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Category: Publishing

Published February 24, 2009

Unproduct

More Ideas, Less Stuff — London-based graphic designer Ben Terrett of the Really Interesting Group and Noisy Decent Graphics is in The Guardian today talking about Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008, a limited-edition newspaper that collected together interesting stuff from the internet, and the idea of  ‘unproduct’, or creating more value but producing less stuff:

Originally coined by the designer Matt Jones and built upon by the strategist Russell Davies, among others, unproduct is basically maximum idea, minimum stuff… More than anything, unproduct is a new way of thinking about things. A new model. So is making something and giving it away. So are joint ventures. We’ve got people building stuff quickly, trying out new ideas, often for free. We have clients and agencies taking risks and more importantly sharing those risks. We’re creating maximum ideas and minimum stuff.

When people start talking to me about e-books, I have to confess there’s a small part of my brain that begins to shut down because I just don’t find them intrinsically interesting (inevitable and utilitarian yes, fun and interesting, no). But I love the idea of applying unproduct-type principles to publishing.

Sadly I don’t own a copy of Things Are Friends Have Written on the Internet 2008, but I gather that on the last page Russell Davies and Ben Terrett say: “2009 feels like a year for printing and making real stuff in the real world. Its going to be exciting”.

I hope so. I think this is fantastic.

Link

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Published February 21, 2009

Something for the Weekend, Feb 21th, 2009

Corpoetics — The text from the websites of  “well-known brands and corporations” remixed and rearranged into strangely engaging and enigmatic poetry by Nick Asbury (photo above from Ace Jet 170). I rather like the one taken from Scottish Widows:

Here in an Edinburgh coffee house,
their futures became history.
Meet the latest widow.

Copies of Corpoetics available for £5 (plus p&p) from Nick Asbury’s website, and all proceeds go to the National Literacy Trust, an independent charity dedicated to changing lives through literacy.

A Q&A With Four Young Editors — Just a fantastic, fascinating conversation between Richard Nash (Soft Skull), Lee Boudreaux (Ecco), Alexis Gargagliano (Scribner), and Eric Chinski (FSG) in the latest issue of Poets & Writers. It’s long. Make some coffee, grab a snack and devote some time to it. Well worth it. Honestly.

In Defense of Readers — Mandy Brown, Creative Director at W. W. Norton & Company,  on designing websites for readers:

Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience… Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.

And last, but by no means least… Coralie in Conversation — The Caustic Cover Critic interviews Penguin’s super-talented book designer Coralie Bickford-Smith.

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Published February 19, 2009

Why don’t you take the comfortable chair?

Colin Robinson, former editor at Scribner (a division of  Simon & Schuster) and previously at The New Press and Verso,  has written an excellent diary piece for the London Review of Books on Publishing’s Demise.

It’s always interesting to read an experienced insider’s take on the state of the industry, and although it covers some very familiar ground, Robinson’s article is particularly  comprehensive and thoughtful (and, given he was fired by Scribner in December 2008, dignified).

It is also interesting that Robinson notes — as Allan Kornblum of Coffee House Press did in his recent interview with Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading (mentioned yesterday)  —  that electronic communication has made  “life easier for writers and harder for readers.”   As more and more stuff is published fewer of us are actually reading. We’re  becoming more concerned with being  heard than with listening, with being read rather than reading:

Books have become detached from meaningful readerships. Writing itself is the victim in this shift. If anyone can publish, and the number of critical readers is diminishing, is it any wonder that non-writers – pop stars, chefs, sports personalities – are increasingly dominating the bestseller lists?

And yet, Robinson doesn’t think the book is doomed. Publishers just have to change the way they do business:

A system that requires the trucking of vast quantities of paper to bookshops and then back to publishers’ warehouses for pulping is environmentally and commercially unsustainable. An industry that spends all its money on bookseller discounts and very little on finding an audience is getting things the wrong way round.

According to Robinson, the opportunity is in curating the mass of material that is out there and finding niche audiences:

The roles of editor and publicist, people who can guide the potential reader through the cacophony of background noise to words they’ll want to read, will become ever more important.

Sounds about right.

Link (via @sarahw)

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Published February 3, 2009

The e-book Revolution Favours the Agile (But Deep Pockets Help)

The publishing industry is finally turning toward “mass digitization”, Matthew Shaer reports in The Christian Science Monitor .

But “it’s not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest” he says. It is agile independent presses — who can make decisions quickly  and are “more open-minded when it comes to distribution and marketing” — that are “making the most extensive restructuring efforts” according to Schaer.

Independent presses are undoubtedly innovating — necessity is the mother of invention after all — and I would really love to believe that they can steal a march on the big publishers in the “e-book revolution”. Unfortunately I just don’t think it’s true. Or, at least, that simple.

Even if you ignore the Schaer’s assertion that the “typical” independent press can make quick decisions “without much internal friction” (in theory yes, in practice I’m not so sure), the ability to adapt is not just about a “fast and light ethos”, it is also about resources. It actually takes a great deal of time and expertise — often in short supply at small presses — to put a digital program in place. And although the cost of creating, marketing, and selling e-books may be low once the infrastructure is there, getting to that point requires a lot investment.

Soft Skull’s ambitious aim to have its entire list available digitally by the end of the year is a huge step for an independent publisher. But the two publishers Schaer specifically identifies as being behind the times are, in fact, already on this track. In November last year, Pan Macmillan made books available for the Stanza e-book reader for iPhones, and they currently offer a large, large number of downloads in different formats from their  web site, as do  HarperCollins .

In fact, ALL of the other major publishers — Random House, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster — offer e-books to download from their web sites in the US. Not that you would know from Schaer’s article.

And HarperCollins has been trailblazing with creative online initiatives in the past year. They set up Authonomy, a community site for writers, and are launching BookArmy, which Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, describes as a “social networking site organised around books and authors.” . They’ve collaborated with if:book London and Apt to create an online, annotated version of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook , and in December they released a charming online video, This Is Where We Live, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their 4th Estate imprint, that quickly went viral.

In April 2008, HarperCollins also acquired The Friday Project — originally set up to find  web based material and turn it into books — as an “incubator for fostering new talent, and finding new markets.”

And let us not forget HarperStudio who may not be offering e-books yet, but have firmly established themselves on online.

Penguin have not been idle either. In December, Penguin US launched Penguin 2.0 to boost their web presence with an iPhone app and other downloads. Penguin in the UK — who sponsored in the recent BookCamp on technology and the future of the book — not only offer over 1,000 e-books on their website, they have an online dating service (no, really), and have created SpineBreakers, a web site with teenage contributors. And there is, of course, the ever-popular Penguin Blog.

The same day as Penguin 2.0 was announced, PW also reported that Random House would be partnering with Stanza and making select titles available for iPhones, and in January, Simon & Schuster relaunched their website with all the whistles-and-bells — such as blogs and author videos (outlined by PW here) — that one would expect from a publisher who knows their audience is online.

Of course none of  these strategies is perfect and the major publishers still have work to do on their e-books programs (there have been complaints about the  pricing in particular), but this is a period of experimentation and, with the best will in the world, it’s simply absurd to suggest, that the big publishers are “dinosaurs” who “think people are just sitting down in leather chairs and reading hardcopy books.”

Independent publishers may have “the most to gain from electronic publishing” as Richard Nash of Soft Skull says, and I genuinely hope that e-books usher in a renaissance of independent publishing. But the big publishers are not blind to the possibilities that technology is opening up and they have the resources to move quickly and boldly, and, in some cases at least, they are doing so. Let’s just give credit where it is due.

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Published January 8, 2009

Double-or-Nothing

Having already called “bullshit” on the Long Tail, Professor Anita Elberse argues that recent acquisitions by Hachette’s Grand Central and Little, Brown & Co. show publishers will continue to make “outrageous” bids for new books despite the recession in (a much linked to) article for the WSJ:

Blockbuster strategies are certainly not free of risk, but, in the long run, they beat the alternative of more balanced investment strategies. That explains why, even when the book industry struggles with the effects of the economic downturn, publishing houses won’t steer away from big bets. Publishers may be even more determined to land such projects in tough times… Are there breakout hits that no one sees coming? Sure. And do media companies sometimes pick the wrong titles to focus their attention on? Absolutely — no one in the industry has a perfect record, and the process of picking winners remains “an informed crapshoot,” as one executive put it. But given their recent performance, it is hard to argue against the approaches taken by publishing houses like Grand Central and Little Brown.

I’m not sure I completely agree with her reasoning–and it’s certainly a lot less warm-and-fuzzy than either the Long Tail or Tipping Point models–but it’s still an interesting argument and I think there’s some truth to her suggestion that consumers prefer blockbusters because, in the end, they “find value in reading the same books and watching the same movies that others do.”

GalleyCat has some thoughtful criticisms of Elberse’s article here and here,  but the shriller, teeth-gnashing responses  make me think she might be on to something…

Link

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Published December 10, 2008

Cautious Optimism

Books a better buy in Canada? After all the problems caused by the high Canadian dollar in 2007, Canadian publishers and booksellers are “cautiously optimistic” at the start of this year’s holidays according to Vit Wagner in the Toronto Star:

“The climate is much better this year,” says [Nancy] Frater, proprietor of the Orangeville store BookLore. “My reason for optimism is that in challenging economic times, people do turn to books. As gifts, books have long-lasting value and they’re reasonably priced.”

It’s all relative though:

“I can’t look into the future and say everything’s going to be sanguine,” says Random House of Canada’s [Brad] Martin. “We’re doing a lot of cost cutting, but it’s more discretionary, like cutting the number of sales conferences from two to one. But we believe that the organization that we have now is what we need to successfully publish books in this country at the level that we have been publishing them.

“What I can’t tell you is what is going to happen to the market over the first six months of next year. It’s concerning for all of us. But certainly right now we seem to be performing better in a difficult market than the two other major English-language markets.”

And I’m not sure how this all sits with the recently reported “belt-tightening” in Canadian publishing — including staff changes at KidsCan Press and Thomas Allen postponing most of  their spring 2009 list — and all the grim news coming out of the US.

Is there worse to come? Any Thoughts?

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Published December 5, 2008

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?*

There has been relentless torrent of grim publishing news coming out of New York the last few days.

It has, at times, been hard to keep up with it all, and I don’t know the people involved well enough or understand the machinations sufficiently to offer much in the way of trenchant analysis. I hope that a summary of ‘Black Wednesday’ and the rest of this week’s events — with appropriate links — will, at least, offer some kind of context.

The details are sketchy, but Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acknowledged that there would be further changes at the company, including job-cuts. According to Publishers Weekly, at least eight people have been let go including executive editor Ann Patty, senior editor Anjali Singh and legendary editor Drenka Willen. GalleyCat has spokesman Josef Blumenfeld’s full statement about the changes.

Personally I’m stunned that the recipient of the 2007 Maxwell E. Perkins Award Drenka Willen, the US editor of Günter Grass, José Saramago and Umberto Eco, has been let go by HMH. PW profiled Willen in 2002, and, after pointing out that she has edited four Nobel Prize winners, MobyLives asked, pertinently, “do the proprietors of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt really know what they’re doing?”

I think my favourite quote, however, came from an unnamed ‘publishing veteran’ who told GalleyCat:

“Those fuckers have destroyed two venerable publishing houses in less than a fucking year.”

Elsewhere things are not much better.

Earlier in the week, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson announced it would be laying off 54 employees, or about 10% of its workforce. CEO Michael Hyatt said in a statement on his corporate blog From Where I Sit :

This was the second round of reductions this year. Unfortunately, this one was no less painful. We did the first round after significantly cutting our SKU count. However, this second round was purely a result of the slowdown in the economy.

According to GalleyCat , Hyatt apparently first made the announcement by Twitter. Stay classy Michael, stay classy…

After Doubleday cut 16 jobs in October, the “long anticipated” restructuring of Random House was announced on Wednesday. Maud Newton offered some bleak analysis and reprinted the full memo from Random House CEO Markus Dohle. Sarah Weinman has questions. Kassia Krozser at BookSquare thinks it’s all irrelevant:

“Who really cares if Crown or Knopf or Ballantine or Bantam Dell survives? I’m serious. Who. Cares… Focusing on imprints is focusing on the wrong problem.

The hyperbole-prone New York Observer called it “The End of an Era”.

In addition to the upheaval at Random House, Simon & Schuster announced it was eliminating 35 positions on Wednesday. Publishers Weekly reported that the Rick Richter, the president of the company’s children’s book division, and Rubin Pfeffer, senior v-p and publisher of the children’s group, would also be leaving.

On Thursday, Penguin Group chairman and CEO John Makinson announced the company will not give pay raises to anyone earning more than $50,000 in the new year. PW quoted Makinson as saying: “I cannot of course guarantee that there will be no job losses in Penguin in 2009. In this financial climate that would be plain foolhardy.”

And, according to a recent wire story from the AP on this week’s events in publishing, pay raises at HarperCollins have been delayed until next July. Spokeswoman Erin Crum says that “no decisions had been made” on job cuts, whatever that means…

All in all, it’s been quite a week. Thursday’s New York Times had a thorough summary and postmortem, and Andrew Wheeler has been keeping a running tab of the changes on his blog if you want more details.

Do I see a silver lining? Well, my hope is that all the talented, smart people who got unceremously dumped this week will stay in publishing (but who could blame them if they don’t?) and take their brilliance and vast experience to smaller more flexible companies and deliver a resurgence of creativity in New York. That would be nice wouldn’t it?

UPDATE:

Ron Hogan has posted some that trenchant analysis that I was talking about over at GalleyCat.

Also, what are the implications of all this, if any, for Canadian publishers? Anyone…?

*Thanks to Pete for the best blog post title ever.

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Published December 3, 2008

Don’t Panic

“The news heard ‘round the publishing world” is how Sarah Weinman described  the decision of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) — the US publisher of Philip Roth, Gunter Grass and José Saramago — to temporarily stop acquiring manuscripts.

Certainly the story has been ricocheting around the book blogs — and beyond — for the last week as everyone tried to figure out what the wider implications were.

GalleyCat, Sarah’s former stomping ground, quoted Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management :

“I think it’s smoke and mirrors,” she said of the announcement. “If they want something, they’re going to get it.” She pointed out that some HMH editors were known, even before yesterday’s freeze, for extremely judicious buying practices, and questioned how much less they could acquire (other than, of course, nothing)… “This is a whirlwind blown out of proportion to what it really is,” Reid continued, calling yesterday’s buzz a consequence of “the first huge economic downturn in the age of transparency.”

And, as the dust settled, HMH themselves tried to played things down.

According to The New York Times,  Jeremy Dickens, president of Education Media (HMH’s owners),  simply wanted HMH to be “extremely prudent about the way that we allocate our capital and where we make our investment decisions.” And HMH’s distinctly chipper-sounding spokesman Josef Rosenfeld described the new policy as “freeze-lite”  to the Associated Press:

“A headline about a freeze is very appealing, but in reality all we’re doing is taking a good, hard look at everything that comes in, much the way this company is watching all expenses and expenditures… It’s just a higher degree of scrutiny.”

Back at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Sarah cited literary agent Colleen Lindsay’s advice not to over-react (“publishers do this kind of thing all the time”), but sounded unconvinced:

“So no, we’re not in panic mode, not yet. But as long as… HMH’s parent company… continues to take a bath and the economy stays moribund (or worsens in the first quarter of ’09), the gloom feels rather warranted, even if it’s only a metaphorical sign of what may well come in other places.”

Personally, I was reserving judgment on the whole situation. But, I have to admit, Sarah was looking bloody prescient this afternoon when AP reported  HMH senior vp and publisher Becky Saletin had resigned, and The New York Observer began speculation that “the C.E.O. of HMH’s parent company, a man named Barry O’Callaghan whose core business in K-12 textbooks is not generating enough money to offset his massive debt, will sell the trade division and its illustrious backlist.”

Yikes.

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Published November 17, 2008

Faber: Looking Back, Going Forward

Not some dusty, elbow-patched publisher: The Bookseller talks to CEO and publisher Stephen Page about Faber & Faber’s legacy and their plans for the future:

“We are in a moment of major, major change. Which from a brand like Faber is not threatening, only exciting, stimulating and interesting… The happy residue of the past 80 years is that we have this great history with six Booker winners and 11 Nobel laureates. Yet if we sit still and admire ourselves, this will only have a half-life and it will cool.”

Founded by Geoffrey Faber and T S Eliot, Faber published some of the defining books of the 20th Century including James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They celebrate their 80th anniversary next year.

Link

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Published November 13, 2008

Not Quite A Crisis

According Carolyn Reidy, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, a worse publishing environment may be on the way, reports Publishers Weekly:

Reidy said she hesitated to use the word “crisis” but “there is no question that we are currently dealing with a set of problems that will test us to our limits.” Critical issues facing publishers included: significant decrease in retail traffic, less consumer purchasing, a gloomy economic forecast, declining backlist sales, brand name authors continuing to sell but “everything else is far off normal levels,” and retail partners who demand more favorable terms and concessions “as if we are the answer to their problems,” she said. Other pre-existing problems she enumerated include retailers competing with publishers, low barriers to self-publishing, and the economics of digital publishing that appear to bring in less revenue.”

Tough times indeed, but it is not quite the end of the world apparently. Although publishers must adapt to new realities, and change business practices, the current situation is an opportunity rather than a threat:

“now we have the chance to actually find the reader where they are spending their time—in front of a screen—and cement a relationship with them through e-mail newsletters, viral marketing, mobile delivery and other tools.” Publishing survives, she noted, because readers have a fundamental need for information, inspiration, and entertainment, “and they get that in a book, directly from an author, in an unfiltered way that they cannot get from any other medium.”

Notably, Reidy urges publishers to make entire catalogues available as e-books and to create adopt print-on-demand when a title’s  sales begin to slow.

Link

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Published November 11, 2008

Bracing for the Worst

“[E]veryone in publishing is bracing for a difficult holiday season while trying to remain optimistic about the enduring allure of books.”

Motoko Rich looks at the recent spate of publishing lay-offs, and what holiday season holds for the book industry, in today’s New York Times:

“I think that people have not been reading for the past year because they’ve been checking political blogs every 20 minutes,” said Larry Weissman, a literary agent. “At some point I think people are going to say, ‘You know what, this is not nourishing.’ I think and I hope — and maybe it’s just blind hope — I think there is a yearning for authenticity out there, and people are going to go back to the things that really matter, and one of those things, I hope, will be reading books.”

Link

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Published November 6, 2008

Media’s Last Die Hard?

The full transcript of Victoria Barnsley’s speech ‘Media’s Last Die Hard?’ (mentioned yesterday) is now available on The Bookseller website:

“the pivotal question for publishers, as we confront the opportunities and threats of digitisation, isn’t a reductive one – it isn’t about asking if the physical book is dead.  It’s about asking, what we’re going to be doing, in the next 10 years, to engage with an increasing number of digital natives – writers and readers alike, while at the same time, building rich temples of content, in all their printed or electronic glory.”

Essential reading.

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