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

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:

• Returns. 35% of all books are shipped to retailers and wholesalers and then returned to the publisher, at which point they are either remaindered or pulped. This wastes fuel, trees, time, and money.

• Advances. The process of acquiring the right to publish a book had spun out of control by the early 2000s. Swollen advances work nicely for some authors — it’s money you don’t have to give back, even if the publisher loses money on your book — but most publishing houses now write down 50% of what once were reasonably considered advances against royalties. The majority of books published today never “earn out.”

• High Overhead. Rampant consolidation failed to solve this problem. (And then, consolidation led to staff cuts without corresponding cuts in output, so that the editors, publicists, and other employees left standing were saddled with more work to do, and fewer resources with which to do it.)

• Bad Retailing. In the ’90s, publishers climbed into bed with Barnes and Noble and Borders, to the point where B&N was regularly consulted on jacket design. The numbers of staff employed to cater to these accounts ballooned.

• Bad Pricing. Swollen advances created upward pressure on prices. Publishers need high retail prices in order to make their P&Ls work. At the same time, consumers are shrugging their shoulders at the prospect of spending $26 on a hardcover debut novel. This is why publishers, agents, and Amazon are battling so fiercely over the Kindle.

• “Throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” Publishers release far more titles into the marketplace than they can and do support. (See above on work load.)

• Bad Branding. A strong brand worked for Penguin in the ’30s, for Vintage Books in the ’80s, but in the late ’90s and early ’00s many legacy publishers diluted whatever household name status they once enjoyed by creating dozens of separate and ill-defined imprints.

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:

• Underestimated costs + Overestimated benefits = Project approval.

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.

“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.

“So it is with the periodical ‘drunks’ of business. Sometimes the big men of business lose their self-control and indulge in a business drunk of [sic] profiteering. But the inevitable readjustment comes as it must always come. Man made laws may not be powerful enough to put these dangerous men where they belong, but the Natural Law always gets them. They must pay and do pay Nature even when they seem to ‘flourish like a green bay tree’; to those that have suffered from their depredations.

“Bigger man always come to take the place of these warped and twisted and self-belittled false Masters of Business. When human criticism cannot reach them, Nature does—and administers the penalty.

“The Law of Compensation invariably adjusts business disturbances as it does everything else. If you don’t believe this, you had better study Business progress for the past ten years—or any other period of the world’s history you choose.

“Mastery comes to him who aligns himself with the Natural Law of Business which provides that permanent success comes only to those who give service for service.”

*Excerpt from Joseph White Norwood’s Success Inevitable, published by long-defunct R. F. Fenno & Company in 1923.

I typed up our conversation for a publication that didn’t end up running the piece. So here it is, here:

“NO LOCAL”

Two weeks ago a friend asked me to proofread a sales brochure for a new condo development being readied for occupancy a few blocks from Manhattan’s bustling Union Square. The condos had everything that he discerning buyer with $500,000 to spend on a one-bedroom could want—Bosch five-burner stoves, quartz countertops, 11-foot ceilings and fourteenth-story views.

The thrust of the sales pitch, however, was neither luxury nor location but local. “We eat local, shop local, and live local,” the hypothetical couple in the Corcoran brochure boasted. The hydrangeas they bought, the lamb shanks they ate, the Long Island Meritage they drank—everything they consumed was purchased within walking distance from their front door.

It seems fair to ask. Once real estate marketing firms are on the bandwagon, has “going local” ceased to be a force for good?

The idea that our love for local has gone to our collective head is one of the driving arguments behind Andrew Potter’s recently released The Authenticity Hoax, a strident call to reexamine one of the defining consumer trends of our times. Plagued by a nagging sense that the current of modern life is taking your further and further from everything that gives life meaning? You’re not alone, Potter argues. Just don’t imagine that greater “authenticity”—whether by going local, buying organic, or foregoing the Sheraton for an eco-resort—will make you whole again.

The quest for greater authenticity is as old as the Romantic movement—and as clichéd as Walden’s pond. Potter argues that today’s variant is particularly insidious because it’s being played out at the nexus of an array of hot-button contemporary issues.

Our culture has wrapped the search for meaning up in environmentalism, the market economy, habit of using consumer products to signal our identities, and topped it off with a heaping spoonful of self-righteousness.

But what is authenticity, exactly? Like obscenity, Potter argues, authenticity is hard to define but you know it when you see it. Out of a thicket of competing claims, there is strong consensus that it can’t be achieved through “the cheap building blocks of consumer goods” alone. Authentic is not just “local” but spontaneous, creative, genuine, commercial-free, and treads lightly on the earth.

Keeping an eye on the planet is all fine and good, Potter claims, but this pursuit all too quickly turns into a status game. To help make this point, he dusts off the sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s classic and cranky critique of conspicuous consumption. What we have today is a conspicuous authenticity, which operates much like the quest to be cool did starting the 1960s. In order for you to be truly authentic, other people need to be less so, or downright inauthentic. And judging from the standards upheld by the “local” movement, inauthentic looks a lot like something you bought at Wal-mart. (Plastic, shipped in from China, and chances are you drove to get it.)

It doesn’t stop there. Now that authentic” and “local” have become fashionable, it has become hard to tell where a true desire to do good ends and oily marketing strategies begin.

“The environmental benefits of local farming are actually highly overstated,” Potter writes. “In the end, moving locally grown produce around in small bundles, by car or truck to dozens of farmers markets or small retailers, is far more wasteful than putting thousands of tons of bananas on a container ship.”

Potter points to how the champions of the 100-mile diet—whose adherents strive not to eat anything grown or produced outside a 100-mile radius from their home—were quickly bested by those touting a 50-mile diet. However well-intentioned—not to mention how aesthetically pleasing small family farms are—the going local ethos is not immune to competitive pressures. Most local stuff is expensive, as is the real estate abutting the shops that sell it.

“There’s no small amount of hypocrisy—if not rank self-delusion—in the growing fetish for all things ‘local.’ We like the idea that we’re eating eggs raised on someone’s rooftop down the street, and we’re happy to tuck into a steak sliced off the ribs of a cow that grazed a few farms over,” Potter elaborated in an email earlier this week. “But the very idea that we would want to return to a time when our cities were filthy with the refuse and exhaust of a truly urban economy is insane. The mirror-image of localism is NIMBYism, and despite all of the chatter about the superior virtues of a local economy, you don’t hear a lot of people pining for the return of the local abattoir.”

But isn’t it good to have people competing to be the most virtuous than to, say, compete to see who can rack up the most frequent flyer miles or wear the biggest shoulder pads? Potter raises an sharp eyebrow at this suggestion. He believes a culture fixated on discerning what’s authentic and what isn’t is easily conned. A socially-conscious consumerism is still consumerism.

It’s an argument that has won Potter some unlikely allies, as The Authenticity Hoax has been picked up by some church-affiliated blogs. So you think modern life is alienating? Can’t find the cure to what ails you at your local farmer’s market? That’s what we’ve been saying all along! For Potter, however, the solution to what he terms “a socially regressive arms race” will come from decoupling the idea that what’s good for you is good for society. In short, we have to stop thinking that what we consume lends us moral credibility.*

But here’s the good news. If you’re worrying about the origins of the $5 pint of raspberries in your hand, Potter suggests, chances are you’re one of the more pleasantly situated human beings to have walked the earth. So maybe one answer lies even closer than the nearest yoga studio. “Ludwig Wittgenstein said that the trick to doing philosophy is knowing when to stop asking the questions that lead us awry,” he concludes. “When it comes to the modern search for authenticity, the irony is that the only way to find what we’re really after might be to stop looking.”

[END]

N.B. For a different take on the not-quite-the-same but related back-to-the-land phenomenon, please read Melanie Rehak’s wonderful “Growing Pains” in the latest edition of Bookforum. In fact, buy the whole issue. It has everything.

*This thought begs to be expanded upon. Someday soon.

Judicious editing could have helped here. Imagine reading only the sections in bold:

June 2, 2010

Dear Ms. Hustad,

Thank you for sharing your concerns about the Mayor’s proposed budget cuts to the City’s libraries.

The New York City Council has been a major supporter of the City’s libraries over the years, and I appreciate you letting us know how important your local branch is to you and your community. In these tough economic times especially, more and more New Yorkers are turning to libraries, not just for books and other media, but also for the many free programs and services they provide.

While our commitment to the City’s libraries remains as strong as ever, the State is struggling to close a massive multi-billion dollar deficit, and we won’t know the full impact of this on our City until Albany passes its budget. One thing is for certain, though: The Governor’s proposed cut of $1.3 billion in state funding to New York City would be a devastating blow to our communities.

On Friday, June 4th at 11 a.m. in the Council Chambers at City Hall, our Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Intergroup Relations, together with our Finance Committee and our Select Committee on Libraries, [we] will be holding a public hearing on the Mayor’s proposed budget cuts to the City’s libraries.

While funding for core services like education and public safety must continue to be our top budget priority, we will certainly do our best to restore as much funding as we can to the City’s libraries. The Council proposed a number of alternative cuts last year that the Mayor ultimately adopted, and we will continue to look for other possible alternatives this year.

Your support and involvement during this process are very important to us, and I will be sure to keep you updated on our progress moving forward. Thanks again.

Sincerely,

Christine C. Quinn

Speaker

The main problem here is offering content that feeds the egos of the people crafting it but really doesn’t accomplish much else beyond that. Ms. Quinn — or, more likely, the staffer that wrote this for her — is providing too much detail, much of which speaks to the difficulty of her job, more of which simply restates the problem (and is thus busy work — obviously someone writing to her with concerns about the proposed City budget cuts and how they might affect library services is aware of the proposed City budget cuts and how they might affect library services).

This is harmless puffed-up writing in and of itself. And yet it effectively buries the one critical and useful piece of information in this email: the 11 a.m. Friday meeting.

Anyhow, this type of thing always happens when too many in-house egos are involved in drafting out-of-house communications. 30% of the space is lost to weird co-dependencies and formulaic expressions of concern that wind up sounding oddly tinny and insincere.

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.

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.

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.