The End of Book Publishing Is Near!

 Posted by at 3:21 pm  No Responses »
Feb 042009
 

I wouldn’t be surprised to find book-publishing pundits walking the streets of Manhattan carrying signs proclaiming “The End Is Near!”

Sales in bookstores are down, heads at publishing houses are rolling, Borders is on the rocks and may not survive, Amazon.com continues to capture market share—its Kindle appears to be the first e-reader to get more than passing traction with consumers.

And, contrary to Chris Anderson’s theory espoused in his book, The Long Tail, the large publishers are still searching for the next blockbuster, the one book that will make a season profitable for the whole house—a tactic that hasn’t exactly served them well, not to say what it does to most of their non-blockbuster authors who don’t get the advance or the attention they deserve. This can’t be the way to develop a robust, heterogeneous industry.

Is this the end of book publishing as we know it?

Yes and no.

Watch for the following in the years to come:

• A proliferation of small, independent houses publishing fiction. As many independent nonfiction houses found their stride in the last 15 years, independents who publish fiction will make gains.

 • Kindle will become the iPod of the book industry. Every book published will concurrently be published in the Kindle format.

 • Many books will never see the inside of a warehouse. We already have online print-on-demand services (Amazon’s BookSurge is one), but you’ll soon be able to go to your bookstore (or other venue) and have a book downloaded, printed, and bound while you wait.

 What does that mean for publishers? Greater distribution—every book available at every bookstore—less warehousing, shipping, and remainder costs, the economic freedom to publish more titles—blockbusters or not.

 Authors will benefit from all of the above, especially mid-list authors.

E-book reader Kindle 2 to Debut?

 Posted by at 2:32 pm  No Responses »
Jan 282009
 

Apparently Amazon will announce a new version of their popular e-reader, the Kindle, in New York on Monday, February 9th.

What to look for?

• A better black and white screen. Color will have to wait for another edition, but the buzz says the greyscale images will be better. Greyscale is how black and white photos and other images are displayed.

• Smaller or relocated buttons  On the original version, the button that turns the pages is on the unit’s side often causing you to turn the page by mistake. Supposedly, here are bootlegged photos of the new version.

• Better battery life.

• Quicker search functions.

There’s no reason to delay ordering one until this new one comes out, Amazon ran out of Kindles before the end of the year and is taking orders for Kindle 2 to ship in four to six weeks.

BTW, if you own the rights to a book, you might want to check out the recent settlement that Google made in the class action suit about them illegally copywriting whole libraries.

The Pope on YouTube?

 Posted by at 3:46 pm  No Responses »
Jan 242009
 

“New technologies have an extraordinary potential, if used to favor understanding and human solidarity.” —Benedict XVI via video on the Vatican’s new YouTube channel.

The Pope on YouTube? Amazing. I wonder how this new media will change the message the Catholic Church as been delivering for over 2,000 years.

Change the message you ask?

Yep. The media used to deliver information is thought to form that information to one extent or another.

Years ago, media guru Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” which, as I understand it, means that the media used to deliver information actually affects the content of that information.

Is this so? Consider, say, a mystery novel made into a movie. More of the story background and the personal thoughts of the characters can be available to the reader than can be expressed on film. Because of this, the message the viewer takes away with him likely will be somewhat different than the message the reader takes away.

We see this effect in e-mail when it takes the place of phone conversations. E-mail has a chance of sounding curt or cold because the vocal tones that can be conveyed over the phone are missing.

Thus the information or message received by the reader of an e-mail can change from the one that would be conveyed in a spoken conversation. Of course neither one of them includes the body language that is so much part of the communication—and part of the message—when the media is a person conversing with another face to face.

McLuhan, a deep thinker when it came to communications, coauthored a book titled The Medium Is the Message. As the story goes, when it came back from the printer, a typo made the title The Medium Is the Massage. McLuhan, feeling this mistake was supportive of the point he was trying to make allowed the title, as misprinted, to stand.

As readers, authors, and publishers we need to embrace the best parts of the new technologies and retain the best parts of the old.

Fiction Cheaper than Nonfiction?

 Posted by at 3:49 pm  1 Response »
Jan 182009
 

I stayed in a motel in San Simeon—home of the opulent Hearst Castle—over Christmas. In the motel lobby are two full bookcases. My kind of place. (By the way, the room was $36 a night for a large, ocean-view room. I went to sleep listening to the relaxing sounds of the surf. E-mail me and I’ll tell you the secret of getting the same.)

One book in the lobby, the 1947 novel Mountain Time by Bernard DeVoto, had been rubber stamped on the inside cover. It read:

This Book is the Property of

THE MAY COMPANY

No Membership Fee

Time Limit on All Books

THIRTY DAYS

Non-fiction [sic] 3¢ a day 8¢ Minimum

Fiction 2¢ a day 5¢ Minimum

Books will be reserved on the payment of

five cents for Fiction and eight cents for

Non-Fiction. This payment covers a

notice to you that the book is being held

for four days from the sending date of notice.

I wonder why fiction was cheaper than nonfiction. Is it today? Are you willing to pay a higher price for a how-to or self-help title than a novel? How about a memoir? Or a political expose?

Narrative Nonfiction Informs and Entertains

 Posted by at 11:59 pm  No Responses »
Jan 162009
 

I recently finished reading True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, a book by Michael Finkel, who was fired from the NYT Magazine for falsifying a story. It’s both his memoir of the actions that lead to his dismissal and the story of a man named Longo who killed his family.

When Longo fled to Mexico after terminating his family, he took the persona of Michael Finkel, reporter. He’d read some of Finkels work and just started saying he was Michael. The FBI wasn’t amused or fooled. He was captured and returned to the States. 

The real, unemployed Finkel was staying incommunicado at his home in Bozeman, contemplating why he decided to falsify the story. On the night before the Times was going to go with the story of his firing, his phone rang and it was a Portland Oregonian reporter asking what his connection was with Longo. Finkel had never heard of Longo, but eventually they began a lengthy correspondence.

While, as a journalist, I dislike the liberties Finkel took with his reporting and hope he has discarded this practice, he has written a fine book. A good example of narrative nonfiction.

I think the best way I can define narrative nonfiction is character-driven nonfiction. The author lets the reader see into the minds of the characters as well as letting us see their actions. Along the way, the reader learns of the issues at hand. It makes for entertaining learning. Other great examples of narrative nonfiction are The Perfect Storm, Black Hawk Down, and Indecent Exposure.

At Quill Driver Books, we publish Peter Rubie’s book on how to write narrative nonfiction: The Elements of Narrative Nonfiction. Hmmmm, we were really inventive when we titled that one!

Word for the day: tomicide. The destruction of books.

Authors as Kites and Publishers as String Holders

 Posted by at 6:17 pm  No Responses »
Jan 132009
 

My son, Josh, who owns American West Books, a wholesaler of books to the warehouse clubs and book trade and I are having dinner with some people from Andrews McMeel Publishing tonight. (We are in Bentonville, Arkansas for a Sam’s Club event.) I wanted to bone up on AMP and so went to check out their website. 

Here is a quote from the site:

Inspired by one of Erma Bombeck’s columns, Kathleen Andrews, vice chairman of Andrews McMeel Universal, says, “Creative people are like kites. They fly high above the rest of us, inspiring us and filling us with awe. But there has to be somebody down here, on the ground, holding the string, pulling it tight, letting it out, or the kite couldn’t fly. If you let go of the string, the kite will crash. But if you don’t give the kite enough string, it’ll never fly as high as it can. That’s what our company does. We hold the string—not too tight, not too loose. The kite is the creator. And the flight of the kite is the creativity.”

There’s a creative way of looking at the synergy of writers and publishers.

Unintended Result: Children’s Books to Be Tested for Lead

 Posted by at 9:46 am  No Responses »
Jan 122009
 

A recent act of Congress has delivered a huge headache to publishers, libraries, schools and many retailers including bookstores—both new and used—antique stores, thrift stores, and cataloguers.

The act, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, is a result of high lead content found in some imported toys and is aimed at protecting children under 12. Each toy or other consumer product aimed at children must be tested.

The problem is, the act, enacted in August 2008 and set to take effect February 10, doesn’t specifically exclude books. With threats of fines as high as $100,000 per instance, retailers are telling children’s book publishers to show proof of testing, or they will return the books. (Books are almost always sold on a fully-returnable basis to retailers.)

Naturally there is a cost, it can run as high as $1,500 per book, but the third-party testing facilities are overwhelmed at the moment. And, of course, few out-of-print titles will be tested.

Schools, libraries, are in the fray, concerned that they will have to empty their shelves of children’s books that they have had for years.

Publishers Weekly Daily quotes Random House Children’s Book publisher, Chip Gibson, as saying, “This is a potential calamity like nothing I’ve ever seen. The implications are quite literally unimaginable. Books are safe. This is like testing milk for lead. It has to be stopped.”

I imagine it is hard for lawmakers to consider all the ramifications of everything they do. Certainly no one faults them for trying to protect children, but they need to make sure they aren’t going off half-cocked.

 

Book Promotion Takes to the Street

 Posted by at 1:37 pm  No Responses »
Jan 082009
 

As part of their huge push on I Can Make You Thin by Paul McKenna, Sterling (owned by Barnes & Noble) dressed staff members in red tee shirts and sent them into the streets of New York. They handed out 25,000 tape measures and postcards. The staffers came from all departments of the company and targeted commuter hubs in the city.

This is a bit unconventional, but if you have a book that has a broad appeal, handing out inexpensive freebies is a good idea. Of course you don’t have to do it 25,000 at a time but doing so might also garner some news coverage if you alert the press.

And what a fun day for the staff at Sterling.

BTW, at this writing, I Can Make You Thin is #36 on Amazon.com.

Digital Library Books, Wave of the Future?

 Posted by at 12:54 pm  No Responses »
Jan 072009
 

According to Publishers Weekly Daily, OverDrive, a company that provides the infrastructure for the delivery of digital content reports a 76 percent increase in library digital checkouts in 2008. 

And what titles ranked highest? The top three were the young adult novels of Stephanie Meyer, Twilight, Eclipse and New Moon.

What does that tell us about the new readers coming into the adult market and how they will want their material delivered?

Choosing the Right Word

 Posted by at 11:03 am  1 Response »
Jan 062009
 

In his column of January 2nd, New York Times columnist David Brooks writes of the annual Sidney Awards given to recognize some of the best in long-form journalism. One of this year’s awards went to “Professor X,” who, writing in The Atlantic, decried his plight teaching college students today.

Brooks quotes the article in which the professor says the energy and excitement exits the classroom when it comes time to write a paper: “Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Student routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.”

Apparently, the professor concludes, this is because his students have done very little reading. He says, “In each of my courses, we discuss…the need for precision in vocabulary, why economy of language is desireable…I explain, I give examples, I cheerlead, I cajole, but each evening when the class is over and I come down from my teaching high, I inevitably lose faith in the task, as I am sure my students do.”

Precision and economy in the words we choose makes our writing sing. When oil lamps lit homes, readers allowed long rambling paragraphs and wordy prose. But today’s readers have the attention spans of my two-year-old granddaughter. Dish them a plate of unnecessary words and all but the most dedicated will put down your piece.

I ran across a couple of excellent, interesting word choices yesterday. A friend of mine e-mailed me that she liked “big weather.” In two words I got what she meant immediately.

And I’m reading Parke Godwin’s The Tower of Beowulf. In it he describes the tracking of a boar: By the depth of the prints in the damp earth, the boar would be of unusual size even for a prime male….

Godwin selected simple everyday words to convey the largeness of the beast —of unusual size even for a prime male—without resorting to more colorful language—behemothic, colossal, cyclopean, elephantine, enormous, gargantuan, gigantic, gross, humongous—which would have raised a different feeling in the reader and not served him as well.

BTW, you’ll never be a great writer until you are a great reader. It’s one of my “Nine Habits of Regularly Published Authors” a presentation I give at writer’s conferences.

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