Say what? Well, Lulu.com is a site for self-publishers, and, in its own estimation, is currently the world's biggest print-on-demand service for books. And CC is shorthand for Creative Commons, which is an outfit doing some of the most clear-headed and valuable thinking about copyright issues. (This blog, for instance, is published under a CC licence, and if you scroll down until you reach the bottom of the right-hand column, and then click on the link which says Creative Commons licence, you can read all about it.)
CC has a blog, and the blog currently offers an interview with Stephen Fraser of Lulu. It provides a handy overview of what Lulu offers, and I for one learnt a few things from it.
First, it seems that you can create something via Lulu, such as an ebook, and publish it free. Now that I find interesting.
Why? Well, because oddly enough I've come to the conclusion that for some of my stuff it's almost a waste of time going to all the trouble (and expense) of preparing a print version, when the profit is negligible. Far easier, much quicker, and more effective, I've decided, is to give it away in ebook form.
Last year I published On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile as a freebie, and have no regrets. The object really is to find readers, and I'm likely to find more readers with free stuff than with something that costs £10. So that's one new thing I've learnt about Lulu. I don't suppose that using Lulu as a distributor is going to create vast interest, even with free stuff, and probably there are other web sites which offer a similar facility, but it's something to bear in mind.
Another useful development is that, as from this month, anything ordered from Lulu from an address in Europe will actually be printed and shipped from Europe.
By the way, Lulu can also be used to publish music, video, images, and software.
I have noticed that there are people who are deeply suspicious of Lulu. Well, by all means read the small print. And remember that they are a profit-making organisation. But it looks like a useful service to me.
Friday, May 19, 2006
Thursday, May 18, 2006
The Alternative Miss World
On Monday of this week we noted that the New York Times had run a piece about the best American novel of the last 25 years. We further noted that some bloggers were not too impressed by this exercise.
One who was less impressed than most was Beth Quittman, who writes Book of the Day. She decided to run an alternative Miss World competition. She wrote to a number of bloggers, the GOB included, and invited a different set of nominations, the results of which are beginning to come in.
When I received Bett's invitation to nominate, I scratched my head and wrote back as follows:
One who was less impressed than most was Beth Quittman, who writes Book of the Day. She decided to run an alternative Miss World competition. She wrote to a number of bloggers, the GOB included, and invited a different set of nominations, the results of which are beginning to come in.
When I received Bett's invitation to nominate, I scratched my head and wrote back as follows:
Within the last 25 years, can't think of anything much. Older than that:
Kurt Vonnegut -- The Sirens of Titan
Richard Condon -- The Manchurian Candidate
I might have added, if I'd thought a little longer:
John Rechy: City of Night
William Styron: Lie Down in Darknessor even
J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye (though I don't like it's self-pitying tone)
But they're all older than 25 too.
Well, this wasn't good enough for our Bett. 'C'mon,' she said, 'rack your brains.' So I did, and wrote back as follows:
OK, fair enough, I have done some work on this. I have looked on my bookshelves, to see what I've read and thought sufficiently highly of to want to keep. And, among recent American fiction, I can't find anything much. I have also looked at various online lists of 'contemporary classics' and again drawn a blank. I have found nothing that I actually want to vote for as 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years'.
Now this is strange, because when I first began serious reading (in the 1950s) I was strongly attracted to American fiction and read a great deal of it. But in recent times, apart from thrillers, science fiction, and the like, I have found very little work by American novelists that I actually want to read. There is also a great deal that I would willingly pay good money to avoid reading, such as anything that wins the present-day Pulitzer or any other prestigious literary prize.
What this means is that one of two things has happened. Either my intelligence, taste, and general sensibility have markedly declined over the years, or else American fiction has changed in its nature.
Naturally, I do not incline to the first explanation, and consider the second more likely.
What has happened in American fiction over the last fifty years (and exactly the same has occurred in British fiction, I hasten to add) is that the writers and publishers of fiction have split into two well-defined camps. One the one hand there is commercial fiction, which ordinary people read but which is not taken seriously by the mainstream media, let alone the intelligentsia; and on the other hand we have 'serious', or literary fiction, the writers and publishers of which have systematically decided to alienate the average reader. And they have succeeded beyond their most lavish expectations. No literary book today can hold its head up in polite society if it is read and genuinely enjoyed on any scale. Because then it becomes 'popular', lower class, disgusting, distasteful, and generally unclean. And Puritans don't like anything unclean.
The causes of this situation are many and various, but they all have to do with the growth of the formal study of English literature in schools and universities. The situation arises because a considerable number of persons of very ordinary intellect have set themselves up as judges of what is or is not a good book -- largely in order to give themselves nice comfortable jobs instead of working for a living -- and these self-appointed experts have been taken at their own evaluation by whole generations of parents and students, some of whom really ought to know better.
Result: nonsense. On the one hand, we have books which are virtually unreadable being given major honours, and, on the other hand, we have commercial fiction, which is often manufactured to fit a template and looks very much like it. In between, if you search long and hard, are the kind of books which used to be given the recognition which is due to story-telling of a high standard. Sometimes these books, if an author writes enough of them, achieve significant sales and some grudging respect: an English example is Terry Pratchett; but often they don't.
So, what can we take from all this?
I am still disinclined to name one particular novel as meeting your criterion -- the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years. Why? Because I would only feel comfortable in making such a nomination if I had willingly read the book two or three times. And although I much admire some recent thrillers, for example, I do not feel the urge to pick them up again.
The best I can do is point you in the direction of one writer who has already produced a solid corpus of work: Neal Stephenson.
Neal has been written about here more than once. He seems to me to embody some old-fashioned virtues. He is, first and foremost, a teller of tales. He is wonderfully well informed on matters scientific -- and I find it hard to imagine that a modern writer can manage without that background, because our society is now so heavily dependent upon science and technology. And he has a good feeling for character.
What Neal perhaps does not have, as yet, is the ability to generate really powerful emotion in the reader -- emotion of the kind which will stay in your memory and will cause you, over a period of time, to read the book again. But, dammit, who today does have that power? It's a rare accomplishment.
The whys and wherefores of blogging
Publishers Lunch informed me that the Arts Journal was acting as host to a blog 'in which a variety of traditional and nontraditional arts critics are debating the role and influence of critics in the web-driven world of infinite voices, ratings and tags.' This as a prelude to the Book Expo America (BEA), which is the US equivalent (roughly) of the Frankfurt or London book fairs and which runs, with some overlap, from 19-21 May.
One post on the Arts Journal blog which caught my eye deals with the question of why people bother to create blogs anyway. And it asks a question which, for many bloggers, is a key one: how can you make any money out of the damn thing?
Well, admittedly it's very difficult, and I for one have never made a penny out of mine -- not directly, anyway, and I can't say that I've noticed a dramatic effect on the sales of my various books. However, in my case, I am not too fussed about the money because I am retired.
So, if I'm not doing it for the money, why am I doing it? And I don't mind admitting that it's only recently that I figured it out. The answer is, it's a continuation of a lifetime preoccupation, namely education. And it combines very neatly with another lifetime occupation, namely writing.
Almost my entire working life was spent in education, either as a teacher or an administrator. So I was, in various capacities, an educator. I was also, at one point, an educationist, in the sense that I made a formal study of education, including a PhD. And I even wrote a book about education.
As far I'm concerned, therefore, the blog is just a natural extension of all that. It's an attempt to pass on knowledge of various sorts: knowledge about how to do things, and how not to do things. What to expect, particularly if you're a writer, and what not to expect. Information about books which are worth reading (imho) and also those which are not worth reading.
Of course you'd probably prefer not to know that I am interested in education, since most people have an aversion to being educated, in the formal sense. But we try, my sources and I, to make it as painless as possible.
One post on the Arts Journal blog which caught my eye deals with the question of why people bother to create blogs anyway. And it asks a question which, for many bloggers, is a key one: how can you make any money out of the damn thing?
Well, admittedly it's very difficult, and I for one have never made a penny out of mine -- not directly, anyway, and I can't say that I've noticed a dramatic effect on the sales of my various books. However, in my case, I am not too fussed about the money because I am retired.
So, if I'm not doing it for the money, why am I doing it? And I don't mind admitting that it's only recently that I figured it out. The answer is, it's a continuation of a lifetime preoccupation, namely education. And it combines very neatly with another lifetime occupation, namely writing.
Almost my entire working life was spent in education, either as a teacher or an administrator. So I was, in various capacities, an educator. I was also, at one point, an educationist, in the sense that I made a formal study of education, including a PhD. And I even wrote a book about education.
As far I'm concerned, therefore, the blog is just a natural extension of all that. It's an attempt to pass on knowledge of various sorts: knowledge about how to do things, and how not to do things. What to expect, particularly if you're a writer, and what not to expect. Information about books which are worth reading (imho) and also those which are not worth reading.
Of course you'd probably prefer not to know that I am interested in education, since most people have an aversion to being educated, in the formal sense. But we try, my sources and I, to make it as painless as possible.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Midweek roundup
And still they come
Last week, in connection with books about codes in works of art, I mentioned that the public seems very happy to go on buying and reading books about subjects and themes which, to you and me, may seem to have been thoroughly worked out and worked over. Here are a couple more examples.
Publishers Lunch reports that Mitch Silver's debut thriller Provenance has been sold to Trish Todd at Touchstone Fireside, in a major deal, by Larry Kirshbaum at LJK Literary Management. The plot features a nonfiction manuscript by Ian Fleming which provides evidence that the Duke of Windsor was in a treasonous plot with Hitler.
Well, ahem, plenty of people have dealt with this before. In fiction there's my own novel Beautiful Lady. Jack Higgins did Thunder Point. And in nonfiction it's a fairly well known story: try King Pawn or Black Knight? by Gwynne Thomas (Mainstream, 1995).
And then there's the continued use of a fairly well known type of character, such as the Cockney charlady, the dumb blonde, or the streetwise private eye. The likeable conman is, in my view, a difficult character to portray, but that doesn't stop people doing it. Coming soon after Locke Lamora is Joseph Pittman's London Frog. (World English rights just sold to Tekno -- report also from Publishers Lunch.)
Tekno-Books, by the way, turns out to be a really interesting outfit. Here's a profile of the CEO, Martin Greenberg. As with 17th Street, this is not an operation which could run in quite the same way in the UK, because (in my view) the market is not big enough.
Mitzi again
If you aren't able to go to erotic writer Mitzi Szereto's week-long course on writing erotic fiction, on the Greek island of Skiathos, in September, a similar course (weekend only) is being offered in the Isle of Wight, UK, 25-27 June. Details on The Grange web site.
Tips from Paul Dorrell
Paul Dorrell, whose Living the Artist's Life was mentioned here a while back, has begun posting Friday Tips for Artists on his blog. And, since Paul is also a novelist, some of what he has to say is also relevant to writers.
Take, for instance, his piece about 'The guilt of selling your work'. It seems that art students are frequently taught (and, being nice girls and boys, tend to believe) that it is dirty, disgusting, and demeaning to even think about selling their paintings and sculptures. Selling things is commerce, and they are artists. Not surprisingly, these crackpot ideas get people into emotional and financial difficulties.
Paul says, and I believe him, that 'dealers like me encounter those artists on a regular basis--especially after they've reached their 30s or 40s, are broke, emotionally exhausted, and feeling like a failure on all fronts--even if their work is great. That is indeed tragic.'
The situation is often the same with writers. Virtually all writers tend to be madly ambitious for fame and fortune, but have absorbed the view -- usually after three or four years of studying Eng Lit at a prestigious university -- that the only worthwhile fiction is literary fiction of the most highbrow variety, and that writing anything which might acutally entertain the woman on the Clapham omnibus is dirty, disgusting, demeaning, and all like that. That b'ain'tn't true. And you shouldn't believe it.
Write a page for charity
I wasn't going to bother reading this story, but I'm glad I did.
The Guardian has an article (link from booktrade.info) about a man who's inviting people -- via ebay -- to buy the right to write a page in a novel. Seventeen pages have been written so far, and there are to be 250 all told. Details on Novel Twists.
Well, it all sounds very silly, until you find out that Phil McArthur, the man behind it, dreamed up the idea while having chemo treatment for cancer, and that the money generated from the page auctions goes to Macmillan Cancer Support. Macmillan, for the sake of non-UK readers, is a charity which has a high reputation for looking after terminal cancer sufferers.
Contributors are allowed to publish a little note about themselves at the foot of the page. Who knows, Jonny Geller might see what you've writ and sign you up! And Random House might give you a six-figure contract! And all like that.
Keeping up to date in crime
I used to make a determined effort to keep abreast of developments in the crime-fiction field, because most of my books have fitted into that genre somewhere, loosely speaking. But then in 1990 I attended the Bouchercon conference in London and realised that, despite my best efforts, there were scores, if not hundreds, of practising crime writers who were completely unknown to me. So after that I stopped trying too hard, and just read whatever I came across, or heard about, which looked as if it might be interesting.
I mention this because if you want to keep up with what's new in crime fiction, and hear from a few experts in the field, Galleycat has a useful essay for you, complete with links to other stuff.
Final word on the London Book Fair
Galleycat also has sensible things to say about the London Book Fair fiasco, mentioned here on Monday.
A short history of the short story
Oh my God. I don't think I'm strong enough, but I owe it to you to try.
Bookslut had a link to a short history of the short story, written by William Boyd, and foolishly I clicked on it. It turns out that Boyd's article is in Prospect, and Boyd is a judge of the so-called (UK) National Short Story Prize, about which I was less than thrilled when it was first announced.
Boyd's history is yet another version of the 'official' history of the short story, and doesn't seem to me to offer anything very new. There is a good deal about Chekhov, for instance. But he does tell us that many of the stories that he has been reading, in connection with the great Prize, are in Chekhovian mode; which is no surprise at all, given the nature of the thing.
If you have any strength left -- or indeed any will to remain living -- after wading through Boyd, you might like to compare and contrast what he has to say with what I had to say in March 2005, both about the 'official history' of the short story, and the unofficial or true history of same.
Meanwhile, just after I wrote the above, it was announced that the winner of the National Short Story Prize is James Lasdun, for An Anxious Man. The Guardian has the story (link from booktrade.info). According to the judges, the story has 'visceral resonance'. Which sounds painful.
The winning story is not available online, but it will be published in the June issue of Prospect, available in shops from 24 May. Queues will doubtless form.
Let's hear it for David Mitchell's publicist
I have the very definite feeling that I would not be entertained by reading David Mitchell's new novel Black Swan Green. I know nothing about the novel, or him either, but I just get the feeling that I wouldn't be interested. The whole enterprise smells lit'ry to me, and, as is well known, I am an ignorant philistine, ill equipped to wrestle with the finer works of our time.
One thing I do know, however, is that David Mitchell's publicist has done one hell of a job for him. You can hardly open a newspaper or turn a page without seeing another review, or an interview, or a profile, or whatever. And if my eyes glaze over, and I hastily move on to the cricket scores, or to check what time New Tricks is on, that's not the publicist's fault.
Samples: Telegraph; Newsday; Guardian; Bookpage; Bookseller; and, doubtless, a whole lot more.
Don't blame me department
I'm gonna stand well back from this one. I just report the facts, OK? (Link from Publishers Lunch.)
Over at Slate, Tyler Cowen has a provocative piece on independent bookshops. What are independent bookshops good for? he asks. And answers: Not much.
Look, I didn't say that, OK? A big boy did it and ran away.
Tyler Cowen, by the way, is a professor of economics at George Mason University, and is the author of Good and Plenty: the creative successes of American arts funding. And if he's writing about the benefits of funding the arts at the taxpayers' expense it's presumably a very short book.
Kids don't know they're born
Went round my local W H Smith yesterday afternoon, and it wasn't as painful an experience as I had thought it might be. And the one thing that occurred to me is that kids today are very well served with books. In fact, some of the kids' books on display looked a great deal more interesting than the stuff in the adult section. (Jokes about my second childhood by snailmail only, please.)
Take Angie Sage, for instance. She seems to have written, or done illustrations for, every publisher in town. Google her, and you get author pages for her from Bloomsbury, Penguin, Hodder Headline, and HarperCollins. At least.
The books of Angie's which caught my eye, however, were the Septimus Heap novels. These have their own fancy web site, complete with ducks that seem to go miaow. The first Heap book, Magyck, looked as if it might be pretty good too.
Then there's Louise Rennison, who has written a series of novels under the overall title The Confessions of Georgia Nicolson. These have different titles in the US, but the one I looked at was called Then he ate my boy entrancers.
Hmm. Think about that. Boy entrancers. And then he -- whoever he is --ate them. No, no, couldn't possibly be. Not in a respectable shop like W H Smith. Well, fairly respectable. Anyway, I reckon kids have a pretty good time figuring out what's going on here. The cover, by the way, promises that you will laugh your knickers off.
Louise lives in Brighton, which she says is the British San Francisco. Which made me think, for a minute or two, that she must be blind, but then I realised that she is also a stand-up comedian, with a one-woman show.
Louise's heroine, Georgia, also has her own web site.
The Stage
The other thing I noticed in W H Smith is that The Stage has had a make-over. Sometime since last summer, which is the last time I looked at it.
The Stage, for those who have never had the pleasure, is a sort of UK version Variety, only vastly inferior in every way and much more limited in its scope. Some 25 or more years ago, there were rumours that David Frost was going to buy it, and even then it was described in the press as a 'clapped out show-business weekly'.
Anyway, there it still is. New tabloid-style shape, slightly snazzier layouts, but still pretty dull. I bought a copy for old times's sake and sighed over les neiges d'antan. There are many pages of advertising, which must be the main source of revenue by the look of it, and many of the adverts are for 'drama schools' and the like.
The Stage has an online presence, which has also been spruced up considerably since I last looked at it. And it seems to include most of the paper content, which is very user-friendly of it. But that suggests that the paper version is bought mainly for the ads -- wannabes in desperate search of work.
Susan Swan on Casanova
Last September, Susan Swan's novel What Casanova Told Me was favourably reviewed here, and since then she's posted an essay about the great man on her web site. For all his vices, Casanova is certainly a figure who has captured the public attention for well over two hundred years.
Last week, in connection with books about codes in works of art, I mentioned that the public seems very happy to go on buying and reading books about subjects and themes which, to you and me, may seem to have been thoroughly worked out and worked over. Here are a couple more examples.
Publishers Lunch reports that Mitch Silver's debut thriller Provenance has been sold to Trish Todd at Touchstone Fireside, in a major deal, by Larry Kirshbaum at LJK Literary Management. The plot features a nonfiction manuscript by Ian Fleming which provides evidence that the Duke of Windsor was in a treasonous plot with Hitler.
Well, ahem, plenty of people have dealt with this before. In fiction there's my own novel Beautiful Lady. Jack Higgins did Thunder Point. And in nonfiction it's a fairly well known story: try King Pawn or Black Knight? by Gwynne Thomas (Mainstream, 1995).
And then there's the continued use of a fairly well known type of character, such as the Cockney charlady, the dumb blonde, or the streetwise private eye. The likeable conman is, in my view, a difficult character to portray, but that doesn't stop people doing it. Coming soon after Locke Lamora is Joseph Pittman's London Frog. (World English rights just sold to Tekno -- report also from Publishers Lunch.)
Tekno-Books, by the way, turns out to be a really interesting outfit. Here's a profile of the CEO, Martin Greenberg. As with 17th Street, this is not an operation which could run in quite the same way in the UK, because (in my view) the market is not big enough.
Mitzi again
If you aren't able to go to erotic writer Mitzi Szereto's week-long course on writing erotic fiction, on the Greek island of Skiathos, in September, a similar course (weekend only) is being offered in the Isle of Wight, UK, 25-27 June. Details on The Grange web site.
Tips from Paul Dorrell
Paul Dorrell, whose Living the Artist's Life was mentioned here a while back, has begun posting Friday Tips for Artists on his blog. And, since Paul is also a novelist, some of what he has to say is also relevant to writers.
Take, for instance, his piece about 'The guilt of selling your work'. It seems that art students are frequently taught (and, being nice girls and boys, tend to believe) that it is dirty, disgusting, and demeaning to even think about selling their paintings and sculptures. Selling things is commerce, and they are artists. Not surprisingly, these crackpot ideas get people into emotional and financial difficulties.
Paul says, and I believe him, that 'dealers like me encounter those artists on a regular basis--especially after they've reached their 30s or 40s, are broke, emotionally exhausted, and feeling like a failure on all fronts--even if their work is great. That is indeed tragic.'
The situation is often the same with writers. Virtually all writers tend to be madly ambitious for fame and fortune, but have absorbed the view -- usually after three or four years of studying Eng Lit at a prestigious university -- that the only worthwhile fiction is literary fiction of the most highbrow variety, and that writing anything which might acutally entertain the woman on the Clapham omnibus is dirty, disgusting, demeaning, and all like that. That b'ain'tn't true. And you shouldn't believe it.
Write a page for charity
I wasn't going to bother reading this story, but I'm glad I did.
The Guardian has an article (link from booktrade.info) about a man who's inviting people -- via ebay -- to buy the right to write a page in a novel. Seventeen pages have been written so far, and there are to be 250 all told. Details on Novel Twists.
Well, it all sounds very silly, until you find out that Phil McArthur, the man behind it, dreamed up the idea while having chemo treatment for cancer, and that the money generated from the page auctions goes to Macmillan Cancer Support. Macmillan, for the sake of non-UK readers, is a charity which has a high reputation for looking after terminal cancer sufferers.
Contributors are allowed to publish a little note about themselves at the foot of the page. Who knows, Jonny Geller might see what you've writ and sign you up! And Random House might give you a six-figure contract! And all like that.
Keeping up to date in crime
I used to make a determined effort to keep abreast of developments in the crime-fiction field, because most of my books have fitted into that genre somewhere, loosely speaking. But then in 1990 I attended the Bouchercon conference in London and realised that, despite my best efforts, there were scores, if not hundreds, of practising crime writers who were completely unknown to me. So after that I stopped trying too hard, and just read whatever I came across, or heard about, which looked as if it might be interesting.
I mention this because if you want to keep up with what's new in crime fiction, and hear from a few experts in the field, Galleycat has a useful essay for you, complete with links to other stuff.
Final word on the London Book Fair
Galleycat also has sensible things to say about the London Book Fair fiasco, mentioned here on Monday.
In an age when Publishers Marketplace posts deals all year round, when blogs demystify the publishing industry and report news as it happens, and the Internet opens things up that much further - and when rights conferences such as BEA just lead everybody into a never ending bitch-and-moanfest - why is this all necessary? Granted, impressing upon the industry just how insanely big it is and how much more difficult it is to do business is an important lesson to learn every year, but is it all more trouble than it's worth?Probably. I haven't been to the LBF for about four years, and I don't feel that I've missed much, except the chance to say hello to a few people.
A short history of the short story
Oh my God. I don't think I'm strong enough, but I owe it to you to try.
Bookslut had a link to a short history of the short story, written by William Boyd, and foolishly I clicked on it. It turns out that Boyd's article is in Prospect, and Boyd is a judge of the so-called (UK) National Short Story Prize, about which I was less than thrilled when it was first announced.
Boyd's history is yet another version of the 'official' history of the short story, and doesn't seem to me to offer anything very new. There is a good deal about Chekhov, for instance. But he does tell us that many of the stories that he has been reading, in connection with the great Prize, are in Chekhovian mode; which is no surprise at all, given the nature of the thing.
If you have any strength left -- or indeed any will to remain living -- after wading through Boyd, you might like to compare and contrast what he has to say with what I had to say in March 2005, both about the 'official history' of the short story, and the unofficial or true history of same.
Meanwhile, just after I wrote the above, it was announced that the winner of the National Short Story Prize is James Lasdun, for An Anxious Man. The Guardian has the story (link from booktrade.info). According to the judges, the story has 'visceral resonance'. Which sounds painful.
The winning story is not available online, but it will be published in the June issue of Prospect, available in shops from 24 May. Queues will doubtless form.
Let's hear it for David Mitchell's publicist
I have the very definite feeling that I would not be entertained by reading David Mitchell's new novel Black Swan Green. I know nothing about the novel, or him either, but I just get the feeling that I wouldn't be interested. The whole enterprise smells lit'ry to me, and, as is well known, I am an ignorant philistine, ill equipped to wrestle with the finer works of our time.
One thing I do know, however, is that David Mitchell's publicist has done one hell of a job for him. You can hardly open a newspaper or turn a page without seeing another review, or an interview, or a profile, or whatever. And if my eyes glaze over, and I hastily move on to the cricket scores, or to check what time New Tricks is on, that's not the publicist's fault.
Samples: Telegraph; Newsday; Guardian; Bookpage; Bookseller; and, doubtless, a whole lot more.
Don't blame me department
I'm gonna stand well back from this one. I just report the facts, OK? (Link from Publishers Lunch.)
Over at Slate, Tyler Cowen has a provocative piece on independent bookshops. What are independent bookshops good for? he asks. And answers: Not much.
Look, I didn't say that, OK? A big boy did it and ran away.
Tyler Cowen, by the way, is a professor of economics at George Mason University, and is the author of Good and Plenty: the creative successes of American arts funding. And if he's writing about the benefits of funding the arts at the taxpayers' expense it's presumably a very short book.
Kids don't know they're born
Went round my local W H Smith yesterday afternoon, and it wasn't as painful an experience as I had thought it might be. And the one thing that occurred to me is that kids today are very well served with books. In fact, some of the kids' books on display looked a great deal more interesting than the stuff in the adult section. (Jokes about my second childhood by snailmail only, please.)
Take Angie Sage, for instance. She seems to have written, or done illustrations for, every publisher in town. Google her, and you get author pages for her from Bloomsbury, Penguin, Hodder Headline, and HarperCollins. At least.
The books of Angie's which caught my eye, however, were the Septimus Heap novels. These have their own fancy web site, complete with ducks that seem to go miaow. The first Heap book, Magyck, looked as if it might be pretty good too.
Then there's Louise Rennison, who has written a series of novels under the overall title The Confessions of Georgia Nicolson. These have different titles in the US, but the one I looked at was called Then he ate my boy entrancers.
Hmm. Think about that. Boy entrancers. And then he -- whoever he is --ate them. No, no, couldn't possibly be. Not in a respectable shop like W H Smith. Well, fairly respectable. Anyway, I reckon kids have a pretty good time figuring out what's going on here. The cover, by the way, promises that you will laugh your knickers off.
Louise lives in Brighton, which she says is the British San Francisco. Which made me think, for a minute or two, that she must be blind, but then I realised that she is also a stand-up comedian, with a one-woman show.
Louise's heroine, Georgia, also has her own web site.
The Stage
The other thing I noticed in W H Smith is that The Stage has had a make-over. Sometime since last summer, which is the last time I looked at it.
The Stage, for those who have never had the pleasure, is a sort of UK version Variety, only vastly inferior in every way and much more limited in its scope. Some 25 or more years ago, there were rumours that David Frost was going to buy it, and even then it was described in the press as a 'clapped out show-business weekly'.
Anyway, there it still is. New tabloid-style shape, slightly snazzier layouts, but still pretty dull. I bought a copy for old times's sake and sighed over les neiges d'antan. There are many pages of advertising, which must be the main source of revenue by the look of it, and many of the adverts are for 'drama schools' and the like.
The Stage has an online presence, which has also been spruced up considerably since I last looked at it. And it seems to include most of the paper content, which is very user-friendly of it. But that suggests that the paper version is bought mainly for the ads -- wannabes in desperate search of work.
Susan Swan on Casanova
Last September, Susan Swan's novel What Casanova Told Me was favourably reviewed here, and since then she's posted an essay about the great man on her web site. For all his vices, Casanova is certainly a figure who has captured the public attention for well over two hundred years.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Muriel Spark: The Finishing School
Dame Muriel Spark, who died recently after a fifty-year career as a novelist, published her last book in 2004, when she was in her late eighties. Its title was The Finishing School.
Like much of Spark's work, The Finishing School is short: 155 pages (themselves short), and by my calculation the book is well under 40,000 words. This I regard, by the way, as a virtue; I have argued in the past that most novels are too long.
The Finishing School describes a small, exclusive school for the teenaged children of very wealthy parents. It is run by Rowland, a man not yet thirty. Rowland has literary ambitions, and is writing a novel. Or trying to; it is not going at all well. Chris, a seventeen-year-old pupil at the school, is also writing a novel. His is going extremely well, and publishers are showing a marked interest in the output of one so young, so good-looking, and so talented.
The bulk of the novel describes how Rowland becomes increasingly jealous of Chris, to the point where it is feared that he may even be violent towards him. Chris, for his part, seems to feed off his teacher's jealousy.
And, er, that's about it, really. I'm not going to tell you how the story ends, but the ending contrives to be both funny and sad, which is a pretty neat trick, and it constitutes a fitting conclusion to a long and distinguished career. Along the way, The Finishing School may well provide some harmless amusement for anyone who has ever written a novel (or tried to), and anyone who reads novels on a regular basis. The comments and asides about writers, publishers, and 'literary experts' will doubtless ring a few bells and raise a few smiles.
There are only two other things to be said.
The first is relatively trivial.
The punctuation of this novel is decidedly odd, in places, as is the use of viewpoint, and it seems to me that one of two things probably occurred. Dame Muriel may, perhaps, have become a little careless as she grew older, and she may have lost the edge of her concentration, and possibly eyesight.
There is another possibility, however, which is that Dame Muriel realised that she was dealing with some pretty thin material, and decided that she needed to find some way to keep readers awake; so she threw in some punctuational and technical oddities to that end.
A similar thing happens, you may have noticed, in drama. Or perhaps you haven't noticed, unless you write scripts. But what often happens is that a writer writes a line which has a natural inflection to it. As in: Character A: Mary was late for school today. Character B: After what she drank last night, she would be!
You and I, speaking Character B's line, would say: She WOULD be. But not today's actors. Oh no. Today the actor would say (as I heard one do last night): She would BE.
God knows why they do this, but it happens all the time. Perhaps the actors and the directors of today have so little faith in writers that they feel obliged to hold the audience's attention with these weird inflections. But the next time you watch a TV drama, just count the number of instances. It's so commonplace that it's as if some rule book somewhere says that it's compulsory.
And perhaps, as I say, Dame Muriel adopted a similar device in her last novel. Putting commas where you least expect them; changing from one character's viewpoint to another, in the middle of a paragraph. She had certainly been around long enough, and had written enough novels, to be well aware of what she was up to.
The other point which has to be made is a rather sad one. But this blog is, after all, dedicated to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about books and publishing, however painful that truth may sometimes be.
And the plain fact of the matter is this: If this book had not had the name of Dame Muriel Spark attached to it, it would never have seen the light of day outside of Lulu.com.
Suppose this book had been submitted to an agent or publisher by Freda Farnsbarns, an unpublished writer from Huddersfield -- what would have been the response? Well, for one thing it would have been regarded as too short, too slight, and, if anyone ever read more than four or five pages, slightly amateurish.
Dame Muriel has her own peculiar style in this book, as mentioned above, and it is easy to mistake it for a lack of technique and a failure to appreciate the finer points of viewpoint; not to mention punctuation.
So. With Dame Muriel on the cover of the book, it gets lots of plaudits. With Freda Farnsbarns on the front page of the typescript, no sale.
Now that isn't fair, is it? Of course it's not. But then, if anyone ever told you that life is fair, you were being grievously misled.
Like much of Spark's work, The Finishing School is short: 155 pages (themselves short), and by my calculation the book is well under 40,000 words. This I regard, by the way, as a virtue; I have argued in the past that most novels are too long.
The Finishing School describes a small, exclusive school for the teenaged children of very wealthy parents. It is run by Rowland, a man not yet thirty. Rowland has literary ambitions, and is writing a novel. Or trying to; it is not going at all well. Chris, a seventeen-year-old pupil at the school, is also writing a novel. His is going extremely well, and publishers are showing a marked interest in the output of one so young, so good-looking, and so talented.
The bulk of the novel describes how Rowland becomes increasingly jealous of Chris, to the point where it is feared that he may even be violent towards him. Chris, for his part, seems to feed off his teacher's jealousy.
And, er, that's about it, really. I'm not going to tell you how the story ends, but the ending contrives to be both funny and sad, which is a pretty neat trick, and it constitutes a fitting conclusion to a long and distinguished career. Along the way, The Finishing School may well provide some harmless amusement for anyone who has ever written a novel (or tried to), and anyone who reads novels on a regular basis. The comments and asides about writers, publishers, and 'literary experts' will doubtless ring a few bells and raise a few smiles.
There are only two other things to be said.
The first is relatively trivial.
The punctuation of this novel is decidedly odd, in places, as is the use of viewpoint, and it seems to me that one of two things probably occurred. Dame Muriel may, perhaps, have become a little careless as she grew older, and she may have lost the edge of her concentration, and possibly eyesight.
There is another possibility, however, which is that Dame Muriel realised that she was dealing with some pretty thin material, and decided that she needed to find some way to keep readers awake; so she threw in some punctuational and technical oddities to that end.
A similar thing happens, you may have noticed, in drama. Or perhaps you haven't noticed, unless you write scripts. But what often happens is that a writer writes a line which has a natural inflection to it. As in: Character A: Mary was late for school today. Character B: After what she drank last night, she would be!
You and I, speaking Character B's line, would say: She WOULD be. But not today's actors. Oh no. Today the actor would say (as I heard one do last night): She would BE.
God knows why they do this, but it happens all the time. Perhaps the actors and the directors of today have so little faith in writers that they feel obliged to hold the audience's attention with these weird inflections. But the next time you watch a TV drama, just count the number of instances. It's so commonplace that it's as if some rule book somewhere says that it's compulsory.
And perhaps, as I say, Dame Muriel adopted a similar device in her last novel. Putting commas where you least expect them; changing from one character's viewpoint to another, in the middle of a paragraph. She had certainly been around long enough, and had written enough novels, to be well aware of what she was up to.
The other point which has to be made is a rather sad one. But this blog is, after all, dedicated to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about books and publishing, however painful that truth may sometimes be.
And the plain fact of the matter is this: If this book had not had the name of Dame Muriel Spark attached to it, it would never have seen the light of day outside of Lulu.com.
Suppose this book had been submitted to an agent or publisher by Freda Farnsbarns, an unpublished writer from Huddersfield -- what would have been the response? Well, for one thing it would have been regarded as too short, too slight, and, if anyone ever read more than four or five pages, slightly amateurish.
Dame Muriel has her own peculiar style in this book, as mentioned above, and it is easy to mistake it for a lack of technique and a failure to appreciate the finer points of viewpoint; not to mention punctuation.
So. With Dame Muriel on the cover of the book, it gets lots of plaudits. With Freda Farnsbarns on the front page of the typescript, no sale.
Now that isn't fair, is it? Of course it's not. But then, if anyone ever told you that life is fair, you were being grievously misled.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Something from the weekend
Is it my imagination, or are there more rows and ding-dongs going on than usual? Anyway, here are a few (usually bad-tempered) exchanges which have been going on in the last day or two.
London's next book fair
OK. So there's been a London book fair for a good few years, for agents and publishers to go sell a few rights, get drunk, and screw each other's socks off, as per usual. Last year it was moved, and people wanted it put back where it was before. Reed, the firm that moved it, said get used to it. Then the organisers of the Frankfurt book fair said that they would run a book fair in London that would be cheaper, more central, lots more parties, free cocaine, nice clean girls from the very best local brothels, and so forth. So then Reed said they would go back to the old place anyway. And the Frankfurt guys, who thought they had a deal with the Earl's Court/Olympia exhibition hall that Reed have now said they are going to be using again, are pissed.
Says Publishers Lunch:
London's next book fair
OK. So there's been a London book fair for a good few years, for agents and publishers to go sell a few rights, get drunk, and screw each other's socks off, as per usual. Last year it was moved, and people wanted it put back where it was before. Reed, the firm that moved it, said get used to it. Then the organisers of the Frankfurt book fair said that they would run a book fair in London that would be cheaper, more central, lots more parties, free cocaine, nice clean girls from the very best local brothels, and so forth. So then Reed said they would go back to the old place anyway. And the Frankfurt guys, who thought they had a deal with the Earl's Court/Olympia exhibition hall that Reed have now said they are going to be using again, are pissed.
Says Publishers Lunch:
Just days after Reed Exhibitions UK chief Alastair Gornall explained why Earl's Court was a bad venue for a book fair and urged the trade to trot out to Excel one more time, the organizers of the London Book Fair have done a complete turnaround--and apparently have screwed the folks at theFrankfurt Book Fair who inspired the change in the first place.And so it goes. Details, if you really must have them:
- Managing information (link from booktrade.info)
- London Book Fair announcement
- Publishing News
- Book Standard
Oh, and there'll be a whole lot more.
The ?best! novels of the last 25 years???
I really am going to have to give up reading all this shit, I really am. Anyway, it seems that the New York Times have consulted the good and the great, who have decided that the best American novel of the last 25 years is Toni Morrison's Beloved.
I really cannot be bothered with this. Especially when I find that one of the top dozen or so is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Anyone who thinks that Toole's book is one of the 'best' books of any period longer than three days, in a bad week, is just plain certifiable, and no two ways about it.
Jessa Crispin on Bookslut wasn't too impressed by the NYT; neither was M.A. Orthofer on the Literary Saloon. Or Galleycat. Well, as far as a newspaper is concerned, it all helps to fills up the white space between the adverts, doesn't it?
Mention of Toni Morrison reminds me of an incident which happened a good few years ago. And for which I accept no responsibility whatever. I simply relate the facts.
There I was, sitting in the senior common room, minding my own business and contemplating the state of nature, with the aid of a cup of coffee, when up hove a friend, with a gleeful expression on his face.
'Tell me,' he said, 'why did Toni Morrison win the Nobel prize for literature?' And he said it in the tone of voice that one uses to ask 'Why did the chicken cross the road?'
'I don't know,' I said, moving into straight-man mode. 'Why did Toni Morrison win the Nobel prize for literature?'
'Because she's black, female, and unreadable! An unbeatable combination!' And off my friend went, chortling happily to himself.
The whole NYT farrago of nonsense reminds me of a book which I wasn't even going to mention: The Test of Time -- subtitled What makes a Classic a Classic? and published by Waterstone's (with the aid of the Arts Council if you please, i.e. taxpayers' money) as a device to shift a few books.
Edited by Andrew Holgate and Honor Wilson-Fletcher, this book also sought the opinions of the good and great, who were asked various questions, such as What is your definition of a classic novel? They were also asked to nominate ten essential classic novels for the next 100 years, whatever that means, and to nominate up to ten books which they believed should never have been called classics.
Published in 1999, you may find a secondhand copy of this paperback in some charity shop or other (as I did), but I really wouldn't advise you to go looking for it. Not unless you wish to have the digestion of your dinner disturbed and your blood pressure raised. It's all waffle and piffle.
Steve Clackson takes flak
Steve Clackson, as mentioned here last week, posted some chapters from his novel Sand Storm on his blog, and found that they were not universally admired. Go to the May archives of the blog and scroll down and you will find masses and masses of comments.
There are even comments on the comments on other blogs. See Edward Champion, for instance.
Well, if nothing else, this procedure has certainly got Steve's book noticed. And now he has posted a few more chapters.
Google trends
OK, this one isn't controversial. Or bad tempered. Yet.
Google has developed a facility called Google Trends. (Link from Publishers Lunch.) You type in various terms and it draws you pictures, from which, according to the caveat at the bottom, you should be wary of drawing any conclusions.
Well, I tried a few multiple terms, as per the example, and couldn't get a lot of sense out of it. If you use single terms, such as books, you don't get much either. Except that in the case of books, the top city listed is Chennai, India. Which is what you would expect, really. (The world is flat, remember.)
Times books
Some weeks, I can go through the Books section of the Saturday Times in about three minutes flat, but last Saturday, for a change, there were some interesting things in it.
Jeanette Winterson, for instance, has a weekly column called Her Word, which must be a nice little earner. Pays a lot better per word than writing novels, I'll bet, though Jeanette is a considerable earner there too. Anyway, this week she's on about damp squids, and giving up the goat, and so forth. She wants other examples, but I'm not clever enough to think of any.
Then there's a review of Jilly Cooper's new book, which I don't want to read, thank you, though they're amiable enough. Jilly is a huge seller in the UK but doesn't do much, so far as I know, in the US. Anyway, somehow or other I got the impression that the new one was shorter than some of the others. So I checked the figures. It turns out to be 864 pages! Wicked, as I believe the young people say.
And finally, a well deserved success. About a year ago I reviewed, with some enthusiasm, Marina Lewycka's novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. At that point, the novel was not very well known. True, it had been shortlisted for the Orange prize, but I doubt whether that shifted many copies; and it had been the clear winner of the Wodehouse prize, for comic fiction, although I did not personally find it all that amusing; it has its dark side. And then later on, Tractors was longlisted for the Booker.
However... in what I take to be a clear result of word of mouth recommendation, rather than a consequence of any of the above, the paperback version of Marina's book has been a very substantial seller. The Times's top 50 bestsellers list shows it at number 8, with 16,536 sold last week alone, and it's been selling at that rate for a couple of months. Couldn't happen to a nicer lady, and it's all well deserved.
Elsewhere in the Times Books bit, there's an interview with Elmore Leonard, and if you haven't read one before he's worth a look.
And finally, the Hot Type column reports that two self-publishers are doing well, partly, it claims, because Waterstone's supported them; which suggests that the source of the info was a Waterstone's press release.
Jack Linley, writing as Jack Sheffield, has got a two-book deal with Transworld on the strength of his semi-autobiographical novel Teacher, Teacher! (Looks as if it might be fun.) And Imran Ahmad's Unimagined, which is an account of growing up Muslim, has been bought by Aurum Press.
So much for Saturday's paper. The Sunday Times has an interview with Gail Rebuck, who is described as 'the most powerful woman in British publishing'.
Business as usual
Just in case you found that story (above) about Jack Sheffield and Imran Ahmad sort of heart-warming and encouraging, here's one which will prove that nothing much has changed. Joel Rickett, in the Guardian, reports that Chantelle has got £350,000 out of Random House (boss lady Gail Rebuck, see above) for her 'life story'. She's 22.
Joel describes Chantelle as a "fake" celebrity, but that really won't do at all. True, she wasn't a celeb when she appeared in Big Brother, but she is now all right. However, he may have a better point when he quotes one of Chantelle's fans: 'I fink she shud def rite an ortobiogafy but i dont fink i wud reed it cuz i aint red a buk in me lyf! LOL reedin iz 4 geekz n sad ppl.
Which says it all, really. Have a nice day, geekz n sad ppl.
Friday, May 12, 2006
How stories change over time
Interesting, isn't it, how stories change over time. They get repeated in bars and cafes, and sometimes they appear in print, and sometimes people don't always remember the details precisely, and sometimes people embroider the story somewhat, to give it a better punch line.
If you've reached any age you will have heard stories in different versions. For example, only the other day I read a story in a Times obituary, a story which I first heard well over 40 years ago, attributed to someone else entirely. Briefly, the story is that a Cambridge academic attends a wedding and gives a speech. 'I am quite sure,' he says, 'that the bride and groom will be very happy together. I can say this with absolute confidence, because I've slept with both of them.'
This all comes to mind because today's Times has a short snippet in the People column about Elmore Leonard, who picked up the Cartier Diamond award. Elmore is quoted as follows: 'I got $90 for the film rights of 3:10 to Yuma . . . now they want to remake it with Tom Cruise, who wants to rewrite most of it. He’ll play the short bank robber.'
I wanted to refer to this quote under the general heading 'The riches that await us', or some such, but at first I couldn't find it in the Times online (though I now have). So I went a-googling, and came up with a slightly different story.
In 1993 Elmore was interviewed by Adam Sweeting for the Guardian. And there he says the following: 'I was 25... I sold everything I wrote. I didn't sell well - I got $90 for 3.10 To Yuma. I only got $5,000 for the movie, with Glenn Ford, but in the fifties that was OK.'
So, either Elmore changed the story for effect, or the Times reporter didn't quite get it down right, or whatever. Either way, there's a difference between $90 and $5000.
If you've reached any age you will have heard stories in different versions. For example, only the other day I read a story in a Times obituary, a story which I first heard well over 40 years ago, attributed to someone else entirely. Briefly, the story is that a Cambridge academic attends a wedding and gives a speech. 'I am quite sure,' he says, 'that the bride and groom will be very happy together. I can say this with absolute confidence, because I've slept with both of them.'
This all comes to mind because today's Times has a short snippet in the People column about Elmore Leonard, who picked up the Cartier Diamond award. Elmore is quoted as follows: 'I got $90 for the film rights of 3:10 to Yuma . . . now they want to remake it with Tom Cruise, who wants to rewrite most of it. He’ll play the short bank robber.'
I wanted to refer to this quote under the general heading 'The riches that await us', or some such, but at first I couldn't find it in the Times online (though I now have). So I went a-googling, and came up with a slightly different story.
In 1993 Elmore was interviewed by Adam Sweeting for the Guardian. And there he says the following: 'I was 25... I sold everything I wrote. I didn't sell well - I got $90 for 3.10 To Yuma. I only got $5,000 for the movie, with Glenn Ford, but in the fifties that was OK.'
So, either Elmore changed the story for effect, or the Times reporter didn't quite get it down right, or whatever. Either way, there's a difference between $90 and $5000.
Hmmm -- and hmmm again
Blogger Buzz, which describes itself as the official buzz from Blogger (which is the outfit that hosts this blog and probably 25 million others) has a piece about WanderingScribe.
WanderingScribe is a blog written by a woman who has been homeless in London for five months. She has a car, and has access to libraries where she can get online and write about herself, but that's about it.
If you want an introductory article which gives the background to this story, there is one on the BBC site, and plenty of comments have been added. The lady herself also offers links to a BBConline interview, a NY Times audio interview, and something with Le Monde.
Now. I have not ventured very far into WanderingScribe. For a variety of reasons. But my initial reaction, I am sorry to say, is one of deep suspicion. Especially when Blogger Buzz gives me the following quotation from the lady's recent posts:
Yes, I know. I am a hard, bitter, twisted and cynical old man. But that's what a lifetime in the book world gets you.
WanderingScribe is a blog written by a woman who has been homeless in London for five months. She has a car, and has access to libraries where she can get online and write about herself, but that's about it.
If you want an introductory article which gives the background to this story, there is one on the BBC site, and plenty of comments have been added. The lady herself also offers links to a BBConline interview, a NY Times audio interview, and something with Le Monde.
Now. I have not ventured very far into WanderingScribe. For a variety of reasons. But my initial reaction, I am sorry to say, is one of deep suspicion. Especially when Blogger Buzz gives me the following quotation from the lady's recent posts:
There have been meetings and it looks like there might be a publishing deal. Nothing is settled...and don't know what else to say for now, feel everything, and sometimes nothing, just walking around in a daze...my fingernails bitten down to the quick.Of course, WanderingScribe could easily be a genuine story. And it could just as easily not. And I am not entirely alone, I am relieved to find, in being somewhat sceptical. See the comments on the BBC article.
Yes, I know. I am a hard, bitter, twisted and cynical old man. But that's what a lifetime in the book world gets you.
Cody's closing
Clive Keeble is a bit like an old man whose friends keep dying. Every time a good independent bookshop closes, Clive gives a big sigh, puts on his black suit, and does the honourable thing by making sure that everyone knows.
This time it is at least a long way off. Not that that makes it any better. For 43 years, Cody's Books, in Berkeley, California, has served generations of UC Berkeley students from a position on the south side of campus. But it has been losing money for 15 years, and it can't go on. Details in the San Francisco Chronicle.
For an indication of what this means in human terms, see Anirvan Chatterjee's eulogy in the Bookfinder.com Journal.
I wonder if Cody's had competition from an official university bookshop. I mention that because, some twenty years ago, I visited an enormous university bookshop on the other side of America. In fact it was more like an aircraft hangar.
My first impressions were that this was the worst bookshop I had ever been in. The floor was bare concrete. The books -- which were virtually all textbooks -- were exactly as they were when sent out from the publishers' warehouse: they were packed in brown paper, standing on wooden pallets, line after line of them. The only attempt to display the book took the form of tearing open a package, taking one out, and putting it on the top of the pile.
Hmm, I said, very sniffily. This place could do with a good manager.
A few weeks later I had the opportunity to talk to the manager. And I discovered, of course, that in terms of sales per square foot, this was one of the most efficient bookshops in America. In those days (and, I dare say, now) American university teaching was heavily textbook orientated. Each lecturer would have one or more set books. Each week he would deal with one chapter of that book. And every student was obliged, if she wanted to pass the course, to have a copy of that book.
What this meant was that, at the start of each term, 20,000 students came into the bookshop, each of them needing to buy six, or ten, or whatever copies of a number of set books, none of which were cheap. All the bookshop had to do was make sure that there were sufficient copies of these, and take the money. No need for frills.
With competition like that, the small independents stood no chance.
This time it is at least a long way off. Not that that makes it any better. For 43 years, Cody's Books, in Berkeley, California, has served generations of UC Berkeley students from a position on the south side of campus. But it has been losing money for 15 years, and it can't go on. Details in the San Francisco Chronicle.
For an indication of what this means in human terms, see Anirvan Chatterjee's eulogy in the Bookfinder.com Journal.
I wonder if Cody's had competition from an official university bookshop. I mention that because, some twenty years ago, I visited an enormous university bookshop on the other side of America. In fact it was more like an aircraft hangar.
My first impressions were that this was the worst bookshop I had ever been in. The floor was bare concrete. The books -- which were virtually all textbooks -- were exactly as they were when sent out from the publishers' warehouse: they were packed in brown paper, standing on wooden pallets, line after line of them. The only attempt to display the book took the form of tearing open a package, taking one out, and putting it on the top of the pile.
Hmm, I said, very sniffily. This place could do with a good manager.
A few weeks later I had the opportunity to talk to the manager. And I discovered, of course, that in terms of sales per square foot, this was one of the most efficient bookshops in America. In those days (and, I dare say, now) American university teaching was heavily textbook orientated. Each lecturer would have one or more set books. Each week he would deal with one chapter of that book. And every student was obliged, if she wanted to pass the course, to have a copy of that book.
What this meant was that, at the start of each term, 20,000 students came into the bookshop, each of them needing to buy six, or ten, or whatever copies of a number of set books, none of which were cheap. All the bookshop had to do was make sure that there were sufficient copies of these, and take the money. No need for frills.
With competition like that, the small independents stood no chance.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
The close study of madness
Here in England, the Booksellers Association has been having its annual conference. Publishing News has a number of reports of the proceedings, but the one that caught my eye was an account of the session featuring marketing consultants Alastair Giles and Stephen Butscher. You ought to read the whole thing, but the chief points are as follows:
- Present discounting is a form of madness. The trade lost £26.5 million on the last Harry Potter. (Presumablyy this means 'forfeited £26.5 million by giving large discounts on the official retail price'.)
- If you ignore Harry Potter, sales of hardback fiction are down 25% in the last five years.
- The tradition of pubishing hardback first, and only hardback, is crackers. We do it 'because that's the frame-set we work in, but it must be unprofitable madness.'
- Giles's proposal: do the mass-market paperback version first, alongside a more deluxe paperback version. Then, a few months later, or even simultaneously, offer a hardback collector's edition.
There were other interesting sessions at the conference too. The speech from the BA President, David Roche, is worth reading. And then there's Michelle Harrison, of the Henley Centre marketing consultancy: she sees the electronic book as a serious threat to paperbacks, but is not offering an opinion on the timescale.
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