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18 February 2008

The e-book arrives - or does it?

This week has seen two big publishers announcing initiatives to prepare for the e-book world. At the same time, battle has been joined on e-book royalties.

HarperCollins is to post entire books online for anyone to read. They believe that this will stimulate demand for e-books, but that no-one will want to read an entire book on screen. CEO Jane Friedmann says: ‘The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of the content.’ Joel Rickett, Deputy Editor of the Bookseller, said: ‘HarperCollins is gambling that people aren’t comfortable reading for an extended period of time on screen.’

Random House, for its part, is making a business title by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath available online for $2.99 (£1.50) each chapter.

In the meantime a battle is looming on e-book royalties. The US and current UK norm appears to be 25% of published price, but Random House and Little Brown in the UK have just announced to agents that they are going to press for 15% of net receipts. Their argument is that it is expensive to digitise books and make them available as e-books. Random House worldwide claims that it will not break even on its investment in its digital warehouse until 2013, but this obviously depends on the speed of take-up. Once set up, e-books will be very cheap to deliver, especially if they are sold online. No-one knows how they will sell.

The very nature of potential e-book sales means that different royalties for different territories is a very dangerous concept for publishers, as there’s nothing to stop book-buyers downloading the book from a website anywhere in the world. Authors will want a decent share of the action and will not want to accept lower royalties from UK publishers.

It’s been quiet recently on the Amazon Kindle front (see News Review 26 November), but e-book possibilities depend on the development of a universally marketed e-book reader at a reasonable cost. Readers of HarperCollins’ new e-books will not be able to download them to laptops or to an electronic reading device. In that sense their experiment is more akin to Amazon’s promotional Search Inside programme, which is thought to have increased sales.

But whilst big publishers slug it out competitively with their digital developments, readers in Japan have already jumped ahead of them. Last year cellphone novels, composed and read on tiny cellphone screens, took five of the top ten spots in the bestseller list. More on this and on Amazon’s takeover of Audible next week.

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11 February 2008

Striking writers win

In News Review of 5 November we noted the beginning of the Writers’ Guild strike in the US. Since then there have been occasional stories in the media about tv companies being forced to put out a diet of reruns and American audiences deserting their tv screens. The writers have stood firm through what must have been a very difficult time, and they are just about to settle after achieving their objectives.

Two deadlines are looming which have forced the tv companies and studios to come to terms. February 15^th is seen as the deadline for new material to be produced for the 2008-9 television season. On a longer timescale, the Screen Actors Guild contract expires in the summer of 2008 and studios must have been keen to settle this dispute well before that negotiation, as the actors could really stop the entertainment business in its tracks.

So what was the dispute about and what has been gained? The writers were concerned about DVD residuals and, even more importantly, about the huge potential for new media, using such techniques as streaming. The tentative agreement became possible when it was agreed that writers would be paid a fixed residual amounting to about $1,300 (£668) for the right to stream a television program online. In the third year of their contract, they will achieve one of their major goals: payments amounting to 2% of the distributor's revenue from such streams.

Writers will be paid a percentage of the distributor’s revenue rather than the flat fee for web-streamed television shows granted to the directors. The writers had insisted on this to ensure that they did not lose out on any new-media windfall the studios and networks may get from web video in the future.

So what has been the effect of the strike? Its financial impact on writers, who have been on strike since early November, has been considerable. The strike is generally reckoned to have cost about $1 billion (nearly £514 million), with a particularly devastating effect on Los Angeles, the home of the American entertainment industry. As for the long-term effects, writers will now get a share in the income from dvd and new media.

In a Gallup poll conducted six weeks into the strike 60% of Americans sided with the writers. TV viewers may not all return to their screens, as the aftermath of the 1988 strike was that around 10% of tv audiences were permanently lost, and there are more alternatives to tv now. But the writers have fought their corner and established their importance to the entertainment industry, as well as their key role as content-originators who must be paid for their contribution.

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4 February 2008

Boom time for creative writing

This weekend has seen the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference in New York City. It’s a sold-out event with 7,000 attendees. The Association was founded in 1967 with 13 members, at a time when creative writing was in its infancy, to support the growing presence of literary writers in literary education in the US. It now has 400 colleges and universities as members and there are 720 degree-conferring programmes in creative writing in the US.

AWP says it has ‘helped to establish the largest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen’. It was founded by 15 writers who represented 12 writing programmes which had been set up in the teeth of fierce opposition from scholars, who felt that the study of literature should focus on the greats, and should not involve actual writing.

Expansion has not been quite so fast in the UK, but there are now around a hundred university courses for creative writers, as well as a host of evening classes and privately run courses. In the meantime this is a booming area across the globe, with many new courses being set up to satisfy demand.

The huge expansion in creative writing is a response to soaring demand from a wide range of aspiring writers. This is part of the booming world of writing, but it’s also a result of the growing realisation that knowing how to write well is a really useful skill. It would be interesting to know how many of the students on these courses go on to make careers as writers, but perhaps that isn’t really the point.

Creative writing courses are very lucrative for the colleges and universities, with full student rolls and plenty of demand, including a large number of mature students. On both sides of the Atlantic many universities have well-known authors teaching their courses and attracting students. In the States Wallace Stegner’s course at Stanford was highly influential and the pioneering University of Iowa course was once taught by Kurt Vonnegut, amongst many literary luminaries.

In the UK the Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway is the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. The search for celebrity has recently hit the headlines with the news that novelist Martin Amis will be paid £80,000 ($157,258) a year to teach 28 hours at Manchester University, a stupendous £3,000 ($5,897) an hour. Another example is recent T S Eliot Prize winner Sean O’Brien, who is Professor or Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Now that many writers, especially poets, support themselves through teaching creative writing, the courses are making an essential contribution to the creative economy by helping writers to support themselves so they can go on writing.

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28 January 2008

Can fumes make your writing more lowbrow?

Joan Brady, the distinguished author of Theory of War, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1993, has made the astonishing claim that the fumes from a factory next door to her home made her writing more downmarket.

Brady is an interesting writer. An American who started out as a ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet, she married a writer and moved to the UK in 1979. Her Whitbread win in 1993 was with a novel about a little white boy who was sold into slavery when only four years old, and was based on her grandfather’s life. As the first woman and still the only American to win this coveted award, Brady was assured of a secure place as a literary novelist.

But then the local council in Totnes in Devon gave permission for a shoe factory to be installed in a one-time theatre next door to her house. Brady started suffering numbness in her hands and legs, which she claimed were caused by solvents used by the shoe manufacturer, Conker. Doctors later confirmed that she had suffered neuropathy, or nerve damage, which was likely to have been caused by chemicals. She fought the council and the shoe factory through two and a half years and no less than 15 court appearances, and finally received an out-of-court settlement of £115,000 last week.

Whilst all this was going on and unable to concentrate on the literary novel she had been writing, Brady started working on a thriller with a friend. And there’s no doubt that Bleedout, her eighth novel, is quite different from her earlier books.

But can the quality and type of writing a writer produces be affected by chemicals? Could the fumes have made her ‘go lowbrow’ and write a violent thriller, putting her literary writing on one side? It seems a unusual claim but the evidence certainly suggests that the battle with the council may have contributed to her state of mind. Her website says: ‘Their relentless pursuit of me through the courts took on an almost messianic quality and focused my attention as never before on issues of justice and injustice.’

In an interview with Matt Craig for Shots Ezine, the author said:

‘My reactions seemed way out of proportion, although I’ve found out since that they’re pretty standard in people who are cornered, especially people unjustly accused of crimes. All I thought about was blood and destruction. I kept watching Terminator. I wanted to kill people. I was too agitated to complete the literary novel I was working on, so a friend suggested I try a thriller instead. Bleedout was the result.’

Brady is now working on the second thriller of a two-book contract and Bleedout has been well-received. The Daily Mirror said: ‘Buy it… brilliant… move over John Grisham’ and it looks as if the author might be set for commercial success. At least her battles have given her a good story to tell and an absolutely unique way to publicise her book. It seems only fair that she should get lots of attention from the media and that Bleedout should hit the bestseller lists.

Joan Brady’s site

Interview with Matt Craig

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21 January 2008

Indies in the ascendant

The New Year has brought some welcome news on independent publishing and bookselling, both of which are especially important to writers.

The UK figures for 2006 show that 96 stores closed and only 64 opened. This has been turned around in 2007, with 81 new independent bookshops opening and only 72 closing. Meryl Halls, Head of Membership Services at the Booksellers’ Association, said: ‘As one of our members has said, 2007 saw the renaissance of the independent bookselling sector, and this story would seem to be borne out by both new shops opening and sales performance.’

Book Marketing Limited’s figures showed a 2007 increase of 6% in volume sales from independents, compared to a 3% fall at the chains. More people seem to be valuing their local bookshops, and the stores that have survived the cull of recent years have worked out how to retain their customers and are now fighting fit.

This doesn’t explain the phenomenal optimism shown by those opening the new stores. Michael Neil of wholesaler Bertrams said that people ‘like the idea of being a bookseller. It’s seen as a noble thing to do. As the chain bookstores have consolidated over the past 18 months, there are opportunities for good local indies to step in’. You can see this in action in a place like the city of Bath, where high-profile bookshop casualties have been succeeded in the past year by high-profile successes, such as Topping & Co.

On the publishing front there is the success of the Independent Alliance. This powerful group of mid-sized independents has shown that banding together to support a really good sales operation is a good way to build independent publishers’ sales. The Alliance reckons that it is now the right size, and will not be adding any further publishers. Its success has inspired others to follow and will hopefully lead to further groupings involving other small publishers. Since big publishers concentrate on the chains, smaller ones have a real opportunity to sell more effectively into the independent bookshops.

All of this is encouraging news for writers. It is big publishers’ and bookshop chains’ focus on bestsellers which has cramped the opportunities for new writers to get published. But independent publishers and booksellers can focus on individual books and authors, and back their hunches, if they choose, provided that they can survive and run successful businesses.

It’s good news that book-buyers have responded to this more bookish approach. It may not be helping independent booksellers directly (although many have developed effective websites) but the web also provides a brilliant way for a huge range of books from publishers of all sizes to find readers.

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14 January 2008

Should publishing be publicly funded?

The current controversy surrounding cuts in grants to regularly-funded organisations by Arts Council England has raised the interesting question of whether publishing should be publicly funded. If it is, which is the case in the UK and many other European countries, how do you decide what deserves funding and what doesn’t? The American model presents a stark contrast, providing very little public funding for literature, and that mostly at state rather than federal level. But Americans have a strong tradition of philanthropy to the arts, and individual donors provide most of the funding for literature.

The situation is complicated in the UK by the fact that large amounts of public funding have recently been diverted from the arts to support the 2012 London Olympic Games, although there will be a cultural Olympiad, hopefully featuring literature, to accompany them. In the recent spending round it was widely expected that the Arts Council would have its own funding cut, so when in the end it received an uplift, the funding body had already worked out where to cut what it gave to its regularly-funded organisations. It decided to wield the knife in any case on the grounds that a general review was overdue.

The problem for literature funding is that, unlike most of the arts, the funded sector sits alongside a large and relatively flourishing commercial sector. So the question arises, what should be funded and what can stand on its own feet? Most publishing of ‘literary’ novels takes place as part of publishers’ commercial activity. The literati may complain, but literary fiction is fairly well-received in the UK and a number of prominent prizes, most notably the Booker, help to focus readers’ attention on the books.

Publishing is a relatively cheap operation to fund. It does not need buildings - theatres, concert halls or art galleries - unlike the rest of the arts, and also does not require large salary bills, unlike orchestras for instance, in order to make an impact. Its relationship to the commercial sector means funders assume that literature doesn’t need support in the same way.

So what do the UK Arts Councils actually fund? It’s mostly poetry, with some support for literary translations. There certainly is an argument for saying that poetry badly needs the help. With the honourable exceptions of Faber, with its long tradition of poetry, and the small poetry lists at Jonathan Cape and Picador, big publishers do not support poetry. So, if the funding was taken away, there’s little doubt that many fewer poets would get their work into print.

But poetry is managing to hold its own. It has been featured on the flagship BBC Today programme every day this week in the shape of the T S Eliot Prize contenders and many people enjoy it. Its practitioners scramble to make any kind of living and mostly fund themselves by teaching creative writing. Poets don’t expect to live off writing poetry, but (like all writers) they certainly want it to be published.

The other genre which is state-funded is literary translation and this is mostly what has just been cut, affecting the publishers Dedalus and Arcadia. Dedalus is threatening to sue the Arts Council o the grounds that it has not followed its own procedures for withdrawal of funding, and is also trying to make this into a class action suit.

Translation has high costs and a relatively small market in general. But literary translation has never been more popular in the UK and is always going to be a minority interest amongst readers. So does it deserve to be funded, more than science fiction for instance? Is it inherently more worthwhile?

This debate will run and run. For now, the answer to these conundrums seems to be that funded publishers owe it to their funders, as the recipients of public investment, to make as good a job of their publishing as they can. In particular they need to reach as many readers as possible, and – for their authors’ sake as well - to make a decent fist of selling the books they publish.

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7 January 2008

A good Christmas for books

It is good to be able to follow up last week’s story on the continuing strength of reading with a report that Christmas 2007 was not the disaster that had been feared in the book trade. In the UK sales for the four weeks up to 29th December were up 5% on the same period last year. In the US the independents reported solid sales, although the chains continued to consolidate their lead, accounting for 33% of unit book purchases in the January through September period, according to figures compiled by PubTrack Consumer. While the US chains had the highest market share, purchases made through online retailers represented 20% of book purchases and the UK showed the same trend towards increasing internet sales.

The Christmas holiday falling on a Tuesday meant that shoppers had an extra three days to visit bookstores, at a time when it was generally thought too late to order from Amazon. The internet giant is nonetheless expected to show record figures.

In the UK it was a ‘range’ Christmas, with no one book dominating the bestseller lists. This is actually much better for booksellers, as it’s easier to keep a range of books in stock and also there was more of a feeling that books offered something for everyone. Overall, the year to 29th December showed growth of 6.2% by value in the UK, which even after inflation is 3.2%, a solid achievement.

Perhaps these results are not particularly remarkable, but they have to be seen against the background of a year in which the demise of the book was widely discussed, with fears about the dangers implicit in the rapid rate of change and possible fallout from digitisation. January 2008 shows the business pages full of gloomy predictions, and the consensus is that the consumer boom is over in both the US and the UK. The expectation is that the credit crunch is going to affect everything, even if both countries manage to avoid sliding into actual recession.

And how would recession affect the book trade? The received wisdom is that books do well in times of economic downturn because they are a relatively cheap form of entertainment and gift purchase. Previous recessions have not always shown this to be the case, and there’s no doubt that the growth and prospering of the chains internationally have been attributed to a consumer boom which relates very directly to people having more discretionary spending power.

But at least the book trade is dealing with books, to which many heavy readers are addicted, and have become used to buying rather than borrowing. The international book business will not emerge unscathed from the likely downturn in 2008, but it looks much better placed than most. And this means that new authors will continue to get their books published, even if it is gong to be tough getting through to publishers and agents.

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7 January 2008

'Why we read books'

An article in a recent edition of the New York Times was headed: A Good Mystery: Why We Read Books. At a time when the book seems more than ever before to be under pressure from the competition of the Internet, TV, computer games and so on, it is important to remember that millions of people across the globe still read books.

In third world countries they thirst for them, seeing them as part of education and a way out of poverty. Some of the best charities working to assuage this hunger, such as Book Aid International, are doing terrific work to shift some of the books we take for granted in the West to countries where they will be better appreciated. Their inspired Reverse Book Club means that a donation of just £5 ($10) a month can provide no less than 48 books a year to readers in the developing world.

Reading is a uniquely private matter. Sara Nelson, editor in chief of the US trade journal Publishers Weekly, says: ‘Why people read what they read is a great unknown and personal thing.’ Alan Bennett’s novella The Uncommon Reader imagines the Queen suddenly becoming a voracious reader late in life through reading Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.

For many children it was Harry Potter which turned them into readers, but whatever it is, the pleasure of reading is that it is something which will stay with you throughout your life. As long as your eyes hold up, books will continue to offer a fantastic range of experience, stimulating your imagination, extending your horizons and taking you to another world of fiction or fact.

Dean Koontz, who sells about 17 million copies of his books a year, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the web is ‘a low-cost way of generating a connection between writers and their audience’. The Internet does indeed provide wonderful ways of linking the very private world of writers, readers and the books they read. The success of sites such as BookCrossing, which enables people from 130 countries to liberate books into the world, show the strength of the urge to share.

Bookmooch is a new means of international book exchange facilitated by the web. American bibliophile John Buckman got the idea when on a visit to the English city of Norwich in 2005. A local community centre had a book-sharing corner with a sign that said ‘Leave a book. Take a book.’ He managed to recreate that sense of community online and Bookmooch already has 40,000 members around the world. Participants create an inventory of what they have and a wish list of what they are looking for.

So can we move into the New Year with confidence that readers will still clamour for books? In richer countries bookshops are thronged with keen readers and the Internet is offering new ways to find them and share them around. In spite of all the concerns about literacy, the thirst for books remains unabated. We are a long way yet from seeing anything which will replace them.

Book Aid International

BookCrossing

Bookmooch

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