As giant companies battle over the shape of the book market, members of the committee of the Association of Authors' AgentsThe association of UK agents. Their website (http://www.agentsassoc.co.uk/index.html) gives a Directory of Members and a code of practice, but no information about the agencies other than their names. The association refers visitors to the UK agent listings from The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook on the WritersServices site. reflect on the position of agents and authors.
Links of the week November 24 2014 (48)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
1 December 2014
Oli Munson, AM Heath
There are opportunities opening up in all kinds of directions. But if you gave me three contracts, two from authors with agents and one from an author going it alone, I would almost certainly be able to tell which was the odd one out. An author with an agent will have more power and routes to market than one without. And the agent community is always looking for new ways to add value to the services we provide. When one part of an industry goes through significant change, every other part has to recalibrate accordingly or risk being left behind.
In an effort to increase holiday sales, which have fallen for the last two seasons, Barnes & Noble is hoping to lure customers into stores this Black Friday with something book lovers cannot download: signed copies.
The chain recruited 100 prominent authors - including Donna Tartt, David Mitchell, Dan Brown, E. L. James, Jeff Kinney, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton - to each sign roughly 5,000 copies of their latest books. The company will distribute the 500,000 signed books among its more than 650 retail stores.
Drawing customers into its physical stores has become an urgent priority for Barnes & Noble. The chain has been battered in recent years by competition from Amazon and by a sluggish book market. It has closed more than 20 stores since summer 2013 and will spin off its money-losing Nook division into a separate company next year. Lisa Scottoline signed 5,000 copies of her new book for sale at Barnes & Noble stores.
Holiday sales at its retail stores and website have declined for the last two seasons. In 2013, sales in the nine-week holiday period fell nearly 7 percent to $1.1 billion compared with the previous year, and in 2012, sales fell nearly 11 percent to $1.2 billion
The first copyright law, in the modern sense of the word, was the British Statute of Anne, enacted in 1710, "for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned." Since then, copyright has grown longer, stronger, and - if one believes everything one reads online - become a threat to education, innovation, and even liberty itself.
Not exactly.
One thing that hasn't changed about copyright is the sheer pretentiousness of the debate around it. On one side, authors argue for the integrity of their work and publishers for their right to profit from it in an orderly marketplace. On the other side, if one takes this debate at face value, is the public that needs affordable access to all of this work - only these arguments tend to be made by other businesses that use creative work for their own ends. Now, as then, such lofty arguments conceal cruder motives: Authors and their publishers want to get paid, as do the unauthorized distributors who hide behind the supposed desires of the public. Like all authors, I am hardly immune from self-interest in these matters: I need to make a living. But we also need to recognize that technology companies that want to offer consumers access to a wider range of works than current laws allow have more than their share of self-interest as well. That's why they spend so much money lobbying for looser copyright laws.
The freshly issued set of guidelines on "new agenting services" from the Association of Authors' AgentsThe association of UK agents. Their website (http://www.agentsassoc.co.uk/index.html) gives a Directory of Members and a code of practice, but no information about the agencies other than their names. The association refers visitors to the UK agent listings from The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook on the WritersServices site. (AAA) will help literary agents who "may not yet have had the opportunity to work out what good practice might mean to them" when it comes to self-publishing, the AAA has said.
The Good Practice Guidelines for New Agenting Services document, which sits alongside the AAA's Code of Practice, aims to help agents who are changing and diversifying their services to include helping authors publish their own work.
The guidelines, which remind AAA members that "an agent has an overriding fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of their client at all times", will be a "framework" for agencies and "offer members a starting-point for potential changes to their client agreements", Kremer added. They include clearly setting out in writing what services are being offered to an author, and obtaining a writer's written consent before making special commissioning arrangements.
Slowly, but surely the European market is opening up to self-publishing, and Kobo, with its partnerships with local retailers in each country, is intent on making the platform as user-friendly as possible.
“Writers have to realize that they are not only writers but publishers, too. They need to have texts that are perfectly proofread, edited, a great cover, and also do media and advertising. Successful self-published authors know that it’s a real job that needs to be done properly. My role is to be the contact for the author. I engage with authors, I spend time on social media and author blogs. I’m there to answer questions for them. I can guide people, and if need be, we have a tech team for more in-depth technical help.”
24 November 2014
Finally. Hachette has put an end to their nightmare of a standoff and has agreed to terms with Amazon. This is great news for book buyers and Hachette authors and the industry in general. It comes right on the heels of Simon & Schuster signing a multi-year deal with Amazon for both print and ebooks, and the wording of that announcement was practically identical to the wording of the Hachette announcement today. What does that tell us?
It suggests to me that Amazon offered Hachette and Simon & Schuster the same deal. But what took Hachette most of 2014 to agree to took S&S a single offer / counteroffer. It must be said, though, that Hachette was at a serious disadvantage by being forced to negotiate first. The settlement with the Department of Justice forced the major publishers to negotiate with Amazon in 6-month windows. This was to prevent them from colluding with one another the way they did in 2009.
A year ago, jacking up ebook prices to protect print seemed like standard operating procedure. Over the course of this year, publishers have watched operating margins go up due to the rise in ebook sales, and many titles have moved a lot of units by employing sane pricing. In a way, Amazon was offering a deal based on what they saw coming, while Hachette was rejecting that deal based on what they saw in their rearview mirror. Simon & Schuster had six months extra of road to study. I hope this helps portray Hachette in a less harsh light. Again, they had a lot of disadvantages.
Dan Brown, who was guest of honor at last week's Sharjah International Book Fair, may be one of the world's wealthiest authors, able to fly anywhere at the drop of a conspiracy theory, but he had never been to the Middle East before, having by his own admission, "spent so much time in Europe researching Christianity and western cultural history. So, on a personal level I needed to start stepping out in the wider world to learn about other things. That was part of the reason why I came, but of course, I also wanted to meet my Arab readership."
His appearance at the fair was a huge coup for the organizers, to say the least. Brown is not on the circuit in the way some writers are, and he is a somewhat reclusive author. "I don't speak often and I don't go to book fairs," he explained, before being whisked off to lunch with Sharjah's Ruler, His Highness, Dr Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammad Al Qasimi. "Book fairs are wonderful, but my feeling is the best possible thing I can do for my readers, and for the book business, is to write, and if I get caught up going to book fairs and interviews and all that, I don't write as well and I don't write as quickly. And I've really decided that when I'm in writing mode I'm in writing mode and I just pull the shades and live a very simple life."
So what is it like being Dan Brown, whose books have now sold 200m world-wide? After all, it's fair to say that his life changed considerably back in 2003 when The Da Vinci Code was published. It changed in a whole lot of ways, and in a whole lot of ways it stayed identical. Certainly, from the point of view of my private life, there were dramatic changes. I had to get used to a lot less privacy [and traveling with security from time to time], and when I started The Lost Symbol after The Da Vinci Code there were a couple of months when I became very self-aware and thought "the next sentence I write a whole lot of people are going to read," and that was a little bit awkward for a month or two. Then I realized that I just have to do what I did before, which is write the book that I would want to read and suddenly it was good and I was able to write freely."
The day began with three different words: content, community and commerce. Keynote George Berkowski set the tone with a challenging talk sayings that publishers needed to focus on other entertainment companies as their main rivals, not other publishing houses.
"You are not in the same industry, but the people who are reading Fifty Shades of Grey and The Hunger Games are the same people sat on the tube reading BuzzFeed and every day. You have got to figure out who your competitors are. They are not the big five. They are not the independent publishers. They are the people trying to get people's attention and doing it in a flashy way, with whizzbang and candy floating over your screen."
This spirit of grown-up debate prevailed throughout FutureBook this year. We have changed from a sector marching in unison and invariably in one direction, to one where there must be disagreements over strategy and execution because the future is not the same for everyone. I was pleased to see this reflected in the conference this time around. It is also being taken back into publishers' offices. In a panel titled New Voices: Who Should You Hire and How Will They Change Your Company?, Orion's digital marketing director Marissa Hussey told the conference that publishing needed to hire "people who want to know the answers and learn new things". And once they are hired, Hussey said they needed to be supported and trusted to do their jobs. "I don't expect my boss to understand everything," Hussey said. "I need him to respect me and be supportive."
Here are some hard publishing truths as I see them:
• Readers do not have a discoverability problem - they are very capable of finding their next book
• Only a tiny percentage of readers has any knowledge of publisher imprints
• Publishers focus vast amounts of their time promoting and marketing the shiniest new book
• Most readers do not know who publishes their favorite author
I guess the learnings are fairly obvious, we are all in the business of putting books into more hands. We don't buy books from only one publisher, so why would we think our readers do? We can work effectively cross-imprint, cross-publisher, even cross-continents; these are OUR challenges that we don't need to worry the reader about (and they're not interested in anyway). As publishers, we are insanely content-rich and have some huge brands to work with (authors = brands) and we need to find new and exciting ways to pull readers to us and keep them engaged enough to stick around.
As reported in The Guardian, Richard Flanagan might have won the Booker this year for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, but that work, called an "outstanding work of literature" might just win him another somewhat less prestigious award: the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction prize.
The passage cited by the Literary Review involves a sex act interrupted by a dog killing a fairy penguin. Yes. That's right. A dog killing a fairy penguin:
"I think this is one of the strongest shortlists in recent years, containing some real literary heavyweights," said the magazine's Jonathan Beckman. "Flanagan swaddles the encounter in so many abstract nouns that the whole experience becomes very obscure and desexualised. The Murakami seems weirdly frictionless, an opportunity for metaphor-making above anything else."
The prize, described by the Literary Review itself as "Britain's most dreaded," has the goal of finding "the most egregious passage of sexual description in a work of fiction." Created by Auberon Waugh in 1993, its stated purpose is to call attention to "perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual descriptions in modern fiction, and to discourage them."