crisis in publishing

BREAKING NEWS: Media Still Sexist In Reporting of Romance Industry

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This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her Amazon Iowan blog on 5/2/14.

I write gay romance novels.

That statement contains three concepts: I write fiction. I write romantic stories. I write gay male protagonists. It is often assumed by my readership and my heterosexual peers that the greatest “shocker” in that list is that I’m a married female in the Midwest writing gay fiction. But the sad truth is that’s merely an eyebrow-raiser, usually begging the inquisitor to ask me more about why, and how that works. In fact, the “gay” factor in my declaration of what I do for a living is a buffer. Because when I say I’m an author, everyone gets excited. When I say I write gay fiction, everyone is intrigued.

When I say that I write love stories, noses wrinkle, and disdain is rampant.

The year is 2014, and we’ve come a long way, baby, but much as Cliven Bundy can tell you all about “the negro,” the international media and everyone at peace with our two-faced, condescending patriarchal culture, those romance novels are trashy bodice rippers. The men and women who read them write them, produce them, promote them, maintain a billion-dollar industry via them—they’re all silly, and sex-crazed, and if they aren’t fat spinsters in curlers eating ice cream in the middle of too many cats, they’re definitely that type of ridiculous person at heart.

Because today when it was announced that Harlequin Enterprises, who advertise themselves as “We Are Romance,” was sold to News Corp, we didn’t receive reporting on what such an unexpected, potentially industry-changing merger would mean, or what this did to the outstanding lawsuit against Harlequin. We didn’t get gravity and insight, or attempts at insight into what this might mean—not often, not overall.

 

Click here to read the full post on Amazon Iowan.

 

Neal Pollack on Rebounding From Massive Hype and Six-Figure Deals to Online Publishing

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This post by Nathan Rabin originally appeared on The A/V Club on 3/14/13.

In Money Matters, creative people discuss what they’re not supposed to: the intersection of entertainment and commerce, as well as moments in their lives and careers when they bottomed out financially and/or professionally. 

The artist: Neal Pollack appeared in the national consciousness as part of the talented group of writers and editors that gravitated to McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers’ publishing empire. In 2000, The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature—a collection of satirical pieces centering on the fictional “Neal Pollack” persona, a larger-than-life spoof of macho world-beaters like Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer—became the first book published by McSweeney’s publishing arm. (The book was later re-published by HarperCollins.) A satirical rock novel, Never Mind The Pollacks, followed in 2003, and was followed by 2007’s Alternadad, a memoir about his experiences raising his son. Alternadad generated tons of publicity and human-interest stories about hipster parenting, in addition to generating interest from the television and film industries. But the book’s sales failed to match its buzz, and television and film adaptations didn’t pan out.

Pollack published a yoga memoir, Stretch, in 2010, but over the past two years he has devoted much of his time and energy to writing mysteries for new publishing paradigms. In March of 2011, Pollack self-published the Kindle release JewBall, a period basketball mystery that attracted the attention of Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer mystery imprint, which reprinted it as a download and a paperback. Pollack followed it up with another mystery for Thomas & Mercer, in this case a yoga-themed book called Downward-Facing Death that Amazon released in serialized installments; it’s now available in its entirety as both a Kindle release and a paperback. Sequels to both mysteries are in the works.

The A.V. Club: What was your relationship to money as a child? 

Neal Pollack: When I was 7 years old, we moved to Paradise Valley, Arizona, which is a very wealthy suburb of Phoenix. In fact, I’d say it’s a very wealthy suburb of Scottsdale. And this wasn’t the Paradise Valley that was described in—this is a very dated movie reference—Pump Up The Volume, the Christian Slater movie. This was the town of Paradise Valley. In the movie it was called Paradise Hill. The town of Paradise Valley that attracted such exclusive real estate that there’s not commercial real estate in it to this day. It’s best known as where Camel Back Mountain is, and there may be a couple of boutiques on one of the streets and then there’s the Barry Goldwater Memorial. So that’s where I grew up. My father was a hotel executive and, at the time we moved there, there were no paved roads in the section where we lived. Every house had to have acres of desert land, and that’s still the case. Not our immediate next-door neighbors, but the family down the dirt road were the heirs to the Campbell’s Soup fortune. They were billionaires, multi-billionaires. My family wasn’t anything like that, but my dad had a very good corporate executive job.

Then, in 1979, he lost that job. We suddenly went very quickly from being upper-middle class to really struggling financially. And that had a big impact on me, because I watched my parents really struggle with having to pay bills and buy groceries and find work.

 

Click here to read the full post on The A/V Club.

 

Announcement Hachette/Amazon Business Interruption

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This post from the Amazon Books Team was posted on the Amazon site on 5/27/14.

We are currently buying less (print) inventory and “safety stock” on titles from the publisher, Hachette, than we ordinarily do, and are no longer taking pre-orders on titles whose publication dates are in the future. Instead, customers can order new titles when their publication date arrives. For titles with no stock on hand, customers can still place an order at which time we order the inventory from Hachette — availability on those titles is dependent on how long it takes Hachette to fill the orders we place. Once the inventory arrives, we ship it to the customer promptly. These changes are related to the contract and terms between Hachette and Amazon.

At Amazon, we do business with more than 70,000 suppliers, including thousands of publishers. One of our important suppliers is Hachette, which is part of a $10 billion media conglomerate. Unfortunately, despite much work from both sides, we have been unable to reach mutually-acceptable agreement on terms. Hachette has operated in good faith and we admire the company and its executives. Nevertheless, the two companies have so far failed to find a solution. Even more unfortunate, though we remain hopeful and are working hard to come to a resolution as soon as possible, we are not optimistic that this will be resolved soon.

Negotiating with suppliers for equitable terms and making stocking and assortment decisions based on those terms is one of a bookseller’s, or any retailer’s, most important jobs. Suppliers get to decide the terms under which they are willing to sell to a retailer. It’s reciprocally the right of a retailer to determine whether the terms on offer are acceptable and to stock items accordingly. A retailer can feature a supplier’s items in its advertising and promotional circulars, “stack it high” in the front of the store, keep small quantities on hand in the back aisle, or not carry the item at all, and bookstores and other retailers do these every day. When we negotiate with suppliers, we are doing so on behalf of customers. Negotiating for acceptable terms is an essential business practice that is critical to keeping service and value high for customers in the medium and long term.

A word about proportion: this business interruption affects a small percentage of Amazon’s demand-weighted units. If you order 1,000 items from Amazon, 989 will be unaffected by this interruption. If you do need one of the affected titles quickly, we regret the inconvenience and encourage you to purchase a new or used version from one of our third-party sellers or from one of our competitors.

We also take seriously the impact it has when, however infrequently, such a business interruption affects authors. We’ve offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool – to be allocated by Hachette – to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%. We did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago. We hope Hachette takes us up on it.

This topic has generated a variety of coverage, presumably in part because the negotiation is with a book publisher instead of a supplier of a different type of product. Some of the coverage has expressed a relatively narrow point of view. Here is one post that offers a wider perspective.

http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-afraid-of-amazoncom.html

Thank you.
 

Amazon vs. Hachette: What It’s About And Why I’m Rooting For Amazon

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This post by Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton originally appeared on her Digital Media Mom site on 5/24/14.

As you may have heard, or read, or discovered while browsing Kindle books on the Amazon site, Amazon is currently in the middle of a battle with “Big 5″ publisher Hachette. The beef is over reseller wholesale contract terms (the publisher’s ‘cut’ on every ebook of theirs sold by Amazon), and Amazon has been using some strongarm tactics to remind Hachette that Amazon doesn’t HAVE to sell Hachette books at all if the parties can’t come to an agreement.

 

First, a little background is needed.

Back when the Kindle was new and ebooks were just starting to become a thing, say 2008 or so, Amazon established wholesale terms with publishers on ebooks based on the “fixed price” (usually known as a “suggested retail price” in other industries, for other products) which was set by the publishers. Amazon could discount the actual sales price of ebooks to whatever they wanted, or even offer them for free, so long as they paid the publisher the wholesale rate that was based on the publisher’s fixed price.

For example, if the publisher’s fixed price was $15 (seriously, that’s the average of the fixed prices the Big 5 publishers were setting; on some ebooks they wanted to go as high as $18) and the publisher’s wholesale cut was 40%, Amazon would have to pay the publisher $5.60 for every copy sold or given away on Amazon. Whether the ebook ultimately sold for $10, $6, or was given away for free, Amazon owed the publisher $5.60 for every copy distributed to Amazon customers. As a result, Amazon was (and still is) actually LOSING money on many ebook sales, but they were willing to take the hit to establish their Kindle line as dominant among ereaders.

 

A couple years down the road, publishers started to get nervous.

In 2010 publishers decided they didn’t want Amazon to have the right to set its own prices on their ebooks anymore, even though Amazon’s retail pricing didn’t affect their wholesale cut AT ALL. They feared that if Amazon were allowed to establish $9.99 in the minds of consumers as a standard price point for frontlist ebooks (new release ebooks the publisher expects to sell well), they would never succeed in rolling out their own, much higher fixed prices. And they were probably right about that, but only because the fixed prices they had in mind for frontlist ebooks were ridiculously high to begin with.

 

Click here to read the full post on Digital Media Mom.

 

Barnes & Noble's Last-Ditch Effort To Save Itself: Going Back To College

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This article by Phil Wahba originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 5/8/14.

NEW BRUNSWICK, New Jersey (Reuters) – Barnes & Noble Inc is turning to its college roots to boost its top line.

The U.S. bookseller, which opened in 1965 as a university bookstore in New York, wants a much bigger presence on college campuses, where students last year spent an average of $1,200 on textbooks and supplies, according to the College Board.

Barnes & Noble, now the second largest operator of college bookstores with 696 shops, plans to have about 1,000 locations within five years, Max Roberts, chief executive of the company’s college business, said in an exclusive interview at Rutgers University’s bookstore in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

It intends to do that by getting more schools to outsource their bookstore operations with the lure of nicer, higher-grossing stores and by poaching accounts from larger rival Follett Corp, which runs 940 stores.

Success isn’t a slam dunk: About 45 percent of U.S. colleges still run their own stores. And overall college store sales have stagnated in recent years at about $10 billion, according to the National Association of College Stores.

 

Click here to read the full article on The Huffington Post.

Will Barnes & Noble be gone by New Year's?

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This editorial by Michael Levin originally appeared on The Contra Costa Times News on 5/2/14.

If anyone gives you a Barnes & Noble gift card, be sure to cash it in by the end of the year.

This may be the last year that Barnes & Noble bookstores remain open.

It’s bad news for people who love books. It’s worse news for the next generation of readers, who may never experience buying a book in a bookstore.

B&N has been closing about 20 stores per year since 2012 and has said it will continue to do so for the next several years. But its financial position is bleak.

This follows a decades-long period of expansion, moving into neighborhoods where privately-owned bookstores thrived, destroying those stores with cut-price best-sellers, and all but owning the book business.

Borders collapsed because of poor choices — weak locations, an overemphasis on music, and, worst of all, selling off its online bookstore to Amazon for $20 million in the 1990s. Chump change, by today’s standards.

So why is B&N on the ropes, if it has virtually no competition today from chains or privately owned bookstores?

 

Click here to read the full editorial on The Contra Costa Times News.

 

Q&A: IBPA Director Angela Bole on Self-Publishing and the Digital Future

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This post by Rich Bellis originally appeared on Digital Book World on 5/5/14.

Angela Bole assumed her role as executive director of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) in July 2013, moving over from No. 2 in command at the Book Industry Study Group (BISG). As she rounds out her first year as the head of the largest publishing association in the U.S. with about 3,000 individual members, she took some time to speak with Digital Book World about her plans for IBPA and how independent presses, self-published authors and digital natives are all reshaping the marketplace.

 

Rich Bellis: What was it like transitioning from BISG, where you served as deputy executive director since 2009, and how were the first few months settling in at IBPA?

Angela Bole: It was a little bit of the best of both worlds. I had a lot of the same contacts coming over from a similar trade association in publishing, or at least a sister association. I still had a lot of the same people that I continue to work with, so that was really helpful.

But it’s a whole new market for me working with independent publishers and self-published authors, so there’s a learning curve as well. I’m still in the middle of it.

 

RB: What direction are you planning to take IBPA in order to continue to serve that market?

AB: IBPA has a long history. It’s been around for 30 years, and it’s one of the most trusted associations in publishing for independent publishers. It has a strong legacy, and that was really interesting to me coming in. Our focus now is just to strengthen the foundations even more: to look at the different programs that we’re running and make sure they’re relevant today—and they have been for many years—and to change some of them if we see that we need to do that to make sure they’re meeting our members’ needs.

Another thing that’s important to us right now is really understanding who our members are. So we launched a full-scale member survey in March, and we pulled results in that we’ll be analyzing this summer so we can start to tailor programs to different members’ needs.

 

RB: Without having done that yet, can you speculate on anything you’re likely to learn about the makeup of your membership?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Digital Book World.

 

When An Author Should Self-Publish And How That Might Change

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This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 4/17/14. a

There is a question that every agent and publisher is dealing with, because authors surely are. And that’s this: when should an author self- (or indie-) publish?

The answer is certainly not “never”, and if there is anybody left in a publishing house who thinks it is, they should think a little harder.

For a number of reasons, the belief here is that most of the time for most authors who can get a deal with an established and competent house, their best choice is to take it. It’s good to get an advance that is partially in your pocket before the manuscript is even finished and assured once it is. It’s good to have a team of capable professionals doing marketing work that authors are seldom equipped to do well themselves and which can be expensive to buy freelance, particularly if you don’t know how. It’s good to have a coordinated effort to sell print and ebooks, online and offline, and it’s good to have the supply chain ready for your book, with inventory in place where it can help stimulate sales, when you fire the starting gun for publicity and marketing. And it’s great to have an organization turning your present book into more dollars while you as an author focus on generating the next one, and start pocketing the next advance.

Publishers have heretofore really had only one model for working with authors. They acquire the rights, usually paying an advance-against-royalties, and own and control the entire process of publishing. It is generally understood that all efforts to make the book known can show benefits in all the commercial channels it exploits. So publishers have generally insisted on, and authors have generally accepted, controlling all the rights to a book when they pay that advance. The two pretty standard, time-honored exceptions have been cinematic (Hollywood) rights, which are rarely controlled by the publisher, and foreign territory and language rights, which are only sometimes controlled by the publisher.

Since publishers until very recently effectively monopolized the path to market, they could effectively make the rules about what an author could publish.asdf

 

Click here to read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

The Library ebook Situation is Appalling

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on Good Ereader on 4/20/14.

Publishers have been heavily resistant about selling their catalog of eBooks to libraries in the US and Canada. It took years of lobbying from the American Library Association and companies such as 3M and Overdrive to finally sway them over. Now, in one way or another, every major publisher has a pilot project or distributes select titles to libraries.

In 2013, both Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, which had not been selling ebooks to libraries, began pilot programs which were eventually expanded. Macmillan now sells its entire back-list of 11,000 titles to libraries nationwide and Simon & Schuster expanded its first pilot to a dozen libraries. Penguin Book Group ended its embargo policy so that all ebook titles would be available to libraries at the same time as in the consumer ones are issued. Hachette Book Group made all its ebooks available to libraries at the same time as print books. Smaller publishers such as Smashwords have also got involved in the distribution of eBooks from their wellspring of self-published content.

Major publishers still see libraries as devaluing their digital product by giving it away for free.

 

Click here to read the full post on Good Ereader.

 

The Best Time NOT To Self Publish Is…(Never)

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This post by Marcy Goldman originally appeared on Joe Wikert’s Digital Content Strategies on 4/9/14.

There are so many op-eds these days on when or if to self-publish but more so, features on the inferiority of self-published works just by virtue of fact they are self-published. This premise is applied even if the self-publishing author has the budget, foresight and professionalism to engage all manner of expert editors, proof readers, formatters, designers and thoroughly research the distributing and promotion of his/her work, the resultant book will be very bad. Worse, it will be amateur in content and looks.

There’s also an assumption (somewhat fear, vs. empirically based) that without sufficient social media or platform, books (even great ones) won’t get noticed. I’ve seen a zillion writerly blogs with this headline: If you publish it who will find it/you? This suggests that Shakespeare (et al, Dan Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert, JD Salinger, James Patterson, Ayn Rand) without benefit of Twitter, Facebook and Instragram or a YouTube book trailer of Othello, would never have been discovered. This is to further suggest that we as authors, creators, publishers and readers actually believe form trumps content. That means greatness, is a deux et machninas/medium-is-the-message is a fail from the get-go and a Pulitzer would never percolate to a deserved level of consciousness and find a collective of readers who know a good thing (or alternatively, what they want) when they find it – however they find it. But trust me (and the author of 50 Shades of Grey), they do and will find it.

What astounds me in the vast acreage of articulated opinions on these issues is a few-fold.

For one thing, there’s a passion, even a nervous derision or tempered contempt or dismissiveness offered to self-published authors in most of the opinion pieces I’ve read. Although I am Canadian, it is a divide akin to Tea Party-ers and Democrats, i.e. it’s a visceral thing.

 

Click here to read the full post on Joe Wikert’s Digital Content Strategies.

 

Give That Piece A Second Chance

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 4/10/14.

In the past, I have advocated for fewer imprints. Allow me to reverse course as I suggest a new imprint idea that should be added at every major publisher. Call it Resurrection or Second Chance or Renewal. The idea is simple: Publishers are sitting on piles of quality material that they paid good money for. Some of those investments didn’t pay off. But it may not have been the fault of the text. Give that piece a second chance.

Self-published authors do this all the time (though probably not as often as they should). If a digital book isn’t selling well, there’s minimal cost and zero risk in repackaging the work and giving it a second go. Every editor has a list of books a mile long that they truly believed in, loved to death, but didn’t quite make a splash. Too often, this is blamed on the book or on consumers. Nearly as often, it is the wrong cover art, the wrong metadata, the wrong blurb, the wrong title, or simply the wrong time.

For the cost of cover art and an upload, a piece of valuable property can be brought out of the vault and sent out to customers. I imagine a spirited meeting once a month over coffee and scones, where editors can make their case for a book at least two years old that didn’t sell as expected. Perhaps they would want to look primarily at books for which they paid large advances, as the earnings are already in the red (so more of what is made would be kept in-house). These are probably the books they cared dearly about when they first saw them. Another $5,000 for a digital-only release is a drop in the bucket.

 

Click here to read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

Literature Helps Explain The World To Me

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This post by Aasim Akhtar originally appeared on The News on Sunday on 4/13/14.

A literary agent in France, Marc Parent is to publishing what Edvard Munch was to painting

Good looks, comic brilliance, and career success have not prevented Marc Parent from doing what he does best: living life as an emotional basket case. More riddled with pain than an arthritic joint, Parent is to publishing what Edvard Munch was to painting — the ultimate scream.

Marc Parent has been working in international publishing for 28 years in the wake of his studies in French and Comparative Literatures at L’Ecole Superieure Normale and at the College de France in Nanterre and Paris, and at Columbia University, NYC. For the last 10 years, he has been a publisher of foreign fiction and non-fiction at Editions Buchet/Castel in France, where he put together a major Indian and Pakistani catalogue of writers, including Daniyal Mueenuddin and Padmasambhava’s Tibetan Book of the Dead.

In May 2013, he started one-of-a-kind literary agency, India Maya Literary in Paris representing writers from all around the globe, with a special focus on fiction and non-fiction writers from India and Pakistan.

His publishing behind him, Parent holed up in Beach Luxury Hotel in Karachi on the occasion of KLF 2014 summing up his motives for the work as an effort to use thoughts about undoing the buttons of the ego to gorge out a proposition of his own.

Before his retreat, TNS tracked him down on the lawns facing the creek for an update. Unassuming and frail, he was nonetheless exuberant. Excerpts follow:

 

Click here to read the full post on The News on Sunday.

 

Tom Weldon: 'Some say publishing is in trouble. They are completely wrong'

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This post by Jennifer Rankin originally appeared on The Guardian UK / The Observer site on 4/5/14.

Ahead of the London Book Fair, the UK head of Penguin Random House insists his industry has coped with the digital revolution better than any other

The indie booksellers are shutting up shop, authors struggle to make a living, and more than 60% of 18-to-30-year-olds would rather watch a DVD than get their nose in a book. But as the publishing world gathers at the annual London Book Fair this week, one of the UK’s leading publishers thinks the notion of the book industry in crisis is just a cliched old story.

“Some commentators say the publishing industry is in enormous trouble today. They are completely wrong, and I don’t understand that view at all,” says Tom Weldon, UK chief executive of Penguin Random House, one of the biggest players in Britain’s book world.

As an up-and-coming publisher, he persuaded a teenage chef called Jamie Oliver to sign a book contract. He gets to edit Jeremy Paxman‘s prose and read the latest Ian McEwan manuscript. And since last July he has been at the helm of the UK division of the world’s biggest publishing house, after a mega-merger brought together Penguin, Random House and their 15,000 writers.

While a recent Booktrust survey showing that reading for pleasure is declining among young people might lead some execs to reach for the chablis, Weldon is convinced book publishers are doing better than other creative industries in adapting to a digital world.

“In the last four years, Penguin and Random House have had the best years in their financial history,” he says. “Book publishers have managed the digital transition better than any other media or entertainment industry. I don’t understand the cultural cringe around books.”

 

Click here to read the full post on The Guardian UK / The Observer.

 

LBF’s Digital Minds: The Golden Age or End of the Book?

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This post by Roger Tagholm and Edward Nawotka originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 4/8/14.

The Digital Minds conference in London took a philosophical bent, questioning is this “golden age for publishing or the end of the book?”

Copernicus, Ptolemy, Einstein, Wittgenstein and Willard Quine (don’t worry…he was a US philosopher and logician) were all name-checked in a presentation at yesterday’s Digital Minds that was as abstract as the speaker’s hair. Bill Thompson from the BBC Archives gave a philosophical masterclass on what we mean when we refer to a book and how the print and digital versions are very different animals, one passive, the other active.

“A [print] book sits there. It will contain the same words every time you open it. A book is outside the stream. Like a neutrino [sic: it was that sort of presentation], it rarely interacts with the world or interferes with the thoughts of even a single reader. This is its merit and its damnation…It is printed, dead, done with. Furniture.”

An ebook, he continued, is a file, “and because it’s just a file an ebook is never finished, an ebook is never cleanly separated from the rest of the flow of bits, an ebook is active, part of a wider ecosystem.”

Thompson thinks the industry needs to find a new paradigm because at the moment “publishers, agents and authors still act as if printed books are the center of the universe, and all other forms of publishing revolve around the printed, bound text.

 

Click here to read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Not Drowning But Waving

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This post by Jonny Geller originally appeared on The Bookseller on 5/22/12, but its content is still surprisingly on-point.

I recently read a good début novel entitled The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan (not my client, so relax, I’m not pitching). A ship has sunk and the survivors are packed in a lifeboat, vying for control. Without a clear idea that they will see land again, they are jostling for a good spot on the boat. You can see where I’m going with this.

It feels like a gust of wind has come along and shoved everyone in the publishing industry into one spot on the lifeboat. The storm has abated and the seas seem calm, but we are all sitting in the wrong place, next to people we didn’t think we would be, or should be, nudging against. We have to work out who we are now. The morning after the disaster, we have woken up on the lifeboat with new objectives:

» The publisher. Now seeking “a direct relationship with the consumer”—a euphemism for “they are going to sell books directly”.

» The bookseller. Now seeking “a localised, niche, customer-driven service”—a euphemism for “they are sick of the huge returns and so [are] now going to stock lots of titles but not many of each of them”.

» The agent. Now seeking to “create a 360˚ vision for his/her clients”—a euphemism for “they now do everything: publicise, edit, organise talks and even publish”.

» The author. Now seeking “a more equal partnership with all elements of the chain”—a euphemism for “they are sick of being treated like a disposable commodity”.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Bookseller.