By the time a federal judge ruled last week that Apple had illegally colluded with five of the so-called Big Six publishers to raise e-book prices, just about no one in the book business was surprised. All the publishers named in the lawsuit had already taken a long look at the uphill battle and the crippling legal bills and decided to settle. (Unlike Apple, book publishers have less cash than the United States Treasury.) The ruling seemed to be just the latest uplifting story for Amazon, whose dominance Apple and the publishers had been trying to curtail until the Department of Justice stepped in.
Links of the week July 22 2013 (30)
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:
29 July 2013
Through logistical excellence, e-reader innovation and pitiless business practices, Amazon has contributed to the demise of hundreds of independent booksellers and the entire Borders franchise, and it is now threatening to do the same to Barnes & Noble. Independents have seen a small resurgence in market share lately, but it is not anywhere near enough to counteract the loss of chain store locations. Industry analyst Mike Shatzkin calls the ongoing decline in retail shelf space "relentless." That all sounds good for Jeff Bezos, right? After all, Amazon is running out of competitors.
There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes. I had an odd, vertiginous sense of unreality reading Hothouse, by New York's Boris Kachka, about the publishing house where I've worked for the past quarter-century, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I loved reading the spiky, spicy evocation of the company's good old days. But the story of those years casts a shadow on the current life of the company, and I found myself wondering: Do the book-publishing cynics have it wrong, or do I?
Yes, the contemporary publishing environment is very different: disappearing bookstores, inimical trading "partners", and a still-consolidating industry (the new Penguin Random House is set to publish more than 15,000 books next year worldwide) in a "mature", i.e., declining, market. There are too many books and readers with too little time to read, and too much competition for anything with a chance of exciting their wavering interest. Everything is different - except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world. In Kachka's version, publishing today is all about "marketing chutzpah". Hasn't it always been?
In our look this week at literary agents in digital times, we opened Monday with New York agents Brian DeFiore and Scott Waxman, and with San Francisco's April Eberhardt. Today, we move the conversation to two much-watched programs in London, talking with agents Jonny Geller and Edina Imrik. And in our new Ether for Authors today, our discussion turns to whether the literary agenting profession can ever be demystified.
'The argument we make is that it's not for every author. But if they do want" to do this sort of work with the agency, "they must get a better deal than anywhere else, and they must have more control than they get anywhere else, and the rights that we need are very different from the rights that a studio might need.'
22 July 2013
Many book prizes and literary awards honor recently published titles, but the Folio Society - the organization behind the UK's Folio Prize - has come up with a way to highlight titles from the past as well.
Starting this week, the Folio Society - the title sponsor for the £40,000 Folio Prize for fiction published in the UK - taps into its distinguished Academy of writers and critics to bring attention to "books that could have been worthy winners of the Folio Prize had it existed in the past."
Suzy Lucas, Administrator, The Folio Prize, said:'One of the chief ambitions of The Folio Prize is to give people the opportunity to find great books that might otherwise lie unread. Our Academicians' choices do exactly that - they date from 179 A.D. to the present day and take in all manner of forms, styles and preoccupations. We challenge anyone not to want to read them all whether they be undiscovered or simply worth rediscovering.'
In the mid-1990s, a string of publishers turned down a manuscript written by an author called Joanne Rowling about a boy wizard. It was a decision that would cost them millions in lost revenues.
Now it has emerged that other publishers missed out on a more recent payday after rejecting a detective novel that the bestselling Harry Potter author submitted under a pseudonym. They learned of their error on Sunday when JK Rowling was unmasked as Robert Galbraith, supposedly a military man and first-time crime writer of The Cuckoo's Calling.
Kate Mills, fiction editor at Orion Publishing, came forward to admit that she had unwittingly turned down the new Rowling work, and suggested that colleagues at other publishers had done the same.
The Gilbert Ryle fellow in philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford, was brought in to analyse the text to discover whether there were tell-tale signs of Rowling's penmanship in The Cuckoo's Calling. His Signature stylometric system ran nine texts in just a matter of hours and discovered that the comparison between the crime thriller and two of the author's other texts was "striking". Professor Millican analysed the book against J K Rowling novels The Casual Vacancy and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
"We feel we have made this country safe for TV, theatre and other drama writers. They have a very clear safety net of proper minimum fees, terms and conditions, along with contracts that deal properly with issues like credits and pension money. If you go to countries where this has not happened, you find people working for very low fees, and without the benefit of proper royalties."
Since I've been with the Guild, we've gone from having half a dozen channels to dozens and dozens. And all the main broadcasters have gone through a spell of cutting down on what they do. At the moment, things are looking up a little: ITV's doing much better as a company and the BBC has had this big rethink which is kinder to drama. Some people might deplore BBC2 daytime becoming a repeats channel but this could be a good thing for our members so we're talking to them about that now. 'Negotiations over repeat fees must also now extend to the large number of new channels which are now putting out packages of repeats.' 'We want to see writers getting a reasonable return for these.'
Like an ocean voyage long stalled by calm seas, the question of "agent-assisted publishing" for authors was all but dropped a couple of years ago, at least in many polite industry conversations. A hot potato of a subject, it had shallowed out in awkward, unsettling questions. It was left as a topic listing queasily toward perceived potentials for conflict of interest.
And yet, as entrepreneurial authors today make ever more assured strides in the marketplace, the position, purpose, and problems of literary agents need open examination.
This week at Publishing Perspectives, we%u2019re going to unfurl the canvas, run up the rigging, reopen the conversation and get this topic moving again. We'll revisit some of the issues and listen to some of the voices in and around the literary agency community. Our goal here isn't to announce resolution where there is none, but to listen to how that muted debate sounds today. No great consensus is yet in place on the high seas of digital transformation - and maybe never will be. But you'll find experimentation, eloquence, and a what may be a growing collective realization that the charts and maps used for so long by agents, like all else in publishing, simply cannot stay the same.