tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43168863178709961022024-03-12T20:12:19.814-04:00Dr. SyntaxScattered Observations on Books and PublishingPeter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.comBlogger105125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-81364969881559428912021-07-03T01:02:00.001-04:002021-07-03T01:17:37.136-04:00Whose Business Model Is Broken Anyway? <p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tJEy-tp6gtY/YN_VJxbfiVI/AAAAAAAAMwk/6dyl7O6Ion8lvR8itiZ-R7CRCy0tPWbvgCLcBGAsYHQ/s512/disassembled%2Bprinting%2Bpress.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="512" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tJEy-tp6gtY/YN_VJxbfiVI/AAAAAAAAMwk/6dyl7O6Ion8lvR8itiZ-R7CRCy0tPWbvgCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h300/disassembled%2Bprinting%2Bpress.jpeg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's been some time since your friend the Doctor has posted here--preoccupied as he has been with sorting out the syntax of authors far and wide--but a publishing story in, of all places, the <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/substack-signs-ex-forbes-writer-as-it-seeks-to-disrupt-book-publishing/">New York Post,</a> has prompted him to pick up his quill and stab it into the inkwell, with a snort of irritation.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><p></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Once again poor old book publishing, the Post's Keith Kelly tells us, is to be "disrupted," this time by the online platform Substack, which has already <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/business/media/substack-newsletter-competition.html">taken a whack at disrupting magazine and newspaper publishing by peeling writers away from their media-company employers </a>and offering their content directly to readers via subscription. Now, apparently, it's coming for the book industry.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Media journalist Zack Greenburg, who has written four books for houses like Penguin Portfolio and Simon & Schuster, <a href="https://zogblog.substack.com/p/ahem-im-moving-my-writing-to-substack?r=m7lp4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter">will release his new book, <i>We Are All Musicians Now, </i>in weekly installments on Substack. </a>A paid subscription will cost $5 a month or $50 a year (typical of Substack); he will also post other content weekly that readers can get free. In the Post, Greenburg sounds pretty jazzed:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>"All in all, with the advance money being in the same ballpark, I’d rather go to a place where I can be my own boss with a higher upside than try to force it through an old business model that I think is broken."<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I'm all for exploring new business models, but when I hear someone bashing publishing as "broken," I cock a skeptical eyebrow. As I've said in my own book, <i><a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo21439635.html">What Editors Do</a></i>, publishing has been declared broken repeatedly since Gutenberg. The industry has plenty of problems, but in fact it has weathered the digital era--and even a worldwide pandemic-- far more successfully than many other media businesses.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>To compare Substack's "disruptive" model with conventional books,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>let's look at the "value propositions" side by side by doing a little arithmentic.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A typical book might run 75-100,000 words. Let's say Greenburg's is 80,000, just to make this math simple. And let's say Greenburg posts a 2000-word excerpt each week--that's long for a Substack but we'll assume he's a real fast typist....It'll take 40 weeks, roughly 8 months, to get his whole book posted, by which point a subscriber has paid $40 (or $50 if they went with the annual rate).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">In other words, the subscriber is paying $40-50 for content they could buy for roughly $25-30 in the form of a hardcover book, or $10-15 as an ebook. In either of those formats, they could read the whole thing at once (no waiting a week between chapters); bookmark or search passages--even give it to another person in the case of the print book.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">So Greenburg and Substack propose to charge their consumer a price <i>four or five times</i> what tired old conventional publishing would ask for a more convenient, more enduring version of the same product. But they will dribble it out over several months. Well, that's a new business model all right!<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But it's not clear to me that it's any kind of improvement on what "broken" old book publishing has to offer, from a reader's perspective.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Maybe what Greenburg believes is that it's a better deal <i>for him, </i>and given the markup just described, you'd think it would be. But that's not clear either, given the chunk of subscription revenues that Substack takes in return for what it advances an author. Other authors who got Substack advances have not necessarily found the economics favorable. One, Matthew Yglesias, <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22338802/substack-pro-newsletter-controversy-jude-doyle">concluded accepting an advance had cost him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue. </a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I'm no knee-jerk defender of traditional publishing, as readers of earlier posts here are aware. And writers are entitled to make a living however they want--there is no easy way, goodness knows. But bashing the industry as "broken" is a cheap shot, especially if your whizbang new model is a worse deal for readers.</span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px; text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">[photograph via libertypressia.com] </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27px;"><br /></p>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-60108529877676316662018-02-21T15:16:00.001-05:002018-02-21T15:25:37.827-05:00What Editors Do Goes on the Road--and on the Air! A Conversation on BookTV, or Maybe in Your NeighborhoodWith my book <i><a href="http://peterginna.com/product/what-editors-do">What Editors Do</a></i> now actually available to buy, I've had the pleasure of appearing in bookstores to talk about it, so far in the company of very articulate contributors and other colleagues. Our first outing, on January 9 was at <a href="http://politics-prose.com/">Politics and Prose</a> in Washington, D.C., one of the truly great independent stores in America. Naturally, given their location, P&P is especially strong in politics, history, and current events, and they have showcased many books that I've published and hosted many of my authors over the years. So it was a particular thrill for me to headline a book event in my own right.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vw_G0nJ3AqI/Wo3QpA6K3NI/AAAAAAAABaM/TbJQJ7-ifpgUljVSoqBPVdSRU86zx3e0QCLcBGAs/s1600/BookTV-P%2526P.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="521" data-original-width="1021" height="203" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vw_G0nJ3AqI/Wo3QpA6K3NI/AAAAAAAABaM/TbJQJ7-ifpgUljVSoqBPVdSRU86zx3e0QCLcBGAs/s400/BookTV-P%2526P.png" width="400" /></a><br />
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One of the things that makes indie booksellers great is they really know their community and their customers, and they did, as usual, a wonderful job of attracting an audience to our event. We had a standing-room crowd who helped make a very lively discussion by asking lots of good questions. I was joined for this event by two contributors to <i>What Editors Do</i>, <a href="https://twitter.com/CalMorgan">Cal Morgan of Riverhead Books</a> and <a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/susan-ferber-oxford-university-press/">Susan Ferber of Oxford University Press</a>, and by <a href="https://www.rossyoon.com/">Gail Ross, a veteran Washington agent</a> who has represented many terrific nonfiction books, often by the capital's heavy hitters and top journalists.<br />
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I began by talking about the three phases of editing that I identify in the book, which provide the organizing principle for it. Cal talked about the "editor as evangelist," from his chapter "Start Spreading the News." Susan discussed working with scholarly authors writing for general readers, based on her chapter, "Of Monographs and Magnum Opuses." And Gail offered the agent's perspective on the role editors play in getting a book from the author's keyboard into the reader's hands. We had a great conversation, and happily, it was all recorded on video by C-Span's BookTV, which has already broadcast it a few times. You can watch the whole thing on the BookTV website--click on <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?439484-1/what-editors-do">this link</a>.<br />
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If you're in the New York City area, heads up: I'll speaking again about editing and publishing on Thursday, February 22 at another superb indie bookstore, Book Culture on 112th Street near Columbia University, with another great panel of contributors plus a guest star, <a href="https://journalism.columbia.edu/columbia-publishing-course">Shaye Areheart, director of the Columbia Publishing Course,</a> which has trained people for careers in publishing for three-quarters of a century. Come and bring your questions! Info on the event <a href="http://www.bookculture.com/event/112th-peter-ginna-what-editors-do">here</a>.<br />
<br />Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-78416124780556667022017-06-01T02:06:00.000-04:002017-11-13T23:09:22.354-05:00BookExpo Snapshots: Editors’-Eye-Views of the Publishing Industry, mid-2017 <div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">BookExpo, the annual booksellers
and publishers convention, has traditionally been the moment for media and
book-business observers to take stock of the industry. Like many things about
traditional publishing, BookExpo has shrunk in size and schedule in recent
years, though it now includes a consumer-oriented portion called BookCon. But editors,
sales reps, and booksellers still walk the floor and ask each other “how’s
business?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">So I thought I’d honor the tradition
and gather some impressions from colleagues. The natural place to start was a
ready-made panel of experts—the contributors to the forthcoming essay
collection <a href="http://www.doctorsyntax.net/2017/05/i-wrote-book-on-editing-i-had-help.html">WHAT EDITORS DO,</a> edited by yours truly. (For more on the book, see
yesterday’s post.)</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I circulated a few
questions to my 26 co-authors. Interestingly, many of those who answered were
not attending BookExpo, probably because for those who are, this is a
crazy-busy week. But I got some thoughtful responses from editors representing
Big 5 trade houses, university, and literary indie publishing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Herewith some brief
selections from their answer, with a few of my own comments thrown in. As
usual, different perspectives give us a variegated picture of the industry,
where cautious optimism is streaked with the awareness of challenges. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="border: none;">What was the first BEA </span></span></i><i><span style="border: none; color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">you attended? </span></span></i><i><span style="border: none; color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">What do you remember of BookExpos past
or present, or what are you looking forward to? </span></span></i><span style="border: none; color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K0UaJfzT63k/WS-ro1JRwkI/AAAAAAAABGo/ZYT_EIWROssx7-HOPCuwsP6YFQW5HwP6ACEw/s1600/Jane-Friedman-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1236" data-original-width="1001" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K0UaJfzT63k/WS-ro1JRwkI/AAAAAAAABGo/ZYT_EIWROssx7-HOPCuwsP6YFQW5HwP6ACEw/s200/Jane-Friedman-1.jpg" width="161" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jane Friedman</td></tr>
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<span style="border: none; color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"><b>Jane Friedman
(Blogger, consultant and industry observer at <a href="http://janefriedman.com/">janefriedman.com</a>): </b></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">My first BEA was 2004 in Chicago. I
don't remember much from that first year, but I attended every year after that
for about 10 years. The best part was always meeting and spending time with
authors. The worst part was always the lines, lines, lines, and c</span><span style="border: none; font-size: 11pt;">rowding—and feeling done with humanity by the end. I'm not
attending this year, but I know it's partly a mistake. Some serendipitous
encounter always happens that makes the discomfort and exhaustion worthwhile.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; border: none; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 0in 0in;">
<span style="border: none; color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"><b>Susan Ferber <span style="border: none;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="border: none;">(<span style="border: none;">Executive Editor, <span style="border: none;">Oxford University Press<span style="border: none;">): </span></span></span></span></span></b></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I have actually never attended the BEA!
Since </span><span style="border: none; font-size: 11pt;">I work for a university press, my highest
priority is the conferences in my academic discipline. </span></div>
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<span style="border: none; color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"><b>Diana Gill </b><span style="border: none;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b> </b></span><span style="border: none;"><b>(</b><span style="border: none;"><b>Executive</b><span style="border: none;"><b> Editor, Tor/Macmillan</b><span style="border: none;"><b>):</b> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">My first ABA w</span></span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">as while I was st<span style="border: none;">ill in college, </span></span></span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">courtesy of o<span style="border: none;">ne of my very first publishing mentors</span></span></span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">.</span></span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"> <span style="border: none;">I remember being so very excited to see the booths and to
get ALL THE GALLEYS. I couldn't believe how cool i<span style="border: none;">t was. Your first BEA is a rush, whether it was many years ago or for the
new assistants just starting out.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"><b>Peter Ginna</b><span style="border: none;"><b>: </b>I have written elsewher<span style="border: none;">e of<a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_248379178">
</a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_248379181">memorable BEA experiences</a><span style="border: none;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_248379181"> and characters</a><span style="border: none;"><a href="http://www.doctorsyntax.net/2011/05/field-guide-to-flora-and-fauna-of.html">.</a> <span style="border: none;">One that was happily not my own
was a <span style="border: none;">peer of mine<span style="border: none;"> who
toiled in <span style="border: none;">an <span style="border: none;">imprint of<span style="border: none;"> Random House, back in the days when <span style="border: none;">Random<span style="border: none;"> caused a stir by spending
a million dollars on a vast, el<span style="border: none;">aborate BookExpo booth
featuring an actual <span style="border: none;">“<span style="border: none;">House<span style="border: none;">”<span style="border: none;"> in the middle of it. <span style="border: none;">Along with other low-riders on the <span style="border: none;">corporate <span style="border: none;">totem pole, he was stocking the
shelves in the booth when an unfamiliar-looking <span style="border: none;">“<span style="border: none;">suit,<span style="border: none;">”<span style="border: none;">
cocking his head to examine the custom-made fixture<span style="border: none;">s,
said, <span style="border: none;">“<span style="border: none;">how does it look?<span style="border: none;">”<span style="border: none;"> The new recruit said, candidly,
<span style="border: none;">“<span style="border: none;">I think it looks like a
French pissoir.<span style="border: none;">”<span style="border: none;"> It was
then that he found he was speaking to Alberto Vitale, Random<span style="border: none;">’<span style="border: none;">s CEO. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pcB1hXMhPYA/WS-rt58lJDI/AAAAAAAABG0/bnW4fvQP5mg9I8N5JCpwqe3HvwHwlS83QCEw/s1600/CF%2BSaller.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="512" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pcB1hXMhPYA/WS-rt58lJDI/AAAAAAAABG0/bnW4fvQP5mg9I8N5JCpwqe3HvwHwlS83QCEw/s200/CF%2BSaller.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Carol Fisher Saller</td></tr>
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<i><span style="border: none; color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">W</span></span></i><i><span style="border: none; color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">ha<span style="border: none;">t is the
most underappreciated positive development in publishing recently, or the most
overhyped negative one? What about the flip side—what is the most
underappreciated threat or challenge to book publishers? </span></span></span></i><span style="border: none; color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">Carol <span style="border: none;">Fisher <span style="border: none;">Saller (<span style="border: none;">University of Chicago Press, author of </span></span></span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo23530364.html">The Subversive Copy Editor</a></span></span></i></b><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"><b>)</b><span style="border: none;"><b>:</b> <span style="border: none;">From the get-go, I was amazed
at the hysteria over e-books and how they were going to destroy publishing.
Instead, we've seen publishing explode in many new d<span style="border: none;">irections,
with more kinds of things to read in more kinds of formats than ever before.</span></span></span></span></span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p><span style="border: none; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="border: none;"><b>PG: </b>One<span style="border: none;"> of <span style="border: none;">the mos<span style="border: none;">t underappreciated <span style="border: none;">challenges<span style="border: none;"> to <span style="border: none;">publishing<span style="border: none;"> <span style="border: none;">is the dwindling of mass consumer media<span style="border: none;">—<span style="border: none;">newspapers,<span style="border: none;"> magazines, and radio especially<span style="border: none;">—<span style="border: none;">that <span style="border: none;">have long been a crucial way for publishers to make readers aware of new books.<span style="border: none;"> Online marketing and social media have not yet replaced the reach of, for example, the vanished book-review sections of major newspapers. Anothe<span style="border: none;">r real problem for book <span style="border: none;">publishing<span style="border: none;"> <span style="border: none;">is its lack of diversity<span style="border: none;">—<span style="border: none;">publishing staffs are far less diverse than <span style="border: none;">America at large<span style="border: none;">. (<span style="border: none;">In <span style="border: none;">a chapter of </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span><i style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;">What Editors Do</span></i><span style="border: none; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="border: none;">, <span style="border: none;">Chris Jackson of One World writes eloquently of <span style="border: none;">why this is a serious issue<span style="border: none;">.) <span style="border: none;">It is <span style="border: none;">not <span style="border: none;">just<span style="border: none;"> a matter of social justice, when talented candidates don<span style="border: none;">’<span style="border: none;">t get hired or promoted<span style="border: none;">. It<span style="border: none;">’<span style="border: none;">s a problem for the industry, which is often out of step with the tastes and interests of <span style="border: none;">the reading population.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-weN2AdFGk_Q/WS-rt6pAb3I/AAAAAAAABGs/e8NFSXrHlwEfSOOrJnOPv0RsMr1HSN07ACEw/s1600/KOK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="512" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-weN2AdFGk_Q/WS-rt6pAb3I/AAAAAAAABGs/e8NFSXrHlwEfSOOrJnOPv0RsMr1HSN07ACEw/s200/KOK.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Katharine O'Moore-Klopf</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"><b>Katharine O</b><span style="border: none;"><b>’</b><span style="border: none;"><b>Moore-Klopf (Freelance editor</b><span style="border: none;"><b> specializing in medical </b><span style="border: none;"><b>&
life science books</b><span style="border: none;"><b>): </b><span style="border: none;">I have
been concerned about the loss of respect for or loss of knowledge about the
value of developmental editing, line editing, an<span style="border: none;">d
copyediting. As publishing has become more about the financial bottom line than
about quality, editing has come to be seen as less of a necessity than it once
was. Part of this is because editors in general have been self-effacing,
thinking it almost imp<span style="border: none;">roper to talk about the value
of their role in publishing. That must change. Editors of all kinds must speak
out in every venue possible to explain what it is they do and why it’s
important to the quality of books.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-U46GUn5hiPY/WS-ruEgDTDI/AAAAAAAABG8/6-dAlP1FT_QT1HV8Ar8-BtGM6z7jOq4QwCEw/s1600/diana-gill-headshot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="314" data-original-width="250" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-U46GUn5hiPY/WS-ruEgDTDI/AAAAAAAABG8/6-dAlP1FT_QT1HV8Ar8-BtGM6z7jOq4QwCEw/s200/diana-gill-headshot.jpg" width="159" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Diana Gill</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<b style="color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;">Diana Gill:</b><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;"><b> </b>I think it's
fairly clear that the bi<span style="border: none;">g 5 will continue to contract
and tighten their programs, with all the commensurate effects and spinning of
publishing's own wheel of fortune for people at those houses,<span style="border: none;"> <span style="border: none;">and for authors new and old. I
hope smaller and indie presses continue to provide some<span style="border: none;"> alternatives and ideally gro<span style="border: none;">w to counteract
the contractio<span style="border: none;">n.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<b style="color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;">Susan Ferber:</b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;">I think we have taken for granted what an incredible
development print on demand has meant for publishers, authors, and
readers. There is no need to declare
books out of print anymore; we can l<span style="border: none;">iterally make
work available forever, which is a development on par with the printing press
in my mind. I think the death of the
print book has been the most overhyped negative in the publishing world. This has been augured and feared for so long,
and <span style="border: none;">for new generations of readers, it is so
heartening to see that they love the print form. It is enduring and old technology can and
does have value. </span></span></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VzmXCpQSxYI/WS-ruMDnE9I/AAAAAAAABG8/6llcYWxwM7YSqlCaqrk5PO0X9IOcoWIdgCEw/s1600/SUF.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="221" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VzmXCpQSxYI/WS-ruMDnE9I/AAAAAAAABG8/6llcYWxwM7YSqlCaqrk5PO0X9IOcoWIdgCEw/s200/SUF.jpg" width="147" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Susan Ferber</td></tr>
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<span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"><b>Jane Friedman: </b></span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;">I am encouraged by
the new data-oriented research and tools that help publishers and authors
better speak to, connect, and market directly to readers. </span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;">D<span style="border: none;">irect-to-consumer knowledge and
marketing has been the Achilles heel for traditional publishers, particularly
when compared to Amazon's capabilities, but it really feels like the industry
is making some progress.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="border: none;">As an
author-advocate, I wish publishe<span style="border: none;">rs would take more
seriously the need to offer authors more communication and education on book
marketing. I know it's not possible for publishers to give all their titles
A-list marketing treatment, but by far the biggest complaint I hear from
authors is <span style="border: none;">that no one told them or prepared them for
what the publisher would or would not do. Greater transparency would be so
helpful<span style="border: none;">. </span></span></span></span></span><span style="border: none; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"> [BookExop photo via Chicago Tribune] </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-9425251971792991342017-05-31T00:21:00.001-04:002017-05-31T00:51:21.249-04:00I Wrote the Book on Editing. (I Had Help.)This blog has gone unrefreshed for far too long now, but your correspondent has not been idle. For much of the past couple of years I have been putting together--editing and partly writing--the book whose cover you see here: <i><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo21439635.html">What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing</a>.</i> It was commissioned by the University of Chicago Press, the publisher of the venerable and indispensable <i><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo25956703.html">Chicago Manual of Style,</a></i> and they'll release it in October. (Feel free to preorder it now!)<br />
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It seems ironic that for those who are interested in going into the book business, or those outside it who want to understand it, there is a dearth of published guidance about how editors do what they do, or why, or what constitutes best practices in editing. There are a few very good exceptions to that statement, most notably the late Gerald Gross's essay collection <a href="http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=Editors+on+Editing"><i>Editors on Editing</i>,</a> first published in 1962, updated twice since, and still in print. I read the second edition avidly when I got into publishing in the early 1980s, and it is still well worth reading, with contributions from many accomplished (in some cases legendary) editors. But <i>EoE </i>was last updated in the early 90s, before Amazon and the internet, among other factors, transformed the industry. It was long past time for another crack at the subject.<br />
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<i>What Editors Do</i> is the result. I'm very grateful to the stellar editors, agents, and other experts-- 27 in all--who answered the call to explain the many and varied roles that editors play in connecting writers and readers. The contents cover a broad swath of the publishing industry, including academic and reference publishing as well as trade, children's as well as adult, genre fiction as well as literary. And because self-publishing has become such a vibrant segment of the marketplace and so important for authors, it addresses what happens when authors become their own editors.<br />
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In the coming weeks and months, I'll be posting some material from and about the book here. For now, in the hope of whetting your appetite, here's the table of contents and list of essayists. (Click on the images to enlarge.) For further description, see the <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo21439635.html">publisher's catalogue page</a>, or watch this space.<br />
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<br />Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-32294255609422413342015-08-16T12:52:00.001-04:002016-12-15T11:14:08.622-05:00Podcast: Historian Martha Hodes on Americans' Responses to the Lincoln Assassination<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/219408901&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I am really enjoying my venture in podcasting,
which gives me a chance to have stimulating conversations about history with a variety of authors. This month I spoke to Martha Hodes of NYU about her new
book <i>Mourning Lincoln</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The murder of President Abraham Lincoln, just days
after the Union had triumphed in the Civil War, shocked and horrified people
across America—it was, in its way, a nineteenth century 9/11. This year, 2015, marks
the 150th anniversary of the assassination. <i>Mourning Lincoln</i> is Martha Hodes's exploration of that traumatic event. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FwKJJ_B-AVE/Vc-wv9F8QqI/AAAAAAAAA0g/wjKxRmbsXu4/s1600/Martha%2BHodes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FwKJJ_B-AVE/Vc-wv9F8QqI/AAAAAAAAA0g/wjKxRmbsXu4/s200/Martha%2BHodes.jpg" width="151" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Martha Hodes</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">She has combed through the private, unfiltered
writings of Americans from both North and South to learn how they reacted to
news of the assassination. Their responses both reflected how much Lincoln
meant to his contemporaries and revealed the profound differences that the
Civil War had left unresolved. Click the arrow above to hear my conversation with Martha Hodes about
her work; you can also download it at <a href="http://oneforthebooks.net/">OnefortheBooks.net</a> or via <a href="https://soundcloud.com/peter-ginna/martha-hodes-america-in-the-aftermath-of-abraham-lincolns-assassination">Soundcloud</a><span style="font-size: 16pt;">.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">P.S. If you'd like to </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">listen to my other interviews with historians, past or forthcoming, you can
subscribe via RSS feed on my podcast's home page, OnefortheBooks.net, linked above. You can
also follow me at <a href="https://soundcloud.com/peter-ginna">Soundcloud</a>. Or you can subscribe to this blog by
e-mail using the link in the right-hand column here, which will bring you all
my posts including announcements of new podcasts. Access via iTunes coming soon, I hope. </span></span></div>
<o:p></o:p>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-33490156560175191922015-07-04T15:36:00.000-04:002015-07-08T11:37:57.477-04:00One for the Books: An Independence Day Interview with Historian John Ferling<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/213229851&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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As a lover of history books, not to mention as an editor of them, I've wished for a long time that there were more conversation to be found online about all the interesting work that historians are doing. There are certainly some lively websites and blogs, and a handful of excellent podcasts, but the avid history reader is underserved compared to the fiction lover or sports fan.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bgmBygmD-Fc/VZgCjnwjUBI/AAAAAAAAAyU/KZSodFxKP84/s1600/51KDRTvvDwL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bgmBygmD-Fc/VZgCjnwjUBI/AAAAAAAAAyU/KZSodFxKP84/s320/51KDRTvvDwL.jpg" width="208" /></a>I think this is slowly changing--for example, I've been happy to see a growing community of historians and history enthusiasts on Twitter. (One quick way to find the latter is search under the hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23twitterstorians&src=typd">#Twitterstorians</a>.) But it's still a challenge to find in-depth discussion of new work in history, especially as serious books reviews have so drastically diminished in newspapers and magazines. </div>
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So I'm making a modest effort to expand what's available with a new podcast, One for the Books, where I'll be talking to historians about their new titles, works in progress, and sometimes other topics. As I'm posting this on Independence Day, I could think of no better person to talk to than John Ferling, who has spent a long and productive scholarly career studying the American Revolution. He has just published a superb new book titled <i>Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It</i>--a sweeping, and stirring, history of coming of American independence. Unlike many books on the Revolution, this one looks carefully at both the political struggle and the military one, and at how each of those influenced the other. Ferling also emphasizes--in a break from the last few decades of scholarship-- the economic factors that he believes drove the colonists toward a break from the mother country. </div>
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Click the orange button above to hear the interview. You can also <a href="https://soundcloud.com/peter-ginna/one-for-the-books-podcast-interview-with-historian-john-ferling">download it from SoundCloud</a> or from <a href="http://oneforthebooks.net/">Libsyn</a>. I hope you'll enjoy this talk as much as I did and that you'll check back for future interviews; you should soon be able to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and other sites, and I'll update this post when those feeds are active. I would welcome comments, positive or negative, about this interview, or suggestions about other authors you'd like to hear on the podcast. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Ferling</td></tr>
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For more about John Ferling, or to buy <i>Whirlwind</i>, <a href="http://johnferling.com/">visit his website</a>, which includes links to online and independent booksellers.<br />
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<b>UPDATE- July 8, 2015</b>: You can now find a dedicated webpage for this podcast at <a href="http://oneforthebooks.net/">OnefortheBooks.net</a>. You can subscribe to it via an RSS feed by clicking the symbol at the top of the podcast page, or by putting this URL into your RSS reader: <a href="http://oneforthebooks.net/rss">http://oneforthebooks.net/rss</a>. Soon it should also be available through iTunes and I'll update again then.<br />
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<b>To subscribe by e-mail:</b> if you don't have an RSS reader, but would like to be notified by e-mail of future podcast episodes, just sign up under the "Subscribe by E-mail" link at the right. That will bring you everything that's posted here, including new interviews.<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4316886317870996102" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4316886317870996102" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a><br />
<a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogger.com%2Fblogger.g%3FblogID%3D4316886317870996102%23editor%2Ftarget%3Dpost%3BpostID%3D3349015656017519192&media=https%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-gZkhweZnekA%2FVZgRY1p_6KI%2FAAAAAAAAAys%2FoJnL5OWZdaM%2Fs200%2F020_17a-1.jpg&xm=h&xv=sa1.37.01&xuid=wk_K1ksWrw3C&description=" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; left: 498px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; top: 820px; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a><a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogger.com%2Fblogger.g%3FblogID%3D4316886317870996102%23editor%2Ftarget%3Dpost%3BpostID%3D3349015656017519192&media=https%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-gZkhweZnekA%2FVZgRY1p_6KI%2FAAAAAAAAAys%2FoJnL5OWZdaM%2Fs200%2F020_17a-1.jpg&xm=h&xv=sa1.37.01&xuid=wk_K1ksWrw3C&description=" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; left: 498px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; top: 820px; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-51223994068064245022014-10-26T14:06:00.000-04:002015-01-01T10:25:49.614-05:00Do Publishers Deserve to Exist?<div class="MsoNormal">
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This week’s screed against book publishers comes from
Matt Yglesias at Vox.com, who proclaims, <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopoly">“Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers”</a>--a headline
that shouts clickbait but fairly reflects his piece. Yglesias, whose work I
have often admired, notes that he’s the child of two authors and has published
a book himself, so his hatred seems to be honestly earned. Writing of the “fundamental
uselessness” of publishers, he says they are going to be “wiped off the face of
the earth soon” by Amazon “and readers will be better for it.”</div>
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Book-business types rolled their eyes at Yglesias’ hostile
tone and ignorance of some key facts, but I saw it cited as smart and “thoughtful”
by a number of media people and others who I’d have hoped would know better. So at the risk of repeating points that have been made many times before (but seem
still to be widely un-apprehended), maybe it’s worth briefly reminding
ourselves just how publishers do add value in connecting writers and readers.
So, <i>pace</i> Matt Yglesias, here are some of the services publishers perform. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Curation.</b> The
function of choosing what work is most worth presenting to readers is derided
by some as a retrograde, “elitist” notion. Why should publishers appoint
themselves as selectors of what people ought to read, when everybody can<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>put their work online and let readers judge
for themselves? <o:p></o:p></div>
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For starters, think about the staggering number of books
released every year: in 2013 it was close to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one million</i>--304,000 traditionally published and more than double
that number of self-published books (precise figures are hard to collect
because many self-pub titles, including those produced on Amazon, aren’t
captured by standard industry measures). A customer going into a bookstore
confronts what may seem like a dizzying number of titles. But all of them have
been through a multi-step screening process where agents, editors, marketers,
and booksellers have determined these books have value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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When I was a publisher, I probably turned down a hundred books
for every one I published--and most of those had already been screened by
agents who filtered another hundred for each one they sent me. Imagine the
bookstore--more like a mega-warehouse--where all of those titles are on the
shelf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A warehouse choked with millions of books, with no sales
clerk to steer you to what you’re looking for--and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>no quality control over what got in there. Where for every Michael Connelly novel there were a a hundred Michael Connelly
wannabes, which would range from the mediocre to the truly illiterate. To put
it another way, the marketplace of books would be one gigantic slush pile
stretching as far as the eye can see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
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Some argue that book selection can be crowdsourced, and
reader reviews can take the place of editors. But if you have spent much time
reading Amazon reader comments, or even reading top-rated self-published titles, you
may share my doubt that crowds do as good a job as the people at Penguin, Melville
House, or University of California Press. In short, if we ever attain the
publisher-less world Matt Yglesias is so eager to embrace, I think readers will
readily see what value was added by those old-fashioned “gatekeepers.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Development. </b>Everybody
understands that publishers provide editing—and as I think most authors would
agree, it’s a vital contribution, but let’s concede that it might be hired on a
freelance basis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, editing is
only part of a larger process that takes place as the book goes from an author’s
proposal to a published work. That development process might include
fundamental shaping of the structure at the outline stage, long before there is
a manuscript to edit; picture research and clearing permissions (a huge task on
some books); line-by-line legal vetting of a manuscript; creating maps,
drawings, or tables; and coming up with typographic and jacket designs that
will express the essence of the text and attract readers to pick it up or click
on it—a whole panoply of tasks that go into presenting the author’s work
professionally. Couldn’t authors outsource all these services as well? Maybe.
But unless an author is truly an obsessive DIYer, there’s a big advantage in
having one “solutions provider” take care of all of this. Publishers have
evolved to do this pretty efficiently and effectively. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Investment/Venture
Capital</b>. Publishers pay advances against royalties, taking substantial risk
that enables authors to undertake time- or money-intensive reporting, or
sometimes just to feed their families, while they’re working on their books.
Even novels sometimes require travel and research. This point has been made by
several other writers (such as <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119769/amazons-monopoly-must-be-broken-radical-plan-tech-giant">Franklin Foer</a> and <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/05/amazon_hachette_dispute_how_the_big_five_publishers_could_have_avoided_the.html">Evan Hughes</a>) so I
won’t go into depth on it here. Suffice it to say that unless someone is
willing to risk substantial advances, the only authors who’ll be able to devote
months or years to their work will be those who are independently wealthy. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Yglesias suggests that “If advances don’t make financial
sense, then they will die off regardless of what happens to Amazon. If they do
make financial sense, then they will live on as financial products even as the
rest of the industry restructures.” This presumes some other investors would be
willing or able to take the risk on projects that might seem pretty unpromising
at first glance. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Publishers were willing to take risks on these books for a
couple of reasons. (First, they are incurable optimists, but let’s leave that
aside.) Second, they have long experience seeing ideas developed into books,
even odd-sounding ideas. Third, they are spreading their risk across a wide pool
of titles. Even if eight or nine of 10 advances don’t earn out (and they don’t),
one or two of them can make up for the bad bets. <o:p></o:p></div>
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If publishers didn’t exist, would this risk/reward ratio
attract other investors? The payouts on most books are tiny compared to venture
capital returns, though the risks are just as bad. And it’s hard to imagine a
Kickstarter campaign funding a multi-year stint in Mumbai or a few decades
plumbing the archives of the LBJ Library and interviewing thousands of people. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally, quaint as this will sound, publishers sometimes
invest in books that they know won’t earn out, simply because they believe in
supporting talented writers. They also know that bringing a promising author to
the list may pay off further down the line. This is true even of big
conglomerate houses, and even more so of the many excellent independent
publishers at work all over the country—the Grove Atlantics, Graywolfs, and Tin
Houses—whom Yglesias would cheerfully consign to oblivion. If all these houses are
“wiped off the face of the earth,” do we imagine the algorithms that replace
them will have the same concern for literary culture? <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Marketing.</b> “Publishers are terrible at marketing,” declares Yglesias, but his argument for
this assertion is full of strange leaps and assumptions. Referring to the
Amazon-Hachette standoff, he says that if Hachette were any good at marketing,
they could boycott Amazon and force consumers to buy their books elsewhere.
This ignores how consumers really behave and the fact that books are
discretionary purchases. If you couldn’t buy milk at your supermarket, yes, you
would go elsewhere to shop. But if you don’t find a given impulse purchase at
the supermarket when you’re already shopping there--Pumpkin Spice Oreos, or
even, say, a book!--you’re not going to leave your shopping cart and walk out.
At Amazon your “cart” might already contain office supplies, appliances, or
indeed books from several other publishers. You may well be a Prime member, who
gets free shipping and 2-day delivery of any book he orders. So if you can’t
find a given Hachette title there, maybe you shop for it elsewhere (with all
the hassle that might involve of setting up new accounts, etc); maybe you
figure you’ll try again another day; or maybe you just choose a different book,
with a nudge from Amazon itself (“people who bought <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Goldfinch</i> also bought...”). Hachette’s power to manipulate you
is limited compared to that of an “everything store” where you are already a
committed customer. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Yglesias develops his point with an example that’s meant to
show the superfluousness of publishers. When George R.R. Martin puts out a new
volume of Game of Thrones, <o:p></o:p></div>
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“If I can buy it as an Amazon Kindle book, I will buy it
that way. If he decides that the only way people should be able to read the
book is to get Powell’s to mail them a copy, then I will buy it that way.
And I am not alone.” </blockquote>
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Yglesias says Martin could simply sell the book off his own
website, with no need of a publisher-middleman. “Nor is Martin,” he notes, “the
only author with the clout to not worry about the terms of distribution.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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There’s no disputing that Martin, or other bestselling authors,
could now self-publish with great success. The key word here, and the one that
refutes the useless-publisher argument, is <i>bestselling</i>. George R.R. Martin’s
--like Donna Tartt’s, or David McCullough’s--status as a bestselling author was
built up over years of publishing. It is not solely a function of his undoubted
narrative genius, but also the product of the efforts of editors, jacket
designers, marketers, publicists, sales reps, and others who helped generate
excitement about Martin’s books and put them in the hands of millions of
readers (long before HBO’s TV series multiplied that fan base). <o:p></o:p></div>
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When authors who have not already captured the public’s
attention publish themselves, by and large the results do not prove the
uselessness of publishers. The average sale of a self-published title is under
250 copies, somewhat less than the average number of friends on Facebook. (I
say this not to bash self-publishing, which is a fantastic opportunity for some
authors and demonstrably a route to stunning success and riches for a few. But
just because some authors achieve stunning success without publishers does not
mean the latter add no value.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The tragedy of publishing is that publishers are never as
good as marketing as they would like to be. Any thoughtful bookperson is all
too aware of this, even before disappointed authors like Yglesias remind us.
Blockbusters aside, the revenues generated by any individual book are barely
enough to cover much more than the cost of mailing review copies, maybe a
couple of online ads or a handful of author appearances. That every new book is
a unique product, whose audience won’t be quite the same as any other book,
means that each marketing campaign is a matter of inventing the wheel--horribly
inefficient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And for these reasons, the
time and attention of publishing personnel are also limited resources that are
typically stretched too thin. <o:p></o:p></div>
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All this makes it difficult to turn most books into the
bestsellers that their authors are always convinced they should be. As an
editor, I was constantly frustrated that my own books often didn’t get the
marketing budget I thought they should have to reach their fullest potential,
and disappointed when I had to tell authors their work hadn’t sold as well as
it deserved. Does this mean, though, that those works would have sold just as
well without the involvement of me or the house? I have to doubt it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Marketing a book is a far larger and more complex process
than just listing it on Amazon or buying a New York Times ad. In a publishing
house, the marketing process begins even before a title is acquired, with an
editor kindling enthusiasm among colleagues. As the process gathers steam, word
is spread out to the world by publicists, sales reps, e-mails and personal
letters, schmoozing, and gossip, plus advertising, review copies and free
advance e-books, social media, and paid promotions with bookstores and online
sellers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As soon as a manuscript enters the publishing pipeline, the
house is communicating with retailers, reviewers, media producers, movie
scouts, foreign publishers,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and all the
other channels by which readers hear about books, telling them what makes this
title worth reading. One of the oldest publishing truisms is that word of mouth
is the most effective way to sell books, and in some ways a publisher is a
large group of people organized to generate word of mouth and amplify it as
widely as possible. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Doing this effectively requires framing the book in a
compelling way and identifying all the potential audiences for it (tasks that
take considerable skill and at which most authors are surprisingly weak). It
also depends on relationships with all the aforementioned actors in the
marketplace and on credibility with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If you were a bookstore fiction buyer, would you rather sift though ten
thousand self-published novels or a few hundred published by houses whose track
records you know?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are a news
producer being pitched on a memoir, will you pay more attention to a publicist
who works for the author, or one from W.W. Norton? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Distribution</b> is one absolutely critical component of selling books, a fact that Yglesias acknowledges while ignoring its implications.
“In the traditional book purchasing paradigm, when a reader bought a book at
the store....the publisher...was doing very real work as part of the
value-chain. Transforming the manuscript into a book and then arranging for it
to be shipped in appropriate quantities to physical stores around the country
is a non-trivial task. Digital publishing is not like that.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He is absolutely right that getting books on shelves--not
just in bookstores, but in supermarkets, newsstands, craft shops, school book
fairs, and so on--is an essential task performed by publishers, who devote
enormous resources to managing the supply chain. When you buy a Dr. Seuss for
your niece in a bookstore, or grab a novel at an airport kiosk for your flight,
you’re benefiting from all the infrastructure that that put those volumes in
front of you--and so is the author whose book you bought. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s true, most of that machinery is irrelevant in a digital
marketplace. And here is the crux of the matter: <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">most books are still not digital</i>.</b> Most people still love printed
books, even those who happily read on their Kindles and phones, and a
significant percentage read only print editions. (One recent survey finds that<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/10/22/do-readers-really-prefer-their-dusty-old-paperbacks-to-e-books-the-e-book-industry-by-the-numbers-infographic/?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=d00463bdbe-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-d00463bdbe-304610433">46% percent of American readers read printed books only; a vast majority read both print and e; and only 6 percent read e-only.</a>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All </i>these readers
are served by the current ecosystem, where you can instantly download a book
you just heard about on NPR, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">or</i> spend
a Sunday afternoon browsing in a wonderful bookstore for a great biography, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">or</i> pick up a baking book that catches
your eye at Williams-Sonoma.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Furthermore,
as I have argued <a href="http://www.doctorsyntax.net/2014/06/why-are-publishers-telling-us-e-books.html">elsewhere</a>, the vibrant
market and high visibility of all their printed counterparts is a vital
component of the marketing for e-books. In a world where you never saw a printed
book in a store, or in a reader’s hands on the bus, it would be harder for any
book to gain the kind of “mindshare” that a hot title does today. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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There are many flaws in this system, to be sure, and they
result in prices that are higher than they might be in a purely digital
marketplace. But book prices, even for hardcovers, are not unreasonable compared
to the costs of other entertainment or information goods. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yglesias, and many other pundits, strike a pose of hardnosed
realism by telling us the Amazon-Hachette dispute “is just about price.” (In
fact it’s really about profits, which isn’t the same thing. Amazon wants to pry
some of Hachette’s margin away for itself. Low prices happen to be part of
Amazon's business model.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But more
important, what these pundits overlook is that the dispute is also about what
kind of marketplace we want to have. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://rack.3.mshcdn.com/media/ZgkyMDEzLzAxLzI4LzQ1L0Jhcm5lc2FuZE5vLjk1MmQ4LmpwZwpwCXRodW1iCTk1MHg1MzQjCmUJanBn/0598b141/5f8/Barnes-and-Noble-closed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://rack.3.mshcdn.com/media/ZgkyMDEzLzAxLzI4LzQ1L0Jhcm5lc2FuZE5vLjk1MmQ4LmpwZwpwCXRodW1iCTk1MHg1MzQjCmUJanBn/0598b141/5f8/Barnes-and-Noble-closed.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
If lower prices are good for readers, so is diversity in the
marketplace of ideas. If Amazon were to "crush" publishers, first of all, book
sales would plunge as printed books, and thousands of sales outlets for them,
largely disappeared. The publisher-less world Yglesias imagines will also be a
bookstore-free world, totally dominated by one seller that will have even
greater sway over what gets promoted than it does now. It will also have the ability to <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/audio-books/article/61231-audible-lowering-royalty-on-self-published-audiobooks.html">change at whim the terms it offers to authors, </a>in their disfavor, as it already has <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/9920920/Self-published-authors-hit-by-Amazon-online-royalties-cut.html">more than once</a>. That’s my idea of a dystopia, not of readers being better off.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
It is naive to imagine that trading many different publisher-gatekeepers for one or a few massive retailer-gatekeepers would result in authors "seeing their total income rise." As for readers, the
serendipity of browsing bookstore shelves and of discovering a book you didn’t
know you were looking for, or of getting a great recommendation from a clerk
who knows your taste, will be nostalgic memories-- replaced by a search function
and algorithms completely controlled by one or two companies who make the “giant
conglomerates” that own publishers look puny and who may <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/amazon-and-its-missing-books/">tilt the playing field</a> for their own purposes. </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Amazon is a brilliant company and it has unquestionably done
readers and authors a favor by making books available in so many convenient
ways. It has also forced publishers and other retailers to up their game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But admiring the value of Amazon shouldn’t
preclude us from recognizing the value that publishers add, at both ends of the writer-reader pipeline. A marketplace where publishers and Amazon compete for authors’
loyalty, and Amazon and physical bookstores compete for readers’ dollars, is a
healthier one for all parties.<br />
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<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Images: Wikimedia Commons; pictureitnow; Genista from Flickr </span></div>
</div>
Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com70tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-76715569391926629652014-06-06T11:28:00.000-04:002015-01-05T10:27:00.682-05:00Why Are Publishers Telling Us E-Books Are So Profitable? Another Book-Business Fallacy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Coverage of the Hachette-vs-Amazon dispute has recycled
various misconceptions about what’s happening, as <a href="http://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2014/06/getting-things-straight-two-wonky-important-hachettesettlement-things-people-get-wrong/">Michael Cader noted Wednesday in Publishers Lunch</a>. But one of the most widespread fallacies you may hear, and
not just relating to Hachette/Amazon, is that “e-books have been more
profitable for publishers than print books,” as <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/05/amazon_hachette_dispute_how_the_big_five_publishers_could_have_avoided_the.html">Evan Hughes put it in Slate</a>.
The chunky margins generated by e-books, the thinking goes, are what the publisher
and the 600-pound gorilla of bookselling are tussling for. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Even before this dispute, some industry voices, led by <a href="http://www.idealog.com/blog/paying-authors-more-might-be-the-best-economics/">Mike Shatzkin</a>
(echoed by Hughes in the piece just cited, and of course the agent community),
have argued that in a sense publishers have been asking for trouble by
maintaining such high margins on e-books—like kids walking back from the candy
store, their pockets bulging, past the local bully. Shatzkin proposed that
publishers raise their royalty rates on e-books so that they could gain some
advantage by sharing the “extra” profits with authors before the retailers
could zero in on them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mike’s suggestion was prescient, and there are other good
arguments for passing along more e-book revenue to authors (starting with, "they could use the money"). Nonetheless I believe publishers would have been better
served by pointing out, long ago, that the notion of e-books as a magical cash cow
is wildly misleading. Because <i>the
supposedly greater profits from e-books—when published alongside traditional
print editions—are an artifact of accounting</i>. The margins that both Amazon
and Hachette find in e-books are only as high as they are because of all the resources Hachette devotes to hardcovers and paperbacks.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Today in mainstream publishing, e-books are almost
invariably published alongside a hardcover or paperback edition. This means the
e-book edition floats on top of a huge investment in whatever that title is, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">which in most houses is not charged
against the e-book edition. </i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Consider the following costs incurred in publishing a new
title:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The advance—frequently the largest single line item in the
investment in a given book, and in many houses charged entirely to the first
print edition. Even when it’s allocated otherwise, there are many other costs
that are charged the print book, such as: <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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“Plant” costs—such as copyediting and
proofreading, typesetting, design, illustrations, legal vetting, maps. These
are typically charged to the hardcover edition, even though the paperback or
e-book editions benefit equally from them. (Side note: for the same reason, even
in pre-e-days, paperbacks were often seen as more profitable than they "deserved" to be.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Furthermore, marketing costs are also charged to the
hardcover even when the e-book is published simultaneously. These include
promotion (catalogues, advance reading copies, BookExpo displays, etc);
advertising; and publicity (review copies and ARCs, author tours). Obviously
all these efforts are working to sell the e-book just as much as the print
edition. <o:p></o:p></div>
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And alongside <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">those</i> expenses are the heinous, eye-watering costs of producing and distributing
physical books: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Printing, sales
commissions, warehousing, shipping, and all the hideous inefficiencies of
taking returns. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Wait a minute, you’re saying, now you’re going too far. Why
should the new, innocent e-book be charged for costs of the bad old dead-tree
"legacy" (shudder) business? <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the </i>e<i>xistence
of printed books, the trafficking and display of them, is still a critical
marketing tool for e-books!</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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What is the currency of advertising? Impressions. Every
physical book you see as you go through your day is an impression, just a like
a Coke ad on a bus shelter or a Coach logo on a handbag--each of those glimpses
is a little hit of marketing. <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Think
about the millions of printed books out in the world</span>--displayed in store
windows, piled on tables, racked at the checkout in supermarkets and drugstores.
Or seen in the hands of people on airplanes and buses; given as given as Christmas
or Mother's Day presents to people you know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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We know that one of the reasons people buy books is that
they see other people enjoying them (hence <a href="http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/01/the-way-of-the-blockbuster">the enduring popularity of bestsellers, even in a long-tail marketplace</a>). There is no
question that many of the titles on the e-book bestseller list are boosted by the
visible popularity of hardcovers and paperbacks. The thankfully still-robust
presence of printed books contributes significantly, I would argue, to the
“mindshare” enjoyed by any e-book--not<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> to mention the overall "mindshare" of "book" as a category of entertainment. </span></div>
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There
are, to be sure, e-only bestsellers—works that achieve significant sales
without riding the coattails of a print edition. I would guess, though, that
very few titles which have achieved true blockbuster e-book sales—tens or
hundreds of thousands of copies—have done so without a blockbuster print
edition helping to spread the word. (<i>Fifty Shades of Gray,</i> a bestseller as an e-book, became a <a href="http://knopfdoubleday.com/2012/05/22/e-l-jamess-fifty-shades-trilogy-tops-ten-million-mark-in-u-s/">megahit</a> when Random House published a print edition.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Perhaps I’m pressing a point if I go from there to arguing
that the cost of trucking a new title to a Barnes & Noble distribution
center ought to be spread across its e-book edition. But the larger point is
that it’s arbitrary at best, and again, misleading, to think we can neatly
separate print from e-book costs, when publishing any title is a multi-platform campaign.
And it leads to fuzzy thinking about the business if we look at the P&L
spreadsheet for a given book and say “wow, the e-book is really profitable”
when the poor hardcover is carrying 80 or 90 percent of the investment load. What’s
really happening, if you look at this another way, is that the print edition is
subsidizing the e-book! <o:p></o:p></div>
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My point here is not to bash the e-book business. It is true
that e-books have an enormous economic advantage over print when it comes to manufacturing
and distribution, because the incremental unit cost of creating &
delivering an e-book is virtually nil. (Even better, no warehousing and no
returns.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You need no publishing
expertise to see this, and it’s one reason why it seems intuitive to say e-books
are more profitable. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Some publishers, I’m afraid, have encouraged this misapprehension.
Corporate houses in particular like to trumpet the profitability of their
digital businesses because it makes them look “innovative” and tech-savvy and
gives Wall Street an easily-grasped, upbeat story of a growth driver in the
industry. Trade publishing companies have historically thrown off quite modest, not to say
anemic, profits and have for decades been caricatured as quaint, retrograde,
etc. so maybe we can’t blame them for bragging about better margins
that seem to come from new technology. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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But for all the reasons above, it's wrong to consider the
profitability of an e-book edition separately from an accompanying print title.
And it makes no sense for publishers to boast of wonderful margins on e-books,
unless they are also going to apologize for the lousy margins they get on print
titles. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Publishers are straining mightily to maintain a healthy
publishing ecosystem that includes print and e-books, online selling and
brick-and-mortar bookstores. This is not out of nostalgia or an inability to
grasp the digital future, but because they understand, as explained above, that
print and e-book sales boost each other. And if they give away too much of their revenue from e-books, whether to retailers or to authors, they risk making that multi-format marketplace unsustainable.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-91595825904787235482013-10-02T01:06:00.000-04:002013-10-02T09:58:11.622-04:00Reports of Editorial's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated (or, Why Mike Shatzkin Is Wrong)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iBdM_ULZG_M/UkukCzmXs6I/AAAAAAAAAas/UOs-XAkA43M/s1600/my_tombstone-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iBdM_ULZG_M/UkukCzmXs6I/AAAAAAAAAas/UOs-XAkA43M/s320/my_tombstone-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Readers of this page or the @BloomsburyPress twitterstream know that I think Mike Shatzkin is one of the smartest observers of the publishing industry today. I cite and retweet the posts from his Idea Logical blog so often that I sometimes feel I'm just a distribution service for him. So I'm perversely happy to report that I think <a href="http://www.idealog.com/blog/marketing-will-replace-editorial-driving-force-behind-publishing-houses/">one of his most recent posts grabbed completely the wrong end of the stick.</a><br />
<br />
His title says it all: "<b>Marketing will replace editorial as the driving force behind publishing houses."</b> Mike starts with a thumbnail history of the rise of sales departments in publishing, noting rightly that large sales forces and the tools they used--cover, catalogue, and the summary of key selling points we call title information sheets or tipsheets--were "critical factors to a book's success." I agree with Mike that as he has often written in other posts, the ability to put titles in front of readers simply by getting a lot of them on bookstore shelves has been for a long time the biggest "value added" by publishers for authors. The sheer scale of a big publisher's sales operation, its reach into the widest number of bookstores (or other outlets), was often its key competitive advantage.<br />
<br />
So far, I'm with him. And I'd largely agree with the next part of his history, which explains that as the marketplace changed (he points to e-books but in fact online bookselling was critical long before the e-book explosion), "selling"--getting books onto shelves--became only a part of the much broader effort to make consumers aware of a title and motivate them to buy it. Publicity, advertising, author branding, and nowadays an ever-evolving range of social media now outweigh wooing booksellers as critical parts of the process of delivering the author's work to readers. I concur with Mike that the "pull" function of motivating buyers has eclipsed the "push" function of bookstore sell-in in importance.<br />
<br />
(Parenthetical note: This isn't to say booksellers, or sales reps, aren't crucial! The hand-selling that good booksellers do is actually the best marketing we have, creating that "pull" at the store level.)<br />
<br />
"So," Shatzkin writes, "marketing has largely usurped the sales function. It will probably before long usurp the editorial function too." This is where we part company. Mike believes that publishing houses "went from editorially-driven in my father's time to sales-driven in mine," and that "the new transition is to being marketing-driven." The fact is that <b>all great publishing houses, and I would argue most really successful ones, are driven by editorial taste, passion, and savvy</b>. ("Savvy" includes commercial savvy, a point I'll come back to.)<br />
<br />
I know we bloggers are supposed to make lists, so here's my list of <b>5 Reasons Editorial Still Drives Publishing</b>.<br />
<br />
1. First of all, as my old boss Tom McCormack used to say, "salepeople can't sell, marketers can't market, publicists can't publicize, until editors bring in the books." However the marketplace has changed, <b>attracting and developing new works that people want to read is the <i>sine qua non</i> of a publishing house.</b> Sales couldn't perform this function, nor can marketing.<br />
<br />
2. The current explosion of self- and small publishers and the hugely expanding universe of titles available makes <b>the role of a trusted curator </b>that much more valuable. It's a cliché in the business that publishers' brands are meaningless to consumers. But with tens of thousands of new titles, mostly mediocre or worse, flooding the market, that is going to change. Houses whose editors consistently find works that readers respond to are going to have the most success.<br />
<br />
3. The development of those works--that is, <b><i>editing</i>--is still a really vital part of what publishers offer authors.</b> It's easy to romanticize, and overvalue, the mystical author-editor bond and the brilliant contributions of editors who turn sprawling stacks of manuscript into future classics. Such transformations are very rare; more often, the best an editor can do is take a book from a B plus to an A minus. Nonetheless, that might be what breaks that book out of the pack--there are a lot of B plus books out there. And whenever I meet with prospective authors and ask them what they're looking for in a publisher, the first thing most of them say is "an editor who will help me make my manuscript the best it can be." So the editing process is still a place where publishing houses truly do add value.<br />
<br />
4. Most important, <b>the best editors ARE marketers</b>. To acquire and edit a book well, an editor needs to identify and understand the audience for that book, whether it's a poetic literary novel or a frat-boy memoir. Editors need to understand those potential readers and what they're going to respond to in a book; with more specialized content (say, history or science or cooking) they need to know something about the field. The editor has to articulate the "sales handle"--the reason why someone would part with $10, $25 or more to own this particular work. (That sense of the reader's interest is also critical in the editing process--the way you edit the book is shaped by what you intuit readers are looking for in it. So "marketing" and "editing" are not in fact separable.) All of this is what I meant above in saying that great publishers are driven by taste plus commercial savvy.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Sometimes</i> an inspired sales or marketing person, or a publicist, has a new inspiration for how to pitch or package a book, and often those colleagues will refine and sharpen the editor's take on it for their own purposes. But as my marketing colleagues will remind me, it's the editor who has to generate the passion and excitement that gets the machinery of the house moving. When editors don't do that, it's hard for marketers to manufacture that excitement themselves.<br />
<br />
5. By the way, not only do editors need to know what readers in a given field are looking for. The best ones also find things that readers <i>aren't</i> looking for--<i>yet</i>. They recognize when an author has written something that doesn't fit an established template yet is fresh and compelling enough to create its own audience. It might be a first novel by David Foster Wallace, Art Spiegelman's <i>Maus</i>, or <i>The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook</i>. Marketers are great at selling books to audiences they recognize, but usually very reluctant to embrace things they don't recognize. The first question marketing asks an editor with a new project is, "what are the comp titles?" When the answer is "there really aren't any" the editor meets stiff resistance. So <b>a drawback of a "marketing-driven" house is likely to be that it follows trends rather than sets them</b>--over the long term, a recipe for diminishing returns.<br />
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Mike's column cites the example of a small publishing house where the head of marketing is also an acquiring editor and remarks, "I think many publishers will come to see the benefits of marketing-led acquisition in the years to come." But the fact that one smart, creative person with an editorial background has a marketing job doesn't mean that marketing is taking over editorial. In fact, it might be the reverse!<br />
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There is no question that marketing is now more important, and more complex, than it has ever been in publishing, and it is likely to become even more so. But--and I say this with complete respect for the many superb marketing people I have worked with--as long as publishing houses as we know them exist, editors will remain at their heart.<br />
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<br />Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-83296026463152953142013-03-18T10:26:00.004-04:002013-03-18T10:26:46.755-04:00Tweet Not Your Query, Author, or, Why I Don't Read the Slush Pile Anymore<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/FileStack_retouched.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="284" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/FileStack_retouched.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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When I began working in publishing, one of my jobs was to read the slush pile--the stack of unsolicited book submissions that pour into the mailbox of any publishing house. In those pre-email days they poured physically through the mail slot in our office door, five days a week. As a young, optimistic eager beaver, I cheerfully tore open envelope after envelope, imagining I might find something brilliant inside.</div>
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Many publishers back then had already declared they wouldn't accept unsolicited, unagented submissions, but I thought authors shouldn't be penalized just because they had not been able to find a literary agent. Perhaps I would find a work too original, too daring for the commercial-minded book peddlers to have picked it up, or discover a rustic genius who had banged out the great American novel at her kitchen table and sent it off to publishers without even knowing what agents were. After all, the tales of bestselling authors who have been discovered in the slush pile (such as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/17/business/the-media-business-searching-for-gems-in-the-slush-pile.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm">Tom Clancy</a> and <a href="http://www.marthagrimes.com/authors/biography/">Martha Grimes</a>) were the stuff of industry legend.<br />
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I was rapidly disillusioned. Of course, I had expected that 90 percent of what was in the slush pile would be unpublishable--and so it was. The many, many ways in which slush can be unpublishable are fodder for <a href="http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=carol_pinchefsky&article=003">much editorial-department humor</a>, but my point here is not to shoot the fish in that particular barrel. What I came to realize is that the task of approaching a publisher is a useful test of common sense and some of the basic skills required for authorship. Writing a book demands the ability to do probably <i>some</i> kind of research; to string a sequence of coherent paragraphs together focused around a central idea; and to have some idea of what the sort of person who's likely to read your work will be looking for in it.<br />
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This is not in the least to suggest I don't recognize how challenging it can be to find a publisher, even for a very good book. I have both respect and sympathy for anyone setting out on that quest. What I'm saying is this: If you are thoughtful and imaginative enough to write a first-rate novel, say, or a gripping historical narrative, you should be able to apply those skills to the process of putting your work in front of an editor. You should not just chuck your query letter into a mailbox addressed to "Editorial Department, Random House" or "To Whom It May Concern". Rather than just sending your stuff to every house in the Literary Market Place from Abbeville to Zebra Publishing, you should find out whether the publisher you're querying even has fiction, or children's books, or whatever, on its list. You would not believe how often my imprint, which states on its <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury/bloomsbury-press/">webpage</a> it publishes NONFICTION, receives queries from novelists. If you have a little more common sense and a bit more enterprise, you can probably figure out that it makes sense to query publishers who have been successful with the sort of book you're writing; take it one step further, and you can track down the name of an editor who worked on such a book. I am always receptive to a letter from an author who says, "I'm writing a book that I think will appeal to readers of XYZ Title and I saw that you edited it."<br />
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But by definition, writers in the slush pile have not taken these elementary steps. They have not gone through the thought process, or done the legwork, necessary to put a well-targeted pitch into the mailbox of a specific person, they have trusted to luck or perhaps the dazzling quality of their work, or they simply haven't thought about it one way or the other. That doesn't mean they aren't gifted; maybe they are naive, untutored geniuses. But it does mean they're not professionals. They aren't thinking about their work or their careers in a businesslike way. And that simply means the odds that they can be successfully published are really slim.<br />
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I don't mean this snidely. Creativity being what it is, it's always the case that there are talented writers out there who are totally naive about what might be involved in getting your work published. And once I even found a pretty talented mystery writer in the slush pile, who went on to write several books. That was one author, though, out of the hundreds and hundreds I sifted through--meaning it wasn't 90 percent, but well over 99.9 percent, whose work had not been viable. Given the state of the marketplace, where it seems to take more effort than ever--by both publisher and author--to make a book work, I've had to conclude that the time I might devote to panning the slush pile for gold nuggets is that much less time that I have to spend on all my other tasks. <br />
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The 21st century cousin of the slush-pile submission is the query-by-tweet. Not only do we get "Dear Editor" letters, we see messages like this on Twitter. <b>Hey, @BloomsburyPress, I've written a teen paranormal romance. Ppl say it's next TWILIGHT-DM me for details!</b> After seeing one too many of those, I tweeted in response, <b>Dear Authors: Twitter is not the way to query us. And this imprint is nonfiction only. If you want to get published, please do yr homework.</b> Instantly--this being Twitter--I received a stream of tweets disparaging Bloomsbury Press as arrogant and ignorant of the new world where "publishers need to impress and adapt, not writers. We have other avenues."<br />
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Now, I celebrate the fact that authors have many ways of reaching readers. Yet as in any other form of writing, it's important to suit your content to the medium. Twitter, a medium of 140-character blurts, is not a good showcase for your ability to write a work of 70,000 words-plus. And since even our Twitter profile says @BloomsburyPress is a publisher of "140+char serious nonfiction," an author who queries us about his YA novel has failed to clear even a pretty minimal threshold of effort. My abovementioned tweet was not intended to disparage or discourage authors, but to offer straightforward, good-faith advice. Twitter is a great tool for authors--but so was the telephone. Neither of them are the right tool for finding a publisher.<br />
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(photo from Wikimedia Commons) </div>
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<br />Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-28735158292829089952012-04-01T09:30:00.000-04:002014-07-13T18:14:45.177-04:00Publishing and Bad Publishing Are Not the Same Thing: A Publisher's Response to "An Agent's Manifesto"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://daphne.palomar.edu/scrout/ams100/AMSongbook/aretha_franklin-respect_s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://daphne.palomar.edu/scrout/ams100/AMSongbook/aretha_franklin-respect_s.jpg" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
The London agent Jonny Geller stirred up a lot of
discussion, and a flurry of Twittering, by posting "An Agent's
Manifesto" a week or so ago. Jonny contended that in the
"maelstrom" of the current book business, authors are being
forgotten, taken for granted by booksellers and, in particular, by publishers. The original post seems now to be behind a paywall but it's extensively quoted <a href="http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/authors-among-us-the-problem-writ-larger/">here</a> and <a href="http://mhpbooks.com/an-agents-manifesto/">here</a>. He writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The author is not an object which a publisher has to step
over in order to achieve a successful publication. If they have a problem with
the cover, blurb, copy or format, then something isn’t right….<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">Remember, we don’t have a job without [the author].
For those of us still working in the legacy business of publishing books, here’s
a reminder of the primary mover in this chain.</span></blockquote>
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A great many people retweeted his column or commented on it
using words like "fantastic." And his dim view of publishers was
echoed elsewhere. At her blog, the novelist and ghostwriter <a href="http://nailyournovel.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/why-do-authors-get-treated-so-badly/">Roz Morris had even more negative opinions of my colleagues</a>:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is common, behind the scenes, to hear editors talk about
authors with undisguised loathing – not just individual ones who may be difficult,
but all of them, authors as a breed. There is a culture that authors must not
be listened to.</blockquote>
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I have to say that I don't buy these generalizations about
our business. </div>
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I have worked at publishers large and small--two Big Six
houses, a literary indie, a university press, and currently a house I'd
describe as mid-size. Never, ever, at any of them, have I heard authors
discussed with "loathing." At all of them it was fully understood by
editors, marketers, and management that the author is, in Jonny's words,
"the primary mover" in the publishing firmament. The whole enterprise
would not exist without authors. To put it another way, as one of my colleagues
says, "the author is our customer." I simply don't know anyone in
publishing who thinks of an author as "an object we have to step over to
achieve a successful publication." </div>
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At Bloomsbury, we regard the author as a key partner in
marketing the book, because as Jonny correctly observes, "the author is
the expert" on the subject, setting, and likely readership of her book. We
want to tap into that expertise, and use the author to help mobilize the
networks of readers who are going to respond to what she's doing. </div>
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I have made clear elsewhere on this blog that I'm fully
aware publishers often fail authors (and themselves for that matter)--for all
sorts of reasons. One is simply the tendency of any complex organization to
screw up from time to time. Another is that most publishers are
under-resourced. Trade publishing is a chancy and low-margin business, and
there's rarely enough money and man-hours to lavish on each title--on <i>any</i>
title--as much as it deserves. In the hustle to get things done, there can be a
temptation to take shortcuts--and one of the most ill-advised shortcuts is to
discount the author's input about jacket design, flap copy, or marketing ideas
when they are at odds with the publisher's. This does sometimes happen, and
sometimes with the arrogant justification that "we're the
professionals." I have no hesitation in saying this is simply bad
publishing, and any author who experiences such treatment is right to resent
his publisher for it. But in my experience it's relatively rare. It may be more common at the biggest
houses, where the sheer volume of titles can, at its worst, lead toward a
book-as-widget mentality. Throughout our industry, however, dedicated people are expending sweat, toil, and sometimes tears to meet authors'
expectations.</div>
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By way of example, in the past week, I've been working with
our creative director to find a jacket for a fall title, where in attempting to
satisfy the author, we have gone through not less than a dozen different
designs. I have exchanged numerous emails with another author, trying to choose
a title and subtitle from among 5 or 6 possibilities--this after his original
choice had been embraced by our marketing team but he had second thoughts. And
I spent an hour on the phone with a third author, negotiating the precise
wording of the captions in his photo section. This is not because I'm a unique paragon of editorial
virtue; all around me, and not just at Bloomsbury, my colleagues are toiling
away with their authors in similar ways. Down the hall from me, a publicist was
booking and rebooking flights for an author's book tour in response to her
changing schedule. And out in the Northwest a sales rep was arranging a dinner
for a debut novelist to meet with booksellers for the region. None of these
authors, by the way, are bestselling VIP types, although we hope they
eventually will be.</div>
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I submit that these
authors are, as Jonny urges, being "valued, understood,
appreciated, included, nurtured and spoken to like adults." Furthermore, I can think of no other major creative industry where a single artist has so much control over his or her content and how it gets presented to the public. The author has absolute final say over the text of the book (contrast this with Hollywood, where a director may not even have final-cut approval, or journalism, where a writer's copy may be heavily rewritten at the editing desk); and--the above-noted Bad Publishing exceptions aside--typically has consultation even on covers and catalogue writeups. </div>
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Editors, especially, value authors because they are our
closest partners in the process. The relationship can be intimate, and like any
close relationship it can be fraught. Authors do things that make editors grind
their teeth from time to time, just as spouses do to one another. And
publishing people do, it's true, vent about authors now and then, just as authors vent
about publishers. That doesn't mean there's a lack of respect on either side. </div>
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Several of the commenters on Jonny Geller's and Roz Morris's
posts cite "horror stories" they have heard about author
mistreatment. I note that most of these horror stories are secondhand. In saying
such stories are unfortunate and rare, I'm not saying none of them are true. By
the same token, I think most agents do a good job for their clients, even if
one of Roz Morris's commenters wrote "<span style="color: #3e4247;">I still
want to punch something when I think how my agent mistreated me." </span>In
any case, I was pleased to see that several authors also posted comments about
how happy they were with the care and attention they received from their
publishers. It's human nature that "horror stories" circulate more
widely than "satisfaction stories."</div>
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I have no quarrel with Jonny Geller’s manifesto. Authors will
always be at the core of whatever publishers do, and it is worthwhile to remind
us of that. But to the charge of disrespecting authors, on behalf of all the
publishers I know, I plead not guilty. </div>
Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-83399864443514804442011-05-29T12:35:00.002-04:002011-05-29T15:55:37.859-04:00A Field Guide to the Flora and Fauna of BookExpo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.adulthalloweencostumes4u.com/pimages/large/adult-carrot-costume.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.adulthalloweencostumes4u.com/pimages/large/adult-carrot-costume.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
The 2011 edition of BookExpo America, or as we call it in
the trade “BEA,” has just concluded—the industry’s annual hoedown where
booksellers, authors, agents, and publishers gather in the uninspiring setting
of New York’s Javits Convention Center <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by%2Dtopic/industry%2Dnews/bea/index.html?page=1">to talk shop, promote new books, and of course gossip.</a> I’ve been attending these trade shows for a couple of decades
now and I have come to realize that, industry transformations notwithstanding,
some things about BEA remain comfortingly the same. Names change, but the cast
of characters is familiar. Herewith a field guide to some typical denizens of BookExpo.
You might have seen them at BEA2011; I’m sure we will see them at BEA2012.<br />
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<b>The Very Important Publisher (or Agent) </b></div>
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This person is easily spotted because he’s one of a small
number of people wearing a well tailored suit. He can usually be observed in one
of two modes: striding purposefully down an aisle en route to his next meeting
(careful to arrive a few minutes late) or standing in
the middle of a busy aisle talking on his cellphone. There are of course also
Very Importants who are female. Their suits are even better tailored. They speak more softly on their cellphones but you may hear a discreet rattle of their chunky gold jewelry.</div>
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<b>The Editor</b></div>
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Editors come in all shapes and sizes, and can usually be
seen flitting around from booth to booth chatting with their counterparts at
other houses. They chat with agents too, but chewing the fat with their
colleague/competitors is actually their favorite thing about BEA, because they
get to do it so rarely at other times. The Editor will stand around his house’s booth for 10
or 15 minutes to show that he's pitching in, perhaps halfheartedly waving a couple of catalogues at passersby. Sometimes he will be actively chased off
by salespeople or publicists who are actually trying to do business in the
booth; otherwise he’ll wave the catalogues until he gets bored (this takes 15 to 20 minutes). Then it’s off for “a meeting in the Rights Center,” which lasts
12 minutes (tells Russian publisher reluctantly, “I don’t think the KGB Cookbook
would work for us”). The Editor then takes a meandering course back to the
booth, stopping to visit comrades at 5 or 6 houses, pause for coffee, maybe
grab a hot ARC from Random or Little, Brown. Finally, he’s back at the
booth—whoops, time for that lunch meeting. <br />
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<b>The Schnittman</b></div>
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No publishing conference is complete without this person, who looms above the fray peering down on it through his black plastic glasses. He is easy to find, for he will appear on half a dozen panels on The Future of Something, lobbing provocative remarks that will light up Twitter like a pinball machine. If you see an individual lobbing equally provocative remarks but lacking the distinctive black glasses, back away very quietly. You may be looking at a Charkin.</div>
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<b>The Swagaholics</b></div>
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These are frequently middle–aged couples who roam the floor
together, towing a bulky roller suitcase that kneecaps, en passant, those
attendees who don’t remember to watch out in the crowded thoroughfares. For some reason they often wear khaki shorts, floppy hats or other garments that suggest they're on safari, or a botanical field trip. The
Swagaholics may be booksellers or librarians; some, I have concluded, are are
just people who have like Free Stuff. Each of them grabs handfuls of the ephemera
that BEA generates in such enormous quantities: pens, pins, jump drives,
T-shirts, keychains, posters--and most prized, but alas, heaviest, galleys—and stows it a tote bag (periodically emptied into the rolling suitcase). I can never tell whether these
folks actually read or use any of the stuff they collect; by the second
afternoon of the show they have a look of grim determination, but they’re
damned if they’ll leave the Javits until the rolly bag is full…</div>
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<b>The Wannabe Author</b></div>
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Important note for younger book business staffers: Watch out
for anyone whose badge says AUTHOR but does not feature the name of a
publishing house. This might well be a self-published author, or more
dangerously, someone who has bought a day pass in the hope of pitching his/her
manuscript to editors on the show floor (in itself, a warning sign of poor
reality testing). Often he’ll have the title of his book on the badge as
well, which can make it easier to tell—something like this: </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">CHARLES "KIP" KLINGENDORFFER</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">AUTHOR</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ANGELS IN MY ASPARAGUS PATCH</span></div>
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He will lurk near the booth, the whites of his eyes
slightly too visible, waiting for a moment to buttonhole someone on the
publisher’s staff. If you see one of these nearby, shifting from foot to foot,
it’s the cue for “Can I get anyone a coffee?” Take off for the remotest Starbucks in the hall and don’t
hurry coming back. </div>
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<b>The First-Time Author </b></div>
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Distinguished from the Wannabe by the key fact this author
has a book coming out from an established publishing house; maybe the F.T.A. is
even lucky enough to have a “buzz book” or be on a panel. The First Time Author will
typically blink a lot, looking from side to side with a slightly dazed
expression like a newly hatched chick. She is excited to be at this much-touted
conference but confused about what is going on, where she should go or what she
should do. The whole thing seems rather…chaotic. After the excitement of her
panel discussion wears off the FTA begins to absorb the chilling fact of just
how many other books are being published in the same season, the same month,
even the same week as hers. You
may see the F.T.A, after her second afternoon on the floor, hastening toward the
exit, her blinking now replaced by wide-eyed alarm. </div>
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<b>The Random Peddler</b></div>
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This person is sort of Yin to the Carrot’s yang (see below).
In addition to people peddling books as if they were some other kind of
product, there are always a few entrepreneurs who come to BEA to peddle
something totally un-booklike—think flashlights, wiper blades, pet supplies.
This year my eye was caught by a booth selling, I think, molded foot insoles.
It seemed completely off the wall, until I realized, after 16 hours of marching
up and down the concrete floors of the Javits, everyone’s feet are killing
them! (Have a thought for the poor Swagaholics, whose rolly-bag is full and whose bulging tote bags are now weighing them down like lead.)
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<b>The Carrot</b></div>
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I’m not being figurative here. The first time I attended
Book Expo was so long ago it was called ABA, the American Booksellers
Association (pause to shout out to my fellow curmudgeons who don’t believe that
mashing together a non-word like “Expo” with a perfectly good word like “Book” is
an improvement on either one, nor that putting the mashup next to “America” can
turn the latter into an adjective. But I digress.) Newly employed by an incredibly literary small press that
published things like poetry in translation, classic reprints, and
magic-realist fiction, I went off to the old Washington convention center full
of zeal to spread the word about our brilliant list. I was somewhat dismayed to
find our booth—it was a table, really—in the most distant reaches of the
exhibit hall, where only the most dedicated, desperately bored, or navigationally
challenged attendees were ever likely to tread. </div>
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As a house with little seniority and less clout at the show, we
had been relegated to the backwaters with other unfavored exhibitors. Our neighbor
on one side was a guy who sold self-hypnosis tapes—<i>Lose Weight While You Sleep</i>,
etc. On the other was the author of a self-published guide to juicing, who had
hired someone to walk up and down the aisles dressed as a carrot. Needless to
say, we weren’t selling a whole lot of our Turkish poetry and essay collections;
few likely customers for our wares made it past the carrot. </div>
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The urge to market books or other “product” by dressing
shills in outlandish costumes seems to be a constant of human nature, for I
have never attended a BEA when there wasn’t at least one person in a foam suit
or other cartoonlike getup. This year I spotted someone who I thought at first
was a giant banana, but turned out to be embodying Mr. Dummy of the Dummies
guides. There were also several aggressively cheerful youngsters who were
dressed as fairy tale characters, or citizens of Dogpatch, or something else of
a rustic nature, promoting I’m not sure what. </div>
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I realize I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">am</i>
being figurative—not metaphoric, but synecdochic—in saying you can count on
meeting a Carrot at BEA2012. Maybe all trade shows are like this. If I went to the Consumer Electronics show, would
I bump into people dressed as Intel chips or iPods? I suppose in some dystopian
future where “books” have been subsumed by “devices,” I may get to find out. </div>
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<br /></div>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-47569380667962006832011-05-27T15:00:00.001-04:002011-05-27T15:04:53.497-04:00One Reason Editors Say No<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Rejected.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Rejected.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tim O'Reilly, whose <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/tim/">blog </a>and <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/timoreilly">Twitter feed</a> are always worth following, pointed in a tweet today to </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://bryce.vc/post/5869424575/my-least-favorite-no">an interesting post by Bryce Roberts</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, a venture capitalist who's partnered with O'Reilly in Alphatech Ventures. His post is called "My Least Favorite No." I had never thought much about the parallels between venture capital and publishing, but both editors and VCs do similar things: make bets, whether it's on books or companies, based on an evaluation of what they're creating, a sense of the market and where it's going, and a gut feeling about the people behind the product--be they authors or entrepreneurs. Bryce writes: </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I hate saying no. But, its the most common answer I have to give when an entrepreneur asks me if I’d like to invest in their business. </span></span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 20px;">For "entrepreneur," insert "author," and it's true for me as well. He continues: </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">The product could have an audience. Even worse, I may really like the team. But there’s a problem: I just don’t care.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Yes, a market may be big, but I just don’t care about it. Yes, a product may be getting popular but I would never use it. Yes a team may be well suited to win a category, but I don’t want to work with them. These are my least favorite no’s because there’s no feedback I can give them that changes anything. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I was in this situation just recently. I received a proposal from a good agent, by a well-qualified experienced author who had written a well-organized outline about a worthy topic. But it was simply not a topic that I'm excited about, so I passed. My rule of thumb is, if I wouldn't go into a bookstore, as a consumer, and buy this book, I shouldn't be the editor. I'm not going to have the right feel for how to connect this book with its audience, because I'm not part of that audience. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">It can be easy to talk yourself into taking on a project when the subject seems hot, or you have an author with great media connections or a successful track record. But when you lack that gut feeling for why someone will want to read the book, you're asking for trouble. As Bryce puts it: </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">As someone who is only going to make a handful of investments a year, I prefer to back every check with cash AND conviction. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I make more than a handful of investments each year--call it a couple of handfuls. But I feel the same way: if you don't have that conviction, it's probably not a good bet. It's hard enough to get a new book off the ground when you <i>are</i> passionate about it. When you're not, it's almost impossible.</span></span></div>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-61473076168377885752011-03-01T22:25:00.002-05:002011-03-04T10:20:58.514-05:00"The imagination has a conscience all its own": Philip Roth on Fact and Fiction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Center for Fiction, which in my un-objective opinion is becoming one of the most happening literary hangouts in New York, had one of its best events yet last week--<a href="http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/philip-roth">an evening with and about Philip Roth</a>. The National Book Critics circle put it together, and their printed program for the event included some wonderful excerpts from reviews of Roth's work over the years (Saul Bellow thought the "fault" of <i>Goodbye, Columbus</i> was its sophistication). But the best excerpt was from Roth himself, accepting the NBCC fiction award for <i>The Counterlife</i> in 1988. I have never read a better statement of how novelists treat life experience, or history:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times,'Times New Roman',serif;">You begin with the raw material, the facts, what appear in the morning light to be potentially exploitable facts. One by one you turn them over in your mind. This can take days, it can take years. The mind conducts the examination at its own pace--</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times,'Times New Roman',serif;">are</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times,'Times New Roman',serif;"> these facts really any good?--and one day turns the facts over to the imagination. The imagination goes to work. It is not a pleasant sight. The imagination is pitiless, brutal, and cruel. It lacks common decency, discretion, manners, loyalty--yes, it lacks even compassion. The imagination has a conscience all its own; you wouldn't want it as a friend. </span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times,'Times New Roman',serif;">The butcher, imagination, wastes no time with niceties: it clubs the fact over the head, quickly it slits the throat, and then with its bare hands, it pulls forth the guts. Soon the guts of facts are everywhere, the imagination is simply </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times,'Times New Roman',serif;">wading</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times,'Times New Roman',serif;"> through them. By the time the imagination is finished with a fact, believe me, it bears no resemblance to a fact. The imagination then turns a dripping mass of eviscerated factuality back to the mind. The mind (if it </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times,'Times New Roman',serif;">is</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times,'Times New Roman',serif;"> a mind) is no less brutal than the imagination and it is not impressed. It finds that that the fact has been badly butchered. It sends down for fresh raw material, <i>new</i> facts. And all this goes on day in and day out, though there are days of course, when the savagery gets to be too much even for them and, overcome with self-loathing, even mind and imagination haven't the heart to continue.</span></blockquote>
By the way, if you are a fiction lover, the <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/">Center for Fiction's website</a> should be a regular stop for you. Recently revamped, it posts <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/magazine/">fantastic new content all the time</a>, including original stories from leading authors, interviews and videos, <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/for-readers/recommended-reading-list/">book recommendations</a>, and lots more. And if you are a fiction lover in the New York City area, the Center itself, on <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/about/directions/">47th Street right near Grand Central</a>, should be a regular stop too. It has an unmatched circulating library of 85,000 books, including novels you'll find nowhere else, and literary programming second to nobody in the city. Can you think of anywhere else in town where you might hear Philip Roth read--or <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/centerforfiction/5485673389/in/set-72157626167051272/">see him chatting with Zadie Smith and Nathan Englander</a>? <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(photo of Philip Roth © Nancy Crampton)</span></div>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-63673784694931450762010-12-17T09:30:00.001-05:002010-12-20T10:19:39.741-05:00A Lawyer's Perspective on Publishing, and on Fair Use<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I confess that I take a somewhat geeky interest in matters of publishing law. But even if the law holds little allure for you, as a publisher you can't avoid legal questions. Every editor has to negotiate contracts, secure permissions, and make sure that manuscripts don't run afoul of libel or privacy laws. And writers need to pay attention to the same questions. So I was happy to learn that Mark Fowler, an experienced publishing lawyer who has also been an author, is now blogging about publishing-law issues at <a href="http://www.rightsofwriters.com/">RightsofWriters.com</a>. I have myself benefited from Mark's astute counsel (and unflappable demeanor) in the past, although he does not currently represent me or Bloomsbury Press. I recommend his site to editors, writers, agents, and anyone else who wants to understand some of the peculiar nuances of our business.<br />
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Last week Mark posted about the <a href="http://www.rightsofwriters.com/2010/12/sounding-trumpet-for-fair-use-quotation.html">always confusing and often contested topic of "fair use"</a>--the doctrine that permits one author to quote another's copyrighted material for purposes of comment, criticism, or scholarship. As he observes, it has been an unfortunate development in recent history that lawsuits or other aggressive moves by rights holders have discouraged some authors from using certain quotations, and in some cases has forced them to paraphrase or omit the texts that they're writing about. I agree with Mark that while authors need to be careful, they shouldn't be too diffident about relying on the principle of fair use. Many times I have quoted to authors some lines I have virtually memorized from the Chicago <i>Manual of Style </i>that I thumbed through constantly when I first started in publishing. <br />
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"Fair use is use that is fair--simply that....The right of fair use is a valuable one to scholarship, and it should not be allowed to decay through the failure of scholars to employ it boldly."</blockquote>
I was happy to see that these lines still appear (though slightly modified), in the new 16th Edition of the <i>Manual</i>. They still hold true. <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(Illustration: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Lawyers</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> by Honore Daumier, via Wikimedia Commons)</span></div>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-82807201987843366852010-12-16T09:42:00.003-05:002010-12-16T10:58:53.446-05:00Why We Should Get Ready for a Plunge in Print-Book Sales<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Cliff_jumping.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Cliff_jumping.jpg" width="231" /></span></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">I wrote earlier this week that publishers need to prepare for a decline in print-book sales that's much steeper than what we have seen thus far, and that is likely to accelerate the reshaping of the industry. The reasons why this seems inevitable derive not from any intrinsic superiority of e-books, nor any growing technophilia or screen-tropism of readers, but rather from the structure of the market. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">For one thing, e-book sales don't replace p-book sales on a one to one basis, as my colleague Evan Schnittman points out in his post "</span><a href="http://www.blackplasticglasses.com/2010/09/27/ebooks-don%E2%80%99t-cannibalize-print-people-do/#more-553"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">E-Books Don't Cannibalize Print, People Do.</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">" Evan argues that once you have adopted an e-reader--whether it's Kindle, Nook, or your iPhone--you soon give up buying print books. You become so happy with the convenience of instant purchase and the bookshelf-in-your-briefcase that you virtually give up purchasing hardcovers--in fact, he argues, you'll simply forgo a title that's not available in e-format. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">I don't think this holds true 100% for all readers--I read e-books aplenty but still buy p-books. But my hunch is that Evan is pretty much on the money: the graph of p-books purchased by an e-reader owner is a step-function. It doesn't slope down gradually, it drops almost straight down once someone becomes an e-book convert. (The good news for publishers is that (a) those e-book sales can be more profitable than print and (b) the graph of e-books purchased by the new e-thusiast is of course also an </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">upward</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"> step function, from zero to lots. Lots of evidence suggests these e-thusiasts buy more books than ever, partly because it's so easy to do. But right now I'm focusing on print, which is a less happy story. Keep in mind that those e-reader owners are usually avid readers, i.e. they are our best customers for print books.) </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">So at the level of individual consumers we're losing not just one print-book purchase at a time, but potentially scores, or hundreds, as that person adopts e-reading. Now look at this at the level of bookstores. Right now e-book sales constitute, at a rough guess, 10 percent of the market and their share is growing rapidly. For many small businesses, especially in a low-margin industry like ours, losing 10 percent of your sales volume is the difference between profit and loss. Even a 5 percent dip is a challenge; imagine looking at a 10 percent dip and thinking, next year it'll be 15, and the year after, who knows? Yesterday I linked to an NPR story about a couple of independent booksellers who have prospered despite the difficult market, and hats off to them. But over the past several months, stories of bookstore closings have, alas, been more common. This week, </span><a href="http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/111729349.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">two beloved indies in Minnesota announced closures, explicitly pointing out that they have lost customers and sales to the e-book revolution.</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"> One store owner made the complaint, common among booksellers,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333132; line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"> that customers browse her shelves to decide which books to download at home. " </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">We're really now a showroom for books." You can see why these folks may decide it's time to call it quits.<br /><br />This, too, is a step function. When a bookstore closes, the sales at that location don't slope down, they drop to zero. Multiply this across many bookstore closings--including locations now being closed by the chains. Furthermore, many surviving stores, in self-defense, are devoting more shelf space to nonbook items, which means fewer print books stocked, and fewer sold. With all this, it seems clear to me that print sales are going to fall, if not off a cliff, down a teeth-rattling escarpment. Just to tighten the spiral, we're also going to see smaller print runs, thus higher per-copy costs, thus higher prices for printed books--which is only going to push more consumers toward e-books! </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">What all this means is: up to now, e-book sales have been growing faster than hardcover sales have been declining, so overall big publishers have been seeing growth. But we may soon reach a tipping point where because of the loss of sales outlets, print sales drop off much faster than e-books replace them. I remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth--and the austerity programs and downsizing-- among publishers back in the 90s, when the chains' great expansion of superstores leveled off (that is, when sales merely stopped growing, never mind declining).<br /><br />I'm not predicting apocalypse here, or even calamity. As I said in yesterday's post, I expect hardcover books, bookstores, and publishers to survive, and some even to prosper. But I am predicting major disruption. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(Photo: Cliff diving in Cyprus, via Wikimedia Commons)</span></div>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-69252412237888522922010-12-15T10:00:00.002-05:002010-12-15T10:00:04.962-05:00More on P- versus E-Books: Bookstores, and Printed Books, Aren't Dead. But...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.freefoto.com/images/1351/06/1351_06_2---Books--Shakespeare-and-Company-Bookstore--The-Latin-Quarter--Paris_web.jpg?&k=Books%2C+Shakespeare+and+Company+Bookstore%2C+The+Latin+Quarter%2C+Paris" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="264" src="http://www.freefoto.com/images/1351/06/1351_06_2---Books--Shakespeare-and-Company-Bookstore--The-Latin-Quarter--Paris_web.jpg?&k=Books%2C+Shakespeare+and+Company+Bookstore%2C+The+Latin+Quarter%2C+Paris" width="400" /></a></div>
Yesterday's post, in which I mused about whether we were <a href="http://www.blackplasticglasses.com/2010/09/27/ebooks-don%E2%80%99t-cannibalize-print-people-do/#more-553">living through a "phony war" period in publishing</a>, generated thoughtful comments in several places around the web. Several readers questioned my statement that we were likely to see a steep drop in print book sales in the near future. One said that e-books had been boosted by the Kindle, but "they could just as easily be just another fad like Tamagotchis, as I personally ascribe the drop in hardcopy book sales to a mix of the recession and the fact that there's just nothing out there I really want." Another said print and hardcover sales were not really "at war" and that they could continue on parallel tracks. Another said that e-book sales had enormous room to grow (inarguable) and that it was more likely print sales would grow alongside of e-books.<br />
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I'm afraid I must disagree with all these commenters. I do think the decline in print book sales is inevitable and probably irreversible, as I'll explain. But I want to emphasize a couple of points: First, I hope it's clear that I am not celebrating this trend. I personally love bookstores and all those other things that are part of the print-book experience--yes, the smell of books, the pleasure of reading a beautifully designed volume, and even <a href="http://www.doctorsyntax.net/2009/12/what-e-readers-will-never-replace.html">the book sitting on my shelf as a souvenir of the experience of reading it</a><b>. </b>I'm too young to have known Fourth Avenue when it was New York's Booksellers' Row, but my idea of paradise is Harvard Square in the 1970s when practically every block had a bookstore on it. I think any community without a bookstore is impoverished, and I certainly hope never to see the day when new books aren't available in print form.<br />
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Second, although I believe the number of bookstores and amount of shelf space is going to shrink drastically, I'm not in the least suggesting that wonderful stores (and beautiful printed books for that matter) aren't going to survive. In fact, it's the wonderful stores that <i>will</i> survive--the RJ Julia's, the Books & Books, and, I trust, my neighborhood's tiny jewel-box of an indie, Three Lives & Company. Stores like these, creatively run, deeply connected to their clientele, carefully curated, and a pleasure to visit, can thrive just as other creative retailers do even under tough conditions. Thankfully, booksellers like this can be found all over the country. Just yesterday, NPR highlighted some first-rate booksellers who are beating the odds (read the piece or listen <a href="http://Just yesterday, NPR highlighted some first-rate booksellers who are beating the odds.">here</a>.) And although I find many chain bookstores disappointing, there are some that serve their localities well. (In Encino, CA, 3250 local residents have liked a Facebook page devoted to <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Our-Encino-Barnes-Nobles/154776021210159?v=wall">saving their Barnes & Noble</a>.)<br />
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Likewise, the printed-book-as-object, though it may become more of a luxury item, is always going to be one of the world's best gift items (including gifts to oneself, of course). And much as I like reading on my iPad, I'm always going to prefer a paperback in the bath or at the beach. For this and many other reasons, printed books are not going to disappear.<br />
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BUT a publisher has to accept the realities of the marketplace, and for better or worse, like it or not, the market is going to see a steep falloff in brick-and-mortar retail and a corresponding downslope in the sale of printed books. Those two facts are closely connected and I'll expand on why in my next post.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(photo of Shakespeare & Co., Paris, by Ian Britton. Creative Commons license)</span></div>
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<br />Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-7564264236610558552010-12-12T13:27:00.001-05:002010-12-12T16:15:25.060-05:00The Last Country House Party? E-Books and Publishing's Phony WarFrom what I can gather around town, major trade publishers have been having a pretty good year--a surprisingly good year, given a lingering recession and the widespread predictions of the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/opinion/27iht-edkeillor.html">death of the book business</a>. And it seems pretty clear a primary reason, perhaps <i>the</i> reason, for our good results is the <a href="http://idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm">explosive growth of e-book sales</a>.<br />
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The introduction of the iPad, slashed prices on the Kindle, now the color Nook and the long-awaited arrival of the Google e-bookstore--all these have helped to drive a massive increase in e-reading. While print book sales have declined in the past year, e-books, with lower per-unit costs, have more than taken up the slack. Even for houses where gross sales have declined, profits may well have increased. And many of us in the industry expect a bonanza after Christmas, when everyone who has just opened their gift Kindles and iPads loads them up with new e-titles to read. We could see a surge in e-book sales that makes the year look triumphant for book publishers.</div>
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I can't help wondering if what we're living through right now is like the "Phony War" of 1939-40--the period when war had been declared in Europe but Germany had yet to assault the countries to its west. The country-house parties went on as before, but the storm was coming. </div>
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Right now e-book sales are, not exactly gravy for publishers, but a profitable layer on top of print sales that have yet to fall off drastically. But that won't last. As <a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=4316886317870996102">Mike Shatzkin</a> starkly put it this week, "every book purchased online is another nail in the coffin of brick-and-mortar bookselling." As the e-book trend continues, more bookstores are going to close--both independents and chain locations. Both B&N and Borders have been closing superstores and also devoting more space to non-book items, further reducing shelf space and inevitably book sales. </div>
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I don't know when it will happen, but we're likely to see bookstore sales go from "declining" to "plunging" in the near future. Shatzkin's take is that "what brick-and-mortar booksellers will experience in the first six months of 2011 will be the most difficult time they’ve ever seen, with challenges escalating beyond what most of them are now imagining or budgeting for." My impression is that most publishers are not budgeting for these challenges either. When they start to hit home, we may have to take our motor-cars back from the country houses and get ready for the Blitz. </div>
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P.S. If you believe, as I do, that independent bookstores--and even well-run chain bookstores for that matter--are a vital part of our literary ecosystem, please remember to do your Christmas shopping there. </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(Still from Jean Renoir's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The Rules of the Game, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">1939</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">.)</span></div>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-66379581406563025092010-12-07T15:45:00.002-05:002010-12-07T16:23:06.725-05:00The Doctor Takes Questions: A Q & A on Publishing with Doug MorrisonI recently learned of writer Douglas Morrison's blog, <a href="http://devinbriar.blogspot.com/">The Novel Road</a>, which is worth a visit for anyone interested in the writing trade, especially the fiction side of it. He posts links to a variety of other blogs and articles, and has been conducting his own series of author interviews, with writers such as Brian Haig, Robin Becker, and Dale Brown. Doug flattered me by including me among his interviewees this month, asking a lot of good questions about editing and publishing, which I answered to the best of my ability. The best part is that Doug included two of Thomas Rowlandson's satirical images with his post. (The one here is captioned <i>Dr Syntax, in the middle of a smoking hot political squabble, wishes to whet his whistle.</i>The Doctor is in black by the fireplace, next to one of the smoking squabblers.)<br />
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<a href="http://www.myoops.org/course_material/mit/NR/rdonlyres/Literature/21L-420Spring-2006/08291549-B390-473E-B75E-83FA41B3D222/0/chp_dr_syntax.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="http://www.myoops.org/course_material/mit/NR/rdonlyres/Literature/21L-420Spring-2006/08291549-B390-473E-B75E-83FA41B3D222/0/chp_dr_syntax.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Here's the Q & A, with thanks to Douglas Morrison:<br />
<br />
<b>Doug Morrison:</b> Do you have a character, from a manuscript you have edited, that has left a mark on you?<br />
<br />
<br />
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<b>PG:</b> Many, so I’ll
pick one from a manuscript I’ve just published: Stephen Douglas, who
lost the presidential election of 1860 to a dark-horse candidate named
Abraham Lincoln. Douglas was on what we’d consider the “wrong” side of
the slavery issue, and he had often acted from expediency and ambition.
But when he knew he was about to lose the office he had coveted for his
whole career, Douglas barnstormed the country trying to hold the Union
together. He literally died trying to prevent the Civil War. The story
is told Douglas Egerton’s book <i>Year of Meteors</i>, and I found it surprisingly moving. </div>
<br />
<div style="border: medium none;">
<a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Year-of-Meteors/Douglas-R-Egerton/e/9781596916197/?itm=1&USRI=year+of+meteors" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Year of Meteors by Douglas R. Egerton: Book Cover" border="0" height="193" src="http://img2.imagesbn.com/images/62700000/62703816.JPG" width="127" /></a><b>DM:</b>
The editor in you must have an intuition for the “special” book; the
one that seems destined to huge sales or a place in literary history.
Among the books you have worked with, what made your “I knew it” list? </div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>PG:</b> The
humbling thing about being an editor is the flip side of your question:
how many of the books you know are special never achieve the sales they
deserve. That’s much more common than thinking “I know it” and seeing
the title on the bestseller list. But it’s exciting when you’re right. I
knew David Hackett Fischer’s <i>Washington's Crossing </i> was a masterpiece
when I first read it—it was brilliantly researched, wonderfully written,
and thrilling to read. It became a New York Times bestseller and won
the Pulitzer Prize for history. But I have had the same feeling about
other books that never hit the jackpot that way. </div>
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<b>DM:</b> The editors
I’ve researched, seem to stick to comfort zones when they choose a
manuscript. Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone?</div>
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<b>PG:</b> I’d hate to think I always publish in a
“comfort zone,” because I think you should always be looking for works
that challenge you and that are different from what you have done
before. At the same time, it’s hard to be a good publisher for a MS you
don’t know anything about or you’re not enthusiastic about. For
instance, my politics are moderately liberal, but I’m always ready to
publish books that make good arguments for conservative positions, or
far-left ones for that matter. On the other hand, I’d never be the right
editor for a book on organic gardening, because I’m not a gardener of
any kind. I don’t think you should edit a book that you’d never buy in a
bookstore. To publish something well, you have to know how to connect
with its intended reader. So I don’t ask, “is this in my comfort zone?” I
ask, “do I know who would want to read this and how I’d get them
excited about it?” <br />
<br />
<b>DM:</b> Publishing Non-Fiction has a higher degree of
speculation (i.e. advances, deadlines) than Fiction Publishing. Is this a
true statement?<br />
<br />
<b>PG:</b> To use a favorite publishing phrase: it depends.
In general the advantage of publishing nonfiction is that you can
identify the audience for it and have some idea how to reach that
market—whether it’s organic gardeners, Obama-haters, Civil War buffs or
dog lovers. You can make some guesses about the market based on how
other titles have performed. In fiction, it’s much more unpredictable,
with the major exception of genre fiction. Historical romances, cozy
mysteries, steampunk, anything in a series –those niches help you target
the readership. But for many novelists it’s hard to predict how a new
work will sell, so it’s highly speculative. In general I’d say fiction
is more of a guessing game for a publisher. <br />
<br />
<b>DM:</b> What is Bloomsbury Press looking for right now?<br />
<br />
<b>PG:</b> That’s a question I’m always reluctant to
answer, because there aren’t one or two things we’re “looking for.” We
are always looking for well-written books that have something
interesting and preferably original to say, on a subject of importance. I
have written more about this on our website, <a href="http://bloomsburypress.com/">bloomsburypress.com</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>DM:</b> I send you a 150,000-word manuscript. It’s a mess,
the title is even misspelled , but you read the first page and it
catches your interest. Do you send it back with a note explaining,
“Spell Check”, margins and sentence fragments, or do you keep it? What
state do you like to see a manuscript in before you work on it?<br />
<br />
<div style="border: medium none;">
<a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Washingtons-Crossing/David-Hackett-Fischer/e/9780195170344/?itm=3&USRI=washington%27s+crossing+pivotal+moments+in+american" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><b></b></a><b>PG:</b>
In all honesty, if you can’t spell the title I’m not going to read much
further unless your first paragraph is stunningly brilliant. Authors
who can’t achieve a baseline level of professionalism are, in my
experience, extremely unlikely to write a book that can be published
with success. </div>
<br />
<b>DM:</b> How much author editing is too much? Where should an author stop editing before submission?<br />
<br />
<b>PG:</b> Keep editing until it’s really good, but by that
I don’t mean “tinker obsessively with your MS for months.” Get
feedback—candid feedback—from readers you trust. I work with a lot of
scholars. In the academic world, even the most senior authors routinely
show their drafts—sometimes single chapters, sometimes whole
manuscripts--to other people who know their subject really well, and get
their comments. It amazes me how often an author will say something
like “I showed this to three readers and they all thought it was the
best thing I’ve done,” and it turns out the readers are her husband, her
mom and her next-door neighbor. Find some readers who aren’t afraid to
tell you your script is boring, and get their comments.<br />
<br />
<b>DM:</b> Freelance editors, hired by authors. The consensus
with literary agents seems to be an author doesn’t need one. You would
think a closer to finished manuscript would cost them less to move
forward?<br />
<br />
<b>PG:</b> I don’t know which agents you have talked to,
but I question that “consensus.” Most of the agents I know tell me it’s
getting harder to sell anything that needs work, because editors are
reluctant to take on really time-consuming projects. And I know a lot of
freelance editors who are being hired by authors and agents to get
their work ready to submit to publishers.<br />
<br />
<b>DM:</b> I’ve written about how I think editors may be going
into a “Gold Rush” market for their skills. I base this on the
increasing number of fairly sloppy e-books that seem to make it onto the
market. Will Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc, have to address this
problem? If so, what’s your solution?<br />
<br />
<b>PG:</b> I’m not sure what problem you’re referring to.
The sloppiness of e-books is often a problem not in the writing or
editing, but in the conversion of print book text to e-book format. This
is a matter, more or less, of proofreading, not “editing” of the kind
that I do. And I think it will dwindle away as publishers learn to plan
their work flow to incorporate e-books. That said, I am sure that the
skill of editing manuscripts and preparing them for publication is one
that will continue to be needed, in whatever format books are produced.<br />
<br />
<b>DM:</b> I’ve written a post on literary agents, in an
ongoing series I call “Writer’s Angst”. What would you like writers to
know about the world of the editor? The Publisher?<br />
<br />
<b>PG:</b> Even though we have to say no to 95 percent (or
more) of the submissions we receive, no editor was drawn into this
business by the idea of turning people down. We’re always hoping that
the next thing we read is going to be something that we love. <br />
<br />
<b>DM:</b> Dr. Syntax
is an incredible site, offering insights to both new and experienced
writers. How do you find the time to blog and maintain the incredibly
high standards at Bloomsbury Press, as well as have a personal life?<br />
<br />
<b>PG:</b> Thanks for all those flattering adjectives. I
squeeze the blog in as best I can, and readers will probably notice that
I sometimes go a long time between posts, which mostly reflects how
much else is going on in my working life at any given time.<br />
<br />
<b>DM:</b> You wake up one day and decide to pitch it all to write a great book. What would the subject be and who would edit it?<br />
<br />
<b>PG:</b> I have often thought I’d like to write about the
history of publishing in the early 20th century, which is so often held
up as a golden age. I’d love to examine how the dynamics of the
industry worked. I suspect the book business in Maxwell Perkins’ day was
closer to ours than we commonly believe. <br />
<br />
<b>DM:</b> The Publishing Industry is facing enormous
challenges in the not so distant future. A number of smaller Houses have
closed, Literary Agencies are taking on fewer, if not more select
clients. Paint us a picture of the Publishing Industry five years from
now. <br />
<br />
<b>PG:</b> Predicting the future of publishing even two
years from now is probably impossible. But I think within ten years it
will look very different. E-books will be a much bigger piece of the
market, but we don’t know whether they’ll be the predominant format.
Conversely, retail bookstores will be many fewer in number. The
shrinking of retail space is going to hurt the revenues of publishers,
big publishers in particular, and we may well see more consolidation of
major houses. I suspect author advances will go down on average—again I
mean at the larger houses. Meanwhile I think we’ll see an increase,
maybe an explosion, of alternatives to the big-house model of
publishing. Smaller houses, e-book-only publishers, houses that sell
books on a subscription basis as well as conventional print sales. Maybe
every bookstore will have an Espresso machine printing books on demand
in the front window.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-89741539990263643732010-10-28T17:30:00.000-04:002010-10-28T17:30:22.022-04:00Foot-Long Subs, or, One Publisher's Reflections on the Curious, Sometimes-Maddening Trend Toward Putting Enormously Long Subtitles on Everything<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_CPP7LjnMEdM/SkE5mwW0RpI/AAAAAAAAA9Y/Bn1gsjcqx0s/s320/mr_ed3.gif" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Horse</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Quick: What do these books have in common?<br />
<br />
<b><i>The Sea Around Us. The American Way of Death. The Best and the Brightest. Dispatches. All Things Bright and Beautiful. Thy Neighbor’s Wife</i></b>. <br />
<br />
They are all bestsellers, and all, if not classics, at least milestones of popular culture from the 1950s to the 1980s. And they all lack something they certainly would have if they were published today: a subtitle. <br />
<br />
As a publisher, there’s one moment I dread in the list-planning meetings where editors present their upcoming titles to colleagues. It’s when someone says, "We need to talk about the sub." Back in the 20th century, a subtitle might have told you the genre of a book (“A Memoir”) or supplied a setting (“Across the Pacific in a Raft.”) Today, as I'm hardly the first to observe, a subtitle often becomes an ungainly skein of phrases clattering along behind the title like tin cans on a newlyweds' limousine: <br />
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<i>The great love affair of the Enlightenment, featuring the scientist Emilie du Châtelet, the poet Voltaire, sword fights, book burnings, assorted kings, seditious verse, and the birth of the modern world</i><br />
<br />
<i>A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo-chasing, and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, The Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put on a New York Uniform--and Maybe the Best</i><br />
<br />
<i>How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West</i><br />
<br />
<i>How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Self-Serving Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us…And What To Do About It</i><br />
<br />
<i>The Amazing True Story of a Missing Military Puppy and the Desperate Mission to Bring Her Home</i><br />
<br />
It's as if, instead of drawing a reader to a book with indirection and allusion, we feel the need to spell out the reasons to buy it. Twenty years ago, I remember a very smart colleague of mine telling an author, "You don't have to write 'Horse' under the picture." Today, perhaps, we do.<br />
<br />
It’s tempting to see in this a dumbing-down trend in our culture. A less jaundiced view might be that subtitle-mania simply reflects the changing marketplace for nonfiction. In the days of <i>The Sea Around Us </i>or <i>Dispatches</i>, readers could find book reviews—with a few hundred words of description—in newspapers and magazines; they might even see authors talking about books on television. Today, printed book reviews have all but disappeared, and good luck finding a non-celebrity author on a talk show. Our best shot at communicating what a book is about might be throwing it all on the jacket so that a customer—browsing in a bookstore or online or, just as likely, Googling the '86 Mets or Fred Harvey—can't fail to see it. <br />
<br />
One fact of publishing life has not changed, from the putative golden age to the brazen present. If you’re a celebrity, you can skip a “sub” altogether, no matter how terse or idiosyncratic your main title. From <i>Laugh and Live</i> by Douglas Fairbanks (1915) to <i>Reminiscences</i> (1964) by Douglas MacArthur, from <i>Cruel Shoes</i> by Steve Martin (1979) to <i>See, I Told You So</i> (1993) by Rush Limbaugh, the more famous you are, the fewer words you need on your jacket. The ne plus ultra in this direction was the 1992 work that combined a single-name author and a single-word title in one nuclear blast of notoriety. Perhaps that’s why titles and subtitles have been getting longer and longer. After MADONNA: SEX, what less can you say?<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: small;">[Many thanks to <b>Creative Nonfiction</b> magazine, for whom I wrote this piece and who kindly permitted me to repost it here. It appears in CNF's current issue (number 39) along with many other meatier essays. You can find the table of contents and some sample articles <a href="http://bit.ly/dfarc7">here</a>.]</span></div>
<br />Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-77976476272615456882010-10-22T17:10:00.000-04:002010-10-22T17:10:45.845-04:00Another Thing You'll Never Be Able to Do with E-Books (Video)Hats off to Bookmans Entertainment Exchange in Arizona for this wonderful video, which I found thanks to Galleycat. More about the video <a href="http://bookmans.com/content/bookmans-domino-book-drop">here</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<object height="390" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Pw5LlSKKG3M&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3">
</param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true">
</param>
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always">
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<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Pw5LlSKKG3M&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="390"></embed></object>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-13251207492483707782010-09-21T10:00:00.002-04:002013-03-18T14:01:26.974-04:00Alfred Hitchcock's Bomb: Suspense, Surprise, and Emotion in Narrative<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Hitchcock-PD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Hitchcock-PD.jpg" width="256" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: medium;">Although I am a nonfiction publisher at the moment, I still love to read fiction in a variety of genres, from literary novels to thrillers. And I think for most editors it’s impossible to read a book without your editorial reflex twitching from time to time, especially when you see the author make a misstep. This week I have been reading an adventure novel that made me think yet again about the distinction between surprise and suspense--and in a broader way, what draws readers into a narrative. </span></div>
<div style="font: 12px Georgia; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12px Georgia; margin: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">Something I frequently say to nonfiction narrative authors is, “Imagine how they’re going to do this when they make your book into a movie.” </span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12px Georgia; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12px Georgia; margin: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">Filmmakers learn to boil a story down to its essence, and to find the most dramatic way to organize the elements of a narrative. They think about this stuff all the time. And it was Alfred Hitchcock who gave one of the most famous explanations of<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=NnE_sPb3XBQC&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=hitchcock,+bomb+under+table,+truffaut&source=bl&ots=CY8MODguPS&sig=JOvWZ05UHx7fUJkPuSEwCLa7AGM&hl=en&ei=GriWTJvJGoX7lwfuzsCkCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false"> how suspense and surprise differ</a>. </span></span></div>
<br />
<i>There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean. </i><br />
<div>
<i><br />We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!" </i></div>
<div>
<i><br />In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.</i><br />
<div style="font: 12px Georgia; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12px Georgia; margin: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">The “bomb under the table” example has been quoted almost ad nauseam by now. In fact, when I looked up Hitchcock’s quote online I found various writers <a href="http://mynewplaidpants.blogspot.com/2008/01/leave-suspense-bomb-be.html">complaining what a cliché it had become</a>. However, when I first heard this principle cited, by my former boss Tom McCormack, he added one valuable further distinction, which I have not found widely discussed.* </span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12px Georgia; margin: 0px;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">Once again, imagine a restaurant where there’s is a ticking bomb under the table, and we in the audience know it’s going to go off in fifteen minutes. Now <i>imagine one of the characters knows it as well, but can’t reveal it.</i> With this, the suspense ratchets to another level. Not only are we aware of the impending explosion, we share in the character’s anxiety to get away and the excruciating effort of acting totally unconcerned even as the bomb ticks down. The emotional connection we have to a character for whom this situation is a matter of life or death makes the suspense we feel that much greater. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;">Hitchcock’s bomb is simply an extreme way of focusing attention on the most essential question the author of any narrative, fiction or nonfiction, needs to ask—and answer—about a given storyline: <b>Why should we care?</b> The more emotionally invested readers are in what happens to those in the story, the more compelling it will be. And our emotional investment comes from understanding what the stakes are for those characters. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">*I am sure Tom credited Hitchcock for the insight, but I have not been able to find an original Hitchcock reference. Sources welcomed</span>. </span></span></div>
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Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-70179949762546286692010-09-10T08:30:00.006-04:002010-09-10T10:53:32.344-04:00Wikipedia and "Open-Source History"<a href="http://glecharles.tumblr.com/post/1084322937/this-is-historiography-this-is-what-culture">Guy LeCharles Gonzalez's Tumblr </a>tipped me off to a neat post by James Bridle at BookTwo.org. More accurately, to a post about a neat project that Bridle has undertaken: he has created a <a href="http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/">multivolume printed set that records the editing history, </a><a href="http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/">from 2004 to 2009</a>,<a href="http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/"> of the Wikipedia entry for the Iraq War.</a><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_riEdfLZvz-8/TIcDqxslLJI/AAAAAAAAARU/rxM6tDC92YE/s1600/4931488183_1e005b7ae5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_riEdfLZvz-8/TIcDqxslLJI/AAAAAAAAARU/rxM6tDC92YE/s400/4931488183_1e005b7ae5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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We all know that what makes Wikipedia valuable, and also problematic, is that its entries can be edited at any time by any user. This makes it, on the whole, remarkably accurate--anyone who scorns Wikipedia as a mishmash of rumor and random errors should read about the study that found it <a href="http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69844">stacked up pretty well against the Encyclopedia Britannica</a>. But if it's terrific<i> </i>in the aggregate, for any given topic, <i>at any given moment</i>, Wikipedia is capable of delivering information that is factually wrong, politically skewed, or simply incoherent, depending on who was last on the "edit" page. Bridle's compilation of the Iraq War edits, I'm sure, will demonstrate this clearly. As he observes,<br />
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It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead.”</blockquote>
If you land on this Wikipedia page at the wrong time, you might find unhelpful "information" like that. But most of the time you'd get a lot of useful facts, 95 percent of them or better probably accurate. And as James Bridle points out regarding the Iraq War, the constant changing of the article is itself a valuable fact--a record of our historical knowledge as it lurches forward--or sometimes back.<br />
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This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.</blockquote>
For anyone pondering the value of Wikipedia compared to "traditional" reference sources, an absolute must-read is an essay, now several years old, by the late Roy Rosenzweig, one of the pioneers of digital history, titled <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42">"Can History Be Open Source?"</a> It's quite long and addressed principally to his fellow historians, but deeply thoughtful and open-minded. His overall assessment of Wikipedia is quite positive. He too compared Wikipedia to more established sources (Microsoft's Encarta and the <a href="http://www.anb.org/biooftheday.html">American National Biography</a>), using biographies as his sample, and concluded, 'Wikipedia is surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history."<br />
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Rosenzweig found that where the ANB was superior to Wikipedia was not so much in factual accuracy, but in the overall quality and richness of articles that draw on, instead of the wisdom of crowds, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">the skill and confident judgment of a seasoned historian</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">."</span> Reading the Wikipedia entry on Abraham Lincoln next to the ANB article by James M. McPherson, he says<br />
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the difference lies in McPherson's richer contextualization [and] even more by his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln's voice, by his evocative word portraits....and by his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words. </blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Admittedly, putting Wikipedians up against James McPherson on Lincoln is sort of like sending the people sitting in the bleachers up to bat against C.C. Sabathia. This is only to say that encyclopedia entries, like any other kind of writing, are better done by a single talented person than by a committee, but it doesn't mean the committee version doesn't have value. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">There is much more to Rosenzweig's article than this, and for anyone who's thinking about plunging into the nine volumes of <i>The Iraq War</i>, it would be a good place to start. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">(Photo from James Bridle's </span><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/4932050448/in/set-72157624693833091/"><span class="Apple-style-span">Flickr set</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span">, reproduced under Creative Commons license)</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><br /></span></span>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-4660551579850210452010-09-07T22:40:00.000-04:002010-09-07T22:40:05.794-04:00You Thought Getting Used to the Kindle Was Hard? Try the CodexI have posted a link to this clip elsewhere but it's so funny (and relevant) I had to do it again here. Yes, it's awful when you have to get used to some newfangled technology for reading. Imagine what it was like when you grew up with <i>scrolls</i>.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">(The YouTube post of this clip doesn't cite the original source but I'm told it is the Norwegian TV show </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Øystein og jeg.)</span></i></span></span>Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4316886317870996102.post-41868668453639655622010-09-06T10:23:00.001-04:002013-03-18T14:11:32.088-04:00Self-Publishing Is the Route to ( ) Success ( ) Failure [Check One]<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The literary agent Nathan Bransford, who writes one of the shrewdest and most entertaining blogs about publishing, recently had <a href="http://bit.ly/8YESHF">an excellent post on a much misunderstood topic</a>: just what publishers actually do for authors. (In brief: a lot.) With the increasing ease of self-publishing in an e-book marketplace; prominent authors dropping their publishers to sell their work themselves, the question of whether and how publishers "add value" to an author's work certainly calls for discussion.</div>
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It's a big subject and I'll attempt to tackle it in future posts. But I encourage anyone interested in it to read Nathan's article, and also the comments thread. What particularly struck me there was reports from two different commenters about their diametrically opposed experiences of self-publishing. Author A writes:<br />
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Self-publishing is a difficult road to take. As an experiment, I uploaded two short works to Amazon and made them available in the Kindle store. I designed the covers, did the editing, and the layout design and html code juggling that needed to be done in order to get them looking right. And let me tell you, after all of that, the time you have to put in to promote your work is exhausting. And there aren't many ways to do it successfully.
The grand total of copies sold thus far (after several months)? Somewhere around 14. Four of which were to relatives. </blockquote>
A sobering tale. But scroll down a bit further and read this from Author B:<br />
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I was very fortunate. After being rejected (but almost making it!) by traditional publishing I let my book set on the hard drive a couple years. Then Kindle store came along and Bezos offered to e-publish my book for free.
With nothing to lose I used the digital text platform interface (very easy) to upload my book. I created a cover from a beautiful photo taken by a friend.
My book has sold over 5,000 copies, and continues to sell at a brisk pace. I've added more books, and I have a nice monthly income.
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What this author said that really surprised me was this:
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I don't have a blog, don't use Facebook, have never twittered. I don't even use my name on blogs (like this one). My books sell very well and I'm making more money than I ever imagined, thanks to 70% royalty on Amazon. Marketing is not necessary. </blockquote>
Even though they report completely opposite results, both of these stories illustrate the same fact about self-publishing: as I have said elsewhere, the skills involved in writing a book are utterly different from the ones necessary to flog it to the buying public. A writer capable of creating a wonderful book may have no aptitude--or as author B's comment suggests, no interest--in networking with readers, flacking her product, etc. That's where publishers come in.<br />
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True, Author B is doing just fine without publishers, thank you very much. I take my hat off this to this person who has figured out how to write books that sell without marketing. I'm not sure what big conclusions you can draw from these starkly different stories, although I believe that the experiences of author A are probably more typical of self-publishing. But as I know all too well, many authors have had almost equally frustrating experiences with major publishing houses. And some books truly will sell without marketing, sometimes on the title or even a jacket image alone. Of course, I can't help wondering, if author B's book had come out from an established publisher, and had a creative, energetic marketing push behind it, might it have sold 50,000 copies, or 500,000 instead of 5000? Several titles come to mind that were successfully self-published, then were picked up by major houses and transformed into blockbusters. (For instance, the authors of <i>The One Minute Manager</i> sold 20,000 copies of their book themselves--pretty impressive. But after William Morrow took it over, it went on to sell 20 million.)<br />
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None of this is to say that self-publishing may not be viable and even preferable, for some authors, to the old-school method. But when it comes to reaching the largest possible audience, a HarperCollins or Random House, with its marketing expertise and massive distribution apparatus, still offers something pretty powerful.Peter Ginnahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00678504299313188170noreply@blogger.com5