The Publishing Contrarian

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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My plan for New Year’s Eve was NOT to go to Times Square, thank you. I’ve been there. Believe me, once is enough. If you’ve ever been, you know you dare not lose your footing lest you get trampled to death. Not to mention that when your companion grabs you at midnight for a kiss, you can only pray that no one lurking beside you is making a grab for your wallet. For a decade, I’d danced until midnight at New Year’s Eve parties held at the Diplomats’ Dining Room at the United Nations. I’d wandered the 4 AM streets of the city on New Year’s morning trying to find a vomit-free cab. This year, however, I found I preferred a quiet champagne fizzle and the sleep of the networked-out innocent to the tabletop dancing girl of yesteryear.

Indeed, Terrible Teddy, aka TT (the 22 lb Maine Coon Cat I picked up about three weeks ago from ARF, The Animal Rescue Fund), and I cozied up together in front of a fire in East Hampton. We’d agreed to stay up until 11:59 PM, sipping warm milk (him) and other beverages (me) and then call it a year. Frankly, I think both of us were happy to watch my 2006 calendar go up in flames. Gargantuan TT had spent six months up island squished in a cage designed for your average-sized Tom cat. He was headed for the gallows when ARF rescued him (cherry picked him, they said) and—dare I say this—foisted this big, bad-ass cat off on me. (Hey, Sara Davidson, you think that I didn’t hear the front door slammed shut and bolted at ARF as a crated TT and I headed for my Jeep?) By New Year’s Eve, with the help of a full belly feeding and full body brushing, TT’s demeanor had turned from paw-swiping raptor to sandpaper-tongue kisser, and he had tentatively plunked his lard-ass self down on my lap, making sounds reminiscent of  a purr while I read The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty.

Here’s to 2006. [Unprintable.] Here’s to 2007! “Bottoms Up!”

Yes, I think the ringing out of 2006 signifies the end of a hard year for TT, too. He was in cat jail and I was spending the holiday season in civil court in Morristown, NJ, waiting for a verdict from a jury of my peers. I believe I was in bed in the fetal position with the covers pulled over my head on New Year’s Eve last year, unable to eat, eyes ringed with fatigue, hair falling out in clumps onto the pillowcase, 40–count ‘em–pounds skinnier than I already was. You know what I’m talking about: that Bela Szigethy v. Lynne Scanlon multi-year, multi-motion, trial-by-jury horror wrought by multizillionaire Bela Szigethy on me. (One of my New Year’s resolutions will be to only mention the lawsuit half as much as I have. I promise. Wait, stop trying to uncross my fingers!) I’ll be mopping up my own blood for years.

Let’s Party! Get Down!

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Should load quickly, unless their server is swamped, but worth the wait!

http://www.elfyourself.com/?userid=16279111fbd6a8c4ea4a061G06122104

I note that every once in a while an ad is sneaked in from Office Max, the creators of this link, but just click on the link again, and the greeting should pop up! And no, I don’t think you have to upgrade FLASH. I think that is an ad, too.

The publisher arrives at her office and boots up her computer. Her password doesn’t work. No big deal she thinks, those security-obsessed IT guys must be making everybody change passwords yet again. She reaches for the phone to tell them she is being denied access. Strange, she thinks, that she should have to leave a voicemail message. She’s so important and no one is responding to the neon flashing of her name in Caller ID.

She shuffles around her office, sipping her latte, fairly paralyzed without access to her computer and fuming because she can’t get to her email. At some point she notices the sound of cardboard boxes being dragged across carpeting and down the corridor between the cubicles. The sound grows nearer and louder.    Ah-hah, she thinks, at last they are getting rid of that #$@%^ down the hall. But no, the sound of sliding boxes inches ever closer. Good heavens, she wonders, why in the world are they are stopping outside my door?

Yep, it’s Judith Regan’s turn to be frog-marched to the curb. 

Frog-march: to seize from behind roughly and forcefully propel forward –Merriam Webster Online Dictionary.
 
In the Wicked Witch’s experience frog-marching usually involves two hulking guys on either side of you, practically lifting you off the ground by your elbows while your feet go through the motions of walking. Not unlike the frantic paw action of the family dog being lowered into the swimming pool.
 
Did Judith Regan make anti-Semitic cracks? According to The New York Times yesterday, Rupert Murdock personally ordered Judith Regan’s ousting. Not, evidently, because of the O. J. Simpson book debacle over If I Did It, but because of comments Ms. Regan made in a phone conversation “with a company lawyer on Friday that…were deemed anti-Semitic….” Slurs are never justified, but are utterly incomprehensible in a milieu where many of your colleagues, not to mention most of your bosses, are Jewish. (Here, let me hand you your own gun to commit professional suicide.) 

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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? Read the rest of this entry »

I hadn’t even intended to go to any of the movies being shown at the 14^th Hamptons International Film Festival. Like a lot of the people who own homes out here, when the Friday night cars stream into town and the Jitney and Luxury Liner buses disgorge the weekenders from the city, we head for deep water. (Oh, wait, I forgot, I had just gotten out here myself on Thursday from the city. That’s right, I was disgorged too, just a bit earlier than the others!) Eleven thousand additional people were expected in East Hampton for the festival! Dive, Dive!

My neighbor, Katy, had miraculously cadged two free tickets to the film 1:1 from a friend who had been doing volunteer work at the festival. Katy invited me, and after last week’s posting with its subsequent vitriolic, finger pointing, name calling (You’re a racist! No, you’re a racist!), email slug-fest around the blogosphere, I needed to sit in a dark theater and regain my sanity. So Katy and I fought for a parking space in town, and joined cinephiles who had trekked in from all over the United States and maybe even the world. The very honest Katy bought a gigantic, butter-soaked bag of popcorn while the opportunistic Wicked Witch dropped down on all fours and sneaked past the overpriced concession with her large diet-coke and stash of oatmeal cookies purchased down the street.   
 
1:1 started and within minutes I had caught the film festival bug—and caught it bad. I knew I would try to snag a press pass in the morning. And, yes, I hoped that some of these films originated as literary fiction or nonfiction books or memoirs so that I could tie the movies I saw to my publishing blog and keep one step ahead of the “tend to your knitting” crowd. (You know who you are!)
 
How to Grift a Press Pass to an international  film festival: Up at dawn I knew the challenge would be to convince someone (it would turn out to be the very handsome D’Arcy Drollinger from Springer Associates in New York City) that I was, indeed, worthy of a press pass. How was I going to pull this off, simple blogger that I am?  Here’s how I did it:   Read the rest of this entry »

“Greetings, my name is [–] and I’m the director of [–], you are slated to do a book signing with us…. I want to know if you are a black/African American person.”

The above is an email message posted by author Millenia Black on her blog Millenia Black—Taking Care of Business. Click on the link above and scroll down to March 13th to see the entire posting.

This blunt email message sent Black into paroxisms of indignation. She felt her race was nobody’s business when it came to book promotion and she was incensed that the director of the bookstore would even dare ask such a question. So insulted was Black that she canceled her appearance and left the director in the lurch, forced to locate an alternative author to make an appearance. And 25 out of 26 commentors joined the rage-in:

“The frickin’ nerve of some people! I’d make sure this idiot looks like the dumb shit he is.” – Lynn Ray Harris

“I think I would call the store and ask to speak to the manager. I would try to get the person who did that FIRED!!!” —Anonymous

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I loved making money while I slept. Every time someone bought one of my nonfiction books, I was probably sleeping or reading on the beach on Block Island, Rhode Island or in East Hampton, New York, or lounging somewhere with a margarita in my hand, humming “Girl from Ipanema.” (”Tall and tan and young and lovely….”

I once went to Yankee Stadium (seating capacity 56,937), looked at all those people, and thought: “Whoa, look at that sea of faces. If each one of them would just buy a single copy of my book I’d make some good money.” And, in fact, several hundred thousand people over the years would indeed buy my books, but I never made great money, certainly not the kind of money I had envisioned when my books started to sell well. But that was then and this is now and I’m not writing books to make money anymore because I have learned that book royalties are just too hard to earn in quantity—even when I’m sleeping, tanning or carousing—and there are too many tricks in book publishing contracts designed to make certain that my share of the profits ends up the smallest share.

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