Over the course of the last few years, it has come to feel that we bookish types are stuck in our very own world war one re-enactment, in trench warfare over where the money lines are drawn. The skirmishes in the global book industry are internecine and unrelenting: the independent authors bombard the traditional publishers; the traditional authors bombard the literary festival directors; the traditional publishers bombard the retailers; academics denounce those who would defend copyright as traitors to the public good; and the retailers take the publishers to courts martial.
Links of the week April 13 2015 (16)
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:
20 April 2015
We've had perhaps five years now of good writers taking their next ambitious project to their agent who in turn excitably puts it in front of publishers only to be told that it's perhaps a little too bold an idea for these austere and shape-shifting times, and might there not be a more reader-friendly project up the writer's sleeve? The agent sheepishly reports this back to their beloved writer, who then either conforms to the market's demands or slopes away to nurse their wounded ego, and think hard about the purposes and pleasures of writing. The next time that writer comes up with a bold, unorthodox, unprecedented notion for a book, what happens? Well, perhaps, just perhaps, they decide before they start in earnest that it's a no-hoper and they ought to play safe, so they bin it without telling anyone. And another bright star never shines.
How we came to love the multi-volume novel
"What was The Goldfinch of last year?"
A friend and editor of mine asked me this over email as he prepared an overview of the year's publishing trends. I tried to think of if there was one.
I wrote first, "I think maybe there was a bit of a Goldfinch hangover from those who didn't love it, and those who did, really didn't want another one, they just didn't want it to end."
As soon as I typed that, I knew there was more to it.
Potter was greeted by skeptics who thought it was just more English children discovering magic, a recasting of the old spell we knew so well. But this time that spell came in big Dune-sized novels, and each sequel was met with a fervor previously reserved for those 19th-century crowds on the dock famously waiting for the newest Dickens. The publisher of Potter even began a campaign to plant trees, given how many books were being printed. None of those Harry Potter fans, waiting at midnight for the latest book, believed for a minute they lacked the attention span to read the whole novel. If anything, they never wanted it to end.
In my all-time favorite episode of Radiolab, "Finding Emilie," a young art student named Emilie Gossiaux gets into a terrible accident while riding her bike and, rendered blind and deaf, is unable to communicate with her loved ones until she makes an incredible breakthrough. Listening to it on my drive home only got me to the middle of the episode, so I sat in my parked car staring at the garage until it was over. I was captivated by the voices of Emilie and her family. I've been an audio convert ever since.
A good story's a good story from the brain's perspective, whether it's audio or video or text. "It's the same kind of activation in the brain," says Paul Zak, the director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Zak has studied how watching and listening to stories influence our physiology and behavior.
Sometime in early 2013, in Dallas, Texas, a generous reader donated his impeccable first-edition copy of Philip Roth's Our Gang to the local Goodwill store, its royal blue dust jacket gleaming as brilliantly as it did in 1971.
There it sat on a shelf, priced at $1, until a semi-trailer from Books Squared whisked it away among 3,000 other leftovers. At the Books Squared warehouse in south-west Dallas, Our Gang was checked and processed by receivers and a scrupulous quality-control team, who deemed the book "like new" before scanning it into their computer system to be sold online.
One of Roberts's employees suggested that he get Wonder Book started on the internet, and, though the business hardly needed the additional income, he was persuaded to wade in. He picked "weird books" from the brick-and-mortar inventory and threw them up for sale online. The next morning he took a look at his page and was astonished to find he had an order: a book on the history of cattle in Frederick County, Maryland - sold to a farmer in England for $45. "We couldn't sell that book in Frederick County for $45," Roberts reflects, "but a guy in England who raises that kind of cattle wanted it." The experience "was like the proverbial light going off in my head: we're international now".
Penguin Random House UKPenguin Random House have more than 50 creative and autonomous imprints, publishing the very best books for all audiences, covering fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, autobiographies and much more. Click for Random House UK Publishers References listing CEO Tom Weldon might not have understood the subscription business model in November 2014, but that hasn't stopped him from signing a deal to distribute audiobooks to Scribd as well as the Danish subscription ebook service, Mofibo.
A NY-based executive of PRH told me a year ago that I had the subscription thing all wrong. From PRH's perspective, it is unwise to offer a service and pricing plan that seems designed to give substantial discounts to your very best customers: those who buy and read many books. This is not a crazy perspective. If PRH sells about half the commercial books, then, on average, they get half the sales from these heavy book readers. Why would they want to help them reduce their book spending?
A former tannery has been magicked into an arts venue, the lights have been dimmed, and a roomful of publishing executives are sitting on creaky wooden floors, cross-legged or knees scrunched up, school-assembly style. The canapes can wait: the group has gathered to listen to writers reading their latest, soon-to-be-published works - a heart-rending family memoir, a Jazz Age tale, the gangs of Los Angeles.
These are some of the stories publishing house Picador hopes will enthral readers this summer - and almost every writer reads from a paperback. One, poet Kate Tempest, speaks from memory, electrifying the room. No Kindles, Nooks or iPads in sight.
Nigel Newton, chief executive of independent publisher Bloomsbury, whose catalogue spans Margaret Atwood and the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, sees the future of bookselling as finely balanced. Publishing itself was in a robust state, he stressed, but the outlook for booksellers is less certain. At a recent industry conference he likened bookselling to the bus in the final scene of the 1960s heist film The Italian Job - balanced on the edge of the precipice. Asked if the teetering vehicle will tilt back on to the road or tumble down the cliff, he said he was an optimist. "I expected the statistics to support a complete downward picture, and in fact they don't," he said.
That African writing is alive and well-both on the continent and in the diaspora-was not in doubt at the 2nd edition of the Uganda International Writers Conference in Kampala in March. But what does concern the several dozen participants, particularly organizer Goretti Kyomuhendo, is how to get it edited, published, distributed-and sold.
The conference participants agreed that the growing number of awards for African literature like the Caine Prize - and now the 15,000-pound ($22,050) Etisalat Prize for African Literature - are important for launching writers. Chinelo Okparanta, a Nigerian writer living in the United States who was among the three finalists for the prize, calls them "community builders." Etisalat will buy 1,000 copies of her Happiness, Like Water from Granta Publishers to distribute to schools and libraries in Africa.
13 April 2015
Publishers need to communicate better with authors, pay them more and utilise writers' skills to market books, but most writers would still choose to be published traditionally, a survey has found.
The Do You Love Your Publisher? survey, co-produced by authors Harry Bingham (in the UK) and Jane Friedman (in the US), questioned 812 writers with experience of being traditionally published on areas including publisher satisfaction, agenting and self-publishing; 310 of those questioned were authors based in the UK and Ireland.
Key findings include the fact that 75% of authors say they have never been asked for feedback from their publisher and that just 7% felt that publishers paid writers well. Despite the negatives highlighted in the survey, 32% of respondents said the prestige of having a deal with a traditional publisher was important to them, while a further 54% said it was one of the appealing aspects of a traditional publishing deal.
A stamp issued this week commemorating the American writer Maya Angelou attributes a famous quote to her that she didn't actually say. But she's not the first person to have words put in their mouth
Never apologise, never explain. That more or less sums up the US postal service's attitude this week. On Tuesday it issued a stamp in honour of the American author Maya Angelou, who died last year. Next to a photograph of Angelou is a famous quote from her: " bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."How sweet. There's just one problem: she never said it.
It was only a year ago that the publishing industry sat riveted as it waited to see how the storm between Amazon and publisher Hachette was going to play out. Hachette wanted new terms in light of the DOJ price fixing investigation, and Amazon wasn't about to budge. And with a 95% control of the ebook market, it's easy to see why Amazon didn't think freezing its sales of Hachette titles could possibly spiral out into a flaming pile of contract negotiation.
Once that fiasco was resolved, other publishers were quick to jump aboard the "we set our own prices" bandwagon, and other issues between Amazon and members of the Big Five arose. But the latest in the battle parade, HarperCollins, doesn't seem as keen to accept the deal that Amazon is holding out.
I was reading a novel today on a Kindle Paperwhite-or "dogfooding" as some would like this habit to be called. Despite the engaging content, I kept getting jarred out of the ebook by its low production quality. The formatting wasn't even so horrible, but small mistakes kept punching me out of my immersive experience.
The problem originated, I am almost certain, from typesetting for print, followed by poor ebook QA after the conversion was made. It's an issue that's stubbornly pervasive in the industry, and there are a handful of straightforward ways to avoid it.
One of my crusading themes as an ebook developer and trainer is how to keep content - formerly known as print assets - agile and clean for future output purposes.
And the key to agile assets is cleanly formatted print files. The idea here is to typeset from print but to keep the assets flexible and elastic. The focus of any set of assets should never be just print, as all content is destined for a print afterlife; laying out pages for the print page only renders that content dangerous or even useless for an ebook, for chunking, for marketing - for any kind of use beyond print.
George R R Martin has waded into the "nasty, nasty fight" surrounding this year's Hugo awards, laying out why he believes that a group of rightwing science fiction writers have "broken" the prestigious prize beyond repair.
The shortlists for the long-running American genre awards, won in the past by names from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula K Le Guin and voted for by fans, were announced this weekend to uproar in the science fiction community, after it emerged that the line-up corresponded closely with the slates of titles backed by certain conservative writers. The self-styled "Sad Puppies" campaigners had set out to combat what orchestrator and writer Brad Torgersen had criticised as the Hugos' tendency to reward "literary" and "ideological" works.
"If the Sad Puppies wanted to start their own award %u2026 for Best Conservative SF, or Best Space Opera, or Best Military SF, or Best Old-Fashioned SF the Way It Used to Be - whatever it is they are actually looking for... hey, I don'tt think anyone would have any objections to that. I certainly wouldn't. More power to them," he added. "But that's not what they are doing here, it seems to me. Instead they seem to want to take the Hugos and turn them into their own awards."
Do print versions still have an advantage over electronic formats? Ebook sales may be reaching a plateau but Dan Cohen argues there may be much more dark reading going on than the stats are showing. A huge and growing percentage of ebooks are being sold by indie publishers or authors themselves, and a third of them don't even have ISBNs, the universal ID used to track most books, so these figures may be slow to catch up. Cohen suspects that we're not going to have to wait very long for ebooks to become predominant.
I read both e- and print books, and I appreciate the arguments about the native advantages of print. I am a digital subscriber to the New York Times, but every Sunday I also get the printed version. The paper feels expansive, luxuriant. And I do read more of it than the daily paper on my iPad, as many articles catch my eye and the flipping of pages requires me to confront pieces that I might not choose to read based on a square inch of blue-tinged screen. (Also, it's Sunday. I have more time to read.) Even though I read more ebooks than printed ones at this point, it's hard not to listen to the heart and join the Permanent Law chorus.