publishing

“Can I Kindleize that Velveteen Rabbit For Ya?”

December 2, 2008 by John 10 Comments

Like most writing and reading households, The Missus and mine has books way in excess of the available bookshelf space. We’ve lived in this house for more than eight years now, yet still — still! — somewhere around six or eight cartons and big plastic tubs of books take up space in our (mercifully dry) garage.

On the one hand, as The Missus soberly points out, we’re never going to (re-)read all the books we’ve already got. Why not donate them to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or just sell the damn things in a garage sale or on eBay?

And yet, and yet…

In just the six or or seven months I’ve been writing here on RAMH, on probably 15 or 20 occasions I have longed to put my hands on a book. Not just any book but a specific one for a specific occasion. A book containing a quote I know, sorta, but don’t know. Or a book containing some random fact which I don’t quite have the words for.

Every one of those books is in one box or another in the garage. I know exactly what their covers look like. Frustratingly, because some of them are in big translucent plastic containers, I can actually see some of them.

(Aside to The Missus: Don’t worry. I’m not about to start rummaging. We both know what will happen: I’ll find another book I wouldn’t mind having to hand, and then another, and then another… Within a half-hour I’ll have an empty box and even less space upstairs in the office for trivial activities like, oh, say, standing and sitting.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if I had all those books on… hmm… online, maybe? or digitized and placed on a little six-inch stack of Amazon Kindles?

A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, by James Gleick*, tackles this problem. The piece begins by discussing the woes besetting the publishing industry (writers, agents, and editors as well as the faceless corporations themselves):

The gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we’ll always need houses.

And now comes the news, as book sales plummet amid the onslaught of digital media, that authors, publishers and Google have reached a historic agreement to allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents available (more or less) to every computer screen anywhere. Are you happy now? Maybe not, if your business has been the marketing, distributing or archiving of books.

If you’ve spent any time at all recently looking at the blogs of editors and agents, the angst will be familiar to you. It’s rampant not just among the bloggers and other opinion leaders, but among the commenters — often writers, nearly always passionate readers — upon their opinions.

Strangely, what is at stake — driving the panicky stampede over the cliff — isn’t the future of literacy, the real linchpin of civilization. It’s the future of books.

[Read more…]

The Business of Publishing Is…

July 11, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

From '...Loveley Money!' - c. 2008 by Richard Stiles (stilesr1 at sxc.hu) …surprise — it’s business!

In a blog post the other day, literary agent Nathan Bransford unleashed a torrent by asking nascent and/or, umm, under-published writers two questions:

Question #1: Let’s say there was a seer who could tell you definitively whether or not you have the talent to be a published writer. Absolute 100% accuracy. But. If the seer person said no, that’s that. Final answer. Would you want to know?

Question #2: If the seer person said no, you don’t have the talent to be a published writer, would you still write?

Now, granted, there are some traps there for the unwary reader. What does “published” mean — does self-publishing count? What’s “talent”?

But there were also a couple traps there for the blogging agent himself. First, of course, maybe 50-60% of commenters began by implicitly re-writing the first question to suit themselves, a la “Nothing is ever 100% certain. Therefore I’m going to assume that the seer may be wrong — certainly in my case!”

(I wanted to say, C’mon, people, make a choice. One shudders to imagine this sort of “decision-making” when facing truly black-and-white life choices — as sometimes, however painfully, life choices are. Re-imagine Sophie’s Choice, say: Sure — take them both! Sheesh.)

The post drew almost 200 comments. But that wasn’t the other trap awaiting Bransford. The other trap was in summing up his responses to all the comments.

[Read more…]

“What Kind of Book Is It?”

June 23, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Pigeons in holes (thanks, Wikimedia!)

One of the hardest — yet most important — questions an author often has to answer about his work is the one asked by this entry’s title.

Now, it’s not hard at all to answer, for many authors and even more books. When you walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble, when you browse Amazon, it’s all organized by “type”: romance along this aisle, SF over there, “literature” along the walls, and so on. The problem is that it’s these classifications which determine “what kind of book” a given title is — not the other way around.

[Read more…]

Thinning the Herd

May 24, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

The blog known as Editorial Ass (which is short, of course, for “Assistant”) is written by an anonymous editor in NYC who identifies herself only as MoonRat. It’s linked over in the “Touchstones” category.

A recent post there, on the surface, was stimulated by a lecture, which MR attended, given by one Jonathan Karp, one of those uber-powerful “publisher/editors” who have been given their own imprints; his is called Twelve. The hook for Twelve — what distinguishes it from nearly all other publishers nowadays — is its emphasis on quality over quantity. The imprint’s name highlights the main rule: it publishes exactly twelve titles a year, one a month, and since publishers’ catalogs are issued to book buyers every quarter, this means that each new catalog from Twelve features exactly three books.

This is both exhilarating and scary as crap.

Exhilarating, because — although unlikely to become a widespread trend — the focus is great for readers.

And scary as crap because — although unlikely etc. — the focus means that only the very best writers and books (at least in a given editor’s eyes) can “make the cut.” No slacking. No room for “good enough.”

Of course, we now live in a world (e-books, print-on-demand, and so forth) where the barriers to entry for a new book in some form are lower. So — even if likely etc. — the “good enough” work will still have an outlet.

Still… If you’re a writer, you don’t even have to think twice about the answer to these questions: are you good enough for a highly selective publisher? if not, why not? are you satisfied with a “good enough” publisher? why?

See what I mean? Scary.

E-readers (and E-writers), Part II

April 26, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Literature 2, by 'lusi' of sxc.hu A rough outline of the path taken by a novel to publication in the traditional way:

First, a definition: by “publication in the traditional way,” I mean that the end product is a hard- or soft-cover book which can be found on the shelves of — or can be ordered by — just about any bookstore or library in the world. The book has an ISBN, it is copyrighted, and (most importantly) its author has paid no money to arrange its publication. (He or she may have paid in many other ways, of course — in time, frustration, and anxiety, if nothing else.)

So it all begins with an author and a book. The author — let’s call him J, and assume he’s a “he” for convenience’s sake:

writes a complete novel,
gets it vetted by numerous readers (ideally objective readers — not just family and/or friends, but independent writers’ groups, university writing workshops, and so on),
researches the correct formatting of a manuscript (or MS) according to some set of rules other than his own, and
prepares a physical manuscript ready to be schlepped around to those in a position to see it published: acquisition editors.

Note a few key points about this journey so far, implicit in the above list.

[Read more…]

E-readers (and E-writers), Part I

April 22, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

This will be an ongoing series of posts, because it’s something I believe is about to demolish the traditional publishing industry — and who can sum up everything about an impending apocalypse within the scope of a single blog post?

Short version: Because they lend themselves more readily than books to digital form, music, movies, and television have been taking the lead in meeting the onrush of the Internet’s challenges to “old media.” All the controversy about digital rights management (DRM), purchasing vs. “renting” content, high-def vs. standard — that’s just the cowcatcher on the locomotive. But at least those industries are struggling to do something.

Publishing? Eh, not so much. “Books are different,” they say. “No one will ever read books in any form other than as printed matter. People like the feel of paper; they like the smell of it; they like the heft of the book in their hand.” And so on.

I bow to no one (as the cliché goes) in loving to read books. But I also have a clear sense of the wind rushing past the windows, and of publishing doing little to address the matter. (There are some significant exceptions, which I hope to cover later.)

For now, let me just plant the idea in your head. Don’t reject it without thought. Think about it. I’ll check in at some point over the next few days with a follow-up.