It’s not a retail location, baby. No more corner stores. Not for us. This is a branding opportunity.
“I’ve been writing for a living for around 15 years now and whatever method I practise remains a mystery. It’s random. Some days I’ll rapidly thump out an article in a steady daze, scarcely aware of my own breath. Other times it’s like slowly dragging individual letters of the alphabet from a mire of cold glue.“
–Charlie Brooker, in the Guardian
If you care to listen to a sermon about the sins of the book business, you’re in luck. Here’s Richard Nash. Here’s Seth Godin. (Godin has many; here’s another.)
Today much-loved web aggregator The Awl linked to a long-form rant by Norman Spinrad, who has some reason to complain about his own publishing house, Knopf, as well as the industry practice of bending over for Barnes & Noble and Bookscan — the book industry equivalent of TV’s Nielsen ratings — and politely requesting a spanking. I was witness to some of the events and fire drills Spinrad describes.
But mainly his protest resonated because I’ve given a lot of thought to the subject of why the book business is floundering in much the same way the record companies were at the time the RIAA decided the route to profitability was suing 12-year-old girls for illegal downloading. When authors who’ve had less than gratifying experiences with their publishers complain publicly, their words are often dismissed by those still gainfully employed in the industry as sour grapes. Maybe so. Or maybe that’s an unnecessarily uncharitable assessment.
What’s the saying? “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you?” Or in this case, just because you’re cranky doesn’t mean your point is invalid.
I’m getting off track. In the last year I began to collate my own impressions of what ailed the book industry. Having worked first as a bookseller, then as an in-house acquisitions editor, a freelance editor, and an author (published author! that’s why this site exists), I felt I had accumulated ample perspective.
The most oft-cited habits that hamper and hobble the old publishing business model are fairly well-known by this point:
Many of these concerns can be addressed by any new publishing start-up. Most of the ones we’ve spoken to — check out OR Books and Open Road Media — have figured out how to better leverage print-on-demand and ebook technology, and are pushing $$ saved on production, overhead, and inventory management over to their marketing departments. This should make authors happy.
All that said, however, there’s one blanketing sin that largely goes unmentioned. Any publisher that wants to exist let alone remain relevant in 2015 will have to figure out how to wriggle out from underneath it. The fundamental error, as I see it, is that the traditional publishing model privileges this formula:
In other words, before most publishers agree to publish anything, they run sales projections spun from a highly selective glance at the track records of “comparison titles” (as they’re called) that sold well. Comp titles that sold poorly are routinely ignored. Only projects for which all decision-makers have bought into best-case scenarios are pursued.
How to work around that? I don’t know! I’m looking for ideas. If you have one, please write me or leave it in the comments.
UPDATE: A conversation with my good friend Julie D. prompts me to clarify that I’m not endorsing Spinrad’s comments about his editors! But his thoughts on the business are instructive.
UPDATE II: More evidence that Borders and Barnes & Noble are, let’s just take a guess here…2 and 5 years from extinction, respectively.
Facebook emails received yesterday:
“Buku S—— invited you the event “Book Recycling at Union Square”
“Maris K—— invited you the event “Vol. 1 Brooklyn Birthday: The Greatest 3-Minute Record Reviews”
“When the individual man drinks whiskey, enough to get drunk, we know that the alcohol has a certain peculiar effect upon the cells of the body, especially the nerves.
“Alcohol causes the little cells to swell out and enlarge. This causes the tiny particles of solid matter in the cell, upon which the vital, positive energy is carried, to fly further apart. The positive energy is scattered and the cell becomes dominantly ‘negative.’ Emotions are stirred up and mental pictures of all sorts formed in a chaos of Imagination. The man is given a sense of freedom from all natural limitations. His ego as well as his cells become expanded and for a time he imagines himself a most wonderful Master of all he surveys. Then the reaction comes—the alcoholic conditions lose their effect, contraction of the cells and the ego sets in and the nausea and headache of the ‘morning after’ arrive. Long habit of ‘going on a spree’ distorts the very shape of the cells and warps the whole man physically and mentally.
The other week I had the good luck to talk to Andrew Potter about his book The Authenticity Hoax. Potter is personable and quick on his feet and has the kind of nimble mind that runs on novel formulations of you know, this thing is like this other thing, this whole other phenomenon that appears unrelated but isn’t, not at all.
I typed up our conversation for a publication that didn’t end up running the piece. So here it is, here:
About twice a day a perfect argument for why even competent writers need editors lands in my Inbox. Below is the latest, and it typifies one of the primary ways organizations misuse email, churning out external communications that are not only too long but also, ultimately, ineffectual.
…and red state / blue state divides in a CB2 catalog. I have respect for what photo-shoot stylists do, and I love New York and the urban aesthetic and white dishes and topiary and half-full glasses of sangria, but when I see things like this, all I think is nooooo, that is NOT how folks eat chips and dip.
Not enough chips on that platter, for one thing. Also, it’s a platter. Potato chips go in bowls. All of which goes to support my feeling that we should institutionalize some intranational cultural exchanges. We’ll send photo-stylists to, oh, I don’t know, take notes at Old Home headquarters in New Brighton, MN, then invite their marketing people for a round of drinks at Raoul’s in Soho. Win-win.
Also, if you’re serving olives, you should include a receptacle for the pits. Just a thought.
From a Q&A with Teresa A. Taylor, COO of Qwest, that ran last September in the New York Times:
Q. Is there anything unusual about the way you run meetings?
A. Well, the first is by saying, “Do we all know why we’re here?”
Q. Do you really say that?
A. Yes, because so many people say, “No, I don’t know, I was invited.” . . . I get invited to a lot of meetings where someone wants to brief me, or bring me up to speed on something, which usually means that they want to tell me about their project and then ask me for money. So I open with: “Do we all know why we’re here? Are we making decisions? Are you going to ask me for something at the end?” I try to get that out right away.
It’s amazing, there will be eight people in the room and they all have a different answer of what’s going on there. I’ll also say, once we’re clear about what we’re doing: “Does everyone need to be here? If anyone feels like they want to leave right now, that would be fine.” Every once in a while a couple of people will say, “Yeah, I could use this time back,” and they get up and leave.
Q. But you could chew up 10 minutes just going around the table.
A. Sure, I think it’s a good 10 minutes. I really do.
Q. What about presentations?
A. I use a little saying, which is, “Be brief, be bright and be gone.” It’s also not uncommon for me to say, “Why don’t we put the PowerPoint aside for a minute and why don’t you just talk to me?”
Q. What’s the maximum number of PowerPoint slides you want to see?
A. Six. But I actually prefer no PowerPoint. To be honest, I’d rather just talk. A really great meeting, to me, is someone who is just talking to me and might give me a piece of paper or two to support something, but that’s it.
A couple things strike me about this exchange. One, Ms. Taylor makes a good case for why tools like PowerPoint are best managed by pushy, efficiency-minded people. Like all technological tools, they magnify the qualities of the user. If you’re timid, PowerPoint enables your timidity. If you’re one of the most restless creative minds of your generation, technologies like PowerPoint are more likely to showcase your incredible avidity.
Either way, a limit on its use — six slides per presentation — is good for all parties. Taylor is essentially saying that she forces presenters to edit themselves, and call me biased, but I believe editing tends to clarify one’s thinking.
Two, technologies like PowerPoint make it easy to pass off sloppy thoughts. “Just talk” is less forgiving. There’s no place for half-baked ideas to hide when you’re “just talking.” To borrow from Orwell again, when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
The New York Times Book Review has a policy of asking potential reviewers of a book they’ve chosen to cover if they know the author. If author and reviewer share a history, be they friends or antagonists or residents of some lukewarm state in between, it will be difficult in the extreme for the reviewer to approach the book free of personal baggage. That’s the idea, at least, because if the answer to the question is “yes,” the potential reviewer doesn’t get the assignment and the Times calls the next person on their list.
I think the question doesn’t go far enough. All criticism announces its author; it’s the rare reviewer who’s able to use the space allotted without an eye toward advancing his or her own career. As such, linking arms with a author via a glowing write-up, or the alternative — distancing yourself from an author / genre / scene via a negative one — is always and inevitably informed by meta calculations that have zero to do with the merits of the work being discussed.
So perhaps the NYTBR should ask not one but two questions:
1. Do you know the author of this book?
2. Would you like to?
I imagine the answer to this second question tells us as much, and a lot more.