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Category: Publishing

Published November 5, 2009

Keep Calm and Carry On?

There is nothing quite like pricing to get book people’s pulses racing and the recent price war in the US — and the American Booksellers Association’s open letter to the Department of Justice — certainly has everyone and their mother all aflutter.

We have plenty of pricing issues of own in Canada. The unique challenges of publishing here (big geography + small population) and the fluctuating US dollar make Canadian pricing particularly fraught. But we haven’t really seen the same kind of problems as the US or the supermarket price wars that have plagued the UK.

As The Toronto Star helpfully points out, Canada is different. But it is not simply a matter of being more polite than Americans (or nicer than the British) — what makes us different is that we are a small book market dominated by a single retailer. Dropping the gloves with Canada’s Chief Booklover hardly seems worth the effort.

Nevertheless, Canadian consumers keep a keen eye on the US and a sustained price war south of the border would inevitably put pressure on bookstores in Canada (including Chapters-Indigo). It would be foolish to ignore what is going on.

The most emotive issue is, of course, the detrimental impact of price wars on already struggling independent bookstores. As HarperStudio’s Bob Miller notes:

The short-term results of this price war are some losses for Wal-Mart and Amazon, and some brisk sales for the publishers whose books have been chosen. But the “road kill” here are the accounts who can’t afford to participate in the race—traditional booksellers.

Clearly though, publishers like Miller are worried too. It has been a particularly difficult 18 months in US publishing, and the thought of additional pressure on prices and discounts is, for many, terrifying. We seem to be lurching from one crisis to the next.

But, is this really anything more than another storm in the tempestuous book industry teacup?

To some extent I agree with Mark and The New Yorker that twitchy book people are exaggerating the effects of this price war. We are, after all, only talking about ten books. This isn’t going to wreck publishing just yet. In the short term it will be good for sales, and as long as Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target are willing to take the losses, the publishers will be laughing all the way to the bank.

But there will clearly be problems down the road if this continues, and I think Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson, is on to something when he suggests that the strategy behind the price war is actually damaging for everyone — publishers, authors, booksellers, mass retailers, and consumers (although Dennis Johnson at Moby Lives isn’t totally convinced by Hyatt’s solutions).

If there are going to be ‘winners’ in this, it is only going to be the big retailers and it will not be long before they demand more books and deeper discounts. Publishers will have to run the risk of crippling returns if the discounted books don’t sell, and will be increasingly reluctant to bet on creative projects. Corners will be cut in the effort to produce cheaper books that are short-term ‘sure things’.

Without over-stating it, I am also troubled that such discounts set the expectation that all books should be less than $10 (and if you’re skeptical about setting expectations with arbitrary numbers, you might want to read Nudge).

In the end, you get what you pay for. Books — good books — take time and they take money, whether they are printed or distributed digitally. If a book costs less than $10, then you can expect publishers  — and self-publishers for that matter — to churn out a lot of poorly researched, quickly written, hurriedly edited, badly designed and cheaply produced books. And, as Don Linn, former Senior VP and Publisher at Taunton Books, points out, this will certainly hurt authors first:

When content’s price and value is pushed below a sustainable level for publishers… writers will suffer. They will be forced to make the economic choice to write less to finance their careers. It’s not enough to say glibly that ‘writers have to write so they will’ or that self-publishing will be their salvation. When content’s value drops, self-published content’s value drops as well.

Of course, publishers need to take responsibility here. Too often publishers dump bad books into stores in pursuit of a fast-buck, and they only have themselves to blame when stores demand big discounts up front and readers don’t actually want to pay full price for them.

And I think it is too easy to say that books (paper or digital) need to be cheaper and more ‘timely’. Sure. But I’m willing to bet that readers are also willing to seek out and to pay for books that surprise and delight (and that format isn’t the real issue).

It is difficult for publishers to think about the long-term (especially if shareholders are involved), but if we are seriously worried about pricing, then perhaps the place to start is publish books that are worth the price tag?

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Published October 19, 2009

Less is More…

Poets & Writers magazine have just published the final installment of Jofie Ferrari-Adler’s series of interviews with publishing professionals.

The last interview in this excellent series is with Jonathan Karp, publisher and editor in chief of Hachette‘s remarkably successful Twelve imprint.

Formerly an editor at Random House, Karp founded Twelve with the objective of publishing no more than one book a month. Since their launch, 15 of Twelve’s first 30 books, including Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great and Dave Cullen’s Columbine (pictured above — cover designed by Henry Sene Yee), have been New York Times best-sellers. It’s clearly a successful model, even if it is one that’s hard for start-ups to replicate (how many new imprints could have snapped up the rights to True Compass by Ted Kennedy for example?).

The interview is, of course, well worth reading in full. But here are a few passages about Twelve that stood out for me…

On founding Twelve:

I was thinking, “Okay, I want everything to be the lead title. I want to have at least a month to put it across. And I want to have the best talent. What’s the best way to do that?” It’s to make a promise to the author and to make the promise so explicit that it’s on the spine of the book: Twelve. That’s it. One a month. You get your launch and, although we can’t guarantee that the book’s going to be a best-seller, we can at least guarantee that you will have our full attention, focus, and commitment for a sustained period. We will talk about your book until people will not listen to us anymore.

On acquisitions:

I really am amazed by how often publishers decide to do something because a similar book succeeded. That is flawed reasoning. Books catch on for any number of reasons, and it’s not a mathematical formula that can be reproduced. Even more insidious is the idea that sometimes creeps into acquisition decisions in a really cynical and negative way, where people say, “Well, that nondescript work caught on, so this nondescript work could too.” I just don’t understand why you would want to go down that road. It makes no sense to me. I would think that you would feel as if you were going through your life just imitating other people, doing something you didn’t really believe in. I’m genuinely mystified by that.

On publishing fewer books:

What I do think is that the Twelve model makes a great deal of sense for unknown authors or authors who want to break out. I think that’s true. I think that this is the best way to publish a midlist author or an author who’s on the way up. Let me put it another way: I think it would behoove the major publishing houses to publish fewer books with more focus. I think that everybody would benefit from that. What I don’t know is whether the companies can meet their targets doing it. I’d have to be a CFO to know that, and it would be arrogant of me to say that a major publisher can get by without disposable books. I don’t know the answer to that. What I know is that I’m working for a company that publishes a lot less than the other major publishers with a more concentrated marketing approach and seems to be making a lot of money doing it.

On the “future of publishing”:

I have an idealistic hope that as more and more media becomes disposable, books will be increasingly regarded as the permanent expression of thought and feeling and wisdom. So publishers who can offer definitive material will thrive. Now, as I say, that’s idealistic. Plenty of publishers are going to continue to do well publishing derivative material that they don’t really believe in. But I think it’s going to be harder for them. It’s going to be harder for them to survive. I think there will be some displacement—some houses will shrink and other houses will grow. I could see some pure play digital publishers who aren’t encumbered by the weight of overhead and the history of their business relationships becoming influential factors in the publishing world. So I think it’s a transitional time and a transformative time. But it’s always been that way. I don’t think anything should be regarded as permanent. All we ultimately have is our belief in the particular books. And as long as you have that, you’re fine.

As I say, the whole interview (the whole series in fact) really is worth your time.

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Published July 17, 2009

Knots

I usually avoid discussions of digital rights management (DRM) as much as possible. It’s a Gordian Knot. We can spend a lot of time and energy painstakingly untangling it, never to find a form of DRM that keeps everyone happy. Or we can  end DRM altogether with one bold stroke (“mission accomplished!”) only to discover that cutting the knot takes longer than we expected and is more complicated than we first thought. Either way, my sense is that we will continue to have some kind of hybrid situation — with some e-books ‘protected’ by DRM and some not — as we both cut and untangle all the issues…

And for all that I’m often left wandering if DRM really matters as much as we tend to think it does. Do people outside of our strange intersection of media and technology really care about it as much as we do? Are there other pressing issues that we should direct energy towards?  I have this nagging sense that as we agonise over the do-we-don’t-we of DRM, most people just want to read good books.

Nevertheless, the great DRM debate has come to the fore again as a result of Michael Bhaskar’s seemingly mild assertion that DRM Is Not Evil on Pan Macmillan’s The Digitalist blog, which resulted in the (predictable) slew of comments.  Michael has now posted a response which has garnered another slew of comments.  It’s all worth reading if you can summon the energy and want some insight into the issue (although I don’t think anyone mentions foreign rights, but perhaps some one will get to that yet…)

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Published June 26, 2009

Something for the Weekend, June 26th, 2009

2009 Penguin Design Award — Peter Adlington’s abstract design for The Secret History by Donna Tart (pictured above) took 1st place. More on the Penguin Blog.

The Good Design Book — Christopher Simmons, graphic designer and principle at the San Francisco-based design firm MINE, records the progress and process of writing and designing his new book on design (via Unbeige). The whole concept reminded me that I should also mention the crowdsourced Smashing Magazine Book.

OK, Go — Kassia Krozser, Kirk Biglione, and Kat Meyer (and an unnamed “veteran of the book industry”), put their money where their collective mouth is, and launch digital publisher Quartet Press (and they’re accepting submissions).

The Debrief — Organizer Hugh McGuire pens his personal thoughts on BookCamp Toronto for Book Oven.

One of the most powerful things about BookCamp, compared with other events I’ve been to, is that this was not just a grassroots group. There was high-level engagement from the publishing industry, with publishers, editors, senior VPs, production managers, marketers, and interns, and everything in between. It was great to see the honest debate and conversation being lead by these insiders, who are truly grappling with the future of their business and their passion.

And VANTAP‘s Sean “Crazy Horse” Cranbury  adds his 2 cents on #bcto09 at the Books on The Radio blog, and teases BookCamp Vancouver.

Vile Bodies — The 1930 first edition cover of Evelyn Waugh’s second novel seen at BibliOdyssey.

And last, but not least…

Apples and Oranges — The article about the evolution of Amazon by Adam L. Penenberg, author of the forthcoming Viral Loop: How Social Networks Unleash Revolutionary Business Growth, that launched a great Twitter chat with @FastCompany and yesterday’s ’26 Things…’ list (which could have easily been twice as long). 

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Published May 26, 2009

What’s Next For Publishers?

An unforeseen consequence of the “New Think for Old Publishers” debacle at SXSW in earlier this year is that I will be a participant in a session on the role of the publishers in the digital age at Book Camp Toronto on June 6th.

140 Character Assassination

The now infamous SXSW panel was supposed to discuss “what’s going right and what’s going wrong in publishing, assess success of recent forays into marketing digitally, digital publishing, and what books and blogs have to gain from one another.”

As has been well documented elsewhere, things did not go according to plan.

Despite the presence of heavyweight panelists (including the venerable Clay Shirky), new ideas were in short supply. Audience frustration overflowed on to Twitter and an array of 140 character bullets (identified by a #sxswbp hashtag) ripped into the panel, with what was perhaps the kill-shot fired by a writer in the audience:

“If, as an author, I can design it myself, write it myself, publish it myself, why would I bother going to a publisher at all? What purpose do you serve?”*

Existential Crisis

The old answer to this question was that publishers offered technical expertise and mass distribution.

But, nowadays, digital technology has made it easy for writers to publish, distribute and market their own books independently. And whilst professional editing, design, production, distribution, and marketing may still be valuable and sought-after services, it’s become very apparent that the perceived gap between self-publishing and traditional publishing is narrowing.

The battering that the SXSW panel took inadvertently revealed what we have long-suspected — publishers need to change the way they think about themselves, the decisions they make, and the services they offer, or cease to exist.

Fine Filtering

One idea that gained some currency in the aftermath of SXSW was that publishers are — or could be — ‘cultural curators’, a role made only more important by the explosion of content created and distributed by digital technology.

In a world where it is impossible to read everything that is emailed, texted, tweeted, posted, uploaded, or printed, there is an opportunity for publishers to become trusted advisers who sift through the vast digital slush-pile and present only the best, most interesting work. Or so the argument goes.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that publishers haven’t proved to be very effective at curating in the past, and it’s precisely this kind of pretension that gets them in trouble at events like SXSW.

A rap sheet of opportunistic publishing, self-indulgence, costly blunders, and generally too much poor product means that publishers (not to mention the mainstream media) have squandered any cultural authority they may once have had, and have been superseded by an informal network of curators connected online.

Furthermore, curation doesn’t really explain what publishers actually do for authors. If it’s just filtering (by set a of cultural criteria I may or may not agree with), why bother going to a publisher at all?

Strengthening the Signal

Not long after after SXSW I sat down in Toronto with Book Camp TO organizer Hugh McGuire to discuss these crumbling cultural hierarchies and the implications for publishers.

Expressing my dissatisfaction with the idea of publishers as curators  — and trying to take into account Hugh’s reader-centric approach — I suggested that perhaps we’d stand ourselves in better stead if we thought of ourselves more as ‘advocates’.

More proactive than curation, advocacy takes into account that publishers do more than find completed works of art and present them to the public. And it goes at least part way towards explaining what publishers do for authors, whilst offering a model for how they can interact meaningfully (and honestly) with readers.

Perhaps, just as crucially, it also means being able to effectively publish and promote books that we believe in, without making any of the claims of cultural authority or superiority that are attached to curating — the framework of advocacy works whether you are publishing literary fiction or genre, poetry or humour.

Admittedly, there are probably minimal and maximal versions of what ‘publisher as advocate’ means. On the minimal side, publishers promote (and defend if necessary) their books in the public forum. A more maximal version — which is probably where my thinking lies — would not simply limit advocacy to marketing a finished product. It would begin with the commissioning editor championing the work in-house, and continue through the production of the book to the publicist who is pitching it to reviewers, and beyond. It would also mean publishing less and publishing better.

So…

These ideas are not definitive. In fact they’re a rather hurried formation (at the prompting of Sean Cranbury) of a jumble of ideas that I’ve had kicking around my head that need more time, but also more air and more discussion.

The Book Camp Toronto session about the role of publishers is on Saturday June 6th at the University of Toronto’s iSchool. Please come along and share your ideas. If you can’t make it, please feel free to leave your feedback, ideas, and links in the comments section or send me an email or a DM.

Over and Out.

* For the record, this quotation is from panelist Peter Miller‘s account of #sxswbp

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Published April 1, 2009

Q & A with Ellen Lupton

“Ellen Lupton makes this industry smarter. If graphic design has a sense of its own history, an understanding of the theory that drives it and a voice for its continuing discourse, it’s largely because Lupton wrote it, thought it or spoke it.” — Katherine Feo, AIGA

Dedicated to raising design awareness, Ellen Lupton is the Director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

A regular columnist  for ReadyMade Magazine, she has contributed to Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis, and writes regularly about design at both Design-Your-Life and her own website Design Writing Research.

Her books include the indispensable introduction to typography Thinking with Type, DIY: Design It Yourself, D.I.Y. Kids,  co-authored with her identical twin sister Julia Lupton, and Graphic Design: The New Basics, co-authored with Jennifer Cole Phillips.

Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things , another collaboration with her sister Julia, will be published by St. Martin’s Press later this year.

But, not content with being an  author, curator, designer, and educator, Ellen recently became a publisher, founding  Slush Editions to independently publish the novel Sexy Librarian by artist Julia Weist.

Sexy Librarian also features as a case study in Ellen’s latest book  Indie Publishing— a guide for independent authors written, researched, and designed in collaboration with graduate students at MICA — published in December 2008 by Princeton Architectural Press.

Ellen kindly replied to my questions about design and indie publishing by email.

And for the sake of full disclosure, I should make absolutely clear that several of Ellen’s books are published by New York’s Princeton Architectural Press who are distributed by Raincoast Books in Canada. But, for the record, that only explains why I have her email in my address book, not why I chose to interview her.

I have also interviewed Ellen previously for the Pages bookstore in Toronto.

How would you define ‘indie publishing’?
Indie publishing is author-driven. The traditional publishing industry is controlled by publishing professionals — editors, marketing people, promotional staff, and the publishers in charge. These are all skilled people. In our book, we use the term broadly, to encompass everything from handmade zines to print-on-demand books to offset publications distributed by the authors to small imprints created by design firms who wanted to get into the content business.

How is it different from the traditional publishing industry?
Because it’s author-initiated, indie publishing side-steps the traditional barriers of the publishing industry. It gets beyond the gatekeepers. Now, those gatekeepers act as guardians of quality to some degree, but they also contribute to a homogeneous and profit-driven publishing industry that many authors find hostile and hard to penetrate. Indie publishing often serves niche or local markets that can’t be addressed by mainstream publishing.

What are the benefits of publishing yourself?
If you have had difficulty breaking into the mainstream publishing world, going independent is liberating. If you end up producing a successful book, the profits can be substantial, but this shouldn’t be the main motive to get into publishing. Few authors make substantial bucks on their books — regardless of who publishes them. For most of us, writing and producing books is a labor of love.

What are the risks?
Most forms of indie publishing cost money, and that’s a risk. When you work with a commercial publisher, they foot the printing bill. Publishers also provide essential services like editing, proofreading, design, distribution, and marketing. The indie publisher has to take on all these tasks alone (or find friends to help out). It’s not easy, especially the distribution part. Self-published books are still viewed as less legitimate than commercially published books, although this is starting to change.

Do you see indie publishing as part of a wider D.I.Y. movement?
We are seeing more independent production in all creative fields — music, art, theater, design, etc. Younger creative people are interested in creating new institutions and networks outside the official art world or music/literature establishments. They are comfortable using technology to disseminate their ideas.

How has the internet affected the development of indie publishing?
The internet allows indie publishers to reach potential readers outside the bookstore system. Today, anyone can set up an Amazon Marketplace account or sell publications directly from their web sites. Print-on-demand publishers like Lulu and Blurb produce books when someone buys them, sending the finished book directly to the customer. These technologies are creating new possibilities for authors, especially those whose work is directed at narrower, smaller audiences.

What advice would you give someone publishing their first book?
Love your book. Get advice from lots of people in order to have the best possible content. Consider the different avenues that exist for publishing your work, including mainstream publishing as well as independent ventures.

Think about your audience and the best way to reach them. And think about your own primary goals for publishing a book. For example, an artist having a gallery exhibition might use a print-on-demand book as a tool for building his or her career via grant applications, networking with galleries and curators, securing lecturing and teaching opportunities, and more. A well-designed, carefully authored book has many functions. Selling copies to lots of people is just one of them. You might use a book as professional portfolio for landing a job or attracting clients — maybe all you need is a few copies.

What are some of the common mistakes people make designing books?
It’s important to use good software. The industry standard today is Adobe InDesign, which is available for both Mac and PC and can be easily learned via software manuals or technical workshops. Programs like Microsoft Word or Publisher are extremely cumbersome and will ultimately be frustrating to a person trying to design a refined and elegant book. Choosing a good typeface is also important. Avoid Times Roman, which was originally designed for newspapers and is so widely used as to be banal. Beautiful, high-quality typefaces such as  Garamond often come bundled with layout software and computer operating systems. Keeping your design simple and consistent from page to page is a rule of thumb for any book design. You also need to “unlearn” some habits from high school, such as leaving two spaces between sentences — this is not done in formal typesetting, and it will make your book look amateurish.

What do you look for in good book design?
Beautiful type, elegant margins, consistent pages.

Have you ever bought a book just for its cover?
Of course! Cover design is extremely important. A cover is not only a billboard advertising your book on a shelf, it’s also an online logo for your book that needs to look great at 100 pixels high. Getting help from a good graphic designer on your book cover is a worthwhile investment.

What will be the impact of e-books on publishing?
I believe that e-books are going to be very, very good for authors. By lowering the cost of publishing, e-books will make it easier for more authors to get their work published and to reach specific audiences who want their content. What I’m less sure about is how e-books will affect graphic designers!

Are we finally seeing the ‘End of Print’?
I do believe there is a sea change going on. After decades of unsuccessful attempts at creating electronic book readers, suddenly the time seems right. I don’t think print will disappear, but I think we will see less of it. It remains a tactile, permanent, stable medium that users can feel a personal attachment to.

What role do you think print-on-demand will play in the future?
Print-on-demand is where digital media and print meet. I think we will see a lot more of this as prices go down in the future. Ultimately, it is a more sustainable way to publish and involves less financial risk, but right now, it is too expensive for large-scale endeavors.

How will e-books and print co-exist?
E-books are great for disposable reading — magazines, casual fiction, newspapers. Perhaps every physical book in the future will come with an e-book supplement. I often want to quickly reference a book I read, and e-books would be great for that. Personally, I collect books, but I don’t need to keep the latest Richard Price book on my shelf forever.

As a designer, do you feel an attachment to print?
I am very attached to print. I don’t want to see it disappear in my own lifetime, that’s for sure. I love the tactility, permanence, and scale. But I do find myself reading more and more online.

Thanks very much Ellen!

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Published March 19, 2009

6 Projects Video

6 Projects That Could Change Publishing For the Better — Video of Michael Tamblyn’s talk at BNC Technology Forum 2009:

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Published March 15, 2009

Experiments

One of the recurring themes of the Book Net Tech Forum was that publishers need to learn through frequent experimentation, or as BNC CEO Michael Tamblyn put it: “place lots of little bets quickly.”

Mark Bertils has just posted this great interview with  O’Reilly Media’s Andrew Savikas recorded at the BNC Tech Forum last week on exactly this topic (and Andrew — sorry about making fun of your PowerPoint slides on Twitter):

And, all this ties in quite nicely with Clay Shirky’s recent — must read — essay on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable :

“You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows… it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it… We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments…

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Published March 15, 2009

Things Are Not Working Very Well. In Fact, They Never Did.

Trawling my RSS feeds looking for Monday’s links, I came across an interesting review of Systemantics, John Gall’s essay on ‘How Systems Work & Especially How They Fail’ (originally published in 1977 and available online here) .

I’m still processing everything from the Book Net Tech Forum, but in the context of revolutionizing the book industry, this line caught my eye:

“Reformers blame it all on “the system”, and propose new systems that would, they assert, guarantee a brave new world… Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point — that their own system would work very well if only it were universally adopted.”

And now having just read the book’s introduction, which — somewhat remarkably — doesn’t seem to have dated much,  I think I’m going have to read the whole book…

Link (via LinkMachineGo)

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Published March 13, 2009

BookNet Tech Forum

Yesterday I was at Book Net Canada’s Technology Forum at the Radisson Hotel on Queens Quay West in Toronto.

The theme of the event was Evolution or Revolution: “How does the publishing community best prepare for the next generation of reading (and readers)?”

With a wide-range of speakers from publishing and beyond, there were lots of ideas zipping around.

For basic details, the day’s schedule,  brief summaries, and slide-show presentations are available from the BNC website, and  immediate, off-the-cuff comments (including my own not terribly clever insights) can be found on Twitter with the tag #bnc09.

The Quillblog has just posted a scholarly summary of the day, but here are some of my slightly random notes on the good, the indifferent, and the ugly of Tech Forum 24 hours later…

The Good

BookNet. Along side SalesData and the forthcoming BiblioShare (which will facilitate access to bibliographic data),  Tech Forum demonstrated that BookNet is fast becoming the honest broker for publisher collaboration in Canada.  Whilst dropping heavy hints about future BNC projects (notably electronic cataloging) CEO Michael Tamblyn delivered a genuinely brilliant presentation, and slipped in the line of the day:

“Plastic Logic is like Jesus: It’ll save the world, but only 12 people have seen it, and no one knows when it is coming.”

(With quips like that I can almost forgive him for: “What do you want your revolution to be?” Er… Something that doesn’t involve vacuous bullshit hyperbole?*)

Harlequin Enterprises. Discussing the evolution of their ebook program, it was hard not to be impressed with Harlequin’s willingness to experiment in  a potentially conservative market.  I’m yet to be convinced that everything they do could be done as effectively by a general trade publisher, but Harlequin’s initiatives  demonstrate  that publishers should innovate and innovate often. And involving authors and readers will only improve that process.

Neelan Choksi, COO of Lexcycle who managed to talk about technology without condescending to his audience or hard selling Stanza. He also dealt with  speed-presenting  the app’s new features as the video demo malfunctioned behind him with self-deprecating good humour.

Hugh McGuire (LibriVox, BookOven) shaking off scurilous internet rumours that he is the angry man of publishing, and talking about love. A lot. Hugh’s advice: Focus on readers and enable book lovers to talk about your books. Do not underestimate the power of passionate people!

And, it should also be said, Tech Forum was  a great opportunity to meet new people in the industry and catch up with familiar faces.

The Indifferent:

Too little discussion of quality and how to make better books; too much blather about marketing and window-dressing.

Asking a room full of Canadians “how many of you have Kindles?” is an easy mistake for an American to make, but it was indicative. The US and Canada are very similar — in lots and lots of ways — but there was very little recognition that there are also very real differences between the markets. The absence of any Canadian sales figures and stats (or even cultural references) made several presentations markedly less compelling.

Assuming that your specific experience can be generalized; the current model is valueless and irreparably broken (even though it provides the vast majority of our business and fuels yours);  that publishers are fiddling while Rome burns; you know something (anything) about the music industry and can make a convincing argument with sloppy comparisons;  all content is of equal value; social media will save the world; the screen is inherently better than print; DRM is the biggest thing we have to worry about…etc. etc.  =  big *meh*. Platitudinous  digital orthodoxy is . not. interesting.

The surprisingly low number of people online at the forum. Mark Birtels’ unofficial count had a dozen laptops in use in the room of around 200 people (all Apples except mine!), which is pretty close to the number of  people who live-tweeted the event… It’s hard to convince people we know our arse from our technological elbow with those kind of numbers…

The Ugly

The really good news is that there was surprising little to complain about. BNC Marketing Manager Morgan Cowie and the rest of the BNC staff did a great job of corralling everyone and ran a great event. BUT, just for the record,  if there’s one thing worse than PowerPoint presentations, it’s BAD PowerPoint presentations: Never. Use. Comic. Sans. In. Anything. Ever.


And if you were at Tech Forum yesterday, I would love to know what you thought about it. Send me an email send at danielwagstaff [at] gmail.com, DM me on Twitter, or leave a comment below…

*As its overall glibness atests, this post was written in haste  to be timely, ‘hyperbole’ better fits my intended meaning better than ‘bullshit’.

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Published March 3, 2009

Monday Miscellany, March 2nd, 2009

Apologies for a delayed entry in the Monday Miscellany category, but here we go (better late than never)…

Eric Carl‘s Flickr photostream has some nice classic sci-fi and fantasy book covers (the rather fine looking Death of a Doll and New Writings in SF 5 pictured above). (via but does it float)

Re-envisioning the American small press — Fiona McCrae, director and publisher of Minneapolis independent Graywolf Press, profiled in PW (via @sarahw):

McCrae believes the publishing business is changing in favor of smaller presses, which can have close contact with their audiences and realistically support the smaller sales that typify many literary books: “I think that’s been true for a long time, and it’s just getting truer and truer and truer. There’s still obviously a layer in which we don’t compete, and it’s not our job to”

Rearrange, Rewrite, Redefine and Reimagine — Chicago-based indie Featherproof Books would like you to “remix” parts of their forthcoming titles, starting with Tour of the Drowned Neighborhood a short story taken from Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas (via @R_Nash).

Overdue! — The Central Library in Atlanta, the last building by “Modernist master” Marcel Breuer, is under threat according to Jonathan Lerner in Metropolis Magazine (pictured above).

A fair share — In the final installment of a 3-part series for the Globe and Mail on the publishing industry in Canada, James Adams looks at the thorny issue of digital rights.

Wild Hair, Wilder Ideas —  The Guardian profiles Alan Moore (and — on a related note — novelist Lydia Millet’s somewhat ill-considered assessment of Watchmen for the WSJ)

From Caveman to Spray Can: A Graphic Journey — Mike Dempsey’s gently meandering history of graphic design which not only features one or two books, but also the lovely Gill Sans typeface (picture above) which was used on the early Penguin paperbacks (via Noisy Decent Graphics).

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Published February 27, 2009

Something for the Weekend, Feb 27th, 2009

The 5 Rules of Book Cover Design Book — John Gall, VP and art Director at Vintage, talks about designing books at Barnes & Noble (video). There is also a nice print interview with John Gall from 2007 at STEP Inside Design magazine and another interview with the designer from the same year  at fwis Covers website (which is worth it just for the immortal line: “I want a telepathic dog.”) (John Gall at the Book Cover Archive— Pragmatism: A Reader designed by John Gall,  pictured above)

Fear, panic, and a little bit of hope — Sarah Weinman discusses the perilous state of  the publishing industry on NHPR’s Word of Mouth.

Chapters-Indigo‘s move into e-books, Shortcovers, goes live to much curiousity and twittering. The Globe and Mail has the basics, The National Post’s The Ampersand rounds up some of the reactions, but O’Reilly’s TOC seems to sum up the general mood: “A Good Start, But Room for Reader Improvement”. Michael Serbinis, the executive VP, writes about the first day on the Shortcovers blog.

(NB – I’ve sort of been ignoring the Kindle2 stuff as it’s not available in Canada, but — just to have some balance — E-Reads has a nice round up of the coverage).

Influence the future — Anthro Goggles lists the first 4 SF books you should read if you work in social media.

Jacket Copy — An interesting interview with David L. Ulin, book editor of the Los Angeles Times (who folded their standalone book section 6-months ago), in PW:

Ulin takes a realistic, broad-ranging view of how book coverage will be presented in the future. “I’m committed to both print and Web. There are two readerships, and I’m not sure they’re the same. My main interest is, how do we get the most book coverage to the most people?” Ideally, Ulin would welcome a return to the stand-alone book review. “But we don’t have one now, and we’re not going to have one,” he says.

modernism 101 : from aalto to zwart — “We specialize in rare and out-of-print design books and periodicals. Our carefully-selected online inventory spotlights both famous and forgotten modernist architects, photographers, typographers, and industrial designers in all their published glory.” How could I not link to this? Even if you can’t afford the books (which I can’t) you can at least look at the covers! (The Twentieth Century Book by John Lewis pictured above). (via ISO150)

And on a related bookporn note, Grain Edit has some rather nice pictures of Typographica, the design journal edited by Herman Spencer…

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