Foot-Long Subs, or, One Publisher's Reflections on the Curious, Sometimes-Maddening Trend Toward Putting Enormously Long Subtitles on Everything

Horse

Quick: What do these books have in common?

The Sea Around Us.   The American Way of Death.   The Best and the Brightest.   Dispatches.   All Things Bright and Beautiful.   Thy Neighbor’s Wife.

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.

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:

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

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

How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West

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

The Amazing True Story of a Missing Military Puppy and the Desperate Mission to Bring Her Home

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.

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 The Sea Around Us or Dispatches, 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.

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 Laugh and Live by Douglas Fairbanks (1915) to Reminiscences (1964) by Douglas MacArthur, from Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin (1979) to See, I Told You So (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?

[Many thanks to Creative Nonfiction 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 here.]

Playing Chicken: Publishers, Apple, and Amazon

My post this morning raised the key question that I thought had been ignored in the first round of coverage on the iPad as e-reader: why would people pay $14.99 for an e-book in Apple's iBooks store when they can get the same title for Kindle at $9.99?  But in fact the trusty Walt Mossberg of the WSJ asked that very question of Steve Jobs at the iPad launch event--the video is now posted at All Things Digital (I found it via E-Book Newser). 

Jobs's answer has huge implications--though it's open to different interpretations. He says "the pricing will be the same." Mossberg asks, "the price will be $9.99?" Jobs: "The prices will be the same...Publishers are actually going to pull their books from Amazon because they're not happy." 

I take Jobs to mean that the prices won't be $9.99, because the higher price is what publishers have been desperately concerned to establish in the Apple deal. But obviously a $14.99 price for e-books can't be sustained if Amazon is going to keep selling the same title for less. For publishers not to undercut Apple, they would in fact have to withdraw their titles from the Kindle store. That would be a real throwdown--especially because right now, publishers are making more money on Kindle e-book sales than Amazon is. (But let's not forget that Amazon is still making loadsamoney on selling the Kindle device itself.)  It would be a significant threat to Amazon's Kindle business, and one has to wonder whether Amazon will retaliate, as they have done at other times, against publishers' print-book business. For both sides, print books are still a much larger business than e-books, so there's plenty to lose. It may be an interesting game of chicken. 

Apple iPad: Is It Actually an Amazon Trojan Horse?

As anyone on Planet Earth knows, Apple announced its new iPad device Wednesday with enormous hoopla. There's particular excitement among publishers because Apple has agreed to sell books in an iTunes-like store at prices somewhat higher than Amazon has been charging for new titles on the Kindle.

The excitement is somewhat paradoxical because although Apple is giving publishers a better split of sales proceeds (70 percent vs. Amazon's 50), these sales will actually make the publishers less money: Apple "iBooks" prices will be capped at $14.99, while right now, Amazon is paying publishers half of a list price that could be $25 to $30.

Furthermore, what no one has mentioned so far is that Amazon already has a Kindle reader app for the iPhone which allows you to buy books and read them--and supposedly all iPhone apps will work on the iPad.  So will you potentially have a choice of buying an e-book from
Apple's iBooks store for $14.99--or, buying the same title from Amazon, on the same device, just as conveniently, for $9.99?

I feel as though I must be misunderstanding something, because this seems like a setup to make iBooks completely irrelevant in a hurry.  This will be no skin off Apple, because the iPad will be just as good an e-reader with a Kindle app as it is with iBooks. So it could be a "Kindle killer" in the sense of luring potential customers of Amazon's device. But it could at the same time actually strengthen Amazon's hold over the book market--the exact opposite of what publishers hoped would happen.

In that case, our joy at the tablet will be short-lived. Not as short-lived as Adolf Hitler's, though, in this latest expression of the unquenchable internet meme:

Two New Approaches to Publishing: Notes from Digital Book World

I’m just back from attending the Digital Book World conference. I thought briefly about attempting to give an overview of  the whole thing, but there’s way too much ground to cover. For what might be called the strobe-light account, I recommend searching Twitter for #dbw, where many participants tweeted updates from the panels. And Publishers Lunch has posted summaries of most of the key sessions.

Out of many informative and sometimes provocative presentations—and unfortunately I missed several because I could only be in one room at a time—two new “business models” that people talked about yesterday especially intrigued me. One might be called an attempt to fix what’s most broken with the traditional big-house trade publishing business. In that sense it’s backward rather than forward-looking, but a smart and promising way of addressing our problems. 

First, the profit-sharing model of HarperStudio, as explained by founder Bob Miller, where instead of traditional advances and royalties (he reports), the publisher pays a small advance, but splits all revenue, minus direct costs (but not overheads) evenly with the author. The beauty of this approach is not only that it drastically decreases the house’s unearned advance risk, but that it aligns the interest of publisher and author more closely throughout the process.

Marketing budgets and strategies, for instance, can come out of a conversation between publisher and author, not the kind of negotiation where the author and publisher haggle over whether to spend on a book party or a publicity tour.  Bob’s account of the warm fuzzy feelings between HarperStudio and its authors sounds almost too good to be true, but as someone who has always tried to make the author part of the publishing team, even with a more conventional contract, I think there is a lot going for his program. (Roger Cooper’s Vanguard Press, which also offers authors less money up front, more later, plus a guaranteed marketing budget, is a similar and also appealing consultative approach.)

If HarperStudio and Vanguard are smart attempts to fix what’s broken in Big Publishing, Richard Nash’s Cursor is an attempt to “skate to where the puck is going to be,” in Wayne Gretzky terms. Looking forward to the likely future (see my post from Monday) when general-interest publishing is a relic and the publisher’s relationship with a community of interest is its key asset, Cursor envisions selling those dedicated readers not just books, but a variety of ways of interacting with authors—expensive, deluxe editions; 99-cent e-books; even classes or other forms of in-person access. As Richard noted in his presentation, paying $25,000 for an MFA, as thousands in our country do annually, is really a very expensive way of buying access to established writers.  Also novel is his plan to make contracts with three-year terms (and no advances), in the belief the publisher should earn the author's ongoing loyalty rather than aking him  (His session, too featured some other innovative models, Eoin Purcell’s Greenlamp and Angela James’s digital-first Carina Press at Harlequin. Cursor seems to me the most ambitious of the three.)

These ventures have been much written about already,  and in truth it's too early to say how well the results will pan out over the long term.  But they look to me like really welcome developments which, if they work, could point the way for publishers large and small to follow. I wish them all success and will be following them closely.