In many respects we’ve got a real Stockholm Syndrome around the model of publishing as it’s existed up until now. We just take for granted that it is the way it is because that’s a good way for things to be. And when something diverges from it we look for proof as to why it should diverge. But I’m interested in trying to reframe questions. Why do we think that a person won’t buy a print book because in theory they could read it for free online? What is it that people are buying? What is it that people want?

From an interview with Richard Nash,  former head of Soft Skull Press. Read the rest here.

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Richard Nash in Boston Review

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Controlling content order in epubs

Right now we’re in a transitional period where books are simultaneously published in both formats. But, as Eoin Purcell has observed, drawing even a small percentage away from the average book’s print run makes the economics of its publication very difficult.

One solution, which I don’t think Purcell considers, is to price up not the print book but the e-book, to compensate for the skewed economics on the print side. So far, despite some grumbling, there hasn’t been very much sign of price resistance to e-books. Once you own a reader you have a natural motivation for filling it with content (or else your purchase of the reader feels foolish). Of course, if one group of publishers’ prices get out of line with others they will have a problem. Just another area where big corporations have a clear advantage.

In the long run, more books will probably fall into one side or the other — many books will be published in e-format only (not much need for a physical copy of that disposable romance novel). Then there are books like the kind I currently do, art museum catalogues. So far I’m not aware of a satisfactory e-format for such books. This also pertains to my own forthcoming title, 1616, which has a large illustration and layout component. If anyone can tell me how to make this into a good e-book, I’d really like to hear. Really.

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On e-books and print books

My author questionnaire and author photo for 1616: The World in Motion are due this week to Counterpoint Press. My daughter Ellen, who is a brilliant photographer, among other things, took this photo from the roof of her apartment overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland. It was raining lightly at the time, and later that day ice would fall from the sky.

In Tom’s Glossary of Book Publishing Terms the author photo is defined as “Pictorial fiction. Authors always choose photos that emphasize that quality in which they feel most deficient.” So what does this say about me? I dunno — but I will say, as a guy who has been cutting his own hair for years, that I don’t think the hair looks too bad.

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Author photo

This interesting standoff between Rupert Murdock’s big publishing conglomerate and a little public library could be a bellwether for future digital book disputes. The SSC Library is boycotting HarperCollins. It is part of a consortium of 60 Nebraska libraries that purchase e-books for library patrons. Until recently the libraries could allow an unlimited number of patrons to check out these materials (just as they do with printed books). But HC changed the terms of the library purchases, now allowing a maximum of 25 check-outs — less than half of one check-out per library. HC says unlimited check-outs could hurt its e-book business, library director David Mixdorf says the new policy “hits on us pretty hard.” It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

One benefit: patrons may be reading better books during the boycot.

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LINK: KTIV.com

Image via El Bibliomata’s photostream.

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HarperCollins vs the South Sioux City, Nebraska, Public Library

The NBCC has announced their 2010 award finalists. I used to be a member of this group but there are too many older books I need to read to spend all my time trying to keep current with the new ones. So I don’t know much about a lot of these books. If you’ve read some, please share your thoughts.

An unusual feature of the NBCC awards is a category for “criticism.” This probably comes about because of the difficulty of comparing nonfiction titles, since nonfiction is such a huge, unruly category. They also have a “biography” category for the same reason.

Dalkey Archive was given a lifetime achievement award.

I think the biggest surprise on this list probably is the omission of Rebecca Skloot’s  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Or maybe it’s that there are still enough book critics around to form a society. Following is the full list.

Fiction

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
To the End of the Land by David Grossman
Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Nonfiction

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne
Apollo’s Angels by Jennifer Homans
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Autobiography

Half a Life by Darin Strauss
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Crossing Mandelbaum Gate by Kai Bird
The Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
Hiroshima in the AM by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Biography

How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography by Selina Hastings
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History by Yunte Huang
The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends by Tom Segev

Poetry

One With Others by C.D. Wright
Nox by Anne Carson
The Eternal City by Kathleen Graber
Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
The Best of It by Kay Ryan

Criticism

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West by Clare Cavanagh
The Cruel Radience by Susan Linfield
Vanishing Point by Ander Monson

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The 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists

This ad, which to me sounds more like some kind of stunt than a typical scam, has been removed from Craigslist. Certainly it’s not a “new and better way” of getting blurbs. Blurbing is already largely corrupt, and it’s not at all difficult to get jacket blurbs without going to all this trouble.

Book Reviewer: $150 – $1500 (Telecommute)
Prepublication book reviews needed for literary novel.

I am an Author and Professor of English in Austin, Texas. I also own a small publishing company. I am currently seeking prepublication reviews for a novel set for publication at the end of next month (February 2011). If your review is favorable, I would like to include a blurb from it on the back cover of the novel.

I am an advocate of finding new and better ways to accomplish common tasks. The old way of seeking prepublication reviews is to send galley proofs (Advance Reading Copies – ARC) out into the abyss of the mainstream media to compete in the mailboxes of those organizations with the one thousand other books they received that day. To me, that sounds like the definition of insanity.

If you are a book critic, an author, a university professor, a member of the media, a blogger, a review writer, a representative of an independent bookstore, or anyone with high literary credentials, I will pay you between $150 and $1500 for your review. Those with higher credentials will receive a higher stipend.

Of course, your review should be honest. Just because this is a paid review does not mean that you have to review the novel favorably; however, I certainly hope that you like the book. If your review is negative, I will not be using any portion of it on the back cover of my novel, on my website, or anywhere else.

Although I will not reveal the name of the novel or the synopsis in this ad, I will tell you that it is literary fiction in the vein of Lolita, Blood Meridian, and Steppenwolf. The novel challenges organized religion and is left-leaning, but the overall message of the novel is one of peace, tolerance, and unity. The novel has been described as Less Than Zero meets Dead Poet’s Society.

I would expect you to read the novel and write a thoughtful evaluative review that is somewhere between 500 and 1500 words long. The review should not be merely summative. It should evaluate the novel, pointing out its strengths in the areas of style, theme, narrative, characterization, etc. It should also compare the novel and writing to other major writers and novels. Remember, this is a pre-publication review, so I am looking for blurbs to include on the back cover of the novel accompanied by your name and organization. Keep in mind that you must be authorized to use your organization’s name. I will also use your review and organization name on my website, in promotional materials, and I will ask you to post your review on Amazon.com.

If you feel you are a qualified reviewer and you are favorable to the type of novel outlined above, please respond to this ad with a list of your credentials. If I feel your credentials are adequate, I will contact you with the full details of the novel, and we can negotiate a stipend amount and a timetable for completion.

Although I will have to verify your credentials, the entire process will be confidential. No one will know that you were paid for your freelance review.

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“I am an advocate of finding new and better ways to accomplish common tasks”

Here’s one way to cut down on the stacks of unsolicited manuscripts that are piling up all over the office. Independent Portland publisher Tin House Books has announced that unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied “by a Receipt for a Hardcover or Paperback from a Real-Life Bookstore.” The program, called “BUY A BOOK, SAVE A BOOKSTORE!” is, despite the combination of caps and exclamation mark, a stroke of genius. It’s a feel-good way to score points with independent bookstores while at the same time providing an excuse to return unwanted manuscripts. Who says there’s no creative thinking in book publishing these days?

Of course, allowances can be made:

Writers who cannot afford to buy a book or cannot get to an actual bookstore are encouraged to explain why in haiku or one sentence (100 words or fewer). Tin House Books and Tin House magazine will consider the purchase of e-books as a substitute only if the writer explains: why he or she cannot go to his or her neighborhood bookstore, why he or she prefers digital reads, what device, and why.

Writers are invited to videotape, film, paint, photograph, animate, twitter, or memorialize in any way (that is logical and/or decipherable) the process of stepping into a bookstore and buying a book to send along for our possible amusement and/or use on our Web site.

I suppose the haiku he and/or she might write for this purpose would go something like this:

Brick and mortar store:
I think I’ll drop in and browse.
Wait! Here’s my package!

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Image from loungerie’s photostream via the Museum of Folly.

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Managing the slush

Advances are, in theory, a prepayment against expected royalties. Authors are often concerned about whether their books “earn out” their advances — that is, whether royalties from actual book sales are equal to or greater than their advance against royalties. The advance represents a kind of benchmark for expectations of a title, and when actual royalties fall short of that number authors feel their titles have underperformed. There is a degree of truth to this, but it’s not the whole story. There are many factors behind the size of advances, and a book that doesn’t earn out can still be a success — the advance excess is in effect the equivalent of a slightly higher royalty percentage.

Still, authors have to do their best with the information they have, so we will assume the advance is logical relative to expected royalties. This being the case, the best way to judge the advance is to get a sense of the publisher’s sales expectations. To do this, try to find out about how many copies will be printed and about what the retail price is likely to be. Those figures will give you a sense of how the publisher is thinking about the title in terms of sales.

As an example let’s use nice round numbers for ease of calculation. Say the publisher plans to print 10,000 copies and sell them at $20 each and is offering the author a royalty of 10 percent off the full retail price. Now, many of the copies that are being printed will not be sold: copies are needed for reviewers and other purposes (among them the inefficiencies of book distribution), but we are only trying to get a ballpark figure, so we’ll ignore that level of refinement.

With that caveat, sales of 10,000 books would equal a total retail value of $200,000, of which 10 percent would be $20,000. Consequently, a logical advance for this title would be somewhere around $20,000.  Woohoo, you’re rich!

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How to figure an advance against book royalties

The goal of our publishing programs is to introduce readers to terrific authors they might not otherwise have the chance to know. Our international customers have made us aware of exciting established and emerging voices from other cultures and countries that have not been translated for English-language readers. These great voices and great books deserve a wider audience, and that’s why we created AmazonCrossing.

You wonder if they know how to do this right, and whether they will low-ball their translators (duh), but considering the paucity of works in translation in the US market I suppose any new translation initiative is positive.

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Amazon gets into the translation business

In recent months a flood of so-called books have been appearing in Amazon’s catalog. VDM Publishing’s imprints Alphascript and Betascript Publishing have listed over 57,000 titles, adding at least 10,000 in the previous month alone. These books are simply collections of linked Wikipedia articles put into paperback form, at a cost of 40 cents a page or more. These books seem to be computer-generated, which explains the peculiar titles noted such as ‘Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit.’ Such titles do have the marketing effect of turning up in many different searches. There is debate on Wikipedia about whether their ‘VDM Publishing’ page should contain the words ‘fraud’ or ‘scam.’ VDM Publishing’s practice of reselling Wikipedia articles appears to be legal, but is ethically questionable. Amazon customers have begun to post 1-star reviews and complain. Amazon’s response to date has been, ‘As a retailer, our goal is to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any item they might be seeking.’ The words ‘and pay us’ were left out. Amazon carries, as a Googled guess, 2 million different book titles, so VDM Publishing is currently 1/35th of their catalog, and rapidly growing.

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Spamming Amazon

Read an interview with the creator.

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Two views of the future of book publishing

Craig Mod makes an interesting case for celebrating the (supposed) demise of “disposable books” — he elaborates at some length a simple distinction between books where the content and form are integral and those where they are independent — and welcoming the IPad as a reading platform. Here’s a sample:

We’re losing the dregs of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.

These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Once we dump this weight we can prune our increasingly obsolete network of distribution. As physicality disappears, so too does the need to fly dead trees around the world.

You already know the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, born from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. New modes of storytelling. Less environmental impact. A rise in importance of editors. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everything in that last paragraph were true! Unfortunately, part of this is fiction writing. Check out the NYT bestseller list and see if you can observe “a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.”

To me the most interesting part of Mod’s argument is his vision for booklike content that disposes of the metaphor of the page, as shown in the image above (the image is Mod’s). In this vision the content metaphor is not the bound book but the East Asian handscroll, on which stories were rolled out continuously from one end to the other rather than proceeding page by page.

The book is a perfected technology, but why should the electronic platform inherit the binding metaphor?

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Link: Books in the Age of the IPad

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“Books” in the age of the IPad

The Bookseller is back with another round of odd book titles. This year the six finalists for the Diagram Prize for odd book titles are the following:

• Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter
• Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich
• Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes
• Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots
• The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease
• What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua?

As I mentioned before in this context, as the translator of Frozen Coagulated Cultures in Wine, Cheese, and Sauerkraut Production, I fail to see what’s so funny about these titles.

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Odd book titles of 2009

The pages are the same, except that in one spread the main text block is ragged and in the other it is justified. I’m curious which version people prefer.

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Rag or justified?

I took the course in 1978 or thereabouts — I think it was the second year it was offered. I was working on my dissertation in comparative literature at the time. At the conclusion of the course I noticed an ad for a marketing copywriter with Jossey-Bass Publishers. I applied for the job and got it. I didn’t work at Jossey-Bass for long, but I did pick up the basics of book publishing and copyediting. The following year I began working as an editor for North Point Press, and I have worked in publishing ever since Thanks, SPPC, for derailing my academic career!

One could argue that with print publishing undergoing its current painful redefinition the course is needed now more than it was then. It looks like Martin Levin will be exploring new possibilities.

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Stanford Professional Publishing Course Closes

But it’s not like I haven’t been reading. What’s up with that?

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It seems I haven’t been keeping up

The first post at The Art of American Book Covers, by Richard Minsky, was made on August 26, so this blog is less than a month old. I regret that I don’t remember who directed me to it, but this blog is so rich in knowledge about techniques of book production that it makes me feel like an absolute novice. The blog will apparently focus on fine books of the nineteenth century. The image above is a detail from a book published by L. C. Page, who it seems offered each of their titles in red, white or blue cloth (wow!). Instead of stamping, a white cloth panel was glued onto the red and blue books. Following is a portion of the blog’s commentary related to this detail, but you should check out Minsky’s blog for the full story:

The panel on the 1906 variant is unusual. The white has a blue-ish cast, and blue is showing through the white where it is rubbed; white is showing through the blue where that is rubbed, and white is showing through the gold where rubbed. It appears as though a white cloth onlay was applied to the cover, which was then stamped with blue, then white, and finally with gold. The details show that the cloth for the panel was applied before the stamping, since the blue and gold both overlap the onlay on both variants.

Why would the stamping be done in white if the cloth were white? One possible answer is that by 1906 opaque white inks were available for the stamping that were not prone to flaking and produced a brighter white than the cloth color. That fails to explain why blue would be stamped under the white.

Regarding white stamping on white cloth, when I published Fantastic Tales by I. U. Tarchetti, translated by Larry Venuti, I put black cloth over black boards. My production manager thought I was crazy. Maybe I was. It’s a nice looking book though (the paper jacket is shown; maybe I will take a photo of the cloth cover later on sometime).

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Sites we like: The Art of American Book Covers

Then: Book of Genesis
Now: FLOOD! A true story of heartbreak, heroism, and the will to survive

Then: Moby Dick
Now: Orca Obsession: How the Whaling Industry Is Destroying Our Sea and Sailors

Then: Romeo and Juliet
Now: The Teen Sex and Suicide Epidemic: What You Need to Know to Protect Yourself and Your Family

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

And my own contribution:

Then: Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Now: Chicken Soup for the Kitchen

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Book titles then and now

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Book vs. Kindle Smackdown