| |||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
News stories from the book world in 2011 and 2012
You can check older stories in our archive.
Editors becoming agents There’s been an interesting discussion this week sparked off by an article in Publishing Perspectives about why an editor who has been working at a senior level in a publishing house would want to become a literary agent in order to spend more time working on authors’ manuscripts. The editor in question is Rebecca Carter of Harvill Secker and before that of Chatto & Windus, both highly-regarded imprints of Random House UK. She is well-known for her work on translated authors but has had a wide editorial brief. The agency she has joined is the London office of Janklow & Nesbit. Carter says: "I want to follow an author’s career. I want to be that stable person in an author’s life.’ Becoming an agent "will involve a certain amount of forgetting. It will be different in many ways and at the same time it won’t be. My motivation comes from wanting to work with writers on editorial. To be involved in the flow of ideas and working on the text… I’ve always been interested in chipping away at a text and finding the sculpture within. To bring in authors who come with a book in an embryonic form and to be able to help them is very exciting… As publishing companies become more risk adverse, as an agent I can do that legwork, you can experiment rather than having to be so sure." For anyone who has been involved in publishing for any length of time, it is an extraordinary idea that you would move to an agency in order to spend more time editing books. Over the years editors have had their role chipped away, mostly by the rise of the Marketing Department. It has become increasingly important in publishing houses to have a clear idea about how to market the book. Sometimes it is the editor who has that idea, but often it is the marketing department and the traditional work that an editor would do on their authors’ manuscripts to get them as good as possible and maximise their chances, has, with a few honourable exceptions, been abandoned by editors in favour of a purely acquisitions role. But someone’s got to do it, haven’t they? This begs an altogether different question, but let’s assume for the moment that the vast majority of authors need some help with getting their work ready for publication. Structural editing of this kind is very time-consuming. Copy editing can be put out of house (although the many complaints about errors in books published by publishers suggest that this isn’t working all that well either.) If editors don’t have the time to do the work in-house, how is it going to get done? Publishers will be reluctant to take on manuscripts which are not ‘ready to go’. Thus the rise of the editorial function inside literary agencies. Many agents don’t have the time (or in many cases the expertise) either, so they bring in a specialist. What Rebecca Carter is suggesting however is something else – that she would actually be able to devote more time to editing her clients’ work as a literary agent than as an editor. This is quite a remarkable change in the relationship between agents and editors, and between agents and authors. Ebooks still on a roll The New Year has started with a mass of news from the ebook front, where things are really moving very fast. In the States ebook sales surged after Christmas. In the UK the figures show that more than one million ereaders and more than half a million tablet devices were received as gifts over Christmas, with Amazon and Apple the leading suppliers of e-readers and tablets respectively. One in 40 adults received a Kindle for Christmas. These results suggest that ereader ownership could as much as double over the next year in the US--6.4 percent of respondents are "very likely" to purchase, and another 9.9 percent are somewhat likely, with 15.8 percent of people saying they "already own" an reader, according to a recent study. But perhaps most striking is that 51.8 percent of those surveyed said they are "not at all likely" to buy an ereader in the year ahead, the first time that number has been above half. But as Jack McKeown of Verso Digital, which carried out the study, has observed: ‘While e-reader ownership rates have increased in a dramatic fashion since our first survey in December, 2009, so too has the level of resistance. The dynamic movement highlighted in this data suggests that over time, consumers have moved out of the 'not sure' category in one of two directions: a.) toward actual ownership, or a high probability of near-term ownership of a dedicated e-reader; or b.) into the ranks of resistors for whom the devices do not yet offer a compelling 'relative advantage' to overcome their conservatism re: printed books.’ So readers are polarising into those who have already bought ereaders, or are likely to do so soon, and those who have decided they never will. Subjective experience of what friends are doing and saying suggests that this may be right, and it means that predictions of rapid and sustained growth in ereader sales might not be as soundly based as they seem. There’s no doubt that ebook sales are putting further pressure on traditional bricks and mortar bookshops, which have suffered in recent years due to increasing sales of electronic and physical books over the internet. Research by the Daily Telegraph last autumn showed that the number of traditional bookshops on the UK’s high streets has halved to 2,200 since 2005. Good news from children's publishing A review of the UK children’s publishing scene by Caroline Horn in this week’s Bookseller provides an interesting picture of a part of the publishing business which is in pretty good shape. There is a strong feeling in the trade that the focus has shifted to bestsellers, bestselling authors and brand-name series. This makes it hard for new authors to get a sympathetic view taken of their work. The view is that nobody is interested in unknowns unless they are likely to be instant bestseller material. Thankfully for unpublished authors, this turns out not to be entirely the case. When you look at actual sales of children’s books, it’s clear that the whole market is looking healthy. Between 2001 and 2010 it has grown from £193m to £325m, a substantial increase by any standards and about twice as much as the increase in the sales of adult books. The number of bestselling authors selling more than £2m had increased during this period from five to 20. However the percentage of sales coming from these bestselling authors had actually decreased during this period. What is very encouraging is that the number of children’s titles being published during this nine-year period had increased by 12.5%, although it’s fair to add that this may be partly because of the increased number of self-published books. So writers aiming at the children’s market should not despair, there is still a market for midlist and for backlist sales. What is important however is to study what is going on in publishing, to look at what is in bookshops and to read other authors’ work. Study the trends and don’t assume that last year’s success will be what publishers are looking for. There is a high premium on originality in children’s writing and good stories with lively characters and page-turning plots work well. Not every publisher is looking for series, although to be fair some are. The most successful authors in this field have strong identities for their writing, which makes sense because they are writing for a very critical audience. Don’t be discouraged though, publishers always have to look for new authors, they are the life-blood of publishing and good children’s writing is in demand all over the world. Hardbacks have another chance Many of us who have worked in the publishing business have long expected hardbacks to be superseded by paperbacks. But over the years hardbacks have been surprisingly durable in their grip on the book-buyer, with various come-backs affecting how much they are produced. Although it’s obviously going against normal pricing rules, the more expensive hardback edition survives partly because of the gift market and partly because readers don’t want to wait to read their favourite novelist. But why not publish that novel straight into paperback? Won’t the bigger effect of one big promotion sell the most books if it can publicise the book on first publication, just when a mass audience can buy, and at a lower price But will it generate more revenue than having a succession of editions, starting with a hardback, then perhaps carrying on with a trade paperback edition and then finally putting the book into mass market, or what the Americans call rack-size paperback? It’s not always clear what the best course of action is and many publishers work it out on a book-by-book basis. UK publishers will be glad to see James Daunt, the new boss of Waterstone’s, backing the hardback edition, whereas in the recent past it was Waterstone’s 3 for 2 offer which tended to encourage many publishers to think they needed to put books into paperback as quickly as possible. It’s surprising in the light of other changes to reflect that the different hardback and paperback editions still have the same relationship as they always did. Years of trade paperback publishing hasn’t really altered this. People still prefer to give hardbacks as gifts and they will still buy favourite bestselling authors in hardback to read and keep. But for the beach or reading on the daily commute, paperbacks have obvious advantages. The American market has long seen paperbacks as disposable and it’s fair to say that they do tend to have a more downmarket look than UK paperbacks, which often have a higher level of art direction going into the cover and can be printed on better paper too. But some people think American publishers produce better hardbacks and the hardback market has survived far better in the US, probably because there’s more disposable income, which allows for a wider market for hardbacks. Simon & Schuster publishing director Suzanne Baboneau said: "It's good to have the option of another edition up your sleeve; to do the hardback, and then be able to tweak the jacket and add quotes when you do the trade paperback edition and then the mass market paperback. It means you can give a book that extra push." She added that, though there was little price differential between formats, "subconsciously publishers and agents love a hardback, and reviewers do too—it's something about the colour of the boards, the flaps, the feel of it for book buyers." Of course the ebook is also changing the hardback/paperback relationship, but that’s another story. Genre fiction booms Certain genre areas of fiction publishing seem to be coming into their own in a big way at the moment, which is good news if that’s the area you write in. Science fiction and fantasy are particularly popular. Last month major SFF author Terry Pratchett’s new novel became the fastest selling adult hardback novel by a British novelist since records began, selling no less than 31,094 copies in its first full week. The fact that many fantasy authors write big books in series, often with strong appeal for younger readers, helps to build faithful audiences. Waterstone's spokesman Jon Howells said: "These things help bring new readers into a genre, and certainly with fantasy authors they tend to build long backlists, which is incredibly important." TV and film adaptations are also fuelling the SFF market growth, with Lord of the Rings not far in the past and influenced currently by the HBO adaptation of George R R Martin's Game of Thrones series. Historical fiction, reported on in News Review 10 October 2011, has also become a big favourite, with many new authors as well as the revival and republishing of many backlist titles in the genre. Romance is another category which is booming. The current growth in the market is fuelled by the surge in ebook purchases of romance, which has brought about the launch of new romance lists. Ebury, part of Random House UK, has just launched a big new list, Rouge, (tagline: "Sexier, longer and 100% more romantic") an is steam-rollering its way into the market with 8 titles, with 4 a month thereafter, to satisfy what it calls "the huge reading appetites" of romance readers. Mills & Boon Harlequin, far the biggest international publisher in this category, now releases 100 ebooks a month, more than it does in print. There’s an enduring view in the business which suggests that women think it’s demeaning to be seen reading ebooks. Mills & Boon author Sharon Kendrick says: "One of the things about reading romance is that slightly furtive thing, the 'Oh God, I can't be seen on the train reading a romance'," she says. "If you've got a Kindle then no one knows what you're reading. It's not about embarrassment, really – it's more that you don't want to be judged, and we are often judged by what we read." "We've experienced huge growth the past couple of years with the explosive popularity of ebook readers," says Susan Edwards, chief operating officer of Ellora’s Cave. "Our readers have been reading ebooks for over a decade now. They were the early adopters of the format." She attributes the popularity of digital romance novels to the "voracious" appetites of romance readers, who will race through "several" books a week. "That's a lot of books to buy and store. Ebooks take up a lot less room and busy people don't have to make a trip to a book store to buy them," she says. Genre writing, always popular, seems to be booming at the moment. Our series on genre writing: Writing Science fiction and Fantasy Publishers' websites: Mills and Boon Aspiring Authors OFT rubber-stamps Amazon acquisition Amazon has been much in the news this last week. After the announcement of it first big purchase for its new publishing arm at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which sent tremors through the publishing world, it is now consolidating its position on e-books. The deal in question may have garnered the book for Amazon because of the high ebook royalty offered. But the question is going to be whether the company can get the book into the book trade – or will Amazon sales be enough? In the UK there has been much surprise at the way that the Office of Fair Trading has nodded through Amazon’s acquisition of The Book Depository, as TBD had only a 2% to 4% share of the online market. It is an extraordinary decision though, as Amazon already has 70% to 80% of the online market and any observer might think this was quite enough as it is a clear monopoly without even adding in the TBD figure. The Bookseller thundered: ‘The OFT’s rubber-stamping of this deal means the best chance to investigate Amazon in 15 years has slipped past. UK book retailers, and publishers, are now threatened by a competitor with almost limitless pockets, intent on customer acquisition at almost any cost. Amazon’s range of secretive activities across the book trade threatens to gravely weaken one of UK’s most important creative industries, and the government does nothing.’ Amazon has also announced rather poor results. Its profits have dropped by 73% in its third quarter, with much worse margins, because of investment in its Kindle e-readers. Rather disconcertingly to investors, the company also suggested that it might make anything from a $200m(£125m) loss to a $250m (£156.3m) profit in its third quarter. Even with these figures though Amazon shares are still up almost 20% over the past year, so it does look unstoppable. Older writers turn to memoir There is an increasing trend for older people to write their own memoir and then to self-publish it, sometimes in a nice gift edition. For many people looking back over their lives, the motivation for this is to set it all down for the family, particularly the grand-children, so that the story of their lives will not be lost but can be passed down through the generations. To have a handsome volume to give to your relatives is one thing, but for your own personal slice of family history to be preserved for the future is also a great motivator. For some older people tackling their autobiography, the motivation is a form of self-expression, to ‘find themselves’ and to work out the point of their lives. It’s a good retirement project too. Eighty-year-old Betty Chiang is an example. She had never written anything before in her life, but found the motivation and had plenty of time to set down her story. "I want the world to know my story," Chiang says. "My father's death was a rock in my heart. I want my grandkids to know what happened." She has given copies of her book to her relatives and sold about 50 books to her friends at Channing House, the independent-living home in Palo Alto where she lives. Many other older writers have different motivations. They may want to tell the story of their marriage, or their business, or their family. They may want to set the record straight or to produce an account of a famous event in history from their own perspective, relating to what they remember and want to preserve. Accounts of the war are often like this and show that different people value different things in their lives. The interesting thing about these memoir writers is that most of them have never written anything before in their lives. They are tapping into a powerful feeling that ‘anyone can be a writer’ and the author of their own life-story. There’s an element of finding yourself in all this. Many however will take writing classes in order to get the hang of this writing business and to understand how to approach a memoir, often very useful advice if you have a tendency just to plunge in. Organisation is key and you need to start with collecting and organising your material before you actually get down to the writing. The other thing which has made the difference to the memoir trend is the vast growth in self-publishing, which makes it practicable to produce a memoir in small quantities, a form of private publishing which enables the writer to remain in control of their book. News from the Frankfurt Book Fair ‘On the surface, there is little to distinguish this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair from any other but beneath the frantic meetings, crowded aisles and over-priced hotels the subtle shades of digital are stealing across the landscape… a new global market in English-language e-books is fast developing as the growing number of English-speaking readers worldwide opt to buy the cheaper English variant instead of the more expensive local-language product,’ says Publishing Perspectives Editor-in-Chief Ed Nawotka. The Fair has reached its full capacity with 7,500 stands. This included 761 exhibitors from the UK and 604 from the US, with between 280,000 to 290,000 visitors going through the doors, of whom around 150,000 were trade visitors. The Literary Agents Centre has expanded from 5,260 square metres to 6,130 square metres to accommodate the increased number of agents coming to the Fair. Traffic there was up 11% over 2010, with more stands, more space, and a flurry of deals being reported. The climate in the world book business has changed a great deal since last year. The shift to digital, ebooks and online selling are all major trends. The rise of ebooks, although only slowly affecting countries in Europe, has rocketed in the US and followed a similar but rather faster growth pattern in the UK. We’re only just beginning to grasp what enormous changes this will bring in the publishing business. Suddenly agents are on the one hand demanding 50% royalties for their clients’ ebooks and at the same time they are setting up their own ebook businesses, often in a way that many would see as potentially competitive with publishers. The technical changes involved in the growth of digital publishing are also so great that it is difficult to come to terms with them. It’s still not yet clear how fundamentally digital will affect everything. On the bricks and mortar side the last year has seen major changes, most of them bad, with Borders going down in the US, Redbook in Australia and Waterstones in the UK being seen as wobbly until it was bought by Russian investor Alexander Mamut, who promptly installed James Daunt as CEO. The swing to Amazon continues apace and an increasing number of independent booksellers are being squeezed out of business. It’s hard to say how all this will affect writers but publishers seem a bit more upbeat than might have been expected at the Fair, although this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to start buying any more books anytime soon. Historical fiction and non-fiction The Historical Writers’ Association, which we reported on last year, seems to have marked the coming of age of the genre of historical fiction. This has long been popular and many classic writers, such as Norah Lofts, Mary Renault, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Henry Treece, were opening up the past through their novels 40 or 50 years ago. It is strange how genres come and go, with no obvious explanation, although sometimes the success of one or two books can have a knock-on effect, reviving the market for other similar books. But it does seem to be more than that. There’s been a corresponding revival of interest in history in general, with a large number of non-fiction titles being published, some of them becoming bestsellers. There’s a real feeling that people are turning to the past, whether with fiction or non-fiction, perhaps as an escape from the dullness and lack of interest of the present. You could point to the interest in Heritage, in visiting historical sites of all kinds, in finding our about and understanding the past. It’s natural that all this is reflected in what people want to read. The Historical Writers’ Association has grown into what founder Manda Scott describes as ‘a solid coalition of fiction writers, non-fiction writers, publishers, agents and booksellers, all bound by our common interest in historical books, but more so by the sense of community that comes from a shared obsession’. The Association now has over a hundred members who are connected by email, a website, a forum, Facebook and Twitter and who have just elected Michael Morpurgo as the honorary President. The aim is mutual support and it looks like it’s working. New books are listed by period and there’s a link to Amazon to buy. Why is it that these writers’ associations are so popular? It seems just to be that authors are lonely creatures and there’s much to be gained from a bit of solidarity, socialising and discussing mutual problems. They also help to support the genre itself of course, to get it taken more seriously and attract more readers. As the Association’s website shows, it is attracting quite a number of publishers and agents, who see themselves as publishing and handling authors writing in this category. Historical Writers' Association The ebook revoloution A new Harris poll has revealed that the number of Americans reading ebooks has doubled in the last year. One in six Americans who do not have an ebook reader are planning to buy one in the next year. Interestingly, the top genres among e-book owners are crime and thriller (47%), science fiction (25%), literature (23%) and romance (23%). In non-fiction, biography is most popular (29%), then history (27%) and religion and spirituality (24%). So these are books with a strong narrative component. There’s also evidence that ebook buyers are buying more books, which may be because they are heavy readers and find the means of acquiring ebooks easy and fast. The report said: "There will always be a place for books in hard cover or paperback. But there must also be a place for reading devices as well. Readers are quickly catching on to this wave as have the booksellers. This is a huge transition time for publishing companies and how they adapt will determine who is still standing 10 years from now." In the UK one in five publishers is now generating more than 10% of their revenue from ebooks. 85% of publishers across all areas are producing print and e-book versions of their titles, but trade publishers in particular are now a driving force in the ebooks market, adopting "at a faster rate than any other type of book publisher". The percentage of trade publishers producing ebooks has risen from 50% to 76% in two years. This really does amount to a revolution, but no-one really knows how far it will go. Are ebooks going to take over the whole market? Well, some commentators think so. But others think that there’s been a strong early adopter influence, with people buying the ereader device and then buying the ebooks to put on it. The generally lower price of ebooks and their relatively early availability have been factors here. The success of the Kindle, both as Amazon’s bestselling item and as opening up the market, should not be underestimated. The rapid growth of ebooks, mostly sold through the Kindle, has substantially increased the online retailer’s dominance of the market. The figures above also suggest that it’s readers of commercial genre fiction who are leading the charge, many of them people who read a great deal and see the ebook as a convenient way to provide new reading material and acquire books more cheaply. For authors this is still a revolution in the making. The greater opportunities for ebooks should be seen as a potential advantage, but there is also a real concern that authors will lose out in terms of royalties. The argument over ebook royalties, which publishers would like to peg at 25% but agents would like to see at 50% or more, is far from over yet. Author fires publisher Last week saw the unusual spectacle of an author leaving her publisher because she thought the covers they put on her new book were inappropriate. Polly Courtney said the image was too racy – and she wanted her novel to be taken more seriously. Courtney took the unusual step of firing her publishers at her launch party, which may have been a rather counterintuitive moment to choose if she wants them to sell her book. It’s after they have published three of her books that she accused HarperCollins UK of ‘patronising women’ with ‘fluffy’ marketing campaigns. Perhaps one can just conclude that she’s a toughie who likes to pick a fight. Her previous career in the City came to an end because she accused her employers of sexism and she then went on to write an expose of life in the Square Mile. Her novel follows the fortunes of a woman trying to make it at a lads’ magazine – facing a personal crisis when she realises she has forfeited her principles in the process. The jacket features a slender pair of women’s legs in high heels and a short skirt with curly writing reading: ‘It’s a man’s world – but it takes a woman to run it’. But is it likely that HarperCollins would have published Polly Courtney’s book with a cover she detested? Most authors are consulted at least but even though publishers consider the jacket to be something they should have the last word on, it is rare for them to find their views completely ignored. Perhaps other things went wrong. It is tempting to see it as a publicity stunt but Courtney was resolute on the subject of the future: ‘For those of you wondering what next for Polly Courtney, I can promise you that there will be more books. ‘I can also promise you that they will not be published by HarperCollins or any other large publishing house. (She self-published one other novel before being picked up by HarperCollins, which published a further two before today’s release.) ‘I will be ‘taking things in-house’, so to speak, and returning to self-publishing,’ she said. 'Women's fiction' Following an appeal by two female customers from Tonbridge in the English county of Kent, the bookseller W H Smith has agreed to remove all references to ‘women’s fiction’ in its shops from October. The two women, Clare Leigh and Julia Gillick, complained that the women’s fiction section was ’very light, with lots of pink fluffiness’ and there were no classic authors. This sounds like a description of chick-lit, which is usually packaged in this manner, and is certainly intended for a female readership. But is it demeaning to have the label ‘women’s fiction’ to guide book-buyers, as indeed the covers and titles do, or is it an essential piece of marketing? Perhaps it depends on how seriously you take your reading? The publishers’ sales departments would certainly argue in favour of the women’s fiction label, which helps them to position books intended for the women’s market. A great deal of work is done inside publishing houses to make the books in this and other genres recognisable. The cover department has an important role in making sure that each book will attract the right market. Promotion is also directed at the intended market, whether it’s (scarce) advertising, point of sale for use in shops or pr, which in this case would be aimed solidly at the women’s magazine market – another market which is clear about who it’s aiming at. Authors of course want everyone to read their books, but the more realistic and perhaps those with a more developed audience recognise that finding the right market is absolutely key to their sales. So why not ‘men’s fiction’? The curious fact is that men don’t read books written by women, although the reverse is not true. So there’s the fiction category known as women’s fiction, but men are expected to range more widely. Thrillers are traditionally seen as appealing to male readers and crime too, although these days it’s thought to have a strong female market as well. And let’s not forget that women make up somewhere between 70% and 80% of fiction readers too – a big market which is very well worth pursuing. The hardback/paperback gap The advent of ebooks and consumers’ reluctance to accept the high price of hardbacks are having an impact on the traditional relationship between hardback and paperback publication. Traditionally, one year has been the norm and publishers have stuck to this for many years, in spite of the growth of sales of paperback editions. Publishers in both the US and the UK would argue that for the right book there is still a substantial market for the hardback, especially if it is well-promoted and sold at a large discount off the retail price, as many hardbacks are these days. But this gap is beginning to close, with publishers feeling that it would be better to get the paperback out as soon as the hardback edition stops selling. This can be six months after publication, or even less, and has to be carefully judged on a book-by-book basis. Jane von Mehren, the publisher of trade paperbacks at Random House US says: ‘I’m looking to do it more and more. We feel as though there is this trade paperback book buyer that we want to make sure is still getting served. The idea that someone would wait for a year is an assumption that we should no longer make. So we’re looking at shortening the window.’ It is really rather remarkable that in an era when most people buy their books in paperback, books should not go into paperback directly. The economics of this are difficult to judge. The hardback edition makes more profit per copy, but it is only really worth doing for books which will make some impact in hardback, either in terms of a solid hardback readership, which is most likely to be for a bestselling author, or because they will garner reviews. There are exceptions though. Leslie Gelbman, the president of mass-market paperbacks for Penguin Group USA, has said the hardcover edition of The Help, which was on the best-seller list for 103 weeks, was selling so well that Penguin waited more than two years before producing a paperback. Stieg Larsson’s third book in the Millennium series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, has yet to be published in paperback in the United States, more than a year after being released in hardcover (having sold 2.5 million copies in hardcover and 1.1 million in e-book form.) The publishers don’t want to put it in paperback when it is still selling well in hardback and ebook. But will the eventual paperback sales measure up, or will the ebook sales have eaten into them? For ebooks, with their low prices, are having an impact on both hardback and paperback sales. If the ebook is made available at the same time as the hardback, there’s an obvious risk that it will undercut it. It may also be a substitute for the paperback, thus cutting into the book’s later paperback sales. There’s the recession to factor in too, which is having a negative effect on sales overall. In short, all of publishers’ certainties about different editions and pricing seem up in the air at the moment, with nothing certain and many challenges to the traditional order. This is not necessarily good news for authors, though, as publishers scramble to deal with major change. World Book Night becomes more global Now it’s beginning to look as if World Book Night may
shortly become just that, rather than an aspirational name for the adult version
of the UK’s World Book Day. The United States is to partner the UK, launching
World Book Night in 2012. 'Authors and readers to the forefront' American author Bob Mayer had published over 40 books with traditional publishers before he decided to take things into his own hands and convert his backlist into ebooks. By January of this year the author of 40 books had reached a turning-point. After 20 years of writing, he had written himself out of his last contract. Mayer said: ‘It was a good news, bad news situation. The good news was for the first time in two decades I could really sit down and think about what I wanted to write. The bad news is, that in traditional publishing, an author without a contract is unemployed.’ Mayer felt that publishing was changing rapidly. He had a treasure chest of backlist to which he owned the rights. Some of these titles had never been released in e-book format. Many had hit the print bestseller lists. He felt that he knew there was a market for them so he launched his own imprint, Who Dares Wins Publishing, and commenced loading his books, starting with his bestselling Atlantis series on various platforms, like Kindle. His primary focus, though, was still on New York and traditional publishing. He was working on a new thriller and a new historical novel and his plan was to go to his agent and go through the traditional publishing process, just as he had for the past 20 years. But the world around Mayer seemed to be changing so fast, with exponential growth in ebook sales, that he decided to go it alone with all his books, the new ones as well as the backlist. He says: ‘I was able to do this because I’d been a traditionally published author and have an extensive backlist. I also had a lot of help through my business partner with the technical side of going independent. This gave me a solid base from which to launch… I accelerated the publication of my backlist and published my first original title, Chasing the Ghost, at the infamous .99 cent price. Chasing soon hit the top 500 overall on Amazon and top five in Men’s Adventure. After two months, we upped the price to a more realistic $2.99 and it didn’t lose any traction.’ Mayer’s conclusion, quoted in full because of its importance to writers: ‘So where do I believe publishing stands? The author-reader relationship is key. Publishers focused so long on distribution to their consignment outlets, they never really focused on selling to readers. And because authors were mostly seen as replaceable parts, they were also not valued until they were a brand name. There would always be another writer willing to step in. That’s no longer true. The writers who are being successful now are those who understand promotion is an integral part of their success. Authors must connect directly with readers via social media. The published author with a strong backlist has the potential to connect to a whole new generation of readers and they don’t need a publisher to do so. So what do these changes mean for the unpublished author? It’s a question I’m asked frequently and I’ve put a lot of thought into. For the unpublished author, my suggestion is they consider writing at least three manuscripts before leaping into self-publishing. Few traditionally published authors had the craft down so well on their first manuscript that they were able to sell it, I don’t believe it’s changed for new writers. The number one promotional tool for a writer is great content and having multiple titles available. The bottom line is that the distance between authors and readers is shorter than it’s ever been, both in terms of getting the book to the reader and for promoting. All the others involved, agents, publishers, bookstores, etc. must shift their focus from their traditional business template to one that puts authors and readers to the forefront.’ Borders bust and Amazon in takeover mode There have been a series of events on the bookselling front which may mark a seismic shift. In the States, Borders have gone into liquidation after what seems like months - or even years - of teetering on the brink. And in the UK Amazon has swooped on its successful competitor, The Book Depository, buying out the competition. There's still a chance that some of the Borders bookstores will be picked up by someone else, but that apart, hundreds of stores are closing and 10,000 people could be losing their jobs. The immediate effect for publishers will be that thousands of books are returned to them and, with fewer sales outlets, publishers will have to cut their print runs going forward. Authors will suffer because this is removing a great slab of bookselling from the American market and there is no way it can be replaced. Publishers will pay less, print less and sell less, although first there will be a great upheaval in the market. The Borders saga seems to have been a catalogue of mismanagement, as the once mighty bookstore chain has gradually been brought down. Ten years ago it had 2,000 stores, 360 of them superstores and 50 of them overseas. It earned more than $3 billion (£1.839 billion) in annual revenues. But then new management brought in "category management," and the decision – in retrospect disastrous – to do web sales through Amazon was taken. Too late the management realised that it had bolstered the competition rather than competing with it. Anyone can see that it is sound strategy for Amazon to buy the competition, the extremely impressive and fast-growing The Book Depository, which has been beating Amazon at its own game by developing a highly efficient sales operation which offered a vast range of titles to serious readers, and also had a rapidly growing international business. The Office of Fair Trading is investigating the proposed purchase and both the Publishers Association and the Independent Publishers Guild has come out against it. Richard Mollet, CEO of the PA, said: "This proposed merger is of great concern to us and our members. We feel that the merger would reduce competition, plurality and diversity in the book retail market, and that it raises questions that have long been asked about Amazon’s strikingly dominant position." The latest organisation to object is the Society of Authors. In its submission it said: ‘Of course the pressures on bookselling and publishing are many and varied, and the threat is by no means solely down to the rise of Amazon, but to approve Amazon’s takeover of The Book Depository would in our view be a further step towards unhealthy domination by a single company.’ Publish your own ebook Do you want to find out how to publish your work as an ebook? This is something you may be thinking about, in view of the rapid growth in ebook sales. Many authors are suffering from a big contraction in their earnings. Midlist authors have found it increasingly difficult to get their books published by mainstream publishers and may be looking for the the chance to go it alone with ebook versions of their books. Our new seven-part series guides you through the process of setting ebook versions of your books up for yourself. The first article provides a practical introduction to ebook publishing. The second article looks at metadata and explains the importance of getting the metadata right.The third article in Chas Jones's series deals with Ebook conversion and what you should think about before starting your own ebook conversion, with an overview of the software.If you are an unpublished author you may need to go it alone. If you are a published author and don’t feel up to handling the technical side of this, a new blogging site that aims to boost authors' independent e-book sales has been created by writers Katherine Roberts and Susan Price as a response to ebook possibilities. The website venture, Kindle Authors, is open to all UK-based authors, both adult and children's, as long as they already have a publishing "track record" to guarantee the quality of their work. It will mainly sell Kindle editions of out-of-print books for anything up to £2. "There are a lot of cheap books out there selling for £2.50 in the chain promotions and we need to compete," said Roberts. "Because of the way the Kindle costs are structured—with a 70% royalty option—we can afford to do so." Breakthrough in libraries campaign It looks as if the campaign against closing libraries in the UK has just scored a significant victory. Since the Culture Minister Ed Vaizey, has failed to intervene to assert the statutory right to a library service, campaigners all over the country have rallied to challenge the closures being put in place by local authorities. Up to 500 libraries in the UK are at risk as a result of the UK government’s current austerity drive.Campaigners argue that the policy will hurt poor people the most and breach the statutory duty of authorities to provide libraries. Now a judge has said that they could be right – and ordered a review into the closures of ten libraries in Gloucestershire in September. In the meantime he has granted an injunction ordering that they stay open. This legal action comes after more than 15,000 Gloucestershire residents failed to convince council leaders to reconsider the plans which they say will leave the most vulnerable residents without a vital public service. Lawyers will argue that the council's planned cuts would mean it no longer met its statutory duty to provide "comprehensive and efficient" library services for all residents. The council will also have to prove that it did properly consult local people and that disadvantaged communities would not be disproportionately affected. Campaigners in local authorities across the country are now expected attempt to follow suit. Desmond Clarke, campaigner on behalf of the libraries, said the ruling was "fantastic news" which would "embarrass" Ed Vaizey. Leading authors such as Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith and Alan Bennett, along with music stars such as Nick Cave and the Pet Shop Boys, have all become involved in the fight. Philip Pullman said: ’Leave the libraries alone, they are too precious to destroy. I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult.’ The latest developments follow almost 10 months of campaigning. In February, there was a national day of protest – called Save Our Libraries Day – with more than 80 demonstrations and events against proposed government spending cuts that at that time put more than 400 libraries under threat of closure. The decision in Gloucestershire could provide a precedent for other campaigns across the country. The news came on the same day that Brent residents, fighting six closures, heard that the ir case will be heard in the High Court on 19 and 20 July. The Isle of Wight action is also on track after a resident was granted legal aid to fight five closures.What has particularly annoyed people about the library cuts is that the libraries should be at the centre of the ‘Big Society’ the government is proposing, but once they are closed and the professional library staff gone it would be very hard to resuscitate these local institutions which are key to literacy, education , social mobility and access to information.J K Rowling ditches agent and sells ebooks direct Rather to the amazement of the publishing world, J K Rowling, long a bye-word for her loyalty to her agent and publishers, has cut out her publisher Bloomsbury and set up a new site to sell ebook versions of her books direct to her readers. When it launches in October, the site will enable readers to ‘walk’ through the Harry Potter books, exploring the places and people that feature in them. It will allow each user to complete a personalised homepage as if they were about to start at Hogwarts School, where Harry studies as a young wizard. Even more surprisingly, Rowling has announced that she has left her agent of 16 years, Christopher Little , and moving to a new agency, The Blair Partnership, set up by Neil Blair, the lawyer who worked with her at the Christopher Little Agency.Rowling is the biggest of big authors. She has sold 450 million books worldwide and the last book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, sold 11 million copies on the day it was published. The last of the immensely profitable films of the Harry Potter books will be released this autumn.The Pottermore site, which will launch in October, will be the only place selling the Harry Potter novels as digital downloads. Booksellers have expressed frustration over being unable to sell the Harry Potter e-books. Jonny Geller of the agency Curtis Brown said that the move was a game-changer for the industry. He said: ‘This does feel like a significant moment. If I was a brand author I would be asking my publisher how to get to the online communities that J K Rowling is getting to. It might be a wakeup call to think of a new way of getting to readers.’ Rowling has said that 18,000 words of new material about characters, places and objects will be released online, rather than in a new book, because she did not have "a new story". She said: ‘It's background, and lots of details that didn't make it into the book. Some of it is new stuff in response to things fans have asked me over the years.’As regards the change of representation, a spokesman for the agency said: ‘Christopher Little has worked closely with J K Rowling since the very beginning 16 years ago… He greatly admires her and her extraordinary talent and is proud to have played his role throughout this journey. However, he is disappointed and surprised to have heard the premature news about the proposed new arrangements. There is no comment as to the prospect of legal action.’ Little reportedly struck a deal under his usual terms when he first signed up Rowling – 15% of gross earnings for the British market and 20% for merchandising rights, for film, for the American market and for translation deals. The agent has been discreet about everything to do with Rowling, but there is a possibility that this percentage has been negotiated down somewhere along the line. It is a graceless departure, but Christopher Little can comfort himself with the thought of the millions he has made from this one client. And perhaps what changed the picture was Neil Blair’s command of the new media and the suggestion that ebook versions of Rowling’s books could be sold directly to her fans through a website which was state of the art and offered much more to keep them interested. The agency clause in Rowling’s contracts cannot be rescinded without Little’s agreement, so the agency will presumably benefit from royalties on the backlist sales of the whole Harry Potter series for many years to come. After all, authors are always free to move from one agent to another and in this case there appear to be no new books to come. Google and British Library digitisation project The British Library and Google have just announced
a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s
collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in
the world, this demonstrates the Library’s commitment to increase access to
anyone who wants to do research. This major project will encompass
up to 40 million pages from 1700 to 1870, from the French Revolution to the end
of slavery. It will include the Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the
invention of rail travel and of the telegraph and the end of
slavery. It will include material in a variety of major European languages,
and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form
online. The first works to be digitised will range from feminist pamphlets about Queen Marie-Antoinette (1791), to the invention of the first combustion engine-driven submarine (1858), and an account of a stuffed Hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange (1775). Once digitised, these items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive. Users of the Library will be able to view these historical items from anywhere in the world as well as to copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes. Professor Colin Jones, President of the Royal Historical Society and Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London commented: "There is no doubt that the digitisation of this unique material will greatly benefit the research process. Academics are increasingly using new technologies at their disposal to search for innovative ways of investigating historical material to enable us to probe new questions and find alternative patterns of investigation. Digitisation gives us the freedom to not only do this quickly and remotely, but also enhances the quality and depth of the original." After all the negative things we’ve said about the
Google Project, it’s good to be able to report on other activities relating to
other Google which seem to be a completely good thing. No more bookshops? Australia breaks into the international publishing news less often than it should, but last week government minister Nick Sherry hit the headlines when he said: ‘I think in five years, other than a few specialist booksellers in capital cities we will not see a bookstore, they will cease to exist.’ He believes it is ‘inevitable’ that online shopping would wipe out general bookstores within five years, leaving only specialist shops in capital cities. This brought a stream of opprobrium down on his head, especially since, as the Minister for Small Business, he is supposed to support them. Australian Booksellers’ Association chief executive Joel Becker said: ‘I'm gobsmacked… It's an industry that's obviously going through changes, and we're responding to those changes by working out ways for even the smallest bookstores to go online and sell e-books; we've been doing it so far without any support from the government.’ The Booksellers' Association's president, Jon Page, of Pages and Pages Booksellers at Mosman in Sydney, said the Minister had demonstrated ‘a distinct lack of understanding about the Australian book industry’. He said the Australian market differed greatly from those in the US and Britain. ’The independents in Australia make up 20 per cent of the market, compared to the US where it's only 9 and in the UK less than 4 per cent. That just shows the diversity and range of bookshops that are in Australia… I think there's still a place for an independent that services their local community.’ Let’s all hope he’s right and that the onward march of online bookselling will be halted soon. Australian bookshops are among the most successful in the world. Australians buy more books per capita than any other English language country in the world. But the recession has affected the booksellers - 2010 was the first year in 10 years that book sales did not grow there. But this was also the week in which the Australian bookselling chain Angus & Robertson has announced 42 store closures across Australia and has sacked more than 500 staff. It was part of REDgroup, which went into liquidation recently. The business will lose 116 full-time staff, 47 part-time staff and 266 casual staff, plus 90 from the REDgroup headquarters and warehouse. The remaining 48 franchise stores would continue to trade as normal. This is indeed a terrible loss to the Australian bookselling community. Let’s hope that the Minister is wrong and it is not a harbinger of worse to come. The final death of the midlist? An article in last week’s Bookseller looks at the long-heralded death of the mid-list. Discussions about this have been going on as long as anyone in the business can remember, but this time it really does look as if we’re on to the last rites. The economics of contemporary publishing dictate that it’s more efficient for publishers to publish fiction at a higher level and to focus on new authors, rather than going for the long slow build, as they used to do. This means a bigger up-front investment in a new author, in terms of both advance and promotion, to build them into an instant bestseller. The reason for this seemingly risky strategy on the part of publishers is the way the book trade will support or not support the author in question. Generally, if the publisher produces enough hype, retailers will give a new author a go. This will mean promotion, a pr campaign and also buying space on the retailers’ shelves. The latter may shock some and is not always acknowledged, but there’s no doubt that this ‘contribution to promotional costs’ does still prevail. Once the book is published it does more or less well, depending on a number of factors – not least, one likes to think, how good it is! The problem then is with a second book, if the first one has not come up to expectations, as the bookselling chains will refuse to stock it, although independents may give more leeway. Dan Franklin, Jonathan Cape publisher, explains it this way: ‘Publishing the midlist has got tougher. It’s got tougher to the extent that subscriptions are a half, sometimes even a quarter, or what they used to be. Nobody buys the books upfront anymore. All of our efforts have to be made after the reviews have appeared, whereas in the old days we used to be able to subscribe 1,500 or 2,000 copies of the book before it was published. That has completely disappeared.’ Giles Foden, a literary author, says: ‘The idea that one will simply progress from better book to better book, to better remuneration is not the same any more. Publishing is a business and no one can forget that, but it is also a culture as well. There is a slight danger of the bifurcation of the market, not into three pieces but into two: bestsellers and then everything else.’ Both Franklin and Foden are talking about literary fiction, but the same dangers threaten more middlebrow books and also genres such as crime fiction and fantasy. In the category publishing areas there is more emphasis on building series with the same main characters or a continuing theme, or building an author’s name. But it’s hard for publishers to do this unless they can make a reasonable success of the first book. None of this is very cheering for unpublished authors, but it does go some way to explaining why it is so extremely hard to find a publisher for a ‘perfectly good’ first novel. It needs to be real bestseller material to stand much chance in the market. And even then that first book has got to be a success for the author’s second novel to stand a real chance. Musical chairs Never has there been a time when so much is changing so fast in the world of books. Seminars and discussion from Book Expo America last week underlined the way things are going, and it’s a scary prospect for people who have spent their lives in publishing or bookselling. So, what’s changing and why is it making everyone so uneasy? A lot of it has to do with the boundaries moving, and all moving at the same time. Suddenly publishers are acting as booksellers, agents are acting as publishers, booksellers are acting as publishers, and authors of course are acting as publishers too. Amazon has a lot to do with all of this, with their omnivorous approach to the business of online retail. Of course it started with books, which are still a key product for them, but now they’re trying to sell everything – or that’s how it feels – and they’re doing it faster and at lower cost than almost anyone else can manage. This makes them a formidable competitor to anyone else who is trying to run a retail operation and that includes all online competitors, and bricks and mortar booksellers. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Amazon has now set itself up as a publisher. It’s been dabbling in this for some time, but last week it got serious with the announcement that Larry Kirshbaum, formerly a very successful commercial publisher, but more recently an agent, has been hired by Amazon to set up a publishing house. Publishers have also been deeply unhappy about agents’ incursions into publishing. The UK Agents’ Association used to prohibit this, but now they are talking about removing this clause. Sonia Land of the Sheil Land agency started this by announcing that the agency would be bringing out 100 of Catherine Cookson’s backlist titles as ebooks, thus cutting out her publisher, the Transworld part of Random House UK. It didn’t take Random House long to try this the other way round, cutting out the agent in a direct deal for ebooks with Tom Sharpe. Agent Ed Victor has set up an ebook list focusing on backlist and Carole Blake has said that she will follow suit. It must look awfully easy to cut out both the publisher and the bookseller, but these books still have to be sold by someone, unless, that is, the theory is that Amazon alone will do. Many publishers would like to cut out booksellers and go straight to their customers online. Maybe they’re going to get better at this, but at the moment there’s nothing to suggest that book buyers are interested in this approach and it would have to be based on big author names or niche lists. Authors are certainly trying to use self-publishing to sell directly to their audience, spurred on by extremely successful authors such as Amanda Hocking – but even she has succumbed to a deal with a publisher now (News Review 4 April 2011). Those who have tried this know that it’s quite a slog and you need to be very determined to be successful, although the success stories fuel writers’ ambitions and the alternative for writers all too often seems to be not getting into print at all. Pity the poor booksellers though, they really are at the bottom of the food chain. It will be interesting to see whether Waterstone’s new ownership and management, and whatever emerges with Barnes & Noble in the States, will weather the storm and find a new way of operating. Waterstone's is sold at last Other news stories had to be shelved with the news yesterday that Waterstone’s has been bought by Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut’s A&NN Group. Although this negotiation has been a bit long drawn-out, the news has been well-received and is in contrast to the situation in the United States, where Borders continues to teeter on the brink. The troubled HMV group has only raised £53m in the sale, considerably less than they had originally hoped for. To everyone’s surprise, Mamut has announced that he intends to install James Daunt as MD. Daunt, not widely known outside London, runs the chain of seven Daunt bookshops, which are regarded as models of their kind. Wide-ranging stock is complemented by knowledgeable booksellers operating in an independent way. Daunt is generally regarded as a ‘good thing’ but will need to bring all his versatility to bear to cope with this job, not least because a solution that works well in upmarket and well-heeled London bookshops will not necessarily be so successful in Waterstone’s 300 bookshops, which are in a range of settings. Daunt himself says: ‘The intention is to keep the shops open and make them vibrant, prosperous places. In an ideal world one would not be closing shops. It may be that some prove irredeemable - the real question is: is there room on our high streets for 300 stores and I believe there is. I believe that Waterstone’s should be an integral part of the community and part of the cultural life of the nation. I wouldn’t be taking this on if I didn’t think it was a worthwhile thing to be doing, and though it is by no means an easy task, I am very excited.’ Tom Holland, author and President of the Society of Authors, said the buy was ‘fabulous’ news for authors. ‘Waterstone's is absolutely vital for authors and the survival of literary culture in this country. If the book vanishes from the high street into cyberspace, if it is exclusively the preserve of independent bookshops which cannot get space in shopping malls or airports, that is very threatening for the future of publishing in this country. The ability to go into shops and browse fosters the habit of reading and makes a statement about the centrality of publishing and books to the culture and the retail economy of this country.’ Many will see this sale as offering a real chance for the survival of bookshops in the UK, following the model of a chain of serious bookstores generously stocked and run in an independent manner by good professional booksellers. Jonny Geller of literacy agency Curtis Brown said that: ‘The staff there will be revitalised and re-energised’, but that Waterstone's would have to change. ‘It's going to have to embrace the online selling market but it has to do it in its own way, to show an alternative to Amazon.’ But the problems Waterstone’s has faced remain, of course. The Ancient Mariner, commenting on the story in the Bookseller Online, may yet have it right: ‘The new management will quickly have to put in place exciting, integrated and credible strategies for e-books and internet selling, as they are all but too late to make up the vast ground lost over many years to Amazon, Apple, Google, Tesco and Sainsburys, as well confronting the time drift of book readers to new media. All this in a long retail recession while trying to understand and attract customers in hundreds of locations with different socio-economic and demographic profiles who are today familiar with a promiscuous approach to media, often for no charge.’ Caine Prize shortlist showcases African writers
Boom in number of books published Readers of this column may be tiring of all the talk about ebooks, but it should be said in our defence that the news has been full of nothing else for many weeks now. Take comfort however, because in the midst of this obsessive concentration on digital developments, publishing – and writing – is still going on as normal. The existing business of publishing is still just as keen to spot the promising new writers and to bag them before their competitors do. The only thing that’s changed, perhaps for good, is that it’s harder to get published if your book is what used to be called ‘midlist’, as what publishers want is books which will sweep straight into the bestseller lists. A major trend at present is the increase in the number of books published and in the number of publishers in the UK, which have shown 3,151 new publishers registering for an ISBN, the highest number in ten years. The Nielsen 2010 book output shows that 151,969 new titles were published last year, a big increase of 14 % from the previous year. The figure is based on the number of ISBNs issued by Nielsen over the year. Since 2001 the number of titles published has risen by 40% In the US the latest figures from Bowker are for 2009 and show that more than one million titles were published. The US figures give the clue to the extraordinary growth in the number of titles: self-published and on-demand books were up by 181% year-on-year, a staggering 2,242% increase since 2002. In the UK self-publishing increases have added to the total and there is also the large number of digital versions of books to be contended with, as every new edition of a book, whether hardback, paperback or ebook, has to have a new ISBN. Self-publishing is booming and, for the first time, authors feel they have an alternative means of getting their book to readers. It should not be undertaken lightly, but if you are an author who has been trying without success to find an agent to take you on, or to get a publisher to look at your work, it is a chance to try out the market. WritersPrintShop, our self-publishing service. Ebooks elbow out print editions A recent article in Teleread questioned the way publishers bring out the premium edition, the hardback, and then make readers wait for the mass market paperback, which is available at a lower price which most people can afford. There’s nothing new about this, it’s been going on for decades. Publishers would claim that they have needed to milk the more expensive edition for all they can by delaying the paperback. The hardback is of course also for people who can afford to pay more and for gift purchase (a paperback, no mater how attractive, is thought by many to be too ‘cheap’ to qualify as a present). Also, there are the fans of big-name author who simply can’t wait for the next book by their favourite author. But for most of us it’s always been the long wait, often as long as a year, for the affordable edition. This makes particularly bad sense to book-buyers because any publicity, advertising or author promotion is usually done when the hardback comes out. There’s often precious little attention paid to the paperback, unless of course it’s by a big author and will receive advertising spend. But publishers justify this by saying they need to get every penny they can out of each edition. What’s changed in this staged approach is that ebooks have blown it sky-high. Now there’s pressure to make a lower-priced ebook available at the same time as the hardback. What this does is risk cutting the hardback sales because the ebook comes out at the same time but at a lower price. But it may turn out to have an even worse effect on the paperback sales, which could easily melt away as people go for the ebook and don’t wait for the similarly-priced but not yet available paperback. In this way both print editions are endangered from the point of view of publishers and their income. So, what’s the upside for publishers? Well, that’s hard to see too, because there is great pressure on ebook prices, they are vulnerable to piracy and authors and their agents are demanding higher royalties from ebook editions. You may well feel in principle that everything available through the internet should be free, but the difficulty is that there is a certain amount of investment involved in publishing a book and for traditional publishers the margins on most books are quite tight, with an occasional bestseller (which may also have entailed paying a big advance) helping to pay for the rest. For self-publishers it’s the same situation, although of course they get a larger percentage of the income from the book. But if books are valued down to nothing, or almost nothing, as they are being right now in the Amazon Kindle store, doesn’t the consumer get used to the idea that books, like many other things, should be free or nearly so? And how do writers make an income from their writing if that is the prevailing view? Mood buoyant at spring book fairs The two big spring book fairs in Europe, Bologna and London, have both gone rather well, with packed aisles and a lot of solid business being done. This is all the more surprising because the book business internationally is in something of a crisis. The two big English language markets are both down on book sales, the UK by 3% and the US by a worrying 9%. Although sales of ebooks are growing, especially in the States, this is not yet compensating for the lost print sales. In addition to the problem of declining sales and keeping up with digitisation, there is the distinctly uncomfortable fact that bookselling chains are under pressure in many places. Australia and New Zealand have already suffered the bankruptcy of their biggest book chain, Borders in the US continues to totter on the brink and HMV in the UK looks like it is about to sell Waterstone’s, the sole remaining UK book chain of any size. Yet the upbeat mood in both fairs was noticeable. Perhaps it was the very international nature of these occasions, since when one country is down, another may be booming. At Bologna classic picture books seemed to be back in demand and dystopian fiction appears to have overtaken paranormal and vampire romance as the genre in demand fro teenagers. Speaking from her own experience of setting up her new publishing house, Nosy Crow, Kate Wilson said: ‘The downward price pressure is impacting on creative investment and experimentation.’ Addressing publishers she said: ‘The pricing decisions and content decisions you make now will decide whether we have a market.’ At the London Book Fair a record numbers of exhibitors, 1,698, came from 58 countries. It was a sign of the times that the digital zone exhibitors were up from last year’s 22 from 7 countries to 54 from 14 countries this year. The International Rights Centre was sold out. Both fairs were attended by a strong American contingent and there was a feeling that the US was emerging ready to buy after a period of relative isolation. Everyone was looking for the big book, or the special book which would work for them or in their territory. As Joanna Pryor, MD of Penguin General put it: ‘The tougher the market, the more unforgiving, the more you need to have the right books. There isn’t a disconnect – it means the terrific books and projects become more sought-after, because you need winners.’ Self-publishing v signing up with a publisher Self-publishing has been much in the news recently, with bestselling self-publisher Amanda Hocking deciding to sign up with a publisher, whilst author Barry Eisler has decided to continue self-publishing in spite of receiving a big offer. Hocking is in a strong position. On her self-published ebooks she claims to have achieved sales of $1.4m to $2m worth of books. On these she keeps up to 70% of sales. But she has just signed up with American publisher St Martin’s Press with a $2m deal for four titles in a new paranormal teenage romance series, Watersong. She says: ‘The reason I took this deal wasn't for the money. At least not the upfront money. Also, let's be honest - if I self-published the Watersong series on my own, I could probably make $2 million within a year or two. Five years tops. I am fully aware that I stand a chance of losing money on this deal compared to what I could make self-publishing.’ ‘I've done as much with self-publishing as any person can do,’ Hocking told the New York Times. ‘People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don't have to keep using them. But I do think they have something to offer.’ Her particular concerns were her readers’ inability to find her books and problems with copy editors which meant she could not get her self-published books into really good shape. Hocking’s decision contrasts with that made by Barry Eisler, who recently turned down a $500K offer from a mainstream publisher to self-publish digitally. The author Joe Konrath, who has written widely on this topic said: ‘If you can handle the key functions that a publisher provides (things like editing, marketing, etc.) it can work out quite well. Publishers used to also be key for distribution, but that's less and less an issue these days, when physical book stores are less and less important, and online/digital is key. But you don't need a publisher for those things. Marketing is still the big issue for many, so this depends on how well you can market yourself, or work with someone else (perhaps the person who used to be your "agent") to market the work.’ Of course at the heart of this kind of decision is the fact that you can make more money per copy sold by self-publishing than you can by going through a publisher, simply because more of the sale price goes to you as the self-publisher. But to balance that, how do you attract attention for yourself and your writing? Can you really compete with what publishers can do? And is it really only viable to make this kind of comparison if the self-publishing alternative is going to be extremely successful? Amanda Hocking was asked if she would stop
self-publishing. Her answer was: ‘No, absolutely not. I have a few titles lined
up this year yet to put out via the self-publishing. And I'll have more in the
future.’ WritersPrintShop, our self-publishing service, with over 90 pages on the subject Techdirt: Have We Reached A Tipping Point Where Self-Publishing Is Better Than Getting A Book Deal? Book-buyers steady in declining market The recent Books and Consumers conference showed some surprising trends in British book-buying, which is catching up on the US as regards e-books. Ebook sales, whilst much talked-about, were still only 1% of the total in 2011. But Kelly Gallagher, Vice President Publishing Services of PubTrack Bowker, the US parent company of Book Marketing Limited, which presented the research, observed that in the US ebook sales had enjoyed a "hockey stick" moment, with a steep rise in sales once devices had become prevalent. Clearly the US is well ahead of the UK as regards ebook sales, but in the UK they have doubled in the first 4 weeks of 2011, due to the Kindle in particular being a favourite Christmas present, and they may catch up fast. Gallagher used the phrase "digital fatigue" to describe those multi-tasking teenagers and young people who are, in fact, reading all day - Facebook and Twitter and texts - but who suffer "a kind of digital fatigue and say they prefer a physical book as a break. They don’t want a reader because they say they don’t want to carry another device". British consumers bought fewer books in 2010 than in 2008, down from 344m to 339m, with the amount spent down from £2,341m to £2,183m. The figures show that the volume of sales was down by 2% but the price paid down by 5%. Value is down a quite large 7% over the period, as the relentless downward spiral of discounting has continued. 64% of British consumers bought a book in 2010 and it’s cheering to report that this number seems to be steady. However they bought less and spent less, so the market itself seems to be shrinking at the moment. The UK market has been suffering from the collapse of Borders, uncertainty about Waterstones and the ongoing recession. Similar factors have affected the American market, where there is currently anxiety about Barnes and Noble, and Borders is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Book-buyers in both countries have been affected by the world recession, but the UK has a unique level of discounting to contend with. Interestingly the figures show that in the UK books are increasingly bought as gifts and this may well be an area where print books will have an advantage, as it doesn’t look as if consumers consider e-books to be a suitable gift. The inexorable rise of online book retailers continues. The bookselling chains still have 30% of the market and online retailers have 26% but the latter are gaining ground and a very large proportion of this goes through Amazon. E-books, by the very nature of how they can be delivered, providing instant gratification, have 90% of the e-book market. Finally, there’s some good news for fiction
writers. Adult and children’s fiction are both up, although adult and children’s
non-fiction is down. Crime is doing well and adventure fiction, literary
fiction, historical, and sf/fantasy also performing well. Romance fiction has
shown the biggest decline - though romance sales are strong in the ebook market
and this may be a simple shift of format from print to ebooks. Stunning news on Google Settlement Some weeks there’s just too much news for us to cover in a short column and this is one of those weeks, so for now the latest moves in the ongoing Google Settlement saga (see News Review 27 April 2009 and 16 November 2009))have to take precedence. In a stunning final judgement, Judge Denny Chin has
this week rejected the Google Book Settlement, some 13 months after its final
fairness hearing, saying: "In the end, I conclude that the [Settlement
Agreement] is not fair, adequate, and reasonable." Chin set a date of April
25th for a status conference, and suggested his concerns with the agreement
could be overcome with one simple change. "As the United States and other
objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be
ameliorated if the ASA were converted from an opt-out settlement to an opt-in
settlement. I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly." Judge Chin said: "I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly." Of course that would literally change everything, not only removing the Settlement's attempt to provide a legal and business-driven solution to identifying orphan works owners and making orphan works available, but also torpedoing the Settlement's scheme to drive revenue from an aggregation of those works. Many parties across the world will be pleased that Google have not managed to get this through. Authors’ organisations in particular have been vocal in their opposition to Google’s vacuuming up of rights. However the US Authors’ Guild President Scott Turow said: "Regardless of the outcome of our discussions with publishers and Google, opening up far greater access to out-of-print books through new technologies that create new markets is an idea whose time has come. Readers want access to these unavailable works, and authors need every market they can get. There has to be a way to make this happen. It’s a top priority for the Authors Guild." Martyn Daniels, who blogs for the Booksellers Association in the UK, and was one of the original and revised agreement’s more vocal critics, said: "What should happen now is that all sides should get together and come up with a better deal. It is a big mess, but also a huge opportunity for the global publishing sector to get its house in order." Daniels said he would like to see the agreement made on an "opt-in" basis, but also agreement over orphan works to be non-exclusive to Google, and for the industry to run and operate its own Rights Registry."
Latest changes in the book trade: Copyright under pressure The struggle for literacy World Book Night was brilliant and World Book Day its usual effective self. But what about the literacy campaign which lies behind the whole operation? It is a shocking statistic that one in six people in the UK struggle with literacy. The figure is better in many European countries and worse in the US and many others. What is clear is what a terrible loss this is for them, how it reduces their life chances in every way, barring them from decent jobs and sapping their self-confidence. Speaking at the launch of the latest Quick Reads last week Random House CEO Gail Rebuck, Chair of Quick Reads, proudly rolled off the stats: 60 titles now available, 3m books distributed, 2m loaned by libraries, 86% of those who'd acquired literacy skills as adults reporting increased confidence, 50% better job prospects. "But adult literacy in the UK is still a serious problem - one in six adults struggles with reading. How did we get to this point?" Rebuck asked. "Is it a failure of education, a failure of aspiration or a generational failure?" Rebuck spoke of her grandfather: a tailor, he had come to Britain alone, aged 15, fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe. He established a highly successful tailoring business, yet he could neither read or write. "He died in 1952, the year I was born, so I was never able to ask him why. But I've often wondered how much more successful he'd have been if he'd acquired those skills." In this difficult economic time, it is nonetheless a shock to find that the Big Society seems to mean so little in terms of supporting the crucial issue of literacy. All across the UK local councils are closing libraries, as they react to the swingeing cuts they have suffered from local government, even though the connection between libraries and literacy is clear. Their defence is that they would rather cut libraries than services to the elderly, or other frontline services, and it is a hard choice, but there’s a widespread feeling that local authorities pay their senior staff too much and have become too much like big bureaucracies, squandering their council tax income. Surely a way could be found to keep these libraries open? The National Literacy Trust, which campaigns for literacy across the country and which successfully ran the National Year of Reading not long ago, hugely increasing the number of children’s library memberships, has just had its funding cut by 40%, a whole £1 million, which must surely be irreplaceable, even with the appeal they have just launched. And this is vital work. Anthony Horowitz, who gave the Simon Hornby memorial
lecture last week said: "One in six people in the UK struggle with literacy –
which is to say that they have the reading level of an eleven-year old. A
quarter of young people don’t recognise the link between reading and success
even though men and women with poor literacy are least likely to be in full-time
employment by the time they are thirty. These are all NLT findings and you might
add to them a survey by the Reader’s Digest last year that found that one in
twenty children have never actually read a book at all – a figure which, in this
golden age of children’s literature, the age of JK Rowling, I found
incomprehensible." National Literacy Trust appeal World Book Night World Book Night is practically upon us, and thousands in the UK will help celebrate it this coming Saturday, 5 March. This year the organisers have broken away from the traditional Quick Reads and book tokens for children - although the traditional programmes are still there - to go for a much larger promotion. Jamie Byng, Publisher of Canongate and the Chair of World Book Night, came up with the ingenious idea of harnessing the power of 20,000 volunteer book enthusiasts, who have been tasked with the job of giving away 48 books each, making for one million books altogether. Publishers and authors have cooperated to supply the books and allow their books to be used. The idea is that this wave of enthusiasm will get everyone reading. There’s also going to be a big party in Trafalgar Square, with 5,000 WBN givers and friends and 5,000 members of the public, will be able to attend the event. Tickets are being allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with 2,500 pairs of tickets set aside for givers. Margaret Atwood, Alan Bennett and John Le Carré will be among the authors headlining the World Book Night launch event in Trafalgar Square on 4th March. Graham Norton will compere the event, with Philip Pullman, Sarah Waters, Mark Haddon and Derek Walcott also among those who will be reading and performing on the night. Nick Cave, Rupert Everett, Hanif Kureishi, D B C Pierre, Edna O'Brien and Lemn Sissay complete the line-up. Ten more Quick Reads will be published on 3 March, to join the 60 titles in the series already published and proven to help people get reading and to encourage them to become more confident. The various children’s promotions which have been run in the past will also be repeated again this year, but the accent is firmly on adult readers this year, and encouraging many of them to get reading or read more. Borders bites the dust Borders’ filing for bankruptcy this week was the expected outcome of the long slow decline of the second-biggest US bookstore chain, as it gradually ran out of impetus and money. The book retailer has been struggling for months, with Ingram as the chain's main supplier of books, and most publishers putting them on stop. Borders had proposed that publishers receive interest-bearing notes instead of payment but publishers, not surprisingly, were cool on that proposal. Borders’s finances have crumbled over the years amid declining interest in bricks-and-mortar booksellers, a broad cultural trend for which it offered no answers. The bookseller suffered a series of management gaffes, piled up unsustainable debts and failed to cultivate a meaningful presence on the Internet or in increasingly popular digital e-readers. Meanwhile in Australia the biggest bookselling chain, Angus and Robertson, went into receivership, threatening 103 directly-owned stores and 61 franchisesd stores. This also affected Whitcoulls in New Zealand, with their 65 stores. Mike Shatzkin of Idea Logical said: "Disruptive change is coming to the book businesses of the world and they're looking to the US experience to understand the nature of that change and what to do to prepare for it." He claimed that within 10 years, bricks and mortar bookshops in the US would slump by 90%, from more than 1,200 large bookshops to around 150 stores, as the book business switches over to e-books. Borders currently operates more than 650 stores, including about 500 superstores, and employs 19,000 people. It had been suggested that the company could close more than 150 of those locations, but now 200 looks likely, or even 275.The move to file for bankruptcy protection was accepted by publishers as an inevitable move after years of declining profits and management turnover. In a desperate effort to preserve cash, Borders abruptly stopped paying publishers at the end of December. Publishers stand to suffer a devastating blow: Penguin is the largest unsecured creditor with a $41m claim. Hachette Book Group has a claim of $36.9m and Simon & Schuster Inc. has a claim of $33.8m. Random House has a claim of $33.5m. Borders was also affected by the difficult retail climate during the recession and by other strategic decisions. It was slow to retire its rather unsuccessful small-format Walden bookstore locations, and, fatally, the company was late in developing its own e-commerce site. Even by this year, as e-books boomed to make up about 9 to 10% of trade book sales in the US, Borders’s online efforts never took off in a significant way. Borders was once seen as one of the best booksellers in the business but lost its way and did not keep up with changes in the retail environment. Analysts said that Barnes & Noble, its chief rival in bricks-and-mortar bookselling, made savvier real estate decisions. In Manhattan, for instance, Borders took on expensive leases that were seen as unsustainable. So, is Shatzkin right? Only time will tell, but the slow death of one of the great bookstore chains will leave many publishers with big write-offs and a declining market. Authors will see a drop in their sales. Many book-buyers will have to go somewhere else to find the books they want, so the independents may do well out of it and the internet sellers, especially Amazon, certainly will. But this huge loss of bookshops can only mean a major decline in publishers’ sales. Are creative writing courses worth it? The big questions about creative writing courses still remain, although there’s no doubt about their popularity, nor that the universities and colleges see them as real money-spinners. There are now a huge number of writing courses in America - no less that 1,000 - and, after a slower start, about 100 postgraduate courses in the UK catering for the creative writing student. But do all these students go on to become professional writers? It seems pretty clear that they don’t, since otherwise there would be far more first novels being published. But is this because they train people to write ‘literary’ novels, which mostly won’t find a commercial home, or is it because they are not talented enough or don’t know how to go about getting published? Not all courses include much practical advice on publishing and exactly how to go about finding an agent or publisher. Mostly they exist in a writerly vacuum, but there is increasing recognition that the colleges and universities let their students down unless the courses include some exposure to the real world of publishing. There seems little doubt that a really brilliant author will find a publisher. But what about the less talented, or even the merely competent? Perhaps the truth is that they were never likely to find a publisher anyway? On the plus side, there is much to be said for a course which teaches you to write better, even if in the end it doesn’t help you with getting yourself established as a writer. Most graduates of these courses seem to think that taking part in them has helped with their careers. A recent Prospect magazine feature interviewed the first graduate of the famous University of East Anglia course, Ian McEwan, who said that, although he did indeed write his story "Conversation with a Cupboard Man" during his time at Norwich, the course itself was really an English MA with a creative writing paper tagged on. The students were not "taught" to write, but the course did give them space and time to reflect, and a good environment in which they could share their work, experiment a bit – and read, read, read. So, are the courses worth it? It seems that only the individual aspiring writer can decide whether it's worth it for them – and also that only time will tell. On-the-ball agents are increasingly keeping an eye on the best graduates of the Creative Writing MAs, so it might be easier than it was to get an agent if you’re really good, but otherwise things seem much the same. Josh Spears asks: Is a creative writing degree really worth it? Cairo International Book Fair cancelled In the light of everything else going on in Egypt, it’s perhaps a small thing that the Cairo International Book Fair was cancelled a few days ago. China was to be the guest of honour and its large delegation of it 248 publishers and 10,000 books was withdrawn at the last minute. President Mubarak, now with other things on his mind, was to have opened the Fair. The CIBF is the biggest fair in the region and an important one for the Arab world. In all some 630 publishers from 29 countries, including 17 countries in the Middle East, were expected to attend. Last year the Fair received an estimated 1.8 million visitors. It had already suffered an upheaval this year with a move to Nasr City Fair Ground in the suburbs from the Cairo International Conference Centre (CICC), which had been its home for 42 years. The Cairo Book Fair also plays an important role in selling books to the public, although there have been some accusations of censorship in the past. Books critical to the government or books with explicitly sexual themes have been banned. A number of titles presented by foreign publishers are said to have been seized by the Egyptian authorities, including works by Milan Kundera, Ibrahim Badi, Hanan al-Sheikh and Elias Khoury, with some booksellers arrested at the 2005 event. The American University in Cairo Press, which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year, is the leading English-language publisher in the Arab world. It also licenses foreign editions of Arab writers in 40 languages, including the works of Alaa Al Aswany, Zahi Hawas (who was named State Minister for Antiquities yesterday) and the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. "The Cairo Book Fair was, as usual, much anticipated and the decision to postpone it was literally made when we had just set up," said Mark Linz, director of the AUC, in a telephone interview with Publishing Perspectives from his home in Cairo. "We have one of the biggest pavilions at the fair," said Linz, "We were all ready, it was just perfect, everyone said it looked terrific. We didn’t anticipate that things would continue." The publishers who had prepared to exhibit at the Fair face the risk of financial loss, not just because of missed business opportunities and already-incurred costs, but because of the books shipped to Egypt for the Fair. At the moment these seem, because of the change of venue, to be locked in the secure location in the new fairground. Loss of business will be harder to recoup and the cancellation of the Fair is also a setback for the whole region, as it is a big fair with a lot of influence in the Middle East. Ebooks outsell paperbacks Amazon has just announced that ebooks for its Kindle are now outselling paperbacks. Jeff Bezos was understandably jubilant: "We had our first $10 billion quarter, and after selling millions of third-generation Kindles with the new Pearl e-ink display during the quarter, Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com. Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so this milestone has come even sooner than we expected - and it's on top of continued growth in paperback sales." Everything is not plain sailing for Amazon though. Sales at $12.95bn (£8.16bn) are up 36% from a year ago, but operating income has declined by £2m (£1.260) to $474m (£298.854m). Wall Street was not happy and shares were marked down sharply by 7.5%, as the market reacted to Amazon’s high-wire act with scepticism. The company, which began life as a bookseller in 1995, is aggressively expanding the range of products it sells, as well as its web services business, which rents computing capacity. They are planning to add another seven fulfilment centres, which handle distribution for the company as well as housing its web services businesses. In its international segment, which includes the UK as well as Germany, Japan, France, China and Italy, sales were up an astounding 26% to $5.74bn (£3.62bn). For bricks and mortar booksellers, the news from Amazon was almost totally bad. The rapid increase in ebook sales as the Kindle gains market share is due to the ease with which people can download ebooks on to their devices. In the US a large proportion of paperback buyers are opting for ebooks instead. But it also shows that Amazon are getting a much bigger proportion of the e-book market than they have of the paperback market. The implication for other booksellers is clear as sales shift to the ebook, to the Kindle and therefore to Amazon. Whether or not Amazon is pleasing the analysts, the implications are considerable. Given the current rate of growth of online sales, the whole structure of the book trade will change, as people shift to ebooks and download them online or straight to their reading device. Writers and depression An interesting study published recently in the US suggests that writers are at greater risk of depression than most other occupations. The study puts artists and writers among the most vulnerable of professionals, alongside other "at risk" jobs including care workers, teachers, social workers, maintenance staff and salespeople. Irregular pay and isolation contribute to the tendency for writers to succumb to depression, says the site, with nearly 7% of male artists and writers likely to suffer a major episode of the illness. It isn’t hard to believe that these figures are accurate. Writers are highly isolated by the very nature of what they do, and like all artists they are subject to all kinds of insecurities because they create material for public consumption. Being publicly judged through sales and reviews, or more privately judged when trying to find an agent or publisher, is very testing. Some well-known writers of the past - Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway and Arthur Koestler - have been subject to depression and this also affects some contemporary writers. Novelist Simon Brett said: "You spend long hours sitting on your own. Writing can be wonderful therapy, but you are digging into yourself, and if you are writing fiction and creating characters, a certain amount of self-examination and self-doubt is inevitable. Many writers are also introverted, quiet people, and find it stressful to have their work assessed publicly. Now there are reviews on Amazon, for example, that happens even more." Writers are hit hard by the current economic woes. "It has always been an insecure profession, and now advances are spiralling downwards and a lot of midlist authors have been dropped by their publishers. It’s even worse for unpublished writers, most of whom experience repeated rejections in their quest for first and agent and then a publisher." Benedicte Page, writing in the Guardian, pointed out that some writers do seem to find some positive elements. The poet Gwyneth Lewis, former National Poet of Wales, who explored the subject in her book Sunbathing In The Rain, said that her research while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard had suggested different findings."I'd argue the opposite, that given that writers do spend a lot of time on their own, and that the worldly rewards for poetry are minuscule, and given that most of the time you don't know whether what you are doing is any good, it's amazing that writers don't suffer more." In some ways, the art itself helps you through the minefield. "There is something in the principles of art that is not depressive, that's so joyful," Lewis said. And she added that the idea that you have to suffer to produce art is nonsense: "You have to be well. If you're properly clinically depressed, you can't think about rhyme." Plagiarism and passing-off Bestselling author J K Rowling is in the clear as regards a case brought against her by the estate of the late Adrian Jacobs in relation to his book Willy the Wizard, which she was accused of using as the basis of the Harry Potter books. The judge said: " The contrast between the total concept and feel of the work is so stark that any serious comparison of the two strains credulity."Jacobs' estate claimed that Rowling's agent Christopher Little was given a copy of Willy the Wizard, which he later passed on to Rowling, but the timing is all wrong. Judge Kitchen also said: "It is inherently improbable that Mr Little would have thought it worth giving a copy to Ms Rowling some eight years later." In the UK it seems likely that the case will be dismissed when it comes back to court in March. Although the whole business appears to have caused Rowling great irritation and annoyance, the case against the bestselling author was not strong. In another case involving the copyright and control of the work of a well-known author, J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye will remain under tight copyright control in the US. Fredrik Colting ‘s 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, has been banned from publication in the US. It will however be widely published elsewhere. The reclusive author reacted with fury to this unauthorised sequel, although he managed to keep control during his lifetime, but after he died in January 2010, he left his heirs to take over stewardship of his literary estate. Since its 1951 publication by Little, Brown, The Catcher in the Rye has sold more than 35 million copies, while the reclusive Salinger towered over his masterwork, spurning all television, stage and film adaptations, including overtures from Steven Spielberg, and refusing to license audio editions. These cases of bestselling authors defending themselves from accusations of plagiarism and defending their work from unauthorised ‘passing-off’ show the pressures that great fame and great riches bring to authors. J K Rowling had to defend her good name and J D Salinger, presumably, thought he had to defend his work from other writers ripping it off, using it in a way he disapproved of and had not authorised, and then making a lot of money out of it. Romance - perfect on e-reader Amazon Kindle sales in the US and UK last year were eight million, making it their biggest selling product ever. An article in the UK’s Daily Mail put this down to ‘spinsters’ buying romance to read on their Kindles (and other e-readers) because they were too embarrassed to be seen reading romances in pubic in book form because of the covers. There are two things wrong about this image, which is not to say that some readers may not be influenced by this consideration. The truth is more interesting though and throws more light on reading habits and trends. In recent years Mills and Boon/Harlequin have flourished and have had many more competitors because the Canadian company gives readers what they want. The old idea of sentimental and formula-driven romances of the sort produced by Mr Mills and Mr Boon has been replaced by a highly efficient publishing machine which has an exact idea of what readers want and long ago set about delivering it. Many of the books they publish now would have scandalised the ‘spinsters’ of the past. New series deliver a much more raunchy read and their books are avidly consumed by a wide-ranging, almost totally female, readership of all ages and from all backgrounds – and across the world, with new markets like India developing fast. Romance Writers of America define a romance thus: ‘Romance fiction is smart, fresh and diverse. Whether you enjoy contemporary dialogue, historical settings, mystery, thrillers or any number of other themes, there's a romance novel waiting for you! Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending.’ According to Nielsen BookScan, just two per cent of all printed books sold in the UK in 2009 were romantic novels, compared with 14 per cent of all e-books sold. So in the midst of this romance success story a greater percentage of romances than of other genres are being sold as ebooks. This is because the books, perfect escapism for our troubled times, appeal to a market which is highly addicted to its romance fix. Mills and Boon’s great success in recent years has been their book club, a subscription service which enables members to choose what kind of romance they want and then they will receive typically four books a month. Most people would consider this a lot of books to consume in a month, but not romance readers, because one of their particular characteristics is that they read a lot, compulsively and all the time. This sounds like a perfect audience for an e-reader, especially if the books themselves are cheap – and Kindle offers a range of romance for £1. This is perfect for the reader who just wants to get their fix and move on to consuming the next one, and isn’t particularly bothered about possession of the physical book. Never mind about what other people think about their reading matter, these readers want their fix and romance publishers have become highly efficient at delivering it. They are the most market-driven of fiction publishers because what they produce is books in tightly defined sub-categories of romance – and that’s what their audience is looking for. Today’s women readers don’t need to hide behind an e-reader, but they do know what they want and are buying it in large quantities. For writers this offers a particular opportunity and one which is easy to research on the publishers’ websites, which are very specific about what they are looking for and their criteria for taking work on. Many highly successful authors have started by writing romances – and many are still doing so whilst making a very good living. Ngram wows them all A fantastic new tool has become available for anyone interested in using the power of the web to trace word use. Google’s Ngram is a digital storehouse which comprises words and short phrases – 500 billion of them from 5.2 million books – contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian. Google was aiming at a scholarly audience, and this will be a great boon to PhD students, but it will also have a much wider appeal, lending itself to all kinds of searches. For instance, you can quickly use the tool to see that "women," in comparison with "men," is rarely mentioned until the early 1970s, when feminism gained a foothold. The lines eventually cross paths about 1986. "The goal is to give an 8-year-old the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books…We wanted to show what becomes possible when you apply very high-turbo data analysis to questions in the humanities," said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, assembled the data set with Google and spearheaded a research project to demonstrate how vast digital databases can transform our understanding of language, culture and the flow of ideas. Steven Pinker said: "When I saw they had this database, I was quite energized. There is so much ignorance. We’ve had to speculate what might have happened to the language." Jean-Baptiste Michel said that the team recognised that including information with errors was worse than not including it at all, so all books that did not pass strict standards for accurate labelling and scanning were filtered out. "That is why we end up working with 5.2 million books and not the whole 15 million," Mr. Michel wrote. (The 15 million figure refers to the number of published books that Google has digitally scanned so far.) "These filtering algorithms took us over a year to improve to our satisfaction. Indeed, if we hadn’t worked on them, we’d have published our very first version of the Ngrams, totally unfiltered, back in 2008." For their paper, Mr. Michel and Mr. Lieberman Aiden based their research on books published in English from 1800 to 2000. "We do not consider that trajectories outside of English 1800-2000 are scientifically validated," Mr. Michel wrote. "In particular, before 1800 there are just too few books: one does not have enough statistical power." The new database is seen as being of such significance that Science magazine has taken the unusual step of making the article about it freely available on its website. English: the global language A wonderful free exhibition at the British Library, Evolving English, makes the point: ‘the roots of old English, slang dictionaries, advertisements and newspapers from around the world are brought together to present a fascinating picture of the evolution of English’. Today 400 million people speak English as their native language, but there are more than 1.4 billion people worldwide for whom it is their second language. At the time of Shakespeare’s birth in 1514, English was spoken only in a couple of islands at the edge of Europe. By the time of his death in 1616, English-speaking settlements had been established in the Americas which were to result in the English-speaking nation of the United States. Between now and then it has been a story of two empires and their effect on the distribution of the English language. First, the British traded across the world, becoming a great maritime nation and establishing colonies in Africa, India, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. English was the language of the occupying power and in these countries it became the language of government and commerce. Countries like India, with a large number of recognised languages belonging to different groups, could unite around English, which belonged to none of them. Then it was the turn of the USA, which took over from the UK as a superpower and imposed English, not through colonisation, but through trade, the spread of American culture and the development of American-dominated science and technology. Now the world is clamouring to learn English and it has become the international language par excellence. English is immensely adaptable and has incorporated words from more than 350 other languages. In the internet age it has become especially dominant and over half of all web pages are currently written in English. This gives authors writing in English an immense advantage, a market potentially of both the 400 million and the 1.4 billion mentioned above. Without your work needing to go through the expensive and difficult process of translation, it can in theory be made available to all the readers in these huge groups. In terms of translation too, very many more books are translated from English into other languages than the other way round, as there are so many writers writing in English that there is no shortage of books for English language readers. There is often dismay expressed about the small numbers of foreign writers translated into English (the current vogue for Scandinavian crime and Stieg Larsson in particular being an unusual exception). The truth though is simply that, although diversity might be best served by a wider range of voices from different countries, the market is already well-supplied with writers working in English and publishers feel no need to translate foreign writers to produce a full publishing programme. Better still for writers using English, the secondary market of people for whom English is a second language but who speak it well enough to read it for pleasure, study or professional reasons is growing apace. Europe and the Far East are booming markets for English-speaking writers and join with the many countries for which English is a primary language to create a stunning global opportunity. Take part in an English mapping project at the British Library. Libraries facing major cuts Libraries are under threat as governments carry out major cuts to public services in both the US and the UK. In New York Mayor Bloomberg last week announced sweeping cuts of $1.6bn (£1 billion) including Libraries, which will have their subsidies reduced by $20m (£12.67m), bringing the average days of service per week down by approximately one day per week. This is mirrored elsewhere in the US and everywhere governments are scrambling to make the cuts which will make their budgets balance.The new government in Britain has just proposed spending cuts that could put a quarter of the United Kingdom’s librarians out of work. Even though 3.4% of librarians have lost their jobs in just the past year, and more and more libraries are relying on volunteers to pick up the slack, more cuts are needed to rein in deficits. It’s a bad lookout for libraries, which are all too easy to cut, especially as regards their book budgets and staff, but this time local authorities are going for large-scale closure of branch libraries. North Yorkshire is considering reducing its 42 libraries to 18 over four years, while Leeds is proposing to axe 20 smaller libraries. In Buckinghamshire, 14 libraries could become volunteer-run, in Gloucestershire, 12 will be closed if volunteers do not step forward. Recent statistics from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy showed a drop of nearly 1,000 in the number of paid library staff in the 12 months to March 2010, a 3.4% fall to a total of just under 25,000. Over the same period the total number of volunteers in UK public libraries rose 7.7% to 17,111. Library campaigners have mobilised highly visible authors to speak on their behalf. Philip Pullman says: "The librarian is not simply a checkout clerk whose simple task could be done by anyone and need not be paid for. Those who think that every expert can be replaced by a cheerful volunteer who can step in and do a complex task for nothing but a cup of tea are those who fundamentally want to see every single public service sold off, closed down, abolished." Kate Mosse’s view is that volunteers simply do not do the job of trained librarians: "Skilled librarians don’t simply say, ‘Go to the third aisle on the right. They can show people where to start, and that is not the same as a volunteer saying, ‘You might enjoy Danielle Steel.’" Catherine Bennett has written in the Observer: "Of course, for the almost 250 libraries already earmarked for closure, their role in the happiness supply chain is probably irrelevant. By the time experts have established that, where the alleviation of ignorance, illiteracy, isolation, helplessness, unemployment, infirmity, boredom, neglect and poverty are concerned, libraries do, after all, offer something culturally irreplaceable, they will be gone. It is becoming clear that Mr Cameron's government will do nothing to protect them." But there is one ray of light. Library campaigner Tim Coates is publishing a how-to manual for running a good library. The Good Library Manual , offering advice on creating "a supremely successful, relevant, and modern 21st-century library" comes out from Berkshire Publishing this week, priced £14.95. Its prescription for running an efficient and effective library service is one which stands worldwide.
Now it's National Short Story Week! This week has been UK National Short Story Week and we’ve all been invited to join in as readers, writers and listeners by a new website with that name. The site offers involvement for writers, readers and audio listeners, and campaigns to get more attention for short stories. It was founded by audio producer Ian Skillicorn, who has been producing and broadcasting short stories, and supporting the work of both new and established short story writers, for many years. Story, the campaign run by Booktrust, has been trying to do the same thing for some time. As well as its campaigning role, it has an extremely useful series of articles about short stories from writers, agents, editors, publishers and the digital world. In recent years there have been not just the two campaigns mentioned above but also two new prizes in the UK alone. These big prizes, the BBC National Short Story Award and the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award have made short stories news, although the latter is only open to published writers, which is a pity in that it will never discover new talent. Nicholas Shakespeare commented in the Evening Standard last week 'short stories still languish in the literary doldrums, perceived by critics and readers alike as a minor tributary of literature.' So, what has changed in the world of short stories? Well, the biggest change is that the internet has made short stories more viable by creating the possibility of publishing them online and using the internet to find an audience for them. Because of the brief form, short stories can be read online or even printed out, which, just like poetry, gives them a head-start over novels. The short form also suits a time-pressured audience with an increasingly short attention span. There’s still not that good a market for stories in book form though and they usually have to be written by a major author and even then are not expected to achieve sales which are comparable to their fiction – and usually don’t. Authors such as Ian McEwan (with his attention-grabbing stories debut First Love, Last Rites) and Maeve Binchy have published collections of short stories but generally they are not as well-received as their novels. Many readers simply like to lose themselves in a novel-length story and find short stories unsatisfactory at providing this engagement. Anthologies, such as those published by small independent Cinammon Press, are a rather different matter and can offer authors a way in and the chance to showcase their work. For a new author stories can be an excellent way to build their craft and their reputation. If you can get them into print, all the better, but even internet publication will help. Stories are a great form to turn to for a change of pace or a new approach and many authors find them refreshing to write, even if the audience is a bit thin. National Short Story Week StoryBBC National Short Story Award Pitchapalooza - pitching your book A recent posting on Publishing Perspectives took the reader to their article on Pitchapalooza, written by authors David Henry Sterry and his wife Arielle Eckstut, the duo known as The Book Doctors. The Book Doctors invented ‘Putting Your Passion Into Print’, now known as Pitchapalooza. This is an American Idol for books, where writers get one minute to pitch their books to a panel of book professionals. The panel then critiques their idea, evaluating everything from character to plot, presentation to marketing, title to comparative books, befriending booksellers to finding an agent. These sessions have proved tremendously popular across the States, with keen audiences of writers who are dying to have the chance to pitch their book, especially to agents. In the past difficult few years, the opportunity to talk about your book to individual agents has not come up very often. This continues to be a problem for writers, as the barriers to getting published are set very high. It’s hard to get an agent’s attention, let alone to get them to take you on, and most major publishers no longer read their slush-pile. The reasons why agents are extremely cautious about who they take on are not hard to find. Essentially, agents will only make money out of their clients when they sell their work. It used to be possible for an agent to nurture an author over a period of years while they developed their writing talent. Then eventually they would hopefully move on to the big deal, the move to a new publisher, a change of genre or a new series, and the agent would get payback. But with the market so uncertain it’s a different story. The agent has to be prepared to invest their time and energy which, even if they’re a small independent and have low overheads, will be their stock-in-trade, against a rather uncertain result, because publishers are really not buying many new authors at present. Emboldened by the success of Pitchapalooza, the authors have written a book, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, which they are selling from their site. The Book doctors have six tips on how to perfect your pitch:
So now all you need to do is to perfect your pitch and then find an agent to pitch to. Writers’ conferences can be good times to do this and you may get your chance to pitch your book then. But if you don’t have that opportunity, remember that your elevator pitch can be be the perfect thing to incorporate into your submission letter. 'E-book sales are astonishing' So, given publishers' latest focus, are readers are switching to e-books at a staggering speed and is the whole market for books set to change radically within a short space of time? The evidence for this is actually a bit contradictory. A new study, Publishing in the Digital Era, commissioned by the Forum d’Avignon and compiled by Bain & Co. states that e-readers, tablets other digital reading devices ‘could be in the hands of 15 to 20% of the developed world’s population by 2015’. It goes on to say that the ‘redistribution of value among players, a redesign of their roles and, potentially and an evolution in the way content is created could produced significant new value for the industry’. Bain suggests that digital formats are likely to represent ‘20 to 28% of industry profits in the medium to long term’. The study surveyed some 3,000 consumers across the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. The United States and South Korea lead in e-reader penetration, with South Korea expected to hit 11% and the United States 8% by 2012, respectively. Men have outnumbered women as early adopters. Buyers of e-readers tend to have higher than average incomes, are aged between 20 and the early 30s. Many are already avid readers, and more than 40% (52% in the United States) report reading more now than they did prior to owning a device. But the report suggests that people are unwilling to abandon ‘the paper experience’. Bain predicts that e-readers ‘could capture as much as a third of the market’ for their ability to replicate the experience of reading on paper. Meanwhile the emergence of powerful distribution platforms, such as Apple and Amazon, has allowed them to contribute to the emergence of global book publishing markets, with implications which no-one can yet foresee. E-books are already having a significant impact on the American market. John Grisham’s new bestseller, The Confession, is the first of his adult hardcover novels to be made available simultaneously as an e-book. The result is that e-book sales were about one-third of week-one hardcover sales, or around 70,000. Sales of the hardcover edition were 160,000 in the first week, although it may be significant that his last book sold 223,000 hardcover copies in its first week, according to BookScan. ‘The e-book sales are astonishing’, John Grisham said in an interview. ‘Would anybody have thought that a year ago? The future has arrived, and we're looking at it… Hopefully there is a whole new market out there of readers buying books digitally. If that's true, it's good news for all of us. I'm cautiously optimistic that it may increase the number of readers, but it's too early to tell.’ The Hachette Book Group have just announced that digital books accounted for 9% of revenue in the US for the first nine months of the year. Digital book sales were so negligible last year that Lagardere didn't even break them out in its financial report for the first nine months of 2009, so they have grown extremely quickly. But on the other hand, as Jeffrey A Trachtenberg has pointed out, less than 3 percent of the population of the US population actually owns an iPad, although Kindle figures may be much higher. A recent Condé Nast study showed that iPad and iPhone users were not the technical sophisticates that had been expected and readers seem to spend more time with the digital replicas in comparison to the print versions. The other big point was that people generally used iPads at home and not, surprisingly, as mobile devices. Then there’s the view best expressed by a ‘senior figure at a large technology firm who works closely with trade publishers, and who has been heavily involved with e-books and other forms of electronic content delivery since the late 1990s’, talking to Scott LcLemee in Inside Higher Education: ‘Sure you can carry 80 books around on this $400 reader, but the number of people who require 80 books to be carried around at one time is very small… This is not the music business – these aren’t two- or three-minute songs. It’s not the newspaper business – [books] don’t have a shelf-life of a day or an hour.’ So we shall see what happens next. Article in Inside Higher EducationUK Arts Council cuts affect poetry So what’s the situation with the UK’s small funded literature sector in the light of the enormous cuts which were announced last week by the new coalition government? Literature is very much the poor relation when it comes to Arts Council funding, with theatre, music and art all taking very much larger slices of the pie. Arguing, quite reasonably, that literary fiction is quite well provided for by commercial publishing houses, most of the literature money is spent on poetry, with a small amount going to pay for the publication of literary translations and some to programmes to support and develop writers. There are very mixed views about the way the money is spent. Poetry would not exist on any scale unless it was funded and also supported by big publishing groups such as Random House (Jonathan Cape and Chatto & Windus) and Macmillan (the Picador list). Faber continues to see poetry as central to its publishing remit. The big funded houses, Bloodaxe and Carcanet, publish a large number of poetry titles, including quite a few debut collections, and then there are the smaller funded publishers who contribute to the total. So the fact is that British poets owe a lot to state support when it comes to their chances of getting published, although the same cannot be said of literary novels. Most people think this is fair because literary novels can be published successfully in a commercial way. There is a big enough market out there and a number of prizes such as the Booker and Orange, which raise the profile of individual titles and help to create interest amongst readers. The hugely successful reading groups are part of this and reading ‘literary’ novels is quite fashionable, in the UK at least. Poets have benefited from the increase in readings and festivals and the audience for poets reading or performing their own work. But it’s still not easy to sell poetry on any scale unless it’s the work of a big name. The Poetry Book Society works to get the best new poetry to readers, but they reach a specific market and it’s difficult to grow that. Poetry prizes such as the Forward and the T S Eliot Prize (the shortlist for which was announced last week) do help to build the careers of poets and get their work to readers, but there are still many people who never read poetry and many others who are not interested in the latest new work. So, should poetry be funded by the government? Only if you think that it is worthwhile, but if you do think this then the funding is essential to give new poets a chance and to make sure that poetry is published and made available to readers. Children's publishers bullish The recent Children’s Bookseller Conference in London focused on a part of the publishing industry in relatively good health. Children’s book sales have suffered less than adult books as a result of the recession and they are only down 2% in the UK against an overall figure of 4%. To be fair, this is partly because the sales of the Stephenie Meyer titles (which are categorised as young adult) have bumped them up, but there is still a greater sense of confidence in the children’s sector. The discussion focused on digital matters and how to use the web and opportunities presented by new technology to market books to young people. Adrian Hon, Founder and Chief Creative at Six to Start, the games company, said he thought there was a race to quality, and that it was about attracting a large audience through content and then upselling to them. Surprisingly, he added that, even though computers, games consoles and mobiles seem ubiquitous in children’s lives, 66% of them still want to read books on paper. Publishers still have strength in marketing, production, brands and authors, and understand authors, so they need to focus on working out new business models to use all this. Dr Su Cranmer from Future Lab said that children do learn through digital media and that they are used to reading information really quickly. These digital natives prefer graphics to text and there is a digital disconnect between them and their parents the ‘digital immigrants’. She emphasised the fact that children process information in different ways and that they are used to being surrounded by digital media, with 82% of homes in the UK (and even more in the US) connected to the internet. The next speaker, Dan Martin, the Director of Strategy at chameleon.net, developed this theme, suggesting that for today’s nine year-old their first language was HTML. He said there are four key things to go for in terms of engaging young people online: websites and content, search and search engines, social networking and mobiles. He thought that things have changed radically and our attention is no longer bound by shapes defined for us by broadcasters – we have created new shapes to suit our needs. We now need to design for attention, not platforms. Fionnula Duggan of Random House UK said that ebooks were the commercial engine of digitisation, but that they were in the foothills still and would be in flux for the next 3-4 years. The pace of change is tremendous but no-one is talking about print books disappearing. Mike Richards, Head of Marketing and Publicity at Egmont, quoted Michael Morpurgo: ‘When we talk about books what we really mean is stories.’ He discussed turning strong properties such as Winnie the Pooh into digital products and said there was a golden rule, which was to be true to the original book and to enhance it, to understand what kids liked about it and, if possible, to engage with the author and illustrator. Finally, Kate Wilson of new publisher Noisy Crow, talked about the huge advantages to UK and US children’s book publishers of the English language, which gives 331m people to publish for with English as their first language, but a stunning 914m English speakers across the globe. Having looked at the current situation, she said she thought that the desire for stories will not change. Publishers would need to change the way they work to connect and communicate with customers. The emphasis throughout the day was on content and the importance of stories and creativity, but the overall impression was of a sector of the publishing industry which is confidently striding ahead and going for digital opportunities. Children’s authors represent the creative part of all this and they could well be at the centre of things in the future. Booker surprise The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize has been a compete surprise to everyone, including the author. Howard Jacobson had never even been shortlisted before, and his book The Finkler Question was the bookies’ least favourite title on the shortlist. It’s very nice to see this important prize going to an author who has paid his dues, with 16 titles which are reckoned only to have sold 90,000 copies in all. What’s more, he had just left Jonathan Cape for Bloomsbury, a great disappointment for the Random House imprint. Publisher Dan Franklin was philosophical: ‘It was just one of those things. We had huge unearned advances.’ Now Bloomsbury is reprinting 50,000 copies and Jacobson’s agent Jonny Geller has had 17 offers for translation rights in different territories. Embarrassingly for Bloomsbury, the book was 'called in' by the judges, which means that Bloomsbury didn't rate it as amongst the top three it could submit. Although Hilary Mantel had been more successful than Jacobson before winning the 2009 Man Booker, she was similarly an author with a number of excellent books to her credit who had failed to break through to a bigger audience and it was winning the Prize that has made all the difference to her writing career. The Finkler Question had sold just 8,300 copies (even after being shortlisted) before winning the Prize, so the situation is reminiscent of The White Tiger, which had sold even less before winning in 2008, and then went on to sell 527,000 copies to date. At 68, Jacobson is the oldest Booker winner since William Golding, 30 years ago. He has past bad form too. In 2001, Jacobson called the Booker ‘an absolute abomination – the same dreary books year after year’. He had given up hope. ‘I was bitter. It's true. I couldn't even get them to read me.’ It’s perhaps surprising that the Booker has such a big effect internationally, but it is the top international prize for fiction in English, even though other prizes are worth more. Clever marketing and stalwart support, first from Booker but more recently from the Man Group, have played a part in this, but so have the many controversies, the leaked judges’ comments and all the rest of it. Perhaps though it’s the dream-come-true element which has so completely riveted everyone’s attention. Jacobson could have continued to meander along, writing a new book every so often but never having much of an audience. Now he will have hundreds of thousands of readers, and if they enjoy this book there’s a whole backlist waiting to be explored. Jonathan Cape can benefit from backlist sales across a range of titles and Bloomsbury have a big international seller on their hands. The agent is going to make a lot of money. The author, of course, will make even more, as well as having the distinction of having written an excellent literary novel and, some reckon, the first comic novel to have won the Booker. An optimistic Frankfurt The Frankfurt Book Fair seems to have engendered a mood of optimism, in spite of the uneasy world economy and the particular preoccupations which are making book publishers feel as if the ground is shifting under their feet. The numbers were up, with 7,533 exhibitors, an increase of 3%, and 522 agents registered in the Literary Agents Centre, 4% up on last year. This shouldn’t be exaggerated as a factor, but some publishers who didn’t make it to London because of the volcanic ash seem to have felt that a trip to Frankfurt was a necessity, although most of them would have been going to the German book fair anyway. The difference seems to be that the international publishing business is experiencing some recovery, probably a bit uncertain, but nonetheless real enough to be encouraging. Book Sales in both the UK and the US have been better this year than last, even though there have still been some poor months. It’s been a fair full of solid business, rather than razzamatazz, but that’s only to be expected in these sobering times. Simon & Schuster MD and CEO Ian Chapman, who did not attend Frankfurt in 2009, partly as a result of recessionary pressures, said: ‘I’m just looking forward to going back. I have never had more meetings; it's back to back.’ Clare Harington, head of group communications at Hachette, said their appointment schedules were ‘absolutely chock-a-block… It’s got off to an amazing start. The stand has been bursting with activity and it’s nice to see everyone we didn’t get to see in London.’ Donald Greig, MD of Bradt, said the Fair’s atmosphere was different from last year’s. ‘It seems much more upbeat and generally optimistic.’ Frankfurt is extremely expensive for publishers, with sky-high hotel costs (including the requirement to book rooms for the whole fair) and the expense of travel combining with the cost of the stand to make it an extravagant business. There were times when publishers would send a vast number of people, especially from London, but now they cut their staff to the bare minimum needed to man the stand and it is no longer expected or even felt desirable that editors, other than the top ones, should go to buy books. The Fair was full of digital news, with the Tools of Change conference just prior to the Fair and also the announcement that Google Editions will launch next year. Juergen Boos, the Fair’s Director, is making a strong pitch for an ongoing role for the Fair. Continuum CEO Oliver Gadsby said: ‘There have certainly been times over the years when I have questioned the cost of attending Frankfurt, but in this year of change, in our business and more widely, it seems more helpful than ever to be able to meet face to face.’ Comedy or errors - or tragedy? It’s been a gift for the media. ’A comedy of errors for author of The Corrections .’ (The Times) ‘Jonathan Franzen's 'book of the century' pulped over error.’ (the Guardian) ‘ Franzen’s new novel recalled to be pulped.’ (Evening Standard)So what really happened to Jonathan Franzen’s highly-anticipated new novel, Freedom, and why did the UK edition have scores of errors, which were so serious that the publisher has reprinted the corrected version and asked buyers to return their copies to be pulped? This was a very big book, after all, it’s not many American authors who get a print-run of 80,000 copies in the UK. Franzen himself even asked readers to wait for the new version. The printers and the typesetters have both been blamed, but these explanations ring less than true. What might well have happened is that the British publisher, HarperCollins, would have taken the book as a computer file of the American version, since Franzen’s primary publisher is the American publisher (not HarperCollins US but the small literary house Farrar Straus). It’s very unlikely that the novel would have been separately edited in the UK, although there might have been late changes incorporating corrections to the text sent over by the American publisher. In the States, where the book was published slightly earlier, the author would have corrected the proofs and they would also probably have been checked by an editor in the American publishing house. But then the file would have been sent to the UK, so it’s hard to see exactly how the UK version could have used an uncorrected file, which is clearly what happened here. Actually quite a number of people could have sent the wrong file. Although it might have been the printers or typesetters, it’s hard to see why they would have had the uncorrected proofs, although these might well have been sent over to the British publisher before the final version was available. They would only have been used internally for people who needed to read the book to work on it, though, and would not normally have been sent to the printers. So the fault could lie with the American publisher, who sent over the earlier, uncorrected file. Or it could have been the editorial department at HarperCollins, or even the production department, which sent the wrong file to the printers. Someone was on automatic pilot. What is interesting but not surprising was that no-one checked anything and no-one therefore noticed until the book had been published, even though on a big book like this copies would have been available well before publication. And readers, did they notice? Perhaps they just thought it was par for the course, since so many published books now contain an astonishing number of errors. The days when in-house desk editing departments carried out copy editing, and often proof-reading too, have now passed into history, but there are many who would mourn their passing. Is a creative writing course worth it? Can creative writing courses really open up the world of writing to the students who pay heavily for the privilege of taking them? As students begin the return to college or university across the northern hemisphere, this seems a good time to examine whether or not creative writing courses earn their keep. There’s no doubt that they are booming in both the US and the UK. America now has hundreds of college-level courses and there are 50 UK universities now offering MAs in Creative writing, as well as many other diploma and post-graduate courses as well. At a time when creative writing courses provide the universities with lucrative source of income, for which they are likely to have a high student enrolment (a key consideration in these times of economic stringency), it’s easy to see why these courses are popular with the institutions themselves. For the faculty, teaching writing can be a good way of supporting yourself if you are a writer and this is particularly true of poets. Out of the ten poets shortlisted for the 2009 T S Eliot Prize in the UK, seven teach creative writing at universities. But the real question seems to be what benefit the students themselves get out of their course. It seems reasonable to assume that they will improve their writing, which is potentially a useful thing for anyone in almost any career. But is it fair to say, as distinguished writer David Lodge has done, that the qualities needed by a writer cannot be taught? Just what are these qualities? There may be another negative too. There’s also criticism in publishing that you can always tell a writer who has taken a creative writing course, because of the formulaic nature of their writing. Ellah Allfrey, deputy editor of Granta, says that: ‘There’s a certain style of writing that you can recognise now that comes from creative writing programmes and sometimes, if the programme is clearly focused on getting students published, there’s a danger of them writing with an eye fixed on what’s going to work commercially.’ But isn’t this reasonable? The students pay good money to study creative writing because they think this will help them develop their writing and get their work published. After all, nobody writes just for themselves. Lionel Shriver, an outspoken author who won the Orange Prize in 2005 for her novel We Need to Talk about Kevin, admitted that: ‘I have always felt a little queasy about majoring in creative writing. Theoretically, I think it’s better for a writer to get educated in something with more intellectual content, such as history, but I needed an audience, which college provided.’ So what do the students themselves think? Many will find it disappointing trying to get their work published, as it’s so hard to do so at present. But will they turn to self-publishing, or go off and pursue another career? Josh Spears, writing on this site, said: ‘The experience of gaining a university degree is unique and unforgettable and if you can get over the fact that the end result isn't exactly what you expected, I would give it my vote and reluctantly, my money.’ His article Is a creative writing degree really worth it? Bestsellers, bestsellers Some recent articles on bestseller lists have shown that the lists can be a bit of a moveable feast. The website Publishing Perspectives took on the Huffington Post’s attempt to list the top 15 bestselling books of all time and offered a revision, expanding the list to 25. It will surprise no-one to know that the Bible still ranks as the bestselling book of all time, which, including all the bibles which have been given away, comes to six billion copies. Quotations from Chairman Mao is said to have sold 800-900 million copies worldwide, but one source says this should be 6.5 billion copies. The Qu’ran follows this with over 800 million copies and after that it are two more works by Mao. Fiction gets into the figures for the first time with Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities at number 6 and The Lord of the Rings doesn’t show up until seventh position, when it ties with The Book of Mormon, and the first Harry Potter comes in at number ten. A recent article on the bestseller charts by the Bookseller investigated which authors have been a ‘bride’, ie got to number one, most often. The undoubted winner is James Patterson. This study, which is based on an analysis of Nielsen Bookscan charts since records began in 1998, shows that no less than 34 books penned by Patterson and his co-writers have reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller lists. Patterson’s books have spent a combined 10 years in the bestseller lists since 1998, meaning that more than 80% of the time he has had a book in the Top Ten. Danielle Steel, the second most prolific author in terms of hitting the top spot, has had 19 number ones and her books have spent eight years in the bestseller lists. The figures show that the biggest ‘bridesmaids’, ie those authors whose books got into the top ten but not the number on spot, are Mark Billingham, Jack Higgins, Jackie Collins and Dean Koontz. All of these are commercial novelists, so it is good to see that Zadie Smith’s literary novel White Teeth has spent more time in the bestseller lists than Dean Koontz. So, what does it mean for authors? Well, the strongest message from all this is that people buy books by author brand. They’re affected by bestsellerdom, which tends to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as bestsellers get more display space and marketing spend, in the attempt to turn them into ever greater bestsellers, which means they sell more. It’s also difficult to turn the clock back on bestseller culture, especially since corporate publishers feel safer investing their money in brand authors. This focus on bestsellerdom does have an inimical effect on everything else though, as bestsellers tend to crowd other books out and make it difficult for non-bestsellers to have much of a chance. Self-publishing as test marketing Keith Ogoreck, Senior VP for Marketing for Author Solutions, has made a rather astounding prediction in book editor Alan Rinzler's blog on Forbes. He suggests that big publishers like Random House could one day ‘cede the midlist to a vast army of self-published authors’. His theory is that the 80% of publishers’ lists which make up what is known as the midlist – literary fiction, cookbooks, self-help books and presumably a lot of genre fiction publishing, they’d just cherry pick from self-published authors who had already tested the market by publishing their book and shown a track-record of success. In many ways publishers have already abandoned the midlist, especially in terms of genre fiction publishing – crime, science fiction and fantasy and romance – as they find the economics of building an author’s name in these areas doesn’t make sense unless they can make some real impact with their first book and thus take it out of the midlist. Ogorek believes that: ‘Some authors could be picked up from the ranks of writers who’d paid the publishers to produce their books under in-house self-publishing imprints: so called “farm teams” of authors willing to underwrite the costs of getting their books into print.’ Some publishers have set up self-publishing divisions, but the odds on getting picked up through these may not be as good as you’d think. Thomas Nelson’s in–house self-publishing division Westbow Press has already published 75 books since January of this year and has signed contracts with 300 writers – but has yet to pick up a single book to publish itself. HarperCollins’ Authonomy has, it is said, done rather better, although there is little information about this on their site. Alan Rinzler said in his Forbes blog: ‘How can writers use this situation to their own advantage? If you’re tired and exasperated at waiting, waiting, and then waiting some more for agents and publishers to wake up and pay attention to your book…take a look at self-publishing. It’s not what it used to be. Self-publishing has grown exponentially and achieved an unprecedented degree of legitimacy. This approach has emerged as a powerful and effective way to prove the quality of your content and show that you can self-market. And most significantly, if you can achieve a threshold of sales, say from 5-10K copies on your own, a traditional publisher may offer you a deal to take over the book for their list. ‘This isn’t some future-tense scenario hyped up by self-pub marketing enthusiasts. It’s real, and it’s happening now. I know this because I’m starting to receive more agented submissions of books from self-published writers. And I’ve signed up several.’ In the meantime consultant and blogger Mike Shatzkin, who thinks e-books are the future, also thinks that publishers need to retrain themselves from being ‘b2b’ organisations, ie those which work through business to business, (booksellers) into ‘b2c’ organisations, which are focused on business to consumers. The only problem with this is that books in general are individual objects, whatever format they are in, so a subscription model, which he suggests, is only likely to work when you publish a series of highly consistent books, like, for instance, Harlequin Mills and Boon’s romances. But, as Shatzkin says: ‘Once publishers accept that being consumer-focused is essential to their long-term survival, it follows logically (although not automatically or instantaneously) that they need to think about discrete audiences on more than a book-by-book basis; that they need to gather those audiences on web sites and in mailing lists; that they need to publish books that satisfy them repeatedly, not occasionally; and that all these efforts will make more sense if each separate audience has a brand facing them with real meaning.’ With the internet becoming more and more the way people find out about things as well as buy them, both self-publishing to test the water and niche marketing to find a particular audience may look like they make sense. Mike Shatzkin's blog 6 September WritersPrintShop - our self-publishing service
Richard and Judy ride again Television Book Clubs are back in the news again with much talk about Oprah’s new choice and the relaunch of the Richard and Judy Book club in the UK. Richard and Judy presided over a real phenomenon, with the launch of their highly successful book club on Channel 4 in 2004. Over the last six years the titles in their club have sold in excess of 10 million copies and generated over £60m (nearly $93m) million in book sales, turning at least eight authors into multi-millionaires and throwing a welcome spotlight onto new writers. After slipping from Channel 4 into a digital TV backwater, Richard & Judy's book club has now resurfaced as a website in association with WH Smith. They will review one book from their selection of eight every two weeks, with promotions across the 1000-odd WHS stores and online. The books are an interesting selection by relative unknowns and translations account for 25 per cent of their choices. There’s only one drawback, which is that the Richard and Judy Book Club continues today exclusively with W H Smith. In the meantime the TV Book Club set up by Amanda Ross of Cactus (Richard and Judy’s original producer) continues. Its viewers have voted The Legacy by Katherine Webb as their top summer read. Webb said: ‘As an unknown debut author, the TV Book Club has given me invaluable exposure to a wider audience, and I'm enormously grateful to have been selected. The success of the book has meant I've been able to give up my day job to concentrate on writing full time. This really is the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition for me.’ The Legacy has sold more than 75,000 copies. These are not the heady numbers of the original Richard and Judy show, but at least the TV Book Club is publicising books and books by unknowns at that. And what of Oprah? She’s due to announce her next pick on 17 September and there’s speculation that it will be Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom. It would be an interesting turn-up for the books if she did, as in 2001, Franzen famously said that: "I considered turning it down" when he was offered a spot on Winfrey's show and was was then told that he would not be invited onto it. No-one knows what might happen this time around. Whatever the ins and outs of all this, the big book clubs have succeeded in selling millions of books and should be welcomed by everyone connected to books. They have also cast a spotlight on new authors, helping many of the big names of today to launch their writing careers. Catering for people who read Last week saw a flurry of articles about libraries in the UK press, starting with Culture Minister Ed Vaizey’s views on libraries and the future, which included proposals to cut costs by giving libraries to communities to run and to run them from pubs and shops. Public libraries have long been at risk, but in the current economic climate they seem absolutely endangered. If the Department for Culture, Media and Sport withdraws their support, many local authorities will find libraries a soft target when they start to make cuts.There is even some doubt about the DCMS’s figures, which claimed that the proportion of adults visiting a library decreased from 48.2% in 2005/06 to 39.4% in 2009/10. This seems like a terrible decline, which could well lead you to think that no-one wants to use libraries. In fact though, as Rachel Cooke has pointed out in the Observer: ‘ In 1996/7 there were 92.3m books available for lending in the UK; in 2007/8 that figure fell to 75.8m. The result of this is that fewer people borrow books – at some councils the number of book loans to adults has fallen below 2.5 a year – at which point it is very easy for a council to claim a library is poorly used and should be closed down.’Many library campaigners believe that it is the declining expenditure on book stock which has affected the number of people who use libraries and this certainly makes sense. Most people who use libraries still go to them to borrow books – and why should they bother if they can’t find the book they want or may have to wait months for it? Increasing prosperity has also played a part in this, and so has cheaper book prices – it’s all too easy for people to buy paperbacks, if they can afford them, and to pass them on to family and friends. The situation is however slightly more complicated than it at first appears. Children do use the library and the recent National Year of Reading was responsible for a substantial increase in the number of children who have a library card. In contrast to the adult figures, and despite the fact that children's books account for only 1.6% of councils' library spend, visits among children aged 11-15 stayed pretty much the same over the five years, at 71.6%.Library campaigner Tim Coates told the BBC: ‘I believe we will lose between 600 to a 1,000 libraries in the next 12-18 months and that may be only the beginning, we are seeing the destruction of the public library service.’ The story has been picked up by the mainstream press who have also reported on Ed Vaizey's library support initiative, which proposes cutting costs by giving libraries to communities to run amid other measures. His ideas are anathema to the library profession and they clearly endanger the service, which needs to be freely available and administered by people who know what they are doing, ie librarians.Tangled up in the figures, however, are some far more complicated realities. As John Harris has pointed out in the Guardian: ‘The DCMS figures suggest that library visitors had dropped 25%. This is nearly true when you look at the drop in respondents to the survey of people saying that they are regular users of the library. But it is nowhere near true if you look at visitor counts in libraries. The 2009 actuals are available and the drop is from 342,168,000 in 2005/06 to 324,991,000 in 2008/09, a drop of 5%. Or put in another light we are still getting over 5 visits for every single member of the UK population.’ As the Good Library Blog put it when commenting on the
DCMS report: ‘The very same report records that reading is the most popular
cultural activity for most people in the country and three quarters of people
read, 80% of those every week. So why are libraries unpopular? Because they
don't cater for people who read. It's blooming obvious.’
Seierstad to pay punitive damages Åsne Seierstad, the author of The Bookseller of Kabul, has been ordered to pay more than £26,000 in punitive damages. As Conor Foley in the Guardian put it, this news will be greeted 'as either a blow to artistic freedom of expression or a victory for the world's misrepresented and powerless poor. The facts of the case are clear. Seierstad set out to write a book about Afghan society and in particular about one family’s experience. She was offered hospitality by the family of a Kabul bookseller and lived with them for five months whilst researching her book.' Foley, who has lived in Afghanistan and written about his time there, comments that: ‘The biggest conceptual weakness of Seierstad's book is that she does not seem to have understood the absolute centrality of the concepts of "hospitality" and "namos" (literally the "status, chastity, purity, virtuousness, and nobleness of the female members of the family") to Afghan society. The idea that you could accept someone's hospitality and then spy on them to violate their namos is completely shocking and makes a mockery of all her other claims of insight into the society in which she was living.’ The Bookseller of Kabul quickly became the bestselling nonfiction book in Norwegian history. It was translated into 29 languages and topped the international bestseller charts, as well as selling on strongly ever since. The author has made a great deal of money out of it and claims that the issues which relate to it are to do with journalistic freedom and integrity. But the fact is that she chose to give her book fictional elements, whilst at the same time drawing very explicity on material she had gathered during her sojourn in Shah Muhammad Rais’s house. She defended herself thus: ‘It is hard as a journalist to be judged like this. I can insist to everyone that it is just three small, concrete points that the judge has found against me, but it will always be written about me now that I have been judged for breaking privacy and had my accuracy questioned, and that's not a good thing as a journalist.’ Amelia Hill, also writing in the Guardian has put her finger on it: ‘Her outrage at the way women are treated in the book crackles on every page, but because she has written herself out of the narrative, her highly subjective account could be accused as masquerading as an objective report.’ But should any writer be free to use any material, however private, in any way they like? Beyond the arguments about Afghan culture and foreign interference and misrepresentation, there is the question of whether the book is libellous. It appears that the judge thought it was and his verdict has opened the way for other members of the Bookseller’s family to sue Seierstad. But the author also wrote about their thoughts, going inside the head of each character, attributing thoughts and feelings to them without the filter of her own voice – as if she were writing a novel. This seems to move the book into a different area altogether, fatally confusing fact and fiction. Just one big bestselling author The British independent publisher Quercus has just announced stellar results: revenue has almost tripled to £15m ($24m) for the first six months of the year, making a profit of £3.4m ($5.41m) compared with a loss of £100,000 ($159,120) in the same period in 2009. Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, which last month accounted for £1.57m ($2.49m) of sales, takes a large part of the credit for this. Mark Smith, chief executive of Quercus, said: ‘Our results continue to be driven by double-digit growth across the business and, most significantly, by the continued success of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, for which we own the global English language rights. These books represent the three bestselling fiction titles in the UK over the last six months, and Larsson is the first to have sold more than one million Kindle e-books through Amazon." Larsson has been a global phenomenon. The three volumes of the Millennium trilogy are reported to have sold 25 million copies worldwide in many different languages. A Swedish film of the first book has already been shown in cinemas and the second is to follow shortly. New film versions, presumably with Hollywood stars, are now being prepared in the States. The fans are hungry for more, but it doesn’t look as if more exists. Larson’s girlfriend Eva Gabrielson has not inherited anything from Larsson’s estate because they were not married and he did not leave a will. She did say at one point that there were 200 pages of a new novel but appears determined to ensure that this is not published. So Larson is a global phenomenon powerful enough to change the fortunes of a new and relatively small publisher. Quercus took a chance on the trilogy, as English language publishers do on any translation they publish (see News Review 31 May 2010), and their faith has been amply rewarded. What is rather remarkable is that the books have touched such a public nerve all across the world. They are readable with rather baroque plots, quite big and rather long-winded. There is something very Swedish about the characters, the heroine Lisbeth Salander, who is tough and resourceful but damaged, and Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist rather like Larsson himself. There’s enough blood and death to satisfy anyone and too much for many crime readers. None of this explains the books’ appeal, so it seems to be down to sheer storytelling. It’s encouraging for writers everywhere that an author like this can command such huge sales. It’s tragic that the author did not live to see his amazing success and very sad that his girlfriend will not benefit from his sales, as he would undoubtedly have wished. But at least readers have the great enjoyment of reading the books, which are perfect for summer reading. A tipping-point for e-books? It will surprise no-one who read the STOP PRESS at the end of last week’s News Review to know that Andre Wylie’s Odyssey Editions and what’s happening to e-books have dominated the publishing news agenda this week. Using the aggressive approach which has earned him the soubriquet ‘The Jackal’, Andrew Wylie decided to push ahead with launching his new imprint, designed specifically to seize his authors’ e-book rights and offer them a better deal than they were getting from publishers. Wylie represents over 750 mostly quite literary authors, including many famous literary estates , so the new imprint would not be short of material. In taking this action Wylie has offended publishers, some of whom complained about it, and Random House have taken the extraordinary action of saying that none of their book companies around the world would do any deals with the Wylie Agency until this was resolved. He’s also upset booksellers, as Odyssey Editions will be sold exclusively through Amazon’s Kindle. The publishers’ position revolves around a specific contractual point. Many older author contracts do not mention e-books, which had not been thought of at the time the contracts were drawn up. Publishers claim that they are included in the grant of volume rights and that they are specifically part of electronic rights, which are often mentioned, but you could argue this either way. What is clear though, as was pointed out by Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press, was that publishers buy rights in a title, not an edition. All the overheads involved in initially producing a book except the actual printing costs are still there for e-books and that is why publishers argue that they are part of the rights they have acquired in purchasing volume rights. Amazon have come back into the fray by announcing a new, improved, cheaper version of the Kindle, which will be available outside the US too later this month. In the American market e-book sales are already becoming substantial, with first James Patterson and then Stieg Larsson having now sold a million e-books. There has however been a lot of argument about e-book royalties. Publishers have been offering 25%, but many agents think they should be 50% or even more. It looks like publishers will have to offer more, but they are reluctant to do so because there are the general start-up costs of the book to consider, even though making the e-book costs very little once you have the text digitised. What they are really worrying about it whether the e-book version replaces the hardback or the paperback edition. This may seem a slightly academic question at the moment, but it doesn’t look as if it’s going to be so for long. Mike Shatzkin in his Idealogical blog said last week: ‘Even if the publishers pushing back manage to win this round with Wylie, and they well might, I don’t think the 25% royalty can hold for very long. As more and more of the business shifts to ebooks, companies without the legacy costs that big publishers have will find it easy to pay higher royalties than that and agents will keep doing the math about how many sales they can afford to lose and still end up ahead in dollars with a higher ebook royalty. As Amazon should have learned in their fight with Macmillan in January, it isn’t smart business to draw a line in the sand marking a position you ultimately can’t defend. I hope every big publisher in town will take that lesson on board… When ebook sales get to 50% of the total (2014-15), even 50% is not going to cut it.’ Are we getting close to a tipping-point? Amazon, again A recent article by British publisher Colin Robinson in The Nation has raised many issues about Amazon. Almost always in the news, the company has also just made an announcement about its e-book sales outpacing hardback sales. Even though books now represent only 25% of Amazon’s revenue, they were its starting-point and are still its bedrock. Amazon has however shown how domination in one area of internet retailing can lead seamlessly to another by adding new categories, the latest being groceries. It’s all based on making things extremely easy and good-value for the customer and, when we’re all so busy, it works. Amazon has grown fifteenfold in the last decade, keeping pace with growth in internet use. It grew its revenues by a colossal 28% last year alone and in 2009 its sales were $24.5bn (£16.07bn). To get some measure of what this means, in 2008 total sales by all US bookstores were less than $17bn (£11.15bn), making Amazon by some margin the largest bookseller in the world. But does Amazon use its huge power wisely? Unfortunately there are plenty of signs that it is single-minded in pursuit of its own interests. Very little of this is in the public domain because publishers are frightened of going up against Amazon publicly, the cost is too great. Over the years there has been relentless pressure over discounts and publishers are bullied into giving way. If they do not, either their books will not be sold on the site or the buy buttons will be removed. The only single instance there seems to be of a publisher standing up to Amazon and getting away with it was quite recently, in connection with e-books. John Sargent, head of Macmillan US, confronted Amazon on the price of e-books, which they wanted to price under $10, threatening simultaneous hardback editions by undercutting them. Sargent stood firm, at a time when five US publishers had just concluded an agency agreement with Apple, and Amazon thought better of it and restored the buy buttons. Amazon said at the time: ‘We will have to capitulate because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles’ – an odd way of putting it as authors’ contracts with publishers do of course confer a ‘monopoly’, ie a license to publish them exclusively. It looks as if Apple entering the ring with the iPad may have changed the situation and Google are also said to be planning to get into internet bookselling. Apple is also doing well at the moment, having just posted gains, with revenue jumping 61% to $15.7 billion in the third quarter. Competition is a good thing, so let’s hope that their new ventures do well.STOP PRESS Agent Andrew Wylie's setting-up of Odyssey Books, the
agency's own e-book publisher, delivering exclusively through Amazon's Kindle,
has shocked the publishing world. International publisher Random House has said
that it: 'undermines [Random House's] longstanding commitments to and
investments in our authors, and it establishes this Agency as our direct
competitor... Random House on a worldwide basis will not be entering into
any new English-language business agreements with the Wylie Agency until this
situation is resolved.' Colin Robinson’s article in The Nation Big is big A recent study published in the Bookseller shows that Pearson has retained its position as the world’s largest book publisher with sales of €5.3 billion (£4,476 bn or $6,854 bn). In spite of all the changes in the publishing world, the ranking is much the same as last year, with Reed Elsevier ranked second with €5,024 billion (£5,948 bn or $6,497 bn), followed by ThomsonReuters and Wolters Kluwer. These are not names that trip off writers’ tongues and that’s because these giant companies’ revenues come from educational, professional and academic publishing, rather than trade or general publishing. At 5th and 6th in the rankings are Bertelsmann and Hachette Livre, respectively German and French companies, which between them control many of the publishing names which are familiar throughout the trade publishing world – Random House, Orion, Little Brown and so on. HarperCollins, owned by News International, has slipped from 16th to 19th ranking. These big companies have not shown much growth during the last year of recession but there is movement in the chart, although the double-digit growth is restricted to big publishers in Asia. Ruediger Wischenbart, who compiles the data for French trade magazine Livres Hebdo, thinks that the companies which have achieved top of chart positions have done so because they have successfully adapted to the global environment. They have shed national identities and successfully become international corporations, meaning that ‘publishing has become truly international at last’. Wischenbart sees this as an ongoing process. It’s remarkable how truly international the list is and no one country dominates the top, with Germany, the UK and the Netherlands each the home to two groups and the US with only one, although eight of those top ten generate the majority of their book revenues within the US. Italy, Spain and Canada also have one each. What does this mean for writers, many of whom might feel that it has nothing much to do with them? It does show how much of publishing is aligned more with education and professional areas rather than the entertainment industry, which is where writers create books that people want to read, as opposed to books they have to. Perhaps in some sense it is now becoming so impossible to get your book published by one of these behemoths that it doesn’t really matter which one is coming out on top in terms of global domination of the book market. But the comments about internationalism above show these giants’ focus, which is on a global vision of the future. Writers can look to the local, the small presses and independent bookshops for support, not to these giant organisations which have become increasingly corporate. Don’t write off Random House or Little Brown, for instance, but do realise that their acquisitions will be made through agents, and top agents at that, who are really part of the same corporate world. Spotlight on new prizes Following on from our look at prizes and what effect they have last week, this week’s column will be devoted to new prizes. There has been a proliferation of new prizes launched over the last few years, so there’s quite a lot to evaluate. Some of them focus on new work but only a proportion of them are open for entries from unpublished writers. A couple of fairly new prizes which have been going for some years have enough track-record to give some indication of their effectiveness. The Caine Prize for African Writing, now in its tenth year, has just been awarded to Sierrra Leone’s Olufemi Terry. The winner gets £10,000 and this Prize has succeeded in throwing a spotlight on African writers and making their work more visible internationally. Also worth £10,000 to the winner, the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Writers, which is awarded biennially and is now in its third year, is designed to support new writers. It has a commercial bent, in keeping with the work of the late agent/publisher whose will funded it, and seeks to ensure that the winner is liberated from financial worries and therefore free to write happily and securely. Books submitted for this one can only be entered by publishers and it does seem to have had a good effect on the careers of the winners. Then there are three completely new prizes. The Walter Scott Prize is a brand new one and claims to be the fifth largest annual fiction prize in the UK after the Man Booker, the Orange and the Costa Book of the Year award. The prize of £25,000 for a historical novel is sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch. The Duke said: ‘Walter Scott was the founding father of the historical novel. Waverley, published in 1814 and completed at Abbotsford, was the world's first bestseller, the first novel to make novel reading respectable for a mass audience… it is I believe a wonderful way of reminding the world of the profound importance of this great house and of the man who created it.’ The first winner is Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning
Wolf Hall and the author said: Certainly this prize has succeeded in throwing a spotlight on historical fiction and appears to be the only prize for this category. The new DSC Prize for South Asian Literature celebrates the rich and varied literature from, and connected to, the subcontinent but written in English or translated into it. The prize will award US$ 50,000 to the winner starting from 2011. It’s open to authors of any ethnicity from any country for a novel which predominantly features themes based on South Asian culture, politics, history, or people. South Asia is defined as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives and Afghanistan. Clearly this one is intended to put a spotlight on South Asian writing. The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, set up last year, are eligible to self-published poetry pamphlets. Finally, there’s the new Picador Poetry Prize, which fortunately is eligible to unpublished writers. The prize is publication of a poetry collection with a small advance and this one has a strong focus on new poets, whom it is intended to find and encourage. All these prizes seem to help writers, although unfortunately most of them will only accept entries from books which have already found publishers. www.picador.com/Poetry/prize/picadorpoetryprize.aspxWhat price literary prizes? The literary world is awash with literary prizes, with new ones being set up every year. But what effect do these prizes have and do they actually sell more books? The answer is mixed. Some of the biggest prizes do have a major effect on sales but others have surprisingly little impact. The €100,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which bills itself as the world’s largest prize for a single novel, was won recently by a novel in translation which will probably not sell in really significant numbers. Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twins is not likely to have the kind of bestsellerdom granted to other lesser prizes. The Nobel Prize for Literature is an immensely prestigious and valuable prize (worth slightly more than €1million, or $1.4 million in 2009), but winning it has a rather mixed effect on the winner’s sales, perhaps because the writer who is chosen is often worthy and literary rather than readable. Winners are often writers in non-English languages, which limits their appeal in the English-speaking world (see News Review 31 May). Doris Lessing was a recent exception to this rule and the great advantage of the Nobel Prize is that it is generally awarded to a writer towards the end of their career, so there is a wealth of backlist for readers to rediscover.There’s recently been a bit of a dust-up between the Man Booker and the Orange Prizes in the UK, with the Orange winners being shown to create more sales. The top seller of all the Orange winners was Andrea Levy’s Small Island, which sold 834,958 copies in all in the UK, well outselling this year’s massive Man Booker winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. In terms of Booker winners, only the million-selling Life of Pi has sold more copies than any of the Orange Prize winners. In some ways this is not surprising, as the Orange is usually awarded to something at the more popular and readable end of the literary spectrum. Submissions for the Orange Prize must be by women writers and the books do usually have a big female audience, and are beloved of reading groups. Why is it that these two big prizes in the UK sell so many books, whereas there is nothing like the same effect for winners of America’s highly-regarded National Book Awards? The answer seems to be promotion and integrated promotion at that, which brings the shortlists and winners to the attention of a large audience through more sympathetic and often extensive media coverage, tied in with strong in-store promotion. Even in terms of poetry, the T S Eliot and Forward Prizes get more coverage in the UK media than any poetry prize in the US does in that country, although the well-supported Griffin Prizes in Canada do also make it into the news. It looks as if the key things are the amount of media coverage a prize can garner and the actual size of the potential audience for that kind of writing. Next week: New prizes - do they benefit unpublished writers? Publishers' acquisitions slow to a trickle An article in a recent edition of the Bookseller has highlighted the ongoing pressure on acquisitions in publishing houses, which has now become acute. Helen Garnons-Williams, Bloomsbury fiction editorial director said: ‘Our entire business is based on confidence, whether among the publishers or the agents, and pretty much everyone is wobbling because no one knows what will sell.’ Auctions have often faltered because the recession is causing a massive loss of confidence and publishers are becoming increasingly risk-averse. Everyone concerned has become too focused on playing it safe. The Bookseller reported that one unnamed trade insider had said that agents should take some blame for lacklustre submissions. ‘Over the last 12 months and longer, agents have been steering writers to write in a particular genre. They are being directed to fill a gap in the market rather than writing the book they want to write. But the novels that work are those written with no interference, those which are different and new—that’s why publishing is a game of risk, not a science.’ Although unpublished writers complain about the difficulties they are experiencing in finding an agent to take them on, agents know that in this situation they have to be very cautious about taking on new authors. If they can’t sell them, then they will have invested their time and a proportion of the overhead costs of running the agency without making any return. The backlist, which used to be a solid source of income for any agency with an established list, is now faltering. The midlist, mentioned above, has become a graveyard, and one of the saddest things is the number of authors who have published solidly, if not spectacularly, over the years and made a modest living but now find that their publishers don’t want to continue with them. Even worse, their agents may cut them loose and then it is very hard for them to find another agent and resume their writing career. This spring has seen some of the worst sales figures for some time, at a time when the book trade was supposed to be coming out of recession, with May in particular proving a disaster. The auctions do still go on in a reduced fashion, but it is the mid-list which is suffering. No-one wants to consider taking on an author who will need to build his or her audience and improve their craft over a number of novels - and thus a number of years. But most authors cannot produce a bestseller first time out, even though that is effectively what the trade is looking for. Behind the scenes, the publishers’ lists have already been cut radically and may well be cut again. Contracts are mostly not cancelled but books are postponed to a future year, meaning that editors already have a full schedule and effectively stop buying until they have caught up with themselves. It’s a difficult situation all round and only improved sales are likely to do much to remedy it. In the meantime, if you have a completed manuscript and think it is ready for publication, it is worth putting some serious time into considering other options, such as self-publishing. Books in the home key for children A major recent study led by Nevada University has showed that regular access to books in the home had a direct effect on children’s long-term educational achievement. Involving 70,000 people in 27 countries, it showed that the effect of having 500 books in the home was to increase by three years the length of time that these children subsequently spent in education. The former Children’s Laureate in the UK, Michael Rosen, has said that many pupils now go all the way through their formative years at school without reading a single novel. It is feared that some teachers are being forced to dump books - and teach children using basic worksheets - to boost their performance in literacy tests, and that school libraries are not making available the wide range of novels that children need to develop an enjoyment of reading. Rosen’s Just Read series for the BBC showed how the children in an ordinary Cardiff primary school could be encouraged to read when reading of all kinds was put at the centre of the curriculum. Another recent study by Michael Norris, an American publishing expert, published in Book Publishing Report, highlighted the importance of letting children choose the books they want to read. This means that their reading is guided by their own taste, rather than by what they think they should be reading, or their parents would want them to read, and enables them to develop that taste and to learn to enjoy books for their own sake. The Nevada University study suggests that filling homes with a range of novels and reference books may be the difference between leaving school at 18 and going to university, which can be worth up to £200,000 ($291,000) more in lifetime earnings. This effect can be observed regardless of the parents’ own education, occupation and social class but the impact varied from two years in the US to six years in China. As few as 20 books would make a difference, meaning that this is one of the cheapest ways of investing in children’s education across the world. Would you buy an e-reader? The excitement surrounding the arrival of the i-Pad in countries outside the US has caught the attention of the media, reinforcing the idea that a mass audience is waiting to buy one and start using it to read e-books. The arrival of the Kindle aroused similar expectations and many articles presaging the end of the printed book. Figures from a recent study in the UK dispute this though. ‘Reading the Future’, the Bookseller’s third annual survey into what readers and book-buyers are thinking, contradicts this view and shows that the publishing world is much more focused on e-books than book-buyers are. Three-quarters of readers are not aware of the Amazon Kindle. Three in every five have not heard of the Sony Reader. The great majority of consumers are unlikely or dead set against buying an e-book reader. The sample of 3,000 used for the study was reached through an online poll, so its participants would only have been people who are comfortable online and presumably relatively savvy technically speaking. Interestingly, it is not the youngest readers who are most interested in the idea of an e-reader, it is 41-60 year-olds. Evidence shows that price is a major factor and that the e-reader needs to be sold for under £100 if it is to get major take-up in the UK. Men are much more likely to buy one than women, the 25-45s are most likely to buy one in the next 12 months and the over 45s are most likely to say that will definitely not buy one. So why is the publishing world so mesmerised by e-book sales and how quickly might they develop? Nobody really knows the answer to that but a lot of forward thinking assumes that they will boom and replace printed books. Publishers therefore need to get ready for the different world we’ll all be in soon. Are the survey’s responses just the effect of rather conservative readers in the UK? There is some evidence to support this. In the US e-book sales do seem to have taken off, with Dan Brown’s e-book sales of The Lost Symbol greater than its hardback sales just after it was published. In Japan e-books are very popular and a vast market has developed for e-books to be read on mobile phones. There’s also the threat of the giant global companies who are now active in the book area and who have huge amounts of cash – Apple with $41.6bn, Google with $26.5bn and Amazon with $5.6bn. For all of them, except perhaps Amazon, which looms so large in the book trade’s consciousness, books are not a primary focus but a secondary one, a means of extending their empire rather than an intrinsic part of what they do. So, would you use an e-reader? The response to this seems to be quite a personal one. It may be cheaper in the long run, which is a real consideration for heavy readers, and very convenient if you’re going on holiday. But many people are very attached to the idea of reading a print book and also like to have the book on their shelves after they’ve read it. Who knows how many of these will stick to print books over the years? You could deduce that a large proportion of the reading public will transfer to e-books, so as a publisher you’d want to make sure you were catering for them. Or you could feel that a majority of readers will still want the printed page. Because it’s a matter of individual behaviour in a changing environment, no-one knows for sure what will happen next. Writers in translation hit the headlines Stieg Larsson notwithstanding, what are the chances of a translated author selling well in the big English-speaking markets of the US and the UK? The received wisdom has always been that translations into English are tough going financially, with it proving virtually impossible to make the figures work without an English-language publisher on both sides of the Atlantic to pay for the costs of translation. Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan, did find a large audience, but he wrote, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns in English. Meanwhile, Pascal Mercier, a Swiss philosopher, wrote Night Train to Lisbon in French, only to sell two million copies in Germany alone. The acclaim of the recent 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which went to the French writer Philippe Claudel for Brodeck’s Report, translated by John Cullen, do show that there is increasing interest in the more literary end of the translation spectrum, but it’s noticeable that most of the publishers with books in contention are small presses. The Prize has in fact been won two years running by Maclehose Press, part of newcomer Quercus, which has also benefited from the ongoing sales bonanza of the Larsson books. Translating out of English is another matter and there are a number of internationally bestselling American and British authors, such as J K Rowling and John Grisham, who are translated all over the world. With the spread of English as a world language though, more and more people want to read these bestsellers when they first come out, in English, so the translators have to work fast to make sure that the translated edition does not lose its market. Novelist and translator Tim Parks produced an interesting article recently in the Observer, in which he argued that translators were not given their due: ‘Writing my own novels has always required a huge effort of organisation and imagination; but, sentence by sentence, translation is intellectually more taxing.’ Harvill Secker and Waterstone’s have teamed up to launch a new prize for young translators. This first year the language is Spanish, entrants have to translate a short story by Matias Nespolo and the winner will receive £1,000. If you’re interested in world literature and would like to think about these issues, have a look at & Other Stories, a publisher and book club which focuses on writing from across the world. www.harvillseckeryoungtranslatorsprize.com www.andotherstories.org/Launch of We give books The Penguin Group and the Pearson Foundation have launched an interesting new charitable venture, designed both to get children reading and to encourage them to become charitable givers. When a child reads a book online, they are able to donate another book to be sent to a reading charity and can choose from four options as to where their this book is sent. The site is free, so the child reads a book, as well as giving one. The American version of the site concentrates more on American charities, including Haiti Learning Spaces, Books Across America, Room to Read and Books for Asia and the UK one offers Haiti Learning Spaces, Rom to Read, which helps build libraries in Southern Africa, and the Asia Foundation's Books for Asia programme, as well as Tinga Tinga Tales, supporting the Pearson Teacher Education Programme in East Africa. The more you read, the more they give. First you choose the literacy organisation you want to support, then you choose a book and read it with a child. The books are chosen from Penguin and Dorling Kindersley’s backlist. Every campaign has its own donation goal. Once a campaign you’ve supported reaches its goal, you and your child will receive a personalised letter of thanks for your effort. The site will have new books added each month. If you’re a member, you will be sent an email automatically to tell you when new books arrive. The aim is to donate more than one million books in the initiative's first year. Visitors to the site will determine the volume shared with each organisation, as each time parents and youngsters read a new book they have the opportunity to select the organisation they wish their reading to support. It’s really a very simple idea and should generate a lot of reading and a lot of giving. A poll has been carried out to find out what parents’ attitudes are and it found that 90% of parents want to raise children who become "giving" adults, and 68% of parents believe a strong connection exists between reading to children and their later becoming charitable adults. Yet it’s disturbing that the poll also reveals that many parents are not aware how reading and specific daily parenting practices can achieve this goal. Other studies reveal the clear effect that reading with your child will have on that child’s educational progress and confidence, but there are still many adults who do not recognise this, or do not act upon it with their own children. (The sites appear identical except that they are linked to different charities. Literary agent steals over £500K The case of Robin Price, a Devon-based literary agent who has just appeared in court charged with stealing over half a million pounds from a number of clients, is a salutary one for unpublished authors. Over a period of several years, Price had bamboozled sums as large as £293,603 out of hopeful authors. The renegade agent is accused of charging authors for marketing and editing their work and then pretending to send it out to publishers, whilst doing nothing of the sort. It is claimed that he used the names of published authors such as James Follett to establish his bona fide but in fact these authors had either had nothing to do with the agency or had disassociated themselves from it. Price’s main way of extracting money from authors was to claim that their work was to be filmed and persuading them to invest in the production. He seems to have been immensely plausible and to have been so convincing that authors continued to deal with him even after his alleged frauds had been discovered. His agency also changed names to cover its tracks, from Avalon Associates/Avalon Films to Media Arts International and then Prospero Films. American agent Martha Ivery, aka Kelly O’Donnell , managed to con 300 victims out of three-quarters of a million dollars before she too was rumbled. Her fee-charging agency passed authors on to two vanity publishers also owned by her which charged several thousand dollars to publish their books. So, how can authors avoid the pitfalls and identify fraudulent agents? This is a particularly important question in these difficult times, when it is really hard for writers to get an agent to take them on board and writers tend to feel grateful to anyone who shows an interest in their work. The first rule should be that no self-respecting agency is going to charge you a fee to read your work. They may be overwhelmed by more authors than they can take on, but agents have to exercise their own judgement in deciding whom to represent, and it has to be authors they believe they can sell. It’s therefore inherently fraudulent for agents to charge a reading fee, giving the impression that this will lead to preferential treatment of their work. There’s nothing wrong with charging for editorial work in itself (WritersServices makes its living from doing just that) but this should not be linked to the agent's decision to take an author on. Any established agency will not charge for this. Finally, it’s important to make a distinction between vanity publishing, where you pay someone to publish your work, and self-publishing, where you do it yourself. You should always be sceptical about what publishers say if they ask you to pay for publication – vanity publishers tend to con quite large amounts of money out of people and then do very little to market or sell their book. You’re better of with self-publishing, which is much cheaper and keeps everything under your own control. Publishing Scams: Six Red Flags That Scream "Rip Off" Writer Beware, a website sponsored by the Science Fiction Writers of America WritersPrintShop, our self-publishing service Australian writer hits the jackpot Every so often a completely unknown writer hits the headlines after years of trying to break through and the dream come true provides fresh hope for many others. Recently it was the turn of Australian Rebecca James, whose new book Beautiful Malice was sold to Allen & Unwin, making her literally cry with joy. The timing couldn’t have been more propitious, as she and her partner had just closed down their struggling kitchen design business. This was just the beginning though. A week later Faber acquired the UK rights, then the German auction went through the roof. As James said: ‘That’s when it went really crazy, big amounts of money. Hilary and I didn’t sleep for a week. It was like winning the Lottery… one minute you’re going: "Shall we sell our house?", "Shall we sell our car and buy bikes?", and the next there are these ridiculous amounts of money.' In November 2009 the Sydney Morning Herald published an article about how her novel had started ‘a worldwide bidding war which has pushed advances on her manuscript past $1 million and led the Wall Street Journal to wonder if she is the next J K Rowling’. Rights have now been sold in 35 countries. Rebecca James has been through some difficult times though. At one point she was at home and struggling to get on with her writing whilst coping with small children. ‘I had four boys under four and I needed some head space, I guess, some creative outlet that wasn’t changing nappies.’ When she was ready to submit Beautiful Malice it was still hard going though, partly because the book is in that tricky territory between adult and young adult. She first approached seven agents in Australia and about 70 in the US, before turning to UK agents and eventually placing it with Jo Unwin of Conville & Walsh. And now the pressure is on to produce the second book – the kind of problem that more authors would like to have… 'Content is being devalued by technology' Mike Shatzkin is well-known in the publishing business on both sides of the pond for his visionary and often uncomfortable views of the future. Unable to make it across the Atlantic to deliver a speech in London because of the ash, he asked someone else to deliver his speech and it can be found on his blog. And uncomfortable it certainly is this time. I n a sobering analysis of the next 20 years, Shatzkin says there is one inexorable truth: ‘The price consumers will be willing to pay for content is going to go down because of the laws of supply and demand.’Shatzkin’s view is that: ‘Content will be distributed digitally and if distribution of all content is digital, and it is hard to see why it would not be, then the list of businesses that exist today that won’t exist in 20 years is a long one. Bookstores will exist, but they’ll be curiosity shops carrying used books and perhaps a handful of printed-on-demand newer items for the few print-pervy holdouts that remain.’ It is publishers rather than writers who will be most affected by this change : ‘The change for publishers, though, is far more profound than a simple change in delivery mechanism would suggest. Publishers, indeed all commercial media in our lifetime, have been defined primarily by format. Some do books; some do magazines; some do newspapers. Others called producers do movies or television or radio. The capital and skill set requirements for a format effectively channelled the media company. For the most part, big media was not topic- or subject-specific; it was format-specific.’This will change because format will become irrelevant if it is all digital and can easily be reproduced in different formats. Shatzkin says: ‘ Here’s the important point for publishers to take on board. Content is being devalued by technology. This is inexorable. It is not anybody’s fault. It is not in anybody’s power to change it. The price consumers will be willing to pay for content is going to go down because of the laws of supply and demand. It is true that professional content creators can benefit from efficiencies and cost savings offered by the same technologies, so the loss of revenue doesn’t necessarily translate into an equivalent loss of income or profit. But the general direction is one way: down.’He argues that content will be devalued and that it will be communities that matter and that they will be in a position to get what they want. Owning a web community which is both a principal source of content and provides the audience for it will be the way forward. But publishers need to start thinking hard about the future, because if they don’t they will be overtaken by the vast changes occurring at a rapid speed. Authors won’t necessarily need them, so publishers will have to reinvent themselves in a way that makes full play of what they can offer, in terms of marketing, publicity and sales skills. Mike Shatzkin’s blog http://www.idealog.com/blog/ Under the volcano/Historian trashes rivals It’s been a rather surreal week in the publishing world, as the suspension of flights destroyed what was to have been the best London Book Fair ever. The timing couldn’t have been worse, as the ash from the Icelandic volcano descended just as international publishers were leaving for the airport to get to London for the Fair on Monday to Wednesday of last week. Some publishers reported longer meetings with those who did make it, but most agreed that it was a disaster. Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, who was stranded in New York for the duration of the fair, said: ‘Mail, phone and fax have made our work easier but there is nothing like being together personally. It's so important to create word of mouth.’ Marco Schneiders, editorial director at German publisher Lübbe, said: ‘Digital developments make a lot of things redundant that we are used to. But there will always be the need for book fairs because the personal contact is a factor that shouldn't be underestimated’. Some publishers were already looking to Book Expo America at the end of May and to Frankfurt in October to carry out their business, but Faber chief executive Stephen Page said: ‘Frankfurt will have a bigger role in maintaining these relationships’, but he did not regard BEA as ‘a credible alternative’. Simon & Schuster publisher Suzanne Baboneau agreed with this, saying: ‘BEA is a very different kind of fair—it's more about booksellers. It's not a rights fair, it's not a substitute for London or Frankfurt.’ Historian trashes rivals The second half of the week has been enlivened by the extraordinary story of Orlando Figes, distinguished historian known for his books on Russia. Poisonous reviews of his rivals’ books had been posted anonymously on Amazon, but using the pen-name ‘Historian’ aka Orlando-Birkbeck’. One of the books trashed by the anonymous reviewer was Comrades by Professor Robert Service (regarded by many as the other big wheel in the field of Russian history studies), which was condemned on Amazon as ‘an awful book’, whilst Service’s biography of Stalin was said to be ‘rather dull’. At first Figes said that his wife, by all accounts a blameless lawyer at Cambridge, had been responsible for the unpleasant reviews, but then finally he confessed yesterday that he was personally to blame. It is hard to see how the historian could have thought he would get away with this. The world of academia is notably back-stabbing, but this takes things to a new level of vituperation. And how on earth would Orlando-Birkbeck not have been traced back to Figes? Amazon has often been blamed for its practice of allowing anonymous reviews which mean that its reviews are vulnerable to this sort of hijacking, but the whole story shows great naivety as well as spite on Figes’ part. London Book Fair volcanic ash disaster The subject of this week’s News Review was to have been the London Book Fair (LBF), how it has grown in importance and numbers and what its role is in relation to other international book fairs. But nature, with supreme indifference to the problems of human beings, has decreed that the volcanic eruption in Iceland should make it impossible for anyone to fly in and out of the UK. It's the worse traffic chaos since the Second World War. As the ban on flights in most of northern Europe was first imposed and then extended, publishers from all over the world watched with incredulity as their flights were cancelled and it gradually became clear that the ban was unlikely to lift in time for people to get to the Fair. Alistair Burtenshaw, Group Exhibition Director for the London Book Fair, said: ‘While I cannot pretend that this is not an unwelcome intervention to the running of the London Book Fair I also have to say that our view is that the show must – and will – go on with as much help from us as we can possibly give to ensure it runs as smoothly as possible within the circumstances.’ Some publishers from overseas have been in London for
several days already, meeting agents and fellow publishers before the fair, but
most will have been scheduled to travel on Saturday or Sunday to be there for
the Fair’s start on Monday. This year’s LBF had been billed as the biggest in the fair’s history. The fair management was expecting 1,672 visiting companies, 7% up on 2009, of whom around 54% would have been from overseas. A healthy number of 775 UK companies have taken stands, as against 300 expected from the US, but it looks like only British publishers will be out in force and for them it will be ‘business as usual’ in so far as there is anyone to do any business with. For the key role of the biggest international book fairs is, as it always has been, subsidiary rights deals rather than straightforward selling, although a fair amount of that goes on too. Translation rights are key, with foreign publishers out in force, and the London Book Fair has now assumed a role as the spring meeting-ground for the international publishers and agents who will congregate again at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. In particular the Fair is important for illustrated book publishers, who often need to build co-edition print runs in a range of different languages to make their books economic propositions. Writers are not particularly encouraged to go to book fairs and they are certainly not good places to try to find a publisher, with few editors and none who are looking for unagented manuscripts. For all that , it may still be worth spending a day at London’s Earl’s Court next week, simply to see what the international publishing industry is doing and to get some perspective on what those rapidly inflating figures for numbers of titles published actually mean. Inside Publishing on
Subsidiary Rights iPad debuts to mixed reviews ‘It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world -- it's going to be a game changer’, said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. ‘iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad’. On the face of it the figures do look good: over 300,000 iPads sold on the first day, along with 25,000 e-books and a million apps. But critics have been fast to come up with adverse comments on the iPad, launched to great fanfare in the US only last week. It’s heavier than the 10.2 ounce Kindle at 1.5 pounds and has been criticised for its glare-prone display, especially in full sunlight. But the screen has also been described as ‘stunning’ in low light and out of the sun it’s apparently easy on the eyes. Daily Finance pointed out that these figures are for downloads, not sales, and most of them would have been free books or sample chapters. Apple is going to have to work hard to compete with Amazon, as they currently only have 60,000 books available for download and not all publishers have signed up with them. But as as Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said: ‘This match is far from over and even if Amazon takes Round 2, there's a lot of fight left in all these fighters. And that's just the way it's supposed to be.’ In the meantime the battle which is raging in publishing is to do with the so-called ‘agency’ model of e-book sales. Publishers look like they’re winning that one and Amazon has been forced to step down, but there’s still a great deal of concern amongst publishers about low e-book prices, which undercut hardback book prices. The latest tactic is to delay the e-book, but it’s not clear if this is going to work in denying something to a market which has always expected instant gratification. It’s a bit like paperback editions in fact, and on the whole those are still brought out some time after the hardback, for exactly the same reason. In the meantime the size of the e-book development is quite stunning – figures from 2009 show that US e-book sales overtook audiobook sales and were up 176.6% up on 2008. So even if you think you don’t want to use a e-book, they are here to come and will hugely affect the publishing industry, and your chances of getting published, for years to come. Surprise winner for National Poetry Competition This year’s National Poetry Competition (which actually has an international entry although it is run by the UK Poetry Society) has been won by Helen Dunmore for her poem ‘The Malarkey’. Better known as a novelist, Dunmore has produced nine poetry collections and a number of novels. This poem was submitted on impulse just before the closing date, so it was a great surprise for the poet when she won the £5,000 prize. Dunmore said: ‘I was standing in a cold car park putting things into the back of the car [when I heard]. It was very emotional, very moving. I'd written the poem shortly before sending it in – it's quite a tightly organised poem, in terms of the rhymes and the near-rhymes. It's very much about containment ... I've written very few poems over the past four years ... but now I have the feeling that there is the kernel of a new collection. It is a great boost to receive the prize – a confirmation.’ This year’s Competition had 10,467 entries, a considerable increase on last year. The judges were poets Ruth Padel, Neil Rollinson and Daljit Nagra. Entries are handled anonymously, with the interesting result that sometimes a well-known poet wins and sometimes it’s a complete unknown. Amongst the poets who have won this well-regarded competition are the current Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, Tony Harrison, the 2009 T S Eliot prizewinner Philip Gross and Ruth Padel. The Competition was established in 1978 and has grown in size and reputation ever since. Entries come from poets writing in English from all over the world. The winning poem: The Malarkey Helen Dunmore Why did you tell them to be quiet and sit up straight until you came back? The malarkey would have led you to them.
You go from one parked car to another and peer through the misted windows before checking the registration.
Your pocket bulges. You’ve bought them sweets but the mist is on the inside of the windows. How many children are breathing?
The malarkey’s over in the back of the car. The day is over outside the windows. No streetlight has come on.
You fed them cockles soused in vinegar, you took them on the machines. You looked away just once.
You looked away just once as you leaned on the chip-shop counter, and forty years were gone.
You have been telling them for ever Stop that malarkey in the back there! Now they have gone and done it. Is that mist, or water with breath in it?
Entry details for the 2010 National Poetry Competition. Submissions cost £6. UK book sales down, gift purchase up At the report back from the annual UK Books and Consumers report this week, Book Marketing Limited’s Research director Steve Bohme pointed out some interesting changes in consumer behaviour relating to books. Nearly half of all book purchases were gift purchases, an increase from one-third in 2005, a stunning proportion which shows that books have not lost their attraction as gifts. Adults do of course buy books for children and there’s some evidence that this has held up particularly well in the recession, but even so this is a remarkable figure. Purchases were down 4% in 2009, compared with 2005, but this is not a bad performance considering the economic conditions and the poor figures for other entertainment items. DVDs were down 5%, with CDs ad LPs down 13% (perhaps explained by music downloads being up 139%) and computer games, which many would have considered a boom area, down 17%. Between 2005 and 2009 there has actually been growth of 10% in volume, but because average price has fallen in each of the last four years, spending on books has dropped 4% over the period. Two-thirds of books bought in 2009 were either bought at a perceived discount or for under £5. Seeing the book whilst browsing is still the main reason given for purchase, with previous readership of the author or series a strong secondary factor. One in ten books was bought in response to gift requests. Only thrillers and sagas did better in 2009 than in 2008, so ‘Popular’, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Romance and Historical Fiction are all down, which is not what one would expect. Children’s books show a 26% increase in volume from 2005 to 2009, but prices have been going down, so value is level. Although the figures are skewed by both J K Rowling and Stephenie Meyer making huge contributions, it’s also difficult to separate out the considerable adult readership they have both had. Perhaps the most interesting conclusion to draw from these numbers is that the market has been more robust than might have been expected. Books have held up well and perhaps even increased their currency and perceived value as gifts. The e-book phenomenon has not yet eaten into these figures and the number of e-books sold, as a proportion of the whole, is currently very small. The consumer appears to have been conditioned into expecting discounts and low prices, but at this point the genie is out of the bottle and it seems very unlikely that it can be tempted back in. Low prices and discounts are here to say. There are indications in the research that heavy book-buyers are the most likely to have been affected by discounting, which makes sense as they are the ones with most to gain from buying books more cheaply. There’s at least a suggestion that they may then also buy more, as they are avid readers. So the picture emerges of a business which is doing better than it might have been and which has survived the recession thus far with less damage than might have been expected. It’s a pity about the relentless discounting though, as consumers will have been conditioned into expecting, to borrow a phrase, ‘everyday low prices’. Anyone who has ever been tempted by a three-for-two offer will recognise how insidious this can be. Bologna is looking good This year’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair runs from 23 to 26 March and provides a good opportunity to have a look at the children’s publishing industry. Not everything in the garden is lovely but children’s trade (general) publishing is undoubtedly doing a lot better than its adult counterpart. Given the astounding success of Stephenie Meyer, it’s no surprise that Young Adult books are expected to be strong at the Fair. Meyer’s own sales may be past their best in the US and UK, but for the market as a whole YA is still very strong internationally, especially paranormal romance. Both Puffin , with its Razorbill list, and Egmont with a new YA list, will be following this trend with their launches at the Fair. Picture books look a better prospect than they have done recently, although children’s publishers are still very cautious because of the cost of development and the need for good co-edition sales if a book is to do well. There is a bit of a sense of the focus moving back to books for younger age groups at the moment, a counterbalance to the great interest there has been in books for teenagers. After all,the younger market still exists, and it’s missing opportunities not to publish for it. In the UK it may be that having children’s illustrator Anthony Browne as Children’s Laureate has made a difference in making people think again about illustrated children’s books. In the US there’s been real retrenchment in this area but picture books are expected to have a stronger appeal for American publishers than they have done recently. New markets in Eastern Europe and Brazil look promising and there’s strong interest in some Scandinavian countries. Fiction is expected to be in strong demand at Bologna. After a number of years when the only thing publishers were interested in was series, standalone titles are back in demand because the commitment is so much less. Publishers still want to know that the a book can turn into a series , but may not want to make the upfront commitment to it that they would have done a little while ago . Young fiction still seems difficult, with publishers likely to exercise great caution. With so much emphasis on literacy and on children learning to read worldwide, this is perhaps surprising, but the UK experience suggests that in the educational sector school libraries (which are not mandatory for primary schools) are not buying all that much and there is a lack of robust demand from schools. The market for books for early readers is thus quite dependant on parent purchase. Early reporting on the recession suggested that people were not economising on books for their children, but this may no longer be the case at this stage. There are a lot of opportunities in the digital sector of children’s publishing and some exciting new projects, such as Carlton’s augmented reality series. Novelty publishers are still ploughing on with Random House’s The Spooky, Spooky House standing out with its flaps, gatefolds and use of heat-sensitive thermochromatic ink. Writing for children is still booming but it is important for any writer working in this field to look at the market very carefully and not just to produce what did well last year or the year before. Fashions in children’s publishing change fast, so make sure your work is attuned to the market. Don’t forget though that it is originality and good story-telling that everyone is looking for. Explosion in titles published in the USA The staggering number of 285,000 new titles and editions were self-published and published by community presses in the US last year, balanced against a slightly lower figure of 275,000 coming from traditional publishing houses. The Nielsen figures for the UK are 133,224, quite modest by comparison, but this presumably does not include self-published titles unless the authors have subscribed to Nielsen, which is a book data collecting organisation which supplies data to the book trade. So, what do these huge figures mean for authors? At a time when it’s increasingly hard to get published, why are there so many titles coming out? The main answer of course is self-publishing and print on demand in general. The combination of these two trends is changing the world for writers, enabling them to take things into their own hands and decide for themselves whether or not their book will get into print. No author should forget the degree of commitment they need to get their book into print, but it’s how successful you are at promoting it afterwards which is the real test and which will mean the difference between success and failure. The other figure which is quite stunning is that there are now 822 creative writing programmes available in the States (a 2009 figure), so the other factor is that enormous numbers of aspiring writers are coming from these courses. Inevitably only a small proportion of these will be taken on by a publisher and fewer still will manage to support themselves totally through their writing, but it’s still an extraordinary figure. So, just why are so many people turning to writing? The readers of this column know the answer to this, so do email us to tell us in under a hundred words and we’ll put the answers on the site. Do you actually enjoy the writing, or is it an unavoidable compulsion? Are you influenced by fantastic success stories such as J K Rowling’s? Or do you just think that the ability to write well will be useful in any career? Creative writing is largely taught by writers, especially poets, so in some sense it’s a self-perpetuating thing, but there’s been such a huge and rapid growth in this area that that is an outcome rather than the cause. Even in the UK there are now a really large number of creative writing courses of all kinds, including nearly a hundred in universities. Ironically the writer has more options in terms of courses, degrees and groups than ever before, but less chance of getting into print through the traditional publishing route. Self-help is beginning to look like an increasingly attractive option. Is a creative writing degree really worth it? by Josh Spears Quick Reads expand Next week’s World Book Day on 4 March will celebrate five years of Quick Reads with a crop of new books by writers including Andy McNab, Cathy Kelly, Peter James and Alison Weir. The books are ideal for those who have lost the reading habit or who have never developed it. Each year a number of bestselling writers and celebrities are commissioned to write a short book which is just as exciting and readable as their usual work but shorter and easier to get into. In the first four years 1.25 million Quick Reads have been distributed, introducing hundreds of thousands of new readers to books and encouraging a large number of non-readers to give books a go. Quick Reads recently surveyed over 30,000 of their readers and found that 100% said Quick Reads had made a positive impact on their lives. 88% were more confident and 41% felt their job prospects had improved since reading a Quick Read. Significantly, in terms of encouraging book reading, 82% said they were more likely to read another book after reading a Quick Read.Why do these short reads have such a profound effect on people who cannot read or cannot read well enough to tackle a book? It must be because these readers become engaged in the story and want to read on to find out what happens. But the reason they’re able to do so is that the books are carefully designed and written with these readers in mind, so they are written for an adult audience but are especially accessible, short on long-winded description and difficult vocabulary and long on providing compelling stories. One of the heartening things about reading some of the success stories is the wonderful way in which some of these adult readers, who have found the written word (and much else) denied to them, feel a sense of empowerment. It’s a great help with basic confidence but it also opens up an immense and life-enhancing pleasure to them. Just imagine not being able to read a book – it’s really unthinkable for anyone for whom books are central to their lives. In another exciting initiative, from World Book Day next Thursday, the brand new Quick Read titles will be available as apps on the Apple iPod and iPhone and as downloads direct to computers and e-readers. To kick-off the digital campaign, one of the previous titles – The Thief by Ruth Rendell - will be available as a free download here for the week of launch.The apps, produced by award-winning digital publisher Enhanced Editions, allow users to choose their font and text size. They also use the device accelerometer (which detects when the device is being tilted) to scroll the page, offer a bedtime-friendly night reading mode and encourage users to send excerpts to friends via email. All of the Enhanced Editions apps come with a short sample of the other nine titles, plus a live feed of the latest news about the authors and partners involved in Quick Reads. The digitisation of Quick Reads will make a great difference to adult learners, particularly those with dyslexia or impaired sight, who may find it difficult to access print of any kind. With Quick Reads available on computers, mobile phones and e-readers, learners can manipulate text on a screen to suit their convenience, for instance to make it larger, as well as use a screen reader. Quick Reads are already doing a great deal to help non-readers and slow readers to get into books and to start to enjoy them. The new crop of titles joins the list of excellent existing titles which are still available. It's heartening to see this excellent programme continuing and developing.J K Rowling defends plagiarism charge The estate of Adrian Jacobs, author of Willy the Wizard, has now widened its claim against Bloomsbury for plagiarism in the Harry Potter books to include J K Rowling herself, previously thought to be protected by a statute of limitations. Max Markson, a PR executive representing Jacobs’ estate, told the Guardian the addition of Rowling's name to the action opened up the possibility of multi-jurisdiction action: ‘We believe that she [Rowling] personally plagiarised the Willy the Wizard book. All of Willy the Wizard is in The Goblet of Fire. We now have a case which is not just against Bloomsbury… I estimate it's a billion-dollar case. That'll be the decision of the courts, obviously.’ The suit claims Rowling's book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire copied substantial parts of Jacobs' 1987 book. His estate also claims many other ideas from Willy the Wizard were copied into the Harry Potter books. Jacobs died in London in 1997. Bloomsbury dismissed the allegations when they were made in June, indicating that a similar claim on behalf of the Jacobs' estate was made in 2004, but never progressed. Bloomsbury stated that J K Rowling had never heard of Adrian Jacobs nor seen, read or heard of his book Willy the Wizard until this claim was first made in 2004. Bloomsbury added that Willy the Wizard was a ‘very insubstantial booklet running to 36 pages which had very limited distribution’ and was of a ‘very poor quality’. It’s easy to feel that J K Rowling has had it all easy, with her millions of fans and the vast fortune she’s made from her books. She was clearly upset the last time she went to court to protect her copyright against Vander Ark, the fan who had compiled an anthology without her permission and it must be heart-breaking for her that this is happening again. She said: ‘I am saddened that yet another claim has
been made that I have taken material from another source to write Harry.
The fact is I had never heard of the author or the book before the first
accusation by those connected to the author's estate in 2004; I have
certainly never read the book. If plagiarism could be proved in court, the Jacobs estate does indeed stand to make millions or even billions. The trustee of The estate of Adrian Jacobs, Paul Allen, said in a statement: ‘The estate - which acts independently of Adrian Jacobs family - has been in correspondence with lawyers for Rowling and her publishers for several years but have been repeatedly rebuffed. We have taken expert legal advice and we believe we have very strong case.’ Allen said it had ‘asked for this breach of copyright to be stopped’, and was taking legal advice as to whether the Harry Potter films breached copyright and ‘likewise the proposed Harry Potter theme park’. Of course the vast revenue earned by the
books is augmented by the income from the films and now the theme park.
Also, the Harry Potter books have sold in enormous quantities across the
world, so many international publishers will be watching this case
closely. The end of the slush-pile It’s always been a tough call to find a publisher though submitting to the slush-pile, but in the current crisis in publishing it just got even harder. Judith Guest’s Ordinary People was plucked from obscurity in 1975 and went on to become a bestseller and a successful film, but it’s hard to remember other authors who have benefited in this way. More recently, Stephenie Meyer sent out 15 query letters about her teenage vampire saga. She wrote to Writers House agency asking if someone might be interested in reading a 130,000-word manuscript about teenage vampires. The letter should have been thrown out: an assistant whose job was to weed through the more than 100 such letters each month, didn't realise that young adult fiction should be no more than 40,000 to 60,000 words. She contacted Ms. Meyer and ultimately asked that she send her manuscript. The rest is history. Writers House agent Jodi Reamer liked what she read, a novel called Twilight. She signed Meyer, and sold the book to Little, Brown. The most recent sequel in the series, Breaking Dawn, sold 1.3 million copies the day it went on sale in August 2008. The latest film grossed more than $288 million in the US. Most publishers have closed their slush-piles and no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. This is particularly the case for large publishers, who have done their sums and reckon that it’s too expensive to read their slush-pile, because so very few new authors are taken on this way. Veteran American agent Richard Curtis has done the figures in his excellent book How to Be Your Own Literary Agent: ‘Although statistics are not available, I would guess that most trade publishers today do not read slush. They return it with printed rejection slips, frequently with a statement that they read material only if submitted by literary agents. As I say, the reasoning is cold-bloodedly economic. Assuming a publisher gets 5000 unagented manuscripts in a year (a figure I’m told is on the modest side), and a skillful editor can read and judge four every working day, and figure 225 working days a year, that’s less than 1000 manuscripts evaluated per editor per year. So you need four or five editors to plough through those 5000 manuscripts… And so, if it is true that only one manuscript in thousands is worthy of acceptance by a publisher, you’re talking about a cost of well over $100,000 to discover it, not including the cost of publishing it. With a bottom line like that, it had better be one helluva book! But because most publishers don’t believe they will find such a consummate masterpiece under those bushels of over-the-transom submissions, they consider it more cost-effective to leave the sorting-out to the agents and spend the $100,000 where it can do more good– or at least where they think it can do more good. For this reason, it can be stated with some accuracy that an editor will read the most dismal piece of junk submitted by a literary agent faster and maybe even more attentively than he will a good book that comes in on the slush pile.’ Things are even worse if you’ve written a screenplay or are trying to get your work into magazines. Film and television producers won't read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing. HarperCollins’ web slush-pile Authonomy.com site offers rather better odds, but they have still only accepted four manuscripts out of 10,000 submitted to the site. This is dismal stuff, but better that authors should be aware of the obstacles than that they should send their manuscript off in blind faith to publishers who are either not accepting unsolicited submissions or are not going to read them. So, it pays to think through your options and do your research. Make sure you’re sending work to somewhere where it will be properly assessed, even if this is a slow process. And do your research first, whether you’re submitting to a publisher or an agent, and follow their guidelines exactly. Finally, give some serious thought to self-publishing, once regarded with disdain, but now a real option for unpublished writers who want to see their work in print. Big four show sales drop Figures for 2009 just released by the big UK publishers show just how tough a time they had and what a difficult book market we’ve had in the past year. Seven of the top UK publishers had negative sales growth last year measured by the Total Consumer Market figures, as did half of the top 20 publishers. The only one of the top four to do well was the market leader Hachette and that was because of Stephenie Meyer, whose £29.4m ($46m) of sales accounted for an extraordinary 10.2% of the group’s total UK sales. This had the effect of putting Hachette well ahead of its rival Random House, giving it a 2.7% lead with a 16.4% market share. Random House’s 9.2% drop in value of sales meant that it put £24.4m ($38.22m) less through the tills last year, in spite of having a new Dan Brown in the autumn. HarperCollins also did less well, down .7% with £15.2m ($23.81m) less in sales, whilst Penguin’s sales shrunk by .3%. Surprisingly in this age of corporations getting larger, the big four showed a drop to 47.4% for their cumulative share, the lowest since 2005. The Total Consumer Market showed a contraction of 1.2% in value, down to £1.752bn ($2.74bn). This was not as bad as 2008, when the drop was 1.5%, but it was still an unwelcome contraction. In the States Meyer also dominated sales, selling more than 10 million books over the year, which was however less than the 15 million she sold in 2008. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol sold 2,854,658, more than any of her individual titles, but Meyer made a bigger impression on the figures than Brown because she had four books in the top ten. Publishers undoubtedly had a hard time and the redundancies made by the big companies early in 2009 must have seemed necessary later in the year. It’s easy to understand why, with strong pressure on discounts from both Amazon and the supermarkets, publishers chose to cut overheads and lists to ensure that they survived the recession. For authors this has been even harder. Many published authors who are not major bestsellers but have made a steady livelihood from writing are finding that they can no longer find a publisher. Those who can are receiving lower advances and, generally speaking, cannot move elsewhere as they have nowhere else to go. The death of the midlist has been long lamented, but this was the year when the impact hit with a sickening thud and now it really is very hard to find a home for a manuscript which is good and shows promise but is not instant bestseller material. It is worth dwelling on the figures mentioned above as they make the publishers’ decisions to cut their lists more comprehensible. In this recession you have to cut out anything which is not paying its way and concentrate on what seems more likely to work. Even that is not necessarily a recipe for survival, since, as publishers found last autumn, some expensive books, particularly celebrity biography, failed to perform. For the agents this means there has been a quiet culling going on, so some authors have lost both their publisher and their agent. Agents are being very careful about taking on new clients and have to have a really clear reason for doing so. So, how long does this go on for? That’s really the $64 million question and relates to the recession as a whole. In the end publishers need new books and they have to invest in new authors, so the time will come when they will have to start buying more aggressively. The other thing is not to let the problems of the big publishers, which have large overheads and a certain amount of inflexibility built into their size , to obscure the fact that small publishers still have many opportunities and self-publishers can use the Internet to publicise their own work.The overall drop in book sales in the UK in 2009 was only 1.2% in value, suggesting, particularly since this was a year of heavy discounting, that most book buyers kept on buying pretty steadily. Perhaps they relied on books passed on by friends and family a bit more, but most book-buyers seem to have regarded their book purchases as essential. Long may this continue. Battle of the titans This has been one of those weeks when there’s been so much happening that it’s difficult to cover it in a single column. Apple has broken the news of its iPad and, amidst the focus on that, Amazon has already started to fight back. This could be a turning-point and how publishing, books and authors come out of all this is hard to predict. Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPad to an excited world caused no great surprise, as the new device had been comprehensively trailed. The iPad, which starts at $499, is a half-inch thick tablet computer with a 9.7 inch (25 cm) touchscreen. It will compete with other e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle, which currently sells for $259, and Barnes and Noble's Nook device. Criticisms from tech reviewers have mostly focused on its over-bright screen, which may well making reading in bed possible, but will also make it very tiring on the eyes. Claudine Beaumont, Telegraph technology editor, commented that it ‘looks exactly like a giant iPhone, right down to the "home" button at the bottom of its 9.7 in touch-screen.’ But she added, ‘the best feature is iBooks, the e-book reading software that knocks Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader into a cocked hat. Novels are beautifully presented . . . The pages of the books resemble proper printed pages, with a sense of texture and authenticity to them. Turning pages is achieved with a swiping gesture, or a single tap in the right-hand margins. Downloading books is incredibly easy too.’Apple have been vague about when the iPad might be available outside the US, which probably means a delayed launch whilst they sort out the logistics and focus on beating the competition in the all-important US home market. Tim Cooper, Director of Direct and Digital Marketing at Mills and Boon, said: ‘It looks great, fundamentally it's going to make a pretty big difference. It's fantastic news for publishers and the consumers as well, it must have sent a few shivers down the spines of other companies with e-reading devices. At that price point and with those multimedia opportunities, it's great for everyone. I think this will definitely help the e-book market.’ Whether his enthusiasm will be shared amongst the publishing community remains to be seen, but Publishers Lunch commented that: ‘For book publishers as important as the iBookstore (and a potential worldwide rollout) is the business model behind it, which the biggest trade publishers see as an opportunity to reset the terms of business in the still-emerging ebookmarket.’ And that was certainly the way Amazon saw it, as a possible threat. Jeff Bezos chose this moment to announce a huge surge in sales through the Kindle. When the company has both editions, he announced that it has been selling 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books, an amazing claim which indicates the market is achieving much faster conversion to e-books than most people would have predicted. Amazon had a huge fourth quarter, with total sales of $9.52 billion, an astounding 42% higher than for the same quarter a year ago. Their net US income is up 71% at $384 million, but their net international income is now even larger. Figures from the International Digital Publishers forum, held in New York last week, suggested that Bezos is right though, as it was announced that wholesale revenue from e-book sales in the US almost tripled in the third quarter of 2009 to $46.5 million, compared with the same quarter in 2008. So it’s a battle of the titans which is now holding the book world in its grip. Apple has a huge base of supporters in the people using the 75 million iPhones and iPod Touches they’ve already sold. It also has its new iBooks from iTunes, which will enable people to download ebooks directly onto their iPad. Amazon has a huge customer base across the world, an enormous range of merchandise taking it far beyond books, and is extremely aggressive in support of its interests. The very latest news is that all the books and e-books published by the Macmillan group in the US had their buy buttons removed on Friday because they tried to switch to a new model of e-book sales which would enable publishers to set higher prices than Amazon’s attempted standard of $9.95. It looks like authors’ interests have to be with publishers on this one, even though publishers and authors do not currently agree on e-book royalties. Otherwise the risk is that the e-book threatens to undercut hardback editions and make books available even more cheaply – leaving the author potentially even further out in the cold.
|
Site Navigation
|
©WritersServices.com 2000-2010 |
