Ban Books - Boost Sales!

Bizarrely, (withholding the books) probably meant we sold more books. We wouldn’t have done this well otherwise ...

Palgrave Macmillan executive director for East Asia, Steve Maginn, talks to Starmag's Elizabeth Tai about the seizure of Barry Wain's Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times, and the way it (ironically) boosted sales when the book was finally released.

Elsewhere, Tunku Halim reviews the book ... and suggests we should look past the lost RM50bil.  Myself, I don't feel that allegation can or should be swept under the carpet.

Damyanti's Dilemma

How fair is it for a local publisher to offer these terms to writers submitting work to their anthology?  My friend and writing buddy Damyanti Ghosh writes that CCC Press :

... want to retain the right to abridge my work and to continue to publish it not just for one year, but till they decide to let it go out-of-print. ... And in the meanwhile, they are going to charge sub-licensing fees to any publisher who decides to publish the story again, including, hypothetically, my own anthology!

Any publisher has of course the right to set their own terms, and a writer can elect to accept or refuse those terms.  

If you are a new writer who needs the exposure and could benefit from getting your name out there (especially in an international anthology), you might be happy to accept such conditions, but if, like Damayanti, you see writing as a career path, are finding success elsewhere, and plan to compile your work into a book, this may not be the best deal for you.

Choices!

I'd advise Damyanti to take her story elsewhere - what about you?

(This was the original call for submissions.)

The Good News About Self-Publishing

Book publishing is simply becoming self-publishing

says Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times, making the point that the stigma once attached to this method of getting your work out into the world has largely dissipated.  Not only are numbers of self-published books up (2009 was 181% over 2008), but self-published books are acquiring a certain cachet.  Heffernan quotes IndieReader, an online source for self-published books as saying :

Think of these books like handmade goods, produced in small numbers, instead of the mass-marketed stuff you’d find at a superstore.

She also points out that self-publishing is :   

...a quiet godsend to literary history. ... Books that defy traditional classification now appear in print, and reprints of public-domain titles account for the biggest category of self-published books.

Postscript :

There's a very good response to this article by Joel Friedlander at The Book Designer. He finds holes in some of Heffernan's findings but says that :

Self-publishing is incredibly healthy and growing at a pretty amazing rate. ... And as far as quality, why is it that no one ever looks through the huge piles of schlock that are included in the 288,355 books from traditional publishers? ...  The self-publishers I’ve been dealing with since the 1990s routinely turn out books that are every bit as good as those coming from traditional publishers. And we’ve been doing it the same way for the twenty-odd years I’ve been involved in independent publishing: by paying attention to detail, hiring in professionals where needed, and knowing the market because we are the market.

Here are the readers' comments on the original article.

When Publishing Changes

Print books are never going to go away; but the current distribution model will. 2012 could be a year of disaster, not because of the Mayan calendar, but because of traditional publishing's inability to deal with the impact of technology, and their arrogant refusal to adapt. As long as publishers cling to the belief that they're the only game in town--employing a business model that has not significantly changed since the early 1800s--it's a matter of when, not if; and that when fast approaches.

writes Michael A. Stackpole in the Huffington Post, commenting on book industry consultant Michael Shatzkin's theory that the publishing industry will crash by the end of 2012.

We're talking about when and not if the industry changes and it's scary stuff for those in the book business.

Among the changes that Shatzkin  posits - books will appear in e-book format first, and if they get a good enough response and reviews, will then be printed as physical books.  There will be far fewer bricks and mortar bookshops as sales move online. There will be far more authors self-publishing and cutting out the middleman.

The End of Publishing?

Boing Boing comments :

Here's an adorable, tricky and clever video on the future of publishing, courtesy of the Penguin folks, who produced it for an internal presentation and then released it into the wild after everyone loved it. Be sure to watch to at least halfway, when the clever gets visible.

(Found this via Zafar Anjum on Twitter.)

Faber Firsts

At the heart of the process of choosing who to publish is, obviously, editorial taste, but it’s difficult to pin down exactly how we choose. It’s a hard thing to make scientific because so much of it is based on intuition, gut feeling and passion. The editor has to really want the writer and the book for something to come out of it ... In a literary business like ours, you find that success comes at strange moments for strange reasons. If you land a book at the wrong moment and the audience doesn’t turn up when you expect them to, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t be a success in the end. You never take on a book without believing that you can create success. When you invest heavily in editorial taste, like we do, you just have to believe in your taste and keep going.

Stephen Page CEO of publishers Faber & Faber is interviewed by Rouwen Lim in Starmag about how the company's amazing track record (which six Booker Prize winners and 11 Nobel Laureatesso consistently over the decades).

(But is Faber trading on past glories? That's an interesting question Sam Jordison asked on The Guardian blog back in May.)

F&F have just celebrated their 80th anniversary and are republishing 10 novels by some of their finest writers as part of the Faber Firsts series. The cover designers share the stories behind their iconic images. These are truly beautiful retro-looking editions and I want them so much!

Five Laws of the Novelist

American psychiatrist Stephen Bergman (who writes fiction under the pen name Samuel Shem) contributes an anecdotal piece called Five Laws of the Novelist to The Boston Globe.

I liked this :

Law Four: There Is No Humiliation Beneath Which a Writer Cannot Go. My second novel had come out in paperback, and my wife and I were on a hiking trip in New Hampshire. We stopped in a mom-and-pop store for lunch. There, in a spindle bookrack, were two copies of my novel. I immediately suspected my wife had placed them there, to make me feel good. Nope. I took both books off the rack and went up to the little old lady at the counter, and announced, “I wrote this book.’’

“Oh, you wrote that book?’’ she asked.

I averred yes. I asked if she would like me to sign the copies.

“Oh no, our folks would never buy a book that was writ in.’’

Another standard humiliation: At an author-signing in a bookstore, sitting at a desk near the window, facing a wall of Grishams, watching people hurrying past as if you are a child molester. Not fun, especially if your publisher has overlooked advertising the event.

Also worth reading is his paper Fiction as Resisitance.

Literary Culture - Roman Style

... money-­making booksellers, exploited and impoverished authors, celebrity book launches and career-making prizes ...

Classics professor Mary Beard isn't writing about the contemporary literary scene in The New York Times, but about how things were in ancient Rome, and there are some fascinating parallels.

I liked this :

The Roman launch party took the form of select readings from the work, given semi-publicly or at exclusive invitation-only events, perhaps in the home of a rich patron. These could be just as frustrating for the author as the modern book launch where only half the expected guests turn up, drink a polite glass of wine and beat a hasty retreat without buying a copy. Pliny, writing in the early second century A.D., complained that in Rome “there was scarcely a day in April when someone wasn’t giving a reading,” and that the poor authors had to put up with small audiences, most of whom slipped out before the end anyway.

It's so reassuring that things don't change much over time!

Beard sounds like a fun academic - there was a very nice piece a short while back in The Guardian about the most popular jokes in Roman times. You can read her regular column in The Times.

How a Book is Made

This is A-Z how books are made. Honestly.



[From Macmillan, US and found via]

Penguin Australia Goes Retro Orange

This picture (left) made me feel quite nostalgic for those old-fashioned Penguins with the orange and white covers and the happy memories of reads gone by.

Penguin Australia brought out a budget collection of 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction titles in the Penguin Popular series, and the sales have exceeded all expectations, Tom Reilly in the Age reports.

The Brits (and remember that Penguin is a British company) were more cautious and rejected the idea ... and are most probably kicking themselves after bad sales over Christmas.

The low-price philosophy goes back to the whole ethos on which Allen Lane based his business more than 70 years ago - each book is cheaper than a packet of cigarettes.

I don't know whether we will get to see these copies here, but they are certainly Penguins I would want to pick up!

The Good Health of Indian Publishing

India’s achievements in publishing are formidable by any standards ...

says Urvashi Butalia in the Hindu Literary Review, and then goes on to tell us why. This makes cheerful reading at a time when publishing in the West is going through a really tough time, particularly as small, independent publishers seems to be thriving alongside multinationals.

What I find interesting (though it isn't discussed in the article) is the fact that many books which might be considered of Asian interest are being published in India ahead of being launched on the UK and other international markets. I've also heard that Indian publishers often pay larger advances!

Walking in a Paper Wonderland

Found 4th Estates excellent bookishly heartwarming video This is Where We Live which celebrate the publisher's 25th anniversary [via Paper Cuts blog]. How great to see Tash's Harmony Silk Factory so prominently featured!

Hard Times

Publishing houses are certainly bleeding, and those that haven't yet started to take staff and books out to the woodshed, ax in hand, are going after end-of-the-year bonuses, raises and who knows what else, while management girds its loins for "the inevitable." After all, in malls across America, the chain bookstores are getting mauled (just like other retailers). Traffic at many bookstores nationwide has evidently slowed to a trickle. Book orders have reportedly fallen off a cliff. It's now being said that, in this Christmas season, no popular book is selling so well as to be unavailable. In other words, if you want it, it's going to be at your local Barnes & Noble. For publishing, that's like an obituary.

Tom Engelhardt in the Nation writes about the state of Reading in an Age of Depression, with both book retail and the publishing industry in deepest trouble.

It's all come as a big shock. As Motoko Rich at the New York Times says :

Since the Depression, the notion has prevailed that publishing is largely a recession-proof industry. Publishers have argued that because books are inexpensive, provide lasting pleasure and are sought by a relatively affluent clientele, their appeal persists even in hard times. ... But now there is widespread concern that publishing's resilience may have been exaggerated and may today be no more than a myth.

Major houses have announced big layoffs (Andrew Wheeler lists the victims of December 3rd, "Black Wednesday", here) are severely cutting back budgets for new acquisitions, and big advances will probably be a thing of the past.

But if there is a bright side, it is as Jonathan Jones on the Guardian's art blog points out - creativity is going to survive, even in the hardest of times :

... so it's best not to depress ourselves just yet with apocalyptic scenarios. We won't improve anything with them and may make matters worse. ... (economic recession) didn't stop people writing books, putting on plays or exhibiting adventurous art. There was probably as much artistic achievement in the 1980s as in the 1990s and early 21st century – perhaps a bit more. In fiction, for example, my generation has yet to produce authors as distinctive as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, who made their impact in the 80s.

Author Jim C Hines puts it very nicely on his blog :

The writers will keep writing. Because that's what we do.

Further Reading :

James Boong's essay Read It and Weep at Salon.com, which ominously begins :

The end of days is here for the publishing industry -- or it sure seems like it.

Rebranding - Bookninja Style

How you like the saucy new cover for Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale?

Yes, it is a joke, sort of.

Earlier this month Bookninja asked :

Are top novelists being rebranded to meet the purchasing habits of an embiggened sector of stupid readers?

in response to this very worrying article in The Independent about novelist Margaret Drabble being under pressure from her publishers to "rebrand" her fiction ... i.e. dumb down.

Bookninja invited blog readers to send in their cover designs for the classics rebranded as more popular genres, and many rose to the challenge with hilarious results. You are invited to vote for the winner by email, but voting closes today so you need to be quick.

Postscript :

Think you can do even better? Now the Guardian is inviting you to send in your own efforts.

The Young Ones

There's a nice piece in StarTwo's Youth 2 section today about young Malaysian authors. Sharmila Nair and Ian Yee interview Lim May Zhee, Ruzaina Fikri and Muhamad Syrafuddin ... valiant souls all. (And may they continue the good fight as they grow older.)

And in a side piece, MPH's Janet Tay talks about how to realise the dream of getting published, tempering encouragment with a dose of realism. And of course the most important piece of advice :

Read, read, read. I can’t emphasise that enough. I think we do encounter a fair bit of writers who want to write but don’t pick up books themselves “ it’s like a chef who doesn’t know how to eat or taste his food.

What Is to Be Done?

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books as jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry. ... Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.

Have We Reached the End? asks Boris Kacka, of the publishing industry in the US. Among other problems he cites drastic fall in the number of independent booksellers following the rise and rise of Amazon.com, the imminent demise of Borders, the challenge of dwindling readership, and the enormous advances paid to authors which are never recouped. (Among the flops of legendary proportions - Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons).

Carolyn Kellogg on the LA Times blog doesn't reckon it's quite as bad as Kacka makes out.

Chapbooks, Chaps!

What do ... Francesca Beard, Sharanya Manivannan, Jasmine Low, Priya K, KG, Liyana Yusof and Poetica and others have in common?

Poetry? Yes, okay.

But something more. Each of them embraced the chapbook, a simple handmade publication to put writing out into the world - given away free or sold for a nominal sum. It's a simple way of being published, showcases your best writing, and often acts as a stepping stone to flashier publishing.

Lee Rourke on the Guardian blog waxes lyrical about the chapbook and reminds us that this form of publication has been around since the C16th. He particularly praises Blackheath Books for their series of poetry chapbooks and links to this video of how the books are lovingly made by hand. (See this in the video below.) In a world where big business interests control publishing, I find this a refreshing and inspiring reminder of how the little guy can be independently creative.

It's almost the print form of busking while you wait to be discovered, isn't it?

The Politics of Blurbing

Caveat lector! The endorsements on books aren’t entirely impartial. Unbeknownst to the average reader, blurbs are more often than not from the writer’s best friends, colleagues or teachers, or from authors who share the same editor, publisher or agent. They represent a tangled mass of friendships, rivalries, favors traded and debts repaid, not always in good faith. There’s some debate about whether blurbs actually help sell books, but publishers agree they can’t hurt. Often, agents try to solicit blurbs even before a publisher buys a book.

As someone who gets called on to write book blurbs occasionally, I really appreciate Rachel Donadio's look at the tricky politics of it in the New York Times. Blurbing up? Blurbing down? Blurbing laterally? There's a whole vocabulary here.

But this really tickled me :

Sometimes blurbish enthusiasm can backfire. Dave Eggers’s first book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” itself sounds like a blurb, and came with endorsements from David Sedaris (“the force and energy of this book could power a train”) and David Foster Wallace(“this thing took off for me in the basement and didn’t stop”). Since then, Eggers has become such an effusive endorser of his contemporaries that one critic, Andre Mayer, said his blurbs “border on farce.” After Eggers called Sean Wilsey’s memoir, “Oh the Glory of It All,” so “intriguing,” “hilarious,” “jaw-dropping,” “reckless and brilliant and insane” that “at one point I had to burn the second half … so I didn’t distract myself from my own dumb deadlines,” Mayer, writing on the Web site of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation , took him to task: “Isn’t the point of a blurb to kindle interest in the book — and not the blurber?”

Postscript :

Do also see Rebecca Johnson's excellent piece in salon.com - Why Won't You Blurb Me?

(Pic from salon.com)

McCrum in Ten Chapters

The Observer's literary editor Robert McCrum hangs up his hat after more than 10 years in the job and gives us a fascinating whistle-stop tour of the changes he has seen in the publishing world in that time.

Along the way he shares his thoughts on subjects such as: Zadie Smith and the new generation of authors; how Amazon.com has changed the retail market; the rise and rise of Rowling; Franzen snubbing Oprah; the explosion of literary festivals; how literary prizes have come to be the most reliable guides in a perplexing landscape; why McEwan's success typifies the decade; how blogs have taken over the role of reviewing; how Lynne Truss talks to our anxiety in an age of cultural upheaval; and finally, the Kindle.

This article is a must-read for anyone interested in the trends, and it's nice to discover that McCrum is very optimistic about the future of the book :

... what I have described are the birth pangs of a golden age. The market for the printed book is now global; the opportunities for the digital book are almost unimaginable. To be a writer in the English language today is to be one of the luckiest people alive.

Complete Authonomy

Jean Hannah Edelstein on the Guardian blog reports on an initiative by HarperCollins to help new writers avoid the slush-pile.

Instead of posting an unsolicited manuscript which may just be filed in the bin, writers can now post up to 10,000 words on the Authonomy website ("social network for writers and book-lovers alike") which will be judged by readers. The extracts that attract most interest will be considered for publication. (The Authonomy blog is here.)

Edelstein seems cautiously optimistic about what the site might achieve for writers, but worries that it :

... may end up being a nice polite way for the publishers to say that they're not accepting unsolicited submissions anymore. If the launch goes well, I'd wager that anyone asking about submissions will be directed to hit the site, keeping editors' (and editorial assistants') desks clear for them to get on with the books agents have sent them, the ones they are genuinely interested in.

I must add here that when I interviewed publisher David Davidar a few months ago, he said that he was very positive about such initiatives since he felt that they really would help the best writers get noticed.

As Edelstein points out, this isn't the first time a social network for writers has been launched. Other are YouWriteOn (funded by the Arts Council) and The Frontlist.

But getting discovered isn't the only benefit of such sites. My friend Saras, now writing really good fiction and getting it published, says that the feedback she received from other subscribers to YouWriteOn has made an enormous difference to her writing. Hopefully she'll swing by this blog in a while and tell us more about her experiences.

Postscript :

Another site, Booksie, comes very highly recommended by Phil in the comments to this post and looks well worth checking out.