The Publishing Horizon

Reading Spa: A great bookselling idea

From The Penguin Blog: In praise of independent bookshops

But [Mr B’s Emporium in Bath, England] have also started what I think is a brilliant initiative. It’s called a Reading Spa: for £55 a person gets an hour of undivided attention from one of their extremely nice and knowledgeable booksellers. You sit and have tea and cake and talk about what you like, what you don’t like; they talk about what’s come out recently, what’s selling well. Based on this, they then go away and come back with a pile of books. £40 of that £55 goes towards these books, plus of course any extra you want to spend. So far they’re doing at least one a week and one chap spent an extra £400 a couple of weeks ago.

I wonder if bookshops in India would think of something like this. Maybe not since the floor staff are not very well informed these days.

Who willl be the brands in future in publishing? Authors? Editors? Publishers?

When we look at a book or consider buying a book, the first thing that strikes us is the Title or the Author, not usually the Publisher, let alone the Editor, who is more often than not unknown except for a mention in the acknowledgements. But could it be different? Kate Eltham wonders.

… is the author the only brand? Isn’t it possible, however unlikely, that some publishers could create an identity so strong and a community so vibrant that audiences seek out their books because they trust and like the people producing them?

and David Henley looks at the possibilities and suggests what authors and editors can do to promote their books better.

I think the long tail of the internet makes branding more and more important than ever. But not just for publishers, for authors, editors, designers, contributors and reviewers. The internet never forgets... unless someone actively deletes their content but few people ever do this. This is something I've been thinking about for a while and this is the place to share it to test whether I'm crazy or not. My partner and I speculate that books will take on similar aspects to films. Not everyone chooses a film because of who directs it or who the screenwriter was, but some of us do, and now with databases like IMDB we can easily find lists of films containing the actors we like, or directors and discover more things we might like to watch. I think books can be the same. Currently I don't get to know who edits each book, or acquires the rights, but if I did I might start to follow their work. Authors need not be the only brands. Publishers can establish a brand identity the way imprints used to. Most will have to start over as they've diluted any meaning they ever had. Now to tie back up with the review sites, and the desire to have every book ever be reviewed, the reason people want this is because they're writing books and nobody is hearing about them. Getting something reviewed is nigh on impossible for the little guys, but to get the ball rolling just imagine that every author has a blog, every editor has a blog, every producer has a blog etc, so when they are working on a project they tell the public about it. Links are created, discussion is begun. Add to this a circle of blogging beta-readers (pre-reviewers if you will) and by the time the book is released into the wild there is four or five independent sources of information about the book, all hopefully tied to an author hub site. Remember aswell what Jamie said, external links are important, so lots of different blogs interlinking is better than one site with internal links. Its a small start but better than nothing. And the game changer for the industry is that the sales window for ebooks and POD books is limitless, so you can play a long-strategy game rather than the current one of timing your efforts for impact in a 90-day opening while the books are on shelves.

Indian fiction market in English - going from back-list to front-list?

So says Thomas Abraham, head of Hachette India.

Commercial fiction will be a significant genre in India. “We may not have a first- mover advantage but the market is changing from being a backlist one to a frontlist one,” said Mr Abraham. At 60-40, the ratio in favour of backlists (classics or bestsellers), India still compares badly to the rest of the world where 75-80 per cent of the business comes from new books. Mr Abraham also feels pricing, which hasn’t changed in a few years, will need to be raised steadily.

The mega promotion (author tours, publicity hype, and awards won by the authors) the front-list fiction titles in recent years might well be driving this trend.

The report also adds,

The Indian business under Hachette UK is already in discussion with authors and will be launching 20-25 books in 2009, with the full programme bringing out 75-80 titles a year by 2010, said Mr Thomas Abraham, Managing Director, Hachette Book Publishing India.

Countering a negative book review

GalleyCat points to an instance of a publisher (HarperCollins) countering a negative book review (for Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games) with an ad (touting an endorsement from the staff of a bookstore) in the very same paper that carried the review.

The value of blurbs

Outlook takes a detailed look at the growing practice of Indian publishers using blurbs (very positive celebrity quotes that are printed on the book covers) to sell their titles.

Most celebrities who were queried indicated that they are uncomfortable about giving a quote (sometimes without even having the time or the inclination to read the book), but felt they are unable to turn down such requests.

There were mixed views amongst the publishers.

Says Knopf's Sonny Mehta, whose legendary reputation as a publisher ensures that he gets glowing blurbs from top-notch authors around the world to promote any of his debut books: "Not all new books carry endorsements, and I wouldn't say that blurbs are indispensable for marketing. At Knopf, we look at each book on a case-by-case basis...in some cases we think a writer might get a boost from an endorsement by a fellow writer, but in other cases a new book will be better served by other means, such as publicity and reviews." Rushdie's endorsement of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, points out Sonny, "helped launch that novel and contribute to its success, but of course it wouldn't have worked if White Teeth hadn't been an accomplished book to begin with. A blurb might bring a reader to a book, but then the book itself has to do the rest of the work."

Publishers were always aware, as Penguin's former CEO David Davidar points out, that "celebrity endorsements are a good way of piquing customer interest". It's just that the pool of big writers was too small to fish in.

"What about readers who are not into the incestuous circle of the books' world?" wonders Anuradha Roy, co-publisher of Permanent Black."They are very likely to be taken in." Or, as Sonny Mehta says insouciantly, "they probably learn by trial and error".

The article only talked about blurbs in the context of English language publishing in India. The use of blurbs is yet to become common in Tamil publishing - I'm not very sure of the situation in other Indian languages.

For now, when the press talks about developments in Indian publishing, they are referring only to English language publishing in india. Indian language publishing is given very little attention today, but that is set to change in the coming years.

Books that don't exist, but are selling well!

Here're two stories of phantom books that weren't written by their authors, but took on lives of their own thanks to book databases.

Jim Crace writes in The Guardian about his phantom novel.

I am overjoyed to discover that my latest novel, Useless America (a catchy and fashionable title) was published at the end of September in a hardcover edition by Viking Penguin. It's a snip at £16.99 for 224 pages. How do I know? Amazon have emailed any of its customers who previously bought my books.

The only hitch is that Useless America is a phantom book - and its not even a phantom of my own creation.

I do have a new novel in the wings. It is called The Pesthouse but it won't be published until next March and by Picador rather than Viking Penguin, who held the original licence. It's set in America's medieval future and is an inquiry into my - and the world's - love-hate relationship with the United States. When Penguin contracted me to write the novel a few years ago, I had not yet decided on a title. But the first line of the book was going to be "This used to be America". It was convenient to use that as a working designation. Nobody would know or care except me, my agent and my editor.

Now we are in the world of guesswork. When the book was "announced" all those years ago, someone at Penguin couldn't type, possibly, or someone at Amazon was hard of hearing. "Used to" became "Useless", an amusing error. But an error with a life of its own. The Amazon computer sucked the information in, fleshed it out, nurtured it, gave it provenance.

Anyway, Useless America, complete with its own ISBN number, is now available for purchase. I am almost certain that not a word of it exists. Order your copy, while stocks last.

Tim O'Reilly writes on his blog - O'Reilly Radar - about the a similar problem faced by O'Reilly Media as a result of "the peristence of (bad) online data."