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News stories from the book world in 2010
You can check older stories in our archive.
Amazon, again A recent article by British publisher Colin Robinson in The Nation has raised many issues about Amazon. Almost always in the news, the company has also just made an announcement about its e-book sales outpacing hardback sales. Even though books now represent only 25% of Amazon’s revenue, they were its starting-point and are still its bedrock. Amazon has however shown how domination in one area of internet retailing can lead seamlessly to another by adding new categories, the latest being groceries. It’s all based on making things extremely easy and good-value for the customer and, when we’re all so busy, it works. Amazon has grown fifteenfold in the last decade, keeping pace with growth in internet use. It grew its revenues by a colossal 28% last year alone and in 2009 its sales were $24.5bn (£16.07bn). To get some measure of what this means, in 2008 total sales by all US bookstores were less than $17bn (£11.15bn), making Amazon by some margin the largest bookseller in the world. But does Amazon use its huge power wisely? Unfortunately there are plenty of signs that it is single-minded in pursuit of its own interests. Very little of this is in the public domain because publishers are frightened of going up against Amazon publicly, the cost is too great. Over the years there has been relentless pressure over discounts and publishers are bullied into giving way. If they do not, either their books will not be sold on the site or the buy buttons will be removed. The only single instance there seems to be of a publisher standing up to Amazon and getting away with it was quite recently, in connection with e-books. John Sargent, head of Macmillan US, confronted Amazon on the price of e-books, which they wanted to price under $10, threatening simultaneous hardback editions by undercutting them. Sargent stood firm, at a time when five US publishers had just concluded an agency agreement with Apple, and Amazon thought better of it and restored the buy buttons. Amazon said at the time: ‘We will have to capitulate because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles’ – an odd way of putting it as authors’ contracts with publishers do of course confer a ‘monopoly’, ie a license to publish them exclusively. It looks as if Apple entering the ring with the iPad may have changed the situation and Google are also said to be planning to get into internet bookselling. Apple is also doing well at the moment, having just posted gains, with revenue jumping 61% to $15.7 billion in the third quarter. Competition is a good thing, so let’s hope that their new ventures do well.STOP PRESS Agent Andrew Wylie's setting-up of Odyssey Books, the
agency's own e-book publisher, delivering exclusively through Amazon's Kindle,
has shocked the publishing world. International publisher Random House has said
that it: 'undermines [Random House's] longstanding commitments to and
investments in our authors, and it establishes this Agency as our direct
competitor... Random House on a worldwide basis will not be entering into
any new English-language business agreements with the Wylie Agency until this
situation is resolved.' Colin Robinson’s article in The Nation Big is big A recent study published in the Bookseller shows that Pearson has retained its position as the world’s largest book publisher with sales of €5.3 billion (£4,476 bn or $6,854 bn). In spite of all the changes in the publishing world, the ranking is much the same as last year, with Reed Elsevier ranked second with €5,024 billion (£5,948 bn or $6,497 bn), followed by ThomsonReuters and Wolters Kluwer. These are not names that trip off writers’ tongues and that’s because these giant companies’ revenues come from educational, professional and academic publishing, rather than trade or general publishing. At 5th and 6th in the rankings are Bertelsmann and Hachette Livre, respectively German and French companies, which between them control many of the publishing names which are familiar throughout the trade publishing world – Random House, Orion, Little Brown and so on. HarperCollins, owned by News International, has slipped from 16th to 19th ranking. These big companies have not shown much growth during the last year of recession but there is movement in the chart, although the double-digit growth is restricted to big publishers in Asia. Ruediger Wischenbart, who compiles the data for French trade magazine Livres Hebdo, thinks that the companies which have achieved top of chart positions have done so because they have successfully adapted to the global environment. They have shed national identities and successfully become international corporations, meaning that ‘publishing has become truly international at last’. Wischenbart sees this as an ongoing process. It’s remarkable how truly international the list is and no one country dominates the top, with Germany, the UK and the Netherlands each the home to two groups and the US with only one, although eight of those top ten generate the majority of their book revenues within the US. Italy, Spain and Canada also have one each. What does this mean for writers, many of whom might feel that it has nothing much to do with them? It does show how much of publishing is aligned more with education and professional areas rather than the entertainment industry, which is where writers create books that people want to read, as opposed to books they have to. Perhaps in some sense it is now becoming so impossible to get your book published by one of these behemoths that it doesn’t really matter which one is coming out on top in terms of global domination of the book market. But the comments about internationalism above show these giants’ focus, which is on a global vision of the future. Writers can look to the local, the small presses and independent bookshops for support, not to these giant organisations which have become increasingly corporate. Don’t write off Random House or Little Brown, for instance, but do realise that their acquisitions will be made through agents, and top agents at that, who are really part of the same corporate world. Spotlight on new prizes Following on from our look at prizes and what effect they have last week, this week’s column will be devoted to new prizes. There has been a proliferation of new prizes launched over the last few years, so there’s quite a lot to evaluate. Some of them focus on new work but only a proportion of them are open for entries from unpublished writers. A couple of fairly new prizes which have been going for some years have enough track-record to give some indication of their effectiveness. The Caine Prize for African Writing, now in its tenth year, has just been awarded to Sierrra Leone’s Olufemi Terry. The winner gets £10,000 and this Prize has succeeded in throwing a spotlight on African writers and making their work more visible internationally. Also worth £10,000 to the winner, the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Writers, which is awarded biennially and is now in its third year, is designed to support new writers. It has a commercial bent, in keeping with the work of the late agent/publisher whose will funded it, and seeks to ensure that the winner is liberated from financial worries and therefore free to write happily and securely. Books submitted for this one can only be entered by publishers and it does seem to have had a good effect on the careers of the winners. Then there are three completely new prizes. The Walter Scott Prize is a brand new one and claims to be the fifth largest annual fiction prize in the UK after the Man Booker, the Orange and the Costa Book of the Year award. The prize of £25,000 for a historical novel is sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch. The Duke said: ‘Walter Scott was the founding father of the historical novel. Waverley, published in 1814 and completed at Abbotsford, was the world's first bestseller, the first novel to make novel reading respectable for a mass audience… it is I believe a wonderful way of reminding the world of the profound importance of this great house and of the man who created it.’ The first winner is Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning
Wolf Hall and the author said: Certainly this prize has succeeded in throwing a spotlight on historical fiction and appears to be the only prize for this category. The new DSC Prize for South Asian Literature celebrates the rich and varied literature from, and connected to, the subcontinent but written in English or translated into it. The prize will award US$ 50,000 to the winner starting from 2011. It’s open to authors of any ethnicity from any country for a novel which predominantly features themes based on South Asian culture, politics, history, or people. South Asia is defined as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives and Afghanistan. Clearly this one is intended to put a spotlight on South Asian writing. The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, set up last year, are eligible to self-published poetry pamphlets. Finally, there’s the new Picador Poetry Prize, which fortunately is eligible to unpublished writers. The prize is publication of a poetry collection with a small advance and this one has a strong focus on new poets, whom it is intended to find and encourage. All these prizes seem to help writers, although unfortunately most of them will only accept entries from books which have already found publishers. www.picador.com/Poetry/prize/picadorpoetryprize.aspxWhat price literary prizes? The literary world is awash with literary prizes, with new ones being set up every year. But what effect do these prizes have and do they actually sell more books? The answer is mixed. Some of the biggest prizes do have a major effect on sales but others have surprisingly little impact. The €100,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which bills itself as the world’s largest prize for a single novel, was won recently by a novel in translation which will probably not sell in really significant numbers. Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twins is not likely to have the kind of bestsellerdom granted to other lesser prizes. The Nobel Prize for Literature is an immensely prestigious and valuable prize (worth slightly more than €1million, or $1.4 million in 2009), but winning it has a rather mixed effect on the winner’s sales, perhaps because the writer who is chosen is often worthy and literary rather than readable. Winners are often writers in non-English languages, which limits their appeal in the English-speaking world (see News Review 31 May). Doris Lessing was a recent exception to this rule and the great advantage of the Nobel Prize is that it is generally awarded to a writer towards the end of their career, so there is a wealth of backlist for readers to rediscover.There’s recently been a bit of a dust-up between the Man Booker and the Orange Prizes in the UK, with the Orange winners being shown to create more sales. The top seller of all the Orange winners was Andrea Levy’s Small Island, which sold 834,958 copies in all in the UK, well outselling this year’s massive Man Booker winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. In terms of Booker winners, only the million-selling Life of Pi has sold more copies than any of the Orange Prize winners. In some ways this is not surprising, as the Orange is usually awarded to something at the more popular and readable end of the literary spectrum. Submissions for the Orange Prize must be by women writers and the books do usually have a big female audience, and are beloved of reading groups. Why is it that these two big prizes in the UK sell so many books, whereas there is nothing like the same effect for winners of America’s highly-regarded National Book Awards? The answer seems to be promotion and integrated promotion at that, which brings the shortlists and winners to the attention of a large audience through more sympathetic and often extensive media coverage, tied in with strong in-store promotion. Even in terms of poetry, the T S Eliot and Forward Prizes get more coverage in the UK media than any poetry prize in the US does in that country, although the well-supported Griffin Prizes in Canada do also make it into the news. It looks as if the key things are the amount of media coverage a prize can garner and the actual size of the potential audience for that kind of writing. Next week: New prizes - do they benefit unpublished writers? Publishers' acquisitions slow to a trickle An article in a recent edition of the Bookseller has highlighted the ongoing pressure on acquisitions in publishing houses, which has now become acute. Helen Garnons-Williams, Bloomsbury fiction editorial director said: ‘Our entire business is based on confidence, whether among the publishers or the agents, and pretty much everyone is wobbling because no one knows what will sell.’ Auctions have often faltered because the recession is causing a massive loss of confidence and publishers are becoming increasingly risk-averse. Everyone concerned has become too focused on playing it safe. The Bookseller reported that one unnamed trade insider had said that agents should take some blame for lacklustre submissions. ‘Over the last 12 months and longer, agents have been steering writers to write in a particular genre. They are being directed to fill a gap in the market rather than writing the book they want to write. But the novels that work are those written with no interference, those which are different and new—that’s why publishing is a game of risk, not a science.’ Although unpublished writers complain about the difficulties they are experiencing in finding an agent to take them on, agents know that in this situation they have to be very cautious about taking on new authors. If they can’t sell them, then they will have invested their time and a proportion of the overhead costs of running the agency without making any return. The backlist, which used to be a solid source of income for any agency with an established list, is now faltering. The midlist, mentioned above, has become a graveyard, and one of the saddest things is the number of authors who have published solidly, if not spectacularly, over the years and made a modest living but now find that their publishers don’t want to continue with them. Even worse, their agents may cut them loose and then it is very hard for them to find another agent and resume their writing career. This spring has seen some of the worst sales figures for some time, at a time when the book trade was supposed to be coming out of recession, with May in particular proving a disaster. The auctions do still go on in a reduced fashion, but it is the mid-list which is suffering. No-one wants to consider taking on an author who will need to build his or her audience and improve their craft over a number of novels - and thus a number of years. But most authors cannot produce a bestseller first time out, even though that is effectively what the trade is looking for. Behind the scenes, the publishers’ lists have already been cut radically and may well be cut again. Contracts are mostly not cancelled but books are postponed to a future year, meaning that editors already have a full schedule and effectively stop buying until they have caught up with themselves. It’s a difficult situation all round and only improved sales are likely to do much to remedy it. In the meantime, if you have a completed manuscript and think it is ready for publication, it is worth putting some serious time into considering other options, such as self-publishing. Books in the home key for children A major recent study led by Nevada University has showed that regular access to books in the home had a direct effect on children’s long-term educational achievement. Involving 70,000 people in 27 countries, it showed that the effect of having 500 books in the home was to increase by three years the length of time that these children subsequently spent in education. The former Children’s Laureate in the UK, Michael Rosen, has said that many pupils now go all the way through their formative years at school without reading a single novel. It is feared that some teachers are being forced to dump books - and teach children using basic worksheets - to boost their performance in literacy tests, and that school libraries are not making available the wide range of novels that children need to develop an enjoyment of reading. Rosen’s Just Read series for the BBC showed how the children in an ordinary Cardiff primary school could be encouraged to read when reading of all kinds was put at the centre of the curriculum. Another recent study by Michael Norris, an American publishing expert, published in Book Publishing Report, highlighted the importance of letting children choose the books they want to read. This means that their reading is guided by their own taste, rather than by what they think they should be reading, or their parents would want them to read, and enables them to develop that taste and to learn to enjoy books for their own sake. The Nevada University study suggests that filling homes with a range of novels and reference books may be the difference between leaving school at 18 and going to university, which can be worth up to £200,000 ($291,000) more in lifetime earnings. This effect can be observed regardless of the parents’ own education, occupation and social class but the impact varied from two years in the US to six years in China. As few as 20 books would make a difference, meaning that this is one of the cheapest ways of investing in children’s education across the world. Would you buy an e-reader? The excitement surrounding the arrival of the i-Pad in countries outside the US has caught the attention of the media, reinforcing the idea that a mass audience is waiting to buy one and start using it to read e-books. The arrival of the Kindle aroused similar expectations and many articles presaging the end of the printed book. Figures from a recent study in the UK dispute this though. ‘Reading the Future’, the Bookseller’s third annual survey into what readers and book-buyers are thinking, contradicts this view and shows that the publishing world is much more focused on e-books than book-buyers are. Three-quarters of readers are not aware of the Amazon Kindle. Three in every five have not heard of the Sony Reader. The great majority of consumers are unlikely or dead set against buying an e-book reader. The sample of 3,000 used for the study was reached through an online poll, so its participants would only have been people who are comfortable online and presumably relatively savvy technically speaking. Interestingly, it is not the youngest readers who are most interested in the idea of an e-reader, it is 41-60 year-olds. Evidence shows that price is a major factor and that the e-reader needs to be sold for under £100 if it is to get major take-up in the UK. Men are much more likely to buy one than women, the 25-45s are most likely to buy one in the next 12 months and the over 45s are most likely to say that will definitely not buy one. So why is the publishing world so mesmerised by e-book sales and how quickly might they develop? Nobody really knows the answer to that but a lot of forward thinking assumes that they will boom and replace printed books. Publishers therefore need to get ready for the different world we’ll all be in soon. Are the survey’s responses just the effect of rather conservative readers in the UK? There is some evidence to support this. In the US e-book sales do seem to have taken off, with Dan Brown’s e-book sales of The Lost Symbol greater than its hardback sales just after it was published. In Japan e-books are very popular and a vast market has developed for e-books to be read on mobile phones. There’s also the threat of the giant global companies who are now active in the book area and who have huge amounts of cash – Apple with $41.6bn, Google with $26.5bn and Amazon with $5.6bn. For all of them, except perhaps Amazon, which looms so large in the book trade’s consciousness, books are not a primary focus but a secondary one, a means of extending their empire rather than an intrinsic part of what they do. So, would you use an e-reader? The response to this seems to be quite a personal one. It may be cheaper in the long run, which is a real consideration for heavy readers, and very convenient if you’re going on holiday. But many people are very attached to the idea of reading a print book and also like to have the book on their shelves after they’ve read it. Who knows how many of these will stick to print books over the years? You could deduce that a large proportion of the reading public will transfer to e-books, so as a publisher you’d want to make sure you were catering for them. Or you could feel that a majority of readers will still want the printed page. Because it’s a matter of individual behaviour in a changing environment, no-one knows for sure what will happen next. Writers in translation hit the headlines Stieg Larsson notwithstanding, what are the chances of a translated author selling well in the big English-speaking markets of the US and the UK? The received wisdom has always been that translations into English are tough going financially, with it proving virtually impossible to make the figures work without an English-language publisher on both sides of the Atlantic to pay for the costs of translation. Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan, did find a large audience, but he wrote, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns in English. Meanwhile, Pascal Mercier, a Swiss philosopher, wrote Night Train to Lisbon in French, only to sell two million copies in Germany alone. The acclaim of the recent 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which went to the French writer Philippe Claudel for Brodeck’s Report, translated by John Cullen, do show that there is increasing interest in the more literary end of the translation spectrum, but it’s noticeable that most of the publishers with books in contention are small presses. The Prize has in fact been won two years running by Maclehose Press, part of newcomer Quercus, which has also benefited from the ongoing sales bonanza of the Larsson books. Translating out of English is another matter and there are a number of internationally bestselling American and British authors, such as J K Rowling and John Grisham, who are translated all over the world. With the spread of English as a world language though, more and more people want to read these bestsellers when they first come out, in English, so the translators have to work fast to make sure that the translated edition does not lose its market. Novelist and translator Tim Parks produced an interesting article recently in the Observer, in which he argued that translators were not given their due: ‘Writing my own novels has always required a huge effort of organisation and imagination; but, sentence by sentence, translation is intellectually more taxing.’ Harvill Secker and Waterstone’s have teamed up to launch a new prize for young translators. This first year the language is Spanish, entrants have to translate a short story by Matias Nespolo and the winner will receive £1,000. If you’re interested in world literature and would like to think about these issues, have a look at & Other Stories, a publisher and book club which focuses on writing from across the world. www.harvillseckeryoungtranslatorsprize.com www.andotherstories.org/Launch of We give books The Penguin Group and the Pearson Foundation have launched an interesting new charitable venture, designed both to get children reading and to encourage them to become charitable givers. When a child reads a book online, they are able to donate another book to be sent to a reading charity and can choose from four options as to where their this book is sent. The site is free, so the child reads a book, as well as giving one. The American version of the site concentrates more on American charities, including Haiti Learning Spaces, Books Across America, Room to Read and Books for Asia and the UK one offers Haiti Learning Spaces, Rom to Read, which helps build libraries in Southern Africa, and the Asia Foundation's Books for Asia programme, as well as Tinga Tinga Tales, supporting the Pearson Teacher Education Programme in East Africa. The more you read, the more they give. First you choose the literacy organisation you want to support, then you choose a book and read it with a child. The books are chosen from Penguin and Dorling Kindersley’s backlist. Every campaign has its own donation goal. Once a campaign you’ve supported reaches its goal, you and your child will receive a personalised letter of thanks for your effort. The site will have new books added each month. If you’re a member, you will be sent an email automatically to tell you when new books arrive. The aim is to donate more than one million books in the initiative's first year. Visitors to the site will determine the volume shared with each organisation, as each time parents and youngsters read a new book they have the opportunity to select the organisation they wish their reading to support. It’s really a very simple idea and should generate a lot of reading and a lot of giving. A poll has been carried out to find out what parents’ attitudes are and it found that 90% of parents want to raise children who become "giving" adults, and 68% of parents believe a strong connection exists between reading to children and their later becoming charitable adults. Yet it’s disturbing that the poll also reveals that many parents are not aware how reading and specific daily parenting practices can achieve this goal. Other studies reveal the clear effect that reading with your child will have on that child’s educational progress and confidence, but there are still many adults who do not recognise this, or do not act upon it with their own children. (The sites appear identical except that they are linked to different charities. Literary agent steals over £500K The case of Robin Price, a Devon-based literary agent who has just appeared in court charged with stealing over half a million pounds from a number of clients, is a salutary one for unpublished authors. Over a period of several years, Price had bamboozled sums as large as £293,603 out of hopeful authors. The renegade agent is accused of charging authors for marketing and editing their work and then pretending to send it out to publishers, whilst doing nothing of the sort. It is claimed that he used the names of published authors such as James Follett to establish his bona fide but in fact these authors had either had nothing to do with the agency or had disassociated themselves from it. Price’s main way of extracting money from authors was to claim that their work was to be filmed and persuading them to invest in the production. He seems to have been immensely plausible and to have been so convincing that authors continued to deal with him even after his alleged frauds had been discovered. His agency also changed names to cover its tracks, from Avalon Associates/Avalon Films to Media Arts International and then Prospero Films. American agent Martha Ivery, aka Kelly O’Donnell , managed to con 300 victims out of three-quarters of a million dollars before she too was rumbled. Her fee-charging agency passed authors on to two vanity publishers also owned by her which charged several thousand dollars to publish their books. So, how can authors avoid the pitfalls and identify fraudulent agents? This is a particularly important question in these difficult times, when it is really hard for writers to get an agent to take them on board and writers tend to feel grateful to anyone who shows an interest in their work. The first rule should be that no self-respecting agency is going to charge you a fee to read your work. They may be overwhelmed by more authors than they can take on, but agents have to exercise their own judgement in deciding whom to represent, and it has to be authors they believe they can sell. It’s therefore inherently fraudulent for agents to charge a reading fee, giving the impression that this will lead to preferential treatment of their work. There’s nothing wrong with charging for editorial work in itself (WritersServices makes its living from doing just that) but this should not be linked to the agent's decision to take an author on. Any established agency will not charge for this. Finally, it’s important to make a distinction between vanity publishing, where you pay someone to publish your work, and self-publishing, where you do it yourself. You should always be sceptical about what publishers say if they ask you to pay for publication – vanity publishers tend to con quite large amounts of money out of people and then do very little to market or sell their book. You’re better of with self-publishing, which is much cheaper and keeps everything under your own control. Publishing Scams: Six Red Flags That Scream "Rip Off" Writer Beware, a website sponsored by the Science Fiction Writers of America WritersPrintShop, our self-publishing service Australian writer hits the jackpot Every so often a completely unknown writer hits the headlines after years of trying to break through and the dream come true provides fresh hope for many others. Recently it was the turn of Australian Rebecca James, whose new book Beautiful Malice was sold to Allen & Unwin, making her literally cry with joy. The timing couldn’t have been more propitious, as she and her partner had just closed down their struggling kitchen design business. This was just the beginning though. A week later Faber acquired the UK rights, then the German auction went through the roof. As James said: ‘That’s when it went really crazy, big amounts of money. Hilary and I didn’t sleep for a week. It was like winning the Lottery… one minute you’re going: "Shall we sell our house?", "Shall we sell our car and buy bikes?", and the next there are these ridiculous amounts of money.' In November 2009 the Sydney Morning Herald published an article about how her novel had started ‘a worldwide bidding war which has pushed advances on her manuscript past $1 million and led the Wall Street Journal to wonder if she is the next J K Rowling’. Rights have now been sold in 35 countries. Rebecca James has been through some difficult times though. At one point she was at home and struggling to get on with her writing whilst coping with small children. ‘I had four boys under four and I needed some head space, I guess, some creative outlet that wasn’t changing nappies.’ When she was ready to submit Beautiful Malice it was still hard going though, partly because the book is in that tricky territory between adult and young adult. She first approached seven agents in Australia and about 70 in the US, before turning to UK agents and eventually placing it with Jo Unwin of Conville & Walsh. And now the pressure is on to produce the second book – the kind of problem that more authors would like to have… 'Content is being devalued by technology' Mike Shatzkin is well-known in the publishing business on both sides of the pond for his visionary and often uncomfortable views of the future. Unable to make it across the Atlantic to deliver a speech in London because of the ash, he asked someone else to deliver his speech and it can be found on his blog. And uncomfortable it certainly is this time. I n a sobering analysis of the next 20 years, Shatzkin says there is one inexorable truth: ‘The price consumers will be willing to pay for content is going to go down because of the laws of supply and demand.’Shatzkin’s view is that: ‘Content will be distributed digitally and if distribution of all content is digital, and it is hard to see why it would not be, then the list of businesses that exist today that won’t exist in 20 years is a long one. Bookstores will exist, but they’ll be curiosity shops carrying used books and perhaps a handful of printed-on-demand newer items for the few print-pervy holdouts that remain.’ It is publishers rather than writers who will be most affected by this change : ‘The change for publishers, though, is far more profound than a simple change in delivery mechanism would suggest. Publishers, indeed all commercial media in our lifetime, have been defined primarily by format. Some do books; some do magazines; some do newspapers. Others called producers do movies or television or radio. The capital and skill set requirements for a format effectively channelled the media company. For the most part, big media was not topic- or subject-specific; it was format-specific.’This will change because format will become irrelevant if it is all digital and can easily be reproduced in different formats. Shatzkin says: ‘ Here’s the important point for publishers to take on board. Content is being devalued by technology. This is inexorable. It is not anybody’s fault. It is not in anybody’s power to change it. The price consumers will be willing to pay for content is going to go down because of the laws of supply and demand. It is true that professional content creators can benefit from efficiencies and cost savings offered by the same technologies, so the loss of revenue doesn’t necessarily translate into an equivalent loss of income or profit. But the general direction is one way: down.’He argues that content will be devalued and that it will be communities that matter and that they will be in a position to get what they want. Owning a web community which is both a principal source of content and provides the audience for it will be the way forward. But publishers need to start thinking hard about the future, because if they don’t they will be overtaken by the vast changes occurring at a rapid speed. Authors won’t necessarily need them, so publishers will have to reinvent themselves in a way that makes full play of what they can offer, in terms of marketing, publicity and sales skills. Mike Shatzkin’s blog http://www.idealog.com/blog/ Under the volcano/Historian trashes rivals It’s been a rather surreal week in the publishing world, as the suspension of flights destroyed what was to have been the best London Book Fair ever. The timing couldn’t have been worse, as the ash from the Icelandic volcano descended just as international publishers were leaving for the airport to get to London for the Fair on Monday to Wednesday of last week. Some publishers reported longer meetings with those who did make it, but most agreed that it was a disaster. Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, who was stranded in New York for the duration of the fair, said: ‘Mail, phone and fax have made our work easier but there is nothing like being together personally. It's so important to create word of mouth.’ Marco Schneiders, editorial director at German publisher Lübbe, said: ‘Digital developments make a lot of things redundant that we are used to. But there will always be the need for book fairs because the personal contact is a factor that shouldn't be underestimated’. Some publishers were already looking to Book Expo America at the end of May and to Frankfurt in October to carry out their business, but Faber chief executive Stephen Page said: ‘Frankfurt will have a bigger role in maintaining these relationships’, but he did not regard BEA as ‘a credible alternative’. Simon & Schuster publisher Suzanne Baboneau agreed with this, saying: ‘BEA is a very different kind of fair—it's more about booksellers. It's not a rights fair, it's not a substitute for London or Frankfurt.’ Historian trashes rivals The second half of the week has been enlivened by the extraordinary story of Orlando Figes, distinguished historian known for his books on Russia. Poisonous reviews of his rivals’ books had been posted anonymously on Amazon, but using the pen-name ‘Historian’ aka Orlando-Birkbeck’. One of the books trashed by the anonymous reviewer was Comrades by Professor Robert Service (regarded by many as the other big wheel in the field of Russian history studies), which was condemned on Amazon as ‘an awful book’, whilst Service’s biography of Stalin was said to be ‘rather dull’. At first Figes said that his wife, by all accounts a blameless lawyer at Cambridge, had been responsible for the unpleasant reviews, but then finally he confessed yesterday that he was personally to blame. It is hard to see how the historian could have thought he would get away with this. The world of academia is notably back-stabbing, but this takes things to a new level of vituperation. And how on earth would Orlando-Birkbeck not have been traced back to Figes? Amazon has often been blamed for its practice of allowing anonymous reviews which mean that its reviews are vulnerable to this sort of hijacking, but the whole story shows great naivety as well as spite on Figes’ part. London Book Fair volcanic ash disaster The subject of this week’s News Review was to have been the London Book Fair (LBF), how it has grown in importance and numbers and what its role is in relation to other international book fairs. But nature, with supreme indifference to the problems of human beings, has decreed that the volcanic eruption in Iceland should make it impossible for anyone to fly in and out of the UK. It's the worse traffic chaos since the Second World War. As the ban on flights in most of northern Europe was first imposed and then extended, publishers from all over the world watched with incredulity as their flights were cancelled and it gradually became clear that the ban was unlikely to lift in time for people to get to the Fair. Alistair Burtenshaw, Group Exhibition Director for the London Book Fair, said: ‘While I cannot pretend that this is not an unwelcome intervention to the running of the London Book Fair I also have to say that our view is that the show must – and will – go on with as much help from us as we can possibly give to ensure it runs as smoothly as possible within the circumstances.’ Some publishers from overseas have been in London for
several days already, meeting agents and fellow publishers before the fair, but
most will have been scheduled to travel on Saturday or Sunday to be there for
the Fair’s start on Monday. This year’s LBF had been billed as the biggest in the fair’s history. The fair management was expecting 1,672 visiting companies, 7% up on 2009, of whom around 54% would have been from overseas. A healthy number of 775 UK companies have taken stands, as against 300 expected from the US, but it looks like only British publishers will be out in force and for them it will be ‘business as usual’ in so far as there is anyone to do any business with. For the key role of the biggest international book fairs is, as it always has been, subsidiary rights deals rather than straightforward selling, although a fair amount of that goes on too. Translation rights are key, with foreign publishers out in force, and the London Book Fair has now assumed a role as the spring meeting-ground for the international publishers and agents who will congregate again at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. In particular the Fair is important for illustrated book publishers, who often need to build co-edition print runs in a range of different languages to make their books economic propositions. Writers are not particularly encouraged to go to book fairs and they are certainly not good places to try to find a publisher, with few editors and none who are looking for unagented manuscripts. For all that , it may still be worth spending a day at London’s Earl’s Court next week, simply to see what the international publishing industry is doing and to get some perspective on what those rapidly inflating figures for numbers of titles published actually mean. Inside Publishing on
Subsidiary Rights iPad debuts to mixed reviews ‘It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world -- it's going to be a game changer’, said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. ‘iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad’. On the face of it the figures do look good: over 300,000 iPads sold on the first day, along with 25,000 e-books and a million apps. But critics have been fast to come up with adverse comments on the iPad, launched to great fanfare in the US only last week. It’s heavier than the 10.2 ounce Kindle at 1.5 pounds and has been criticised for its glare-prone display, especially in full sunlight. But the screen has also been described as ‘stunning’ in low light and out of the sun it’s apparently easy on the eyes. Daily Finance pointed out that these figures are for downloads, not sales, and most of them would have been free books or sample chapters. Apple is going to have to work hard to compete with Amazon, as they currently only have 60,000 books available for download and not all publishers have signed up with them. But as as Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said: ‘This match is far from over and even if Amazon takes Round 2, there's a lot of fight left in all these fighters. And that's just the way it's supposed to be.’ In the meantime the battle which is raging in publishing is to do with the so-called ‘agency’ model of e-book sales. Publishers look like they’re winning that one and Amazon has been forced to step down, but there’s still a great deal of concern amongst publishers about low e-book prices, which undercut hardback book prices. The latest tactic is to delay the e-book, but it’s not clear if this is going to work in denying something to a market which has always expected instant gratification. It’s a bit like paperback editions in fact, and on the whole those are still brought out some time after the hardback, for exactly the same reason. In the meantime the size of the e-book development is quite stunning – figures from 2009 show that US e-book sales overtook audiobook sales and were up 176.6% up on 2008. So even if you think you don’t want to use a e-book, they are here to come and will hugely affect the publishing industry, and your chances of getting published, for years to come. Surprise winner for National Poetry Competition This year’s National Poetry Competition (which actually has an international entry although it is run by the UK Poetry Society) has been won by Helen Dunmore for her poem ‘The Malarkey’. Better known as a novelist, Dunmore has produced nine poetry collections and a number of novels. This poem was submitted on impulse just before the closing date, so it was a great surprise for the poet when she won the £5,000 prize. Dunmore said: ‘I was standing in a cold car park putting things into the back of the car [when I heard]. It was very emotional, very moving. I'd written the poem shortly before sending it in – it's quite a tightly organised poem, in terms of the rhymes and the near-rhymes. It's very much about containment ... I've written very few poems over the past four years ... but now I have the feeling that there is the kernel of a new collection. It is a great boost to receive the prize – a confirmation.’ This year’s Competition had 10,467 entries, a considerable increase on last year. The judges were poets Ruth Padel, Neil Rollinson and Daljit Nagra. Entries are handled anonymously, with the interesting result that sometimes a well-known poet wins and sometimes it’s a complete unknown. Amongst the poets who have won this well-regarded competition are the current Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, Tony Harrison, the 2009 T S Eliot prizewinner Philip Gross and Ruth Padel. The Competition was established in 1978 and has grown in size and reputation ever since. Entries come from poets writing in English from all over the world. The winning poem: The Malarkey Helen Dunmore Why did you tell them to be quiet and sit up straight until you came back? The malarkey would have led you to them.
You go from one parked car to another and peer through the misted windows before checking the registration.
Your pocket bulges. You’ve bought them sweets but the mist is on the inside of the windows. How many children are breathing?
The malarkey’s over in the back of the car. The day is over outside the windows. No streetlight has come on.
You fed them cockles soused in vinegar, you took them on the machines. You looked away just once.
You looked away just once as you leaned on the chip-shop counter, and forty years were gone.
You have been telling them for ever Stop that malarkey in the back there! Now they have gone and done it. Is that mist, or water with breath in it?
Entry details for the 2010 National Poetry Competition. Submissions cost £6. UK book sales down, gift purchase up At the report back from the annual UK Books and Consumers report this week, Book Marketing Limited’s Research director Steve Bohme pointed out some interesting changes in consumer behaviour relating to books. Nearly half of all book purchases were gift purchases, an increase from one-third in 2005, a stunning proportion which shows that books have not lost their attraction as gifts. Adults do of course buy books for children and there’s some evidence that this has held up particularly well in the recession, but even so this is a remarkable figure. Purchases were down 4% in 2009, compared with 2005, but this is not a bad performance considering the economic conditions and the poor figures for other entertainment items. DVDs were down 5%, with CDs ad LPs down 13% (perhaps explained by music downloads being up 139%) and computer games, which many would have considered a boom area, down 17%. Between 2005 and 2009 there has actually been growth of 10% in volume, but because average price has fallen in each of the last four years, spending on books has dropped 4% over the period. Two-thirds of books bought in 2009 were either bought at a perceived discount or for under £5. Seeing the book whilst browsing is still the main reason given for purchase, with previous readership of the author or series a strong secondary factor. One in ten books was bought in response to gift requests. Only thrillers and sagas did better in 2009 than in 2008, so ‘Popular’, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Romance and Historical Fiction are all down, which is not what one would expect. Children’s books show a 26% increase in volume from 2005 to 2009, but prices have been going down, so value is level. Although the figures are skewed by both J K Rowling and Stephenie Meyer making huge contributions, it’s also difficult to separate out the considerable adult readership they have both had. Perhaps the most interesting conclusion to draw from these numbers is that the market has been more robust than might have been expected. Books have held up well and perhaps even increased their currency and perceived value as gifts. The e-book phenomenon has not yet eaten into these figures and the number of e-books sold, as a proportion of the whole, is currently very small. The consumer appears to have been conditioned into expecting discounts and low prices, but at this point the genie is out of the bottle and it seems very unlikely that it can be tempted back in. Low prices and discounts are here to say. There are indications in the research that heavy book-buyers are the most likely to have been affected by discounting, which makes sense as they are the ones with most to gain from buying books more cheaply. There’s at least a suggestion that they may then also buy more, as they are avid readers. So the picture emerges of a business which is doing better than it might have been and which has survived the recession thus far with less damage than might have been expected. It’s a pity about the relentless discounting though, as consumers will have been conditioned into expecting, to borrow a phrase, ‘everyday low prices’. Anyone who has ever been tempted by a three-for-two offer will recognise how insidious this can be. Bologna is looking good This year’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair runs from 23 to 26 March and provides a good opportunity to have a look at the children’s publishing industry. Not everything in the garden is lovely but children’s trade (general) publishing is undoubtedly doing a lot better than its adult counterpart. Given the astounding success of Stephenie Meyer, it’s no surprise that Young Adult books are expected to be strong at the Fair. Meyer’s own sales may be past their best in the US and UK, but for the market as a whole YA is still very strong internationally, especially paranormal romance. Both Puffin , with its Razorbill list, and Egmont with a new YA list, will be following this trend with their launches at the Fair. Picture books look a better prospect than they have done recently, although children’s publishers are still very cautious because of the cost of development and the need for good co-edition sales if a book is to do well. There is a bit of a sense of the focus moving back to books for younger age groups at the moment, a counterbalance to the great interest there has been in books for teenagers. After all,the younger market still exists, and it’s missing opportunities not to publish for it. In the UK it may be that having children’s illustrator Anthony Browne as Children’s Laureate has made a difference in making people think again about illustrated children’s books. In the US there’s been real retrenchment in this area but picture books are expected to have a stronger appeal for American publishers than they have done recently. New markets in Eastern Europe and Brazil look promising and there’s strong interest in some Scandinavian countries. Fiction is expected to be in strong demand at Bologna. After a number of years when the only thing publishers were interested in was series, standalone titles are back in demand because the commitment is so much less. Publishers still want to know that the a book can turn into a series , but may not want to make the upfront commitment to it that they would have done a little while ago . Young fiction still seems difficult, with publishers likely to exercise great caution. With so much emphasis on literacy and on children learning to read worldwide, this is perhaps surprising, but the UK experience suggests that in the educational sector school libraries (which are not mandatory for primary schools) are not buying all that much and there is a lack of robust demand from schools. The market for books for early readers is thus quite dependant on parent purchase. Early reporting on the recession suggested that people were not economising on books for their children, but this may no longer be the case at this stage. There are a lot of opportunities in the digital sector of children’s publishing and some exciting new projects, such as Carlton’s augmented reality series. Novelty publishers are still ploughing on with Random House’s The Spooky, Spooky House standing out with its flaps, gatefolds and use of heat-sensitive thermochromatic ink. Writing for children is still booming but it is important for any writer working in this field to look at the market very carefully and not just to produce what did well last year or the year before. Fashions in children’s publishing change fast, so make sure your work is attuned to the market. Don’t forget though that it is originality and good story-telling that everyone is looking for. Explosion in titles published in the USA The staggering number of 285,000 new titles and editions were self-published and published by community presses in the US last year, balanced against a slightly lower figure of 275,000 coming from traditional publishing houses. The Nielsen figures for the UK are 133,224, quite modest by comparison, but this presumably does not include self-published titles unless the authors have subscribed to Nielsen, which is a book data collecting organisation which supplies data to the book trade. So, what do these huge figures mean for authors? At a time when it’s increasingly hard to get published, why are there so many titles coming out? The main answer of course is self-publishing and print on demand in general. The combination of these two trends is changing the world for writers, enabling them to take things into their own hands and decide for themselves whether or not their book will get into print. No author should forget the degree of commitment they need to get their book into print, but it’s how successful you are at promoting it afterwards which is the real test and which will mean the difference between success and failure. The other figure which is quite stunning is that there are now 822 creative writing programmes available in the States (a 2009 figure), so the other factor is that enormous numbers of aspiring writers are coming from these courses. Inevitably only a small proportion of these will be taken on by a publisher and fewer still will manage to support themselves totally through their writing, but it’s still an extraordinary figure. So, just why are so many people turning to writing? The readers of this column know the answer to this, so do email us to tell us in under a hundred words and we’ll put the answers on the site. Do you actually enjoy the writing, or is it an unavoidable compulsion? Are you influenced by fantastic success stories such as J K Rowling’s? Or do you just think that the ability to write well will be useful in any career? Creative writing is largely taught by writers, especially poets, so in some sense it’s a self-perpetuating thing, but there’s been such a huge and rapid growth in this area that that is an outcome rather than the cause. Even in the UK there are now a really large number of creative writing courses of all kinds, including nearly a hundred in universities. Ironically the writer has more options in terms of courses, degrees and groups than ever before, but less chance of getting into print through the traditional publishing route. Self-help is beginning to look like an increasingly attractive option. Is a creative writing degree really worth it? by Josh Spears Quick Reads expand Next week’s World Book Day on 4 March will celebrate five years of Quick Reads with a crop of new books by writers including Andy McNab, Cathy Kelly, Peter James and Alison Weir. The books are ideal for those who have lost the reading habit or who have never developed it. Each year a number of bestselling writers and celebrities are commissioned to write a short book which is just as exciting and readable as their usual work but shorter and easier to get into. In the first four years 1.25 million Quick Reads have been distributed, introducing hundreds of thousands of new readers to books and encouraging a large number of non-readers to give books a go. Quick Reads recently surveyed over 30,000 of their readers and found that 100% said Quick Reads had made a positive impact on their lives. 88% were more confident and 41% felt their job prospects had improved since reading a Quick Read. Significantly, in terms of encouraging book reading, 82% said they were more likely to read another book after reading a Quick Read.Why do these short reads have such a profound effect on people who cannot read or cannot read well enough to tackle a book? It must be because these readers become engaged in the story and want to read on to find out what happens. But the reason they’re able to do so is that the books are carefully designed and written with these readers in mind, so they are written for an adult audience but are especially accessible, short on long-winded description and difficult vocabulary and long on providing compelling stories. One of the heartening things about reading some of the success stories is the wonderful way in which some of these adult readers, who have found the written word (and much else) denied to them, feel a sense of empowerment. It’s a great help with basic confidence but it also opens up an immense and life-enhancing pleasure to them. Just imagine not being able to read a book – it’s really unthinkable for anyone for whom books are central to their lives. In another exciting initiative, from World Book Day next Thursday, the brand new Quick Read titles will be available as apps on the Apple iPod and iPhone and as downloads direct to computers and e-readers. To kick-off the digital campaign, one of the previous titles – The Thief by Ruth Rendell - will be available as a free download here for the week of launch.The apps, produced by award-winning digital publisher Enhanced Editions, allow users to choose their font and text size. They also use the device accelerometer (which detects when the device is being tilted) to scroll the page, offer a bedtime-friendly night reading mode and encourage users to send excerpts to friends via email. All of the Enhanced Editions apps come with a short sample of the other nine titles, plus a live feed of the latest news about the authors and partners involved in Quick Reads. The digitisation of Quick Reads will make a great difference to adult learners, particularly those with dyslexia or impaired sight, who may find it difficult to access print of any kind. With Quick Reads available on computers, mobile phones and e-readers, learners can manipulate text on a screen to suit their convenience, for instance to make it larger, as well as use a screen reader. Quick Reads are already doing a great deal to help non-readers and slow readers to get into books and to start to enjoy them. The new crop of titles joins the list of excellent existing titles which are still available. It's heartening to see this excellent programme continuing and developing.J K Rowling defends plagiarism charge The estate of Adrian Jacobs, author of Willy the Wizard, has now widened its claim against Bloomsbury for plagiarism in the Harry Potter books to include J K Rowling herself, previously thought to be protected by a statute of limitations. Max Markson, a PR executive representing Jacobs’ estate, told the Guardian the addition of Rowling's name to the action opened up the possibility of multi-jurisdiction action: ‘We believe that she [Rowling] personally plagiarised the Willy the Wizard book. All of Willy the Wizard is in The Goblet of Fire. We now have a case which is not just against Bloomsbury… I estimate it's a billion-dollar case. That'll be the decision of the courts, obviously.’ The suit claims Rowling's book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire copied substantial parts of Jacobs' 1987 book. His estate also claims many other ideas from Willy the Wizard were copied into the Harry Potter books. Jacobs died in London in 1997. Bloomsbury dismissed the allegations when they were made in June, indicating that a similar claim on behalf of the Jacobs' estate was made in 2004, but never progressed. Bloomsbury stated that J K Rowling had never heard of Adrian Jacobs nor seen, read or heard of his book Willy the Wizard until this claim was first made in 2004. Bloomsbury added that Willy the Wizard was a ‘very insubstantial booklet running to 36 pages which had very limited distribution’ and was of a ‘very poor quality’. It’s easy to feel that J K Rowling has had it all easy, with her millions of fans and the vast fortune she’s made from her books. She was clearly upset the last time she went to court to protect her copyright against Vander Ark, the fan who had compiled an anthology without her permission and it must be heart-breaking for her that this is happening again. She said: ‘I am saddened that yet another claim has
been made that I have taken material from another source to write Harry.
The fact is I had never heard of the author or the book before the first
accusation by those connected to the author's estate in 2004; I have
certainly never read the book. If plagiarism could be proved in court, the Jacobs estate does indeed stand to make millions or even billions. The trustee of The estate of Adrian Jacobs, Paul Allen, said in a statement: ‘The estate - which acts independently of Adrian Jacobs family - has been in correspondence with lawyers for Rowling and her publishers for several years but have been repeatedly rebuffed. We have taken expert legal advice and we believe we have very strong case.’ Allen said it had ‘asked for this breach of copyright to be stopped’, and was taking legal advice as to whether the Harry Potter films breached copyright and ‘likewise the proposed Harry Potter theme park’. Of course the vast revenue earned by the
books is augmented by the income from the films and now the theme park.
Also, the Harry Potter books have sold in enormous quantities across the
world, so many international publishers will be watching this case
closely. The end of the slush-pile It’s always been a tough call to find a publisher though submitting to the slush-pile, but in the current crisis in publishing it just got even harder. Judith Guest’s Ordinary People was plucked from obscurity in 1975 and went on to become a bestseller and a successful film, but it’s hard to remember other authors who have benefited in this way. More recently, Stephenie Meyer sent out 15 query letters about her teenage vampire saga. She wrote to Writers House agency asking if someone might be interested in reading a 130,000-word manuscript about teenage vampires. The letter should have been thrown out: an assistant whose job was to weed through the more than 100 such letters each month, didn't realise that young adult fiction should be no more than 40,000 to 60,000 words. She contacted Ms. Meyer and ultimately asked that she send her manuscript. The rest is history. Writers House agent Jodi Reamer liked what she read, a novel called Twilight. She signed Meyer, and sold the book to Little, Brown. The most recent sequel in the series, Breaking Dawn, sold 1.3 million copies the day it went on sale in August 2008. The latest film grossed more than $288 million in the US. Most publishers have closed their slush-piles and no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. This is particularly the case for large publishers, who have done their sums and reckon that it’s too expensive to read their slush-pile, because so very few new authors are taken on this way. Veteran American agent Richard Curtis has done the figures in his excellent book How to Be Your Own Literary Agent: ‘Although statistics are not available, I would guess that most trade publishers today do not read slush. They return it with printed rejection slips, frequently with a statement that they read material only if submitted by literary agents. As I say, the reasoning is cold-bloodedly economic. Assuming a publisher gets 5000 unagented manuscripts in a year (a figure I’m told is on the modest side), and a skillful editor can read and judge four every working day, and figure 225 working days a year, that’s less than 1000 manuscripts evaluated per editor per year. So you need four or five editors to plough through those 5000 manuscripts… And so, if it is true that only one manuscript in thousands is worthy of acceptance by a publisher, you’re talking about a cost of well over $100,000 to discover it, not including the cost of publishing it. With a bottom line like that, it had better be one helluva book! But because most publishers don’t believe they will find such a consummate masterpiece under those bushels of over-the-transom submissions, they consider it more cost-effective to leave the sorting-out to the agents and spend the $100,000 where it can do more good– or at least where they think it can do more good. For this reason, it can be stated with some accuracy that an editor will read the most dismal piece of junk submitted by a literary agent faster and maybe even more attentively than he will a good book that comes in on the slush pile.’ Things are even worse if you’ve written a screenplay or are trying to get your work into magazines. Film and television producers won't read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing. HarperCollins’ web slush-pile Authonomy.com site offers rather better odds, but they have still only accepted four manuscripts out of 10,000 submitted to the site. This is dismal stuff, but better that authors should be aware of the obstacles than that they should send their manuscript off in blind faith to publishers who are either not accepting unsolicited submissions or are not going to read them. So, it pays to think through your options and do your research. Make sure you’re sending work to somewhere where it will be properly assessed, even if this is a slow process. And do your research first, whether you’re submitting to a publisher or an agent, and follow their guidelines exactly. Finally, give some serious thought to self-publishing, once regarded with disdain, but now a real option for unpublished writers who want to see their work in print. Big four show sales drop Figures for 2009 just released by the big UK publishers show just how tough a time they had and what a difficult book market we’ve had in the past year. Seven of the top UK publishers had negative sales growth last year measured by the Total Consumer Market figures, as did half of the top 20 publishers. The only one of the top four to do well was the market leader Hachette and that was because of Stephenie Meyer, whose £29.4m ($46m) of sales accounted for an extraordinary 10.2% of the group’s total UK sales. This had the effect of putting Hachette well ahead of its rival Random House, giving it a 2.7% lead with a 16.4% market share. Random House’s 9.2% drop in value of sales meant that it put £24.4m ($38.22m) less through the tills last year, in spite of having a new Dan Brown in the autumn. HarperCollins also did less well, down .7% with £15.2m ($23.81m) less in sales, whilst Penguin’s sales shrunk by .3%. Surprisingly in this age of corporations getting larger, the big four showed a drop to 47.4% for their cumulative share, the lowest since 2005. The Total Consumer Market showed a contraction of 1.2% in value, down to £1.752bn ($2.74bn). This was not as bad as 2008, when the drop was 1.5%, but it was still an unwelcome contraction. In the States Meyer also dominated sales, selling more than 10 million books over the year, which was however less than the 15 million she sold in 2008. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol sold 2,854,658, more than any of her individual titles, but Meyer made a bigger impression on the figures than Brown because she had four books in the top ten. Publishers undoubtedly had a hard time and the redundancies made by the big companies early in 2009 must have seemed necessary later in the year. It’s easy to understand why, with strong pressure on discounts from both Amazon and the supermarkets, publishers chose to cut overheads and lists to ensure that they survived the recession. For authors this has been even harder. Many published authors who are not major bestsellers but have made a steady livelihood from writing are finding that they can no longer find a publisher. Those who can are receiving lower advances and, generally speaking, cannot move elsewhere as they have nowhere else to go. The death of the midlist has been long lamented, but this was the year when the impact hit with a sickening thud and now it really is very hard to find a home for a manuscript which is good and shows promise but is not instant bestseller material. It is worth dwelling on the figures mentioned above as they make the publishers’ decisions to cut their lists more comprehensible. In this recession you have to cut out anything which is not paying its way and concentrate on what seems more likely to work. Even that is not necessarily a recipe for survival, since, as publishers found last autumn, some expensive books, particularly celebrity biography, failed to perform. For the agents this means there has been a quiet culling going on, so some authors have lost both their publisher and their agent. Agents are being very careful about taking on new clients and have to have a really clear reason for doing so. So, how long does this go on for? That’s really the $64 million question and relates to the recession as a whole. In the end publishers need new books and they have to invest in new authors, so the time will come when they will have to start buying more aggressively. The other thing is not to let the problems of the big publishers, which have large overheads and a certain amount of inflexibility built into their size , to obscure the fact that small publishers still have many opportunities and self-publishers can use the Internet to publicise their own work.The overall drop in book sales in the UK in 2009 was only 1.2% in value, suggesting, particularly since this was a year of heavy discounting, that most book buyers kept on buying pretty steadily. Perhaps they relied on books passed on by friends and family a bit more, but most book-buyers seem to have regarded their book purchases as essential. Long may this continue. Battle of the titans This has been one of those weeks when there’s been so much happening that it’s difficult to cover it in a single column. Apple has broken the news of its iPad and, amidst the focus on that, Amazon has already started to fight back. This could be a turning-point and how publishing, books and authors come out of all this is hard to predict. Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPad to an excited world caused no great surprise, as the new device had been comprehensively trailed. The iPad, which starts at $499, is a half-inch thick tablet computer with a 9.7 inch (25 cm) touchscreen. It will compete with other e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle, which currently sells for $259, and Barnes and Noble's Nook device. Criticisms from tech reviewers have mostly focused on its over-bright screen, which may well making reading in bed possible, but will also make it very tiring on the eyes. Claudine Beaumont, Telegraph technology editor, commented that it ‘looks exactly like a giant iPhone, right down to the "home" button at the bottom of its 9.7 in touch-screen.’ But she added, ‘the best feature is iBooks, the e-book reading software that knocks Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader into a cocked hat. Novels are beautifully presented . . . The pages of the books resemble proper printed pages, with a sense of texture and authenticity to them. Turning pages is achieved with a swiping gesture, or a single tap in the right-hand margins. Downloading books is incredibly easy too.’Apple have been vague about when the iPad might be available outside the US, which probably means a delayed launch whilst they sort out the logistics and focus on beating the competition in the all-important US home market. Tim Cooper, Director of Direct and Digital Marketing at Mills and Boon, said: ‘It looks great, fundamentally it's going to make a pretty big difference. It's fantastic news for publishers and the consumers as well, it must have sent a few shivers down the spines of other companies with e-reading devices. At that price point and with those multimedia opportunities, it's great for everyone. I think this will definitely help the e-book market.’ Whether his enthusiasm will be shared amongst the publishing community remains to be seen, but Publishers Lunch commented that: ‘For book publishers as important as the iBookstore (and a potential worldwide rollout) is the business model behind it, which the biggest trade publishers see as an opportunity to reset the terms of business in the still-emerging ebookmarket.’ And that was certainly the way Amazon saw it, as a possible threat. Jeff Bezos chose this moment to announce a huge surge in sales through the Kindle. When the company has both editions, he announced that it has been selling 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books, an amazing claim which indicates the market is achieving much faster conversion to e-books than most people would have predicted. Amazon had a huge fourth quarter, with total sales of $9.52 billion, an astounding 42% higher than for the same quarter a year ago. Their net US income is up 71% at $384 million, but their net international income is now even larger. Figures from the International Digital Publishers forum, held in New York last week, suggested that Bezos is right though, as it was announced that wholesale revenue from e-book sales in the US almost tripled in the third quarter of 2009 to $46.5 million, compared with the same quarter in 2008. So it’s a battle of the titans which is now holding the book world in its grip. Apple has a huge base of supporters in the people using the 75 million iPhones and iPod Touches they’ve already sold. It also has its new iBooks from iTunes, which will enable people to download ebooks directly onto their iPad. Amazon has a huge customer base across the world, an enormous range of merchandise taking it far beyond books, and is extremely aggressive in support of its interests. The very latest news is that all the books and e-books published by the Macmillan group in the US had their buy buttons removed on Friday because they tried to switch to a new model of e-book sales which would enable publishers to set higher prices than Amazon’s attempted standard of $9.95. It looks like authors’ interests have to be with publishers on this one, even though publishers and authors do not currently agree on e-book royalties. Otherwise the risk is that the e-book threatens to undercut hardback editions and make books available even more cheaply – leaving the author potentially even further out in the cold.
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