The future of High Street retailers

Buying books from Waterstones is ideologically similar to buying organic items at Tesco – it’s better than some of the alternatives (ie: Amazon), but I can’t feel as smug as I might if I bought from an independent. Still, there’s so much doom and gloom in the industry news at the moment following the Red Group collapse that I feel any help is good, right?
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The air of the bookshop was thick with manic desperation – not that surprising given the threat  of a possible 200 store closures hanging over their heads. They had no less than 6 staff members manning a shop with four aisles of books in a town of 25,000 people, most of whom would probably have been at work at 2pm on a Thursday. Overkill? Probably. The staff were helpful. Overly helpful. Do I need help, a recommendation, a foot massage, a bagel? [Note: there weren't really any bagels, that's called dramatic effect. Please don't ask Waterstones staff to provide you with bagels.] There were mutters in the corners of limiting the range of stock to boost sales and the fact that you could now buy a hardcover for £7.90, and every second sentence I heard was: ‘We don’t have it, but we can order it in for you! It’ll only be two days!’ In a small town of geriatrics, this might fly. In a city where people know how to use the internet, it will not.
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I bought my three 3for2 books (a Booker prize winner, something from a publisher I love, and one by an author I had thought I had heard of but it turns out I was thinking of someone else), which came to a paltry £17.98 (the same titles on Amazon came to £19.79). The guy at the checkout, busy flinging ‘50% off’ stickers on every book in his immediate radius, tried to apologetically up-sell me the Stephen Fry biography for a bargain of £4.98, and didn’t seem that surprised when I declined. You don’t have to work in the industry to see this is a business in a state of decay.
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Their tight smiles and false cheer left me with the feeling more than ever that, as publishers, we have to support our retailers. I wanted to hug each of them and tell them everything was going to be ok and that I would go to work on Monday and make things right for these people who cared not just because their personal livelihoods were at stake but because they wrote the recommendations for these books, because they read each of the new titles, because they know their job and are pretty damn good at it when they’re not being nailed to the cross by store closures. They are out there selling their faces off for publishers. What a fucking thankless task.
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So how do we help them? Smaller fucking lists! I have said this ever since I started to work in publishing, and it is disgustingly apparent to me now that publishers must cut back the number of physical books they publish each year. Not only will bookshops not have enough room to stock the books, but they probably won’t be able to sell the ones they do have because there are too many to keep track of. If we were more selective and discerning in our publishing, the market wouldn’t be flooded with more novels than it can hold and buyers wouldn’t get confused by the range. Retailers can hone their skills and sell directly to individual consumers through intelligent marketing campaigns based on genre and topicality, rather than slapping a reduced price sticker on everything that rolls into their storeroom. As a book buyer, I think I know which experience I would prefer.

A ludicrously and deliriously over-written and maniacally composed response to David Ryding’s comment on Felice Howden’s post about why the book industry is not going to rupture your spleen, in a style that blatantly derives from the balls-out style of the admirable Felice herself.
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In which Grammaticus Paine suffers a mini nervous breakdown that’s been building for weeks, but not before he expounds on his ill-thought-out ideas about the style of economic tinkering we need to do to fix this flailing industry, which basically means ‘getting your thumbs out of your arses and looking around you for the people who are innovating with panache, and taking bits and bobs from their business models, as appropriate‘. Not hard.
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Yeah, ‘the authors’. Just like ‘the world would be better off if the gays and Arabs were all placed on an island and detonated’, a stupid maxim I’ve always loved is that ‘publishing would be so much easier without authors’. They’re always hanging around, asking about their royalties, demanding they get a suitable amount of publicity and expecting editors to pick up after them when they leave their dirty mugs jammed up their arse because they’re always falling over arse-backwards onto things, because they’re too absent-minded and short-sighted to see where they’re going, because the only thing they care about is the contents of their own navels.

I’m all for unseating incumbent gatekeepers who spend most of their inordinately large salaries and amounts of confirmation bias producing arguments to maintain the institutions that employ them, but authors are not among this class of scum. Authors are a whole other type of scum. More like the scum you might find on the inside of a Coopers cap – soooooo yeasty and tasty and perversely right and enjoyable but also upsetting but mostly just caaaalllllllmmmmmming and really really good for you. It is their jobs that need to be protected, not the bureaucrats’.

Sounds like hell in a bottle, that workshop. Like the Independent Press Conference that didn’t take off that year, as an offshoot of EWF, despite Grimwade’s noble efforts. I wonder what happened to that. Maybe that’s where SPUNC grew from.

That was another place I heard so much manifest despondency I had to get drunk – the IPC, not SPUNC: SPUNC was full of optimism when I was still tagging along there. Two publishers at the IPC commiserated with each other about how the only way to handle this problem of having too many books to sell and not knowing how to sell them is to stop publishing for a year and just focus on selling the backlist. I mean, come on, fuck, I know they were joking, but the quaking silence that succeeds these sorts of earnest and self-pitying cries for help is terribly distressing for someone like me, who, especially at the time (five years ago now) was an especially young, aspiring editor and publishy type, implausibly more naively and hopelessly optimistic than I still am now.

Ian Syson has a good model at Vulgar Press: he just has a core backlist and continues to sell that hard. (But that’s deliberate, ya know – not a dummy spit because he can’t manage his ever-expanding and stockpiling list.) Re.press have that weird international model where they’ve registered with PODs all over the place and do short runs to distros overseas, to save on printing and freight costs. (Are these cases still even current?)

I just found out about a model that basically amounts to flogging the same three titles and two authors over and over again, and when one of their three books got torrented¹, their pBook sales escalated. And there’s another model in Adelaide where a publisher is bypassing the general trade altogether and selling directly to libraries and schools. Our booksellers miss out, but if his model pays the bills and doesn’t hurt anyone too bad, then, well, these are times that call for mixed business models.

Shit, come to think of it, if there is a business model that is more mixed and confusing than Wakefield’s, I would like to know about it. We’ve got a gazillion different income streams here. It’s hard to keep up. And yes, just like McSweeney’s, Wakefield is a ‘privately held publishing company with wildly fluctuating resources’. We all are. Books don’t fit properly in a free market, or even a mixed economy like ours. We need a whole new economy, that’s the beginning of the answer to all these problems. Screw it up and start again. Stop trading for a year, sit down and figure out the ideal model, then get back on our bikes. Yer! No. We just have to keep making it up as we go along.

Gawd, the list goes on: Vignette Press, aduki independent press, Breakdown Press (tooooootally making it up as they go along – hell, they paid ME to manage their distribution when I was so stoned out of my brain I stepped on a bong shard and got four fucking stitches and then blogged incoherently about it), The Lifted Brow (who also employed me, unpaid, to attend meetings and pontificate about things I would promise but fail to do), Falcon v. Monkey, falcon wins (though Torpedo folded and Chris reckons he’s out of the game for good, which I know is total bullshit: publishing gets in your blood and stays there, just like all the iron my spleen is harbouring because I have (at least) one dodgy gene).

Shit, there’s Dumbo feather, Wet Ink, Collect, Finger …

These are not all purely digital operations, but they ALL have innovative business models – they have all identified a new way to finance their operations, and mostly free of government subsidisation or corporate annexing. They are examples of the nearest we come to truly independent publishing in this country. Meanwhile, HEAT’s folding. Meanjin keeps fighting with its board of directors about how far to go online. Meanwhile, places like New Matilda are folding, then getting back up, swinging! Meanwhile, Meanjin, one of Australia’s oldest, most eminent magazine of ideas, is churning through editors until they find one who will do what they want.

The other magazines emerging are the truly creative publishers, in that they create new ways of doing business. In a game that wouldn’t even exist if the free market had its way, where the institutions charged with making up for market failure are becoming increasingly stringent about the age of the people they give money to, these freaks are doing it anyway. They are racking up credit card debts, throwing hipster parties, getting loans from their middle-class parents, getting jobs in their parents’ media companies, and dealing drugs to stay off the dole and dream up new arts magazines.

Why? Because they are endearing and adorable and compassionate young people who have taken the responsibility of publishing ideas into their own hands.² No, WINGS! These are, truly, rare birds³.

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*takes a breath* *gets up for a glass of water* *paces around the room*
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*says, gesticulating wildly, stroking his half-beard*
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I’m ranting this way because it gives ME hope, at least, that there are people around here who don’t want to just roll over and make generalisations such as the one Felice shat on.

These are times for brazen, risky, innovative business models. Fight, adapt and live, or sit still and die with a big shit stain in your pants, just like in all those infamous pictures of idiot bungy jumpers who didn’t anticipate that, yes, it might be terrifying to jump off a tower with nothing but a dodgy Balinese rubber rope around your ankles. (It IS terrifying, but if you go into it willing to embrace that maybe you’ll learn something from the experience – even if that’s to NEVER GO BUNGY JUMPING AGAIN – you’ll be totally fine.

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This guy has LEARNT A LESSON!

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And about the whole thing about the eBook market being uncertain, well, from the viewpoint of an relatively uneducated observer of economic trends and publishing trends in general, I’d say it’s going to be a lot of fun to sit back and see what develops, prodding it now and then to see if it moves or changes direction at our touch, like running along behind a really big whoola hoop, with a big wonky rubber baton, taping the hoop now and then and giggling, TE HE HE HE HE, “Look it WOBBLE and ROLL, like tickling a fatty.” [Grammaticus! *smacks wrist*]

If you want to play this game with the hoola hoop, you’re going to have to harden the fuck up, oldies. Here, you can have one of my cement pills⁴. Get your thumbs out of your arses and look around you for the people who are innovating with panache, and take bits and bobs from their business models, as appropriate.

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*grinds teeth* *gets up for a piss* *paces around the backyward*
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*sits down to quietly resume the response to Mr D Ryd*
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Well done for making it through that hellish workshop. Feel free to drive by here and yell at us anytime, Mr D Ryd. I’ve got plenny in the tanks to make up for any lack of griffonagey longevity you might have. #balderdash #griffonage

Hey, we’ll probably be playing #balderdash again soon. You should play, Mr D. Anyone reading this should SET UP A TWEETDECK COLUMN FOR #BALDERDASH RIGHT NOW. So much fun. You’ll learn heaps of new words, none of which will be useful in general conversation, but I can guarantee you will piss yourself at least once, maybe multiple and simultaenous times until you actually sneeze and orgasm at the same time.

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Meanwhile, old people, for real
If you want to get a taste of more of this sort of ridiculous thinking in action, come to The Academy on Sunday 27 Feb at 15 Peel Street, Adelaide. It’ll be a hoot. We’ve got a rider in case it’s hot, but feel free to BYO brandy snifter.

Further, old people, to bastardise yet another device from a great master: step out of your shit-stained pants, hold our hands, and come with us, this won’t hurt a bit. At the Academy you will meet some of the young people who are at the coalface of the sort of change you need to be listening to if you hope to outlive your flailing business models.

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Cheer up!

1. [goddamn auto-spell changed that to 'tormented' – fucking robots, they'll be the death of our intellectual integrity and independence yet]
2. The alternative meaning of that awkwardly structured sentence was not intentional, but it’s fitting: some of these publishers ARE publishing directly into the hands of niche markets they know will sympathise with their aesthetics and ideas, which is kind of like masturbating into your first, but I’ve said it before: you have to learn to masturbate before you can stop fucking and start making love.
3. some of them getting their feathers all sticky
4. Pills may contain traces of kava. To help with the PANIC.

This article on Dave Eggers’ optimism about youth literacy and print books (via @Mean_land) made me think of the title of his unfinished Salon.com serial, The Unforbidden is Compulsory, or, Optimism: for Eggers, it would seem, optimism about print books is compulsory, and should not be forbidden.

Elsewhere (almost everywhere else), it seems the trend is in the chatter: it’s trendy to be pessimistic about print books, regardless of whether there is actually a declining trend in print-book readership, because worrying about the decline of print books seems to illustrate your affinity with digitial technology and the democritising power of the internet.

But I think it’s true that the concern is misguided:

Adults might be projecting from their own behavior when they worry that kids will forsake reading in favor of Twitter, Eggers said, as some adults in the audience nodded in apparent self-recognition. “We’re blaming the kids, but we’re the ones who can’t stop checking our e-mail and adding the latest Google apps.”

So stop worrying about it, stop reading this blog, and go sit in the park with a book, it’s spring time!

I had to do some quick research into ‘second and subsequent serial rights’ recently, and realised it might be worthwhile demystifying some of what I learnt – it’s such a minefield of ambiguity out there, it must be terrifying if you’ve finally got a book deal and then have to learn legalese when you get the actual contract.

First, second and subsequent serial rights are part of the subsidiary rights clauses in your contract: primary rights being things like the right to edit, produce, publicise and distribute your book (der stuff, basically); subsidiary rights being things like the right to license the work to film producers, or have it turned into an audio book or eBook.

Selling your first serial rights means the publisher can license portions of your content to magazines or newspapers, for promotional purposes.

Selling your second and subsequent serial rights simply means they can publish extracts in more than one newspaper or magazine. This is good for you – they’re bound to have more contacts with these outlets than you have.

Bet you’re glad you skipped dinner for that!

Here are the articles I found about these curious subsidiary rights. Disregard the mid-90s styling of these pages – no surprise that information about print-book rights is not the domain of the internetologically savvy.

Ker-ching!

I don’t know about this one: ‘The Future for Book Editors: Royalties?’ In this article, Ann Patty (former Harcourt publisher from NYC) argues that editors should receive a royalty on profits because they do so much work on books and then get squat in the way of remuneration or recognition.

I’ve rewritten books only for a mention in the the Acknowledgements, but that’s not why I work as an editor: I work as an editor because I genuinely believe in the value of facilitating the expression of others. Ten people have way more ideas than me, and they’re far more likely to clash with each other than my own are with themselves, and it is from this collision that genuine insight arises.

Anyway, of all the people being insufficiently remunerated in the publishing industry, editors are doing alright – at least they have a salary. Taking royalties away from the author who turns into a runaway success just doesn’t seem fair, given how many years of unpaid service they’ve poured into the product before so much as emailing it to the editor.

And let’s face it, unless you’re Ann Patty (or any other high-flying NYC publisher), the majority of the books you’re going to work on are not going to be runaway bestsellers, so trading in your salary for a royalty system doesn’t seem like a viable alternative. Unless she’s suggesting we get a royalty on top of our salary, so that our salary is more like a retainer and royalties more like a commission.

This seems more plausible in the context of the article, yet far more implausible in the real-world industry.

Glancing thoughts: editor royalties would work only for those with a hand in the bestseller pie (so, no one in the small–medium press).

What do you reckon?

I shook hands with Julia Gillard yesterday morning, and then wound up on the telly about it. She made a rousing speech, praising the values of hard work and education, and I came away feeling really inspired by it all.

Like me, Julia was raised in a working class family in Adelaide, where she became inspired to do something good in the world, and then, unlike me, she went and became Prime Minister. All because she shares the belief that each of us has a duty to each other to be our best, and to contribute some improvement to the world before we die.

At least, that’s the reverie I fell into as I swooned and gave her my card, nervously avoiding the bodyguard who had just inspected it with what I later became certain were ASIO-issue x-ray or maybe just photo-recording spectacles, and then I went back to work and came home and saw my mug on the telly and figured I better ride this wave of thought, and pulled out this little doozy that I’ve been nursing for a week or two. It is now a love letter to Julia.

Dear Julia,

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Independence. Independent publishing house. Indie. Indie rock. Independent record label.

All of these except for the first are relatively easy to identify with, in a cultural sense. It is easier to identify something that has been labelled ‘independent’ than it is to define what independence really means, especially when you say or write independent too many times – like the word ‘spaghetti’, or ‘bowl’, if you look at it for too long you go cross-eyed, and you begin to wonder how these combinations of symbols came to mean something as specific as ‘a kind of pasta of Italian origin, made from wheat flour, in long, thin, solid strips or tubes, and cooked by boiling’ and ‘a rather deep, round dish or basin, used chiefly for holding liquids, food, etc’.

Bowls are great for cereal!

Being independent is so hot. Being into independent art, literature and music seems to imply that you know of an alternative source, like a really good drug dealer, who supplies you with gear that common people can’t score. It’s true that a bag of weed still costs twenty-five bucks after all these years, but ‘independent’ art carries the misguided connotation that it also somehow exists outside of market pressures that warp commercial art, literature and music into the generic pop that makes us vomit a bit in our mouths when we like anything that more than five of our friends like.

When I started at Wakefield all those moons ago, their curiously mixed-economy style of publishing was confusing. They get a few government grants, they do a bit of partner publishing, a bit of corporate publishing, they ran a distro for a while, and they trade international rights with publishers of all persuasions and structures. They also publish a variety of mass-market DIY gastronomy slash ‘gastro memoir’ that is remarkably successful in the trade. They do this to support their investment in novels, poetry collections and obscure South Australiana.

At the time I latched onto the idea that independent literature was defined primarily by the absence of financial backing from large conglomerates. Yet, a quick look around at what is generally considered to be ‘indie’ lit reveals that most of these operations are supported by something, other than the market: the good will of a benefactor, government funding, or a university. So as I think it out now I realise true independence is the reliance on consumers making the choice to buy your product.

My misconception has to do with ‘indie’ bastardising the meaning of ‘independence’. ‘Indie’ is a trend – something that people toss around willy nilly, slapping on anything that seems vaguely removed from the mainstream, without due consideration of how it’s actually financed. ‘Independence’ is a timeless value. Lit journals funded at ‘arms length’ by Australia Council are not independent – they are dependent on the government, a dependence we felt was threatened when, under Howard, severe funding cuts swept the sector, leaving Mark Davis to suggest it was a silent campaign to cripple dissenting opinion. Try to not let that happen again, if that’s cool.

A silver lining of that period might be that it seemed to spurn on a bunch of truly independent ventures – Wet Ink, The Lifted Brow, Torpedo, aduki and Vignette Press are examples that come to mind – fiercely anti-welfare and determined to reach audiences through sheer leg work, they inspire me because they’ve chosen to think of innovative ways to get their product out there.

Marketing to general readers, or directly to small, self-sustaining niches, is integral to the business models of these operations, and advances in communication technology are providing the means to answer the question: ‘Where is the market, and how do we get the value of our product in its way?’

But our cultural definition of ‘independence’ continues to inhibit innovation in these important areas of the sector. SPUNC are trying to rejuvenate innovation, and Australia Council are behind them, but the sector needs more. We need to change our definition of ‘independence’. Imagine, say, a parallel universe where the small-press operators put the stipend of a part-time marketing person on their credit card along with their printer bill, which is not uncommon, such is the belief in the value of this work that people go in for personal debt to fund it.

There are other ways to affect this shift in the mindset of the industry, such as a massive injection of capital tied to marketing, publicity and sales campaigns for small presses, and serious audience-development research and training. This would show small-press operators that it’s worth investing in commercial innovation. Split Literature Board funding 50/50 instead of funding the production of more manuscripts than we really don’t know how to sell.

The shift could also be nudged along by facilitating pro bono partnerships between the corporate sector and the independent-publishing sector, such as Australian Business Arts Foundation are doing in the high operatic arts sector.

With enough money, companies like Coca-Cola Amatil can convince people that drinking lots of acidic, sugary water will make them float around in really fun bubbles. Think of the social benefits of merely doubling the scant budget of a small press, so that they might propel their product into a self-sustaining market orbit. Facilitating communication through literature offers people a private communion with ideas that is unsurpassed by any other medium: it affords us the time and space to consider ideas on our own terms, to learn in the comfort of our own headspace.

This is why I’m so passionate about facilitating the written expression of others. Your speech reminded me of that, when you mentioned that hard work and education are the key to a truly progressive and productive society. An ongoing engagement with literature from an early age constitutes the finest education a person could ever hope for or need. Being literate in literature gives us access to a lifelong education, as we seek out the experiences of others to develop love and compassion through understanding our myriad differences.

Facilitating this provides me with hope that shit won’t get worse, at least.

It was a genuine pleasure to meet you briefly. Seriously, hit me up if you need to know anything about semi colons or en rules or ellipses or whatever.

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Love,
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Ryan
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PS You might already be familiar with this clip. I was reminded of it today when my friend said she wants to have your babies. Thing is, you’re both woman, which is why I was reminded of this clip. It doesn’t transpose exactly, but I’m sure you’ll catch my gist.
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I’m in the kitchen at the café, scraping the detritus of some asshole customer’s food into the bin and the radio starts playing that song I can’t stand. I suddenly can’t tell what I hate more: the fact that I just stuck my finger into a pile of half-eaten and probably now disease-carrying scrambled eggs, or that skin-melting noise pollution accompanied by vapid words. Later, I am in a dark club with my mates and the floor is sticky and lit only by pools of flashing light and my pint cost me less than £2 and the DJ starts playing something I recognise. I’m halfway through choking out the lyrics to the second verse, thinking if I know it then it must be good, before I realise it’s the same song I heard in the kitchen. It’s not always the booze that does this. It’s the drugged state of familiarity that overtakes my genuine disgust.

I have just started riding the London tube, which has the greatest saturation of book advertisement that I have ever seen. Most stops have posters for two different titles, sometimes three or four, with huge book covers and then a couple of endorsements thrown over the top like ‘international Twitter sensation’ and ‘most shocking thing since I threw your mother under a train’. I see these posters every day and have no strong reaction to them as I slide past on my way to work, but when I actually consider each title, I do a mental sneer and decide that I won’t buy that book. And when I wondered about why this might be, I started to worry about the implications of holding such an attitude.

Would you buy a book you saw on a billboard? The medium screams of mass-production, which in turn seems to cheapen something’s cultural value. I know not many people will admit to the fact that liking books that other people haven’t heard of is like being in a club where you get a membership card – it drips of desirable exclusivity – because as readers and producers of literature we should all be wanting to get good literature to those who don’t currently classify themselves as ‘book people’.

But isn’t this the underlying principle I’m adhering to if I scoff at a book that’s got a massive poster with tag lines written by famous people all over it? And by extension, don’t I want books to remain something only experienced by a select and worthy few, who have discerning taste built into them like the perforations in toilet paper?

Pretend for a moment you are a small publishing house, or the publisher of a small independent journal that is mostly reliant on grant money, and you suddenly come into a whole lot of cash with no spending guidelines. Would you spend it on making twenty billboards and an intense marketing campaign for your latest release that could potentially boost your readership numbers in the long term, or would you put it towards a hardback print run or a full-colour photography essay?

Are a lot of independents shooting themselves in the foot because of an underlying assumption that production will always be more important than marketing? One should not come at the expense of the other. Both from my own attitude and the attitude of a significant number of people I have met in the publishing industry, expansion doesn’t seem to be desirable thing for independents.

So my question is this: is it lack of funding that serves to hold back independent publishers from having a larger market presence, or is it an attitude of elitism?

Because, let’s face it, these posters probably will boost sales of the book. Maybe I’ll scorn the poster on the tube, and later see the same title in a bookshop and remember the cover, but not remember where from. Maybe I’ll think it was from a book review website. Maybe I’ll think the endorsements on the cover are all true. Maybe I’ll have a false memory about hearing that it is the next ‘Catcher In The Rye’. Just like the song that I hate but then find myself singing along to at a club, the familiarity is often enough to make something endearing. And that’s probably not something any book producer should sneer at if they seriously want to increase their readership.

Sam Cooney republished an article he wrote for Bookseller+Publisher about, well, the relationship between booksellers and publishers – and how this relationship is changing as publishers embark on direct-sales ventures, which, I guess, have the potential to undermine the traditional business models of booksellers. On the surface it seems like a superfluous debate, when compared to whether eBookstores will overrun this model, but it remains relevant, and the article got me thinking, which I like, obviously.

I hadn’t quite got to wondering about how booksellers might feel threatened by publishers’ online sales, perhaps because I never really buy from physical bookstores, and because I currently work in production, which often leaves me feeling quite removed from the whole extra set of steps that are involved in getting books to readers.

I’m becoming increasingly interested in sales though, and Sam’s article tapped me on the noggin and said, ‘Dear naive and idealistic editor, booksellers are very important to you and your job, and your interest in disseminating ideas with literature.’ So I started riffing on how this shifting relationship might weather the rapid market changes that are being pushed along by this here internet thing.

Perhaps an organised partnership between booksellers and publishers could be established to develop a website that aggregates all of their separate marketing and direct-sales efforts. For these purposes (compared to blogging, say) one big website is surely better than many small ones. Australia Council should fund something like this – just as they’ve recently funded the establishment of Literary Magazines Australia.

Another idea that sprouted was whether booksellers could borrow from the idea of subscription publishing. McSweeney’s do this at their online store. You can sign up to their Book Release Club and receive every book they publish over a twelve month period. Maybe booksellers could offer something similar: I’d like to sign up for a package of ’seller picks’, a bunch of random books from various publishers, delivered to my letter box once a month.¹

The other thing that struck me in Sam’s article was the comment from Don Grover, CEO of Dymocks and aspiring booktrade despot slash self-described benevolent despot: suggesting that ‘a healthy industry occurs when everyone focuses on their own area, their niche in the market’ seems like a typically neo-con thing to say, but my understanding of economic ideology is pretty patchy. Am I right or wrong?

My idea of a healthy industry is one that is not dominated by small groups of large, domineering companies controlling those niches, but one where individuals determine what is produced and how they get it. From this perspective, the suppliers are the ones who need to adapt, rather than trying to restrict trade to a traditional structure of publisher through bookseller to consumer. I guess that’s an irresolvable ideological difference, though.

Or not.

Because then Sam speculated that ‘the coin can also be flipped, the spotlight shifted. Will booksellers be forced to become publishers?’ This must be happening, somewhere.² Curiously (considering my aversion to Grover’s suggestion), this got my hackles up, with its suggestion that booksellers could just whip up the infrastructure required to produce quality books, as if it’s just a matter of pressing the go button on the the Espresso Book Machine.

Thinking about infrastructure, resources and expertise made me realise a more convincing reason publishers should be wary of ‘wading into booksellers’ waters’ (Don Grover’s defensive phrase), and it’s not because they’re not ‘customer-centric’ (also Don’s words). This suggestion denigrates the motives of publishers: does he think we make these books because they look pretty on our shelves? That’s only a secondary reason.

Okay, back to trying to be objective: I’d say a more convincing reason book publishers should be (and, sometimes, are) wary of prolapsing their resources on marketing and direct sales is that they operate in an ailing sector of the economy (especially small-press, literary publishers), within which they have barely enough resources to get their books to print, let alone invest in a serious marketing, sales and publicity strategy.

It’s also possibly true that such print aficionados feel drastically uncomfortable in the online world, and speaking into what seems like an echo chamber a lot of the time. If anything needs to change, I would suggest that booksellers, who will go down the eBookstore path or perish, are in a much better position to drive the development of a collaborative business model that focuses their own, and book publishers’ marketing, sales and publicity efforts. Booksellers and publishers need to share their resources, infrastructure and expertise, so that each is free to work on what they are proficient at, either bookmaking or bookselling.

It’s not as cut and dry as Dan Grover implies, but then, neither is parallel importation, and that didn’t stop him from pushing that wheelbarrow around in the dark.

The rest of the comments in Sam’s article, from all sorts of industry figures, are spectacularly reasonable, and well presented by Sam. A great spectrum of ideas, and all strung together with such clarity and concision. Check it out!

Meanwhile, do you know of examples of this type of bookseller/publisher collaboration? It would be great to keep this dialogue underway about how this changing relationship might morph into something weird, like an Imprints blimp parachuting books to customers in response to sign language made visible by wearing those massive foam-rubber hands.

1. NB: By googling ‘Book a Month Club’, which I thought was the name of McSweeney’s book-subscription service, I found this, The Book of the Month Club, and then I realised that this idea, which I thought was quite novel, is not novel at all, and then I remembered how much I used to bug Mum to join these, but she was savvy to their swindling ways, with which I now sympathise. And anyway, it’s still a better than Don Grover’s idea, which I’m getting to.
2. *googles ‘booksellers turn to publishing’, finds this, is not surprised*

I’ve been reading about marketing recently, because I joined the committee of Wet Ink magazine as Marketing Dude, and understanding what marketing means does not come as naturally to me as understanding how to edit a manuscript does.

This seems to be a common sentiment in the small-press sector: there is an immense amount of production talent – well-read, judicious editors, tweaked and beautiful designers, typography wonks and typesetting nerds whose idea of a hilarious joke is that keming is bad kerning – but most of the people I know in this field spend as much of their time producing as they do commiserating about their poor sales.

The problem with most of us progressive, literary types is that we’re educated enough to be critically minded about marketing and advertising, so we find it difficult to employ these dirty means to sell our own work, or that of the writers we publish. As though literature were some sort of sacrosanct product – something that could, or should, exist outside of the market in which we trade everything else.

Yes, a lot of the marketing literature out there is riddled with impenetrable corporatese, and the prospect of beginning to use this language makes me feel illogically duplicitous, but buried in that corporatese are perfectly reasonable phrases like ‘identifying your market’, ‘putting your product in the way of your market’ and ‘delivering value to your customers‘.

If you produce literature, why wouldn’t you want to do these things? Marketing is only a dirty word in some literary circles because it has been appropriated by unscrupulous companies to deliver products of dubious value to customers whose faculties of scrutiny are less than sharp. It’s not just anti-ageing cream that gets this treatment – someone, maybe Albert Camus, said that abstract art is ‘a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered’.

It might also be that marketing doesn’t fit well in the literary sector because no one can really explain what the value of literature is: you either get it and you read a lot, or you don’t and you’re not sure what all the fuss is about. Next time you meet someone who says they don’t get reading, try explaining to them that regular engagement with literature develops your compassionate motives by facilitating your understanding of other people’s experience of the human condition.

Yet, Coca Cola manage to convince millions of consumers every day that they should buy their sugary, carbonated tooth corroder. Coke has no value, but look how fun it is to drink – you get to float around in one of those bubbles!

So, what are the values of literature? One way to begin answering the question of how to market literature is to start thinking about why you read literature. Chances are, many others read literature for similar reasons, and you can derive a loosely representative sample from this.

I read literature for private communion with the ideas of others, and I write it to offer the same. This communion improves my understanding of others, which improves my personal relationships. Through literature I learn about perspectives on the world I could never have dreamed up myself, simply because I have not lived the same experiences as the writer. So my world view shifts almost imperceptibly through reading literature, and this empowers me to lead a more ethical, productive and compassionate existence.

Why do you read literature? What value does it contribute to your life?

An exciting opportunity has come up for young writers at one of Australia’s most prestigious platforms for the discussion of literature, ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. They are looking for five young bloggers to write about book culture on their new blog. I will certainly be applying, and I encourage other young book lovers to do so as well.

The gig is unpaid – advertised as ‘the best unpaid gig in town’ – and a discussion was brought up by Lisa Dempster about whether this is because blogging is not a legitimate form of publishing. The discussion of blogging legitimacy baffles me, especially attempts to articulate support for the medium, and the cries of outrage when another media outlets ‘exploit writers to leverage their online presence’: if the writers didn’t consider it worth their while, they wouldn’t do it.

The debate also reminds me of the equally superfluous debate about the life expectancy of the novel as a medium. Debating the legitimacy of blogging or the longevity of novel publishing is less important than simply blogging well and publishing good novels.

Reading the post highlighted a division that I think is worth exploring further. For these purposes, legitimacy might be arrived at through payment or publication of writers. I think there is much more at stake here than the meagre incomes of a couple of writers – embracing this opportunity, paid or unpaid, will yield far greater cultural capital than the alternatives proposed by its detractors.

Legitimacy through Payment

If the legitimacy-through-payment debate is to be had, it could be easily applied to many art forms that people practise without remuneration: graffiti, long-stitching, or writing books themselves – Lisa herself has done a lot to reveal the appalling financial conditions under which Australian authors labour.

Brian from Fitzroyalty mentions – with some exasperation – legitimising blogging by paying bloggers is difficult in a medium that barely has a functioning economic model. Instead, another idea of legitimacy needs to be considered when evaluating blogging.

Legitimacy comes from other sources in the blogosphere – sources that traditionally legitimate mediums are lacking, such as the amount of conversation generated by your writing, which is inhibited in most print mediums. And the inclusion of young voices on the ABC is worth more than the validation a young writer might get from being paid by any other institution. The prospects arising out of a gig with the ABC far outweigh the likelihood that they’ll never pay for blogging.

Legitimacy by Publication

Young writers are apprentices pushing their way into an industry with an abundance of suppliers (writers) and a dearth of distributors (editors/publishers). The under-representation of young writers’ voices in our traditional outlets makes this even harder. These positions at the ABC will help young writers to advance their position in this pursuit, by teaching them the ropes and getting their name out there. These are legitimate means for the development and promotion of youth literature.

They could choose not to publish them, which is the model alluded to by Mel Campbell, editor of The Enthusiast. In the comments to Lisa’s post, Mel criticised the ABC and Express Media¹ for not paying young contributors, and stated their alternative policy of restricting the number of contributors and writing a lot of the content themselves instead of ‘exploiting inexperienced workers’.

Not only does Express Media have an honourable tradition of paying its contributors, the organisation also works extensively at legitimising young writers in other ways, such as by providing professional development and experience in the industry. As with the ABC publishing youth literature on this blog, this constitutes a greater contribution to the legitimacy of their careers than paying them ever could.

I would rather see a million young writers working for free than a handful of writers dominating the industry because the market found a way to pay for their time. These young writers are producing content for free anyway, on their own blogs – that the ABC is leveraging some of their resources and infrastructure to endorse this content is legitimising enough.

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1. Disclaimer: I am a former employee of Express Media, and I have been paid to write book reviews for The Book Show, so maybe it’s easy to go into bat for these guys, but in reality I’ve seen the value in providing professional development for young writers, and I’ve experienced the same writing for the ABC; I certainly would have written for the ABC for free if it meant getting my name out there the way it did.