Introducing a Terrific Young Historian

In my first post on this blog I promised not to use the word "excited" more than once a month. But sometimes there's no other word to describe how an editor feels about a book. I've just published a new work of history that quickened my pulse from the first time I read the proposal: Rawn James, Jr's. Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Huston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation. This book tells one of the most important, most dramatic, yet least known stories in American history, and makes it not only exciting, but deeply poignant.

     When we think of the Civil Rights movement, we tend to think of the 1950s and 60s, and scenes made famous by television-the bus boycott, the March on Washington, the Freedom Rides. But some of the most compelling, most dramatic, and most  important victories took place long before then, in America's courtrooms, where two determined lawyers waged a decades-long battle against racial injustice.

     The men were Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, attorneys for the NAACP. From the 1930s to the 50s, they crisscrossed the country, going from backwoods county jails to the Supreme Court to fight for the legal rights of African Americans.  In the Deep South, they sometimes slept in their car because no hotel would give them a room. They were heckled, threatened, and sometimes in danger of their lives. But in those days bigotry was not confined to the backwoods--it went all the way to the nation's capital. When Charles Houston argued his first case before the Supreme Court, one justice turned his chair to face the wall so he wouldn't have to look at a "colored" lawyer.

     What the justices could not ignore was the razor-sharp arguments, and the relentless preparation, of Houston, Marshall and their colleagues. Case by case, slowly, methodically, but relentlessly, they dismantled the legal principle of "separate but equal" that had kept blacks as second-class citizens even after they emerged from slavery.  Over some  two decades, they laid the groundwork for the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Brown vs. Board of Education, that outlawed segregation in public schools and led to the collapse of Jim Crow. Without Houston and Marshall, there would be no Barack Obama. 

     These two great advocates are also a great pair of characters. Charles Houston was a stern, buttoned-down, no-nonsense guy. As a dean of Howard Law School, he turned it from a rinky-dink night school into a rigorous institution whose mission was to turn out the lawyers that could meet the white elite on equal terms. Marshall was his brightest student and his protégé, but in personality his opposite. Thurgood was casual. He loved to lean back and tell off-color jokes over a glass--or maybe a bottle--of bourbon.  The two complemented each other perfectly. In effect, Thurgood became a surrogate son to Charlie. Sadly, Houston worked himself to death and died just before the Brown case, the one he'd been building toward, came to the Supreme Court. But Marshall did his mentor proud: not only did he win a historic victory in Brown, he would become the first African-American to join the Supreme Court.

     Rawn James Jr. is a lawyer himself, and an heir to the great legacy laid down by Houston, Marshall, and those that followed. He tells this story with gusto, with a great sense of pacing and rhythm, and it truly comes to life in his pages. This is Rawn's first book but I'm sure it will not be his last. It's the debut of a dynamic new historian-and, yes, I'm excited by it.

(You can see Rawn talking about his book below, or visit his website, www.rawnjames.com, for more about Root and Branch.)

Why Publishers Need to Learn to Talk to the Animals

I've been reflecting some more on the recent debate over e-book prices. Michael Cader's much-applauded post on the topic made the point that in general publishers have not done a good job of explaining either the reasons for their pricing policies, or even the basic facts about the marketplace. He's right, and the situation highlights a problem that the industry is still just beginning to grapple with: big publishers are not used to thinking of readers as their customers.

For a century, publishing has had (as Shiv Singh noted in a presentation at Digital Book World) a business-to-business orientation. Big publishers' customers were retailers, a few wholesalers, and libraries (mostly sold to by wholesalers again). On the rare occasions when an individual reader ordered a book from the publisher, fulfilling the order was such a hassle that the author actually got a reduced royalty because of all the extra costs incurrred.

True, publishers directed some of their marketing (such as advertising) to consumers, and we tried to reach individual readers with publicity. But even our publicity efforts were largely aimed at a small ring of intermediaries like book reviewers or radio/TV producers.  The idea of telling a story about ourselves or our industry to the reading public, or explaining to book buyers why our products cost what they do, wouldn't have occurred to most publishers a few years ago.

It has at least occurred to some houses by now (and some vertically focused houses and imprints are well along at this), but it's a long way from being fully absorbed by the industry. Publishers are a bit like Dr. Dolittle, slowly learning to "talk to the animals." I'm not being pejorative to either side in that remark. Dr. Dolittle loved the animals--but it took him a while to speak their language. Our readers were out there in all their wonderful variety; we loved them; in our way we took care of them--but we never had a conversation with them.

So, at the same time publishing houses are struggling to master the "disintermediated" marketplace where we can, and must, communicate with end users directly, on top of the old, hard work we have to do of telling people about our titles, we have to explain about how the industry works and why $14.99 for a great new novel is not a ripoff.

All of which gives one pause about the "agency model," where publishers set and enforce their own prices. Just as we have no expertise in talking to readers, we have no expertise in what prices work best for what kinds of titles when. Kassia Krozser notes that "price is an important tool in the arsenal of retailers" who are constantly in conversation with readers, and add their value by getting books into those readers' hands. 


Don't get me wrong--I don't believe in rolling over and ceding the job to Amazon or some other behemoth. Just as we have to learn to communicate with readers directly--that is one reason I write this blog--we're going to have to fool around with different pricing schemes and start to figure out for ourselves what works.  Doing so will involve a lot more talking to the animals. 

(Illustration by Hugh Lofting from Doctor Dolittle in the Moon)

Recalled to Life: Kirkus Reviews Finds a Surprise New Owner

Kirkus Reviews, the pre-publication review outlet, was expected to close a few weeks ago, but has now had a reprieve. As Daily Finance reports, the business has been sold to shopping-center mogul, and bookstore owner, Herb Simon, better known for owning the Indiana Pacers. This may seem odd news, but it's good news. As I said in an earlier post, with the huge number of titles clamoring for attention (and often going with virtually none), any service that can help pick some needles out of the haystack is really useful. 


Kirkus will keep its editors and continue to publish bi-weekly. It plans to "beef up" its digital offerings--where there should be plenty of opportunities. Kirkus at one time licensed its reviews to Amazon--I wish they would again, to complement the, er, less gimlet-eyed notices from PW I often find there. Or wouldn't you like to have, say, an app on your iPhone that would deliver a pithy, one-screen-size review of a book you're leafing through in a bookstore? Kirkus would be well suited to that. 

We'll wish the rescued Kirkus success--and hope that their near-death experience may make them a little kinder toward the books they review. Just not kind enough to be boring. 

(image by Phiz from A Tale of Two Cities) 

Cutting Through Some of the Nonsense about E-Book Prices

I’ve been trying not to let e-books monopolize this page, but it’s a subject that’s hard to avoid with so much happening. This week we had a New York Times article about the ever-contentious topic of e-book prices, on which vast quantities of hot air are expended.

The Times notes that many readers are complaining, not to say outraged, about the idea of paying more than $9.99 for e-books—the price that Amazon has aggressively promoted in its effort to sell Kindles. 

At Publishers Lunch, his indispensable blog/newsletter, Michael Cader had a terrific piece yesterday debunking some notions implicit in the NYT article, and urging publishing people do to a better job of explaining to the public the widely held fallacies about e-book prices. I’ll write more about this myself, but his points are so cogent that I might as well start by quoting some of them:  

* $9.99 never was the top e-book price; people pay more than that every day
[When there was no Kindle, many e-books, including those for Sony Reader cost well above $9.99. And from the beginning of the Kindle store, plenty of titles were above that price. As Cader notes elsewhere, three recent surveys, two presented at Digital Book World, one this week by Goldman Sachs, strongly suggest that while price is important to e-book buyers, there are—as you’d expect--more important elements to a buying decision, such as author reputation.]

* The implicit, false promise of cheap e-books was made by the people who profit, at very nice margins, from selling the devices, not by publishers. Please blame them if you feel deceived.  [Right. Amazon has sold “millions” of Kindles by Jeff Bezos’s account. Which means, at the prices they charge, they are raking in hundreds of millions on Kindle hardware. Was it a coincidence that Amazon had its biggest profits ever last year?]

* Publishers are lowering their ebook prices
Most stories say publishers are raising prices. We in the trade know that publishers are preparing to lower their ebook prices by 50 percent or more, and reduce their own profit margins. But customers don't; they hear that publishers are raising prices. [Another key point. Publishers are actually looking to take less per book than they have been getting from Amazon. And in general e-book list prices are coming down.]

* The new "top price" is going to be $12.99 more often than not
[Cader notes that this will depend on what deals publishers arrive at with Apple, but in general we’re talking about a rise of a couple of dollars.]

Cader’s piece also makes one other important point:

Publishers are hoping to protect smaller and local retailers and ensure that customers have a wide range of real bookstores and online e-bookstores to choose from.

Right again. Low prices are a weapon used by big, deep-pocketed merchants, typically chains, to crush their small, local competitors. Publishers don’t want to see a marketplace that consists of nothing but Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This is, to be honest, partly because most of us in the business have a sentimental attachment to old-fashioned bookstores, the kinds of places where most book-lovers love to hang out.  It is partly because we know that it’s in those independent stores that surprise, hand-sold hits can catch fire and turn into bestsellers. But it’s also because we don’t want to find ourselves with nothing but 600-pound gorillas for customers.