The Publishing Contrarian

Two hundred thousand titles published each year in the United States, 40,000 publishers with books on shelves at Barnes & Noble. And you wonder why YOU can’t find a literary agent or an editor? 

Two hundred thousand titles is a staggering number. To put it into perspective, visualize the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge spanning New York Harbor between Staten Island and Brooklyn, NY, at the start of the world’s biggest marathon. More than 36,000 runners are stretching and running in place, waiting for the race to start. Now take a look at this photo from the Runner’s World 1997 Calendar and in your mind’s eye multiply that figure by FIVE and you’ve got the size of the crowd of freshly published authors an unpublished author is up against. That’s how many people got published last year and the year before and the year before, and will be published next year and the year after.
 

 
 
The front runners in publishing get preferred positioning based on track record. By dint of previous book sales, Lisa Scottoline (Daddy’s Girl), Maeve Binchy (Whitethorn Woods), James Patterson (Step on a Crack), Danielle Steele (Sisters), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and John Grisham (The Innocent Man) will sprint out ahead of the unproven masses, easily maintain the lead and skip merrily to the big payoff—reimbursing the publishing houses’ coffers for the advance against royalties. Yes, the occasional upstart and unknown first-time author will also breathe the fresh air enjoyed by the lead runners, but not the majority of authors. No, in the “win, place, or show” of racing, mid-pack (if they are lucky) or end-pack (more than likely) will be the only place for them.

Do you really want to join the 200,000 writers who will get published this year and run the publishing marathon cheek to jowl or would it be smarter to pull a Rosie Ruiz and take the subway to the finish line?

Why Not Generate Book Sales the “New”-Fashioned Way?

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Boy, was I ever wrong! Last July I was practically turning cartwheels upon learning that George L. Jones had been hired away from Saks Department Store Group, where he had been earning $2,286,695+, to become the president, ceo and director of Borders Group. I eagerly anticipated an infusion of retail savvy from outside the self-protective and insular world of book publishing that would shake things up and ultimately transform the way business was done.

At the time he was hired, Jones pledged that he would not, repeat, would not, copycat what Barnes & Noble was doing, yet on March 22, 2007 he announced that he would significantly increase Border’s proprietary publishing program and launch a Web site—a site surely designed to compete head-on with Barnes & Noble online and Amazon.

Hello!  Wal-Mart, Costco, Sam’s, BJ’s Will Not Shelve a Borders Group Book. 

May I suggest, Mr. Jones, you hightail it over to Barnes & Noble Annual Reports online and look at the P&L statements for the imprint Barnes & Noble Books and see how they have fared, financially. I am not talking about Sterling Publishing, which B&N, Inc. acquired in 2003. I’m talking about the Barnes & Noble Books’ imprint, specifically.

I suspect that the vehement resistance certain to be displayed by Costco, Sam’s, BJ’s, and Wal-Mart—all the big, blousy retailers who make so much money off hawking books to the shopping cart set—might cause some surprise and then real consternation at Borders Group, Inc., when it becomes apparent that competing retailers are no more interested in improving Borders’ P&L than they were in improving Barnes & Noble’s.

Wake up and smell Seattle’s Best Coffee, Mr. Jones!

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Bill O’Reilly missed it when he talked about it on The O’Reilly Factor. Meredith Vieira, the Today Show host, missed it when she interviewed the three girls, young women really, future leaders of America all, who stood up in school on open-mic night and recited two lines from Eve Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues. No, they both blew it. It was not only the controversial recitation of the word “vagina” that should have been addressed, but the flawed character exhibited by the three girls when they lied to the high school principal about whether they would recite the two lines or not. 

Oh, yeah, right. The girls didn’t outright lie. They didn’t SAY they were going to recite the lines, but when asked by the principal, they implied that they didn’t intend to. That’s the issue I’d like to address.

Splitting Hairs, Double Talk and Obfuscation 101.

You’ve no doubt heard the story. The high school principal forbade teenagers Hannah Levinson, Elan Stahl and Megan Reback from reciting these lines: 

“My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women’s army. I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina’s country.”

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I am so tired of hearing unpublished writers (I won’t call a writer an author until he/she can actually show me a bound book or a buyable online version) wail about not being able to find a literary agent or get published or get readers to buy direct. Last night I practically leapt across a dinner table to throttle a wannabe author because he simply could not or would not absorb what I was telling him—that what he desperately needed was someone to assess his book and let him know if it was good or bad.

Over the main course I listened politely to the very familiar saga of an 80,000 word novel that had taken three years to write and that was destined to turn his life around as soon as his literary genius was revealed to all. Over dessert I nodded encouragingly at the synopsis of the story. Over coffee I braced for what I knew was coming next. Would I read the manuscript?

NO! The answer is NO. I will not read a total stranger’s manuscript. I will not spend hours and hours curled up reading a manuscript or an online book unless I know the writer and for personal reasons want to make the time available to read his book. I consider reading a manuscript, any manuscript, A LOT LIKE WORK.

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Fictional dog gets bitten in “scrotum” by rattlesnake. Censors evacuate their bowels over body-part reference and book burning begins!

The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron, winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s lit, has shocked, yes, shocked some school librarians. They are ripping The Higher Power of Lucky off their shelves, banning it, not ordering it. So there!

One person’s scrota are another person’s…

All I can say is that if I were the 10-year-old reader of this book and stumbled across the word scrotum (which little Lucky Trimble, orphan, overhears through a hole in a wall), I would actually know what scrotum was. In fact, I knew what it meant when I was even younger. Maybe 8- or 9-years-old. I knew what scrotum was because of a paper-bag-jacketed book tucked way up on the top-shelf over the workbench in the basement of the house in which I grew up. The book Diseases of the Skin contained the most horrific tight shots of people’s you-know-whats from every possible angle in every possible medical condition. (If my brothers are reading this posting: Yes, I saw that book, too!) Believe me, I’d have much rather found out what “scrotum” meant by reading the word in The Higher Power of Lucky and looking it up myself (and then looking up “testes” to see what that meant) or by dragging myself and the book downstairs and pointing to the word while asking one parent or another. Just like I did certain other words whose definitions absolutely flabbergasted me, like menstruation. (WHAT! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?)

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Sitting in the comfort of my New York City apartment, shoes off, feet up after a long and fruitless day at the New York International Gift Show looking for non-book product for TreadWaters (my pretend, inherited bookstore nestled in a small town in upstate Connecticut), I mulled over the mystery entrepreneur’s words from a previous posting. If you recall, I had asked him what it would take to make an independent bookstore successful these days. Mystery Entrepeneur had replied: “When in doubt—Ask! What would you have to believe about my store to be willing to come here and spend money here?”
 
I could think of many changes I could make within the store that would encourage people to pause and think of dropping by TreadWaters before driving to the more convenient Barnes & Noble on the main highway just outside of town, and I planned to make all of them, but I had the niggling feeling that those improvements would not create the dramatic increase in traffic that I needed—like a stampede to TreadWaters. 

I knew many other independent bookstores had increased the number of in-store events, showcased complementary products, offered a variety of book genres and stood ready, as knowledgeable handsellers, to help any and all who ventured into the bookstore. Yet, there just weren’t enough people entering their stores and walking away with shopping bags stuffed with books. And despite often heroic efforts to increase traffic to the stores, more and more independents had folded and the media had taken to sounding the death knell more and more loudly throughout the industry. (As recently as yesterday the LA Times ran an article entitled “Bookshops’ Latest Sad Plot Twist,” forwarded to me by Dave Newton.)
 
Wicked Witch Badgers People for Clues to Turning Around Independent Bookstore.

Creative suggestions from visitors to this blog, many with insider knowledge, flooded the Comments section of my last two postings about independent bookstores. The problem, as Mystery Entrepreneur said it would be, was that the suggestions were all over the place, from narrow and fairly easy to implement in the bookstore to more broad-based, ill-defined statements about being “hooked” into the community. The Mystery Entrepreneur had said: “Most of the people…will not have an answer—or, at least, not an answer that would prove to be truthful and accurate. But some, eventually, will. Sort of. And that’s the place to start. … someone will figure it out, and, in the process, change the way people who buy and read books interface with the people who produce them.”

So I pressed on, asking Mystery Entrepreneur’s question, again and again, until I began to get a sense that I might be onto something when it came to comments about community. For example, I had an off-the-record cup of coffee early in the morning last week with a top publishing executive in New York City. We hunkered down in a Starbucks at a table for two surrounded by slumped and sleeping homeless people nursing their cups in order to stay out of the 22-degree cold. We talked about my recent postings in The Publishing Contrarian. “A successful bookstore is all about being a real participant in the community,” he said. Another publishing industry executive on another day said: “If you can’t get them into the store, take the bookstore to the people.” In his comment in The Publishing Contrarian Frazer Dobson attributed part of the 30-years of success at Park Row Books in Charlotte, North Carolina, to “reaching out to the community.” He also suggested NOT coming up with “wild, new paradigm shifting ideas.” 

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Let’s stop boo-hooing and get on to the business of conjuring up ways to reinvent those independent bookstores that are still managing to survive, while the big boxes and online retailers busy themselves trying to knock each other off with price wars and territorial imperatives. 

Actually, as I think about it, this situation is kind of like the implosion of the independent stock photography business in the late 1990’s and early 2000. [Stock photo agencies maintain libraries of photographs for commercial use by advertisers, packagers, publishers, web designers and the like. Originally, stock photos were “rights-protected” and were only leased to users, as opposed the more recent situation where many images are designated “royalty-free” and sold outright.] The industry was different, but the battle royale taking place between Getty Images and Corbus (think Microsoft) over dominance and market share wreaked havoc in that industry in a manner very similar to that being wrought on the independent booksellers now. Price wars turned $3500 rights-protected images into $250 images, while high-quality royalty-free (read: cheap) images ($79!) decimated the rights-protected business model. Small stock photo agencies hunkered down in fox holes, but most ended up waving white flags, joining one warring side or the other and surrendering their inventories—ostensibly as “acquisitions,” but more accurately as starving prisoners of war whose assets were pillaged. The dead stock photography agencies were buried.

As the business model shifted, it was all about “just surviving” and not going under until a new model could emerge. In the stock photo industry survival turned out to be about understanding what the people who bought photos really wanted and needed (mostly cheap, unprotected images), and then being willing and able to switch from bricks and mortar to clicks and mortar and ultimately to clicks alone (sound familiar?) in the nick of time. The stock photo industry shake-up and shakedown left a very different industry in its wake.

But enough of the gloom and doom. As Mark Twain said: Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. Let’s do something about it!

Wicked Witch Asks Entrepreneurs for Advice: I fired off emails to some entrepreneurs I know (not in the bookselling business) to get their insight into transitional periods when business models become outmoded and only the innovative will survive. Below is the strongest, most direct response I received. The businessman who fired off his recommendation sold his 25-year-old international company several years ago to a publicly traded company. Luckily, I caught him between tee times. He took the time to hold forth and give me his thoughts. He is also a HarperCollins author, by the way.

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The Wicked Witch of Publishing has had a brilliant idea. Yes, a Christmas bulb exploded over her head while she was planning her December visit to the James A. Farley Post Office in midtown Manhattan in New York City to comb through letters to Santa Claus. This holiday season, why can’t book reviewers, authors, literary agents, libraries, publishing companies, bookstores, community service organizations, local associations and individuals—along with a new doll, video game, or warm coat—send great books to needy kids and families? 
 
More than 100,000 letters from around the world are sitting at the James A. Farley branch right now, and millions of Dear Santa letters are being read by caring people at local Human Services Departments, Rotary Clubs, churches and synagogues around the globe.  
 
Dear Santa,
I am the mother of three (3) beautiful childs of the 5, 13 years old and one of eight month (8)… The most important thing I want is to give my childrens happiness sadly enough I can’t buy the basic thing in life. I would be so grateful if Santa Claus would send things. Luis is 13, pants size 16-18 sneakers 9 coat sweaters = 16-18. Magdalena is 5 years old Pants = 6, sneakers = 13, coat and sweathers = 6 Emiliano is (8) month old pants 18-24 m sneakers = 4-5 Coat and Sweathers = 18-24 m. Thank you, Santa Claus for making dream be come true.

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For three years my friend Gilbert (a retired physician and, he would be the first to agree, an intellectual) has been emailing me article after article about “the terrorists.” His belief is that the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist and that there is no such thing as a Muslim who isn’t a terrorist. I used to resist the implied syllogism, suggesting he was overreacting. (Should I mention here that he is Jewish?)
 
Now, I’m a true believer, halleluiah, and it ain’t in Islam.

Where’s my gun?
 
I’m wondering whatever happened to that 410 shotgun with which I used to shoot skeet on Lone Tree Hill in New Canaan, Connecticut with my father and his friends and my brothers when I was a little girl. I can shoot. Oh, yes, I can. Thank goodness.
 
Documentary “Obsession” on Fox News Network Causes Wicked Witch to Click Over to National Rifle Association (NRA) Website.
 
Yes, I saw “Obsession.” I was one of the 2.5 million comfy, cozy Americans sitting in front of his or her big-screen TV, whiling away the evening when I got my peek into the inside world of Muslim extremists. My God. (And I mean MY God, not the prophet, Mohammed.) Little kids in Muslim countries were not reciting their ABC’s in this documentary. Those weren’t Nazis goose stepping around, but they sure looked and sounded like the ones you see in vintage news clips. If you missed seeing the documentary in its entirety, at least go to the online Fox News site and watch excerpts. (You have to get past the 18-second commercial, but the snippet from Obsession is worth the wait.)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,226482,00.html

Those videos of the jets hitting the Twin Towers remind me of the footage of the  Japanese kamikaze pilots on “World at War,” the documentary series that my father, a ship’s doctor on the USS Alabama during WWII, watched religiously. He knew all about kamikaze pilots.

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If the first thing a bookstore browser sees when picking up your book is the book title and the jacket design, shouldn’t that title and jacket just blow him away? And once he plucks your book from among the thousands in the store, shouldn’t the jacket promotional copy just sizzle and scorch his hands on the way to the cash register?

Of course it should, but more often than not (given the number of books that fail to ignite in the bookstore), the promotional copy on the book jacket is so lackluster that the potential buyer doesn’t even bother to take that critical next step—a peek at the first paragraph of the first chapter—before tossing the book back into the pile and moving on in search of a book whose jacket copy leaves him breathless!

The Story Can’t Sell Itself

Well before a book hits barnesandnoble.com, borders.com and bookstores, a huge mix of promotional elements must be in place to set the stage for robust sales. The most obvious pushes come from the author’s reputation for writing blockbuster stories. Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons soared onto the top-10 fiction list in the New York Times four weeks ago because of the success of Cold Mountain. The extraordinary publicity The Audacity of Hope received when Barack Obama appeared on “60 Minutes,” “Today,” “The Ophrah Winfrey Show” and the front cover of major magazines has catapulted this nonfiction book to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times nonfiction list next Sunday. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature or The Booker Prize doesn’t hurt either (though they don’t always help.) A publishing company can also back a book with advertising, fire off extra author review copies (ARCs) to book reviewers, and even spend money for preferential shelving. All of these strategies, individually or in combination, work to move a book to the cash register or online checkout in the days or weeks immediately after publication, but the question is: how do you generate sales once the initial publicity push is over? (more…)