition. Picador publisher Andrew Kidd says: ‘We want to help well-reviewed authors get straight to their readers. People who love books as objects are always going to buy them, and will be prepared to spend money doing so. But we are no longer trying to entice people who don’t really want to buy the hardback to do so.’ Many observers might well think it’s about time that the paperback was acknowledged to be the driver of book sales, and that readers should not be denied access to it for an arbitrary period of up to a year. Back in the seventies, when the power of the mass market paperback started to make itself felt, with big auctions for valuable paperback rights, it looked as if the paperback would rapidly become the format of choice for most fiction. Since then publishers have become ‘vertical’, which means that the same publisher publishes both the hardback and the paperback, making coordinated promotion possible. Commercial fiction has enjoyed a surprising resurgence in hardback, partly because of the opportunity to discount from a higher price and partly because of its perceived value as a gift, but literary fiction has in most cases languished unless it is written by top prize-winning names. What is extraordinary about the Picador announcement is that the book trade has greeted it coolly. Retailers predict that the hardback edition will be side-lined and Picador will in effect become a paperback publisher again. Agent Clare Alexander warned that the imprint might be disadvantaged in rights auctions: ‘If Picador is in straight competition with another publisher which has confidence in hardbacks, then the author is going to choose to have a hardback.’ But why are they going to choose a hardback, when most book-buyers will not buy it? Don’t authors want to reach readers and sell their books? Perhaps it’s just another part of the bestseller culture which dictates that only bestselling authors, whether they’re writing commercial or literary fiction, can be published successfully first in hardback. For commercial novels, reviews don’t matter. But for decades literary fiction has been adversely affected by reviewers’ unwillingness to review paperback originals, thus denying a literary novel published in this way the coverage it needs. Reviewers have welcomed Picador’s move, which is good news, but it does of course still give them the hardback editions they crave. In a sane world though you would have to ask why the format of a book is so important to them when what most readers clearly prefer is the cheaper paperback edition.
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