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News Stories from the Book World 2004You can check latest stories.
Bad Sex AwardTo the amusement of literary scene watchers (but not presumably of the author, who was the first winner in the award’s 12 years to decline the invitation to the ceremony) Tom Wolfe was awarded this year’s Bad Sex Award for a passage from I Am Charlotte Simmons. The award, which was set up in 1993 by the literary critic Rhoda Koenig and the late Auberon Waugh, is made by the Literary Review each December ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.’ Previous winners have included distinguished novelist Sebastian Faulks and gardening writer turned bestselling novelist Alan Titchmarsh. This year there was a strong field and a doughty challenge was mounted by Nobel prize-winner Andre Brink, Will Self with an extraordinary passage involving a cow, previous winner Wendy Perriam and Julian Fellowes. Wolfe’s novel is about a virginal heroine who is shocked by the decadence she encounters at an Ivy League university. Wolfe is said to have spent four years researching the novel in America’s temples of academe. The result is a novel which contains this Bad Sex Award-winning passage: ‘Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth ... Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological* caverns ...’ (*defined by the New Oxford dictionary of English as relating to ‘the study of diseases of the ear, nose and throat’.
Christmas jittersThe all-important festive season is not currently delivering what booksellers were hoping to get for Christmas. The general trend on Britain’s high street is down, affected by a stalled housing market, high petrol prices, rising utility bills and general uneasiness about what the future holds in store. The effect is a faltering in the enthusiasm with which consumers are approaching the biggest buying bonanza of the year. Last year provided a good Christmas, highlighting the fact that retailers are hugely dependant for their profit on December sales by contributing 17% of annual revenue. This year aggressive discounting of up to 55% in the battle for market share has meant that the 2% drop in sales last week, compared to last year, was matched by a 4.8% drop in value. The Bookseller quotes the example of Michael Palin’s bestselling Himalaya, which had sales worth £800,000 last week, but at a heavily discounted average selling price of only £11.92 (published price £20) the trade ‘gave away’ a stunning extra £540,000 in discounts. Sales on bestsellers sales are being achieved at a wafer-thin margin. In a report in Publishing Trends British consultant Barney Allan commented: ‘Not many industries discount their bestselling product 40% or more on release. I think it has handed the initiative to the supermarkets and damaged both the publishers and the trade.’ In the US sales are also disappointing, but the discounting has not been so steep because the Robinson-Patman Act ensures that publishers have to offer the same discount structure to all bookshops. It’s therefore harder for the big chains and the supermarkets to undercut the independent bookshops, as they do in the UK. Allan goes further, seeing the current situation in the UK as an opportunity for American publishers: ‘I think all British publishers should be really worried about the challenge from the US houses. If the US publishers can overcome their fear of flying, they will become the locus of the world’s English language book supply. Better cost structure, bigger runs, and a weak dollar all add up to a big headache for British publishers.’ Fortunately for the Brits, American publishers have to date never focused on export, but perhaps now is the moment when they will. Certainly in the bookselling arena the international division of American chain Borders is showing sparkling growth at a time when domestic sales are in the doldrums.
Googling into academiaThe launch of Google Scholar was bound to bring the Internet giant into conflict with publishers who are fighting off the open access threat to their business (see Open access, the way of the future? and Google Print targets books in previous News Review columns). The new project will give users access to a giant database of research material, research material which use of the open access model would make free to all at the point of access. Google argue that its new search engine will help and encourage students and academics to source the books through libraries, online retailers or direct from publishers. In the UK a recent government pronouncement has backed the publishers who charge for access to databases of material on a subscription basis. Google’s database will come from scholarly articles, journals and books, submitted by the publishers themselves, and by academics and societies, so they are dependant on getting the suppliers of this material to work with them. Those using their service will be able to read the full text of articles if they hold a subscription to the relevant journal, or if it has been published in open access journals. Although initially hostile to Google Scholar, the giant academic publisher Reed Elsevier is now talking about working with it in one or two areas. The company owns paid-for search engine Lexis-Nexis, which gathers news from 32,000 sources and had sales of £1.25 billion last year. With its income increasingly derived from sales of subscriptions to its large range of online journals, Reed Elsevier, not surprisingly, feels that it has to defend the concept of paid-for access. It seems inevitable that the two parties’ different views of the world will continue to keep them on an ultimate collision course.
'Girl saves the world'There are signs that the old-fashioned romance genre is having to refashion itself to appeal to younger readers and to take account of changes in women’s lives. Strong and sexy heroines who can deal with any situation, save the day and find their man are more appealing to a new generation of women than the passive heroines of the traditional romance. In the UK Mills and Boon is having to take account of the new demands of a younger market. Chick-lit, which has been massively successful in appealing to younger women, is in itself a reaction to the passive and rather earnest stereotypes of the traditional romantic novel. In the States romance novels remain the top-selling genre, but sales are down from 54.1% in 1999 to 48.8% in 2003, causing romance publishers to rethink their approach. The result is the launch of new series where the heroines are tough enough to look after themselves and deal with the challenges of the modern world, often in something which is more of an action thriller type of plot, rather than the traditional romance which centres on the love element as the central part of the story. The biggest romance publisher, Harlequin, has launched Silhouette Bombshell. The twelfth book in the series features a Special Forces Captain who has to find out who is cloning government agents. Dorchester, another romance publisher, has brought out an action-adventure romance series entitled 2176, which is going well, and plans to launch another series, Crimson City, delivering paranormal action stories, in 2005. Linda Marrow, vice president and editorial director for Ballantine Books, says that the heroines in these books: ‘are really multi-dimensional and more layered than some in the past. They may be single mothers or divorced and tremendously accomplished. Their goal is not to be in a couple, but to catch the serial killer. They also happen to find love and happiness along the way. It’s a terribly powerful and appealing fantasy, to be very feminine and accomplished, and also very strong.’ The romance novel seems at last to be taking account of how women’s lives have changed, although of course what they offer is a different fantasy. You only have to look at films and TV to see that the modern heroine is no shrinking violet and it’s surprising really that publishers, even in this very traditional genre, have taken so long to wake up to what readers really want. But the result is a new twist to the ‘boy meets girl’ plot. 'Girl saves the world and also meets boy’ is what the modern action romances are delivering.
What price the first World city of Literature?No-one was more surprised than the members of the UK delegation who had worked to put in a bid for Edinburgh to become the first UNESCO City of Literature. Just after a grand party in Paris to launch the bid, it was announced that validation would be immediate, rather than there being six months to wait before the decision was made. But Edinburgh is ready. The website, www.city-ofliterature.com is already up and running, with information on the city’s landmarks and a listing of book events. But why Scotland, and why Edinburgh? The answer to this must partly be the immensely successful Edinburgh International Book Festival, with its 650 events and huge reputation (see News Review 26 July). Edinburgh is home to internationally-known writers, such as J K Rowling, Ian Rankin, Muriel Spark and Alexander McCall Smith. It prides itself on its culture. But what will this actually mean to the city? Will it make a real difference, as opposed to providing an occasion for an outburst of civic pride? An economic impact study estimates the benefit to be in the region of £2.2 million (approximately $4.49 million) to Edinburgh and £2.1 million to the rest of Scotland. Lorraine Fannin of the Scottish Publishers Association said: ‘I think the publishing industry will benefit enormously from the focus on the city as a city of literature, publishing and writing.’ Leverage is already being applied in relation to matters such as the state of the city’s libraries, and the proud title of first World City of Literature looks like providing something to live up to. Watch this space for news on what happens next.
Is there a community of writers?The American crime writer Sara Paretsky made a powerful appeal to the community of writers last week in a statement read out by her publisher when he collected the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for Blacklist on her behalf. Her words raise important issues about the treatment and role of the writer. ‘The last week has brought little of joy and much of worry and fear about the future of our most cherished freedoms in the United States – including the freedom to express ideas fully and openly. An artist in upstate New York has been arrested and held without charge for an installation piece questioning the bio-terror threat in Washington during the fall of 2001. A library patron in New Jersey was arrested and held for three days for looking at foreign-language pages in the Web in his library. In San Francisco, the FBI pulled in a man for questioning after he made comments against Mr Bush in a public place. All of these acts, and the fear of their repetition, create an atmosphere of fear, and are used deliberately to silence dissent. ‘In this climate of fear, the only way I can find the courage to continue speaking is from the knowledge that I belong to a community of writers – to know that, all around the world, people are supporting my voice as I struggle to speak – just as I will try to support the voices of other writers. As Donald Barthelme wrote in one of his short stories, "we must huddle and cling".’ Paretsky’s words raise important issues about the role of the writer, writers’ demand for the right of free speech and the role of the community of writers. Firstly, does this community exist at all or are writers more distinguished by their competitive approach to other writers? Are these freedoms worth fighting for? And, how can writers get together to exercise their potential power, which is that of a vociferous and therefore potentially highly influential international group? Please let us have your thoughts through our WritersForum discussion or by emailing individual contributions for our My Say column.
'Public libraries are on the verge of extinction'Last week a fresh attempt to set new standards in UK library provision was attacked by the library pressure group Libri. As reported in News Review 3 May 2004 Libri’s view is that libraries are in dire straits. Tim Coates, the author of their report Who’s in Charge? thinks that unless drastic changes are made now, libraries as we know them will cease to exist within the next 20 years. Libri has shown that 19 of the largest 20 councils have seen a double-digit decrease in the number of books issued over five years. Although there has also been a 1% increase in library visitors over the previous year, the trend is 6% down over 6 years. There has also been a continuing decline in book loans. Only 7.5% of library funding is currently spent on books, compared to 14% in 1995. Because so little is spent on replenishing the book stock, increasingly affluent readers are buying books – and passing them on to their friends - rather than borrowing them. Last year’s small increase in library visitors is not related to book-borrowing at all, but to use of the successful People’s Network, a free computer and Internet provision. For most libraries this has been a success, but why does it have to be at the expense of the more traditional book-lending role of the libraries? Tim Coates says: ‘Public libraries are on the verge of extinction. Action is needed now to halt their decline and renew their role in cultural life.’ His view is that the changes have embodied the wrong direction: ‘The diversification has been a disaster for reading in libraries. No one minds the videos, CDs and DVDs in libraries, but they should not have been brought in at the expense of books and reading. Rather than panicking and bringing in entertainment they knew nothing about yet they thought people wanted, they should have just made the books better.’
Will authors threaten legal action?As everyone in the British book trade knows, Penguin UK’s disastrous move to a new warehouse using the latest software system has already cost the company dear in terms of lost sales. But, as authors receive their royalty statements for the six months when the problems were at their most acute, many appear to be unhappy with the reduced sales and earnings. Agent Felicity Bryan says; ‘taking into account obvious variables, our January to June DK (Dorling Kindersley) backlist royalties are at least a third down on the same period last year.’ This week Mark le Fanu, Secretary of the Society of Authors, and Chairman Anthony Beevor have a meeting at Penguin to discuss the situation. In the meantime the Society has written to 50 of its members who are Penguin authors, asking them to work out what damage has been done to their sales and whether they think Penguin ‘should be pressed by the Society and agents to compensate authors’. Such a move is unprecedented. It would be extremely difficult to assess exactly how many sales have been lost by Penguin’s inability to get books out of their new warehouse. New titles were given priority and at one point were being supplied through a special despatch area in a marquee erected outside the warehouse. It’s the backlist which has been suffering most, as bookshops have been unable to get regular stock orders through the warehouse. Anthony Forbes-Watson, Penguin UK CEO, points out that its sales were down only 6% on the previous year in the four weeks ending 23 October, but acknowledges that the figures conflict with booksellers’ experience, which suggest the situation has been much worse. ‘The anecdotal evidence is all of books coming in late and incorrect; there is over seven months of cumulative frustration.’ All concerned are moving into uncharted waters here. It is not clear whether Penguin could reclaim damages from the company which supplied the allegedly faulty software. No-one knows how you would begin to assess the damage done to individual authors. But because Penguin are such strong backlist publishers their problems will have directly affected many authors – and there is a growing feeling that they should be compensated.
Man Booker winner 'exciting, brilliantly written'This week’s Man Booker Prize winner has continued the honourable tradition of overturning expectations of who would win, even though David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was the hottest favourite ever according to the bookmakers’ odds. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty was the first gay novel to win the Prize. The Poet Laureate Andrew Motion said he ‘can’t think of anyone who writes better line by line.’ Alan Hollinghurst, a gracious winner, said he would be grateful for the jury's decision for the rest of his life. ‘However they reached it I can't imagine. It's very amazing to me that the long, solitary process of writing a novel should lead to a moment like this.’ Chris Smith, the Chair of the Judges, said: ‘This was an incredibly difficult and close decision. It has resulted in a winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite 80s. The search for love, sex and beauty is rarely this exquisitely done.’ The judges took over two hours to reach a decision and only did so when, after five rounds of voting, Chris Smith (consummate politician that he is) suggested that the only judge voting for Colm Toibin’s The Master should transfer his vote to his second choice. But the judging process had been marked (and enlivened) by individual judges’ grumbles about the low quality of many of the 132 novels they considered. One judge, Tibor Fischer, said that: ‘some of the entries were so execrable I reckon they must have been submitted as a joke’. Perhaps the British book world and the literary establishment should be grateful for the Booker, which is frequently controversial but can be guaranteed to attract attention. America’s National Book Awards have just caused controversy because the five nominees are little-known novels by female New Yorkers, most of which have to date sold only a few hundred copies. The Awards are not widely publicised and bookshops are not geared up to sell the winner. Cuttingly, Larry Kirschbaum, the chairman of the admittedly commercially-oriented Time Warner Book Group, said: ‘We are completely closing ourselves off from the culture at large… we are supporting our demise.’ With considerable press coverage and two TV stations televising the awards ceremony, popular interest in the Man Booker has never been greater. This interest stretches around the world and can only be good for books. Next year’s inaugural International Man Booker Prize should be an interesting breakthrough.
Google Print targets booksGoogle’s recent launch of its Google Print project at the Frankfurt Book Fair will transform the way books are used in the Internet age. Going far beyond Amazon’ s Search Inside the Book facility, this ambitious scheme may bring books to Internet prominence but it also raises a host of concerns for publishers and authors. Amazon’s Search Inside the Book is so far available only to American publishers. Typically, it makes the first chapter of the book available for online browsing, with the straightforward intention of encouraging book purchase through Amazon. The Google Print project has more ambitious plans. In effect it will be a searchable content service for books. As the Bookseller said this week ‘The world’s most popular search engine has swallowed four billion web pages, and is now coming after books. The prospect is both thrilling and frightening for the book industry…’ Google’s plan is to scan millions of books in order to add their content to the Google database. If Google hadn’t already achieved what it has, this might well be considered an insanely ambitious plan. The way it works is that when you search for books on a topic, you will find links to the books which are relevant to it. Another click brings you to a three-page excerpt, the facility to search its pages and a chance to buy the book. Perhaps surprisingly, the main point of this is not to sell books, but to make money through advertising links on the book search pages. The revenue will be shared with publishers, although the online pages are coy about how much money publishers will make. To prevent people just reading the book online, Google’s plan is to limit the total number of pages viewed by a user to 20% of a book’s content within a 30-day period, and to prevent both cutting and pasting, and copying. The scheme raises some difficult issues as regards sharing the advertising revenue. Although publishers may try to argue that they should retain the income, or spend it on marketing, authors and their agents are likely to argue that the writers should take a share of it and may press for a 50/50 split. After all, Google Print will make the actual content of books available online and it seems reasonable that authors, as the copyright holders and creators of the material, should share in the income produced.
Self-publishing boomsAs the Frankfurt Book Fair draws to a close, it seems a good time to look at what other routes to publication exist for writers who feel excluded from the international publishing circus’s focus on bestsellers. Self-publishing has become an increasingly viable option, although it requires energy and the ability to get out there and market your book. The advent of print on demand publishing, making it possible to print one copy at a time and to avoid the crippling cost of an initial print-run languishing in your garage, has made self-publishing a possibility for many frustrated unpublished writers. Last year more than 70,000 self-published books were published in the USA alone. A number of highly successful writers, including Louis L’Amour, Leo Tolstoy and L Ron Hubbard, have taken the self-publishing route to publication at some time in their careers. More recently, there’s been Stephen King’s online experiment and Dave Eggers’ self-publishing of You Shall Know Our Velocity. These authors have wanted independence, but for others it has provided a way to attract publishers’ attention and to get their books taken on by big publishers. The Englishman Stephen Clarke self-published his quirky A Year in the Merde, which pokes fun at the French, printing 200 copies and putting his book on the Internet after he had failed to find a publisher. He now has a big publisher in tow and looks set for major success. Peter Inson has just launched his debut novel Dunno on the London Tube after getting fed up with comments such as: ‘It’s a wonderful idea and somebody ought to publish it, but I can’t be sure that it will be the next world bestseller’. American writer M J Rose has shown the way for unpublished writers by focusing on self-publicity. As long ago as 1999 she managed to get Lip Service taken on as the first self-published book chosen by the Doubleday Book Club. This catapulted her onto the Today programme and good sales for her risky self-financed 3,000 copy first print run. With her advertising background she is dismissive of publishing: ‘I know of no other business that would invest in a product, spend a year developing it, then throw it up on the shelves without serious marketing to see if it lives or dies.’ If you despair of getting of finding a publisher for your work, self-publishing may be worth considering. If you have a means of selling your work, such as a lecture tour, you may make more money that way. If you want to attract a publisher’s attention, then showing that there is interest in your book and how it has already sold may put you in the limelight. Niche books with specific markets can do well, fiction is harder. But don’t ever think that it will be an easy option, or that you won’t need to put the same energy and determination into selling your book which went into writing it in the first place. WritersPrintShop gives the lowdown on self-publishing.
The business of FrankfurtThis weekend publishing people all over the world are packing their bags for the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair, which starts on Wednesday. The largest annual gathering of the book world, the Fair is expected to have 6,648 exhibitors this year. The biggest international contingent will be the Brits, with just under 900 exhibitors, followed by the USA with 750. The Americans seem to be sending less people every year and American editors, with the cuts in publishing lists and the increasing reluctance to buy in from abroad, will be in short supply. Diane Spivey, Rights and Contracts Director at Time Warner Publishing in the UK, has noticed that Americans are not buying at Frankfurt in the same way as they used to. ‘There is a divergence in taste between Europe and the US, especially in the illustrated market. If a book is sellable in the US, it is less sellable elsewhere. There has been a real cultural shift and British tastes seem to be getting closer to the rest of Europe.’ At the first Frankfurt Book Fair 55 years ago 10,000 titles were exhibited. This year it will be around 350,000, of which 22% will be new publications. Last year there were 241 organised discussions, 444 readings and 219 film screenings, but the real point of the Fair is the thousands of individual publishers' meetings. For this is the international rights fair par excellence and together with BookExpo and increasingly the London Book Fair in the spring, it is the pivot on which the global publishing year rotates. This year there have been a few concessions to the publishers’ wishes. The Literary Agents’ Centre – sold out weeks ago – has been moved closer to the action in the English-speaking hall. The Fair authorities are not insisting on the Fair staying open late on the Friday evening (as they did last year) and this year’s Fair will close on the Sunday evening, a major improvement for weary rights sellers. Small concessions perhaps, but a recognition that the exhibitors are the Fair’s main customers. The ‘focus on’ feature has been reinstated and this year it will be, politically correctly in some quarters at least, on the Arab world, which contains 1,000 publishers and publishes 31,000 titles annually, nearly three-quarters of them school and university books. This year the Rights Directors’ Meeting will concentrate on the four most important Asian markets - Japan, Korea, China and Thailand. These are the most dynamic new publishing markets, where everyone hopes to develop their business - and business is exactly what this enormous gathering is all about. Inside Publishing on the Frankfurt book Fair
Booker feverThe astonishing fact that this year’s favourite for the Booker, David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (Sceptre) has the hottest bookmaker odds ever (5 to 4) highlights the way in which the Man Booker Prize now commands attention outside the book world. This year’s shortlist includes at least two novelists who are better-known than Mitchelll, Alan Hollinghurst and Colm Toibin, so the favourite is quite a surprise. The Man Booker is by no means the most lucrative international book prize, but for some reason, in spite of the fact that it is only open to writers from the British Commonwealth and thus excludes American novelists, it still manages to arouse interest across the world. Perhaps its history of controversy is the reason, but it’s that combined with the growth in English as a world language, giving an unchallenged international dimension to whatever is written in that language. Writers working in English really should be grateful for the good fortune that has given them a global market. Another example of this is last week’s Goteborg Book Fair, which highlighted British literature, with 38 writers from the UK participating in what is essentially a Nordic fair. This year’s Booker Prize had the benefit of early controversy, when one of the judges, the writer and critic Tibor Fischer, proclaimed in mid-August, that publishers don’t have a clue about books or what constitutes good writing. Commenting on the 126 entries, he said; ‘Some entries were so execrable I reckoned they must have been submitted as a joke.’ He concluded (in what one hopes was also meant as a joke) that ‘the most damning charge I can make against British publishers is that no one has tried to nobble me’ and stated his price (£10,000 for a shortlist and £20,000 for a – not guaranteed – winner). Mr Fischer is no stranger to controversy, but even the mild-mannered Chris Smith, chair of the judges, commented that some of the novels submitted had been poor, but that it was ‘an exceptionally strong shortlist’. Just in case the publicity juggernaut has passed you by, here’s the Booker shortlist. The bookies, and the rest of us, will find out who has won on 19 October. Achmat Dangor Bitter Fruit Atlantic Books Sarah Hall The Electric Michelangelo Faber & Faber Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty Picador David Mitchell Cloud Atlas Sceptre Colm Toibin The Master Picador Gerard Woodward I’ll go to Bed at Noon Chatto & Windus
What's the point of World Book Day?World Book Day 2004 was a British book promotion with global ambitions, which perhaps this year, for the first time, started to be realised. The PR agency Colman Getty generated £1.8m ($3.2) worth of press coverage. Awareness statistics show high public awareness of the day, with 89% of children and 44% of adults showing awareness. Since the day was still largely focused on children, this difference is not surprising, but secondary schools were involved for the first time, with 70% of them actively participating. Booksellers benefited from new customers, as children came in to spend their £1 book tokens, sales from which amounted to 704,106 copies sold. Excluding this book, the impact of WBD on the book trade was £3m ($5.33m). 98% of library authorities took part in World Book Day 2004, supporting it with 823 live events. The online festival, in its second year, was launched with a JK Rowling webchat and many other well-known authors lent their support, including Jacqueline Wilson, Nick Hornby, Minette Walters and Benjamin Zephaniah. On World Book Day itself the Online Festival had 1.4 million hits from 78 different countries; by the end of March this amounted to 3.3 million hits from 100 countries. This was the first truly international World Book Day, a real global celebration of the book. It was an impressive indication of what can be done on the web and how much World Book Day might achieve in the future. World Book Day 2005 will be on 3rd March and details will be put on the website, www.worldbookday.com
UK outsells Germany/US titles surge aheadA recent survey on European publishing compiled for the European Commission’s
DG Enterprise division by a team led by Rightscom has shown that UK
publishing turnover has overtaken that of Germany. This is surprising since
Germany has a considerably larger population and has always been a very active
book market. Around 140,00 people work in the publishing industry in Europe as a
whole, a disproportionate 35,000 of them in the UK. This UK growth is probably
due to the huge benefits of having a large export market and a native language
which has become the international lingua franca.
Germans reject 'new spelling'As if Germany does not have enough major problems at the moment, there are growing signs of an unbeatable wave of popular opposition to the spelling reforms which have been introduced by the federal government and were supposed to become universal by August 2005. Six years ago the Rechtschreibung or ‘new spelling’, a reform affecting about 5% of the language, was introduced to simplify and modernise the complex German spelling rules. It was intended to make the language very much easier to learn. In fact the changes have encountered increasing popular opposition. Literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote: ‘Chaos has broken out… in no other major European country is the gap so deep between the language of the people and the language of literature.’ The newspapers are voting with their feet. Axel Springer’s titles and Der Spiegel returned to the old spelling last month. Gunther Grass and other leading writers have refused to allow their books to be published with the new spelling. Some publishers are taking the line of least resistance and allowing their authors to choose which form of spelling should be used in their books. But for school textbook publishers this is a crucial and costly issue. Latest estimates for making the changes throughout educational publishing start at around €250m (£168m or $298m). Publishers may be unwilling but resigned to the costs involved, but will be even more unhappy if the changes are in the end abandoned. These reforms are meeting resistance the bureaucrats never dreamed of, although they should perhaps have remembered that Germans are rightly proud of their cultural inheritance. Not surprisingly, people are usually attached to the spelling they have always used. Many would regard using correct spelling as a measure of their personal level of literacy. Which might be why Profile’s Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary looks like being this year’s successor to the hugely successful Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
'It was a dark and stormy night'With many people in the northern hemisphere just coming to the end of the summer holidays, it seemed a good week to feature some less than serious news. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest exactly fitted the bill. Set up in 1982 by some wags in the English Department at the San Jose University, this challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence in the worst of all possible novels. It is named in honour of the Victorian writer Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (who in fact penned the following passage some years before Victoria ascended the throne, as the opening of his novel Paul Clifford): ‘It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.’ The latest winner of the 2004 Contest is Dave Zobel, a 42-year-old software developer from Manhattan Beach, California. His immortal opening passage was: ‘She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.’ The runner-up, who gave Dave Zobel a good run for his money, was Pamela Hatchet Hamilton of Quebec with this passage: ‘The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen's hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.’ For other awards, see the website.
'I'm still doing the same thing.'The extraordinary success of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves has shown yet again how one hugely successful book can transform the performance of a small publisher. There are now more than 1.1m copies of the book in print in the UK and it has also been a surprise international bestseller, in spite (or perhaps because of) its very English appeal. The book was voted Book of the Year at the British Book Awards and its publisher Profile was named Small Publisher of the Year. Profile’s turnover doubled in the year ending 31 March and the nine shareholders received their first dividend cheques since the company was founded eight years ago. ‘Before this experience I was thinking: "Independent publishing is hopeless; I'm a terrible publisher; it's not working; I should give up". Now I think I'm a genius. But I'm still doing the same thing.’ MD Andrew Franklin, former head of Penguin's Hamish Hamilton, compares publishing to gambling. ‘Every publisher deserves an Eats, Shoots from time to time, but without solid underlying growth, it’s just like gambling – or even more like gambling than publishing is normally.’ HarperCollins’ excellent results internationally (boosted by The Purpose Driven Life - see News Review 16 August) have show yet again that when a big company is powering along it can turn in a healthy profit. But the corporate cohorts can also stumble badly. The Penguin UK warehouse disaster shows how a usually efficient distribution system can be brought to its knees by the badly planned introduction of a state of the art automated system. Those with long memories will recall Oxford University Press and Littlehampton suffering similar traumas. The worst of the Penguin debacle is now in the past, but substantial sales, especially of Penguin’s rich backlist, have been lost. Andrew Franklin must feel that he prefers the gamble of life in his own small company to working for his previous employers.
Man with a MissionHe's the author of one of the top-selling books of all time, but the chances are that you’ve never heard of him. Rick Warren, dubbed ‘America’s pastor’, is the author of the monumental bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life. The book has now sold a staggering 20 million copies worldwide and is currently racing out at the rate of a million copies a month. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for a straight 70 weeks and looks like staying there indefinitely. The huge sales of Warren’s book must have played a major part in the 37% growth in religious publishing in the US last year. Warren is a man with a mission. Working through a network of American churches, he has used the book to propagate his ’40 Days of Purpose’ programme, which presents ‘a manifesto for Christian living in the twentieth century’. This is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. He has by-passed the traditional media, particularly television, and used the Internet to build his campaign. Over 300,000 pastors across the globe have been trained in the programme. Around 125,000 of them get his weekly email, which includes his latest sermon, ready for them to deliver to their congregations. Warren is now working through a global network of churches – more than 15,000 worldwide have already carried out the programme. By the end of the year over 30,000 churches will have completed it. They span all denominations and already include over 1,000 churches in Britain and 1500 in the Philippines. With its straightforward message, its propagation through the pastors and its enthusiastic international adoption, The Purpose-Driven Life is bound to continue generating huge sales as its author’s message is carried across the world.
Tomorrow the worldThis week’s sale of Hodder Headline will come as no surprise to News Review readers (see 5 July). The problems of parent company W H Smith have been much documented and the sale of Hodder Headline always looked like a good way of giving some cash to shareholders whilst at the same time being seen to do something about Smith’s own problems. The price paid was £210m ($388m) in cash and the assumption of Hodder Headline’s £13m ($24m) pension deficit, and the company proposes to return most of this to shareholders at 85p ($1.56) per ordinary share. Hodder Headline has not been a bad acquisition for W H Smith. It has consistently turned in a profit and grown steadily and rapidly, but there has always been a feeling in the City that Smith’s had no business owning a publisher and should stick to retailing. Other publishers and booksellers have always felt distrustful of a too-close relationship disadvantaging them, although from the outside it simply looked as if there was an easy fit between Hodder Headline’s commercial fiction publishing and what W H Smith’s customers wanted. The Hachette-owned companies in the UK (Hodder-Headline, Orion, Franklin Watts and Chambers-Harrap) will now constitute the second-biggest publishing group in the UK. The French-owned group will be positioned to give Random House a run for its money. Tim Hely-Hutchinson retains his position as ceo of Hodder-Headline and takes on a new role as chief executive of the £275m ($508m) Hachette UK book group. He is widely liked and respected and this will be seen as one of the most positive aspects of the sale. Hachette have a reputation for running their companies separately, so this acquisition will not have the possibly devastating effects of cuts in staff and publishing lists which a purchase by Penguin or HarperCollins (both of which were reputed to be in the running) would have had. Big publishing has just got bigger, but authors will not suffer from this acquisition. The Americans used to be seen as taking over British publishing, but now Hachette has continued the European trend set by Bertelsmann, the German owner of Random House. The next step for Hachette will be the world. As it positions itself for the global English language publishing market the group will have to look for an American acquisition. But it will do so from a much-strengthened base.
Poetry and politicsNo-one would claim that literature and politics go together, which makes it even more astonishing that John Kerry, chosen this week as the Democratic candidate for the presidential election, should have taken the risky strategy of quoting poetry in his campaign speeches. In fact Kerry has gone one step further than that and used Let America be America again as a campaign slogan and the cornerstone of his message to American voters. The poem, by the black poet Langston Hughes, is written from a radical – some would say communist - standpoint and harks back to the dream of the founding fathers. Kerry closed his speech in Pittsburgh on July 6 with these words: ‘Langston Hughes was a poet, a black man and a poor man. And he wrote in the 1930s powerful words that apply to all of us today. He said "Let America be America again. Let it be the dream that it used to be for those whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, for those whose hand at the foundry – something Pittsburgh knows about – for those whose plow in the rain must bring back our mighty dream again."’ It’s hard to recall other American presidents who have quoted poetry as part of their campaign, although John F Kennedy did on occasion quote Robert Frost – and perhaps that is exactly the comparison that the Kerry campaign would like voters to make. But it’s a risky strategy, since the Democratic candidate lays himself open to being dismissed as an elitist dreamer, particularly when he’s up against the plain-speaking, anti-intellectual, often tongue-tied George W Bush. But perhaps the sheer power of the poem itself is enough to overcome this.
Hughes speaks straight to the heart, in words every American can understand,
about regaining a sense of national purpose, a moral stance based on doing good
in the world and acting responsibly as the leader of the free world. This sense
of a global mission, tarnished though it may seem by recent events, is a
powerful force in the American psyche. It’s good to see poetry taking centre
stage again.
'The planet's biggest and best literary party'There’s still time to book for most of the 650 events at the world’s largest annual literary and cultural showcase, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which runs from 14th to 30th August. The Festival celebrates its 21st birthday this year with the biggest line-up of authors it has ever had, 550 writers from 30 countries ranging from Muriel Spark to Louis de Bernieres, from Carlos Fuentes to Germaine Greer, Richard Dawkins and Tony Benn. Last year 185,000 tickets were sold and this special anniversary festival is expected to exceed that. Starting from just 40 events in 1983, this huge event now attracts massive audiences because it pulls in world-famous authors and ties in with the celebrated Edinburgh Festival. The readings have a more participatory focus, particularly those involving non-fiction, which include topical subjects such as science, current affairs and history. The Festival’s director, Catherine Lockerbie, says: ‘A 21st birthday calls for a party, and we are throwing the planet’s biggest and best literary party this August. We’ll be celebrating the writers of the future as well as the writers of the present, and enjoying democratic discussions on everything under the sun, including democracy itself.’ The huge growth in the number of literary festivals worldwide, of which Edinburgh is just a part, is very good news for the book business. It is heartening to think of more than 185,000 tickets sold for people to listen to authors and then often buying a book afterwards as well. In some circles books have now become quite fashionable. Given the fact that they also commandeer an enormous amount of media coverage, the literary sector does punch above its weight in terms of publicity. The problem is still to turn this publicity bonanza and the huge public interest in books into actual sales and to sustain levels of reading (see News Review last week). Edinburgh International Book Festival
Reading at riskReading at Risk, a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts involving 17,000 people, paints a dismal picture of a decline in reading in the US. Defining ‘literary reading’ as novels, short stories, plays and poetry read not for work or study, i.e. leisure reading of fiction, the study shows a sharp and continuing decline amongst all sectors of the population. Less than half of American adults now read literature, but the steepest and most worrying decline is amongst younger age groups, where the decline is 28%. There has been an overall decline of ten percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, representing a worrying loss of 20 million readers. The rate of decline is increasing and has tripled in the last decade. NEA Chair Dana Gioia said ‘This report documents a national crisis. Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life. The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflects a general collapse in advanced literacy. To lose this human capacity - and all the diverse benefits it fosters - impoverishes both cultural and civic life. ‘ Women read literature more than men do, but only just over a third of adult males now read literature. As previous studies have shown, education is the most significant factor affecting this. Depressingly, reading is also an indicator of participation in other activities: for instance literary r readers are almost four times as likely to visit an art museum and more than two and a half times as likely to do voluntary work. There isn’t much good news here, but it should be noted that spending on books has stayed pretty steady over this period, suggesting people are buying books but not necessarily reading them. Also, reading is still the fourth most important leisure activity amongst those surveyed. Looking at literacy figures, it seems that a much larger percentage of the people who have the reading competency to read literature are doing so. But in spite of these caveats it’s a pretty grim picture and Gioia is right to say that ‘America can no longer take active and engaged literacy for granted… No single factor caused this problem. No single solution can solve it. But it cannot be ignored and must be addressed.’
Second-hand books boomA recent article in Publishing Trends, the newsletter of US consultants Market Partners International, has reopened the debate about the effect of used book sales on new books. Second-hand books have always possessed a resale value and been a way that people with less money can feed their reading habit. But in the past these sales have largely escaped notice and been effectively unquantifiable. Amazon has changed all that, with its listing of used books right alongside the new versions. If a book’s out of print, the used version may be the only one available. Some of the prices are so low that it’s difficult to see how Amazon makes money out of these transactions, at least until one remembers the sheer volume of Amazon sales. The listings present a good opportunity to sell even a low-value item such as a used book, especially if it’s the only version available. There’s also the income from delivery to take into account. Amazon has done its sums carefully and it’s all incremental income, since the online bookseller is listing the book anyway. But does all this damage new book sales? And how are authors affected since they get no income from used book sales? The outlook is not good. In certain areas, such as student books, the rapid growth of the second-hand market is beginning to have a major impact on sales of new books. Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners, says that: ‘Used books are to consumer books as Napster was to the music industry.’ The comparison is chilling. Ipsos Booktrends said that 15% of all books for adults and teenagers that were purchased in the US from April to December 2003 were used. The percentage of used books may already be much higher than that in countries where book buyers have less disposable income and there is no stigma attached to buying second-hand. Internationally, the web has facilitated these sales and will provide the means by which they continue to accelerate – which they undoubtedly will.
Hodder Headline on the blockTroubles at high street giant W H Smith may now affect its publishing arm, Hodder Headline. Under its new chief executive, Kate Swann, Smith’s has been struggling to reinvent itself whilst dealing with a takeover bid from Permira. The discovery of a large hole in the pension fund, variously reported as £215 million or £190 million, has led to the plan to sell off its profitable publishing arm, Hodder Headline. Investors are unhappy about W H Smith’s recent performance, but it’s worth remembering that it is a sleeping giant. As the Bookseller sagely remarked some time ago: ‘WHS still sells an awful lot of books… More than half the population are light or non-readers, whom WHS is better equipped than any other retailer to attract. These consumers have not disappeared just because retail analysts say that modern retail has left them behind.' There’s no doubt that Hodder Headline would make a tasty snack for various big publishing groups which are still struggling to position themselves internationally, especially in the key English language markets. The French group Lagardere, still in acquisitive mood after gobbling up a large chunk of French publishing in its recent purchase of Editis, is rumoured to have already made a bid of £230 million. Lagardere has paid two times sales for Editis – the same multiple would mean that it might pay £316 million for Hodder Headline, and its educational arm would be particularly valuable to the French group. Other possible purchasers are rumoured to be HarperCollins, which already has a large presence in the UK in publishing areas which duplicate Hodder Headline’s commercial publishing, and US publisher Simon and Schuster’s parent company Viacom. The latter has a UK arm which is generally reckoned to be too small to compete adequately in the battle of the titans. Tim Hely Hutchinson, the highly respected CEO of Hodder Headline, has been reassuring about the possibility of a sale: ‘There is a tendency to think that corporations are evil, but people are incredibly conscious of the value of creative people and management who can make a profit.’ Hodder Headline authors and staff should be reassured by this, but may still find it a little unsettling that their publisher is for sale and the outcome uncertain.
Is writing a moral act?Professor Alexander McCall Smith is an unlikely popular author. Chairman of the British Medical Ethics Committee, visiting professor at SMU Law School and Professor of Law at Edinburgh University, a publisher and the author of over 50 books of a mostly much more weighty nature, he is a busy academic who turned to writing detective stories for light relief and to help him relax. He has drawn on his own upbringing in Bulawayo to recreate Botswana, one of the most stable and robust of African countries. As he writes at up to 1,000 words an hour, he has effortlessly produced five novels in the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, starring his heroine Precious Ramotswe. In writing about his fellow-Scot Irvine Welsh, whom he doesn’t approve of, he has said: ‘I feel that writing is a moral act. I feel that those who portray an aggressive, vulgar, debased attitude towards life are conniving in that life, and I think publishers should reject them.’ This is surely a deeply unfashionable approach, which makes it all the more extraordinary that McCall Smith has been so successful. But something about his writing touches a chord. It’s probably his optimism and his desire to believe the best of people. His heroine Mma Ramotswe is not a fool, but she does believe that practical common sense is the right approach to life and the only way to solve problems. Perhaps that’s just a very reassuring approach in these times of shifting sands obscuring right and wrong. It’s certainly a message that has been welcomed all over the world and has lifted the author’s unique books effortlessly into the bestseller lists.
Why are dead poets dead?A survey published a month or two ago, but little publicised, turns an interesting spotlight on the mortality levels attached to different kinds of writing. James Kaufman, a professor at California State University, has shown that poets are likely to die younger than any other kind of writer. Writing in the cheerily named Death Studies, Kaufman reports on his survey of nearly two thousand dead writers, showing that poets on average live just 62.2 years, whereas playwrights manage just 18 months longer and novelists make it to an average age of 66. Interestingly, non-fiction writers do much better than this, with an average age at death of 72.7 years, suggesting that these statistics may not relate to the act of writing per se, but may have more to do with the creative nature of the writing itself. Many poets have produced their best work quite young - Wordsworth and T S Eliot come to mind. But the older ages of some of the recent Next Generation Poets list (see News Review 7 June 2004) suggest that many of them do not start writing until well on in their lives). There’s no escaping the conclusion that writing is not the best thing to take up if you want to live a long life. Only stuntmen and gliding instructors have a shorter lifespan than poets – even deep sea divers do better (although one might presume that they do not carry on with their profession into old age and poets do not usually ‘retire’). Kaufman thinks that it is the loneliness of being a poet, although it does seem that modern poets at least must have some other occupation to prevent them starving. Many write fiction, or even non-fiction, as well, and a number of contemporary poets seem to have benefited from the boom in creative writing courses and now teach writing as a living. But perhaps the early mortality of poets shows another link to the creative gene, which is that poets suffer from higher rates of mental illness than the population at large. As Macaulay somewhat witheringly (and sweepingly) said: ‘No person can be a poet of even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.’ So avoiding mental illness and steering clear of poetry might be the best ways to avoid the statistical risk of early death. But did any poet ever take any notice of statistics, after all?
The biggest book of the year?Bill Clinton’s memoir was the hit of BookExpo this year and huge sales are anticipated when it’s published on 22nd June. There’s been a lot of speculation about the advance paid by the publishers Knopf, with the Wall Street Journal bringing its gigantic initial estimate down to a measly $9 million dollars. My Life is reckoned to be too important for the publishers to risk losing sales because of the serial. Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards said: ‘You go down the road of serialization when you’re trying to maximise exposure for an author. In this instance, we are controlling the exposure for Clinton.’ The first print is 1.5 million, but a huge reprint is waiting in the wings and this looks set to be the biggest book of the year. Clinton will undertake a massive tour. Although much bigger than the others, it’s part of a rash of political books (see News Review 5 April 2004) condemned by Rachel Donadio in the Observer: ‘publishers are flailing around, publishing even the dumbest political books’. But this book is a one-off and will rise above the other over-publishing in this genre. As his electrifying performance at BEA showed, Clinton is in a class of his own when it comes to book promotion. What is harder to forecast at the moment is the way in which this hugely influential book from the charismatic previous incumbent of the Oval Office is going to affect the presidential election in November. But this and the rash of books on the late Ronald Reagan being rapidly reissued to meet high demand show that the books are intimately entangled with the political events they chronicle and describe. When it comes to politics, books can have a massive influence.
Poets to define the next generationThe list of 20 Next Generation Poets has just been announced. Ten years after the successful New Generation poets promotion, this new list is an attempt to put poetry back at the centre of the cultural landscape and to celebrate the work of these 20 exhilarating new voices. The original New Generation list had an age restriction, meaning that a number of important poets in their early forties were excluded from the list. This time there was no age restriction and poets were eligible if they had published their first collection during the decade from 1994 to 2004. The Next Generation Poets are:
Publishers entered 156 titles for the list, setting the judges a particularly difficult task. The judging panel was made up of a cross-section of people who enjoy reading poetry, not just poets, to give the list wider relevance. Chaired by Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, the panel consisted of Simon Armitage, poet and writer; Bernardine Evaristo, poet and writer; Colin Greenwood, musician and member of Radiohead; A L Kennedy, novelist and critic; James Naughtie, broadcaster and writer; and Marie Robertson, keen poetry reader and member of the Poetry Book Society. Andrew Motion commented on the list: ‘It’s ten years since the highly successful New Generation promotion – time enough for a large number of significant new poets to have emerged and begun to make their mark. The Next Generation gathers twenty of them – and proves that contemporary poetry is thriving. Individually and collectively, these poets have a remarkable range, appeal and authority.’ The promotion was publicly funded by the Arts Council and managed by the Poetry Book Society, a book club for poetry lovers which was founded by T S Eliot in 1953. As well as library and bookshop promotions, there will be a series of events featuring the Next Generation poets taking place all over the UK during the second half of the year. More detailed information about the poets and the events, and a downloadable pdf of the reader’s guide are available from the Poetry Book Society’s new website, www.poetrybookshoponline.com The Next Generation Poets’ books will be available in libraries and can be purchased from bookshops or from the new website.
Book Aid makes a real difference‘If education is the road out of poverty, books are the wheels needed for the journey.’ Richard Crabbe, former chairman of the African Publishers Network There are still 113 million primary school children in the world who are receiving no education at all. A remarkable charity, Book Aid International, has been providing books on a regular basis to help these children and their communities break out of the cycle of poverty. Over 50 years it has provided 26 million books to 30 of the world’s poorest countries, mostly in Africa. The charity's ‘Reverse Book Club’ supplies 4 books for £5 - and you never receive a single one of them! This ingenious idea means that a donation of £5 (around $9) a month would provide 48 books a year to readers in countries such as Ethiopia, Nepal and Sierra Leone. Book Aid has been generously supported by publishers and direct book donations from them make up £2,868,000 ($5,257,000) of its last full year’s income (with £1,248,000 ($2,287,584) coming in cash donations). The high value of book donations means that for every £1.50 ($2.75) cash donated, Book Aid can provide a book worth £4.70 ($8.61). Some successful programmes include working in partnership with Malawi National Library Service to put books into 1,000 community resource centres; supplying books to refugees; and working with girls to increase their literacy in Sierra Leone. Books are supplied to libraries, hospitals and schools. In the longer run, Book Aid is working to support the growth of local publishing and bookselling, so that affordable books can be produced which reflect local languages and culture. What kind of books does Book Aid want? Because of the relatively high cost of getting the books to their destinations, it’s important that donated books are in good condition and exactly what they’re looking for. There are clear guidelines on the website about this, but children’s books, adult fiction and reference books are much in demand, along with the kind of vocational books and law student textbooks which most people are less likely to have at home. So the next time you clear out your shelves, remember Book Aid needs those books!
Eats, Shoots - and SellsMuch to everyone’s surprise, Lynnne Truss’s witty little book about punctuation (see News Review 19 from 19 January below) has been a big hit all over the world. In the UK it passed 600,00 sales last month and is still heading the non-fiction bestseller lists, having held this dizzying position for 20 weeks. Eats, Shoots and Leaves was reckoned by many to relate to a typically British obsession and even its author, a doughty fighter on the barricades of the punctuation wars, could not have imagined what a chord her book would strike in the furthest corners of the world. Truss has recently completed a coast-to-coast tour of the US and the book, published by Gotham, an imprint of Penguin, already has nearly 500,00 copies in print and has swept to the top of the bestseller lists. She commented: ‘There’s always this idea there’s a sense of humour gap between the two countries but there isn’t. People are exercised about punctuation. I’m meeting a lot of sticklers and it’s encouraging. In Milwaukee and Portland they were saying thank you, thank you for writing this.’ The book has not been adapted for the American market. The US publisher, William Shinker, said: ‘We felt it was not necessary to Americanise it. To do so would be to change the book. And a lot of the charm of it is it’s very British.’ Obviously readers all over the world feel the same way. As well as topping bestseller lists in English-speaking countries such as Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong and Singapore, it has done extremely well in countries such as Egypt, Italy, Poland and Iceland. Most readers are enjoying it in English, but the author’s agent is hoping to place translated versions in Holland, Sweden and Japan (though the Japanese translator faces a challenging task). To anyone concerned with the written word, it’s cheering to see that so many people care about punctuation, often regarded as a bit passé in our email/text-messaging age. Pedants of the world unite!
Bad news/good newsBook sales in the two biggest English language markets seem to be set on diverging paths. In the US recent Book Industry Study Group figures for 2003 show a decline in general adult books of 2.6%, whilst children’s book sales fell 0.7%. The BISG forecast is that adult book sales will continue to decline, but children’s will show growth, starting with this year. These figures mask other trends. Sales of used books are going up and are difficult to measure, with high impact on specific markets such as students. The number of new books is increasing, even as unit sales decline, making margins tighter and the publishing of individual titles even more difficult. The big books need big promotion budgets to work and consume all the money, making midlist tougher and tougher. Still worse news is that the BISG has reworked previous years’ figures in a shift in methodology, which has meant that the overall market for 2003 was almost 8% smaller than had previously been thought. This reflects the way US publishers feel about their business, which many complain has been tough for nearly three years. By contrast, the British market seems to be doing better. The annual Booksellers’ Conference was notable for few grumbles and a generally optimistic mood caused by an expanding book market. This has partly been due to successful promotions such as the Big Read and Richard and Judy’s Bookclub, which have successfully stimulated book sales through TV programmes. BA President Colin Marshall said: ‘I cannot remember the book enjoying a higher media profile’ and books and authors have definitely been getting a huge number of column inches. Competition between the UK bookshop chains has meant that any reasonable-sized town is now likely to have a good chain bookshop, although the attrition amongst the independents continues. In short, books are fashionable, book-buyers have access to more bookshops and they are benefiting from increasing affluence. It's cheering to report that many readers are responding accordingly by buying more books.
Free Culture is free onlineLawrence Lessig has put his money where his mouth is – and his publisher has helped him do so. Lessig, already well-known in some circles for his book The Future of Ideas, has long argued for the free dissemination of material on the web. His new book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, was published in March by Penguin US but a free online download has been available from the start. Lessig’s editor Scott Moyers suggested creating a free digital version because he felt that ‘by putting the book on the Internet we can get the word out to the first-line people who are going to help us’. Lessig commented that: ‘What so many examples around the world demonstrate is that free content actually helps push commercial content.’ The current number of downloads might be around 200,000, many of them from Amazon, so it’s been an effective exercise and many readers may have subsequently decided to buy the paper version. If the idea spreads, Lessig said: ‘lots more content will be available online to people around the world, even to people who can’t buy it. If we’re right, it also means the sale of more books.’ This idea of the free dissemination of information through the Internet is very attractive, particularly in http://www.free-culture.orgview of the many countries in the world where books are prohibitively expensive in relation to incomes and yet there is huge demand for books. But there is a downside to all this. For Lessig free web distribution of his book makes sense precisely because that’s what his book is about. But other authors may worry about their copyright and how to make money from their writing. For works of reference the outcome is less clear-cut and publishers are still struggling with how to get people to pay for reference material which can be delivered in a more efficient and up-to-date way online. For fiction and other kinds of reading for pleasure the book still looks like a good bet. But for books which are about spreading ideas, the web is just perfect.
Crisis in the librariesThe publication of a damning new report on libraries in the UK has turned the spotlight on to what they are and should be doing. The report, published by the library charity Libri , can be found at www.libri.org.uk. It is by Tim Coates, an ex-MD of Waterstone’s, well-known in the book trade as a forceful character who does not mince his words. The report claims that unless radical reform is undertaken immediately libraries will die on their feet and could have mostly ceased to exist in just fifteen years’ time. Coates says that there are four statistics which show how rapidly the situation is deteriorating:
The report states that what the public wants is longer opening hours and a better range of stock, including the books they actually want to borrow. Spending on books and reading materials should be trebled. £200M a year could be found from big cuts in administration, including overhauling outdated management and stiflingly expensive supply train processes, which make it extremely expensive to add a book to stock. Coates has exposed a depressing reality: the library service, once a model of its kind staffed by dedicated professionals, has lost its way. As readers have become more affluent they have deserted the library shelves and bought the books they want to read, rather than trying, often without much luck, to borrow them. But the libraries have also been focused on developing a wider role as resource centres, and it is the book holdings, the central reason for the libraries' existence, which have suffered. We can only hope that this report will cause sufficient alarm for the problem to be taken seriously and a major reform to be put in hand, before it is too late.
Books as second-hand consumer itemsThe rapid growth of book clubs and successful promotions such as The Big Read and Richard and Judy have stimulated book purchasing and library borrowing. They’ve also given a fresh lease of life to the charities’ bookselling activities, which are now becoming a major source of income. Their staple has been second-hand clothes, but they are increasingly finding that books are even more attractive. Many of their donors have hundreds of books at home which they will never read again. So why not persuade them to give them to charity? Books are a perfect second-hand item. Many readers consume them and then feel that because of space constraints they should get rid of them, but don’t like to throw them away. There has always been a huge number of books being passed on to family and friends, so it hasn’t been hard for charities to persuade people to pass unwanted books on to them instead or once they’ve been passed round the circle. A recent survey by Oxfam showed that 30% of respondents had an average of more than 500 books in their homes, but 35% said that they rarely or never picked up a book for a second time. The charities are becoming more professional in their approach, running the bookshops with knowledgeable staff. Oxfam say that the most popular titles are children’s fiction, SF, fantasy and crime fiction, travel writing and history. Georgia Boon, manager of the Oxfam bookshop in Reading, which sells 1,500 books a week, said that charities were becoming more serious about books. ‘Everyone can remember when you were young and buying one book a week was extravagant but now it can be quite normal to buy two or three books a week because they are so cheap.’ It’s easy to see why this would create stockpiles of (perhaps unread) books at home which could be donated to charity, but perhaps less obvious why people should not just buy new books instead. Perhaps the answer is that second-hand items have become more acceptable. Books are increasingly viewed as consumer items which can be disposed of once read. Paperbacks have long been viewed that way in the States and now, with increasing affluence and cheaper book prices, the same thing is happening in the UK and elsewhere.
Boom in creative writing coursesJust like the States (see News Review 22 July 2002) the UK is going through a huge and sudden growth in courses in creative writing. There’s an unending demand for writing courses. In just twelve years the number of universities offering postgraduate degree courses in creative writing has increased from eight to 85. But the interest in writing goes much further than that. In 2003 an estimated 110,000 people enrolled on some kind of writing course. There are a total of around 11,000 short-term and evening classes relating to the subject, giving a fantastic geographical spread of courses and opportunities to find exactly the right course. Many of them are based at former polytechnics and they see writing as a craft that can be developed through learning and practice. Debbie Taylor of Mslexia magazine has recently conducted a study of creative writing courses. She believes that her own work has been helped by such courses, and that writers really can benefit from studying creative writing. Not everyone would agree, and there is a view that creative writing courses turn out writers who write in much same way, and that they stifle originality. The author William Boyd says; ‘My feeling is that writing can’t be taught, but you can learn about the business. I think it’s more pragmatic than creative. You can learn the tricks of the trade, but I have a feeling that writers are born and not made.’ Perhaps this is true, although many writers would not agree. But when it is so difficult to get published, aspiring writers feel they need all the help they can get. Understanding the business side of writing may well be a constructive approach and many writers enjoy honing their writing skills. It’s just a pity that this is all happening at a time when, in spite of the increasing number of book being published, it’s harder than ever to make sure that yours is one of them.
Unofficial Laureate of the Sleepover GenerationUniquely beloved by teenage girls, Jacqueline Wilson is the extraordinary children’s writer who has recently supplanted Catherine Cookson as the most borrowed author in Britain’s libraries. The author of nearly 70 books, her sales exceed 15 million copies worldwide (not counting the US) and Philippa Dickinson, Publisher of Random House Children’s Books in the UK, says: 'She is unstoppable. We’re projecting 20 million sales for her by the end of 2004.' What is it that powers this dynamo of a writer, who is uniquely loved by the kids she writes for? Probably it’s her very down-to-earth quality. Her books are about real children in everyday situations. Her daughter Emma said of her: ‘I remember, if difficult things happened, she always wanted to see them and respond to them absolutely justly… Realism and justice are very deep within Mum.’ Success hasn’t changed her – she’s stayed in the same house in Kingston-upon-Thames where she has lived for 35 years. |
