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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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?

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 figure a lot of people could save a lot of time if they weren’t rebuilding the wheel each time they wanted to get something rolling. For example, I have been contracted to build on the existing bookshop relationships for Breakdown Press and the process involved harvesting email and phone contacts of Australian bookshops.

It was kind of annoying to have to do it with the knowledge that many had probably been through the same process before, and were sitting on their own database somewhere, compiled with a similar sense of frustration. SPUNC kindly shared the database they are beginning to compile – Breakdown Press are members. I assume the Australian Booksellers Association has one, but you have to pay for it. I reckon we shouldn’t need to pay for this sort of information – just as people are producing open-source and free versions of micro-blogging sites, word-processing software and project management tools, the open-source philosophy could be applied to small-press industry resources.

Bookshop databases are just the beginning: Alex Hutton, a guy I worked with at Voiceworks, has all sorts of crazy ideas about pooling the administrative infrastructure of the sector, including the slush pile; when we were trying to execute a Voiceworks promotions mailout to Australian schools, you can imagine how far we got, a small, under-resourced organisation up against ten-thousand-odd schools. I’ve since found the Australian Schools Directory, but even this is marginally useful – the information needs to be more easily accessible, and malleable.

So I want to share the database I’ve compiled, but am not sure about the best way to do this. Having compiled it for Breakdown Press, I wondered briefly whether there would be copyright concerns with sharing such a resource, but they’re cool with it – because they’re cool, see? It’s just a spreadsheet right now, but if a group like SPUNC came on board it might be turned into an online database that SPUNC members have access to. Online CRMs like Highrise come to mind.

Does anyone else know of ways to share these sorts of resources?

One Magic Square is a call to action, with the know-how to get started right away. We all have the potential to grow our own food, even if we’re jammed in a terrace house in inner-city anywhere. One Magic Square provides the plot design, food knowledge and seasonal organisation.

The one-square-metre idea is not new, and One Magic Square picks up on much of the environmental urgency the conscientious are already aware of in ‘Part Two: Toward food self-sufficiency’. But this artfully packaged reference guide to the practice of individual self-sufficiency will make it easy for anyone to get a shovel on, no matter the colour of their thumb.

The principles behind One Magic Square are much like those being expounded by citizen journalists in the media industry: large corporations are not considering the long-term interests of the masses, so it is up to the individuals to reappropriate control of the food industry.

Thankfully, One Magic Square doesn’t mince words when acknowledging that individual action is not the whole answer – one square-metre plot will yield approximately ten per cent of your food needs. The idea is to use the first square to plot your expansion. At the very least, if you grow your own corn it won’t be fed to beef cattle or hybrid engines.

Definitely a book to get you started, and one to keep on your shelf and splash with dirt before turning to your tomato-stained cookbooks.

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Published by Wakefield Press
Paperback, 352 PP 200 x 200
9781862547643
$45.00

I met this guy called Warri who wants to start up an arts and culture magazine. So I said, ‘Hey, I know a thing or two about magazines, let’s hang out and geek out on production talk.’ We’re yet to meet up, but we will.

Recently Andre, who I posted about a while back, emailed me for advice on a book proposal he’s putting together in the capacity of Right Now editor. I sent some feedback along with a book-information-summary sheet I’m developing for Paine Management – this should give him an idea of the sort of info publishers are chasing in book proposals. I hope he’ll keep me in the loop, because this is exactly the sort of thing I’d like to move into.

Last night we launched How to Make Trouble, the book I’m helping Breakdown Press to distribute to Australian bookshops¹. It was a raging success, and much fun was had by all. I feel confident that we’ll move the whole (substantial) print run, and it’s been empowering to apply the distro knowledge I hadn’t even noticed I picked up along the way.

Plus I’m always reading someone’s work and sending back feedback. Mechanics joke and moan about this, and people sometimes ask me if my writer friends are always hitting me up for some free editing. I say yeah, and invariably they say, ‘You know, I write a bit of poetry … ‘

This is agency as I know it – I don’t know much …

… but I know that what I am essentially doing in a relationship like this is acting as a consultant. It’s agency of a temperate variety, but it’s just the beginning. I’d like to take Andre’s book proposal to a publisher and say, ‘Hey, you should publish this and these are three good reasons.’

I conceived the idea to establish a publishing-services business with agency in there as a service to offer, with the long-term plan to allow things like typesetting, editing and indexing to slowly atrophy as legitimate agency opportunities arise.

In the meantime, if I can offer consultancy services on a case-by-case, somewhat ad hoc basis and figure out a way to monetise this, that would be great. If you’re interested in using services like this, let me know – in lieu of actual money, we could arrange a mutually beneficial sort of pro bono arrangement.

To this end, I recently registered with a website called The Sharehood - one of a few online communties I know about that are trading in alternative currencies: samaras. there, I’m offering print-publishing services in exchange for web design and development services. Maybe I should add ‘publishing misc’ in the things I can offer.

1. this one I”m even getting paid for!