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- High Discounts Hit Authors
- Bestselling authors disappoint...
- A breakthrough for e-books?
- Do Books Cost Too Much?
- Who will Judge the Judges?
- The End of Copyright?
- British Book Market Grows
- Scandal, Innuendo and Celebrity Gossip
- Who Writes for the Writers?
- Booker to Outsider from Small Publisher
- 'The golden age'
- News from Germany
- A Political 'Bonkbuster'
- A Heartbreaking Move
- Second-hand Books go Global
- Amis Novel Slammed by Critics
- BOL to be phased out
- Writers for Hire
- Are Consumers Buying more or less Books?
- Misery Sells Books
- Bestselling Authors 'Delegate' the Writing
- Self-published Authors Taken on by Major Publishers
- Rapid Growth in Creative Writing Courses in the US
- AOL Time Warner in Stormy Seas
- Author Writes Novel in 6 Days
- Boom in Independent Publishing
- Canadian Book Prices Affect Demand – but do Americans Read the Books they Buy?
- InsideSessions Runs into Difficulties
- A Yankee Takeover?
- Reading Fiction is Being Squeezed out of Our Lives
- Hawking Disputes Audio Publisher's Book Rights
- Gone with the Wind Copyright Battle ends with a Whimper
- Book Sales up in UK but Predicted down in US
- Boom-time for Writers and Readers
- Author Makes it into Print
- Writers Guild Battles with Amazon on Used Books
- Was Frazier right to go for the money?
- Bookseller sells books on demand
- Authors Lose out the Second Time around
- The War of Greene’s Comma
- How to Get Published
- Quiet Growth in E-books
- Copyright & freedom in the Internet age
- Online Sales Steady but not Spectacular
- Follow my Leader
- Chicago chooses famous Holocaust novel
- Amazon – success at last or just another damp squib?
- Would you ban these books?
- UK Fiction Sales Shrink
- Christmas book sales in US & UK
- E-book mixed news
Visit our Comment pages for sharp commentary on books and publishing
30 December 2002
There is mounting concern amongst literary agents in the UK about the
practice of reducing authors’ royalty payments on books sold at high
discounts. Originally introduced into authors’ contracts in the
early ‘90s to allow for bulk orders when the retailer would ask for a
special higher discount, the increasing pressure on margins caused by
active discounting has meant that the lower royalties are now being
paid on a much larger scale. The way it works in most of these
contracts is that authors’ royalties are cut by a fifth when their
publishers’ discounts to wholesalers or book chains go above 50% on
hardbacks and 52.5% on paperbacks. Originally seen as opening the door to
special deals which would help to promote the individual author’s book,
this practice has now become so widespread that some sources claim that
90% of royalties are paid at the reduced rate. The dramatic loss of
royalty income for authors can easily be imagined.
The argument is about the level at which the lower royalties should
kick in. What is a ‘normal’ discount when all business is being
done at a high discount? And should authors effectively be asked to
finance book trade discounts out of their royalty income? Jonathan Lloyd,
managing director of Curtis Brown and president of the Association of
Authors Agents, speaking to the Bookseller, said: ‘We’re
sympathetic to the pressure on publishers, but in the end we have to draw
a line in the sand. At some point publishers are going to have to do
the same with retailers, or margin will continue to be chipped away.’
This may be a particularly British problem, but it is one which affects
all book markets where there is heavy discounting and book-buyers are
becoming used to the idea that books should be available at a considerable
discount off the published price.
(See News Review 9 December 2002 below Do Books Cost too Much?
and Inside Publishing on royalties
and advances).
Back to Top
23 December 2002
The American book market, which Jack Romanos of Simon and Schuster
described as going through ‘the most prolonged retail and bookselling
slump of recent memory’ has thrown up a few surprises in 2002. During
the autumn selling season, many bestselling authors have suffered from
dramatically lower sales. Stephen King’s new book From a Buick 8 is 44%
down in the first 11 weeks, compared to his previous book. Tom Clancy has
dropped 38% on his latest book in the first 18 weeks.
But maybe this is just the usual ebb and flow of popularity? Michael
Crichton is up 27% in the first two weeks’ sales of Prey, compared to
his last book, Timeline. John Grisham’s new legal thriller is up 24% in
8 weeks compared to sales of his last book , which broke out of the genre,
causing buyers to drift away.
It’s too soon to tell, but a frisson of anxiety is affecting big
American publishers as they contemplate the sales patterns of their ‘bankers’
... but new novelists make their mark
In a nervous year there has still been a comforting number of first
novelists published by these same big houses. Surprisingly perhaps, Random
House, the largest American publisher and not known as a risk-taker,
published 103 first fiction titles.
Some houses, such as St Martin’s Press, take on many new writers,
often those producing genre fiction, and manage to do this by printing
small quantities and limiting their investment. But everyone loves the
excitement of discovering new talent – and publishing it successfully.
Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little Brown, says: ‘There’s nothing
publishers love more than first novels: opening up that box with a
manuscript in it and discovering a new novelist.’
Sometimes publishing debut novels can pay dividends. No-one can
underestimate the importance of new talent to replenish the stock of
possibly past-their-prime bestselling authors. Alice Sebold’s first
novel, The Lovely Bones, has now sold 1.9 million copies. Readers still
have a great deal of power and, in spite of the trend to see authors as a
corporate investment, we can all be grateful that word of mouth continues to create those surprise bestsellers.
Back to Top
16 December 2002
The recent launch of the TabletPC has given publishers the hope of a
real breakthrough for e-books. At the recent TabletPC Digital Publishing
Conference in New York (sponsored by Microsoft but also by other companies
with e-book readers), the hope was expressed that the new e-reader format
will help with the wider adoption of e-books. Nick Bogaty, executive
director of the Open eBook Forum said: ‘Publishers are excited about it…
This will jump-start things, and it will certainly jump-start a lot of the
e-book activity that two years ago was supplied by venture capital money.’
The multiplicity of e-book formats has not made it any easier to
develop the e-book readers, with Microsoft’s e-reader format with its
TabletPC operating system, the Adobe PDF (which is now quite widely used
for downloading from the Internet), Gemstar’s e-book reader and Palm’s
computing platform all competing. Greater interoperability of the
different file formats would make things very much easier for publishers,
who are currently having to produce material in up to five different
formats. The more general use of XML (Xtensible Markup Language – a
standard for labelling the content in documents) would help to standardise
how data files are used in the different publishing platforms, making it
easier and cheaper to produce what is currently required. Of course
publishers – and the e-book reading public – would benefit from one
e-reader emerging as the clear winner.
But does it all matter? What sort of future does the e-book, which
currently still represents only about one-tenth of 1% of the publishing
business, really have? Just in case you remain sceptical, it’s worth
noting that Allied Business Intelligence has just forecast that the
TabletPC will add another $1 billion in market value to the
Internet Appliance computing category this year. And it predicts
that the market
value of the Internet Appliance market as a whole will grow to $32 billion by 2007.
Back to Top
9 December 2002
A recent article in Salon.com has raised once again the vexed question
of book prices. The feeling is that consumers are resisting the
ever-upward spiral of book prices, but because of discounting and the high
proportion of a book’s price paid to the retailer, publishers’ margins
are also increasingly under pressure.
In some ways discounting has just made things worse, as the book
trade is now suffering from the expectation that books will be discounted
and is struggling to fund the discount. But the real pressure comes from
an over-competitive market-place, where there are simply too many books
being published and too many big publishers fighting for market share
– both of which trends should bring prices down. But what is really
happening?
Robert Sahr, associate professor of political science at Oregon State
University, has done some interesting work on RR Bowker’s figures for
the increase in US book prices. Once inflation has been factored in, American
hardcover prices have remained about the same in the quarter-century from
1975 to 2000. Non-fiction prices have actually gone down by 27%. What
has changed is that mass-market paperback fiction, adjusted for inflation,
has gone up nearly 40%. The other key change is the rise of the
trade paperback, which is now the way most backlist titles are published,
so an inexpensive mass-market edition no longer exists. The
book-buyer has no choice as regards a particular book. For instance, John
Updike’s Rabbit Run cost 65 cents in the 60s (about $4 today), but now
it is only available in an (admittedly much nicer) trade paperback edition
for $14.
In the US, the UK and many other good book markets, consumer purchasing
has held up remarkably well over the last year in spite of the weak
economy. But books are a discretionary purchase and, in spite of the old
adage that books do well in a recession, any downturn in consumer
spending is likely to hit the book business hard. Many heavy
purchasers may feel that books are actually a necessity for them, but lighter
purchasers may well cut back on their book purchases if times get tough. Even
heavy purchasers usually have plenty of books stockpiled at home and can
cut back for a while without running any risk of not having anything to
read.
Back to Top
2 December 2002
Controversy surrounds literary awards on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the US there has been a flurry of words relating to the judging of
the non-fiction National Book Award (which went to Robert Caro for the
third volume of his huge biography of Lyndon Johnson) following on from
judge Michael Kinsley’s admission that he hadn’t read most of the
400 or so books submitted for the award: ‘Chris Merrill, our
chairman, says, "I read enough of each book to know whether it
merited further consideration." Me, too. Sometimes that was none
at all.’
But the truth is that you cannot possibly read this number of books
in the time available. Inevitably you have to glance at some books and
rely on the views of other judges for others. Christopher Merrill, chair
of the panel judging the non-fiction award, rose above the controversy and
provided a useful re-definition of the point of such awards: ‘Life is
too short to spend reading bad books; if we succeed in steering readers
toward what we considered to be the best book this year, then we have
performed a service.’
In the UK the controversy is only just beginning with the news that Granta
has set up a panel to find the Best of Young British Novelists for 2003. In
spite of the perhaps inevitable hoo-ha surrounding the previous lists in
1983 and 1993, all the evidence suggests that this list has proved a
brilliant way of promoting young literary writers. The 1993 list looks
very impressive in retrospect, every one of them seems to have been worth
including, even ten years later, and amongst them were such luminaries as
Kazuo Ishiguro, A L Kennedy, Alan Hollinghurst, Lawrence Norfolk and
Jeanette Winterson. The 2003 list should continue this distinguished
record, in spite of a feeling that there is less talent around. Bill
Buford, former editor of Granta says: ‘... it is going to be
interesting. I think that everyone will be surprised by how much talent
there is on it.'
Back to Top
25 November 2002
A thoughtful piece by Fred Reed in the Washington Times has raised
the
question of where copyright is heading, in the age of digital sound and
words. The establishment view has always been that authors must defend
their copyright and need a system which will guarantee them proper payment
for the work in the form of a royalty on each copy sold, often with an
advance against royalties paid upfront. This is defined as a percentage of
the selling price and the working assumption is that the costs and profits
of the chain of publisher, bookseller and distributor which gets the book
into the hands of the book-buyer will swallow up the rest of the purchase
price.
But with the advent of the Internet, in particular, the situation has
changed radically. Not only is it possible to digitise written material
easily, it can also be made available to everyone through copying off
the Internet and downloading. It seems only a question of time before
someone produces a hand-held device which really does the job at the right
price.
But, as everyone knows, people are not keen to pay for things on the
Internet, which is why it can be so difficult to make web-based businesses
work. So, supposing the books were offered free? Would readers,
hopefully encouraged to acquire a great many more books than they do now
by books becoming freely available, be prepared to donate a dollar or
£1 to the author? If they would, then the author might well get the
same sort of amount as they do now in terms of royalties (although with
less certainty), but conceivably on much greater sales. The difference
is that publishers and booksellers who now dominate the process of getting
a book from the author to the reader would be rendered completely
superfluous. Now that’s quite a thought…
Back to Top
18 November 2002
Figures released this week by Mintel show that the UK and Ireland are
Europe’s fastest-growing markets for books, with the UK increasing by
5.7% to £2.7billion (€4.3) in 2001, outpaced only by Ireland’s 11.3%
increase.
The UK is the second-biggest European book market after Germany, where
books sales increased by 2.2% (in spite of the deep gloom in the German
market) to £5.95bn (€9.6).
However, other sources dispute the Mintel figures and Nielsen Bookscan’
s UK Total Consumer Market figure (based on high street book sales) for
2001 is £1.3 billion. Most publishers use the Nielsen Bookscan figures
and anecdotal evidence suggests that their figure of a 2.6% increase in
2001 is closer to the mark.
Other figures from the Mintel report are interesting. 21% of the
adult population buys at least ten books a year and, in spite of the
decline of independent bookshops, 41% prefer to use specialist bookshops
for their book-buying. But one in ten people used supermarkets as their
most frequent buying channel, either ‘creaming off’ sales of
discounted bestsellers or reaching a non book-buying market, depending on
your point of view.
The survey also attempted to measure the effect of promotions. Only 4%
of people were drawn into bookshops by a window display and 16% said they
were likely to buy on impulse. Rather surprisingly, only one in five
respondents had specific purchases in mind when entering a bookshop, thus
reinforcing the importance to book-buyers of browsing as a prelude to
purchase.
Lest the book trade should be overly complacent about these figures,
Mintel also reported that 2001 UK sales of videos and DVDs grew even
faster than those of books, at an astounding 25%, although the music
business is clearly threatened by the huge increase in Internet downloads.
Back to Top
11 November 2002
There’s never been a time like it. Bookselling in the UK has been
dominated during the last few weeks by scandal, innuendo and celebrity
gossip. First there was the kiss-and-tell memoirs of politician Edwina
Currie, whose book revealed, to everyone’s astonishment, her genuinely
secret affair with former prime minister John Major. TV presenter Ulrika
Johnsen has scored more heavily in sales terms than Currie with her
revelations of rape by an unnamed TV personality (who has rapidly been
smoked out by the media). Jeffrey Archer’s prison diaries seem to have
sold in large quantities, in spite of snide comments about the deluxe
nature of his own prison experiences and the wisdom of offending the
prison authorities whilst still in their grasp.
Finally, most sensational of all, there’s the story of Diana’s
butler, Paul Burrell, the case against whom was dropped after the
astounding revelation that he had told the Queen he was taking the items
he was accused of stealing into safekeeping. Only a few days elapsed
before Burrell himself was telling all to one paper, whilst being
comprehensively trashed by the others. Although it’s hard to believe
that there’s much more to tell, a book cannot be far behind.
After all this fevered sensationalism, it’s a pleasure to record that
the memoir of Nelson Mandela, Long Road to Freedom, has just reached a
landmark sale of 1.5 million copies in its UK edition. Mandela managed to
write most of the book secretly whilst he was in political detention. He
subsequently negotiated with the apartheid regime to secure the release of
fellow political prisoners and was ultimately successful in bringing
democracy to South Africa. Anyone who has read the book will attest to its
power and honesty. Anyone who hasn’t is recommended to dive into its
pages, which are a testimony to the human spirit, as well as the power of
memoir to inspire, rather than disgust.
Back to Top
4 November 2002
A recent article in Forbes magazine raised once more the
question of ghost-writers helping big blockbusting writers keep up their
sometimes formidable output. (see News Review 5 August 2002 - Bestselling
Authors ‘Delegate’ the Writing). Books ‘written’ by Robert Ludlum
and V C Andrews (who died 16 years ago) continue to take their place on
the bestseller lists, giving a new spin to the word ‘ghost-writing’.
But the most successful practitioner of the ‘factory’ approach to
writing bestsellers is James Patterson, author of 23 books, 14 of which
have been bestsellers, including the Alex Cross novels and the Women’s
Murder Club series. His publisher at Little Brown, Michael Pietsch says:
‘The crux is, when I receive a manuscript, it’s delivered to me by
James Patterson. And whatever the byline is, the quality is the same.’
Tom Clancy is another writer who has had help to sustain his output,
especially for Tom Clancy’s Net Force and his Op-Center series. His
agent Robert Gottlieb points out: ‘If Tom Clancy didn’t write any
Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich.’ What publishers are
buying is certain access to the bestseller lists from a branded name. And
branding is what it is really all about. ‘If you’re stuck thinking of
authors as ‘writers’, you’re never going to (understand branding),’
Gottlieb says.
If the incentive is big enough, publishers will commission other
writers to produce sequels to major bestsellers, as was shown by the
international success of Scarlett, the follow-up to Gone with the Wind.
Random House US recently asked agents to come up with candidates for a
commission to continue with Mario Puzo’s Godfather series. The stakes
are quite high and there’s big money involved, but is this really such
an attractive proposition? Alexandra Ripley, author of Scarlett says: ‘A
person has to be more than slightly insane to try to write a sequel that
everyone will surely be waiting to attack.’
Back to Top
28 October 2002
The 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded this week to an
outsider, Canadian Yann Martel, for his Life of Pi. With a new sponsor
and a more transparent approach for the judging panel, this has been a
year of changes for the Booker. One judge, David Baddiel, argued that the
award should go to a more popular novel and criticised the number of
serious novels submitted.
There were complaints from the panel that 130 novels were too many
to read and complaints from publishers that the rule allowing each
publishing house to enter only two candidates was unfair, especially for
the big houses. Although titles can be ‘called in’ by the judges, this
procedure is not foolproof, as was shown by the omission of Irvine Welsh’s
new novel. The publishers with large literary lists not unreasonably claim
that they are in a cleft stick: if they do not enter the ‘big names’
on their list, they risk losing them, but how do they choose amongst their
authors? The writers themselves are clearly not treated fairly. The
chair of the judges, Lisa Jardine, also criticised this rule: ‘It is
mad that every publisher gets two books’.
The win was also seen as a triumph for the small Scottish publisher
Canongate, as it is rare for a novel from a small publisher, let alone
one outside London, to win the prize. For Yann Martel himself, this will
be the key to his writing career. As well as winning the £50,000 prize,
he can expect a massive increase in the sales of his book, 50,000 copies
of which are already being reprinted in the UK. It is not an obvious
winner and many commentators had thought the prize would go to the
distinguished veteran William Trevor with The Story of Lucy Gault
or the successful young Sarah Walters with her readable Fingersmith.
But the judges’ unanimous choice of Life of Pi, with its surreal
storyline of a man adrift with various animals, including a tiger, does
represent a different approach. As Lisa Jardine said: ‘We’ve chosen
an audacious book in which inventiveness explores belief.’
Back to Top
21 October 2002
|
In an erudite and thoughtful article originally written for Prospect
magazine, Toby Mundy, the publisher and MD of Atlantic Books in
the UK, has posed challenging questions about
publishing and its future. This article is so important that we
believe it should be presented as news.
Mundy’s view is that: ‘Doomsayers persist in the belief that
the book world has been overrun by philistinism. They are wrong. Publishers
can rejoice in unprecedented levels of both quality and quantity. We
are living in a golden age of the book.’ He points out that
books have an importance disproportionate to their economic weight,
as the carriers of ideas. The increasing conglomeratisation of the
business is clear to see, as shown in the UK by this year’s
purchase of the ancient firm of John Murray by the newcomer Hodder
Headline. But there is now a hugely increased amount of competition
between bookselling chains, which often takes the form of price
competition adversely affecting publishers’ margins. Big
publishers compete more too and the stakes are higher all round,
with bigger advances and bigger marketing budgets meaning more focus
on the ‘big’ books.
But the decline of the midlist, which has made it so hard for
many writers to get published, has also been balanced by innovation
in the smaller publishing houses. Mundy also points out that power
has increasingly swung towards the big authors and their agents, so
publishers, precisely because they now competing so fiercely with
one another for market share, are no longer calling the shots in
quite the same way that they used to. Against the accusations of ‘dumbing-down’,
he points to the flowering of mass-appeal but serious
non-fiction, particularly history and science, which are also
now big business for publishers.
His conclusion is surprisingly encouraging: ‘The future, it
seems, belongs to writers, readers and entrepreneurs. There will
be as many or as few masterpieces published as ever, but they will
enter the world through proliferating channels. More publishers will
exist and some of them will also be famous authors. For less
well-known writers, making a living from the written word is likely
to be hard, but no harder than it is now. From the industry
point of view, as it sits on the tail-end of the longest economic
boom in postwar history, all this seems somehow unimaginable. From
the consumer’s point of view, the golden age is set to continue. But
for publishers, ordinary writers and booksellers, the next few years
could be the last great days of publishing as we have known it since
the 16th century.’ |
Back to Top
14 October 2002
The 2002 Frankfurt Book Fair seems to have confounded most of the
doomsayers. In spite of initial figures which suggested that attendance
would be 4% down, visitor figures for the first day were 3% up on last
year, with international visitors up 6.5%. The overall attendance
throughout was slightly down however and the Fair was described as
'steady', rather than spectacular. The 2002 Fair may have lacked
‘big book’ excitement, but solid business was the order of the day.
There also seem to be some slightly better signs as regards the German
book business, which has been going through hard times, possibly
supporting the old adage that books do well in times of recession.
Bertelsmann Acknowledges Nazi Past
An independent commission appointed in 1998 to investigate
discrepancies in the wartime record of Bertelsmann has made its report
public. The German company, which controls the fifth largest media empire
in the world, including Random House, the world’s biggest publisher, is
shown to have used its ties with the Nazis to transform itself from a
provincial printing company into a mass-market publisher and the largest
supplier of books to the German army. The firm was also involved in the
use of Jewish slave labour and the then head of the family, Heinrich Mohn,
belonged to a circle of supporters who donated money to the SS.
Although it is shocking to find that Bertelsmann was involved with the
Nazi regime in this way, it is greatly to the credit of the company that
the commission has been allowed to investigate freely and to report its
findings fully.
Back to Top
7 October 2002
The British papers this week have been full of stories relating to the Diaries
of Edwina Currie, which have been serialised in The Times. In many
ways this is the publishing story of the year, both an amazing
publishing coup and an instance of a book truly forcing the rewriting of
history.
Time Warner UK have been Edwina Currie’s fiction publishers since
1997, so they were the obvious publishers for her Diaries, covering
the period 1987 to 1992, which they signed up as part of a two-book deal
last autumn. However it wasn’t until publishing director Alan Samson was
reading through the draft manuscript earlier this year that he came across
references to Currie’s affair with ‘B’ – and soon figured out
that this concealed the identity of John Major, then chief whip in
Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. A highly successful campaign of secrecy
followed, with only a handful of top executives at Time Warner in on the
secret, and the deal with The Times negotiated just three weeks
before the book was serialised. Undoubtedly the book will be one the
biggest sellers of the Christmas season, overshadowing other
much-touted titles.
The wider implications are particularly interesting, forcing political
commentators to revaluate the Major years and his ‘back-to-basics’
campaign. It is quite extraordinary that the affair was successfully
kept under wraps for all this time. After the relationship had ended,
Edwina Currie, who seems to have really loved John Major, was undoubtedly
devastated when the prime minister, returned to power, failed to offer her
a senior cabinet post and her political career was effectively over. She
turned to writing ‘bonkbusters’ and has established herself as a
bestselling author – and a formidable publicist. In fact the plot of her
first novel, A Parliamentary Affair, mirrored the facts of her
affair with Major far more closely than anyone could possibly have guessed
at the time.
Back to Top
30 September 2002
The latest move by Dave Eggers, the
bestselling American author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius, looks likely to cause heart failure amongst big American
publishers and booksellers. Eggers has decided to self-publish his new
book, You Shall Know Our Velocity, and, what’s more, he has announced
that he will only be selling it through independent booksellers, thus
cutting out the giants such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
Eggers himself is taking an experimental approach: ‘It might work on
this scale; it might not – we really have no idea … I think that if
you care about writing, then you care about how it makes its way into the
world, and self-publishing is one good way to make sure it comes out the
way you’d envisioned. But we’ll see. It could all go horribly,
horribly wrong.’
Presumably Eggers’ intention is to support the independent bookshops
by making book-buyers go to them to purchase his book, but he is also
striking a blow for the author’s control of his or her own work. As the Wired
columnist M J Rose comments: ‘The self-publishing stigma has been
replaced with high-figure advances and full-page ads in the New York
Times Book Review.’ In the last 18 months nearly 40 self-published
novels have sold so well that they have subsequently been taken on by big
New York publishers, so this really does seem to be turning into an
alternative route to publishing success.
Booker Goes Popular
The Booker prize judges have astonished everyone by declaring ‘the
beginning of a new era’ for the prize and their opposition to large
literary novels with ‘a kind of pompous pretentiousness about them’
(judge David Baddiel). The complaints about the submissions from the
judges have sparked off a wave of fury from literary publishers, since
even those with the biggest lists can only submit two books for the prize
and they therefore have no recourse but to hope that other worthy titles
from their lists will be ‘called in’ by the judges.
This cri de coeur from the judges may be the result of the exhausting
task of wading their way through 130 heavyweight tomes, but many
fear that the Booker will get caught up in a tide of populism and may more
closely come to resemble the W H Smith ‘Thumping Good Read’
prize. This year's shortlist is however entirely respectable, in
spite of the omission of various much-fancied titles such as Zadie Smith's
The Autograph Man.
Back to Top
23 September 2002
In a move that is sure to stoke controversy about online sales of
second-hand books, Abebooks, the American used book site, has announced an
alliance with giant online bookseller Amazon, to be called Amazon
Marketplace. This will enable the thousands of booksellers who currently
list their used, rare and out-of-print books on Abebooks sites to access
Amazon’s huge customer base. Since Abebooks exists to connect
booksellers to book-buyers, this will mean that the 40 million books
available through their site from 10,000 booksellers all over the world
will all now be available via Amazon.
At Abebooks the book-buyer will still be able to access the global
information bank, but certain national sites will also provide access to
books of more domestic interest (Abebooks.com in the US, Abebooks.co.uk
for the UK, Abebooks.de for Germany and Abebooks.fr for France).
This move reinforces the view that Amazon now has an unbeatable lead
in the race to dominate online bookselling (see News Review 9
September 2002), but it will also be of concern to authors’
organisations, which have already voiced their anxiety about the potential
loss of royalty income for authors which will probably result from the
more active global selling of used books (News Review 22 April 2002).
Back to Top
16 September 2002
British publication of Martin Amis’s new novel Koba the Dead has been
marked by anger and derision from the British press, where historians
have competed with more literary reviewers to express their loathing for
the book and the author. The historian Orlando Figes, writing in the Sunday
Telegraph, has a magisterial definition of the task of writing
history: ‘History is a debt the living repay to the dead. A good
historian needs many qualities: imagination, judgment tempered by human
empathy and understanding; perhaps a belief in the search for truth. But,
above all, he needs humility. We don’t write history to draw attention
to ourselves.’ He concludes ‘The true subject of this book is not
Stalin, nor even his victims, but Amis the would-be historian, Amis
brooding on the suffering of the world from the safety of his home.’
Suzi Feay in the Independent on Sunday, approaches the novel
from a literary reviewer’s perspective and is even more condemnatory: ‘This
is a chilling book, because apparently without knowing it, Amis has
revealed his own deformed personality. The proper response is not the
anger displayed by so many critics. The only human response is to pity
poor, preposterous Martin Amis, deluding himself that he – or his
talentless father – have more merit than toilet cleaners like my granny,
who read little but love more than he can ever know.’
Amis in his novel equates the horrors of Stalin’s terror with the
relatively mundane events of his own life, but he has also offended widely
by treating history as fiction, or really perhaps just as an opportunity
to muse on his own life. In an interview in the Observer he
commented chillingly: ‘when you’re dealing merely with what
actually happened it seems quite a lot of the job is done before you get
there, you don’t have to be dreaming it up. Writing Koba was a very
happy writing experience.’
Back to Top
9 September 2002
As part of the major refocusing of the Bertelsmann Group following on
from the departure of Thomas Middlehof, his replacement Gunther Thielen
has announced that the online bookseller BOL will be ‘phased out’.
It is doubtful whether there is much demand for abandoned online
bookselling ventures, so this will probably mean that some of the BOL
operations will be closed down. BOL in the UK, which has recently been
made part of the BCA book club operation and set up as a club within BCA,
may be the only BOL operation to survive.
In the UK this announcement coincides with the news that another online
bookseller, Alphabetstreet, has been closed down. This appears to leave
Amazon virtually unchallenged and confirms the view that the other
Internet bookselling operations never really had a chance: Amazon was
always going to benefit hugely from first mover advantage and from its
focused and aggressive drive to achieve growth.
For the book world internationally, the latest news should be seen as
encouraging. Random House, the biggest general publisher in both the US
and the UK, will receive more support from its parent company Bertelsmann
now that the Internet adventure is over. Bertelsmann’s huge book club
empire is to be refocused and revived, which may prove to be a difficult
task in a declining market. But above all this sees a refocus by one of
the giants of the publishing world on its traditional book publishing
strengths, which can only be seen as good news for the future of books.
Back to Top
2 September 2002
An article in the London Independent raised once again the
thorny question of ‘writers for hire’ – fiction writers lending
their skills to producing fiction which will promote a brand or, as in
this case, the launch of a company which will provide name authors to
write specially commissioned novels for businesses and for government
departments.
When Fay Weldon wrote a novel for Bulgari, she encountered heavy
criticism, but this latest development is likely to engender an even more
hostile reaction because of the scale envisaged.
One of Narration Ltd.’s first customers is the Foreign Policy
Centre, which has commissioned an online novella about an anti-globalisation
campaigner who gives up direct action in favour of Internet protest.
The reaction of some prominent British authors has been hostile.
J G Ballard commented: ‘I wouldn't want to buy a novel whose
point was that I should eat less saturated fat or drive more slowly. This
sounds deeply sinister. It's all part of the corruption of the mental
environment we inhabit.’
David Lodge dismissed it as advertising and said: ‘There's a long
tradition of using fiction to get across ideas and there's nothing wrong
with that. But this has nothing to do with literature.’
But many authors may be happy to undertake ‘work for hire’ of this
kind. Unfortunately for many
possible participants, this venture does seem to depend heavily on the
name of the author, so writers need to have a name the public will
recognise before they are likely to be tempted by receiving commissions of
this kind.
Back to Top
12 August 2002
Recent figures from the US and the UK paint a rather different
picture of prospects for the book business over the next few years. In
the US Veronis Suhler, the merchant bank which specialises in media
transactions, has recently estimated that consumer book spending
declined by 0.6% in 2001. The bank believes that this figure should
improve to a 2.1% growth in 2002, but the forecast for the next five
years is that spending on books will be stagnant and will be overtaken
by other forms of entertainment spending.
In the UK the outlook looks rosier, with intense competition amongst
the bookselling chains and supermarkets bringing about extensive
discounting. Over the last four years total book sales in the domestic
market have increased by 22.5%, although the year to date has been
rather variable and has shown poor sales of fiction.
Book sales in both countries will be affected not only by pressures
on consumers’ time and competing entertainment attractions, but also
by general levels of consumer spending. If the US does now experience
the dreaded double-dip recession, then book sales this year will be
lower than Veronis Suhler have forecast. In the UK the consumer book
market looks more stable, but it will still be affected by general
levels of consumer spending and by consumers’ willingness to put their
hands in their pockets when it comes to buying books.
Back to Top
12 August 2002
The demand for books about childhood deprivation and misery seems to
know no end. Seni Glaister of the Book People, a British cut-price direct seller of
books, commented recently on the success of Ten Thousand Sorrows and the current vogue
for books about personal misery: 'It's a very tragic memoir of a
Korean woman. Misery, tragedy - that's a big area at the moment.
The
Road to Nab End - that's the big hot book. That's Lancashire misery. Angela's Ashes and
'Tis we did hundreds of thousands. That's
Irish misery. And Dave Pelzer, with three in a box set, you don't
get any more miserable than that."
Back to Top
5 August 2002
A recent article in the Washington Post told the intriguing
story of bestselling authors employing other writers to do the actual
writing. Tom Clancy is one of the most prominent of these and under his
guidance a number of fiction writers ‘flesh out’ thrillers from story
outlines he has produced. These books become part of Tom Clancy’s
Op-Center series or his young adult series, Tom Clancy’s Net
Force. This use of ‘personal writers’ is not new, although with the
increasing focus on brand names, it may have reached new heights. Robert
Ludlum, who died in 2001, has left behind a number of outlines which will
be written up by other writers. It has long been a standing joke in
publishing that V C Andrews, who died in 1986, has produced a string of
bestsellers from beyond the grave, with Andrew Neiderman doing the actual
writing under her name in a way that seems to have kept her fans extremely
happy.
What has changed is the extent to which this ‘brand extension’ is
going on, with publishers apparently believing that there is an insatiable
demand for books by their top authors. They are only too ready to
oblige, as this means a new book from a brand name which can be marketed
and sold to the fans far more frequently than the bestselling writer alone
could manage. It’s all part of the focus on big names. The downside for
writers is that publishers’ investment is
going on these books, rather
than on developing new authors for the future.
Back to Top
29 July 2002
There are signs that self-publishing is becoming more of a route to
publication by a major publishing house. M J Rose, writing in Wired,
comments on the way that self-publishing your own novel may help you to
get wider attention. In a sense, it’s a bit of a short-cut for the
publishers. An author who has successfully sold their book will have
already established a readership. The fact that the author has managed to
achieve good sales without a publisher’s sales and marketing clout
behind them is an indication to a major company that it can make their
books an even bigger success.
Literay fiction is always tough to sell well though self-publishing,
but writers working in fiction genres such as science fiction, romance and
erotica have made the breakthrough and it is generally accepted that it is
usually easier to self-publish non-fiction than fiction. Author Brandon Massey, whose Thunderland
was subsequently picked up by a big publisher, says: ‘Self-publishing
has become one of the quickest ways to land a book deal. You can almost
boil it down to a formula.’
Bulwer-Lytton Prize for Bad Writing
In what must surely be a champion piece of bad writing, Rephah Berg
from California has been awarded this year’s prize (awarded in memory of
the Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton) for writing such
as the following:
‘On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had
always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the
toilet-paper roll gets a little quashed so it hangs crooked and every time
you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its
holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of
annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.’
Back to Top
22 July 2002
When the University of Iowa set up the first, rather controversial,
American creative writing programme in 1936, no-one would have guessed
what was in store. There are now 99 such programmes available in American
colleges and no less than 330 universities offer creative writing degrees,
nearly double the number of a decade ago. The best courses are also
difficult to get into: Iowa estimated that it had almost 700 applicants
for only 20 places.
Many of these students are hoping to become writers when they graduate,
although no-one appears to claim that, in order to become a writer, you
need to study creative writing. Many of the students appear to enjoy the
courses and, whether or not you eventually become a published writer, ‘you’ll
learn a lot about language and people …This knowledge will be helpful to
our graduates in whatever occupation they choose’ says Mike Magnuson of
Southern Illinois University.
This surge in creative writing has been mirrored elsewhere in the
world, although not yet on anything like the American level. But the
demand is probably there, as many writers do feel they benefit from
working with other writers to improve their craft in a more structured
academic environment. Stephanie Kuehner, studying at Columbia, said: ‘It’s
good to have other writers around to discuss your work with. I’ve had my
writing improve by leaps and bounds. It’s invigorating to hear other
people’s ideas. It’s helped me find my best voice.’
Back to Top
15 July 2002
At the time, the merger of AOL and Time Warner was seen as one of the
most celebrated triumphs of the dotcom boom. But now that the fever has
subsided, and AOL’s turnover from advertising and commerce has shrunk
30% since last year, it is the ‘old economy’ divisions of Time Warner
which are keeping the company afloat. And this is in spite of the sharp
decline in advertising revenue over the last eighteen months. Since the
share price has plummeted, many executives have seen the value of their
share options sink and the company is still servicing a $28 billion debt.
It is not clear what effect this corporate instability might have on AOL
Time-Warner’s publishing division, Time-Warner Publishing, but it does
highlight the continuing corporate fallout from the dotcom boom.
Do E-books have a future?
News from the e-book front looks more promising. EbookWeb has grown its
traffic to more than half a million page views a month and there appears
to be a steadily increasing demand for online digital content. For
instance, PerfectBound sold more e-books in the first 5 months of 2002
than in the whole of 2001. And the software is increasing in number too:
more than 5 million copies of Microsoft Reader have now been distributed.
The growth is not sensational, but it is steady and the signs are that the
publishers that continue to develop their online content or their e-book
publishing will find a growing market.
Back to Top
8 July 2002
The latest ‘hot’ book from the US is journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez‘s
novel Dirty Girls Social Club, the story of six women who met at
college and whose lives stay connected. The women are all Latina and their
narratives are told in the first-person. The agent Leslie Daniels said:
‘There’s a huge market for books speaking to this Hispanic population…What’s
breakthrough about this book is that it’s inclusive. It speaks to that
market in a very particular way, but it’s also mainstream.’
The publishing house St Martin’s Press paid $500,000 for the novel.
People working for the company were hugely enthusiastic. The book’s
editor, Elizabeth Beier said: ‘People all over the company dropped
everything they were doing and read it. The characters dance off the page.
I can see women all over the country adoring this book.’
But the thing which makes this book really stand out was that the
author wrote it in six days. Her agent was trying to sell a non-fiction
book about Hispanic singing stars. Publishers didn’t want that book, but
they liked the author’s writing and asked if she had written a novel.
Valdes-Rodriguez set to with lightening speed. Six days later she had
finished Dirty Girls Social Club, which she and agent polished
before it was sent out to publishers in an auction.
Back to Top
1 July 2002
A recent article in the Washington Post has drawn attention to
the explosion of publishing from small independent publishers.
This is the other side of the coin to the increasing domination of
American consumer publishing by the big publishers.
The top ten publishers are
now thought to account for no less than 80% of domestic consumer
publishing revenue, which amounts to a total of $6.5 billion.
The giant Random House contributes $2 billion of this, with its
massive range of 125 publishing imprints.
However, the Book Industry Study Group, which carried out the
study, estimates that the entire publishing industry may be producing
total annual domestic revenues amounting to an astounding $25 billion.
So where is all this publishing coming from?
Many small independents are not registered as publishers and so their
output is not counted in the figures. An increasing number are individuals
self-publishing their own work. According to Bowker there were 6,981
publishers in the US in 1997 and this figure had already rocketed up to
9,982 by 1999. By now, it is probably considerably higher. In the main
though, what seems to be happening is a rapid increase in the number of
small specialist publishers, who are flourishing through their ability to
target and reach a specific market. They have been helped by the boom in
online bookselling and by the other advances in technology which have led
to desktop publishing, print on demand, Internet distribution and growing
direct sales. All of these changes have made it easier to set up as a
publisher, to target a particular market and to publish books without a
high overhead. It’s good news for writers, as it decreases their
reliance on the big publishers as the only way to get their work
published.
Back to Top
24 June 2002
Recently-released Books in Print figures from Canada show that
the number of titles published annually is still in excess of 50,000, and
has been dropping since 1996. This decline is attributed to rising book
prices, as book buyers think twice about buying high-priced hardback
fiction. Canadians are obviously great readers though, as the country
still has the second-highest per capita number of new books published in
the world, after the UK, with a new title for every 577 people.
Meanwhile, in the US, Associated Press ran an article on the new book
clubs which have been set up as successors to Oprah’s Book Club. The
first ‘Today’ show book club asked John Grisham to recommend a
first-time novelist’s work. He chose Stephen Carter’s bestselling The
Emperor of Ocean Park, saying: ‘I tell people all the time I’m a
famous writer in a country where people don’t read.’ It certainly
looks as if it’s no longer ‘cool ‘ to admit that you don’t read at
all, even though some people may be buying more books than they actually
get round to reading. From the authors’ point of view, the royalties
roll in whether people read the books or not, but obviously every writer
would like their work to be read.
Back to Top
17 June 2002
A recent piece by Katharine Mieszkowski in Salon (www.salom.com) has
put the spotlight back on Penguin Putnam’s InsideSessions, a joint
venture between the US publisher and Universal Music Group. InsideSessions’
Internet-based learning programme claimed, for a fee, 'to teach you
everything you need to know to transform your passion for writing into a
published work’. The real attraction was that it promised that writers’
work would be read and critiqued by an editor at one of the house’s 27
imprints.
Apparently the outcome has been what many in the publishing world would
have predicted – the editors have been overwhelmed and Penguin Putnam
are having to put the work out to outside editors to keep up with the
flow. The logic is that, if the editors are too busy to read unsolicited
manuscripts in the first place, the fact that they are doing it for a fee
won’t change that situation. But this has caused unhappiness in some
circles, since the writers are not sure that they are getting the degree
of professionalism they have paid for, not to mention the particular
benefit of getting their work in front of an acquiring editor. All of this
reinforces how difficult it is to get published, especially in the US,
where the editor of Writer’s Digest recently estimated that there are an
astounding 24 million writers.
Back to Top
10 June 2002
The whisper that the new sponsors of the Booker Prize for Fiction, the
Man Group, might be considering opening it up to American authors has
caused a furore in British literary circles. Lisa Jardine, chair of this
year’s Booker panel, declared that it will make the award ‘blandly
generic’ and said: ‘With someone like Roth at his best, I can’t see
how an Amis or a McEwan would touch them.’ But the contrary view was
expressed by Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Guardian: ‘apart
from Bellow, I can think of only four American novelists – Michael
Chabon, Gail Godwin, Craig Nova and Anne Tyler – whose work could be
submitted to an international competition with any confidence. The rest is
assembly-line product, each as indistinguishable from any other as one
Ford Mondeo from another, self-referential and self-absorbed, technically
competent but thematically empty or banal.’
Back to Top
1 June 2002
A rather dismal recent UK survey of reading habits carried out by Book
Marketing for Orange has revealed that the time pressures of modern life
are eroding the time spent on reading fiction, which is likely to be a
stronger trend in the United States. Although fiction sales are growing by
4% a year, even the 60% of people who do read books are spending less and
less time doing so. The average daily breakdown of time spent shown by the
study is as follows:
 | 11 minutes on reading fiction |
| 8 minutes on non-fiction and reference |
| 22 minutes on newspapers/magazines |
| making 48 minutes in total on reading |
| but this is dwarfed by: |
| 3.5 hours on watching tv |
| 3 hours on listening to the radio (perhaps combined with another
activity) |
Book sales are up 25% since 1990, but there seems to be strong evidence
that people simply don’t have the time to read all the books they
buy,
with longer working hours and competing claims for leisure time pushing
book-reading into weekends and holidays. Women spend more time reading
books than men and account for 70% of the books that are read, with some
evidence from other studies that they regard reading novels as their
private indulgence. It’s comforting for writers that book purchases are
increasing, but worrying that so many books seem to be piling up unread.
Back to Top
27 May 2002
Two collections of essays by the distinguished scientist Stephen
Hawking are at the centre of a legal dispute involving the publisher New
Millennium. It appears that the audio rights in Universe in a Nutshell
and Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays were sold some
time ago to Michael Viner at Dove Audio. This deal, agreed before
Professor Hawking became a bestselling author, gave the right to publish
in ‘written form the text of the said recording’. Now that Michael
Viner has done just that through his new company New Millennium and
published, highly successfully, a transcript of one of the collections in
book form, Hawking has complained to the FTC and New Millennium has now
also filed a complaint.
Al Zuckerman, President of Writers’ House and Hawking’s agent,
described the deal with Viner as ‘an audio contract that says he has the
right to print a transcript of the audio. At the time we made the deal in
1988 Viner was an audio publisher and it never occurred to me in my
wildest dreams that the right to print a transcript of an audio would give
him the right to print a book’. The case rumbles on and highlights the
importance of looking carefully at the small print of any contract. Even a
seemingly innocuous agreement should be treated with care as, if the
author is subsequently very successful, this may well give their early
work great commercial value.
Back to Top
20 May 2002
What the Boston Globe has described as ‘the most contentious
copyright battle in recent memory’ ( see News Review dated 29 April
2001
and 11 June 2001) has just
ended rather inconclusively, as the Mitchell Trusts, representing the
heirs of Margaret Mitchell, gave up the legal fight to block publication
of The Wind Done Gone. Alice Randall’s parody had reinterpreted Gone
with the Wind from the point of view of Scarlett’s black slave
half-sister. The novel is to be published with a label calling it ‘an
unauthorized parody’.
If you believe that an author should have full copyright protection for
their work, including the plot and characters they have created, you may
feel that this outcome is unsatisfactory in protecting authors’ rights.
But if you think that Alice Randall’s work was giving voice to another
view of Mitchell’s mythic novel, you may feel that her parody should be
fully available. Gone with the Wind is indubitably Margaret
Mitchell’s copyright, but has its importance as an interpretation of the
American Civil War from the white plantation-owner’s perspective given
it some other, iconic status? And does this justify publication of Alice
Randall’s reinterpretation to ‘set the record straight’ or is she
trying to cash in on the earlier book’s huge success?
More Debate on American Book Sales
Following on from last week’s report about book sales trends in the
UK and US, there has been further discussion of prospects for the US book
business, but little agreement on where things are heading. Michael Cader,
industry commentator and editor of the industry newsletter Publishers’
Lunch, is disposed to take a gloomy view: ‘With record numbers of
new books published every year, a more liquid market for used books
online, fewer books going out of print thanks to print-on-demand
technology, and overall unit sales stagnant or even declining, the
mathematical collision is disastrous – lower sales for all but a few
titles.’
But other commentators, including Patricia Schroeder, President of the
Association of American Publishers, disagrees: ‘We have been getting
statistics that we send out every month that we hardly believe. They are
so good.’
Perhaps these differing views reflect different timescales looking
forward. In the end no-one really knows whether current trends will
continue or go into reverse. But 135,000 new books published in 2001 in
the US is a very large number, so the sheer growth in output must be
having some effect. September 11th had a catastrophic impact on
fall 2002 book sales and perhaps one of its longer-term after-effects has
been a loss of confidence in the future of the book business.
Back to Top
13 May 2002
According to the latest Book Marketing Ltd figures, consumer spending
on books in the UK rose by 5% in 2001 and unit sales were up from 336
million to 345 million, an increase of 3%. Growth came mostly from
paperback fiction and non-fiction bought for adults. However, in spite of
the ‘Harry Potter effect’, unit sales of children’s books fell for
the fourth year running, from 109 million to 104 million.
This relatively positive set of figures is in contrast to the US, where
the Book Industry Study Group has just predicted that the total number of
units sold (across all book segments) will fall from 2.41 billion in 2001
to 2.39 billion in 2002. This figure takes all domestic book sales into
account, but 2001 was in any case a poor year in the US book trade. An
economic slowdown in the early part of the year was followed by the
body-blow of 11th September. Looking forward, the current view is that
there will be 2% growth in consumer spending on books in 2002, but that
there will no significant improvement for the book trade until 2004.
Back to Top
6 May 2002
Publishers have just gathered in New York for American publishing’s
biggest annual convention, BookExpo America, which the New York Times
has described as ‘the Super Bowl of book promotion, where publishers
battle to influence what stores promote and what customers ultimately
read.’ But recent reports suggest that the real book boom that is
currently going on is not in bookselling, but in creative writing courses
and reading groups.
Students Choose Creative Writing
There’s been spectacular growth in creative writing programmes, with
colleges in the US rushing to offer the writing courses that students are
demanding. Currently more than 320 colleges and universities offer these
classes and around 240 have established creative writing MFA programmes.
There’s huge demand, with many students seeing themselves as future
Hemingways or even Jean Auels. The courses are very focused on actual
writing, rather than theory, although only a few students will actually
make it in terms of a professional writing career. But, as Susan Hubbard,
Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, says:
‘you can never take away from a writer the feeling of accomplishment
that comes from having crafted a solid story, novel or poem. The pride in
creation, to me, is the real reason why students are gravitating towards
this field.’
Books or Dates?
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Telegraph has suggested another reason
– other than the love of books - for the boom in reading groups in the
UK, now said to number more than 50,000. They’re said by dating experts
to be perfect for ‘speed-dating’, offering the opportunity to meet
twenty or so new people in any evening. Since many of the most successful
reading groups are largely female, very stable and quite serious about the
books (although everyone also enjoys a sociable evening), most reading
group members are likely to find this description rather wide of the mark.
Back to Top
29 April 2002
Writing recently in the London Sunday Times, columnist Godfrey
Smith tells a wonderful story of an author’s success against all the
odds. Carl Tighe was a young writer who had done everything from gutting
fish to cleaning mental hospital toilets. Offered a job teaching English
in Poland, he couldn’t believe his luck and, during the years from the
birth of Solidarity to the imposition of martial law in Poland, he recorded
everything he saw around him, every joke, hardship and anecdote
All this rich raw material later went into a first novel, which he sent
out to over 30 publishers, all of whom rejected it as too uncommercial. It
seemed like the end of the line for his manuscript, but Tighe was lucky in
that his landlady Madeleine Rose believed in the book and put up £1,000
to publish it under her own imprint. Out of a tiny initial print of 300
copies, 50 went to reviewers, but not a single review appeared. She sent
one copy to the Whitbread review panel and they shortlisted it. Another
copy went to the Authors’ Club for their best first novel award and
Godfrey Smith gave it the prize. Against all the odds, Carl Tighe’s Burning
Worm, now written up in Smith’s highly influential Sunday Times
column, is going to make it.
Back to Top
22 April 2002
The used book debate is hotting up. After Jeff Bezos of Amazon sent an email to thousands who had sold
second-hand books through the online retailer, over 4,000 of them emailed
the Writers Guild of America. As expressed by Nick Turner, the President of the Guild, its
view was that:
‘We're not against Amazon's selling used books, or used book sales generally.
We're against Amazon's selling 'used' (frequently new copies sent out for
review) books on the same page as new ones. It's disingenuous to trumpet
Amazon's concern for authors by saying that used books sales encourage
readers to experiment with authors and genres and that this in turn
encourages new book sales. Used books might do that, but Amazon's way of
selling them does not. That's because readers so encouraged, finding their
way to the page displaying an author's newest book, will see a box
offering it used for less than the new one. If Amazon were truly concerned
about authors, it simply would stop offering used books on the same pages
as new ones.’
According to
Internet correspondent M J Rose, who had spoken to a number of authors who
were Guild members, not all of them supported this stance. But the public view is that, once they have bought a book at
a ‘new’ price, it is theirs to dispose of as they wish, including
selling it on to someone else, and that they would like books to be as
cheap as possible. This ties
in with Amazon’s sales policy, which seems to be to sell whatever they
can sell profitably online and to attract purchasers through price
promotions.
Used book sales through Amazon amount to a tiny proportion of overall book
sales. There doesn’t seem to be any workable way of ensuring that the
author gets a share of this market, so it looks as if authors will have to
comfort themselves with the hope that used book sales will help to extend
their readership.
Back to Top
15 April 2002
The case of Charles Frazier has been causing much debate in publishing
circles, particularly in New York. Frazier is the author of the 1998 Civil
War bestseller Cold Mountain, which was published by the
well-respected literary firm Grove Atlantic, received wonderful reviews
and went on to sell 2.8 million copies in the US, as well as becoming an
international bestseller. But now Frazier has accepted the lure of a huge
advance and has moved with his new book to Random House for a rumoured $5
million.
The head of Grove Atlantic, Morgan Entrekin, did everything he could to
acquire Frazier’s second novel, but the author’s new agent asked for
sealed bids and in the end Grove Atlantic, a medium-sized independent
publisher, simply did not have such a deep pocket as the Bertelsmann-owned
Random House. Emphasising the importance to all publishers of the big
bestsellers, Entrekin said: ‘The success we enjoyed with the (first)
book made it possible for Grove Atlantic to thrive as an independent
publisher over the last five years.’ Charles Frazier obviously found the
decision to go to Random House a hard one to make and he has been widely
criticised for his mercenary approach. However many in the author
community will defend his right to sell his work as he pleases and for the
highest price possible.
Back to Top
8 April 2002
The future has arrived at Books Express in Cambridge, Ontario, where
customers can buy books which are then printed for them, using an in-store
print on demand facility. Instabook Canada has a counter in the store and
it takes just five minutes to produce each volume by downloading the file
from the computer, printing the pages , trimming and binding the paperback
books. Audrey McNeill, the first customer to use this new facility, bought
a two-volume set of Adam Bede by George Eliot and Agnes Gray
by Anne Bronte for her daughter’s birthday and was pleased with her
purchases, which cost only slightly more than they would have done in
ordinary paperback editions: ‘The books weren’t available in the
store.. I wanted to get something personalized… My daughter was
thrilled,’ she said.
The Instabook range currently consists of 650 titles, mostly classics.
Naturally the print on demand facility would be more attractive to book
buyers if more titles were available, but publishers, having been ‘burned’
by the lack of demand for e-books, are likely to move only cautiously to
make their titles available for print on demand purchase.
In spite of early expectations that print on demand would immediately
change the way publishing and bookselling works, publishers have been slow
to adopt the new technology. Offering as it does the possibility of
printing each book on demand at the point of sale, ie the bookstore, it
has radical implications for publishers and booksellers, although both
groups may well be feeling wary when other components of the technological
revolution have so singularly failed to deliver the anticipated payback.
But in-store print on demand would enable the book business to slash the
cost of unsold books by offering the book-buyer sample books on display,
which could then be printed for the customer as required. Daniel O’Brien
of Forester Research has forecast that print on demand books will be a
$3.9 billion market by 2005 and that with consumer e-books they will
constitute $7 to $8 billion of sales, which would be 17.5% of the US
publishing industry.
Back to Top
25 March 2002
The well-known web author and journalist MJ Rose, in her column for
Wired.com, has drawn attention to the growing threat to authors’ income
posed by the spread of secondhand book sales via the Internet. Although
there has always been a market for used books, more aggressive selling
through eBay and Amazon has seen them listed next to new copies, with an
obvious price advantage to lure buyers. But for the author this is bad
news, since used book sales do not figure in publishers’ figures and, if
they displace new book sales, the author will not get the benefit of
earning any royalties.
A literary war has broken out between the custodians of Graham
Greene’s papers, in support of his authorised biographer, Norman Sherry,
and other writers needing access to the papers, whose right to see them is
supported by members of Greene’s family, the custodians of his estate. A
large proportion of Greene’s writings are held by the Lauinger Library
at Georgetown University in Washington and the library has made it clear
that it believes Greene’s wish was that Norman Sherry should have first
access. His son, Francis Greene, says that; ‘Graham gave his papers for
the good of the scholarship of the readers of the world and they have been
withheld from everybody.’
Greene’s final statement, signed two days before his death in April
1991, says: ‘I Graham Greene grant permission to Norman Sherry, my
authorised biographer, excluding any other to quote from my copyright
material published or unpublished.’ Before he signed the document,
Greene inserted a comma between ‘other ‘ and ‘to’, supposedly
changing the meaning to suggest that, although Sherry was the sole
authorised biographer (which is not contested), the question of whether
others should be allowed access to the papers is left open. This debate
could run and run.
Back to Top
18 March 2002
The How to Get Published conference, sponsored by the Daily
Mail at the London Book Fair, drew a capacity audience of 450
writers, who took part in a series of sessions involving an agent, a
publisher, four authors and three booksellers. The writers attending the
conference were mostly very focused on the mechanics of getting published,
putting forward questions such as how to present your material, how long
the synopsis should be and how to get an agent. Carole
Blake of Blake Friedmann, the author of From
Pitch to Publication,
estimated that her agency takes on only around eight new authors a year,
even though the agency may, partly because of her book and her
participation in events such as this one, get up to 50 unsolicited
manuscripts submitted in a single day. Amanda Ridout, MD of
HarperCollins General Division, thought that around 20% of authors
published by her division in the last two years were first-timers. All
the speakers emphasised the importance of new authors to the publishing
industry.
The authors taking part had a great deal of useful advice to offer.
Both Mike Gayle and Lisa Jewell emphasised the importance of rewriting.
Mike Gayle said that you have to write because you really want to, that
you should get friends to comment on your work and that it was
important to have the right agent;
‘You don’t want to be represented by someone who doesn’t
understand what you’re writing’.
Magnus Mills, the former bus driver and author of The Restraint of
Beasts, gave an amusing account of his own sudden rise to fame,
including the fact that his occupation had given his publisher an
unbeatable publicity angle. Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat,
gave a powerful but modest account of her rise to writing success, via two
early unsuccessful novels which she had lost the rights to. All the
authors spoke of the importance of rewriting and pointed out that you
needed persistence to get published.
The conference was good-humoured and constructive. There is a great
gulf between unpublished writers ‘out there’ and the publishing
business, often seen by the writers as inward-looking and difficult to
penetrate. The writers I spoke to felt that this event was a useful
first step in helping writers to work out just how to get to grips with
the task of getting their work published.
Back to Top
11 March 2002
With the hype about the e-book revolution now seeming quaintly
old-fashioned and big publishers such as Time Warner and Random House
scaling back their e-publishing ventures, it’s easy to assume that
e-books are a complete failure, part of the collapse of the dot-com dream.
However, the truth is that a market for e-books is quietly developing.
US publishers such as Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins and St Martin’s
Press have achieved at least 10% growth over the last year. At the more
dedicated end of the market, Fictionwise.com now offers more than 1,000
titles and has 30,000 members. Palm, which has a strong interest in
developing this market to create demand for its hand-held reading devices,
claims to have sold nearly 180,000 e-books in 2001 and to be acquiring
1,000 new customers a week.
Big publishers may have found that e-publishing is not going to take
off in the way they had originally predicted, but they are still concerned
about the outcome of the Random House v Rosetta Books appeal (see News
Reviews 29, 27 and 17 for earlier reports on this story). If digital
rights are not implicit in book contracts, then the e-book rights in a
vast number of backlist titles will be up for grabs. The big publishers
know their expectations of the e-book market were wildly over-optimistic,
but they don’t think the market’s gone away either, and they don’t
want to find another company exploiting ‘their’ backlist.
Back to Top
4 March 2002
The US Supreme Court is to hear an obscure copyright case which will
bring centre-stage the issues relating to freedom in the Internet age. The
case involves what has been disparagingly referred to as the ‘Mickey
Mouse Protection Act’, i.e. the 1998 law which extended copyright
for 20 years, and concerns the question of whether the US Congress
exceeded its authority in making that extension. The US constitution
authorises the granting of copyright ‘for limited times’, but just how
‘limited’ might this be, and does 20 years exceed this?
Now that the Internet has made it so easy to use and propagate
copyrighted property, the issues this will raise are right at the
centre of debates about intellectual freedom. This was first brought
to public attention by the group of academics led by Professor Boyle of
Duke University, who argued that attempts to define copyright ever more
tightly and restrictively amount to a ‘second enclosure movement’ and
must be resisted as an attempt to control ideas which should be in the
public domain (see Scientists
Rebel).
The case to be heard by the Supreme Court relates to this. Lawrence
Lessig, the celebrated legal theorist of the Internet, recently wrote in Wired
magazine: ‘If the internet teaches us anything, it is that great
value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they are free
to build on as people see fit. We are now corrupting this core, and
this corruption will in turn destroy the opportunity for creativity that
the Internet built.’
This extremely important case raises issues which will affect not just
academics, but also authors, artists, musicians, scientists, and the
publishing, music and entertainment industries. The need to redefine
copyright protection in the age of mass information will have to be
balanced against the requirement for a free flow of ideas to fuel future
innovation. This promises to be a fascinating debate.
25 February
Recent figures from Goldman Sachs show that US online sales grew by
between 20% and 25% to $32bn in 2001. These figures do not match the
heady expectations of online sales which fuelled the huge investment in
online retailers in 2000. However they do show that money can be made out
of selling on the Internet if you are either better at it, or have a good
combination of ‘clicks and mortar’, where retail stock and existing
fulfilment systems can support selling online.
Online shoppers are showing themselves to be strongly driven by price,
which is not surprising when price comparisons are so easy to make on the
Internet. Early hopes that those buying online would be prepared to pay
premium prices have been dashed and online retailers are having to compete
on price, rather as they do in direct mail.
This is why Amazon’s approach is now ‘everyday low pricing’ and
they have responded to their customers’ desire for free shipping by
offering this on orders worth more than $99. However the US, as the most
mature Internet sales market, shows little sign of developing a real mass
market online, as had been anticipated would happen as Internet access
broadened to different demographic groups.
People seem to be using the Internet for different things, gathering
information being one of them. Perhaps going shopping is just too much
fun. Why cut out an activity which you positively enjoy and which enables
you to see what you buy before you buy it?
18 February
A leader in the this week’s Bookseller comments on that
well-known publishing rule relating to copycat publishing: books which
set out to jump on a bestselling bandwagon never sell as well as the
original book. Tariq Ali, in a reference to the success of Cod,
said : ‘The bloody book on salmon never works’.
He is echoing many in the industry who have observed that the sales
departments’ desire to publish next year more of whatever made it to the
bestseller lists last year is fatally flawed. The very fact that the first
book did so well means that the next one won’t.
Public taste does change and readers do get bored with the same
thing, however successful it has been in the past. Delia Smith,
generally seen by everyone in the British book trade as a ‘banker’,
has just sold 100,000 fewer copies to date of How to Cook: Book
Three than of previous volumes. The tie-in to the third series of Absolutely
Fabulous, assumed by everyone in the book trade to be a dead cert,
has been shown to be just a dead book – and so it goes on.
Taking a more positive approach to all this, one could applaud the fact
that book-buyers are exercising choice and discrimination. In spite of the
best that publishers’ marketing departments can do to promote the books
that have been selected for the bestseller hype, a bad book won’t
sell.
Word-of-mouth is still an irresistible force, as the huge success of
books such as Wild Swans and Cold Mountain
have shown. The book business would do well to remember that readers
are fickle and opinionated, as they have every right to be, and cannot be
force-fed with a diet of pre-digested bestsellers.
11 February
As the second book in its One Book, One Chicago programme,
Chicago Public Library has chosen Elie Wiesel’s Night, a powerful
novel which draws on the author’s own terrible experiences in the Nazi
death camps. Wiesel, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, was
born in what is now Romania and was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. The
author will visit Chicago in April to take part in discussions about the
book.
Night is the second novel to be chosen by the Chicago Public
Library for this programme. The first was Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mocking-Bird. The idea of a whole city reading one book was first
tried in Seattle in 1998 and has now been adapted by 40 cities in the US.
The intention is that people should read the book and then gather to
discuss it. To date, this has been very successful as a way of encouraging
people to read and to focus on books.
28 January
Amazon this week announced that it has reached its goal of making a
profit in the fourth quarter of 2001, with an operating profit of $14.5m
on sales of $1.1bn for the quarter. This
was achieved with the help of a $16m gain related to the fall in value of
the Euro.
The news has sparked off a debate about what this profit figure means.
John Cassidy, whose book Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold,
is published this month by Penguin Press in the UK, says that, by trading
only a small proportion of its shares, Amazon kept the valuation of the
company high. Writing in the New York Times, Cassidy pointed
out that ‘It was the media that transformed Amazon.com from an
interesting small business story into a multibillion dollar corporate
thriller’ – with all the unending media speculation that has
surrounded it ever since. The Independent
provided a negative view on the profit news, pointing out that it is
‘going to take an awfully long time to earn back the $3bn in capital the
company has gobbled up’.
Some commentators greeted this as good news for the whole Internet
sector and in the UK the Daily Telegraph hailed it as a sign of a healthy
book market no longer hampered by the Net Book Agreement.
It argues that since the end of the NBA ‘far more books are
published, bought, and perhaps even read than in the old days, while
independent shops have burgeoned.’
This is not a picture which would be recognised by everyone in the
British book trade. Independent bookshops in particular feel themselves to
be very much under pressure from the burgeoning power of the chains.
Although now discounting much less ferociously than in the past, Amazon
has played a major part in fostering a competitive book retailing market
which relies heavily on discounting bestsellers.
Some commentators have pointed out that this has put margins under
pressure throughout the trade book business.
High discount sales usually also mean that the author receives a
lower royalty, so authors are also affected by the way in which Amazon has
redrawn the bookselling map.
21 January
The Christian Science Monitor has recently published a rather
sobering list of the books noted by the American Library Association as
the most frequently ‘challenged’ during 2000. It’s mostly an
extraordinary mixture of children’s books (thought elsewhere to be
helpfully encouraging children to read) and literary novels, which deal
with major issues of our time:
- Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, for occult/Satanism and
antifamily themes.
- The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, for violence and offensive
language.
- Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for sexual content.
- Killing Mr. Griffin, by Lois Duncan, for violence and sexual
content.
- Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, for using offensive language,
racism, and violence.
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, for being too
explicit in the book's portrayal of rape and other sexual abuse.
- Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers, for offensive language, racism,
and violence.
- Scary Stories series, by Alvin Schwartz, for violence and occult
themes.
- The Terrorist, by Caroline Cooney, for negatively portraying the
Islamic religion and Arabs.
- The Giver, by Lois Lowry, for being sexually explicit, having occult
themes, violence.
14 January
According to a recent study by Book Marketing Ltd, fiction sales in
the UK have fallen by about 10% in the last 18 months. Hardback sales
have continued to decline and now account for only 17% of all fiction
titles sold, or 26% of the total by value.
There is also little sign that discounting, even of bestsellers, is
having the effect of encouraging more purchases, as the book trade had
hoped. ‘It does not appear that discounting has had either a positive
or a negative effect on the overall level of hardback fiction sales,’
the report comments.
Perhaps discounting is tending to encourage book-buyers to buy the
heavily-discounted books, rather than leading them to buy more fiction
overall. So the publishers’ and bookselling chains’ view that
discounting is about securing their own market share may be right after
all, but the cost to the book trade as a whole is wafer-thin margins
and an unstable market. The sudden announcement last week that James Thin,
one of Scotland’s oldest-established booksellers, had gone into
receivership, is the kind of unwelcome news that 2002 may hold in store.
7 January
A £30 million last-minute surge in book sales in the week
before Christmas made this a bumper year for UK booksellers. Cumulative
sales for the year to 22 December had fallen by 5% on the previous year,
but a sudden leap in retail sales in general in the last week before the
holiday boosted book sales for the whole year. This is in line with
consumer purchasing, which has remained relatively strong through the
autumn and into the January sales.
In the US the picture was less rosy, with most bookstores
reporting sales flat or slightly down on 2000. The disappointing sales
were attributed to the poor economy and the after-effects of 11 September,
but many commentators thought that even flat sales were welcome in what
has been a very poor year for book sales. Many of the big fall books,
including the fiction bestseller ‘bankers’, sold disastrously, and
there is continuing uncertainty in the book world about when the world’s
largest economy will come out of recession - and what kind of 2002 the
book business can expect.
1 January
A piece on Wired suggests that the death of the e-book has been
exaggerated. E-book reading and sales are stronger than ever with
independent publishers and retailers such as Fictionwise.com,
Booklocker.com, Hardshell Word Factory and Palm Digital Corp reporting
sales increases in 2001 from between 100% and 400%. "What hasn't
worked is heavily invested companies -- such as iPublish and
MightyWords -- setting overly optimistic expectations. But what has
worked, albeit on a smaller scale, is selling quality work from recognised
authors (Palm or Fictionwise), or offering readers niche titles that they
are interested in reading (Hard Shell and Booklocker)."
But Mighty Words to Close
Yet another e-publishing venture is coming to an end, as MightyWords
CEO Chris MacAskill served official 30-day notice of termination to
content providers. MacAskill says, "We regret to inform you that we
have made the difficult decision to cease operations effective January 12,
2002."
The site offers only slight more details; while distribution partners
are encouraged to investigate becoming BN.com affiliates, the FAQ tells
content providers wondering "Whom do I speak with at BN.COM to sell
my digital titles?" that "We do not have contact
information."
Chris Holifield
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