The Publishing Contrarian

I’m back. The streams are low. The fish are lying on their sides at the bottom of the river with their tongues hanging out. No self-respecting trout is biting. Whoops, ’striking.’ I’ve hung up my waders until the fall.

So what did I come home to from Pine Creek in Pennsylvania? Mediabistro rocketing nonstop to Jupiter(Media), as well as scads of query letters and book review requests piled up. And a trendy new eReader to drive me mad with 90-pages of instructions.

MediaBistro Goes Corporate

Mediabistro.com gets sold to publicly held JupiterMedia Corporation, a Darien, Connecticut-based, internet media company that sells photos and art. Laurel Touby falls into the clutches of Alan M. Meckler, Chairman and CEO. Twenty-three-million dollars! (Cash? Stock? A combo? It’s enough to keep Laurel eating out every night at trendy Spice Market Restaurant in New York City. No more doggie bags for her!) And guess what? Laurel gets to stay on as a Senior Vice President at JupiterMedia. (Er, okay, Laurel, but maybe you should convert some of those dollars into gems and sew them into the bodice of your frock. That way you’ll have a protective vest on when the first volley hits you after the honeymoon period ends. I can’t think of many entrepreneurs who survive more than two years once their company is acquired. Can you?)

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“Gone Fly Fishing”

I’m happy that newspapers are cutting back on book reviews. Most of them are unnecessary and just take up space. Long ago, I stopped believing the majority of them.

No, I don’t mean every reviewer ought to be cashiered. I know a handful of book reviewers who are objective, insightful and truthful, and who can get you to run, breathlessly, to the book store and leap eagerly into bed with a book on Saturday night. (“Hands off! Can’t you see I’m reading?”) For the most part, however, I find reviewers just steal copy from the book jacket and promotional materials, glance at the first few pages of the book (maybe), turn in their column, collect a few measly shekels and move on to the next book, whoops, few bucks.

If I am tempted to buy a book based on a reviewer whom I don’t know, 99% of the time I get a second and third opinion before actually making the purchase.

Reviewers Who Delight in Maiming or Killing

When I was working at the book publishing arm of Barnes & Noble, Inc., I plucked an advance reader’s copy (ARC) from among the stacks of free ARCs tossed on a long table for us to take if we wanted them. The book was The Know It All—One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, by A. J. Jacobs. It’s the true story of a middle-aged man who feels he has become a dolt and forgotten everything he ever learned. So he takes it upon himself to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.   Of course, as he pushes through one volume after another, his brain overflows with esoterica, which he dispenses ad nauseum at every opportunity in EVERY conversation. You can only imagine with what his wife, friends and colleagues have to contend. As Jacobs becomes the repository of the history of the world, no, the universe, he and his wife are struggling with a serious family issue that, because you grow to like him and his wife so much, makes this book much more than just a yuck a minute. (My review, thank you.)

A more honest woman would have given back the money she billed for that workday. I drove my fellow cubicle dwellers crazy with my insane laughter. I actually sent the editor an email telling him how much I enjoyed this book, and got a nice email in return.

Then a review came out in The New York Times Book Review. What a cruel, unfunny, outright nasty review. The kicker, of course, was that The New York Times, in its infinite wisdom, had selected Joe Queenan, a “contemporary humorist and critic,” with an ostensibly funny (and perhaps competing) book coming out later in the year.

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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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Where do I find the mass grave of the 2500 bookstores that went out of business between 1990 and 2006? I want to stand beside it and bid adieu to Murder Ink, Coliseum Books and Micawber Books—bookstores-turned-white-elephants that have recently succumbed at the ages of 34, 32, and 26, respectively—as their corpses are tossed on top of the bones of their erstwhile predecessors. Then I want to grab the owners of the 97 new independent bookstores that arrived on the scene in 2006 by the scruff of the neck, drag them to the edge of the grave and scream: “Don’t make the same mistakes these guys did.”  

Because they bring incredible enthusiasm and vigor with them, I love the idea of brave, out-of-industry folks entering the independent bookstore fray, but they’ll need more than bravado to be successful. If they’re to avoid the same fate as their forerunners, as my mystery entrepreneur said in last week’s post, they’ll need to bring fresh ideas and inspired new ways of doing business. And…they’ll have to figure out what is working for the top 100 independent bookstores and the largest independent bookstores like Barbara’s Bookstores, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Powell’s City of Books, City Lights Booksellers, Elliot Bay Book Company and The Tattered Cover Bookstore, then adapt their insights to their own enterprises.

Still Dining at The Alfresco Dumpster After All These Years! 

Did you see The New York Times Metro Section on January 10th, 2007, and the article: “Two Places Where Readers Hold On to Their Bookstores”? Peter Applebome, “Our Town” reporter, covered two 34-year-old bookstores about an hour out of the city nestled in suburban areas: Village Bookstore in (simply rich) Pleasantville, NJ, and Second Story Book Shop in (really rich) Chappaqua, NY.

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