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Writers' magazine |
News 03 |
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News Stories from the Book World 2003.You can check latest stories.
22 December 2003 Agencies as big businessesA recent extraordinary interview with New York agent Andrew Wylie, known without affection as the ‘the Jackal’ has focused attention again on the way in which agents are developing a more predatory approach to other agents’ clients. Wylie is one of a kind, as exemplified by a recent interview, in which he admitted that he’s like a sponge: ‘If I were to characterise it, I would say that I have an aspect of my personality which is that I have no personality. That's why I work as an agent. I have the assumed personality of the people I represent. I am like a sponge. When I came here and was working with Gillon Aitken, I had a certain kind of handwriting. After a couple of years, my wife looked at my signature and said, "What's that?" I said, it's my signature. She said, "That's not your signature." And it had changed. I'd taken over his signature.’ Wylie currently stands accused of trying to entice clients away from London agent David Godwin. Some would say unsympathetically that it is a case of the biter bit. The agent community contains its share of predators and eccentrics, but most agents, including these two, work hard and do a professional job for their clients. The very nature of the relationship means that it is much more personal than most business relationships, which can lead to a terrible sense of betrayal when authors move on, particularly when it is to a bigger agency. Once noticeable thing about the greater commercialisation of the agency world is that the bigger US agencies are starting to open up their own offices in London. Janklow and Nesbit did this two years ago; ICM have recently taken the same course. The London agency PFD have recently done the same in New York. London agent Ed Victor, whose agency sells direct in the States, says "No one can represent a project as effectively, passionately, or knowledgeably as the original, primary agent. All too often, sub-agents deal with incoming books from other agents as ‘product’ — sausages in a sausage machine. It makes much more sense for the initiating agent to learn the other market and use that knowledge to sell their clients’ books in it." None of this necessarily makes it any easier for an unpublished writer to find an agent to take them on. In fact the ‘big business’ aspect of the agency world (just like the increasing conglomeratisation of publishers) makes it hard to for authors to get their foot in the agencies’ doors with anything other than a big commercial project. But in this the agencies are only faithfully representing the market they sell to, for publishers feel they can no longer take on or sell the midlist authors who used to be the staple of their lists.
15 December 2003 Bestsellers and Big ReadsThe international scene has continued to reverberate as Harry Potter smashes through previous sales records. In spite of huge sales of the English language edition, the German translation has gone on to set new records. A staggering 1.2 million copes were sold in the first two days, making it the fastest selling book in German history. The first print run was an unprecedented 2 million copies. Never before has a book been sold through so many channels, two-thirds of them outside the book trade. Since Germany has fixed prices on books, most sales were at a price of euro 28.50 (£19.50). The French edition of the fifth book was also published on 2 December with a print-run of more than 1 million copies. This fabulous sales record is still only part of an extraordinary worldwide phenomenon. The author's agent, Christopher Little, recently attempted to quantify this. He thinks that global sales of her books have now topped 250 million in 60 languages and 200 countries. Translating J K Rowling's work has been tough going for the many translators working against short deadlines, as publishers try to get the translated editions out as soon as possible. An added problem has been that Warner Brothers, which has the merchandising rights, has brought pressure to bear on foreign language publishers not to change the names, even though many of them contain symbolism and wordplay which is lost unless they are properly translated. Another pitfall for the beleaguered translators is that the author is not prepared to help with any difficulties they may encounter, although perhaps, in the light of the 60 different languages involved, this is understandable. In spite of the pressure, it's good to know that the translators have on the whole shared in the Harry Potter books' success, receiving better rates of pay for their work. The Biggest ReadMeanwhile the highly successful Big Read promotion in the UK has come to a climax with The Lord of the Rings winning the top accolade. Although there has been continual sniping from the literati, the Big Read has had a terrific effect on sales and reading, with many readers rediscovering the classics and scores of new reading groups being formed. Last year’s smash British TV series, Great Britons, has already been tried in Germany; it seems likely that the stunning success of the Big Read will be repeated all over the world.
8 December 2003 Open access, the way of the future?Open access is beginning to look as if it will transform online journal publishing. To date readers (and libraries) have paid subscriptions to academic journals, now mostly online, where research is published. With open access the model is turned upside down and the authors are charged for the publication of their articles. BioMed Central, the pioneer in this field, is charging $500 per article and claims that this can easily be paid for as part of the initial funding for the research. This is probably easier in some disciplines than others, depending on how the research is actually funded, but BioMed claim that it has managed to make this new model work. Open Access started as a campaign by a group of breakaway academics who wanted to establish free access to published research. At the time when it first entered the general, as opposed to the academic, consciousness, it looked like a rather idealistic campaign to extend the ‘open access’ of the Internet to the academic world. Since many academic journal publishers are highly profitable, it was never likely that they would greet this new model with much enthusiasm. But the fight between the idealists and the publishers no longer looks quite so much of an un-winnable version of a ‘David and Goliath’ battle as it once did. BioMed now have 4,300 open access papers online and there are currently 500 open access journals. This is still less than 5% of the total, but there is strong support for the idea of open access from many sectors of the academic community. If Biomed have created an alternative funding model, other publishers can follow suit. Academic research may yet end up being freely available to all.
1 December 2003 The British Library teams up with AmazonAnother Amazon coup has hustled the online retailer into the headlines yet again. Stealing a march on its competitors, such as abebooks.com (see News Review 20 October 2003), Amazon has done a mega deal with the British Library, which will give it the right to use the Library’s massive bibliographic catalogue, which contains 2.55 million books. This includes the 1.7 million books published before the 1970 introduction of the International Standard Book Number system (the ISBN identifies any book published since then). At one stroke, it gives Amazon users hugely improved access to the British Library’s rich database and catapaults the online retailer into the online market for antiquarian books. Robin Terrell, MD of Amazon.co.uk, said: ‘Buyers will be able to come online and order them using us as a third party to make sure of things like security of payment.’ An important element of the deal is that the British Library’s catalogue not only provides access to a massive list of titles, but also authenticates those books that do not have an ISBN number because they were published prior to 1970. Natalie Ceeney of the British Library says: ‘The Library’s alliance with Amazon is a wonderful way to make our catalogue data relevant and available to a wider audience.’ The British Library’s collection includes 150 million items in most known languages and a massive three million new ones are added each year. British publishers are obliged to send in a legal deposit copy of each book they publish. The items, mostly books, are stored on 599 km of shelves at five sites in London and Yorkshire, including the huge new British Library building in central London.
24 November 2003 Book famine in our schoolsRecent news from both sides of the Atlantic has highlighted once again the importance of reading in educational achievement and how much education and reading in general are harmed by poor provision for books in schools. Scores just out in the US show that children’s reading skills have barely improved since 1992, despite all the efforts that have been made. While relatively few children are illiterate, experts say that ‘aliteracy’, or lack of interest in reading, is a serious problem. New figures from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that nearly half of fourth-graders said they read for fun nearly every day, but by eighth grade this had dropped off to one in five. Television and computers become greater distractions and children seem to lose interest in reading as they make their way through school. Researcher Kylene Beers of Yale University said: ‘About 100% of first-graders walk in on the first day and are interested in this thing called reading… Eighty per cent of graduating high school seniors tell us they will never again voluntarily read another book.’ In the UK the Junior School Project found that the ‘school effect’ on reading was 4 times more important than home background, even though an earlier study had highlighted class differences as the crucial factor in levels of attainment. The study also found that reading levels at age 7 were a good predictor of future educational achievement, with a direct relationship between the level of reading at age 8 and exam achievement at age 16. In both the US and UK, and in many other rich countries across the world, school book budgets are pitifully small. In the US book spending is limited largely to textbooks for the youngest groups. In the UK figures revealed at the Educational Publishers Council reception last week painted an equally dismal picture. An investigation by Keele University showed that 45% of all pupils had to share textbooks. A study from Staffordshire University showed that at current expenditure levels schools can only afford to buy one additional book per student per year across all school subjects. If children have no access to books which are fun to read and which interest them, how can we expect them to grow up into adult readers? And if they do not form and retain the reading habit at school, what will be the future of reading and of books in general in the years to come?
17 November 2003 Authors use the webIt’s hard to attract the attention of an agent and get your work published. Recently writers have been coming up with some innovative ways of grabbing the attention of the publishing world. Take David Little, younger brother of Christopher Little, J K Rowling’s agent. Even the family connection didn’t help with getting his novel published, so Little, an advertising veteran, launched a website, www.stuff-uncut.com, inviting the world, and particularly all his famous friends, to come to the site to read extracts and post their comments. He believes that word of mouth is the best way to sell books. But he’s potentially a self-publisher too, so you can sign up to buy his book, if it does eventually get printed. Using the Internet to launch yourself as a writer is an interesting new model, although you’ll need famous friends to get the publicity which will bring people to your site in the first place. But the success of Rev Graham Taylor, now the bestselling author of Shadowmancer, suggests that it may be better to self-publish from the start, because then you can put the book into people’s hands right away and you can sell your work. The huge technological advances offered by print on demand are a boon to self-publishers, who can limit their costs by ordering just a few books to start the ball rolling. But even if you’ve got a publisher, how can you make sure that your book gets maximum publicity? A recent innovation means the web can help with this too, as Dennis Hensley, author of Screening Party has shown with his virtual web tour, which linked him with bloggers. Kevin Smokler of the Virtual Book Tour, who organised it, said: ‘Bloggers are driven, information-hungry people. The publishing industry hasn’t embraced the Web at all… The idea has been received staggeringly well. The Web community has responded in droves.’
10 November 2003 Compelling insider's story or just tittle-tattle?Many British book-buyers may be bemused by the extraordinary amount of attention paid to the new book by Princess Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, which has been a media sensation over the last two weeks. Since the book was ‘gutted’ for the serialisation, sales might have been expected to be disappointing. Much to Penguin’s delight, it seems to have been flying off the shelves and a large reprint is already in hand, even though it has been condemned by some of the media. Boyd Tonkin in the Independent said it was ‘a terrible book’ and condemned Penguin for taking part in this ’squalid royal pantomime.’ Perhaps even more amazing, for the cynical royal-watcher, is the fact that Burrell is planning a 25-city US book tour and that his American publisher has put in hand a huge print-run. Can there still be so much worldwide interest in this rather tired saga? Some feel it might be time to let the Princess rest in peace, but this story still promises a storehouse of insiders’ gossip still to be made public. There’s an interesting contrast with the reception to America’s own royalty with Hilary Clinton’s book. Living History seems to have sold well internationally but the Chinese situation, still unresolved, continues to provide a source of embarrassment. Her memoir was censored either by the Chinese authorities or by the Chinese publisher (no-one seems to know which) without any consultation with the author or with the American publisher. The passages removed relate to Chinese government policy, human rights and the repression of the media. The International Publishers Association has protested, saying that ‘this is a case of censorship that not only violates intellectual property rights, but also curtails Ms Clinton’s right to free expression.’ It’s an own-goal for the Chinese, drawing the world’s attention to the degree of censorship still commonplace in everyone’s favourite boom country.
3 November 2003 The Big Read - trashy TV or reinstating great books?Last week WritersServices featured Bob Ritchie’s astringent look at the Big Read in his Journal. The BBC’s big literary idea has certainly come in for its share of harsh comments over the past week or two. Roy Hattersley calls it ‘showbiz, not lit crit’ and the poet Michael Horovitz says the choices are ‘predicatable’ and show how ‘commerce and television affect our reading habits.’ Catherine Bennett, writing in the Guardian, goes for the jugular: ‘To ignore books is easy. So is burning them. You just need a match. But to make independent reading sound dull and great books look stupid, to transform literature into a vehicle for celebrities, polls, lists, voting opportunities and confected rivalries, to get books confidently debated by experts who have never read them, to set up a competition between Winnie the Pooh and War and Peace: that takes a kind of genius.’ But the fact is that the Big Read has given books new prominence and coverage in the media. A surge in their sales has taken several backlist titles into the bestseller lists. Libraries are reporting increased demand for books on the 21-strong shortlist. At a party to launch the Big Read I heard the BBC’s Jane Root described how one woman bookshop customer staggered both her and the bookshop staff by setting out to buy all 100 books on the original list. People are using it as a reading list, a means of re-exploring the classics. This is an idea which really could be picked up and copied all over the world to stimulate discussion about books and make them controversial. However ‘literary one’ own tastes, whatever your personal view of the list, it’s hard to see how anything which provokes so much interest in books can be bad.
27 October 2003 Amazon's book searchAs mentioned in our 28 July News Review Amazon powers ahead, Amazon has been working for some time now on its just-launched ‘Search inside the Book’ feature, which allows browsers to search within the pages of books offered on its site. You can jump to a number of pages within the book, but not view them all. This limitation has not prevented authors’ organisations voicing their anxiety about the copyright situation. The Executive Director of the Authors’ Guild, Paul Aiken, said: ‘It is a question of whether publishers have the right to put up these works in full text form, and our view is that they don’t… I think authors have to look at it on a case-by-case basis whether this type of marketing and promotion for their book makes sense or not.’ So far 190 US publishers have come on board, a relatively small number which still does not include all the big firms. Publishers have said that they will withdraw books from the scheme if authors object. Amazon’s new feature opens up a vision of their future as a repository of books awaiting POD orders. Effectively they could become an electronic archive offering information about where books on a particular subject can be found, which would link in naturally to selling them. Wired’s view is that; ‘Amazon’s scheme would never work if users really wanted their books in digital form. The magic of the archive lies in the assumption that physical books are irreplaceable.’ But it is understandable that publishers and authors should be nervous about a scheme which could in time lead to the giant of Internet book retailing becoming also the repository of a vast amount of searchable data about where information can be found in books. In the meantime the stock market approves of Amazon’s ambition to transform itself into a major online retailer, selling not just books and CDs, but also everything from kitchen equipment to golf balls. One analyst commented that ‘This is a company built on faith in the future’, but with the share price having risen from $5.97 two years ago to almost $60 today, there’s little doubt that the market shares Amazon’s own optimism about that future.
20 October 2003 Second-hand books take offThe Internet has transformed the sale of used books. In an operation which works a little like Ebay, except that it serves primarily the antiquarian book trade rather than private sellers, the Canadian firm Abebooks has opened up a new world. Antiquarian books used to be a somewhat dusty corner of the book trade, even though large amounts of money could change hands when wealthy collectors bought prized first editions. In this, as in so much else, the web has had a democratising effect, making the buying and selling of second-hand books something that everyone can get involved with, wherever and whoever they are. Abebooks was set up by two Canadian couples seven years ago. Effectively it links the stock available from antiquarian booksellers and others all over the world into a giant database, a huge online ‘bookstore’ of titles coming from 12,000 booksellers in 42 countries. It costs booksellers about $35 a month to list up to 500 books, up to $400 for 150,000 or more titles. A small commission is also payable on each sale. Compared to the costs of running a real bookshop, this is pretty cheap, but the real advantage is the huge market it opens up. The 100 or so workers at Abebooks in Victoria never see the books, which are despatched directly from the bookseller to the customer. Abebooks is a book collector’s dream – access to 45 million titles which can be tracked down and purchased instantly and easily. Some booksellers grumble about Abebooks’ charges, but what the online operation has provided them with is a global market. Book-buyers now have instant access to untold riches - all the second-hand books on sale in 42 countries throughout the world.
13 October 2003 Frankfurt under threat?The Frankfurt Book Fair, just drawing to a close, is still the biggest international book fair by some considerable margin, but there are signs that its pre-eminence is being challenged by smaller fairs. The London Book Fair, for example, is more user-friendly for the publishers who gather from all over the world to buy and sell rights. BookExpo America can be more glamorous – and more useful if it takes place in New York. There is increasing resistance in a cost-conscious industry to the escalating cost of going to Frankfurt. This year some publishers, such as the American companies owned by Holtzbrink, have decided not to send anyone to the Fair. The Fair authorities have negotiated down the exorbitantly-priced minimum stay insisted on by the hotels from 6 days to 3 and offer a 12% reduction in stand costs, but these changes will only take effect next year. There has also been much resistance to increased admittance for the German public (the German publishers’ attempt to stimulate interest in books in a flat market), which means that stands had to be manned till late on Friday evening. This is deeply unpopular with people who have worked hard all day and want to turn their attention to the important business of partying in the evening. Ronnie Williams, chief executive of the British Publishers’ Association said: ‘The core business of Frankfurt has always been the rights selling – if you dilute that then publishers are getting less of a return.’ Although this year saw 6,611 exhibitors, up 3% from 2002, international exhibitors decreased significantly from 4,248 to 3,876. Around a thousand authors will also be attending the Fair to promote their books. Perhaps it’s just a side-effect of a sluggish book market, but smaller fairs such as London can benefit from their very size. It’s easier to find the people you really want to talk to, and many international visitors prefer London as a destination. But in the end Frankfurt’s dominance is about its size. Where else would you meet such a large concentration of publishers from all over the world? You may not like Frankfurt, but for most publishers a presence there remains an essential part of the publishing year.
6 October 2003 E-books threatened by takeoverIn an interesting coda to last week’s story on the progress being made by e-books, some sudden changes of personnel and policy have followed on from a switch in ownership at a key e-book operation. Palmgear, an independent retailer based in Tennessee, acquired the assets of Palm Digital Media last month. Differences of policy and approach immediately became apparent and all three of the senior executives who have built the e-book operation have now left the company. In the meantime certain titles had disappeared from sale at the Palm Digital online store, apparently because their cover images were judged too explicit. Whole categories such as Erotica and Gay and Lesbian have also vanished as separate listings. The new owners would presumably claim to be exercising their right to judge what will sell, but it’s unfortunate that their approach may well stymie the development of the Palm operating system – and the still uncertain future of e-books. In the meantime the publishing world is packing its bags for the Frankfurt Book Fair, which starts on Wednesday. We will report in more detail next week on this huge international bookfest, which is loved by the aficionados and dreaded by those who suffer their way through the book world’s annual October ritual.
29 September 2003 Ebooks still growingRecent industry-wide statistics released by the Open eBook Forum suggest that some publishers may have been too hasty in writing off the commercial potential of ebooks. In the first half of 2003 alone, ebook sales revenues are up by 30% and unit sales up 40%, which compares well with an annual growth rate of 5% in traditional publishing. Compiled from data from 34 of the world’s leading publishers and retailers, these figures mark the first-ever quantitative assessment of the ebook industry. OeBF Director Nick Bogaty said: ‘Those of us in the industry have been seeing real signs of growth from every direction. Libraries are a huge growth category as they look to revitalize themselves in the age of Google; school systems are finding that today’s kids like to read when the media is digital; and consumers are snatching up better devices and more titles as fast as they can. But, until now, all the evidence of growth has been anecdotal. The goal of this program is to put some concrete numbers behind the successes we’re seeing in this maturing industry.’ Coincidentally, Barnes and Noble online have just announced that they are stopping all sales of ebooks. Gemstar, seller of one of the reading devices, pulled out of the business in June. So, although the growth is there, some big companies are retrenching, feeling that ebooks still represent too small a market to be worth the costs involved, for the moment at least. The heady days of the dotcom revolution, when ebooks were the great white hope of the future, still seem firmly in the past.
22 September 2003 Booker, book awards and bestsellersThe announcement this week of the shortlist for the 2003 Man Booker has surprised many in the book world. Only one of the big literary names entered for the prize, Margaret Atwood with Oryx and Crake, made it to the shortlist. Luminaries such as Martin Amis, Graham Swift and former Booker winner J M Coetzee were excluded in favour of relative unknowns, three of them first novelists and three published by independent publishers. John Carey, chair of the judges, said ‘This is a giant killers’ year in the Man Booker. Three first novels and only one big name left.’ Much attention has focused on Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, a much-heralded debut novel from the publishers Transworld, who have got a book onto the shortlist for the first time. Editors at the other part of the Random House UK Group, better known for its literary publishing with such imprints as Cape, Chatto & Windus and Secker, must have mixed feelings about their colleagues’ success. The publisher of Clare Morrall’s Astonishing Splashes of Colour, tiny Tindal Street Press in Birmingham, with a staff of two and only 15 books published to date, will see a big change in its fortunes. The shortlist is a real boost for the new and the small, displacing the established authors and publishing houses and showing that new writers can break through at the very highest level. In the States there’s been a mixed reception to the news that horror-writing super-seller Stephen King is to receive the National Book Awards’ annual medal for a distinguished contribution to American letters. Former winners are such literary stars as John Updike, Arthur Miller and Toni Morrison. Harold Bloom, self-appointed definer of the literary canon, is outraged: ‘That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.’ But just where do you draw the line between the literary and the commercial, and how do you decide what is really good? The Man Booker judges seem to have come up with an interesting answer.
15 September 2003 Determination is the keyFurther reflection on the big children’s hit of the summer brings you to certain rather surprising conclusions. The first is that you should write what you feel inspired to write, not try to copy someone else or write to suit the market. The second is that writers may come from the most unexpected places and achieve their goal through all sorts of different means, self-publishing being one of them. Determination is the key. In case you hadn’t already guessed it, the other ‘big hit of the summer’ has been G P Taylor’s Shadowmancer, a children’s novel involving 17th century witchcraft and black magic, and the battle between god and evil. The author has never read J K Rowling or Philip Pulman and didn’t even start reading himself until he was 16 or 17. Most surprising of all perhaps is that G P Taylor is actually the Rev Graham Taylor, a north Yorkshire country vicar who only started writing in 2001. But the determination to get his work into print is what characterised Taylor’s approach. He had to sell his precious Yamaha motorbike to raise the cash to publish the book himself, but once out there Shadowmancer sold well locally, eventually attracting the attention of a London publisher, the staunchly independent house of Faber. The Faber edition of the book duly sold like hot cakes and there is now a big American deal in place, bringing an advance of $5000,000 and the chance to mend the leak in the vicarage roof. But Rev Taylor says he will stick with the day job: ‘Once ordained a priest you are ordained for ever. Whatever happens I will carry on as a priest.’
8 September 2003 Books AliveThe success of a recent industry-wide promotional campaign for books in Australia has sparked interest elsewhere in the idea of generic book promotions. Described by the chair Sandra Yates as achieving ‘an outstanding result in its first year’, the six titles in the Books Alive campaign dominated the bestseller lists during the promotion. The books were carefully chosen to offer a wide range to the book-buyer. The campaign stimulated an increase in total book sales during the period of 23%, considerably higher than the 15% target set for the promotion. Total retail book sales on other titles increased by 13.7%, suggesting that the promotion had also had an encouraging knock-on effect on sales of other books. A key part of the campaign’s success seems to have been the massive publicity generated by the promotion, which was mentioned on Channel 7 and ABC News, as well as the fact that each writer featured on the Today Show on every day of the first week. In the UK the BBC’s Big Read programme has already stimulated great public interest and increased sales of the 100 favourite titles on the initial list. With the major part of the promotion still to come, the considerable success already achieved suggests that books can be promoted generically to a wide audience.
1 September 2003 Bookcrossing under attackBookscrossing,com (see News Review), the website which encourages people to ‘free’ books so that others can find and read them, is under attack from authors who claim that its activities are affecting book sales. Jessica Adams, the author of the War Child anthologies, claimed that Bookcrossing’s activities devalued books because it extended lending in such a way that no royalty was paid to the author. She said: ‘The site’s growth should be a worry for authors and for charity bookshops, which rely on second-hand books for their income.’ Bookcrossing now has 150,000 members and more than 500,000 titles registered on its website. The founder of the site, Ron Hornbaker, defended it, pointing out that a survey of 4,000 members had shown that 81% of its users spent the same on books after joining as they had before, with 15% spending more and 4% less. The site probably does encourage reading, giving many who might not buy many new books another way of getting hold of them. It’s generally recognised that books are passed around friends and family on a vast scale and this activitiy has never been successfully captured by the statistics. In a sense what Bookcrossing does is to extend the range of your friends and family in a way uniquely possible in the Internet era, whilst at the same time stimulating a huge amount of interest in books. Can this be altogether bad?
18 August 2003 Beach readingA good ‘silly season’ story in London’s free Metro newspaper draws on a study done by business psychologists Nicholson McBride with W H Smith to make the far from revolutionary discovery that what you read is the best guide to your personality type. Singletons who are hoping to escape that state should however not be seen on the beach with Bridget Jones’s Diary, which gives too strident a message that the reader is someone hunting for romance. The study identified three key influences that affect people's personality types: stress, confidence and life philosophy. From these, the psychologists identified 18 personality types, each of which is more likely to read certain types of book rather than others. Stephanie Wyman of Nicholson McBride says 'We may not be able to judge a book by its cover but a quick glance will tell you all you need to know about the reader.’ We all know how much what you read says about the real you. So, how much are people’s beach-read choices dictated by the image they want to give out to others? Hands up all those taking weighty classics they ‘have always meant to read’ on holiday – and then finding that actually the latest John Grisham is all you can cope with on a hot beach. We are all influenced by what people are reading and for readers part of what defines a friendship is finding that you enjoy some of the same books. To take it a stage further, perhaps this is the real secret of the success of reading groups: that they are where you will meet like-minded people and form new and enduring friendships based on your reactions to books. Everyone connected with the book business can only feel grateful that books are currently fashionable, as well as an enduring passion for many lifelong readers. Books get masses of media coverage, authors provide good news stories and it’s smart to be seen with a book. So in this year of stagnant sales and collective global anxiety about freak hot weather, blackouts, terrorism and the economy, it’s good to know that for many of us going on holiday still provides the chance to settle down with a good book.
4 August 2003 Restless conglomeratesThe relentless pace at which publishing houses are bought and sold on the international scene has slowed recently, as anti-monopoly rulings are brought to bear on proposed acquisitions. In Germany the Bertelsmann purchase of Ullstein Heyne List has run into trouble because the Bundeskartellamt, the German monopolies and mergers commission, has objected to it. Random House Deutschland has retreated, saying it will go ahead only with the purchase of mass market paperback house Heyne, but there are still objections to this because it would give the publisher 39% of the paperback market. The legal limit on what any one company may own before being accused of market dominance is 33%. Worse still, from Random House’s point of view, is the fact that the company agreed that it would satisfy the regulators if there was any objection, so it may be legally obliged to sell on the parts of the company it is not allowed to acquire. In France the Hachette acquisition of the French conglomerate Vivendi’s publishing interests has also hit the rocks. The European Commission has yet to decide whether to refer the proposed takeover to the French competition authorities, but in the meantime the French book world is making is opposition clear. This acquisition would put Hachette in a very strong position indeed, particularly as regards the highly sensitive area of literary publishing. But restless conglomerates continue to range across the world, like giant birds of prey looking for new snacks. In a recent interview in the New York Times, Gunther Thielen, the head of Bertelsmann, has intimated that he might be prepared to go back to trying to acquire Time Warner Publishing once the £1.1bn sale of BertelsmannSpringer has gone through and the group has more cash at its disposal.
28 July 2003 Amazon powers aheadAmazon has continued to surge ahead with sales growth backed by new initiatives, such as the controversial but highly successful addition of used books. It has also been active on the promotional front, with last Christmas’s free delivery on spends over £39 in the UK proving so effective in growing sales that it has become a regular offer. Amazon.co.uk has just announced its intention to bring the free delivery figure down to £25. Harry Pottter has played its part in this sales growth. Amazon’s worldwide sales of the book were 1.4 million. The international division sold at least 420,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in the UK, enabling it for the first time to move into operating profit, which was £8.1m ($13m) for the three months to the end of June. Robin Terrell, Amazon.co.uk MD said: ‘We used it to reinforce our low price offer and to attract new customers. It drove a quarter of a million new customers to Amazon worldwide.’ Growth in international sales of ‘media products’ - books, music CDs, DVDs and video games - was up 75%. The latest initiative from Amazon is Look Inside the Book II, which will involve the online retailer acquiring digital rights so that their customers can browse online by searching and reading pages before buying. This is likely to create a storm in the publishing world, where a clear distinction is usually drawn between selling books (and the promotional efforts involved) and sub-leasing rights. Globally, Amazon is making huge strides and its stock price has more than doubled in the last year. It has seen off the competition and now has a clear field. Amazon.com’s second quarter net sales are $1.1bn and its net loss has halved to $43m. But as TheStreet.com pointed out: ‘With Amazon’s stock still trading at nearly 73 times projected 2003 pro forma earnings, the company still has little room for error going forward.’
21 July 2003 'African Booker' to Kenyan writerFor the second year running the Caine prize for African writing has gone to an Kenyan writer. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was awarded the $15,000 (£9,000) prize for her short story Weight of Whispers. Narrated by an aristocratic Rwandan refugee and set after the 1994 massacres, the story was praised by the chair of judges, the writer Abdulrazak Gurnah for the ‘subtle and suggestive way it dramatises the condition of the refugees and also successfully incorporates so many large issues.’ Owuor was born in Nairobi, studied English at Jomo Kenyatta University and went to the UK to do an MA at Reading University. She is currently executive director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Her story was published in the newly-established Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? The prize attracted 120 entrants and the shortlisted authors from South Africa, Zimbabwe , Congo and Kenya were all awarded travel bursaries. The Caine Prize is awarded for a short story published in English by an African writer whose work has reflected African sensibilities. It is named in memory of the late Sir Michael Caine, chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years, and is thus often referred to as the ‘African Booker’.
14 July 2003 New technology – opening up the marketA summer promotion from Microsoft offers three free e-books a week for download using their Reader Software. The offer will run from July through to November and includes bestselling titles such as Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. The company needs to encourage readers to try e-books if they are to develop a market for their Microsoft Reader. It’s interesting to see them adopting web promotion techniques to do so. If you want to check out e-books, this could be a good time to give them a try. And threatening it…Meanwhile in Japan new mobile phone technology presents a fresh threat to the book business and to authors’ royalties. People are using their mobile phone cameras in bookstores to photograph pages of books and magazines, thus effectively photocopying them without payment. The quality is comparable to that produced by basic digital cameras. The owner of a big bookstore in Tokyo said: ‘If we say something to them, most stop photographing material but it seems that they don’t have much of a sense that they are doing something wrong.’ Restaurant listings and recipes are particularly popular, but any useful reference material may to be targeted.
7 July 2003 Discounting drives down sales growthMarket research agency Mintel has attacked widespread deep discounting of books in the UK in a recent report, claiming that it has adversely affected sales. Since the UK has the deepest book discounting in the world, but appears to be spearheading a worldwide trend, these figures are worth looking at closely. According to Nielsen Bookscan, heavy discounting has pushed down the average selling price of books sold in the UK General Retail Market from £7.51 in 2001 to £7.33 in 2002. The Mintel survey of 1,000 adults concluded that personal recommendations were a far more important factor affecting book purchase than discounts. It added that: ‘While discounting may attract customers, it certainly does not ensure customer loyalty.’ and advised retailers; ‘Discounting only cuts into their margins and damages their sustainability over time… it also brings all retailers down to the lowest common denominator.’ This may be the most serious problem confronting the British bookselling chains as they battle for market share. The retail sellers of books with the deepest pockets are the supermarkets, which showed that they would sell Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as a loss leader if necessary to undercut the competition. In the same way American bookselling chains arguably have more to fear from the price warehouses, where books are a very low-priced extra, than they do from the competitive efforts of other booksellers. This is an unequal competition which the book trade cannot win. But booksellers can in the process do much to destroy themselves by driving down prices to a level where their own margins are simply too low to sustain their businesses.
30 June 2003 The fastest-selling book in historyThe aftershock of the fastest-selling book in history is running through the book trade worldwide. In spite of negative pre-publication forecasts (see News Review 16 June 2003) the publication of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a happy celebration for millions of children all over the world. Booksellers organised special events and midnight openings on a huge scale, to satisfy the enormous excitement generated by the first new Harry Potter title for three years. In the UK nearly 1.7 million books were sold on the first day alone, four times as many as on the last book. Bloomsbury is already going back for a second printing. The predicted price war broke out, with an average selling price of £10.47 (making a price reduction of £6.52 - $17.23 - or 38%). The lowest price was Asda’s at £8.96 ($14.75). However the post-mortem will have to take account of the crowds drawn to shops selling at full price, such as Foyles and Selfridges. One of them, the Pan Bookshop in London, sold out. In the US Scholastic ordered a third printing this week, bringing the total up to 9.3 million in print, 5 million of which were sold on publication day. Scholastic may have been nervous about the huge volume of books involved and the danger of over-printing, as some bookstores seem to have experienced re-supply problems. It’s a sad reflection on the company that it announced 400 job losses less than a month before reaping the financial benefits of publishing the biggest book in history. The pattern of huge first-day sales was repeated all over the world. In South Africa sales were ten times those of the previous book, the midnight launch was a huge success and there was no significant discounting. In Australia 170,000 copies sold in the first week made it the highest-selling book ever recorded. Although the New Zealand Listener described the book as ‘overdue, overhyped and 700 pages’, it still sold 100,000 copies. Sales in Germany are 450,000 to date, with the German translation not available until November. Booksellers were taken by surprise by the heavy demand for the English-language edition, with many of them running out of stock. Interestingly, since the book was not subject to the usual retail price maintenance, it was heavily discounted. The cheapest price was 14.70 euros or £10.23 ($16.83). So, the book was a huge international bonanza, in spite of the negative voices. (The Daily Mail said that the series was ‘patronising to its audience, highly derivative and dispiritingly nostalgic for a bygone Britain.’) But will the Harry Potter books encourage children to read other titles? Unfortunately Book Marketing figures show little sign of this. The blockbusting sales of the Harry Potter titles may not bring broader benefits for children’s reading, or amount to all that much in terms of booksellers’ profits, which discounting has often cut to the bone. But J K Rowling has woven her magic yet again, casting a spell of excitement and magic, and giving millions of children many happy hours of reading.
23 June 2003 Title output still growingCutbacks in the number of titles being published by big publishers have made no difference to the inexorable rise in the overall number of new books published. In the US this is now around 150,000 books a year. In the UK figures just published by Whitaker show that 125,390 titles were published in 2002, an increase of 5% on the previous year. But this disguises the fact that a smaller number of fiction titles were brought out. There are signs of cutbacks in trade (general) publishing having some effect, as the 11,797 fiction titles are 10% fewer than in the previous year. Independent publishers may be contributing more to the general increase, particularly as a result of the growth in local publishing. Academic, professional and STM lists accounted for more than half the number of new titles published in 2002. A survey conducted by Book Marketing for the Publishers Association has also shown that students’ spending on books has remained constant. This is in spite of fears that photocopying and online delivery of information, added to other pressures on student finance, would affect what students spend on books. It is ironic that it is so difficult for authors to get their work published at a time when title output it continuing to grow, but these figures may provide the explanation. Trade publishers are cutting back the midlist, particularly fiction, and the growth is coming from academic and professional publishing. So unfortunately it really is harder to get your novel published, but you may be doing quite well if you are an academic or write for a professional market.
16 June 2003 Pottermania takes overThe biggest book of the year is making a serious bid to become the biggest book of any year. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be released at midnight on Midsummer’s Day, 21st June, to the accompaniment of huge excitement and enormous presales. The 768 page book, with around 255,000 words, is huge by the standards of children’s books, but so is everything else about the Harry Potter phenomena. By publication there will be 13 million copies of ‘Harry 5’ in print, around 8.5 million in the US and 2.5 million in the UK, with around twice that number to come in foreign editions. Amazon has taken advance orders of 875,000 copies, far exceeding the sales of any book in its history. Harry has also sparked a price war. In the UK there’s been anxious discussion in the trade press about the biggest seller in history being discounted so heavily in the battle for market share that no-one will make any money from it. In the UK British Bookshops have laid down the gauntlet with a £9.99 price (the publisher’s price is £16.99). W H Smith’s, Borders and Ottakar’s will all discount it to £11.99. But it is the supermarkets, determined to benefit after slow distribution meant lost sales last time, which will take the most cutthroat approach. Tesco is already selling online at £7.64 and the supermarkets see it as a perfect loss leader, a bonanza to bring shoppers into the stores. But not everyone is united in their enthusiasm for this giant superseller. Some American publishers see it as a chance to sell books to adults once they are in the bookstores. J P Morgan is forecasting disappointment. Their survey shows that some fans do not intend to buy the new book and suggest that it may fail to live up to its advance hype. But 190 million copies sold of previous Harry titles is an awful lot of books. Even after the three-year wait, a lifetime to young readers, the Harry Potter magic looks set to cast its spell all over again.
9 June 2003 Amazon, E-books and SagaThe saga of Amazon continues. With American business still struggling, Amazon’s revenues of about $4 billion are still growing at 20% a year, driven by relentless diversification into new products. Most observers would agree that Amazon has effectively seen off the competition as far as online bookselling is concerned, with Bertelsmann abandoning its attempt to establish Bol.com. But Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has driven the company to some amazing behind-the scene achievements too, not least a stock-turn of 20 times a year, far ahead of most retailers and hugely ahead of other booksellers’ norms. Gemstar winding downGemstar, which has supposedly been running at a loss of $12 million a year, is rumoured to be closing down its e-book division after failing to find a buyer. The irony is that e-books sales are now quite robust and Gemstar’s customers are thought to include many loyal early adopters of the e-book. But it is still costing too much to grow the company, at a time when the sales of e-books, although promising, are still way off the big numbers originally projected at the height of the dotcom boom. New Prize for over 50sSaga, the British group which sells a wide range of services to the over 50s, has just announced a new prize of £20,000 for humorous fiction or non-fiction written by authors of 50 or over. This is a real boost for older writers and for a neglected type of writing, which many will feel provides a good antidote to the grim headlines on the news pages.
2 June 2003 Book Expo, US Sales and Title OutputThis weekend the 2003 Book Expo (BEA) convention in Los Angeles has brought together American publishers and booksellers with a contingent representing the rest of the world. Numbers appear to be steady in relation to last year, although the west coast venue always attracts fewer Europeans and more participants from Hollywood. The first BEA Writers Conference saw the presentation of the inaugural annual John T Lupton awards for book proposals, with a value of $10,000 each. The non-fiction award went to Canadian Michael Boxall, for his 30-page proposal Driven by Desire: Sex and the Spread of the New Media. The fiction award went to New Yorker Anika Weiss’s complete novel Moonshine Baby, about a plantation owner’s daughter who learns that her older brother is black, and on death row. BEA was also marked by the publication of conflicting statistics about American book sales. According to the BISG preview, generally regarded as producing the official figures, trade (or general) sales in 2002 are up 8.8% and mass market up 11.7% on the previous year, with unit sales showing a smaller increase of 4%. This may reflect poor sales in 2001. The Ipsos data, generally thought to provide a better measurement of behavioural changes, shows trade books purchased growing by just 1% per annum since 1999. This feels more accurate, in terms of anecdotal information about stagnating sales. Slightly surprisingly, perhaps, Bowker figures show US title output increasing by 5.86% to a whopping 150,00 new titles and editions in 2002. But this overall increase masks a decline in title ouput of trade titles of 5.02%, while university presses increased their title output by 10.21%.
26 May 2003 Another seismic shiftThe purchase of BertelsmannSpringer by buyout specialists Candover and Cinven has brought about another seismic shift in the rapidly-changing world of scientific and academic publishing. The new owners will pair the huge German publisher BertelsmannSpringer with recently-acquired Kluwer Acadmic Publishing to create the world’s second-biggest academic publishing conglomerate, with a turnover of about £628 million ($1,020m). Between them the two publishers have around 1,400 academic journals and publish around 5,000 books a year Candover and Cinven plan to invest heavily in digitising material and to deliver this online through their Internet platform. This will enable them to compete directly with the world’s largest academic publisher, Reed Elsevier, which has reaped enormous benefits by investing £750 million ($1,218m) in setting up to deliver its material online. This investment meant that the company was able to achieve Internet sales of £1bn last year, around one-fifth of the total. It has bounded ahead of its rivals, making a pretax profit of £289 million ($469m) in 2002. Increasingly, academic publishing – and particularly journals - seems to be where the money is to be made in publishing. Unlike general publishing, academic publishing is wonderfully stable and the revenues, based largely on subscriptions, are relatively predictable. The Internet provides an extremely effective, fast and cheap way of selling the journals to the growing international academic market. But this is a business requiring scale and access to massive investment. The Internet has had the democratising effect of opening up communication directly between authors and their readers, and making small-scale publishing more feasible. But it has also created huge opportunities for big publishing companies, especially those with captive markets of academics and a big ‘stable’ of journals which are essential reading.
19 May 2003 The Big Read finds the best-loved booksThe Big Read, a television spectacular designed to find Britain’s favourite book, has just come up with its top 100 titles. This follows the format of the highly successful Great Britons, which eventually voted Winston Churchill the Greatest Briton, after many happy hours of argumentative TV-watching. The Big Read has already attracted four times the number that voted in the early stages of Great Britons. 140,000 voters had originally nominated 7,000 titles, which the voting has now whittled down to 100. The Big Read has thrown up some strange bedfellows. James Joyce vies with Jeffrey Archer, Lord of the Flies with Lord of the Rings. Charles Dickens and Terry Pratchett had the most titles nominated, with five each. One-third of the titles were children’s books, with 4 Harry Potters, 4 Roald Dahls and titles from Enid Blyton, Kenneth Grahame and Jacqueline Wilson. It was an insular choice too, with 66 out of the 100 titles by British authors and over half of he books set in the UK. 20% were by American authors. 41% were published in the last 30 years. Literary figures have condemned the choice as mediocre. The novelist and Booker Prize winner A S Byatt said; ‘Even the good books on the list are the sort that weedy nerds would like. I can’t stand Jeffrey Archer or Enid Blyton. They both make me feel quite ill.’ In going for the books that they ‘loved best’, voters ignored Hemingway and H G Wells, but they also omitted the hugely popular Catherine Cookson. This was a truly popular choice, a real list of favourites. And no-one can deny that it has sparked off a huge amount of interest and argument about books. Jane Root, the Controller of BBC2, said that more than 14,000 messages were posted on the website by ‘people engaged in heated, passionate and funny debates about why their book was the best choice.’ The public will vote to find the top 20 and documentaries on each of them will run in the autumn. Whatever your views, how can books fail to benefit from this huge publicity bonanza?
12 May 2003 The little guys see off the big battalionsThe seemingly endless news of corporate publishers acquiring small independents has been disrupted this week by two developments which many in the book trade will regard with relief. The acquisition of the 105-year-old Duckworth Press in London by Overlook, Peter Mayer’s small American company, will bring together two companies with a similar respect for the legacy of the past and a focus on backlist. Overlook, moving very fast, saw off nine other bidders, after there were 60 expressions of interest in Duckworth. Mayer is a well-known and much-liked figure in publishing, an American who spent 20 years at the helm of Penguin worldwide, overseeing a radical modernisation and expansion of the company. Overlook is the company he set up with his father and has been running full-time ever since he left Penguin. As its name suggests, it seeks out titles which have been ‘overlooked’ by other publishers. In the meantime the sale of Time-Warner Books is not yet completed, but it looks as if Perseus may be close to concluding a deal. This coup would involve the acquisition of a company nearly four times its own size at what will probably be a knockdown price. Time-Warner Books has substantial US and UK publishing divisions, each one including backlists and fiction publishing programmes involving many major authors. The range is impressive, going all the way from the highly commercial to the respectably literary. They say that timing is everything. With the current unwillingness of corporations to invest any further in general publishing and AOL Time-Warner’s determination to sell, the time is ripe for an audacious coup of this kind. Agents and the authors they represent would be delighted if Time-Warner Publishing found a home with Perseus, rather than a media conglomerate such as Bertelsmann. This would avoid the layoffs and contractions that follow when corporations acquire another publisher. With corporate publishing acquisitions, the first move is to cut the company down to a size that is compatible with what they already have. In practice this has often defeated the object of the original acquisition. It is also generally bad news for the authors and publishing staff involved. So we can feel really positive about both these acquisitions, which should grow the publishing opportunities on both sides of the Atlantic.
5 May 2003 The stuff writers' dreams are made ofThe success story of David Benioff is the stuff that writers’ dreams are
made of. Although the young American had been a writer since his college
days, he had never even submitted his first novel and his second collected 30
rejections. His third, The 25th Hour, told the story of a New York drug
dealer’s last night of freedom before a seven- year jail sentence. That one was
also initially rejected, but eventually the fifteenth publisher it was
submitted to gave him a $7,500 advance - still not exactly big bucks. But
that’s when Benioff got his big break, because the film actor Tobey Maguire
read the book, thought he’d like to star in the film version, and commissioned
Benioff to write the screenplay.
28 April 2003 Writers take an experimental turnNews of interesting new approaches to writing fiction is coming from all
over the world.
21 April 2003 UK library borrowing habits are good news for writersA boost of £2 million in the funding for Public Lending Right has given 1500 more British authors the first chance to share in the payment made for library loans. There were 382 million loans in 2002, a drop of nearly 119 million from five years ago, a pretty discouraging statistic. After lobbying from the Society of Authors and other bodies, the amount available for author payments has been increased from £4.5 million to £6.2 million for the year ending June 2002. The average payment has grown from £255 to £325 and many writers will receive a 30% to 40% increase in what they get. This doesn’t sound like much, but at least authors are getting some money from library borrowings. Library users seem to be more faithful to writers they like than book-buyers as a whole. Catherine Cookson has been the most-borrowed author for many years and, still with 3 million loans a year, no other author comes near touching her record. Although J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the most borrowed title, the author only ranks 42nd in overall number of loans, since she has only published four books. Authors such as Audrey Howard and Jack Higgins do much better comparatively in libraries than in bookshops, suggesting perhaps that library borrowers are a more conservative and probably older group than book-buyers. There is also clear word-of-mouth operating here: ten years after it was first published. Jung Chang’s much-loved Wild Swans is still the most borrowed historical biography. Travel writing, historical biography and cookery are the most popular non-fiction categories. Modern fiction, crime and romance between them amount to nearly half of the total loans. In spite of the drop in borrowings, we can safely assume that public libraries are still supporting the fiction-reading habit of some of our most avid readers.
14 April 2003 UK book sales: value up, books sold downBook Marketing’s excellent annual study Books and the Consumer (which gives the UK some of the most detailed information on book sales of any country in the world) has just reported another year of growth in 2002, although not all the indications are positive. More money was spent on books last year, but around four million fewer of them were bought. Contrary to what you might expect, given the current visibility of children’s book, their sales declined by 11% in 2002, with spending also down. It’s good to know that adult books increased by 3% in volume and 4% in value, with growth coming mainly from non-fiction, which was up 4% by volume and 6% by value. Fiction sales were pretty static though, in spite of the fact that 50% of adult paperback fiction was sold at a discount in 2002, compared with only 33% in 1997. The many ‘3 for 2 offers’ running in the chain bookshops do not seem to have increased overall levels of buying, although the chains may well justify them in terms of an increase in their market share. What is striking is the continuing inexorable shift in where books are sold. Total chain book sales are up 17% and supermarket book sales are up a whopping 32% over the last four years, accompanied, not surprisingly, by a 26% decline in sales through independents. Spending through direct channels (Internet, books clubs and direct marketers) rose by 6% in 2002 alone and it looks as if this is about to spark off a row at the Booksellers’ Association conference later this month.
7 April 2003 Libraries on a book-hunt/News from the corporate worldTwo bits of news to lift the gloom, one from the library world and another from the corporate front. Buckinghamshire County Council has finally had enough of dealing with overdue library books and is setting up a pilot scheme to track them down, using computer chips placed in their spines. The scheme will be tested in Reading, Berkshire and Booker, High Wycombe and will involve ‘book hunters’ in vans touring the streets and looking for random signals whenever their detectors pick up a signal. They will then call at houses and issue a demand for payment. Hugh Turner-Page, library service spokesman said: ‘With the new technology we are going to be able to retain more library books than ever before. In this way we will never lose a Dick Francis or Jilly Cooper novel ever again.’ Meanwhile, in New York, the latest speculation regarding the fate of Time-Warner Books took an interesting turn. At a press conference this morning, Tom Dunne announced that Thomas Dunne Books (an imprint of St Martin’s Press) was no longer in the bidding for the Time Warner Books Division. "It was all a misunderstanding," the reclusive billionaire nephew of Warren Buffet claimed, "We thought People Magazine was part of the package." Dunne, who had made an immense fortune selling the market short for the past three years, stunned the press by announcing that Dunne Books had, however, purchased Bertlesmann, "lock, stock and blazing barrels". "The books are all well and good, and we are thrilled to own Random, Transworld, und so weiter." Rumour has it that CEO Peter Olsen was revealed to be "pushing" fifty and, therefore, shot. (All Random executives who are in their fifties have recently been offered early retirement.) To keep the record straight, we should point out that both these gems were published on Tuesday 1 April.
31 March 2003 'Muggle'makes it into the OEDNews of the latest words thrown up by the ongoing revision of the Oxford English Dictionary gives a comforting sense of stability in a chaotic world. It’s amazing how quickly that bastion of the English language is now adding words as they come into common use. The latest example is ‘Muggle’, used in the Harry Potter books to describe an ordinary human who is ignorant of the arts of magic, which is now widely used to describe someone who is clumsy or unskilled. This brings J K Rowling into the august company of Lewis Carroll and J R R Tolkien, as one of the very few authors whose invented words have entered everyday use and thus found their way into the Dictionary. A spokesperson from OED says: "Normally it takes some time before the word starts to be used outside of its fictional context but with muggle this seemed to happen quite quickly." The Dictionary is the accepted world authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It traces the usage of over half a million words through no less than 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books. As well as a list of variant spellings, there’s also a guide to pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet The OED is now covering world English. As well as all the work going on at the Oxford headquarters, the North American Editorial Unit of the Dictionary scans new American words constantly. It has added words such as ‘urban jungle’ and ‘power shopping’, not to mention the ‘buyer’s remorse’ which follows. The Dictionary editors are also continually trying to antedate words, such as the recent moving of the first use of ‘mumble’ from 1902 to 1653. If you feel you can help, please get in touch with them if you come across uses of ‘nickable’ antedating 1989, or ‘overtop’ (meaning over the top of) prior to 1978.
24 March 2003 Good news from London/ Bad news from the USThe London Book Fair seems finally to have come of age, confirming its position as the second most important international rights fair after Frankfurt. Trade attendees, at 13,532, were up 19% on last year. Despite the fact that war was looming, the international delegates leapt by 20% to nearly 5,000 people. The Americans seemed to be there in force, in spite of predictions that they would not come. It was also a surprisingly upbeat fair, with plenty of big splashy deals announced, as well as a lot of solid business being done. In spite of the strains in the world economy, publishers, with their customary optimism, look forward to a bumper crop of new books. Other international book fairs may be more welcoming towards authors, but the London Book Fair, with its packed aisles, didn’t seem to have much room or time for writers. All the more important therefore that the PEN/Daily Mail Masterclasses catered specifically for authors, as reported last week. US book purchasing downElsewhere, there was less cheering news. Ipsos Booktrends announced further results from their survey which tracks US consumer purchasing over time. There’s a continuing decline in the number of households which buy at least one trade (or general) book a year, from 60% in 1997 to 56% in 2002. There’s also been a demoralising shift to used bookstores and deep discounters, both of which reduce authors’ income from their books. The amount spent is relatively stagnant, so increases in trade paperback prices mean fewer books are being bought.
17 March 2003 Society of Authors publishers' surveyThe Society of Authors has just published the results of their annual survey. This gives 1,000 British authors a chance to comment on their publishers’ performance. It makes slightly depressing reading and, since there’s no reason to think that British publishers are particularly hopeless, or British authors especially hard done by, it probably shows up global trends. Authors’ levels of satisfaction with their publishers have fallen over the past six years. They criticise their publicity and marketing; lack of continuity in publishers’ editorial departments, where books ‘orphaned’ by their editors’ departure were felt to suffer; and over-zealous copy editing. There are some hair-raising horror stories. These include the children’s picture book which was taken over by the publisher’s MD and sold at Bologna under her name. Another was the extremely unprofessional editor who told one author that ‘she hated me and hated my books’. One author described their publisher in memorable terms, as ‘a sinking ship with a rat as captain’. On the positive side, 70% of the authors would recommend their publishers to other authors, so the Society’s work to improve conditions for authors has borne fruit. Authors were impressed by publishers sticking to contractual terms, by good dealings with commissioning and copy editors, and by the high quality of book production. Publishers who came out of the survey well included Constable & Robinson, Hodder Headline, Pan Macmillan, John Murray, Oxford University Press, Penguin, Random House trade, Transworld and Walker.
10 March 2003 Writers' conference at BookExpo AmericaFor the first time BookExpo America, the US book trade fair running from 31 May to 1 June, will this year add a daylong writer’s conference on the Wednesday before the opening of the show. This follows the London Book Fair’s PEN Masterclasses next weekend. It’s all part of an increasing realisation that writers are part of the publishing world and should have a part to play in its book fairs. As well as the conference itself, there will be the first presentation of the John T Lupton New Voices in Literature awards, sponsored by the Books for Life Foundation. Two $10,000 prizes, for fiction and non-fiction, will be awarded, not for finished manuscripts, but for the best combination of query letter and book proposal. The intention is to encourage writers to complete professionally written submissions. The award is open to any writer who has not been traditionally published, so self-published authors are eligible. You don’t need to attend the conference in order to enter the contest, although you will have to pay the contest entrance fee of $25. There is also the provision that ‘the ten finalists in each category will be forwarded on request to publishing industry literary agents and publishers for consideration.’ It is good news for writers that the book trade is beginning to take more notice of the originators of the raw material on which their business is based. Book fairs, which are notoriously trade-oriented affairs, are at last trying to help with the huge demand amongst writers for help with improving their work and getting published.
3 March 2003 Profitable transatlantic synergy?Publishers on both sides of the Atlantic are nervous about what 2003 will bring. Consumer spending has slowed down abruptly in the early months of the year and this is inevitably damping down book sales. The book business is no less affected by world events as everyone waits to see whether there will be war with Iraq and, if so, exactly what the outcome will be. The British Book Awards last week were celebrity-oriented but also unusually political. There were standing ovations for veteran parliamentarian Tony Benn, who recently visited Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and for American author Michael Moore, whose book Stupid White Men unexpectedly won the Butler & Tanner Book of the Year award. Some brave souls continue with their plans for expansion. The British publisher Hodder-Headline has abandoned its efforts to find a suitable American general publishing house to acquire. It has decided to go for a start-up in the US, working with Simon and Schuster, one of the houses it was trying to acquire. Organic growth worked for Headline in the UK, so why not try it in the US? It has usually been thought too slow an approach to satisfy the corporate need for rapid growth, but perhaps it will create a more solid publishing company, more based on the rhythms of writing and the publishing seasons than the corporate drive for acquisition? The US company may also prove an attractive prospect for the authors published by the company in the UK, who now have a greater chance of effective US publication. It will be interesting to see if Hodder Headline US, as a start-up, manages to develop closer working relations with its British parent than other publishing corporations have done in the past. The elusive goal of profitable transatlantic synergy could turn out to be an achievable proposition in the long run.
24 February 2003 Postman Rob breaks through
Postman Rob has broken through a number of barriers in publishing his
first novel, Cover to Cover (Weidenfeld). During his 16 years delivering
the post in theYorkshire city of Bradford, Robert Craig whiled away the time
writing stories in his head. He liked being a postman, although more than
once he had to escape from would-be muggers and aggressive dogs. His round
started at 5.30 am, leaving the afternoons free for writing. Years of
submitting his work seemed to get him nowhere, but he persevered and finally
achieved a two-book advance of £50,000 ($81,500).
17 February 2003 More Corporate ReshufflesThe combining and recombining of the corporate assets of the book world, otherwise known as publishing companies, continues apace. In Germany Random House has considerably strengthened its position by acquiring Ullstein Heyne from the Axel Springer Group. If this deal, still to be approved by the German monopolies commission, goes through, it will give Random House 11% of German general publishing, but a whopping 30% of paperbacks. The Grove Dictionaries of Art and Music, just put on the market by Macmillan UK, have been rapidly snapped up by Oxford University Press. Since 80% of current sales are to US libraries, the editorial department will be moving to New York, although, one assumes, without its editors. The after-effects of bookseller Barnes & Noble’s acquisition of publisher Sterling are still rumbling on in the States. The book chain’s giant rival Borders has now announced that it will no longer, unless absolutely essential, stock Sterling titles. Fortunately for the British firm Hodder Headline, owned in its turn by the bookseller W H Smith’s, British bookselling chains are not taking the same approach. But Hodder Headline has just announced that, having given up the search for a suitable American publisher to buy, it will establish its own publishing company in the US. Although this is a low-cost and therefore low-risk option, Hodder Headline will need all their famous commercial nous to break into the tough American market.
10 February 2003 The Harry Potter effectThe latest news from the world of children’s publishing confirms the growing interest in writing for children (see our new children’s editorial services). The recent announcement that J K Rowling’s whopping new book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will be published in June has gladdened the hearts of booksellers everywhere. Not exactly surprising, as the Harry Potter books have now sold a breathtaking 192 million copies worldwide. First estimates of the likely print run for the new book are 12 million copies for the US alone. But the Harry Potter effect, although not easily repeatable, has made publishers wonder what else they can publish for these millions of keen young readers. The answer is – a mass of fine children’s writers producing innovative work, together with many more commercially-oriented authors who are also achieving terrific sales. The latest success story is Philip Ardagh, a British writer described as a cross between Monty Python and Dickens. His Eddie Dickens trilogy, the first book of which has been a bestseller for Faber in the UK, has been bought in the US by Henry Holt and Scholastic for a six-figure advance.
3 February 2003 Great readsIn the midst of the latest gloomy corporate news about publishing, two interesting promotional initiatives give cause for hope about the future of the book. Book Crossing www.bookcrossing.com is an intriguing website set up by the American Ron Hornbaker to encourage people to pass their books on after they’ve read them. The way it works is that, after reading a book, you register it with your journal comments on the website. You then get a unique number, label the book and release it for another reader to find. There’s even a ‘Go hunting’ facility on the site, which enables readers worldwide to track down books released in their vicinity. It’s all friendly, good-humoured, free and private. What a great way to promote books and to encourage people to pass them along! In the UK the recent highly successful competition to find the Greatest Briton (it was Winston Churchill) has been adapted to fit books, with the Big Read. Launching with the first TV programme in March, the BBC will set up a competition to find the top 100 best-loved books, to be announced in alphabetical order in April. More promotion will follow, then the top 10 will be announced in November. After that they’ll each have 60 minute TV programmes fronted by high-profile figures, before the public gets its chance to vote in December. If this is even remotely as successful as Great Britons, it will give books a tremendous amount of coverage and attention.
27 January 2003 Are there any buyers?A flurry of activity from big corporations threatens once again to change the face of publishing. The sudden firing in the New Year of Ann Godoff, President and Publisher of the Random House division of Random House Inc (often referred to as ‘little Random’) took everyone by surprise. Her division, often seen as the flagship, had been falling short of its profit targets and has now been combined with the mass market division Ballantine to form Random House Ballantine. The corporate owners, Bertelsmann, are taking a noticeably harder line as regards imprints which do not produce the required level of profitability. AOL Time Warner, beset by huge debts caused by the merger with AOL (and before that Time Inc’s merger with Warner), has now put Time-Warner Publishing up for sale. This affects the commercial Warner Books and its more upmarket Little Brown division in the States and what is now called Time-Warner Publishing (until recently Little Brown) in the UK. |
