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News stories from the book world 2007You can check older stories in our archive. News archive 2007 Archive 06 Archive 05 Archive 04 Archive 03 Archive 02 Archive 01
Clash of the titansWikipedia has been squaring up to Google with its plan to create a major new search engine called Wikiasari. The plan is for it to utilise the large community that has helped to build Wikipedia into the eighth most visited site on the Internet to help determine search engine rankings. An astonishing one thousand servers to host the new search engine were delivered to the Wikimedia Foundation in St Petersburg, Florida, last week. Jimmy Wales, its founder, said: ‘We are close to launching this new project. This will differ from, say, Google, as with them it is hard for a computer to make an editorial decision, and their real procedures are secret. There is no public accountability and a lot of spam with their results. This will be an open source model. It sounds tough, but then nobody would have expected us to create a free encyclopedia and we achieved that.’ Wikipedia, founded in 2001, has more than eight million articles in 253 languages. It has taken the moral high ground, in contrast to Google, refusing to alter its policies to operate in certain countries, which has led to it being blocked in China. Google has been quick to react to Wikipedia’s news, announcing a new knowledge service. Called ‘knol’ this will invite people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it and it will be free to read online. It will have a commercial element though, as knol’s authors will be able to attach advertising to their work and take a share of revenues. Google says: ‘We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.’ As well as being ranked by readers, the content will also be ranked by the Google search engine. The two will differ in that contributors to knol will not be able to edit each other’s work or contribute anonymously, both of which are hallmarks of Wikipedia. In October Wikipedia, which relies on donations for funds, was visited by 107 million people, or a third of the global online population, making it the eighth most-visited site on the web. Google’s search engine was the world’s most popular site, with more than 260 million users. These astonishing figures give the clue to what is at stake here. So it will be interesting to see how this battle of the titans develops. They do represent two very different approaches to the web. But if you think you’d rather go for something more traditionally book-oriented, Encyclopedia Britannica, the much smaller stalwart of the old-style encylopedia business, is now available online. For just 11p a day you can get access to its riches, although it’s a bit hard to work this out from either its UK or its US websites, which are a bit coy about the actual cost of a subscription.
China - a breathtakingly big marketThe recent announcement that Chinese author Jian Rong has won the inaugural $10,000 Man Asian Literary prize for his novel Wolf Totem focuses attention on China. The book has sold more than 2 million copies there and won the largest-ever foreign language advance for a Chinese novel, with Penguin paying $100,000 (£50,000) and planning to publish in the spring. But publishers from across the world were already focusing on the giant book market China represents. The recent Beijing Book Fair saw major international publishers increasing the size of their displays and staff delegations. Lynette Owen, Copyright Director at Pearson Education Ltd, reported in Publishing News: ‘Trading in rights remains the key to this market in terms of both language and price, although over-enthusiastic publishing and strong competition in some areas has led to more caution on the part of Chinese licensees… Interest in Western publications remains wide-ranging.’ Publishers are piling into this potentially huge market. As well as planning to publish Wolf Totem, Penguin has launched a classics series and a bilingual website www.penguin.com.cn, which will have a Chinese language blog. HarperCollins is also very active in the market and has recently signed a major deal to bring the bestselling Naughty Ma Xiatiao children’s series, 12 million copies of which have been sold in China, to the West. At the Beijing Book Fair HarperCollins’ author Neil Gaiman held the Fair’s first-ever author signing, which was a great success. Gaiman was struck by the enthusiasm of the visitors: ‘People don’t have that weird jaded quality that they do in Frankfurt, when everyone has grey faces.’ Publishers are naturally keen to sell their books into the Chinese market and there is a huge interest in books from overseas as the country opens up and the economy develops at breakneck speed. Around 31% of all trade sales in China in 2006 came from titles translated from abroad. Of the 2006 translation licences 37.8% came from the US and 20% from the UK. In 2006 Chinese publishers acquired licences for 10,950 book projects and 540 journals but they sold rights in just 2,050 Chinese publications. The Chinese are naturally keen to redress the balance so that more of their titles go to the West and they are offering translation subsidies to encourage this. One book from abroad looks unstoppable though. Although at the time of the Cultural Revolution Bibles were burnt, demand is now soaring and the 50 millionth Bible has just rolled off the press of China’s only authorised Bible publisher, Amity Printing.
Secrets of the ghostwriting fraternityGhostwriting has been very much in the news recently, with the host of celebrity memoirs fuelled by the public desire to read the inside story of the lives of the rich and famous. In October last year the Bookseller reckoned that five of the ten bestselling hardback non-fiction titles in the UK to 9th September were written by someone other than the named author, and that they had sold 533,485 copies altogether. Ghostwriting is a term penned by Irishman Christy Walsh, who set up the Christy Walsh Syndicate as long ago as 1921 to control the literary output of American sportsmen. Publishers have found it a useful practice as many celebrities, whether from the sports or show business arena, cannot write, but the books need to written in the first person to have the full impact of a personal story. You've probably never heard of the most successful ghostwriters – and you never will. Discretion is everything. The ghostwriter needs to be absolutely trustworthy and has signed up not to go and blab to the papers about the salacious details they couldn’t put in the book. At the top end of the scale Mark McCrum, who ghosted Robbie Williams’ Somebody Someday got £200,000. Ghostwriting the first part of British footballer Wayne Rooney’s autobiography earned British writer Hunter Davis £80,000. Andrew Croft, author of more than 50 books, and most visible of the ghost-writers - if not necessarily the most successful - says: ‘As with every other type of writing, there are books that earn millions in royalties and others that earn nothing. If you ghost enough books, the big earners will compensate for the labours of love and the more speculative ventures.’ Crofts’ view is that: ‘The job of the ghostwriter is to write the book that the author would produce if they had the time, inclination and ability… The publishing industry uses ghosts for projects where there is a marketing advantage to having a ‘named’ author, such as a celebrity book or an autobiography, but a requirement for someone else to do the writing.’ In case ghostwriting is a role you aspire to, it’s worth bearing in mind that there are downsides. Obviously the first of these is that the celebrity in question may be appalling to deal with, or totally boring, or may not remember anything. (There’s a probably apocryphal story in publishing circles that Mick Jagger had to return the huge advance he’d received for his autobiography because he couldn’t remember anything. Pity the poor ghost!) And then there’s the problem of envy. British writer David Baddiel’s advice is: ‘Don’t be a ghostwriter, or even a biographer, unless you are absolutely convinced that the person you are writing about hasn’t lived a life that will make yours look shite by comparision.’
Is the Kindle the future of the book?So have we arrived at what Evan Schnittman, Oxford University Press’s VP of Business Development, called this week in Publishing News ‘the most significant moment in the history of e-books’? He goes on to say ‘the Holy Grail of e-books – Kindle + Amazon = the first consumer e-book success story’. But it is he right? It may still be too soon to tell. The book world anticipated that the Kindle would be delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair (see News Review 22 October). Is the Kindle the future of the book?). Presumably Amazon weren’t quite ready, so here they are launching it with a full fanfare a month later. What it delivers is extremely impressive and even the non technically-minded can immediately appreciate its virtues. The Kindle offers electronic paper display, which gives an experience much closer to that of reading a book than previous e-books have achieved. It weighs 10.3 ounces (292 grams), which Amazon claims is lighter and thinner than an average paperback. Of course you can adjust the type size, making it especially attractive to readers who are having problems with small type. The device holds over 200 books. It has a small KWERTY keyboard which enables you to make annotations and to bookmark your place. The Search function will enable you to find material on the device and it comes with access to the 250,000 word New Oxford Dictionary. But the killer application is that it links to Amazon’s own new Whispernet wireless network and you can download a book direct from Amazon onto the e-book in less than a minute. The Kindle shop currently offers 88,000 books, but Amazon intend to make it many more. For many an attractive feature is that you can download and look at the beginning of any book for free before buying it, just as you would be able to do in a bookshop. You can also sign up for book and magazine subscriptions which will automatically be downloaded to your e-book. This may mean that the trip to the newsagent or waiting for the paper version to be delivered are over. For many web enthusiasts news already arrives online, but now you don’t even have to turn on your computer – although you will of course need to pay for the subscription. Similarly audiobooks can be downloaded direct. The Kindle is currently selling in the US only for $399, and is already sold out and awaiting new deliveries. On the Amazon website opinions are mixed, with 685 customer reviews giving an average of only 2.5 out of a possible 5 stars. David Pogue of the New York Times said: ‘So if the Kindle isn't a home run, it's at least an exciting triple. It gets the important things right: the reading experience, the ruggedness, the super-simple software setup. And that wireless instant download -- wow.’ Our webmaster Chas Jones says: 'Kindle is another step towards making e-books viable. Perhaps the e-format needs to deliver more, such as integrated music and images, to make it worth investing in a reader. You can now download the software required to convert your writing to run on Amazon's Kindle at http://www.mobipocket.com/' Many will say that the printed book is good enough for them and will always be the way they like to read. Nonetheless, the many add-ons Amazon have given their new e-book, together with the immensely easy delivery of books from their Kindle shop, suggest that this may well be a seismic moment of change in the way books are sold and read.
A paperback revolution - at last?Picador, the literary imprint of Pan Macmillan in the UK, has just announced that it will in future launch its new fiction in simultaneous hard and paperback editions, in response to the very poor sales of hardback literary fiction. The majority of its titles will be released in a 1,000 copy hardback edition, with some of these ring-fenced for review purposes. The logic of this move is clear. New hardback fiction can subscribe in less than 200 copies into UK bookshops and the new plan will enable the publisher to get press attention for new books at the time when most people who are interested in the book might go out and buy it in a paperback edition. Picador publisher Andrew Kidd says: ‘We want to help well-reviewed authors get straight to their readers. People who love books as objects are always going to buy them, and will be prepared to spend money doing so. But we are no longer trying to entice people who don’t really want to buy the hardback to do so.’ Many observers might well think it’s about time that the paperback was acknowledged to be the driver of book sales, and that readers should not be denied access to it for an arbitrary period of up to a year. Back in the seventies, when the power of the mass market paperback started to make itself felt, with big auctions for valuable paperback rights, it looked as if the paperback would rapidly become the format of choice for most fiction. Since then publishers have become ‘vertical’, which means that the same publisher publishes both the hardback and the paperback, making coordinated promotion possible. Commercial fiction has enjoyed a surprising resurgence in hardback, partly because of the opportunity to discount from a higher price and partly because of its perceived value as a gift, but literary fiction has in most cases languished unless it is written by top prize-winning names. What is extraordinary about the Picador announcement is that the book trade has greeted it coolly. Retailers predict that the hardback edition will be side-lined and Picador will in effect become a paperback publisher again. Agent Clare Alexander warned that the imprint might be disadvantaged in rights auctions: ‘If Picador is in straight competition with another publisher which has confidence in hardbacks, then the author is going to choose to have a hardback.’ But why are they going to choose a hardback, when most book-buyers will not buy it? Don’t authors want to reach readers and sell their books? Perhaps it’s just another part of the bestseller culture which dictates that only bestselling authors, whether they’re writing commercial or literary fiction, can be published successfully first in hardback. For commercial novels, reviews don’t matter. But for decades literary fiction has been adversely affected by reviewers’ unwillingness to review paperback originals, thus denying a literary novel published in this way the coverage it needs. Reviewers have welcomed Picador’s move, which is good news, but it does of course still give them the hardback editions they crave. In a sane world though you would have to ask why the format of a book is so important to them when what most readers clearly prefer is the cheaper paperback edition.
Writers Guild of America goes on strikeAt midnight on Saturday the Writers Guild of America went on strike, with what look like extremely well-organised plans to picket the studios. 90% of the Guild's 12,000 members had voted to strike in what has been a slow-brewing dispute. The Guild is demanding an increase in the fees writers receive from residuals and new technology - when their work is reproduced on DVDs, and a better share of revenue derived from content on the internet, mobile phones and other electronic devices. Studios and networks have refused to give way. Writers Guild of America West says: ‘With increased viewers and ad dollars on the Internet, we must secure our future. The Internet, cellular phones and other new distribution technology are simply channels for viewing the content we create. Again, our position is simple and fair: when we create valuable content for the Companies, we deserve to be paid… The only substantial economic issue for Internet reuse is the residual payment to directors, actors, and writers… ‘We believe it is long past time for the talent that creates some of the most successful shows on television and some of the most popular and profitable feature films to be recognized and treated fairly. Again, our position is straightforward: when writers create programs of great value for the Companies, whether scripted or unscripted, live-action or animation, they must have the right to be represented by the WGA and covered by our MBA.’ The strike which has just started does represent a considerable risk for the
Writers Guild. Today's studios are better able to withstand a strike than in
1988 because they're owned by media conglomerates with deep pockets.
Murder made publicWhy is there a compulsive need to write about dreadful real-life murders? And why are their perpetrators sometimes so keen to unveil their crimes? In the case of O J Simpson, the infamous American ex-footballer, the reason may be money, even though it is the families of his alleged victims who will benefit. New charges made last week against O J Simpson and three co-defendants in the alleged armed robbery of two sports memorabilia dealers have brought him back into the news. The case suggests that he is short of money. O J Simpson’s book, originally called If I did it (News Review 27 November 2006) was cancelled last year after the announcement of its publication by HarperCollins US led to a wave of revulsion against it in the American book trade and many bookstores refusing to stock it. Embarrassingly and very late in the game, HarperCollins had to pull out and withdraw the book. According to a Newsweek story, all 400,000 printed copies were recalled for destruction, except for one, locked away in a vault at News Corporation (HarperCollins’ parent company). One copy did show up on eBay in January, with a starting bid of $1500 (£731), and sold for over $65,000 (£31,665). The current success in the American charts of Simpson’s reworked book, now called Confessions of a Killer and published by Beaufort, points to an ongoing public obsession with this story. Rod Liddle in the The Times damned it as: ‘A book that is simultaneously morally disgusting and excruciatingly dull. A filthy little project that, although extremely brief (there’s a lot of padding in those 208 pages), succeeds in both boring the reader beyond endurance and making him gag.’ Meanwhile in September in a famous case in Poland the successful writer Krystian Bala was convicted of the grisly murder of his ex-wife’s suspected lover, Dariusz Janiszewski, in 2000 and sentenced to 25 years’ detention. Bala claimed that his book, the bestselling Amok, was fiction, but there were many similarities to the unsolved murder. Police received an anonymous tip-off about the connection and were able to establish that Bala had sold the victim’s phone a few days after his death. It was though the very similar details of the murder which gave the author away. In this case it looks as if Bala could not stop himself from wanting to show the world how clever he had been. Both books have an element of the confessional about them. Perhaps the more interesting question is why the public is so obsessed with these grisly murder stories, and why the ‘true crime’ element adds so much to the public fascination with these famous crimes.
No-show for Amazon's KindleIs this just another false dawn for the e-book? Strong rumours that Amazon were about to launch their new Kindle device at the Frankfurt Book Fair appear to have been just that. But this is not the first time that much-anticipated e-book developments have failed to produce the expected outcome. Last spring Sony launched its e-book Reader in the US at a price of $349 - £170 - (currently $279.99 - £137 - but apparently now out of stock). You also get 100 free Connect eBooks Classics titles as part of the deal. It has enough memory for hundreds of books and consumers can purchase 12,000 titles through Connect. The expected launch in the UK and internationally has not happened yet and now seems to have been postponed until a new version of the Reader is available next year, a sign perhaps that Sony do not yet feel that they have got the device quite right, or that it has not sold as well as expected in the States. The iREx iLiad, created by Dutch company iRex, the development partner of Phillips, was launched in February 2007. Mark Chillingworth, editor of Information World Review, reviewed it in the Bookseller and concluded that it works well as a business tool, since it has portals for USB and Flash memory cards, you can add notes to texts, and connect directly to a printer, and you will soon be able to connect to wireless internet. He concluded that: ‘For book-heavy occupations such as engineering, law, medicine and teaching, the iLiad has an obvious use.’ At £449 ($1,016), it is not currently aimed at the mass market. But it is really the Amazon Kindle that everyone is waiting for and it looks as if this is the device that might propel e-books into a new mass market world, which previous e-book readers have failed to do. Publishers certainly think so, and have been developing their digital warehouses at speed (see News Review 10 September), so as to make sure they have plenty of titles to offer once the Kindle is launched. There’s no doubt of course that Amazon is in a pole position to sell e-books. Sara Lloyd, head of digital publishing at Macmillan UK said back in April: ‘The industry is on the edge of its seat for the announcement because of its huge significance. Amazon saying it is worth investing in a device is a massive step for the e-reader business. It is an enormous global brand and extremely influential.’ The fact that the launch of the Kindle appears to have been delayed may be because Amazon has had technical problems with getting the reader to deliver to its ambitious brief, but it may also relate to hard-nosed commercial decisions. Why launch the Kindle before the company has access to a decent range of e-books available to read on it? But when Amazon’s Kindle is launched we should see the answer to the questions which have been hanging in the air for several years: Will the e-book have a real impact on traditional book sales? Is this the future for books?
Books for childrenTwo big promotions in the UK are doing wonders to promote children’s books and children’s reading. The publicly-funded Bookstart initiative, which supplies a pack of books to children at eight months, 18 to 30 months and three years, has proved a good way of getting children’s books into households which don’t have many of them. Bookstart aims to promote a lifelong love of books and is based on the principle that every child in the UK should enjoy and benefit from books from as early an age as possible. Research shows that children who love books go on to start reading earlier and do better at school, in all areas of the curriculum. The Bookstart idea has been adopted internationally and it is now affiliated to schemes in Europe, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia and Thailand, and has links with other schemes in New Zealand, the USA and Canada. In the UK it is supported by 25 UK children’s publishers and aims to reach 2.1 million children every year. A new development for older children called Booked Up will give a free book to every 11-year-old across the country by the end of the year. What must have made it logistically challenging is that the children were given a choice from a list of twelve titles. There is an interactive website at and the initiative has had a 98% take-up from UK schools. On a more commercial front the Richard and Judy Show, which has done so much to promote books, is now planning Richard and Judy’s Best Kids Books Ever, which will air on 28 October. Their selections have been pretty wide-ranging and tiny Chicken House, which only publishes 22 books a year, was delighted to find that it had three book on the list, as many as Puffin. This list will start with 19 titles and then teams of young people will help Richard and Judy with their selection of the final eight books. All of this shows a welcome emphasis on children’s writing and on getting children interested in books from an early age. Not only will this have a significant effect on their education, but we can all be grateful for the cheering prospect of a new generation of readers on the way.
Frankfurt - the global market place for content?This week the focus of the international book world will be on Frankfurt and its famous book fair, still the largest and most influential one on the planet. Starting on Wednesday 10th October, more than 7,000 exhibitors from over 100 countries will bring their staff to Frankfurt for several days of frenzied meetings and schmoozing. The Fair is important for anyone with any interest in international publishing and a must for the international rights community of rights managers, agents and editors. Sales people are also busy, but editors get less of a look-in these days as large publishing companies have reined in their staff to prevent them spending a fortune on the ‘book of the fair’ – usually something which is acquired for far too much money in an atmosphere of fevered competition. Frankfurt is still a great place to meet contacts from across the world, and generally regarded as the best time to make major announcements about big books and company acquisitions. Perhaps the current credit crisis amongst the world’s banks will act to slow potential acquisitions this year, but there are persistent rumours that Amazon plan to announce their new ‘Kindle’ e-book reader and a major e-book programme. If they do make an announcement we’ll report on that next week. Catalan Culture was chosen as the guest of honour this year, a surprising decision which raised hackles in Spain. There’s an Africa Day on Saturday 13th October, with a focus on the African Renaissance and events about the relationship of African literature to listening and writing. Amongst 2,500 other events there is a big seminar on the topic of the moment, The Quest for Global Digital Sales: New Relationships and New Revenues. LitCam (the Frankfurt Book Fair Literacy Campaign) has a meeting about the campaign to promote better educational opportunities for all. There’s also the Forum for Film and TV and the Comics Centre. Frankfurt isn’t really for writers, even if what happens there is crucial to the book world. The official website has little real information about the fair although this page may yield more of interest once the fair starts. Bloggers will be working from the new Web 2.0 Living Room which doesn’t seem to be in place yet. There’s no doubt that, with all of this and also its involvement in the book fairs in Cape Town Abu Dhabi, the Frankfurt Book Fair is trying to broaden its appeal and secure its position as the global market place for content. Inside Publishing: The Frankfurt Book Fair
Writing rated top jobWhy is it that becoming a writer has such a hold on the public imagination? As this week’s Comment wittily points out, ‘The modern writer's life is like a cross between that of the Venerable Bede and Naomi Campbell.' Partly of course it’s the lure of easy money, possibly easily made. But you only have to look at the statistics of those who sell in vast quantities to realise that it takes most authors a lifetime of writing to get to the top of the tree. John Grisham, for instance, had his first book rejected by almost every major publishing house. When it was eventually taken on by a small independent publisher, it was given a modest print run of 5,000 copies. Nineteen years later, over 200 million people have read his books. The story of J K Rowling’s rags-to-riches rewriting of the ‘unknown author to international bestseller’ story is legendary, so much so that it has sunk into aspiring writers’ consciousness as something to aim for. It isn’t. It’s just a monumental flash in the pan. The career of Ian McEwan is more typical and worth looking at because he is a literary, not a popular or children’s, writer and currently a Man Booker contender with On Chesil Beach. His first book, First Love, Last Rites, was a literary cause celebre, but since then he’s published 12 highly distinctive books. His previous novel, Atonement, (admittedly helped by a superb film) has just sold 53,357 copies, which is the highest September weekly sale of any book in the UK since the current records began. This all shows that it takes time and effort to become a successful writer. But that hasn’t stopped anyone aspiring to it. In a YouGov poll reported in the Guardian more Britons said they dreamt about becoming an author than other job, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event organizer. More women than men would like to write and those aged between 35 and 50, and those over 50, (ie most of the adult population) were the age groups which put writing as their top choice. Now we know why it’s so difficult to get published – there are just so many aspiring writers our there! Many of them will never complete a manuscript, let alone get it into publishable form, but it does show how much the popular view of writers has changed from rather eccentric people cooped up in their garrets, to international superstars. From the Venerable Bede to Naomi Campbell just about sums it up, but there’s still an awful lot more of the reclusive old monk’s lifestyle involved for most writers.
'Storm in an agency teacup'In a week when the Sunday Telegraph has announced with horror that the latest book by topless model Katie Price (aka Jordan) was outselling the entire Booker shortlist (which will not surprise those familiar with the bestseller lists), London literati have been transfixed by an extraordinary saga involving one of the oldest literary agencies in the world. Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, which started life when A D Peters set up as one of the new-fangled literary agents in London’s Adelphi in 1924, has long since become part of big business. It had already merged with scripts agency Fraser & Dunlop when in 1999 the entire agency was bought for £12m ($24.29m) by CSS Stellar, an international sports and entertainment agency. Cynics in the book world have not been altogether surprised by the fact that the expected synergies between the two agencies have failed to materialise. The literary agents at PFD have not been happy with CSS’s management, and in February of this year they proposed that they should buy back the literary agency business in a management buyout. They had the finance to do this in place, but in the meantime there were other interested parties with deeper pockets. Then CSS Stellar itself faced a move on its shares and David Buchler, a specialist in restructuring companies, acquired this shareholding and became chairman. Buchler’s plans did not include allowing the PFD buyout to go ahead, so he brought in Caroline Michel as MD of PFD to rally the troops. For the irate agents this was probably the last straw. The glamorous Michel is a publishing veteran and known for her skills at handling authors, but she had only been an agent for two years, having been brought in by the big New York agency William Morris to head up its London offshoot. By then the agents were getting decidedly restless. Amongst their number are top names such as Pat Kavanagh and Caroline Dawnay and their roll of authors includes Ruth Rendell, Nick Hornby and Julian Barnes, alongside many other successful writers. The upshot is that a number of them have now resigned and they are setting up a new agency. An author’s working relationship is with the individual agent rather than the agency of which they are a part, so there is little doubt that many of the authors represented by the departing agents will go with them. However the contracts negotiated by these agents whilst they were at PFD will stay with the agency, and the revenue generated by their backlist will not flow through the new agency. Authors are not bound to their agents, but their backlists are. This will be a problem both for the new agency and for the authors involved. You may wonder what this storm in an agency teacup has to do with authors. But this story neatly illustrates the way in which agents have in many cases been taken over by big business, setting up a conflict with the personal nature of the author/agent relationship. What is essentially a service provided to authors has become another commodity to be bought and sold. This saga illustrates why this approach does not work, and demonstrates some of the advantages of having an independent agent to handle your work.
Surviving the 'omnivores and the 'killer store'Last week News Review looked at how publishers are reacting to digitalisation. This week will concentrate on how it is affecting bookselling and the outlook for the future. Last year the UK Bookellers’ Association published a report by Martyn Daniels, Brave New World, which was a clarion call to booksellers not to ignore the digital future, but to understand that it is already upon us and they must develop a strategy to deal with it. The report describes search engines such as Google as ‘omnivores’ and Amazon as a ‘killer store’ that has already achieved domination of the global book market. Academic and professional publishers have already migrated online and travel publishers are experimenting with the possibilities. Audio downloads are thought to be reaching a tipping point in terms of volume. But, beyond the growth of Amazon, the real danger for traditional booksellers is that search engines could effectively lock out bookstores by offering publishers paid-for advertising on their search results pages. This would enable publishers to sell direct, as many of them are now gearing up to do. The Internet giants such as Google and Microsoft have even deeper pockets than Amazon and they already dominate the web through their search engines. Fred Newman of Publishing News says: ‘The digital era is here and now, and booksellers who fail to embrace it will find that their role in the high street continues to be eroded.’ Research suggests that heavy book-buyers are not as loyal as booksellers would like to believe and that many use more than one source to purchase their books. A Book Marketing survey, which had 67% heavy book-buyers in its sample, suggested that amongst British book-buyers 93% bought from the chains and three-quarters bought online. Print on demand in bookshops may be an opportunity for them to deliver what customers want in the future, but at the moment it looks far more likely that the bookselling sector could be cut out altogether. But there are bright spots in this rather dismal picture. The bookshop, more than most retailers, is part of the local community and does engender loyalty amongst heavy book-buyers and anyone who likes to browse. Search Inside and other versions of the this facility are highly functional but for many book readers they cannot replace a visit to their favourite bookshop, the opportunity to look at the books, author events in the bookshop and the personal relationship they have with that shop. It looks as if this is what booksellers must build on.
Digitalisation - opportunity or threat?Digitalisation has become such a huge issue in the book world that News Review will be investigating the latest developments over the next two weeks. First, what are publishers doing about it and how will this impact on writers? Over the last year or so the big publishing companies have realised that they need to take digitalisation seriously, or they may wake up to find that bigger players, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, have taken over their territory. But what, you may ask, is digitalisation and how does it impact on writers? Digitalisation essentially makes the book into a digital file, and after that it can be printed using print on demand or, potentially, delivered to readers by a download to an e-reader, a computer or some other device yet to be invented. At the Making the Most of Digitalisation seminar in London last October, Francis Bennett concluded that: ‘Going digital presents publishers with real opportunities for exploiting their texts in a totally new way. But making the most of this opportunity is a daunting process because it calls for the rewriting of so much of what has become established practice in the industry – from the way we think about authorship and the role of the publisher, to redefining the contractual basis of our business, how we sell the content we publish, and how we find new ways to reach our markets.’ Publishers have responded to these threats and opportunities by setting up their own digital stores. HarperCollins internationally was the first in the trade (or consumer) publishing world to do so in August 2006, when it had already scanned 10,000 titles and made them into digital files. Random House UK followed with the announcement of a £5 million investment in October 2006. It has already digitalised all the company’s titles from the past 2 or 3 years and expects to have several thousand books in its digital warehouse by later this year. Other publishers are following suit. Interestingly, Random House has also set up a ‘Search Inside’ function, copying Amazon. This scramble to set up digital warehouses raises the issue of whether this is done though the intermediation of booksellers or direct by publishers, which is the particular issue which is causing anxiety in the publishing world. Francis Bennett again: ‘The problem faced by booksellers and publishers alike is that no one knows where the digitations frontier lies, what ground is secure and what isn’t.’ Peter Bowron, Group MD of Random House UK says: ‘The theory behind what we are doing is that far from not wanting to work with Amazon and Google, we definitely want to work with them. We are not going to stick our head in the sand, but we want to be the people holding and managing the material and the copyright. We will then serve up pages to whoever we have dealings with.’ We are in unknown territory here. It looks as if writers’ interests are best served by publishers continuing to handle their work, as they will produce and market it, protect authors’ copyright and pay royalties. But digitalisation also offers up opportunities for self-publishers, providing that they can work out how to sell their books. We are beginning to see the immensity of the change all this may bring, but there are bigger challenges to come. As Jerry Fishenden of Microsoft says: ‘In just a few years, the digital age has been more disruptive than the industrial revolution, and we are still very much in the nursery stage.’ Next week: How digitalisation is affecting bookselling and distribution.
Better news from BordersThe big falls and continued turbulence in the stock market may well affect the book world in the future, as private equity’s borrowing capacity looks like it will suddenly dry up. Many in the book world would be delighted at this outcome, as the many takeovers in bookselling and publishing have tended to create ever bigger companies and there is ongoing suspicion about the private equity approach to book businesses and its focus on short-term returns. The turbulence hasn’t stopped the last few acquisitions going through. To the surprise of many observers, the UK Competition Commission has provisionally cleared the merger between wholesalers Bertrams and THE. It said that competition from big rival Gardners and direct supply from publishers would act as a sufficient counterweight to the newly merged company. The UK Office of Fair Trading has also cleared Pearson Education’s £471m ($950m) acquisition of Harcourt Education in the UK from Reed Elsevier. It may be that other planned private equity-driven acquisitions have been stopped in their tracks by the drying-up of international credit, but on the bookselling front there seems to be better news. Recent results from Borders US, helped by good superstore sales, show that sales in the second quarter were $169.8m (£84.16m), up by 31.2%. The business made an operating loss of $4.3m (£2.13m), compared to $13m (£6.44m) a year ago. The sale of the UK Borders stores looks like it might be a management buyout, rather than a takeover by W H Smiths. Luke Johnson, the maverick businessman who is chair of Channel 4, may be backing this MBO, which is headed by much-respected Borders UK CEO David Roche. Many observers would like to see the Borders chain continue, as it does offer something different and provides a counterweight to the domination of the UK bookselling sector by Waterstone’s. In spite of the enormous loss posted by Borders international division last year and the decision, because of pressure at the US end of the parent chain, to sell it, Borders UK is widely thought to have had some successes and to offer a different approach to the market. Old Street’s Sales and Marketing Director Ben Illis says: ‘What we want is a high street of the right size and shape, run by people who appreciate and understand it. It’s important to remember that there is a culture of shopping in book chains in the UK – not everyone wants to shop at supermarkets or even at Amazon – and we want a vigorous high street chain business which as publishers, we will support.’ This seems to be an outcome which everyone who is interested in a healthy bookselling sector can support. Across the world book superstores perform an essential function in catering for readers who want a wide range of books to choose from.
Dead authors write onAfter last week’s look at brand name authors whose books are written by others, this week News Review investigates those who continue their writing careers from beyond the grave. V C Andrews’ creepy family novels have come out with great speed, although the lady herself died in 1986. Flowers in the Attic was published in 1976 and became an instant popular success, reaching the top of the bestseller lists in only two weeks. Since 1990 Andrew Neiderman has continued Andrews’ own prolific output with further series of gothic stories. All but eight of her output were penned by Neiderman but the actual writer is not credited. It must feel strange to devote your life to writing books which go out under someone else’s name. Some more literary writers have had posthumous success with books commissioned by their estates – Ernest Hemingway is an example of this. Then there is the entirely above-board practice of commissioning another often well-known writer to carry on the story that has been a bestseller – Geraldine McCaughrean’s Peter Pan in Scarlet and Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett are successful examples of this. And then there is Robert Ludlum, who died six years ago, and who is about to bring out the thirteenth book published since his death. His agent Henry Morrison says that this continuation of his name is what Ludlum wanted. Apparently he said: ‘I don’t want my name to disappear. I’ve spent 30 years writing books and building an audience.’ Fortunately the author met another client of Morrison’s, Eric van Lustbader, at the agent’s Christmas party in 1980, and the two got on like a house on fire. Lustbader says: ‘We talked for hours about characters and story arcs and how to fashion a book in three acts, where one act outdoes the next one. We talked about being the only thriller writers who knew anything about characters and wrote about characters in our books.’ Other people in the industry endorse the view that it’s OK to write from beyond the grave. Morrison, the architect of the latest books, says: ‘I don’t think anyone objects as long as you maintain the quality of the book.’ Sara Nelson, editor-in-chief of Publishers’ Weekly, comments: ‘Publishing does look to the past to see what will work in the future. Series and big-name authors have tended to work well. Publishers, like executives in other creative fields, want Nos. 2, 3 and 4 to work as well as No. 1. And instead of going off to find the new Ludlum, they figure they’ve got this formula and will continue to use it.’ Her conclusion on Ludlum is that: ‘It seems like more of a posthumous factory than anybody I can think of, and more of a well-oiled machine than V.C. Andrews’s.’ But for the rest of us it continues to seem slightly strange that an author’s output can continue from beyond the grave.
The hidden authorsWhen Random House UK announced recently that their newly-acquired mega-selling author James Patterson will nearly double his annual output to eight books a year, you might be forgiven for wondering how on earth he would do it. But ‘James Patterson’ is a brand and the publishers are talking about him ‘extending’ the brand to include romance, teen fiction, non-fiction and even graphic novels to add to his well-known thriller series which have been published by Headline. But surely he can’t actually write eight books in all those different categories in a single year, let alone every year? Well no, but Patterson is a brand who (or which) ‘works with writing partners’. What this appears to mean is that the author comes up with the plot ideas and someone else is employed to write them, so that they can go out under the Patterson name. It’s hard to anticipate but this could misfire on the children’s front, as the Patterson ‘brand’ is not known in this area and both children and the adults who buy for them are conservative where brands are concerned. But perhaps that’s where the power of marketing will take over, as the company is intending to assign a full-time brand manager to work on the books. The children’s area does in fact already have many successful precedents for this kind of approach. In the States there are various companies which produce successful series such as Sweet Valley High, credited to Francine Pascal. The historic precedent for this is the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which was launched in 1910 and went on to create many highly successful and enduring literary brands, including ‘the Bobbsey Twins’, ‘the Hardy Boys’ and ‘Nancy Drew’. The Nancy Drew series alone has sold more than 80 million copies in 25 languages, and the children who have enjoyed these books over the years have no idea - and probably do not care - that they were not written by the author to whom they are attributed. The UK company Working Partners, which is just about to open up an American office, is also in effect a series-producing factory, and a very successful one at that. Their Rainbow Magic books for 5 to 7 year-old girls have sold ten million copies, but the author Daisy Meadows is actually three people. Other series include Animal Ark, the Lady Grace Mysteries and Warriors. All Working Partners' ideas come from editors rather than writers and are developed in meetings. MD Chris Snowdon says: ‘We tell new writers our rules and that they shouldn’t deviate from the story. If they have their own ideas, that’s fine, but they should tell us. Our integrity as a business is the ownership of the idea.’ Not surprisingly, the books that result are not great literature, but nor are they intended to be. Snowden says: ‘I don’t know what great literature is… in this country there’s a great snobbery about books, but we’re creating a reading habit.’ As any parent of book-shy children will tell you, it’s pretty hard to argue with that.
The battle of the classicsWhat price the classics? The battle of the classics has commenced! Random House and Penguin are going head-to-head this month with their classics relaunches, with little to distinguish between them in price and everything down to presentation. Perhaps you’ve packed a classic or two to read at the beach? Do you find that when you get there it seems to take an awfully long time to get through it, and you’d really rather be reading something a bit shorter? If so, Orion’s new abridged classics might be for you. Working on the assumption that many people who would like to have read the classics have been put off by their length and their own lack of time, Orion have started publishing a new series of Compact Editions, which have been ‘sympathetically edited’ by between 30% and 40% of their length. Malcom Edwards, Orion Group Publisher says: ‘Literally, life is too short. Once you get to a certain place in your life, you realise that there is a finite number of books that you’re going to be able to read.’ The publisher’s research into readers’ views of the classics showed that: ‘The way they viewed the classic novel was as books that had been rammed down their throats at school and when they left, they gave them up, like algebra or chemistry… With novels there’s a reaction that it’s sacrilegious to think of touching them. They’re not religious icons and they’re not museum pieces, but they’re in danger of becoming museum pieces.’ Only time will tell whether the market Orion have identified exists, but in the meantime the main battle is joined elsewhere, in the lucrative classics market. It’s lucrative of course because there are no tiresome authors who need to receive royalties, although sometimes there may be a translator. Headline have fired a broadside across the bows with their Jane Austen reissues, which present the novels as lightweight fun for a younger generation, but it’s not yet clear whether book buyers have risen to the bait. It all comes down to presentation. Rachel Cugnoni, Publishing Director of Vintage at Random House UK, says: ‘These are great books that have stood the test of time, and I think they should be packaged as such… People who don’t generally read books are not going to be persuaded to buy Jane Austen because you put a chick lit cover on it. I think that’s unrealistic, and it’s short term. This is a long-term venture for us.’
Piatkus sold to Little BrownThis week’s surprise announcement of the sale of Piatkus Books to Little Brown is saddening for those who value the diversity in the publishing world contributed by independent publishers. Piatkus, which had successfully increased its profitable turnover to £10 million ($20 million) was set up 28 years ago by its eponymous founder, Judy Piatkus, as a library publisher. It has grown steadily, building up highly successful mind body and spirit and personal development lists before such things were fashionable, and also a profitable business list, alongside a strong fiction list. In recent years the Portrait list has added a wider range of non-fiction, such as history and memoirs and (as the website says, rather endearingly) ‘other subjects that appeal to us’. As well as big-name fiction writers such as Norah Roberts, Piatkus has carved a successful mainstream niche for itself with initiatives such as their paranormal romances. Throughout, the Piatkus approach has been cautious but realistic, checking out markets before venturing into them, as a publisher which does not have the big financial resources of the corporates has to do. Deputy Managing Director Philip Cotterell has guided the publisher’s sales growth through the choppy waters of bookselling. Little Brown is now part of Hachette Livre UK, the biggest UK publisher, and this acquisition puts them safely out of reach of the next biggest, Random House UK, which had been shortening Hachette’s lead. This may seem a very trivial consideration to those outside the publishing world but big publishers are obsessed with market share. In fact market share ought to be of concern to everyone. Before this purchase was announced Hachette, having acquired Hodder Headline then Time-Warner Publishing (now Little Brown) in quick succession, had achieved 15.3% market share in the first half of this year. Random House had 14.7%, Penguin 10.5% and HarperCollins 8.3%, meaning that the top four publishers had nearly 50% of the UK market. The importance of strong independents as part of the mix is evident. It’s good at least to be able to report that Piatkus will move over in its entirety into Little Brown, with minimum loss of jobs and none of the list-cutting which often accompanies takeovers of this kind. It will be a good fit from the publishing point of view since Piatkus’ areas of strength are not duplicated within Little Brown, although they certainly are in other parts of the Hachette group, within Hodder, Headline, Orion and Octopus. Since the new dynamic of corporate publishing growth is to have a wide range of lists, which may even compete, this may not be bad news for Piatkus’s authors and staff, nor even for writers as a whole. And Judy Piatkus, retiring after 28 years of extremely hard work, has said that she may train as a reiki healer - an apt new direction for someone who has published so many successful books in this genre.
Biggest one-day sale in history is loss-leaderNews Review does not usually deal with the same subject in successive weeks, but we have just witnessed the biggest one-day sale of any book in history with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and it is worth reflecting on how this blockbusting saga affects the book world. As the doors were thrown open at midnight on Friday in 10,000 shops across the planet, we were witnessing a global phenomenon. The queue in Waterstone’s in London’s Piccadilly was 7,000 strong. In the US 12 million copies were ordered in advance. The five films to date have already grossed $3.5 billion (£1.7 billion) and the books are translated into 65 languages. Of the 325 million Harry Potter books sold worldwide only 21 million have been sold in the UK. It’s a global audience and a huge number of these avid readers are in the US. The reason for these stupendous figures is not hard to find. As 55 year old speed-reader Anne Jones (who read the 608 pages in just over 47 minutes) said: ‘The book was great, fantastic. It was an easy read because it’s a real page-turner.’ Robert McCrum, the Literary Editor of the Observer, concurred: ‘Rowling does that unbeatable thing: she makes it work. How exactly she does it remains the mystery, but it’s to do with a primitive grasp of basic storytelling.’ Last week saw an international row about some US media reviewing the book and spoiling all the fun. Breaking the embargo, pirated extracts were available on the web. All of this highlights the way in which the global mania for J K Rowling’s work has seized hold. Author Celia Brayfield put her finger on it in The Times: ‘In the lifespan of the series the publishing business has become a small adjunct to the global entertainment industry, a tiny fragment in the worldwide economy of screen, media and information… The role of a publisher has been reduced to sieving the primordial soup of writing for some viable blob of artistic matter that these risk-averse wealth creators can culture into a planet-buster.’ The Harry Potter saga shows that the book world has changed for good, and not in ways that make sense in relation to the simple equation of writer, book and reader. Harry Potter rowIn an interesting sideline to the main Potter furore, British supermarket chain Asda last week accused Bloomsbury of holding children to ransom over the price of the final Harry Potter book (which is £17.99 ($36.99) for 604 pages in hardback – not an unreasonable price in relation to other books). Bloomsbury decided to play hardball. It threatened a writ for defamation and also said it would not supply the supermarket because of an unpaid bill. Faced with the disaster of thousands of disappointed children because it had not received its 500,000 copy order, Asda was forced to cave in and apologise. It subsequently put the book on sale for £5 ($10.28), with a limit on two copies per purchaser. Morrisons trumped this with £4.99 ($10.26) but a limitation on one copy. These prices are much less than independent bookshops have to pay to stock the book and make it a huge loss-leader. As Will Hutton said in the Observer: ‘British competition rules permit supermarkets to wreck the book distribution networks so important to publishing.’ The irony, as pointed out last week, is that, in the UK at least, the book with the biggest one-day sale in history is not making any money for many of those who are selling it.
Is this the last Harry Potter?Pottermania is about to reach what may well be its peak, with the imminent publication of the last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the just-released film of the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. J K Rowling is a phenomenon, the richest and best-known writer on the planet. Her books have already sold over 325 million copies worldwide and have been translated across the globe. She is reckoned to be worth between £600 and £700 million. Her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, has sold 107 million copies to date and is ninth in the list of the bestselling books of all time. The author has long said that the seventh book will be the last, and hinted at two deaths to come. Could she be intending to kill off Harry Potter himself? For her millions of fans the thought is almost too much to bear - they are already upset enough about the idea of there being no more books. There is even a campaign, rapidly gaining ground, to persuade Rowling to write more books in the series. The author shows no sign of succumbing to public demand, except to say that she will produce a Potter encyclopedia which will contain all the material which has not gone into the books. J K Rowling’s effect on children’s publishing is notable. She has made it into a commercial arena, a place where big bucks can be made and where the author brand is everything. It’s no longer a quiet backwater of publishing, where well-intentioned editors calmly go about the task of editing children’s books. It’s become monetised like the rest of publishing and its values are the same commercial ones. Harry Potter’s UK publisher, Bloomsbury, is widely credited with having survived because of J K Rowling’s amazing success. Last year brought no new book and the firm’s profits crashed by nearly 75%. In the States Scholastic have found the Potter magic nearly as important. But have the books really encouraged many more children to discover for themselves the pleasure of reading a good story? Well, the jury’s out as far as the experts are concerned, but many non-professionals - parents and the like - would agree that Potter has shown thousands of children the magic there can be in a book. Finally, what about booksellers? Here, at least in the UK, it’s a pretty dismal story, with the supermarkets pricing the book aggressively in an attempt to gain market share and independent booksellers fated to lose money on it. It’s ironic that the book which is the biggest seller on the planet should be treated as just another loss leader.
Fopp collapses - is this meltdown?The British book trade is close to meltdown at the moment, due to circumstances which affect mature bookselling markets across the globe. Last week’s collapse of the Fopp chain has cut off access to the younger, 'cool' market which the chain had cultivated through its brilliant marketing of culty backlist, alongside its core offering of music. The chain’s woes were partly due to difficulties in the music business but it had also grown too fast, from 16 stores at the end of 2003 to 81 by the time it went into administration. Fopp’s purchase of 67 Music Zone stores in February was the death-knell. It inherited Music Zone’s poor credit record and proved incapable of refinancing itself in spite of the fact that most of the original Fopp stores were doing well. Emma Barnes of Snowbooks said ‘They had a great identity. They were interested in edgy contemporary fiction and sold it beautifully.’ British bookshops are being squeezed by the supermarkets on one side and Amazon on the other. Supermarkets offer convenience and low prices, the Internet offers low prices and a huge range. Where does this leave traditional booksellers? The biggest book chain, Waterstone’s, has just turned in rather dismal results, which show that like-for-like sales declined by 4.1% for the year to 28 April. Their acquisition of Ottakar’s last year has been handled well, but it does make the chain very big and it seems to be heading towards the giant W H Smith’s mid-market territory. Waterstone’s is also in the midst of executing a plan to consolidate book orders through their own warehouse. It may save costs but publishers worry that it will also be more risky in terms of getting books to the shops on time. Borders, in a surprise decision taken by the US head office relating to troubles with the American stores, put the UK and Irish shops on the market in April. There might be a management buyout, but the outcome is still uncertain. On the independent front, the decline in numbers is inexorable, from 1,562 independents in the UK in 2005, to 1,483 in 2006 and 1,422 now. It looks as though those that survive might be doing better though, as sales through independents have grown by 2% in volume and 10% in value over that period. The 10% is particularly striking, as it suggests that independents are successfully selling books at a better margin, ie less discounted, than before. But the British book trade is tricky place at the moment and that is making publishers even more cautious. It feeds back into their acquisition policy, making it even harder for new authors to find a publisher who is willing to take a punt on a new author, unless they look like an obvious bestseller.
Has Rushdie's knighthood sparked off a new terrorist campaign?In the UK it’s been a week when major news stories crowded each other off the front pages. Pictures of appalling floods jostled with the coverage of the new prime minister and the fresh faces in his cabinet for space in the media, only to be replaced this weekend by grim news of terrorist attacks. In the midst of it all there is one surprising story from the book world, which may be interacting with the other stories in ways we can only guess at right now. To the astonishment of many observers, Salman Rushdie was given a knighthood, in a move that must have been one of the last acts of Tony Blair’s government. There’s no doubt though that giving him this honour has caused fury across many parts of the Islamic world, with riots and threats in Pakistan and Iran showing that this is seen as a direct insult to Islam. Gerald Butt, editor of the Middle East Economic Survey, said: ‘It will be interpreted as an action calculated to goad Muslims at a time when the atmosphere is already very tense and Britain’s standing in the region is very low because of its involvement in Iraq and its lack of action in tackling the Palestine issue.’ In Tehran Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said at Friday prayers: ‘They [Britain] have honoured him only because he insulted the Prophet. In such a situation, honouring him means confronting 1.5 billion Muslims around the world.’ The connection with events in London and Glasgow may be closer still. A posting on a jihadist internet forum on Thursday night said: ‘Today I say: "Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed."’ Aidan Liddle, a spokesman for the British High Commission in Islamabad said: ‘Sir Salman's honour is richly deserved and the reasons for it are self-explanatory.’ Rushdie’s own response was: ‘I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way.’ But was this honour really a recognition of his work? It doesn’t look as if the outgoing Blair government paying its dues to literature has much to do with it. Clearly the long years in hiding must have taken their toll on Rushdie, and nobody would wish a fatwa on anyone. But many resent that it has cost the British taxpayer £10 million (over $20 million) to protect the author. Those working at Penguin UK, or even visiting it at the time when the threat of the fatwa was at its height, will not forget the way an ordinary publishing office came under siege. Many deaths in riots, and threats to the lives of translators and publishers, have also been the outcome of the fatwa and protecting Rushdie’s right to free expression. Have those involved in the latest terrorist threats in the UK also been inflamed by news of Rushdie’s knighthood? These are much more dangerous times. How can anyone not have realised that it would cause grave offense in the Muslim world and re-ignite the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses? This weekend it looks as if literature and the international terrorist threat are interacting in new and alarming ways.
POD means in print foreverA row has erupted about publishers’ attempts to rewrite author contracts to allow for changes in technology which make it possible to keep books perpetually ‘in print’. Big US publishers Simon & Schuster have been trying to insist that authors and agents sign contracts that assign all rights, in perpetuity, to the publisher, and had refused to negotiate alternative terms. The Authors’ Guild of America took a firm stand on the issue and they have been backed by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of American, which said: ‘This decision by Simon & Schuster constitutes a massive rights grab and is an attempt to take advantage of authors. The members of SFWA, Inc. stand with the Authors Guild in this matter… we urge Simon & Schuster to rescind this pernicious policy.’ The latest news is that S&S appear willing to negotiate a ‘revenue-based threshold’, ie an annual figure which would have to be reached if a book was to be considered to be in print. Agents in the UK and the UK Society of Authors are pushing for a threshold based on the rate of sale, which would fit more easily with existing contracts. In many ways it is surprising that this has not happened before. Print on demand technology makes it possible to keep a book in print indefinitely, printing one copy at a time when it is ordered. But traditional author contracts include a reversion clause. This gives the author the right to get the rights in their book back if the publisher allows it to go out of print and does not reprint it within a set time (generally six or nine months). This clause has given an author valuable protection against a situation where their book is out of print, and thus not available in the shops for anyone to buy or order. The author cannot earn any royalties from it. Efficient agents (and authors) have in the past made sure that publishers were kept up to the mark on this, so that reversion would be requested unless a reprint was put in hand. The problem in practical terms has always been that the author then has to find another publisher, which has become increasingly difficult as backlists are pruned. Publishers will not take on a book originally published by someone else unless the author has a lot of clout or selling power. Authors have therefore sometimes left their rights with a publisher in the often vain hope that at some point the book might be reprinted. But the very print on demand opportunity which is giving new life to publishers’ backlists is also offering authors the chance to republish their own work and make sure that it is kept in print. Authors have not moved on to considering this possibility in large numbers yet, but this is only the beginning of what could become a major trend. Print on demand (from Inside Publishing series) The advantages of print on demand WritersPrintShop self-publishing service
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