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.

If:book Australia is a think-and-do tank dedicated to promoting ‘new forms of digital literature’ and exploring ‘ways to boost connections between writers and audiences’, which is more exciting than I can fully express.

They are associated with the Institute for the Future of the Book in New York, and if:book London, and are based at Queensland Writers’ Centre. Kate Eltham and Simon Groth there are my newest heroes, not least because Simon found an excellent photo of a statue of Farnsy to accompany the essay I wrote for them.

I’m pretty excited about this essay because: 1) it is a call to action on governing our own literary culture and is my first steps into the territory of full-blown internet apostate; 2) it was commissioned with a Direct Message on Twitter by Simon after he read SIB; 3) they paid me really good money to do it.

I’m becoming a little tired of writing and promoting SIB in the ad hoc fashion I do, so I’m starting to think of this commission as the catalyst for the beginning of a departure, maybe.

Sometimes I’m tired of being a wannabe leftist revolutionary and pseudo-intellectual. Thinking about ideology, politics, economics and the publishing industry all the time is kind of bringing me down: the ideologues, the politicians, the failing markets, the legalese … ugh.

Doing this sort of work with good (liberal) intentions is kind of like trying to ride your bike safely: there will always be dickheads on the road, making your journey unsafe no matter how cautious you are; there will always be ideologues pushing their agendas in the way, making your journey of intellectual discovery that much more difficult by being dickheads.

I want to focus on creating literature again for a while. I had a short story broadcast on Radio Adelaide recently, and sitting there listening to it with Felice in Lucy’s lounge room caused a heartswell that I want to chase up.

Also I don’t want to burn out and become jaded ten months out of the next Academy, so after a couple of posts I’ve got lined up I think I’m going to give SIB a break and just post whenever I feel like it and, ya know, try to stop worrying about the internet.

Meanwhile, here is the introduction of the if:book essay, which is called ‘You’re the Voice’ (the rest can be found here):

There was a time, kids, back in nineteen tickety two, when people sincerely believed in the internet as the great democratising power of the twenty-first century. I, for one, thought it was the Second Coming of the Gutenberg Revolution. But then I’m one of the most naive and optimistic people I know. Gullible maybe, whatever.

Now, in only nineteen tickety three, this promise has gone the way of … well, democracy itself. Just as a concentration of third-estate power has occurred in Thomas Carlyle’s esteemed fourth estate, control of the online knowledge market is coagulating in the cloyingly, sickeningly sweet hands of our dear friend Google.

Sure, there are others (alternatives), but only in the same sense there are alternatives to News Ltd and Fairfax in Australia’s traditional media industry: they’re nominal alternatives, with no real power. Running a successful, independent newspaper in Australia would be much like going into farming against Monsanto in the United States.

The book-industry implications for this trend first dawned on me when I found another puff piece about cultural criticism, this time in the Guardian: “Is the age of the critic over?” Puff piece or not, the precis really got to me: “Critics reflect on how social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and myDigg, fit into the perennial debate on cultural elitism.”

I have some questions for all you publishy/economicsy types. When dealing with eBook distributors, can publishers reasonably expect to set the terms of trade? With enough collective bargaining power, could we garner sufficient market pressure that the eDistros would be forced to capitulate?

It seems there are two choices when deciding how many eDistros to sign with: just the big guns (which I’m gonna go ahead and dub The Bazooka Approach – choose a core group of big distros, and sell to them hard), or all of the little ones as well (The Scatter Gun Approach – spray your books at as many distros as possible and hope your files don’t wind up on torrentz.eu).

The total administrative resources required to sign with all these eDistros, whose terms seem varied to the nth degree, is gargantuan, and what if the big guys squeeze out the little guys when the market settles? All those resources will have been wasted. But The Bazooka Approach means accepting unfavourable terms – some of which are actually illegal in Australia.

If you don’t have the answers/ideas, but know someone who does, please forward a link to this post. I’d love to see a stream of discussion on this here humble blog about ignorance.

An argument for The Scatter Gun approach is that you wouldn’t limit yourself to certain retailers in the pBook trade, though there’s an argument that you would do this: say, if the retailer was actually a lemonade stand. An argument against The Scatter Gun approach is: who knows what sort of DRM software these cowboy operators are using; how do you monitor that? Google Alerts? By then it’s too late – there’s no turning back from torrentz.eu.

An argument for The Bazooka Approach is that your administrative resources are more targeted, and marketing through these outlets much more manageable. And the security’s probably better. (Key word: ‘probably’.) An argument against The Bazooka Approach is you might miss whole territories, such as those where the big guns won’t aim, such as China, if China pinches America’s breakfast one morning.

More of the reason I ask is that I wonder if shooting for something like this would make the whole business of dealing with eDistros far more efficient, at least for publishers. Disclaimer: I’ve never been a bookseller, so I don’t know how it feels to negotiate terms from that side. Maybe the terms we’d like could never be reasonable to enough eDistros that the market would survive.

The Big Five did a bit of muscling against Amazon to get the agency model established, yeah? And The Little Thousands are benefiting from that. Maybe we could ask our bigger brothers to sort these fuckers out for us – get some heads knocked.

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Who knows? Not me. That’s why I’m asking you. Bring it!
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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 was doing a bit of internet stalking the other day and came across this article by Rjurik Davidson about creative writing courses and so forth. It’s an interesting read, but there was one line in particular that hit out at me from a guy he interviewed (Errol).

[I]n the 1970s, there was a much smaller pool of authors … fewer publishers [and] no literary agents. We were more inclined to take on things that were perhaps a bit rough around the edges in the hope that we could work with the author and polish them up … We used to do more work in those days. All sorts of things have happened since then. Literary agents have come along …

There it is. That ellipses represented to me not a edited quote (which it was) but a backward gaze into the carefree days before agents or agencies, and my head started to explode from wondering about what the industry would look like without formal representation for authors. In this one paragraph I could see a literary utopia blossoming like vinegar and baking soda in a glass – a place/time where writers and editors worked on manuscripts together in coffee shops, their heads bent to the paper and their noses nearly touching, and the editor would whisper a word of advice and the writer would leap up and shout in delight and the book would be a bestseller and everyone had leather bound notebooks and no-one wrote about vampires.

Obviously this is far from any reality. I know that agents play an integral part in the industry game – making sure that authors get enough money for their art. But facing a time when the author-publisher relationship might be changing, I started to consider what this could mean for agents. Are they likely to be more important now in bartering distribution and rights deals for digital editions? Or will the author just take their Adobe Acrobat and manuscript and go straight to a distributor themselves?

More than this, I began to question the fundamental aspects of being an agent. It seems to me that literary agents are another form of middle-management – external to the house but somehow so entwined in all the major publishing deals that they can’t be bypassed. Even though it’s a job an editor could perform if they had the inclination. Sourcing new talent and reading raw manuscripts – didn’t this once fall under the remit of editor/editorial assistant? It sounds like more fun than dealing with an author who has a premature ego the size of a small galaxy due to the fact an agent has decided to pitch their novel to Penguin. And is this even what agents really do? There are now books out on how to best go about getting an agent, as the agents themselves start putting up filters before they will touch a manuscript.

I believe publishing houses should do more in-house siphoning. Not to put agents out of work, but to keep their hands in the author pool, feeling out the grooves and flows, rather than only dipping their toes in the warm shallows. With socks on.

A good book editor has to be capable of mentoring a person: after hacking at the fundamental structure of an author’s manuscript, an editor needs to be there to field questions, lend support and generally reassure the author their early work has not been one big, protracted period of self delusion and folly.

A good editor is often the only person who will ever consider the text as closely as the author, and therefore is in a good position to play the above mentor role, advising on intimate details of the manuscript’s development while the author rebuilds their manuscript around their shattered ego – this requires considerable, tact, diplomacy and compassion, and often it seems an author becomes willing to let their guard down with their editor more than anyone else, for the sake of their beloved manuscript.

This can be beautiful (though it is sometimes embarrasing and painful), and is the sort of relationship I constantly aspire to in my work. The operative word being ‘aspire’: it is not always possible, especially when an author’s insecurities manifest as petulance, arrogance and resistance.

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?

There’s been a recent development in the ebook royalties debate, with literary agent Andrew Wylie taking matters into his own hands and negotiating a deal with Amazon to sell ebooks through an imprint of his agency called Odyssey Editions. That’s right. Imprint. Agency. That shit happened for real. I guess this is so he can force publishers to give in to his demands for higher royalties for his authors by going into direct competition with them. After releasing 20 books by prestigious clients of his to be sold only through the Kindle book store for the next two years, he is threatening to expand this to 2,000 if publishers don’t atone for their sinful underpaying of authors.

So a literary agent is going in to bat for his authors. Makes sense, right? But in doing so isn’t he’s also making himself some pretty powerful enemies in publishing and doing his authors a disservice for future print publications?

Sam Cooney wrote an excellent article on the effects of digital selling on booksellers, and part of this explored whether it was advisable for publishers to sell direct to consumers rather than go through the old channels. I can’t help but feel Wylie’s move falls into this same debate. Should you move away from traditional forms of publishing if you think you can get a better deal elsewhere, or should we be supporting each other and trying to come to a compromise? It’s sort of like if you were the manager of a football team and you decided your players weren’t getting paid enough so you told the AFL you were going to start your own league. People will probably still come and see your team play, but now the AFL is split. Well done. Because publishing isn’t disparate and parochial enough, bozo.

“I am only trying to make a point in order to underscore the importance of getting the right terms with a view to uniting the two [print and digital] revenue streams,” Wylie said (via The Bookseller website)

Fair shout, and I can sort of see the weird logic. Future unification on his terms through deliberate deprivation. But this point he’s trying to make has effects that last at least two years. So even if you do sort out the royalties thing in the mean time, which I guess everyone hopes will happen, these first 20 books won’t be available from anywhere except Kindle book store until 2012. Do it for the other 2,000 and that’s giving exclusive sales rights for a huge number of potential high sellers to an already massive company, taking away opportunities from smaller booksellers. CEO of ABA Oren Teicher made an excellent point when he said:

Diminishing the availability of titles and narrowing the options for readers can only harm our society in the long run. That the Wylie agency has sought to distribute these works through a single retailer is bad for the book industry and bad for consumers. Books — in whatever format — are crucibles of ideas and unique expression, and we should be doing all that we can to expand, not constrict, readers’ access to them.

Should Wylie be more worried about authors in this debate, or about the industry in general? Book buyers won’t give a fuck about royalty rates, they’ll just not be able to find the ebooks through other outlets and might not bother looking for them on the Kindle book store. Is it wrong for an agent to go this far to protect the interests of his authors?

Besides which, I have this sneaking suspicion that Amazon are slightly evil… It’s completely unfounded at the moment, just a sort gut feeling that they are getting too big for their boots and, eventually they’ll make all publishers bend to their will or be destroyed.

Or maybe I’ve just been smoking too much pot.

An excellent article on this (the Wylie vs publishers, not me smoking pot) can be found here: Welcome to Wylie World

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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My whole world at the moment is about marketing. Against my will, it’s become increasingly important to my job and my life. Sales figures, profit margins, the whole lot. I know I might have been pretty critical of the way independent publishers don’t use marketing to their advantage, but the more I learn about it the more I want it to disappear. Or at least keep its ego in check.

Recently I was having a discussion with a guy I know, who wrongly thinks he knows everything about everything, regarding whether a marketing plan that utilises the public’s opinion to influence creative process was ‘genius’ or not. I fell on the side of not. Something seems horribly wrong with the idea that developers, in this case of a game, had to compromise their creative vision because the marketing team came up with the suggestion that people might feel more involved if they had direct input into the production of the thing. From a creative point of view, my argument favoured the position that characters that come to life in games, books, films whatever are not necessarily the ones that most resemble the players/readers/viewers or the ones we would chose to create ourselves. That’s why writers exist – to tap into and display creativity not everyone has.

And why does marketing exist? Apparently to tell writers how the masses think they’re doing their job wrong.

This is basically the crux of my argument. I had always thought marketing was a process where you take something, anything, and display it in such a way that it is appealing to the largest possible audience. Commissioners and writers make the thing, and the marketing team go fuck yeah you know what would make this a success? An intensive fliering campaign! Or a week of skywriting over London. Or a competition in the newspaper. Whatever, I don’t know. Now, though, focus groups and user data have the ability to influence the direction of publishers. If a marketing campaign is to become the beating heart of a creative process, then won’t creative industries such as publishing, film, music, gaming and all that just produce stuff based on what’s already out there rather than pushing boundaries and challenging consumers? I’m thinking specifically of the absolute fucking deluge of vampire/supernatural novels that followed the release of they Meyer books, but this is just one example in a swamp of many.

Effective marketing can make the difference between a successful product and a not so successful one. Lots of great ideas go by the wayside because they’re not marketed well. But as an editor or a developer or whatever it is that I do now and will do in the future, I value my aesthetic judgment more than my market knowledge. I’m starting to feel pretty fuckin’ lonely out here.

Then, my mate made this point:

If you stick only those you know to be creative, you will get specific creations.  Give everyone and their dog an open invitation, and you will get a whole mass of shit, but the odd unexpected result… It is the logic that within a mess of fuckwits, there will be great things.  Rather than just picking great things you know and having a tiny number of created entities

Will sterility of creativity result from a belief that market knowledge will hold the key to future production, or will it result from writers who have limited vision in the first place? Both? In which case, is this guy right in thinking that the only way we can really grow creatively is by throwing in the towel as producers and leaving it for other people to decide the exact products they want? But then isn’t that sort of like… making ourselves redundant, and analogous to throwing away a million dollars to pan for gold in a river?

The fact is, people will not always do themselves favours.

This never was, is, or will be acceptable to wear. Anywhere. Just no.

I don’t know whether I trust the beast that is public opinion to be the single driving force behind all creative creation, but isn’t this the underlying principle behind market-driven production?

There’s heaps of shit that hasn’t been thought of yet because people are putting their energy toward creating similar products to what they made last year (with small differences, of course) that are a safe bet economically as they pander to an established audience base.

This does not mean that different things don’t have a market.

It does means marketing will need to be more creative in winning over an consumer.

Then I read this and realised I haven’t even scratched the surface of the consumer-driven vs creative-driven issue.