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Happy new year
We wish you a merry new year and a happy 2012, as the song famously goes. Hope 2012 is a corker for you and - well, frankly, that you continue to buy a lot of our books.
And if you're a writer, here's a sensible thing to do to kick off the new year. Git yersen along to Blackwell in Oxford on 19th January to learn from the queen of writing to be published, Nicola Morgan.
More info below the cut. It's incredibly worthwhile, and highly recommended.
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Best books of 2011
I love these lists. Especially when our books are on them. The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man by one Mark Hodder is on Forbidden Planet's list. Huzzah!
(And don't they do a good job of making our books look nice?)
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2 x Tims, a Laurie and a Lorris
Mr Tim O'Reilly recently linked to a couple of publishing-related articles on Twitter which you might not have seen. (Particularly if you can't remember whether Twitter is the one where you see what old school friends are up to or the one where you bid on other people's secondhand junk.)
Tim linked to this article on Publishers* Weekly about how Amazon might be tightening the screws on publishers. However the bit I liked best was Tim's own comment (here) about a bit of recent publishing history: "I've seen for a long time where Amazon is headed, towards a Walmart-like status where it can dictate whatever terms it likes to the publishing industry. And that was why I was amazed at the train-wreck of short-term thinking that led to the Google Books lawsuit by the Association of American Publishers and the Author's Guild. Faced with the threat of a future monopoly by a ruthless competitor as pbooks transition to ebooks, a potential white knight arrives on the scene...and the publishers promptly sue the white knight! And as a result, though no one is saying it out loud, Google has quietly de-prioritized its efforts and abandoned the publishers to their fate." Ha ha. We're such idiots.
Mr Tim also linked to an article in the Observer about four startups taking innovative approaches to publishing. link.
And on a non-publishing note, I wanted to share a quote from an article in The Independent on the subject of the recent Climate Change talks in Durban. This is Laurie Penny's summary of the outcome from Durban: "With a maximum of five years to go before carbon emissions at current rates make climate disaster a certainty, governments ask those already under water to give them 10 years to think about it."
And finally, just in case you read that Laurie Penny article, you will now need what BoingBoing call a 'unicorn chaser' to cheer you up. Here's the all-important video of a Slow Lorris holding its little arms up so it can be tickled.
* a note on apostrophes, which, let's face it, is the bit you care about most: I assumed that it was "Publishers' Weekly" because it's a weekly for publishers. Tim O'Reilly referred to it as "Publisher's Weekly" in his article. But their logo has no apostrophe at all, so I followed their lead.
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Magical thinking and an EU probe
I know that almost no one reads this blog and I won't be swayed from that view. There are one or two stalwart commenters, bless you - and I will admit that occasionally people get in touch about something said here (link). But I assume the latter is just part of the normal process where you put yours or your company's name into Google, append the word 'rotters', hit 'search' and see what pops up. In fact I'm assuming that's most of what PR firms do these days. But every now and again I have cause to exclaim 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' before adding a sarcastic 'non'. That happened today as I glanced at the newspapers. On Thursday I complained that I couldn't find a good article in the press about the law suits underway regarding Apple, e-books, the iPad and 'agency' pricing. Today I see that the Observer have furnished just such a thing. They must have set to work as soon as they read my words. I imagine they'll be writing any minute to apologise for not doing it sooner. (article)
Incidentally, if I had to choose a 'pull quote' from the article to whet your appetite, it would be this: "Some ebooks now cost more than the hardback."
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VAT on UK e-books
Bureaucracy is a funny old thing. Under UK law, e-books attract standard-rate VAT because they are text "supplied by electronic transmission" (source). And of course paper books are 'zero-rated' for VAT. What that means is that someone has to pay an extra 20% on top of the nominal price of an e-book but not a paper book. Either the retailer or publisher need to swallow that charge or, more likely, the customer does.
It's a peculiar setup because increasingly we use e-books and paper books interchangeably. In many (I would suggest most) publishing companies, the e-book is brought into being using the exact same files used to create the paper version, with a few extra tweaks and adjustments thrown in. So the chances are that the content, at least in novels and other all-text formats, is identical to the paper version right down to the last comma. And especially on e-ink screens, the reading experience can be very close to that of a paper book. I think in the reader's mind an e-book is a kind of book, whereas under tax regulations one is printed and bound material, the other is something quite different: text delivered electronically. In reality, the main differences are in the means of production and the method of delivery. Given that VAT is a consumer-oriented tax, it's strange that the nature of the product and the benefit to the consumer end up being more or less irrelevant compared with the supply chain details of how it arrived in the consumer's hands.
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Wholesale vs Agency Pricing
Excellent. I've finally found a succinct description of what agency pricing is and a little bit about it on lovely NPR (here). But I still haven't found a good article about the anti-competition and anti-trust lawsuits underway that relate to the use of agency pricing in the e-book market.
There's an article in the FT today about that sort of thing and about the Amazon $5 rebate if you leave a bookshop empty-handed, but a) you might find you have to register (for free, though) in order to read it and b) I found it curiously vague and confusing. At any rate, it's here and it's called "Don't Make Amazon a Monopoly".
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Amazon vs Local Bookshop
So what do we think about this bête du jour of Amazon offering shoppers money to do their browsing in bookshops but their spending online? There was a New York Times editorial (here) about how it was wrong because independent bookshops are cuddly and wonderful like baby owls. And there was this counter-argument (here) saying that Amazon were stinkers for a completely different set of reasons but in many ways independent bookstores were much bigger stinkers. I'm not sure that latter article, though rationally presented, is going to do much more than cause hysteria.
I remember in the UK, Dixons trying something similar, where they suggested you do your browsing in John Lewis (though they employed a flurry of nudging and winking in place of naming them) but do your purchasing with Dixons. I seem to recall I was agin' it and powerfully so in that case because I really do think John Lewis are as cuddly as a baby owl (being owned by their employees and being principled to a preposterously high standard). Indie bookshops I'm less sure about. I like them and I don't want Amazon snapping them up like some sort of evil anteater on the rampage. But I do take the writer from Slate's point that if there's anything that Amazon does well it's to get people reading more books for less money.
OK, I think I'm now ready to render a verdict on this whole business, and it is: 'dunno'. I think I'll have to wave this particular scandal through without laying a glove on it because I'm not sure enough of my own views. But surely that won't stop you commenting types, will it?
update: I forgot to make it clear (in case you don't read the articles I've linked to) that the Amazon offer excluded books which is an important point. So this particular situation is about competing with bookstores on non-book sales (e.g. CDs) - although I think most people have seen it as symbolic or symptomatic of a larger battle and of various similar tactics.
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Consequences of hyper-hypothecation
Oopsies
Sadly, that title isn't as much fun as it sounds. And it's not a writing or publishing term so you might want to sit this post out if you're not in the mood for gloom-laden current affairs talk.
Ann Pettifor is someone I mentioned on the blog in 2008. She's an economist and back in 2006 she wrote a book about how the boom in the global financial system would soon end to be followed by a huge debt crisis. Not only was she right about the outcome, she was right about the reasons for it.
The bad news is that she's now saying things are about to get worse.
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If you can't think of anything nice to say...
Sigh. Am I going to have to give up criticising things? I slated Amazon's InDesign plugin and they got in touch to ask how they could improve it. And I poured scorn (or is it heaped scorn? I honestly can't remember whether I was using liquid or powdered scorn on that occasion) upon Penguin's website and someone very nice from Penguin tracked me down to apologise and to promise better in the future. I'm just not very good at being cutting and critical if I think there's any danger the culprits themselves might be personally singed by my vituperations. If this doesn't stop I'm going to have to get mealymouthed before anyone else writes in to apologise.
And really, what's going on with all this high-quality customer service? This is not America, people.
Seriously, though, I'm now half-expecting the Torchwood team to get in touch to apologise for any bugs I might have experienced in their entertainment delivery system and asking whether I have any constructive feedback. (Which of course I do.)
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Marketing to readers
Back when Snowbooks first began, we realised something a little bit counter-intuitive: it was far more important to sell our books to retailers than to sell them to readers. If we could get Waterstones to put one of our titles on a shelf at the front of each store then the readers would see it and many would take an interest - we didn't need to reach out to readers directly (which was good news because we struggled to find a way to do that). Now I'll admit that when a book gets *really* famous - or when the plan is for it to *become* really famous - then a different approach is required. But we've never been in a financial position to say, "We'll have a big launch, then let's put a couple of hundred thousand quid into bus stop and tube ads, and then follow up with some TV spots." When your marketing budget is measured in hundreds not thousands of pounds - and when you can't afford to have nine flops because the tenth will pay it all back - you have to put your money and effort into whatever comes closest to guaranteeing results. And the only affordable way we had of getting the attention of large numbers of readers - that's to say, not a couple of hundred, but many thousands - was to get a good placement in store in a major chain.
Annoyingly the major chains are now dwindling. Borders is gone and WHSmiths on the high street looks like a badly-managed stockroom - at least the ones near me do. You'd have to set fire to a book to have it stand out. WHSmiths Travel have great locations for catching the reader's eye, but we've found their internal processes to be so disastrous that there's no commercial point doing business with them. And of course the independents are not a single bloc with which one can arrange a promotion (much in the same way that cats are not a single organisation). Favourable reviews in the major press seem to reap rewards for some publishers and some titles, but they have had little benefit for us and many we have spoken to. So what does that leave when it comes to catching the attention of readers?
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The New Aesthetic
Is it patronising to call James Bridle a 'Snowbooks alumni'? Perhaps I should simply say that he was responsible for a number of our books in years gone by before he headed off to do all sorts of new and interesting things. One of which I was finding highly entertaining the other day (until my internet connection refused to fetch the second half of it). James gave a keynote talk at Web Directions South in Sydney about something he had, in a slightly tongue in cheek way, named 'the new aesthetic'. As I say, I've only managed to get my hands on the first twenty minutes of the talk but it's a very interesting exploration of the way that certain artistic sensibilities are being influenced by the 'digital' realm. The web gives us eyes and ears on the world, it becomes part of our sensory apparatus, so perhaps it's no surprise that it also changes how we perceive reality and gives artists opportunities to mix and blend features of the digital with aspects of reality. If that sounds too abstract (probably because I'm failing to explain it well) let me give you a tiny example from James's talk: a square of turf cut out of a public park by the artist Helmut Smits which is of the correct size so as to appear like a dead pixel on your monitor when you view the park on Google Earth. Lots more novel ideas and fresh concepts in James's talk which you can find here.
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Occupy: the comedy
This may not interest you, being more revolutionary than literary, but it amused me. I don't know if the papers will pick it up but there was apparently considerable entertainment to be had last night in New York City. The TV show, Law and Order, decided to do an episode that featured the Occupy Wall Street camp which until recently used to reside in Zuccotti Park until the NYPD raided it and threw the whole thing into dumpsters. So the TV company built a replica in a different Manhattan park... complete with People's Library, food and medic tents. I happened to be following along on Twitter when the protesters found out that their camp had been resurrected... as a film set - not far from where the real thing used to stand. "So all we needed to do was create a fake film company, apply for a permit, and we could have stayed?" asked one protester.
Then someone realised, well, if they've gone to the trouble of rebuilding our old home, maybe we should move in. So the real Occupy protesters headed over to see the fake camp. And finding it more or less deserted, they made themselves comfortable and had a look around. Apparently the food in the food tent was healthier than the real version, and the handmade signs were a little bit too 'art school', but the books in the library were about right. The Twitter hashtags for the night became #moccupy and #fauxcotti. And just as the surreality of the situation was really sinking in, the police turned up to clear them out - raising the mind-boggling question of whether the NYPD were there to protect an exact replica of what the same police officers had recently destroyed because only exact copies of the camp could be tolerated, not the real thing. A few wags claimed to be unsure about whether the cops on the film set of a TV cop show were TV cops or real life cops, but the cops (=real) didn't seem to be in the mood for games.
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So, what's this Twitter thing all about?
I'm not ashamed to admit that I don't always understand what today's kids are on about. Pop music, moisturiser for men, Post-It notes: it often takes me a while to get on board with the latest trends. And much as I hate to hear people my age drone on about 'not seeing the point' of something, I just couldn't quite get my head around Twitter. I listened to a couple of lazy comedians making fun of people who tweet about making a sandwich or going to the shops and I probably did think, "those scruffy hippies with their Twitter-blogging should just get a haircut and a proper job."
But I decided to give it a try. I mean, Velcro turned out to be pretty useful, so I shouldn't be such a Luddite about new things. And for a while I followed a few celebs (NB: followed on Twitter, not in real life, in a disguise). And it made the cool, funny ones seem cooler and funnier and the dyslexic ones seem more dyslexic. But then from time to time I'd read a retweet of something cool from a non-celeb and add that person to the list of my followees (or whatever the word would be).
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Rob's guide to great coffee
I'm about to do you such a favour. I'm going to tell you how to make fabulous coffee. It takes about two minutes.
First off, this is my definition of great coffee and I'm not a proper coffee snob. For a start, my favourite kind of coffee is a latte - and probably not the correct definition of a latte either - more like what Starbucks might make for you on a good day. I'm talking about something that's half hot milk but which has a really rich and smooth coffee taste. In the last couple of weeks I've had some of the best cups of coffee of my life and I made them all myself. And best of all, you can almost certainly improve on what I'm doing here. (But note, you will need to spend twenty quid - or the equivalent in foreign money)
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Paper vs Electrons - a personal view
I'm a long way off wishing all my books were electronic. And it depends on the type of book as to where my preferences lie. I've said before that the typesetting and presentation of most e-books is rubbish - not to mention the e-readers, the software and the formats (e.g. EPUB, Mobi) being barely up to the task. E-books are at their shaky best when the source material has no footnotes or images or tables or non-standard fonts or unusual layouts. Nevertheless, I'm reading more and more books electronically. And when I switch back to paper I'm starting to notice a few failings by comparison:
* Reading in bed the other night I actually caught myself thinking, "I'll put the light out now and just read one more chapter." Then I remembered I was reading on paper not on my iPad and paper needs a separate light source.
* I've got pretty used to asking a book to define a word like 'metonym' or look up a term like 'Hanseatic League'.
* It's not ideal, but every now and again I want to read a bit more of the book I was reading at home while I'm on a train... and all I have with me is my phone.
* If I'm looking to quote something I read, I like to be able to search a book
* I'm on a trip and I get two pages into reading my book and realise I want to be reading something else. I like to be able to either dip into one of the other fifteen books I've got on the go (not novels, of course. more likely to be things like Gleick's The Information where you can read a chapter at a time). Or I'll nip online and buy something new.
That's not to say that paper books don't retain a lot of advantages - and they're put together with much more care too - but it's got to the stage where I feel they also have their drawbacks.
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BS, in this case, standing for revealed truth
Not everyone *gets* Bruce Sterling. I had a very quick chat to him when I was in Texas early in the year and one could be forgiven for thinking that he was drunk at 10am. Not that he wasn't friendly and extremely interesting, but there's something about his run-on slightly-whiney monologues that makes you think he's just rambling. But if you continue to pay attention you generally hear something pretty amazing pretty soon. And you start to wonder if maybe he rants on like that because he's fairly used to people not being able to follow the trajectory of his remarks - perhaps on purpose in some cases. Anyway, here's Mr. Sterling unspooling another of his golden threads of unpunctuated insight and disaffection. I recommend watching it if you're at all able to dial yourself in to the eccentricity of his delivery. link. I couldn't say that this is directly related to the practice of publishing; but it's about art, the world, the future, the next generation, the past and loss, so then again maybe it is. Incidentally, he's wrapping up the Nevada Museum of Art, 2011 Art/Environment Conference.
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Round-up
Two or three things randomly collected together:
* The Amazon Fire is out and has been thoroughly reviewed. Andy Ihnatko always does a good job on these matters and his review is chatty but thorough. (The Fire is a lot more open than I predicted. You can indeed load the Hulu+ and NetFlix apps on it, plus other apps to let you play content not natively supported. It also offers the 'Mantano' app that will let you read EPUBs. Good news if you want a tablet for half the price of an iPad - and you're not planning to use it as a laptop replacement.) review.
* I know everyone in Britain has had something to say about Jeremy Clarkson's recent remarks and the furore they've caused but I wanted to add my 2d's worth. First off, my favourite quote about the whole thing was from the brilliant Ben Goldacre who said, "Complaining about Clarkson expressing an offensive view is like complaining that the wheels just fell off your clown taxi." (source). Despite my politics being at the other end of the spectrum from Clarkson, his comments didn't bother me at all - in fact I think he's an appalling, but extremely funny man. But I experienced severe embarrassment listening to union leaders and other left-wing stalwarts calling for punishment, legal suits, sacking, etc; Left vs Right is not supposed to be two random teams scrapping. It's supposed to be about principles. The left is supposed to remember that free speech is vital to their view of the world and that the only reason that strikes aren't banned by the state is because enough people stood up for the right of union members to express their views and grievances in the form of protest. You don't get to call a strike and then demand someone else be dragged into court for making a joke you don't like. Locking people up for inappropriate humour is the sort of thing I'd hope unions campaigned against not for.
* Interesting newspaper article: "Publishers and designers have reacted to the rise of ebooks with exquisite new releases and revamps." source
* And finally, does anyone need to look at pictures of new-born zoo animals? Here's the place: zooborns.
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Targeted Marketing and The Uncanny Valley
If you want to be able to read an e-book, you pretty much need a device that connects to the internet. And many of those devices also *upload* information. For instance, Amazon's Whispersync technology lets head office know which page you're up to in your e-book so that when you switch to another device, that gadget can jump to the right page. It's a darned handy feature. And that sort of functionality gives Amazon, and potentially publishers too, access to all sorts of new info. You can tell when a reader abandons a book, for instance. Imagine a graph that shows that, on average, people who didn't finish a particular techno-thriller stopped reading in chapter 14. That's the chapter where our hero visits his grandmother to get her advice. Boring! But why not put out a 'revised edition' where instead of receiving homilies over camomile tea the hero instead arrives to find grandma rigged with explosives by the CIA splinter cell he's been closing in on?
That scenario may be horrifying to many publishers (not the thing with the grandmother - that's just good, clean fun - the bit about issuing revised editions based on surveillance). But it seems to me that as this new information becomes available to us we're going to need some sort of rule for how to use it. If Google, Facebook and Amazon ever teamed up they'd know an unbelievable amount about an unbelievable number of people.
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