"Freedom of the press," said A. J. Liebling, "belongs to those who own one." There's a reason that remark is so often quoted -- today almost anyone with a personal computer can be a publisher. But the same technology that has democratized the process of creating books has also brought a new freedom -- the freedom to make them ugly in ways that could formerly not be imagined.

In the days of metal type, designers and typesetters went through a lengthy apprenticeship process to learn traditions of book making that had been transmitted over centuries. But today many people think reading books is all the experience they require in order to design them.

I'm currently judging books for an award -- not a design award but a translation award. Among the eligible books are two by the same author, rendered into English by different translators and published by different publishers. One of the books is a joy to hold. The trim trize is 5½ x 8½ inches. It's a hardcover book with a tastefully designed matte-finish jacket. The type block occupies a traditional placement on the page. The text, set an old style Venetian face, is about 66 characters to the measure. The other book, a 6 x 9 in. paperback, is less pleasing. The type on the cover and spine is too large, and it makes the page look crowded, despite the larger trim size. The title page is in a completely different face that does not echo the cover in any way -- and the copy is set so low on the page it appears to be falling off the bottom of the page. The text features bold sans serif headers centered over highly leaded serif text, which is often set rag right because it is a book of poetry. It's not the worst book ever, but it does not appeal to me as the other book does.

So which is the better translation? That's what I will have to decide, putting aside the physical aesthetics of the book itself. But it's hard to do, when I like holding one so much more than the other. Book design is a powerful force indeed!

You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a publishing company by its covers, and interiors. So what follows is a simplified speed course in making books that readers will want to pick up. Good book design is something that is learned over time, but even a novice can make a pretty good book just by avoiding the most common pitfalls.

Setting trim size and margins

If you're on a budget the most economical trim sizes for text-based books will probably be in the range between 5 x 8 and 6½ x 9½ inches (depending on where and how you print). Avoid square or landscape-orientation trims -- these are difficult even for the most accomplished designers to pull off successfully. Give your books a generous margin. Nothing ruins a book as effectively as text that completely fills the page. That's visual asthma: you can't breathe. And where do you put your fingers when you hold the book?

Make the bottom margin the largest, and the outside margin the next largest. For example, the spine margin might be 2 picas, the top margin 3 picas, the edge margin 4 picas, and the bottom margin 5 picas. Or you could make the edge margin and the bottom margin the same, as long as they are bigger than the spine and top margin (which could also be the same). This approach is shown below in the next section.

Using the golden section

I'm a great believer in the golden section. Anything designed with the golden section will always look decent (try it). The golden section can be elegantly defined in algebraic terms, but for our purposes we will just consider it the ratio 1 to 1.618. For example, say we made both our spine and top margins 4 picas. We could then make the edge and bottom margins 4 times 1.618, or about 6½ picas. Below is an image showing these margins on an ISO-proportioned page (6 x 8½ inches).

Setting the measure

After inadequate margins, unappealing measures are the next most common offenders in ugly books. The measure is the number of characters that fit on a line. In a one-column book this should be in the range of about 50 to 75 characters. For example, using the page text block I show above, with the typeface Amalia it works out that 11 point type gives the proper measure, as shown below.

Adjusting leading

The word leading (rhymes with bedding, not with beading) comes from the days of hot type, but it's still used to refer to the space between lines. The main thing here is to avoid extremes. In the example above 11-pt type is set over 14-pt lead. A face with a large x-height will require more lead than one with a small x-height. Which is logical -- if a face has a small x-height its relatively longer ascenders and descenders will provide more white space, so not as much lead is needed. For most books, 20 to 35 percent leading is a good place to start (11/14 is 27 percent).

Aligning text

No one ever seems to believe this, but if you simply set everything flush left, rag right, your book will look elegant. But just about every memo I've ever gotten features a centered title over left-aligned text. That makes no sense! The centered element and the left element have different axes of symmetry. In general, if you want to center your heads you should justify your type.

Try this at work: next time you write a memo leave your title left aligned instead of centering it. You'll be surprised how much more sophisticated the page will look.

Avoid mixing too many elements with different alignments. Favor small distinctions over gross ones.

Choosing a typeface

Typefaces are an area where modern technology has really given us an amazing array of tools for uglifying a book. We've all seen pages where the designer used a different face for every design element. This aesthetic is called "Junior High Yearbook."

Resist the urge to use lot of cool fonts and instead limit yourself to one or two faces. I recently designed a book of collected poems (East of Pouring by Drew Weinbrenner) where every element was left-aligned and only one face was used (Amalia, the same one shown in the samples above and below).

How do you pick your fonts? It's easy! Just look at type samples and find one that catches your eye. Throw that one out. Repeat, and keep repeating until you get to a font that you didn't notice at first, but which looks well-proportioned when you look at it closely. That one could be a good choice. Make sure it is a good font from a reputable foundery and not a cheap knock-off.

There are historical considerations in font choice, but we won't worry about those now. (Check out Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style.) Amalia, for example, is a neo-Dutch faced designed by Nikola Djurek for FontShop. Did it look ordinary in the fuzzy sample above? It's actually quite interesting. Check it out closer up.

Especially if you are on the PC side, I recommend OpenType fonts, which are cross-platform. This can be important since most output shops and printers favor the Macintosh. If you give them application files there's a good chance they will give the job to a Mac pre-press person who will substitute Mac fonts, ruining your line breaks and spacing. (You can also avoid this by printing from a high-quality pdf with the fonts embedded.)

Colophon

How many of the guidelines I have lain out here can be broken? All of them.

Parsimonious publishers who slavishly lay out all their books in one template, as though the contents weren't different in each case, hold little interest for me. Design should serve content. It should be creative. It should be fun.

You're not likely to get rich publishing books, so you'd better enjoy doing making them. I'm working on a book now that could hardly be more aggravating. But I still love making and reading books.

Just, please, don't make them ugly.

That's my final word here at ForeWord. Many thanks to my hosts, and please visit me over at Right Reading.

Posted by: Tom Christensen

Have you ever got in the middle of one of those Mac versus PC arguments, where fierce partisans of each platform express contempt and loathing for the other? You can get stuck in that argument and lose sight of the fact that it's not the computer that matters, it's what you do with it.

Some people are the same way about print and electronic media. At one extreme, print partisans say they they would never read anything on a screen, and may even pride themselves on their ignorance of electronic media. At the other extreme, some new-media advocates contend print is archaic and useless, and will soon become extinct.

The reality is that there is a place for both traditional and new media. Just because a publisher is working in print doesn't mean it can afford to neglect the Internet. All print publishers should master the basics of Internet marketing, because it offers potentially higher returns than can be obtained from traditional methods. Let's look at why that is and how to make it work.

The first and most obvious factor in favor of online marketing is the sheer numbers it offers. I maintain several blogs on different subjects. The one that gets the most traffic is a blog that is generally devoted to publishing issues. Together with its associated html site, it gets around 150,000 visits in a year—a relatively small number compared to the most popular blogs. According to eBizMBA, the blog Gizmodo receives several million visitors a year—probably 20 times or more than I get.

Now compare those numbers to print publishing. When I was at North Point Press, we made the New York Times national best-seller list with a title that had only 30,000 copies in print—about the number of readers my site gets in a few months. (Granted, I'm comparing book sales to web visits, which are not directly equivalent, but the different order of magnitude is still staggering.) A book that I co-translated, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, ranks as one of the twentieth century's best-selling titles. But its initial printing was said to be 11,500 copies (publishers commonly inflate these numbers)—fewer than the readers my blog gets in a month—and even its peak annual sales of perhaps 675,000 copies could not compete with the top online numbers.

Okay, so there are a lot of people online. But how can they be turned into customers?

Before answering that question, let's take a broad look (omitting all but the largest factors) at some of the different ways books can be sold. We'll compare traditional bookstore distribution with sales through online retailers such as Amazon or Powell's and with direct sales through a publisher's own website.

Sales to bookstores through a distributor

Let's assume we have a book that retails for $20. Traditionally, a network of sales reps would be employed to present the publisher's list (along with those of many other publishers) to buyers at key bookstores around the country (maintaining sales reps who actively sell to stores is what distinguishes a distributor from a wholesaler or fulfillment service). At each store the rep might devote 20 or 30 seconds to those of your main titles that seem the best match for the store. In exchange, the distributor will probably charge the publisher somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of net sales. How good a deal the publisher can cut with the distributor might be affected by the prestige its list brings, its growth potential, the desirability of its niche to the distributor, or other factors, but mainly it's a function of volume of sales (the greater the volume the better the publisher's percentage is likely to be). For our analysis we'll figure the distributor takes 40 percent.

Bookstores buy the book at a significant discount off the retail price. The exact discount is supposed to depend on the size of the order, but the store can probably gang your titles with those of other publishers represented by your distributor to get a better discount. We'll figure the bookstore discount averages 48 percent.

So, for a $20 retail book sold through traditional bookstore channels—leaving aside shipping and other fees —the bookstore will pay $10.40, of which the distributor will take $4.16, leaving the publisher $6.24. (The real world number would be smaller, because I am leaving several expenses out of consideration here.)

A further complicating factor is that books are sold to stores on a returnable basis. Selling into the stores is called the "sell-in." Those books still have to be purchased by a reader—that's called the "sell-through." Industry-wide, sell-through is probably around 65 percent of sell-in. That means that in order to sell 65 books you have to print and get 100 into stores, only to see 35 of them come back to you as returns. In 2002, 37 percent of all bookstore sales were returned, and some 80 percent of returned books ended up being destroyed. This is a significant factor that new publishers sometimes forget to figure into their calculations.

Sales through online retailers

Online retailers offer a bewildering number of publishing arrangements. Basically, however, their business is built on underpricing brick and mortar stores by offering books at a discount. I haven't been able to find an authoritative source for Amazon's average book discount, but I would guess it's about 25-30 percent off retail. In order to offer prices like these, they buy from publishers or wholesalers at steep discounts, perhaps 60 percent.

That means if the publisher can sell direct to Amazon it would keep $8 dollars on a $20 book—better than the $6.24 it would see through a distributor/bookstore sale. Moreover, I don't think you are likely to see many returns from Amazon, and these, as we have seen, are a significant factor on the publisher's bottom line. So, while there are many compelling reasons to support independent booksellers, on a pure short-term profit-and-loss basis online retailers offer a better return than traditional bookstore sales through a distributor.

Direct sales from publisher to reader

But why routinely give that big discount to Amazon? You're still going to be paying shipping costs. If a publisher could sell direct from its own website it would see a much better margin. What would this require? In my opinion, it requires two things: an e-commerce function and an effective web marketing program that will bring consumers to your site where they can make the purchase.

Without an e-commerce function the publisher is reduced to asking the consumer to call or fax orders, which are then fulfilled manually. In today's online world, many consumers are reluctant to initiate this comparatively cumbersome process. They want a secure website where they can make an immediate purchase with a credit card or a paypal account. There are several e-commerce options for small publishers. One of the simplest is Yahoo Store (I offer Yahoo not as an endorsement, but as an example). The publisher pays a small ($50) one-time set-up fee and then a monthly fee of $39.95 or more depending on volume, as well as a 1.5 percent transaction fee. The Yahoo name is reassuring to consumers, and the secure sale is handled through its site and then forwarded to the publisher for fulfillment.

That means that the publisher retains $19.70 out of the $20 retail price. That's $13.46 more per book than with the distributor/bookstore model and $11.70 better than with the Amazon model. Therefore (leaving aside the initial set-up fee), to come out even with the other methods of selling you would only have to sell three or four books books a month. At that point you've covered your monthly fee, and thereafter one direct sale is worth two or three sales made through the other channels. All three approaches might be worth doing, but clearly direct sales are gold if you can get them. So it would be logical to try to maximize such sales as a percentage of the total.

But can you bring enough visitors to your website for it to produce a meaningful volume of sales? That's the subject for my next post. Stay tuned!

Posted by: Tom Christensen

You know that book publishing is in a moment of crisis when the big New York publishers start talking about cutting back on their glam literary lunches. Yet just the other day Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper, was quoted in the New York Times musing about"whether it's absolutely essential to have a lunch here or there."

Sure enough, recently Houghton Mifflin suspended acquisitions, laid off staff, and saw its publisher resign. Thomas Nelson cut 20 percent of its workforce. Random House announced a major reorganization. Penguin imposed a salary freeze on many of its workers. Borders cut hundreds of corporate jobs. Barnes & Noble reported multimillion dollar losses. And the president and CEO of Simon & Schuster warned that worse could lie ahead.

Digital media advocate Steve Rubel went so far as to declare that print itself is in its death throes, and he predicted that print media will be extinct by 2014.

That's not going to happen. Printed books are a proven technology. A commercial book trade has existed at least since the first century of the common era. The earliest existing dated book, from 868, is still usable, while digital documents from just twenty years ago can barely be deciphered today.

Still, it is clear that the book publishing industry needs to make adjustments to respond to the rise and digital media and the fall of the economy. In many ways, independent publishers are better prepared for this transition than are the large corporate houses. So let's look at five lessons smaller publishers can offer their bloated rivals.

1. Streamline your operation for maximum efficiency

Small publishers have always played on an unlevel field. The corporations that control most of publishing also own means of distributing and publicizing their titles. (The largest book publishing companies are owned by Bertlesman, News Corp, Time Warner, Disney, and Viacom, who also own countless newspapers, radio stations, and magazines.) As a result, the smaller publishers have become lean and efficient, eliminating many of the redundancies of the larger organizations.

Right now I am reading a book by David Silverman called Typo: The Last American Typesetter; Or, How I Made and Lost $4 Million (An Entrepreneur's Education) (Soft Skull, 2007). In it Silverman describes the way a huge typesetting organization handled a job: "Each book required a job estimator, a customer-service person, a setup person, a keyboarding manager, outside keyboarders, one or more typesetters, and art specialist, a 'proofer' (it took me a while to figure out this was the person who ran the laser print), one or more quality-control people, a system-setup person (a whole position to set up file folders on the system), a technology specialist for when things went wrong (they always went wrong), a production supervistor, a plant manager, a shipping clerk, and a billet.... There had to be a better way."

There is a better way. Using software like Quark and InDesign, a small team of employees with flexible job descriptions can produce books for a fraction of what it costs large organizations with entrenched redundancies of operation. But beware -- such software enables an ignorant designer or typesetter to do serious damage. Small publishers should consult books like Robert Brindghurst's The Elements of Typographic Style in order to learn the basics of sound book design.)

2. Publish books you believe in

I'm currently a reader for the Northern California Book Reviewers 2008 Translation Award. There is a strong group of excellent translations contending for this award. Who are the publishers of these books? They are City Lights, Dalkey Archive, Green Integer, Kaya, Melville House, Milkweed, New Directions, North Atlantic, Omnidawn, Wesleyan, Whereabouts, and Yale. They are all independents and university presses -- not a single corporate publisher is represented!

It wasn't always that way. Alfred A. Knopf built the publishing house that bears his name by publishing books in translation. But today Knopf has turned its back on that tradition and publishes fewer translations than some publishers whose employees number in single digits. High-quality literary translations might not offer the quick profits than a little picture book about cats might bring in (I know an editor at a larger house who calls himself their token editor "for books with words"), but once independent publishers find the market for their unique type of publishing, so long as they are putting out excellent books they are likely to develop a solid base that will see them through the ups and downs of the marketplace.

3. Develop the backlist

Books like this are seldom designed to capitalize on a passing fad or a blip of celebrity gossip -- they are books that are likely to remain pertinent for many years. Because bookstore-oriented publishing is so frontlist-loaded, it is difficult to get big numbers out of the backlist using traditional channels of marketing and distribution. Collectively, however, backlist books can produce a steady stream of sales that can level out the up-and-down curves created by orders and returns of frontlist titles.

With frontlist publishing you are only as good as your current book, and for the most part you are not building a foundation for the future. Backlist publishing, on the other hand, helps to sustain a press when new titles fail to meet expectations. New techniques of small-run printing make building a backlist more economically feasible than it was in the past, when larger numbers needed to be printed in order to reduce unit costs. Some backlist books can even be kept on a publisher's list through print on demand.

4. Build your personal network

One of the reasons that book publishing has been particularly vulnerable to the economic downturn is that it has been slow to let go of antiquated models of operation. In the past, a title was announced and bound galleys were sent to hundreds of book reviewers. The reviews created demand for books, which were picked up by a large network of independent bookstores. To encourage the stores to give shelf space to the books, publishers offered them more or less on consignment. Early readers further built demand through word of mouth. Bookstore buyers noted the interest and reordered the title, and healthy sales resulted.

Hardly any of this structure still exists in the same way. Newspapers have been folding and cutting book reviews -- there are only a few major book review sections left. Independent bookstores are a much smaller segment of the market than they used to be. Books stay on shelves for shorter periods of time, so that word-of-mouth has less opportunity to be effective. Book reorders are less likely to be made by knowledgable staff who have interacted with customers than by automated computer inventories that may fail to pick up on reader enthusiasm. Books are often sent to the wrong stores, only to be sent back to publishers as returns or hurts -- it's said that today only UPS makes much money from book publishing.

Most smaller publishers have identified a particular niche, an area of publishing in which they are passionate and knowledgable. This enables them to find alternative ways of finding and introducing themselves to the primary market for their area. The internet offers many opportunities for social networking that publishers would be wise to take advantage of.

Consider the success of the Obama presidential campaign, with its focused approach to marketing. Robert Niles of the Knight Digital Media Center has observed that "Republicans mocked Obama's experience as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago. But Obama's community organizing skills defined his campaign. ... [T]his will be the new roadmap for election campaigns: do not rely on ads and news coverage to convince people to vote your way on election day. Instead, recruit volunteers throughout your community and use the power of their personal relationships to build a network of loyal supporters that expresses its support through publishing, demonstrating, organizing, recruiting and, ultimately, voting. Then send those volunteers into new communities, to build new personal relationships that can extend your campaign into fresh territory."

Publishers should consider this model and see if similar opportunities for building networks of support exist in their areas of publication.

5. Think about the book as an object

Finally, it is important to remember than digital publishing is faster and in some respects more flexible and convenient than print publishing, and it routinely reaches much larger audiences. Purely as a means of delivering words to readers, print cannot compete with online alternatives. Larger publishers have been trying to reduce the expense side of their finances by lowering the quality of production, for example by printing on paper that is barely distinguishable from newsprint and probably has about the same life expectancy.

I believe this is a mistake. One great thing the book has going for it is its aesthetic quality, which far surpasses that of digital publishing. A well made book is a treat for the hand and the eye.

Independent publishing is never going to be an easy business. But as long as independent publishers do not lose sight of the goal of making the best books they can in the best way that they can, their books will continue to find readers.

Posted by: Tom Christensen

In contrast, the goal behind the brand of networking I’m advocating is to blend so fully into the fabric of the network itself that somehow you’re everywhere that people look.

The contrarian rationale for this approach was provided in last week’s post. For those of you entering the theater a few minutes into the movie, we’re not talking about the stealthy infiltration of publishing’s VIP Room, but rather the natural, low-stress, and meaningful growth of your career over the long term. It’s not about you being the hub of the universe, or wearing a sandwich board with your résumé on it. It’s more like you’re a really good server—always on, reliable, and yet as anonymous and ego-free as a piece of hardware.

How to turn such theory into practice? Well, here are some rules of thumb I’ve found helpful….

Network with the Person, Not the Company

At the risk of stating the obvious, that contact of yours at the bookstore chain, publisher, or press outlet could switch employers at some point, yes? When that happens, you can then extend your network accordingly—provided you’ve built the relationship with the person. That means not just treating him or her as a flesh-and-blood extension of the corporate monolith. Chances are, there’s human being under there, one who—guess what?—would probably welcome the chance to network with you as well.

Be a Source of Intelligence

If you know a reporter is covering a given beat, or that an editor is developing a line in a certain area, keep your antennae alert. When you come across a news story that might be of interest, send an e-mail saying. “Did you notice this?” It will take about thirty seconds and fewer characters than a Twitter post. The idea is not for us to run around like altruists with our heads cut off, helping everyone else out while blowing our own deadlines. Rather, the trick is to see oneself always as part of a professional field, a cause, an area of expertise, and so on. Then everyone else who also operates in that sphere is either an ally or a potential ally—not “contacts” to be milked for all they’re worth. So if you freely offer intelligence as you gather it, then before you know it, you won’t have to—folks will come to you asking for it.

Use “Strategy” Strategically

In other words, don’t overthink things. Sometimes you’ll want to go tactical, but sometimes you’ll want to opt for a more Taoist go-with-the-flow approach. So try not to consider networking as a grid-based board game where you’ve always got to decide to where to place your pieces with the utmost care and precision. First of all, in real life you have an unlimited number of pieces. So think of networking as a board game if you like, but just be aware that its rules allow you to pour yourself all over the board.

Offer to Help Informally

The adverb “informally” is wonderful device for taking the pressure off. The parties you’re trying to build relationships with will sense that you’re not just another player requesting something from them—a paying gig, media coverage, an introduction to a mover-and-shaker. Instead, you’re saying it would be absolutely no problem for you to help them out in an advisory way, no strings attached. Maybe that means sharing contacts. Maybe that means a brief meeting where you provide some brainstorming over coffee before getting back to the daily grind. At the very least, this kind of “volunteer” approach to doing business puts you more in the know. And while of course you’ve got to respect confidentiality, the great thing about becoming an informal partner is that it gives you that inside edge... which is why you’re reading a blog called “Publishing Insider” in the first place, isn’t it? Just checking.

Don’t Connect Yourself, Connect Others

If you put “A” and “B” together consistently, and without an overt agenda for yourself, then you’re automatically connecting yourself more substantially to both A and B. In fact, the current economic downturn is the perfect time to make this practice a part of your networking repertoire. For example, know any folks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who have been laid off? Could their experience really benefit an indie publisher, either as an employee or as a consultant until they land their next job? Don’t get deeply involved in the matchmaking process—you’re not a recruiter, after all. I’ve found that a simple e-mail recommending someone, and copying that person, works wonders.

Revisit Your Base

This point may be too obvious too include. But the reason I’m doing so is to mitigate the tendency I've noticed where networking is thought of solely as meeting brand new people and then rushing back to one’s office to stuff and mount their business cards. Sure, that’s part of the fun. Yet effective networking also means keeping the lights blinking steadily regarding those with whom you’ve established relationships over the years. The temptation to be complacent, at least for me, is sometimes very hard to resist. So bring yourself back to reality if you find yourself thinking, "Hey, so-and-so recommended my company [or reviewed my work favorably, etc.] back in ’05— I’m sure they’ll let me know if a great opportunity for me crosses their radar screen." The key, though, in keeping one’s existing network vital is to keep using all of the above techniques, not take things for granted.

There’s definitely a lot more to say on this topic, but I’ve run out of space. Want to continue the conversation, or tell me how to refine some of these pointers? Great, here’s my e-mail address: fiifgutierrez@gmail.com. Consider us networked.

Posted by: Peter Gutiérrez

Posted by: Peter Gutiérrez

Posted by: Lynne Scanlon

Posted by: Lynne Scanlon

Posted by: Sara Dobie

Posted by: Judy Gruen

Posted by: Judy Gruen

Posted by: Judy Gruen

Seven years ago, in a moment that was either inspired or crazy (or both) I decided to write a humor book called Carpool Tunnel Syndrome: Motherhood as Shuttle Diplomacy. I had already worked as a writer and editor for several years, had a graduate degree in journalism, and had many author friends, so this idea wasn't quite as ludicrous as it might have been if I were, say, an actuary for an insurance company. Since I knew something about book publishing already, it made my idea merely meshugena.

Still, as an unknown writer, I knew my chances of landing an agent and contract with a reputable publishing house were slim. So, trying to save time and aggravation (that was the idea, anyway) I decided to self-publish. Knowing I lacked the skills to handle all the functions of a publisher, I researched publishers that offered self-publishing services. One man at the publishing house I almost (and should have) signed with was saint-like in his patience for my endless questions during numerous phone calls.

This brings me to my favorite line from the movie "Terms of Endearment," when Jack Nicholson, who plays a retired astronaut romantically involved with Shirley MacLaine, keeps trying to make a break from MacLaine, who is clinging to him needfully. Just when he thinks he can bolt, MacLaine latches on again. Nicholson, in classic tone, says, "Just seconds from a clean getaway."

And so there I was, ready to write the publisher a big check and get my book project moving,  when a friend about to self-publish her husband's book invited me to publish my book under her new imprint. She had read John Kremer, she had bought a block of ISBNs, she was applying to B&T and Ingrahm for distro agreements, and she was an outstanding graphic designer who I knew could ably handle the book design.

"Why not?" she said. "I know you could save a lot of money if we do it together."

And so, like Nicholson, just seconds from a clean getaway, I signed an agreement with my friend that we cobbled together as best we could. This was a big mistake. I ignored my misgivings, such as that my friend had a controlling personality that I knew could make her difficult to work with, and that despite my research, which included calling publishing attorneys, no one had ever heard of this kind of publishing partnership and could offer no advice about how to structure the contract. Our agreement spelled out our respective responsibilities as we could foresee them. But of course, certain things were not foreseeable, such as my friend's marriage dissolving, her life becoming so tumultuous that she could no longer keep up her end of the bargain, and the worst: her deciding to yank her (ex)husband's book from circulation, ending her imprint, and therefore forcing me to declare my own, precious first book OOP when it was barely getting its sea legs.

This was devastating. I had devoted more than six months to just marketing the book, networking with every Mom-related web site in the universe, sending out review copies, contacting magazines, a maniacal one-woman marketing machine. And she was the one who convinced me to publish with her! 

Despite this, we had three successes: Radio shrink Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who had more than 20 million listeners back then, plugged the book on her show and offered it as a giveaway to "the first five callers" who called our toll-free number. (No one on her staff told us that our phone would start ringing at 6 a.m. and go through the night, by "first callers" who listened to the show in every time zone imaginable.) I also sold an excerpt to Woman's Day (circulation 6.2 million at that time), and they also put in our toll-free number to order.

Dr. Laura's plug pushed the book sky-high on Amazon . . . for about two days, after which it settled back down to humble territory. I was bewildered that the Woman's Day excerpt did almost nothing for sales that we could see, until I realized that a magazine whose every issue hawks "20 ways to save money" (my excerpt was about saving money, too) was a magazine whose readers waited for their books at the library. 

The third, and most substantial success, was my selling 2,500 copies of Carpool to Scholastic Book Fairs. This was a huge achievement, though a logistical pain (25 copies to this location; 87 to this location, etc), but at least I made a little money.

When I was forced to declare Carpool OOP, we hired a legal mediator to untangle our partnership, simple as it was. While my partner's troubles were far worse, I still felt I had gotten a raw deal. Thinking about what might have been with the other publisher was useless, but I wasn't ready to remainder my book to a small sad blip in publishing history. Tune in next week to find out what happened next!

(By the way, if you'd like to order a copy of Carpool Tunnel Syndrome, please order it from my web site, www.judygruen.com. Remember, it's OOP!)

“Graphic novel” is a weak name. For one thing, it sounds like smut. (“Man, that novel was so…so graphic!”) Besides, it implies that a book-length comic book must be fiction.

And that’s a rotten shame, because nonfiction graphic novels have a huge potential readership. The Zogby polling group just released a new survey on books and reading. It found that the most popular genres after general fiction are nonfiction: history, current events / politics / international affairs, biographies, and religion / philosophy. Library Journal’s 2008 book-buying survey says that the books with the highest circulation are in the medicine/health category. An Associated Press / Ipsos poll says that the most-read books in 2007 were the Bible and other religious works; history and biography were popular, too. Nonfiction sells.

So why does nonfiction account for only two percent of all graphic novels?

I took that figure from Amazon.com, which lists 74,021 graphic novels, of which only 1,573 are nonfiction. Quite a few of them aren’t graphic novels at all but prose nonfiction about comics like Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America.

Maybe there are so few nonfiction graphic novels because they don’t sell. Or maybe not.

Rank Amazon’s GNs by sales. You’ll find that the top one percent – in fact, the top one-third of one percent – includes plenty of nonfiction. There’s history and current events like The 9/11 Report and Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History series, and memoirs such as Fun Home, Persepolis, and Maus.

What’s more, Joe Sacco’s work of comics journalism Palestine seems to find new readers every time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heats up. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is virtually required reading for anyone interested in comics. And Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor became an Oscar-nominated movie.

Publishers for kids know the strength of nonfiction GNs. Capstone Press’ Graphic Library series has dozens them, covering history, biography, and science (including – cough, cough – my own Samuel Morse and the Telegraph). Lerner Publications has its Graphic Universe line, Rosen Publishing has Graphic Nonfiction, the British publisher Osprey’s Graphic History imprint focuses on wars and battles, and Gossamer Books publishes nothing but nonfiction graphic novels.

But where are the graphic-novel equivalents or adaptations of the nonfiction that adults buy? It’s hard to find comics versions of spiritual and self-help books like The Purpose-Driven Life, The Secret, The Last Lecture, and A New Earth. There aren’t many political manifestoes like Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope and Ron Paul’s The Revolution. There’s a shortage of GNs full of advice along the lines of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, or Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. And where are the GN editions of food books like The South Beach Diet? As my retailer friends say, we’re leaving money on the table.

If publishers start generating graphic novels for grown-ups in a variety of nonfiction genres, will retailers and librarians stock them? Maybe not immediately, but I think it’ll happen. I can imagine publishers producing floods of squarebound comic books full of happy-talk spirituality, oversimplified investment counseling, rants about government, and hardnosed commands about how to eat, behave, feel, think, and live.

Say, publishers? Take your time, okay?

Posted by: Rudy Shur

For independent publishers, it is the best of times and it is the worst of times. And yes, I know I took that line from Dickens—but it is absolutely true. Today’s breakthrough technologies have allowed more people to print books than ever before in the history of mankind. Years ago, the cost of editing, typesetting, printing, and promoting a book made publishing prohibitive for most. Now, we are able to digitally typeset and print a single copy for peanuts. This remarkable technology has ignited the entrepreneurial spirit in thousands of people here and around the world. Now, we can all be publishers! Every would-be author can see his or her name on books; children can give their grandparents a copy of their latest handy work in a bound edition; and no books need ever go out of print again. Could it be the dawn of a new golden age of independent publishing? I don’t think so.

About sixty years ago, an individual in England would have to work years to become a bonafide publisher. They would first work as a publisher’s apprentice, and then move up the ranks. After years of service, they would hopefully be granted a certificate letting the world know that they have proven themselves worthy of being called a “Publisher.” Publishing was considered a trade, but that was then. Today, it seems all you have to do is get on the right website, download your file, and within a few days your book will arrive at your front door. And yes—according to the website copywriters, you have just become a publisher. The truth—and what the website will not tell you--is that your book has been printed, which is, in fact, not the same as being published. And while it may look, feel, and even smell like a book, it is not a published work.

For the indie publisher today, publishing is a hard-nosed, fight-for-every-sale, better-know-what-you-are-doing business. Financially distressed distributors can bring you down; vendors think nothing of holding onto your money for months at a time; and, even when you think you are ahead of the game, there are those unexpected returns to put a dent in your cash flow. And just like that smell of napalm in the morning, I love it. What I don’t love, however, are all those people who tell anyone with a computer that printing a book makes them a publisher. For every one of those folks who buy into it, there is another person willing to teach them how to create a bestseller, how to get free PR, how to become rich—off of their book. The truth is the only people becoming rich are the people printing the books and selling the seminars.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with lots more people becoming publishers. Independent publishers have always been the driving force behind innovations, discovery of new voices, and quality over profits. However, if you are going to be a publisher, you not only need to know how to run a business, you also need the drive and instincts to run it. Take courses on the subject. PMA, the Independent Book Publishers Association, offers great workshops on the subject. Talk to people who are in the business. Read books about the subject. Send some time walking the halls of the BEA. Do all you can to prepare to be brutalized, and then when you think you are ready, ask yourself one question. Do I want to run a business or be a writer? And if you truly want to be a publisher, then go for it.

I answered that question years ago, and have never looked back.

Back to you.
Rudy Shur
Publisher
Square One Publishers

Posted by: Rudy Shur

Posted by: Victoria Blake

Posted by: Victoria Blake

Posted by: Victoria Blake

    They say that starting a business takes twice as long as you think it will, and costs twice as much. When I heard this-on NPR, the week before I was going to leave my good, solid editorial job to start Underland Press-I thought, Nah. Not me. I have a plan.
    What was that plan? To start a publishing house with between five to seven titles in the first year. To be distributed by one of the industry heavies. To develop my web site beyond industry boundaries. To only publish what I love, and to love what I am sure I can sell. 
    I love stories that scare me. I like weird things-monsters and magic and characters with nothing to lose. More than anything, I like to be intrigued and entertained. I started Underland Press to bring the best of the world's weird, scary, odd, unsettling and strange stories to life and to light.
    So how's it coming? I left my editorial job in October. In the last five months, I've been to Frankfurt and back, found a lawyer and fired a lawyer, negotiated for five books, read eleven manuscripts, taught myself QuickBooks, opened two bank accounts, designed one cover and three different business cards, had in-depth discussions about the definition of "weird," been yelled at by one agent, and been reduced to tears exactly twice.
Also: I signed a distribution contract with PGW. I bought the rights to three of my five books. My web site is coming along, and I'm about ready to announce something big.
    I might be four months behind where I wanted, but my launch won't take twice as long.
    I might be spending more on my web site than I wanted, but the business won't cost twice as much.
    Plus, I am having a blast.

ForeWord has asked me to blog about my experience starting a genre press. If there's something you're interested in, please ask. Next week, I'm planning to write about the creative vision behind Underland, and what my definition of genre is. I wish I had a web site up for you to go to, but it's taking a little longer than I hoped… Maybe by the time I next post…

Posted by: Victoria Blake

Book industry numbers are cold-sweat terrifying for publishers and authors alike. According to Nielsen Bookscan, 3,000 books are published per day in the United States alone (as reported on www.deadlyprose.com). ForeWord can review at most a few thousand per year. Publishers report an average of 2,100 submissions per year, totaling 132 million submissions. Just under one percent are accepted for publication.

In the face of these staggering odds, is there any hope for authors and publishers?

The Majority of Books Sell Fewer than 99 Copies
Of the 1.2 million titles tracked by Bookscan in 2006, only 2.1% sold more than 5,000 books, 16.6% sold fewer than 1,000, and a terrifying 79.6% sold fewer than 99 copies. The 99 copies are no doubt the reason only one percent of authors’ submissions make it through the arduous publisher-review process.

This is all the stuff of wake-in-a-sweat nightmares: 63,000 publishers vie for readers with their wonderful author lists (according to Dan Poynter’s ParaPublishing.com).

The terror is no less for authors: only six conglomerate publishers publish fewer and fewer debut authors and less and less fiction. Then the real horror story commences as a book makes it into distribution. The bestseller dreams of authors and publishers are splashed with the cold water of real numbers.

Negative or Naïve?
Am I being negative or naïve? Perhaps both. The naïve part of the equation is my firm belief there are ways to break through these barriers to success. Kunati  was founded with this goal in mind, and has proven it can work.

Heather Shaw touched on one important element of the success formula in her insightful Blog on book covers. When competing with 1.2 million titles, first impressions (impact) and credibility are vital. These are the twin functions of a cover.

What Works for Selling Books?
Websites, book videos and novel trailers, author critique groups, social marketing, author Blog tours, old-fashioned but still-important book signings, and publicity are the proven methods for marketing. I hope to focus on these in future Publisher Insider Blogs in a more how-to format.

Innovation begins with a study of what works. Read every Blog in the ForeWord archive and every article in the magazine. Visit the sites of successful publishers—the innovative publishers who lead with new ideas such as novel trailers, Blog touring, online publicity. (hint, hint, Kunati). Read every page on sites from innovative publishers.

Getting Noticed is the Primary Goal
My message is simple. With these horrifying numbers, being noticed is almost the only thing that matters—for both authors and publishers. Many authors are creative, even brilliant, yet if they can’t market their “author brand” no publisher is interested.

The publisher faces an epic battle analogous to a Tolkien quest to get attention in the marketplace. The publisher must build the authors’ brands, edit the manuscripts for the market, arrange distribution, obtain reviews from magazines (which choose from millions), then sell to wholesalers, retailers and finally readers.

The Retailer
How does a retailer choose which titles to carry? The average retailer chooses to stock a few thousand copies per year, far less than 1% of the titles available—similar in numbers to the reviews published annually by ForeWord. That’s not a coincidence.

Publisher and author success relies on buzz, which is a combination of review exposure, social networking, book cover designs, author activities such as Blogs and signings (the two types of touring, virtual and tangible). The last part of the equation is wonderful content.

Innovative Authors Look Beyond Good Prose
With the knowledge that more than 80% of books published are going to fail, how can a publisher risk taking on new, unproven property? How can an author convince a publisher to take them on?

There are certain musts in an author presentation, and in our evaluation of the author:
• Is the query well-written? An author who doesn’t polish a query until it becomes the choicest morsel of prose ever written has no chance at all.
• Is the idea compelling? Yes, tell us the comparables (claims of being the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter are overused though!), but what’s the UNIQUE aspect—the high concept. No matter how small, there must be one.
• The sample chapters? Same story. If those three chapters aren’t pure masterpiece, the editor will tend to move on.
• Did they read the submission guidelines on the website? One mistake here disqualifies most authors. Take the time to study your prospective publisher.

Innovative Publishers Look Beyond Agents
Unlike many publishers, Kunati accepts un-agented submissions by email. How can we do this, given the awful odds against a new author’s success?

We certainly acquire agented manuscripts, but the creative-process required for an author to pitch a manuscript is clearest sign of ambition, drive and creativity. We believe in the un-agented submission. It allows the author to prove they can develop their author “brand.” Other things we look for:
• Is the author realistic about his/her prospects?
• Is the author able to work with the publisher at making the book as marketable as possible? Considering the numbers, this might be the most important of all.
• These days, we also look for authors who are savvy about online marketing, blogging, MySpace and social marketing, and who are not shy about public appearances. Some writers are notoriously shy, preferring to hide behind their keyboard.

Successfully Marketing Books Require a Publisher-Author Partnership.
The truth is, only bestselling authors receive major publishing support in marketing. A publisher’s first duty is to market to the trade. That’s a big job. Stores stock thousands out of the millions of titles. Just getting the books into distribution is monumental. Trade ads, reviews, advance reading copies, publicity, great book covers, strong web presence, book trailers—these all help. Even the big conglomerate publishers typically stop there. There’s not much in the way of marketing dollars left for end-reader marketing for 90% of authors. Hand-selling from retailers and buzz becomes the key to success.

Hand-selling and Buzz
Book selling is still very much a word-of-mouth business. Readers don’t always respond to what we think they will. Social marketing, in all its aspects, it the true secret of any book’s success. Books can become bestsellers when just one influential person finds it and starts buzzing (Oprah will do.)  Social marketing involves building a broad network of friends.

Ultimately, the true secret to publishing success is a strong partnership between authors and publishers, working together to create buzz. This is a big topic, and the subject of next week’s Blog.

Posted by: Derek Armstrong

Condemning Controversy?

Why are readers receptive to controversy? Judging from a report I received this week—the Library Open Access report “Tracking Challenges in Libraries: 2007 Results”—the opposite is true. Patrons are vocal in condemning anything notorious or contentious. It seems that some library patrons would bring back book-burning. So, why do Kunati’s provocative books sell so well? Why do controversial books such as The Da Vinci Code become bestsellers? How is it that publishers can turn controversy into bestsellers and provocation into opportunity when some readers seem vocally in favor of censorship?

Violence, Racism and Promoting Witchcraft

The easy answer seems to be the power of the silent majority—enlightened readers—voting for freedom and fun with their wallets. Librarians, publishers and booksellers continue to offer these books despite a vocal minority. Among the condemned titles from library patrons in the “Challenges” report were: Oliver Twist (for violence), Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby Girl (for racism), and—of course—Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass for religious viewpoints. I recall Harry Potter being on a previous list for “promoting witchcraft.” The list of 36 “patron condemned” books in the 2007 list included my favorite classics, making me wonder if this is indeed a 2007 report. Fortunately, the librarians—stewards of free thought—denied all requests to “burn” or remove books.

What’s so Controversial?

A quick analysis of this most entertaining report from librarians shows the most common reasons for requests to “pull” books off library shelves, in order of prominence, were: homosexuality, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit language, violence, offensive language. Thank goodness for librarians, otherwise all of my own novels would be burned:

• The Game: let’s see, explicit violence, offensive language—it is a thriller, after all

• The Last Troubadour: ah, religious viewpoint for its portrayal of the Cathars as heroes and the Inquisition as evil?

• MADicine: oh, probably everything on the no-no list.

I suppose I’d be in good company with nearly all of Kunati’s popular books—including a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a NY Times bestseller. Not to mention the rest of the “challenges” list: Exit to Eden, The Monkey King, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Rainbow Boys, Fly on the Wall, and the entire religion-based bestselling Left Behind series.

Steve Jobs says, “No One Reads Anymore.”

It seems that Apple’s Steve Jobs believes “people don’t read anymore.” The computer guru declared in his keynote at MacWorld 2007 that Amazon’s new e-ink reader was “dead on arrival” with a sweeping, and inaccurate, statistic: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” Good to know, Steve. I guess Job’s forty percent only read controversial books?

According to a landmark study of 10,800 Americans by Persona Corp in 2007: 30.6% “Can’t live without books”; 23.4% “LOVE books”; 20.9% “Read regularly”—totaling 74.9% of all Americans. I guess it depends on whether you make phone gadgets or publish books which survey you trust, although a quick look at actual book sales indicates Persona’s study is closer to the right number.

Book Sales Over 36 Billion Net in 2007

Net revenues on book sales, according to The Book Standard, were up another billion dollars to $35.69 billion net sales in 2006 and another 1% up in 2007. After removing the 162 million in sales, which are exports, this translates into approximately billions of books sold in a nation of three hundred million. Even a rough averaging works out as every man woman and child in America reading at least 12 books each. Clearly, Steve Jobs has some research to do. And Amazon’s out to prove Steve wrong, putting all their sizable marketing muscle behind the Kindle, a device that, by all accounts, might become the iPod of e-books.

Librarians and Publishers Do It For Love

Contrary to the doom and gloom scenarios often painted in the trade news, books are not only alive and well and flourishing (sales continue to go up, and contrary to Steve Jobs, we’re reading books) but the trade remains an important champion of free thought and free will. Is there anything more important to a free nation of free people? I don’t think so.

So next time you visit your public library, don’t forget to shake your librarian’s hand and say “thank you.” Independent booksellers and small press publishers—who publish and sell books for love, not profit—equally deserve the support of free-thinkers everywhere. I’ll go one step further, at risk of offending my beloved indy booksellers—bravo to Amazon, for ignoring the e-book’s checkered history and coming out with the Kindle. We may be a fragmented industry, but we come together for freedom—and we do it for love.

Posted by: Derek Armstrong

In a twist for the music industry’s digital revolution, “In Rainbows,” the new Radiohead album that attracted wide attention when it was made available three months ago as a digital download for whatever price fans chose to pay, ranked as the top-selling album in the country this week after the CD version hit record shops and other retailers.

Posted by: Jim Lichtenberg

So we’re used to it, right? We know what is, and what to expect from, a “NY Times Bestseller” (which is not the same as the NY Times bestseller lists).

A rock critic in my ill-spent youth (East Village Other to NY Times), I am now grooving on the spate of new books about rock icons like Dylan, Clapton, and even Patty Boyd, a beautiful young Brit, born of a dysfunctional family, who grew up to be a model and wife of George Harrison and then Eric Clapton. Wonderful Tonight by Ms. Boyd, is actually a whole lot better than Clapton’s Eric, which is an interminable set of acknowledgments of all the cool people he knew. (hence my title.) However, at a crucial point in Patty’s account of her break-up with George she describes the tension as being the same as “a chop stick about to come apart. Something had to give,” she writes.

Help! Did an editor ever read this? Not that Patty should be treated like Raymond Carver, but shouldn’t someone have asked for a better metaphor?

Of course, it is completely unfair to tar all editors with this brush. And I recommend, if you can, being a fly on the wall at an editorial meeting. It’s a fascinating dynamic to watch.

But, it does beg the question: what is a publisher? A few years ago, Peter Jovanovich, scion of Jovanich Publishers, told me that a publishing house is “a bank with an editorial department attached.” After all publishers haven’t printed, manufactured, distributed or sold books for nigh on to a long time. And if they are no longer really editing them, then what are they? Just a bank?

Enter the Internet, which is changing the equation quite fundamentally. As other publishing blogs have been feverishly discussing, and as I will attempt to demonstrate at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference next month in NYC, bringing content to customers is essentially a “service” in which an increasingly customized and customizable product (often self-published by the author) is embedded.

Two examples of the dawn of this service function are author sites, for example:
http://www.harpercollins.com/author/index.aspx?authorID=17367 and http://www.oreilly.com/authors/

But then Tim O’Reilly foresaw this direction in a 1995 paper.  

Which just goes to show that things that appear to be suddenly “right on the brink of change,” were probably there for a while. They were just hard to see.

Posted by: Jim Lichtenberg

In my end of our business, scholarly publishing, having “a sense of where you are” in perceiving where your field is going is what excites an editor’s imagination. That is, your success as an editor is predicated on having a clear sense of where your field is moving —be it religion, economics, or physics—and working backwards from that horizon to imagine what the next great books will be. “A sense of where you are” in the milieu of ideas inspires you, the editor, to ask, “what will the next truly great philosophy list look like, and what do I have to do to publish such a list. Which authors will I have to attract? What kinds of books will I have to develop, and in what combination?  What are readers—scholars and students here and abroad—interested in? What does the field need and how will such a list shape its frontier and its connections to other fields?”   

Scholarly publishers help to spur the course of intellectual progress by publishing various kinds of books—the tools of our trade:  Research monographs, the building blocks of knowledge in most fields; academic trade books, statements that provoke big questions about controversial issues within and across fields; treatises, systematic explorations of big subjects by major figures that galvanize entire intellectual discourses; and reference books, works that consolidate and memorialize knowledge in their fields.

While each of these genres is essential to a great scholarly list, of the four, the treatise provides editors their most delicious publishing opportunity because editors can often exercise an active hand in conceptualizing this kind of book and because it so generously rewards the editor’s sense of his or her field. Signing the big treatise is sometimes a function of blessed serendipity—being in the right place at the right time with the right author—but at a deeper level, such books can result from the planful imaginings of editors.  That is, astute and informed editors draw on a sense of what kinds of major, synthesizing works their fields need and actively look for such titles. 

Treatises can, and do, make singularly impressive contributions to learning. Think of the effect of E. H. Gombrich’s canonical Art and Ideas on the field of art, or Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions on comparative religion, or Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory on literary studies, or Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations on international relations. Provocative and path-breaking texts of this kind have for generations helped draw and redraw the map of scholarly knowledge—and can mark the careers of their editors.     

An excellent example of this kind of publishing can be found in the work of my colleague Brigitta van Rheinberg, Editor-in-Chief and History Editor of Princeton University Press. A few years back, Brigitta began thinking about the evolving trend toward global history, and started to discern the opportunity to engage this trend with a new set of books on master themes in global history. Beginning by signing a broadly contextualized historical book on racism, Brigitta followed through by signing global histories of empire and of famine, and is now working with prospective authors on similarly significant themes.

Brigitta works with a sense of where the field of history is going, a conception of how to embrace the themes that unify comparative and historical research, an understanding for how certain books would enhance the intellectual infrastructure of the field, an appreciation of the broad cross-national readership engage the themes addressed in these books, and a network of outstanding historian authors whose command of the relevant subjects enables them to tell the big story.

While it would be easy to consider the publication of these books simply as a string of thematic histories, that misses the point. Developing the idea for these books rewarded Brigitta’s sophisticated knowledge of the direction of her field, her understanding of the market, and her appetite for thinking big. For Brigitta, as for all good editors, “a sense of where you are” is the necessary ingredient in achieving major signings such as these. 

Bill Bradley would understand.  Ever the student of his game, Bradley offers an instuctive model to us for ours.  I recall stories of Bradley practicing his jump shot by methodically moving from under the basket outward, breaking down his hook shot into distinct parts, and deliberately pounding the last dribble of the ball before releasing his jumper to gain greater control over his shot. This mania for method may seem silly in a game as seemingly fluid and improvisational as basketball, but that’s not the point.  By self-consciously becoming a student of the game, Bill Bradley found ways to expand and refine his repertoire and improve his already awesome athletic gifts.

The lesson for scholarly editors is clear. To animate one’s publishing, it is vital to develop a sense of where you are in the flow of your field. That sense will produce a clearer understanding of the trajectory of your list, and will reveal new and exciting publishing possibilities.   

Posted by: Peter Dougherty

Posted by: Peter Dougherty

A little over two-and-a-half years ago, the scholarly publisher for whom I work, Princeton University Press, achieved the unlikely goal of placing one of our titles at the top of the New York Times bestseller list: Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. Weighing in at 80 pages in a small 4x6 format, Frankfurt’s book became an instant classic, and its author, an elderly and distinguished philosopher and teacher, something of a pop culture icon.

But for those of us at PUP, some of the most interesting action on this title has since occurred far from the roar of the American bestseller lists, and the media, including The Daily Show, and 60 Minutes, that popularized this book: that is, on the translation front. Now appearing in some twenty-five translated editions, On Bullshit has quietly achieved the status of an international publishing phenomenon.

Appearing in languages as diverse as Finnish, Hebrew, Portuguese, Catalan, Japanese, German, Czech, Korean, Indonesian, Serbian, and Italian, On Bullshit now travels under a remarkable variety of titles and covers. The Italian edition sports my favorite Euro-title, the expressive, Stronzate; the Finnish edition, Paskapuheesta; the French, De l’art de dire des conneries; the Portuguese, Da Treta; and the Brazilian Portuguese, Sobre Falar Merda.

And yet, according to my colleague Ben Tate, PUP’s Director of Subsidiary Rights and Translations Editor, many of the foreign editions have retained the English term, “bullshit,” either as their title or in their title of their respective editions. Some of these include the German, Danish, Swedish, and Dutch.

Adds Tate, “among the those editions which conveyed the book’s title in the local language, only the Italian comes closest to a straightforward translation, as “stronzate” means bullshit in the literal sense of cow excrement, but also in the sense which Frankfurt is considering. The rest of those publishers who sought to localize the title either had to approximate the expression using several words or had to settle for something close but inexact, such as the Brazilian Portuguese edition, Sobre falar Merda (On talking Shit) or the French edition, De l’art de dire des conneries (On the Art of Saying Crap) . Indeed, that is the reason so many of the publishers left the word untranslated. It’s a unique word with a specific history, and its meaning as addressed by Frankfurt is underpinned by the crassness and vulgarity of its literal meaning. It’s a special word.”

And while many of the international editions have emulated PUP’s sober, monochromatic cover, some of our foreign co-publishers bravely chose to go the graphic route, in the process rendering some pretty imaginative cover art. The Dutch edition is a shocking pink, the Portuguese edition sports stripes. Truly amazing is the Japanese edition which features anatomical images.

What are the lessons for publishers and authors in this international story? First, size—in this case, brevity—matters. Since time immemorial, book editors have encouraged authors to keep their books brief, partly—though not entirely—because foreign publishers find it easier (cheaper and faster) to translate shorter books. This is an object lesson in that sage bit of editorial advice.

Second, ideas matter. Say what you will about the nature of the subject, bullshit is an idea and Harry Frankfurt treats it as such—that is, philosophically. Ideas, if they are engaging, travel to the far corners of the earth, and so do good books about ideas.

Third, on a more anthropological note, the global popularity of Harry Frankfurt’s book suggests, and to put it more emphatically, confirms, that “bullshit” as a cultural feature knows no boundaries. We Americans have no monopoly on it. It is everywhere.

Last, but not least, the fact that so many of our foreign co-publishers used the English-language title, On Bullshit, attests to the enormous power of global English as an all-pervasive cultural force and, I suspect, of the enduring power of American popular culture.

So much for my brief publishing disquisition on the international aspects of this remarkable little book. I’d better stop now, lest I find myself engaging in more stronzate than I’d like to be accused of.

Posted by: Peter Dougherty

As publishing professionals, let’s follow the money. No, let’s fantasize about the money. An 8 @#%* million dollar advance! How many independent publishers can compete with that? It’s a rhetorical question and I assume we all know the answer. Grand Central, formerly part of Time Warner AOL, now part of Hachette, a French based, otherwise referred to as “Freedom,” 10-figure communications conglomerate, won the competition to publish the book. The French have always had a thing for the Kennedys, Jerry Lewis, and the willingness of Americans to bleed out on French soil.

In the days when book publishing assets were actually owned and controlled by the people whose names were on the mastheads, we were all independents. Some were big and some small, but the buck always stopped at the desks of the people who owned the firm and only cared about publishing books.  There’s no way that kind of money would or could have been concentrated on a single acquisition. Banks would not have extended that kind of credit line to even the largest houses, and there were not any multinational conglomerates in command yet to subsidize outsized advances and write-off the subsequent losses.

In less than a generation, a huge dichotomy has developed between the mega houses and everyone else. Except the term “mega” is misleading, because within the body of the conglomerate, the trade book publishing assets may amount to little more than the tip of one small toe nail. The book publishing companies get pulled around and traded like indentured servants. Firms like Grand Central have nothing to say about who owns them or from which nation their flag is planted. Perhaps there’s no reason to care, but most American book publishing assets aren’t domestically owned and haven’t been for years. This isn’t to suggest that the American based editors and other professionals are not entirely dedicated to their craft, but it does mean they ultimately have to answer to powers that would otherwise have nothing to do with the book business or this country. For them, it’s business. So at the end of the day, retiring Presidents and politicians can look forward to trading their connections and influence for multi-million dollar book advances; on the surface, all they have to do is deliver an “acceptable” manuscript. Behind the scenes? Well, what would you do under the radar for 7 to 8 figures?

Let’s go to the proverbial Main Streets, where privately owned publishing companies still exist and often thrive. This is where the real passion for books will be found. The only inhibitors will be poor choices or practices by the proprietors. This is probably not the soil within which the Kennedys and other celebrities will plant their so-called books. But it is where the word “independence” achieves its highest meaning and purpose. If there’s ever a day when conglomerate publishing is entirely controlled by “other” agendas, independent publishing will be here to save everyone.

Posted by: Jeff Herman

I can’t claim to be a F-O-J (friend of Judith’s). I have met her professionally on a few occasions, I know people who know her, and I know people who talk about her; there’s only a few degrees of separation between Judith and myself. And now I want to write about her, because she’s in the news again and is the most interesting book editor in memory to cross an otherwise boring stage.

About 18 years ago I had a private lunch with Judith Regan. I remember it and doubt she does. I was a young insecure literary agent and she was a youngish fledgling book editor at Simon & Schuster. I didn’t guess that within a few short years she would become the most dynamic and innovative editors in the business. In fact, it seemed that most new editors moved in and out of the business with silent velocity. I recall she was above average looking and had a great sense of style in the way she was dressed and groomed—a genuine head-turner in a town that boasts a lot of them, and in a business that’s known to clone blandness.  I was especially impressed by her sun glasses, or at least that’s what stays with me. I can’t say that I detected a sense of humor per se, but there was a mix of irony and sarcasm in her, and I suspected that if and when she laughed, it was noticeable and for good cause.

She was a high-strung Type-A personality, which is normal for a mid-towner in the middle of the week at mid-day. She was new to her job and had not yet made any big acquisitions. She explained she was recruited because of her Hollywood/LA LA Land connections, which made her a different species than her Ivy League in-bred colleagues. She expressed her dismay that “they” assumed she could simply open her Rollodex and recruit the rich and famous, and infamous, to write books real people would buy. Ms. Regan felt pressured to prove herself, and was willing to display her anxiety about it.

It was a warm humid New York kind of day and I failed to dress appropriately for the venue she selected, which was the NY Women’s Republican Club. Go figure. Because of me, we were not allowed to eat in the main dining area and were exiled to a side-room. I apologized for being “dressed down”, and she expressed her honest view that I should have known better. She was right. That and a cluster of similar experiences finally disciplined me to dress well. It became a habit to wear nice slacks and a collared shirt on days no meetings were scheduled, and a suit if I had appointments. Now I live and work in the countryside, and dress accordingly.

Back to Regan. With the speed of a comet, she became the “It Girl” at Simon & Schuster, and then seemed to be given a piece of the lease at Harper & Collins, where it was made clear that iconic Rupert Murdock personally liked her a lot. The rest is history. She made a lot of money for everyone, whereas most editors don’t. She hired her own publicist and became a celebrity, whereas many editors may not even recognize themselves in a mirror. She published books of so-called high cultural value and books that some people considered repulsive. Most of them made money, whereas most books that get published don’t.

Ms. Regan wasn’t a criminal and was a proven rain-maker beyond compare. So what was the problem? The answer to that loaded question is stuffed with years of bruised egos, resentments, dramatic interactions, steamy sexuality, and not always unreasonable concerns. I don’t have the inside story, but the trajectory of her Ms. Regan’ nine-figure law suit will surely uncork a rash of lushy gossip-geysers that most of us will enjoy immensely.

In closing, Harper Collins shouldn’t have lost Ms. Regan as a publisher and shouldn’t have acquired her as an enemy. Like a Hindu Goddess, she can either create or destroy with much more power than most individuals dare to aspire for.

Posted by: Jeff Herman

It’s interesting to note that the OJ book, which is independently published, continues to thrive as a bestseller. This should not surprise anyone. It vindicates Judith Regan’ commercial instincts and is why her peers and over-lords at Collins initially supported the acquisition. So OJ potentially “outs” himself as the killer. Why does that offend anyone? It would have been more offensive, and boring, if he wrote a book trying to prove that he didn’t do it. But people are always looking for reasons to get on their self righteous high horses, which can lead to censorship and often misses real opportunities to be useful.

The bottom line is that bloody true crime stories are commercially reliable, and that the OJ fetish is not yet ready to fade away.

The book became too hot a potato for any large corporate house to handle, which proves one again why independent publishing can, and must, thrive. While IF I DID IT isn’t an important book by anyone’s standards, it’s vital that a non black market venue existed for it to be published and widely distributed. All too often, and far below the public’s radar, countless good books are effectively terminated by the large corporate entities due to their lack of faith that enough people will buy them. But this is often due to a corporate culture that squelches risk taking, innovation, or anything that springs from gut instincts. Editors at large houses have to be mindful of their career tracks; it’s simply too risky to advocate for decisions that might end up losing a lot of money. Of course, independent publishers can go out of business for losing a lot of money, but they are also more likely to successfully follow their passion, not just their fears.

James Frey is in the news this week, but in a relatively silly and quiet way. Some kind of class action suit was settled that provided various lawyers with hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in fees, about $200,000 for random charities, and nominal refunds for the 2,000 or so consumers who feel compelled to demand them. But the need for the law suit is extremely confusing, because the publisher had already promised to give people their money back on demand. It may be safe to conclude that some savvy lawyers saw an opportunity to make some money for no good reason, other than the fact that they could.

The above scenario set back Random House and its insurer nearly a million dollars, and for what? Imagine how many books an independent house could publish with that much extra cash; which brings me to the real point. A dozen or so independent houses should form a consortium dedicated to the purpose of launching class action suits against their large corporate brethren. Only in-house lawyers would be used, thereby avoiding massive contingency fees. In any given week there must be at least one stupid thing one of the large houses does that is class-actionable and settleable. Eventually, the program can be structured so that the large houses simply pay a negotiated annual fee in exchange for not being hit by any class action suits. Sort of like protection money. Absurd? Well, is the current reality any less absurd? Are independent publishers any less deserving of such windfalls than vultures-at-law, especially since the money derives from the corporate supported houses?

Posted by: Jeff Herman

Traveling to a new location for vacation (and sometimes business) can be an exciting event and generally a lot of planning goes into the effort so you make the best use of your time. Often building your ideal itinerary may necessitate the purchase of several travel guides (or in my case diligent note taking in the cafe at BN) and I can only imagine that this situation is even more relevant if you travel as a family. Having had a great time - and probably seeing only half of what you thought you would - you leave the travel guides behind in the hotel room because they don’t fit in the bags.

What if you were able to build a specific guide before you left that you could either print out before or carry with you as an electronic e-book? This is an idea that Penguin publishing unit DK are experimenting with which allows users to select content from their travel guides and build their own guide. I found the site a little clunky but the idea is sound and as an electronic platform DK could be in a position to offer far more content than appears in their DK travel books. If Penguin has other travel related content this could also be integrated with the DK travel content to create a distinct product that perhaps has more breadth than a user could get other than buying multiple books.

Travel (book) related websites are (or have the potential to) generating decent advertising revenues. Since a travel guide is a glorified directory it will not be long until the web is the primary mode of distribution for this content as has been the case with traditional data driven directories (i.e. booksinprint). As e-products, the integration with content from other publishers, map applications, photos, video and Podcasting is not far away. For example, I want to visit Boston and I build a travel book that includes a history and background information on Boston, a walking tour of North Boston, a satellite map, restaurant recommendations in and around the walk and after lunch I want to go to the Museum of Fine Arts where I buy admission tickets, add the highlights of the collection tour and download the MP3 audio tour. Ultimately, I want this 'packaged' so that I can either print it out and/or retain as an e-book or e-collection for future use.

But wait a minute, does the interaction end there? Conceivably, I will be taking pictures and forging my own impressions about the visit. And perhaps I want to include experiential things, like what I had for lunch and whether I liked it. So the publishing platform I use to create my travel book of Boston should be something I can edit outside the confines of the publisher-supplied content. As such the DK application is not so functional but there are options elsewhere that are starting to appear - and in the future there maybe nothing to stop DK from adding this functionality.

One such application has been developed by SharedBook, a software company in lower Manhattan. Sharedbook works with content owners who want to extend their relationship with their customers and enable them to self-select content and build their own book and in the process adding their own content. SharedBook works with customers who may not seem like publishers such as Regent Cruises and Legacy.com, but the functionality is similar to what I describe above. Clients of Regent cruises are able to select some core content to create their book while also adding their own specific content. So they can add pictures, annotations or full length essays on their cruise experience. There are a surprising number of clients who take advantage of this program since it serves as a high quality memento of their journey.

Sharedbook has a relatively easy to implement solution and their model has enabled 'non-publishers' to treat as 'content' assets that otherwise would remain one-dimensional as marketing or promotional material. In the case of traditional publishers, the Sharedbook platform can allow publishers to engage their customers directly and perhaps with a stronger link because the publishers content goes along with the customers positive experience. Obviously, customers pay for the privilege of creating their unique books but the prices are both reasonable and set by the content owner.

Back to my Boston example and using a SharedBook I could have a coffee table book produced with all the elements I selected before I left, those I added during my trip and the those I added after I return home. Once home I could scan the MFA ticket stub, the restaurant menu and add photos with annotations. Then I have my own memento of my trip. Models such as those I have described above will become more prevalent as publishers see the value in opening up their content repositories and allowing consumers to interact with their content. It is a trend worth following.

Posted by: Michael Cairns, Information Media Partners