PETRONA

Some thoughts about restricting e-readership

Those of us (and our numbers are increasing rapidly!) who like to read in e-format often bemoan the way in which publishers sell the "rights" to their books on a regional basis hanging over from the world of print as the only reading medium. Of course, print readers (myself included) also find it frustrating not to be able to read a book after perusing reviews of it, if one does not live in the "right" (righted?) region. But for the e-format (including digital audio), this restriction seems even more pointless.

Bernadette, in an excellent post at Reactions to Reading, put her finger on one reason why this regional  division is a no-win for publishers - piracy, which as everyone from the CEO of the major publishing companies down to the youngest kid on the internet block, admits occurs on a massive scale. (Never by me or anyone in my house, I am of the honest but frustrated quarter of content users.)

I have two "hats" that I wear in the context of this debate. First, as a reader, I want to read a book as soon as it is published, not wait for some artificially imposed geographical business model. In the world of scientific research, this is the norm. When a paper is published, it is published - people argue about subscription vs "author pays" or the size of the unit of publication, but the argument is how readers pay for access, not about whether one can access at all.  Second, my other "hat" is that I work for a publisher - not, thankfully, on the business side, but on the scientific journal/editorial side. So I can see at first hand the large amount of value a publisher adds to the raw material. In the case of scientific publishing, there is an incredibly large investment in the editorial selection process, for example. I am not as closely familiar with book publishing (though my employer is an internationally leading publisher of books). Even so, I can see the resources that are put into both print and e- (digital) books, and am well aware that this is considerable. (There are many other factors in addition to editorial and production costs, of course.) 

The point for the reader is not price, it is access. Based on my long experience of scientific publishing, it is not necessary to restrict access geographically in order to run a viable business. This is why news items such as these lose me completely -

Waterstones has removed from its website the ability for anyone outside the UK to buy e-books, with "no plans" to reinstate them.

WH Smith has removed e-books from people's e-readers. That is, people who have paid to download a book. The information provided to these paid-up customers is minimal.

The UK Publishers' Association last week agreed that it would restrict library borrowing of e-books to those who are physically present in the library. (See, eg, this Guardian piece.)

This last piece of news is appalling: "I can't believe the PA has declared war on libraries in this way" wrote Luton's librarian at the Bookseller website. Yes, indeed, the very point of e-books is that people who do not live near, or cannot get to, a library can now read! How ludicrous.

I understand concerns on the behalf of authors, and I understand that publishers want to stay in business (and booksellers, but that is also a slightly different story). I know that issues often seem more simple to those outside a situation than they are in reality, but what I am questioning is what we learnt years ago in the scientific publishing sphere - base your business model on some form of payment per download, not on deciding who can read the content based on where they live. The payment can be made directly by the customer (book purchaser) or library on behalf of its patrons,
or borrower (lending fee). Public libraries could also use a variant of the site-licence model in place at academic libraries, in which the price paid for the content is proportional to the number of readers of that content; as well as providing books and other content for free according to whatever criteria they choose (including providing out-of-copyright books free). 

The point of this post is simple - there are technological solutions in place in other parts of the industry for what is termed "e-commerce". Why aren't organisations such as book publishers and governments' library authorities exploring these to reward authors and publishers, instead of exploring technical means to restrict access to non-rights-holders and/or people who have not paid? To paraprhase Bernadette, even if not perfect, the former means some income; the latter encourages piracy. The former also gives the customers (readers) the message that the publisher likes, or even is proud of, its content and actively wants people to read it. (This Telegraph article, for example, is about the increase in library membership bought about by the e-format.) Those new readers might then go on to read more, instead of watching TV or playing computer games - that is, the publisher has a great opportunity to increase its customer base with this format. The latter seems to me bad for business, and provides a rather Scrooge-like image which can hardly be good PR for an industry that is under so much pressure in this era of "instant availability" and from Google Books et al.

I do hope that publishers' organisations will soon find a way to remove the geographical element of their rights arrangements - in their own interests as well as in readers'. We are living in a global community,  after all.

Alex Delaware investigates.....online

Via an email from the author's UK publisher, Headline:

The latest Jonathan Kellerman book, Deception, is being brought to life online. Alex Delaware, forensic psychologist and the novel's protagonist is asking readers to help him 'solve' the murder at the heart of the Deception plot.

Using his own website , Twitter  and Facebook profiles,  Dr Alex Delaware needs your help to solve his latest case. Find out more information and view the evidence discovered so far. To give your views on the case and the evidence to Dr Alex Delaware please visit him at Facebook and Twitter, where you can get to know the man behind the Ph.D. and be able to help solve the Deception case.

Deception has been reviewed positively at Sharon's Garden, and you can read more about the book and publicity campaign at Crawl Space.

Jonathan Kellerman's website.

Deception at the publisher's website.

Swedish crime fiction is not all like Stieg Larsson

Ever since the phenomenal, and continuing, success of the Millennium Trilogy by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, we have read numerous articles in newspapers and on the internet likening the output of other Swedish, or Scandinavian, authors to him. Increasingly, "blurbs" on or about newly published novels are explicitly likening the book in question to S. Larsson (recent examples include Jo Nesbo's The Snowman (Norwegian), Yrsa Sigurdardottir's Ashes to Dust  (Icelandic), Ake Edwardson (Swedish), Camilla Lackberg (Swedish) and Roslund/Hellstrom's Three Seconds (Swedish). I am sure there are lots of other examples.

 Let's put aside the obvious fact that an author from a region of the world does not by default write books that are clones of other authors from that region (is Martin Amis the next Jane Austen or James Patterson the next Edith Wharton?).  Let's also put to one side the publisher's motivation to attempt to emulate S. Larsson's commercial success by likening its own titles to his novels.

What are we left with? What elements do "define" S. Larsson and hence could be used to liken other novelists to him?  I'll list ten here but welcome further suggestions or contradictions.

1. Exciting plots with many themes: thriller, political cover-ups, financial scandal, Nazis, serial killer, thugs, drug dealers, lesbians, spies, police corruption, sex, detective agency, blackmail, evil doctors, tortured family history, bikers, gore, devious lawyers, bad businessmen, lots of very nice and principled women - it's all there. 

2. Unusual and highly sympathetic female central character who has been very badly treated so is justified (in the reader's mind) in a search for vengeance.

3. Campaigning journalism (what I call the nostalgia ticket!). Journalists expose financial, political and other wrongdoings, and the world cares. That is so nice, I wish the world really was like that, and I like being able to imagine that it might be - hence one appeal, for me, of these books.

4. The goodies are good and the baddies are bad.  The lack of shades of grey is not particularly appealing to me but I think it helps to make the books more widely commercial.

5. Each book is about the same characters yet is distinct by having a different theme. Book 1 is a locked-room mystery; book 2 is a fugitive drama; book 3 is a political spy thriller in the Le Carre mould.  This is the structure of other successful series, most notably the Martin Beck novels of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, that is, a tried and tested recipe for success and a classic structure that readers can recognise while enjoying the unusual settings.

6. Masses of detail, eg how to put a magazine together, or open an offshore bank account, that the average reader will not know about and which appeals to the "inner nerd".

7. The curiosity factor. The author's necessarily enigmatic life seems to fascinate people and make them want to read his books.

8. The books are written at an "easy reading" level while not being dumb. Hence they appeal to a broad readership.

9. The books have been made into films, which often boosts sales.

10. The books have won awards and been bestsellers in other countries before being published in English, which encourages people in the English-speaking world to try them.

I am sure there are other factors in the Larsson make-up, but the above ten are the ones that immediately occur to me. By this count, a standard crime novel such as a police procedural series does not qualify for comparison. Jo Nesbo is perhaps a little closer in that his police procedurals also have strong thriller, gory and historical elements, but to my mind there is no more in common between the two authors than there is between Larsson and a standard US or UK (or any) thriller involving a police investigation. And Yrsa Sigurdardottir? No point of comparision, apart perhaps from the fact that Liesbeth and Thora are both women. (But then, so is Kinsey Millhone or Hannah Scarlett.)

Perhaps the novel published after the Millennium Trilogy that comes the closest to it is Three Seconds by Roslund and Hellstrom. The cover has a big red banner across the bottom, stating in capital letters "The new crime sensation from the publishers of Stieg Larsson".

Factors in common:

It is long

It is one of a loose series, this time about a seriously depressed, ageing policeman and his colleagues and other contacts (eg a prosecutor).

It is very thrilling with a scorching pace, while being replete with minutiae about things the average reader will not know about.

It concerns corruption in many institutions and at  the highest levels, and lots of it. Paranoia is rife.

There is no equivalent to the morally upbeat and forceful characters of Liesbeth Salander and Mikhael Blomqvist, but the character of Piet Hoffman is certainly well drawn and intriguing. I think the reader is supposed to like him more than I did.

Part of it takes place in a prison.

The English publisher is almost the same (MacLehose/Quercus for Larsson, Quercus for Roslund/Hellstrom).

Er, it is Swedish.

Crime-fiction publishing in Argentina

The current (17 September 2010) issue of The Bookseller carries a feature on the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair (6-10 October), with a special emphasis on Argentina, a country in which 82.5 million books were published in 2008; 20,038 new titles were published in 200; and 4 per cent of new books are published in translation; and where there are 660 specialist bookshops. (Stats according to The Bookseller.)

Five Argentinian authors will be meeting delegates to the FBF, including Claudia Pineiro, a journalist and scriptwriter whose novel Thursday Night Widows was published in the UK last year by Bitter Lemon Press, and whose next, Forever Yours, will be out here in 2011; and Guillermo Martinez, author of The Oxford Murders (Abacus) and other novels.

Although there is apparently a strong reading culture in Argentina, economic calamities have had a negative effect, not least on import of books and on library, school and other institutional budgets. Martin Schifino, a writer, publisher and translator who lives in Buenos Aires (I've read his translations of Water-Blue Eyes by Domingo Villar and At Close Quarters by Eugenio Fuentes, for example), describes the decline of the city's book-publishing industry, which for many years was ranked with Barcelona and Mexico City as one of the leaders of the Spanish-speaking world, but now can't compete with Spain. For most Argentinian authors, Schifino suggests that "cracking the Spanish market" is the main goal, as the country's own market can't sustain writers.

Bitter Lemon Press is singled out for its track-record in publishing many of the small list of Argentinian writers in print in the UK. The company was set up in 2003 to publish crime fiction and thrillers from overseas. Next year, six of the 50 titles on its list will be by Argentinian authors. Francois von Hurter, founder of the press, is quoted as saying "We love noir and we love dramatic locations, but we decided to give Scandinavia a miss because that's been done to death with the likes of Larsson and Mankell. So we looked at Latin America instead, and as we cast about, Argentina kept coming up. Buenos Aires is a totally seductive place and there's such an ebullient literary scene. It's a city of bookshops - like Europe in 1935."

Bitter Lemon's authors include the aforementioned Claudia Pineiro, as well as Rolo Diaz, Ernesto Mallo (who was recognised via the German translations of his work) and Sergio Bizzio (via rave reviews of French translations). 

Argentinian books I have reviewed include Thursday Night Widows by Claudia Pineiro, translated by Miranda France (Bitter Lemon);  No-One Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi, translated by Nick Caistor (MacLehose/Quercus); and Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo, translated by Jethro Soutar (Bitter Lemon).

Any recommendations for good Argentinian crime fiction that is available translated into English would be most welcome!

A S Byatt on translated (crime) fiction

I enjoyed reading an article in last week's (21 May) Bookseller (apparently not online) about the Independent Foreign Fiction prize by A. S. Byatt, well-known novelist and director of literature of the English Arts Council. Although there is a big picture of this year's winner, Philippe Claudel (winning title; Brodeck's Report), the article was written before the announcement, print deadlines being what they are. Ironically, the Bookseller's announcement of the prize, and their picture caption in the printed article by A. S. Byatt, do not mention the translator, John Cullen!

Obviously, A.S. Byatt's piece is not about crime fiction. But unlike many literary pieces, which are above such a lowbrow genre, she embraces this little corner of activity. She writes: "The prize has seen a range  of genres develop in translation. Crime fiction entries have always been numerous and the presence of a dedicated award for crime fiction in translation - the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger - first awarded in 2006, is welcome."

On the role of the translator: ..."the prize has given the translator's art more profile. Often a translator's contribution is hidden - almost as if publishers don't want to advertise that the book is a translation. We ask that translators are credited in any publication we fund, and we also support organisations like the British Centre for Literary Translation which helps writers to work closely with translators developing their skills".

Translated novels that A. S. Byatt highlights as being worthy examples of contemporary literature include Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. Finally, a word for the publishers. A.S. Byatt writes that the majority of fiction in translation is published in the independent sector, and singles out for special praise our favourites Bitter Lemon Press, Arcadia and Serpent's Tail among others. (All but one of this year's shortlist were published by independents; the winner was published by MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus - the same imprint that publishes the Millennium trilogy of Stieg Larsson).

Read reviews of Brodeck's Report at Euro Crime, The Guardian, The Times and Reading Matters.

News of the winning title at Crime Scraps.

Discussion of Brodeck's Report by the Not the TV Book Group.

Independent feature on the winning book.

Independent fiction prize: long list.

Waterstone's Quarterly interview with Ian McEwan

 I enjoyed browsing through the latest edition of Waterstone's Books Quarterly ,which I was given at the checkout last weekend after spending vast sums of money on some volumes for someone I live with. The highlight, for me, was a Q/A with author Ian McEwan, the questions being by Waterstone's customers, mainly about his latest novel Solar (which I am so much looking forward to reading). Here is my favourite bit:

Q: What has been the biggest change in you as a writer in ...35 years and what has been the biggest change in publishing?

A: The biggest change in me probably came sometime in the early 1980s - becoming a father, stopping writing for a while and then going back to write A Child In Time [is this or Atonement my favourite book by this magnificent author?] . A sort of shift took place around that time. [Me too.] As for publishing, I can only draw on my own experience. Publishing in the 1970s was still a rather dusty, gentlemanly affair. It was still the time of the long two-bottle lunch and accountants were of very little importance. Not much money was made and one distrusted any writer who sold more than a couple of thousand copies of a book. I don't think novelists in those times were the subject of gossip columns, either. So everything has become a little louder, a little more vulgar, a little more trashy, a little more celebrity-conscious, sales-conscious. Less sleepy and considerably more sparky. More fun in lots of ways.

Solar is reviewed in the current issue of Nature (28 April 2010). Read more about the book at the author's website.

Mysteries of the catalogue

I am slowly reading though the publishers' catalogues that I picked up at my recent trip to the London Book Fair. Although an increasing number of publishers are producing online-only catalogues, and one can only approve of this activity, I am always pleased to receive or get hold of a printed edition where one exists, for ad-hoc browsing.

 One of these catalogues caused me to smile quite a few times in its bizarre descriptions of its books. Here is a lovely example:

"Scrupulously honest Amish-born cartographer John Graef teams up with outlaw prospector and gemologist David Freeman in a ferocious race to be the first to find the treasure and solve the centuries old Tavernier Stones mystery." Sounds exhausting, and that's just the blurb. The author biography just below the synopsis reads "xxx xxx is a cartographer and gemologist. This is his first book." Delightful!

Later in the same catalogue, here is a description of a book in its entirety: "Could Dr Brian Eddy, plastic surgeon to the rich and famous, possibly be the Blonde Bomber serial killer? Packed with everything from homeless kittens to Mob connections, this mystery is messier than a chicken parmigiana sandwich." Er, that is supposed to make you want to buy the book? 

The economics of bookselling, based on a Saturday experience

I'm confused by the "3 for 2" ethos. I was walking past Waterstones yesterday (Saturday) and I noticed a big front-shop display of Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, a book in which I'm interested on the basis of good  reviews at Euro Crime (by Norman of Crime Scraps) and elsewhere. Looking at the book and a few pages, I was even more interested, so thought I would buy it ("support brick and mortar stores", I was thinking). There was a "3 for 2" sticker on the book - at which my heart sank slightly as I have so many vast piles of books at home - but, gamely, I looked at the price so I could look for two other books of roughly similar. £9.99! Wow.

Undeterred, I searched the crime fiction shelves. I was mildly intrigued by Twisted Wing by Ruth Newman, a debut novel priced at £6.99 with an ecstatic blurb quote by Sophie Hannah. But, try as I might, I could not find a third book which I want to read soon. I looked for several books on my list, which were either not in stock or not on "3 for 2" offers. If I want to buy a book by George Pelecanos, for example, I can buy only one title in the "3 for 2" but no others. All the "3 for 2" books I found in half an hour were either books I'd read or books I didn't want to read. So, I went home without buying anything.

I checked out the same books on Amazon. Alone in Berlin is £4.98 in a Penguin modern classics edition. Twisted Wing is £4.18 in the same edition as on the Waterstones shelf. (I'm also keener on the book since getting home, having read Sharon Wheeler's review at Reviewing the Evidence.)  Other books I had looked at (not in the "3 for 2" offer) were  £2 or £3 cheaper than their in-store counterparts.

If I had wanted 3 particular books which Waterstones had in stock and on "3 for 2", the price would have been roughly the same as Amazon. But this was not the case, so I do much better by buying the books I want singly or in a personally selected bundle, at a discount price each, on Amazon.

I am not a book publisher or a bookseller, so I don't really know why all this foot-shooting is going on. My understanding is that the bookseller charges the publisher a premium for being included in the "3 for 2" offer, which allows the bookseller to offset the loss by selling at a discount and the publisher gains by selling more books via front-of-store promotions than if the same title was just stuck on the shelves. But aren't they both missing out here? If Waterstones sold all their books at, say, £2 off cover price, without forcing their customers to take 3 instead of 1, wouldn't they sell more books overall? I would have bought 3 or 4 books yesterday if that had been the case, whereas in fact I bought none because I could not create a bundle using "3 for 2",  and the prices of buying the 4 books in which I am interested worked out as about double what I would pay for the same books on Amazon. I want to support High Street bookshops, but not that much - because I can't help feeling that this pricing policy is not in my (the customer's) best interests based on personal choice/market forces, but rather is the result of some deal between retailer and publisher as to what I should be reading.

More reading in March

After being overwhelmed with the quality and quantity of paperback reading in store for UK readers in March, I now fear I have to bring some news of yet more joys of that month - in hardback. According to the 4 December issue of The Bookseller, we are due the pinnacle of the reading experience - a new novel by Ian McEwan. It's called Solar, and it tells the story of Michael Beard, "an overweight Nobel prize-winning nuclear physicist, whose career is fading and whose fifth marriage is on the rocks. He sees his chance to sort his life out, and just possibly save the world from environmental disaster." Can't wait.

Another piece of good news is that the excellent The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, superbly translated by Marlaine Delargy, is due out (as a trade paperback) on 1 March at £10.99. I highly recommend this "futuristic tale set in a dystopian world".

Turning to the crime fiction scene, there are just so many brilliant novels on offer it is hard to know where to start. Nicci French has a new book out, called  Complicit, which concerns a woman who discovers the body of her murdered lover and calls her best friend to help her get rid of the body. Or, how about The Snowman by Jo Nesbo? Harry Hole delves into the unsolved case files - and discovers that a worrying number of wives and mothers have gone missing over the years. The author is a Glass Key award winner and is translated by Don Bartlett, an admired favourite of mine and other Euro Crime readers/reviewers. Another exciting title is The Stone Cutter by Camilla Lackberg, translated by Steve Murray, who has done excellent work with favourite authors of mine Stieg Larsson, Karin Alvtegen and many others. In The Stone Cutter, Patrik Hedstrom has recently become a father, and is summoned to the wharf in the remote Fjallbacka where a young girl's body has been found, presumed drowned. But the post mortem reveals it was murder. Sophie Hannah, now billed as "the queen of psychological suspense" (!) has a new title out, A Room Swept White, in which Fliss Benson, working on a TV documentary about miscarriages of justice involving cot-death mothers, is sent a mysterious card with 16 numbers on it. Then one of the accused mothers is found dead, with a card in her pocket with 16 numbers on it. And so on. Hmm - how believable is this? But the Bookseller calls it "unputdownable".

More English-language originals will be tempting us. Robert Crais, with The First Rule, is the story of how armed men break into Frank Meyer's home and gun down everyone in sight. Joe Pike, his old friend and sidekick of PI Elvis Cole, swears revenge - no matter what. Lee Child (61 Hours), Alexander McCall Smith (the Double Comfort Safari Club, one of his Botswana series), Robert Harris (Lustrum), Jonathan Kellerman (Deception), Simon Brett (The Shooting in the Shop), Linda Fairstein (Hell Gate) and Robert B. Parker (Split Image) also have new titles coming out in March.

Other authors untried by me who have titles coming out in March are: Maggie Orford (Blood Rose), Jefferson Bass (The Bone Thief), Known to Evil (Walter Mosley), D. J. Taylor (At the Chime of the City Clock), Shona MacLean (A Game of Sorrows), S. J. Parris (Heresy), Andrew Williams (To Kill a Tsar), Carol Goodman (Arcadia Falls),  Barbara Cleverly (Strange Images of Death), Louise Welsh (Naming the Bones) and June Hampson (Jail Bait). Plus a few other historical-mystery-code-style adventures, and Robert B. Parker (again) with Appaloosa, a Western adventure/mystery which I mention here because Viggo Mortensen was in the film (which for some unknown reason I have not yet seen).

Finally, a debut that looks interesting, This Perfect World by Suzanne Bugler. "Laura Hamley's past comes back to haunt her after she receives a phone call from the mother of a girl she bullied at school. The woman is now in a psychiatric ward - as a consequence of Laura's cruelty?" I wonder if this author will treat the subject as well as Inger Frimnansson in Good Night My Darling? (Translated by Laura Wideburg.)

UK paperbacks for March

I've been unable to write any posts for the past few days owing to other priorities - one of which is that I've bought a new computer which is very nice, but is taking a bit of learning/setting up. Here is a rather boring post, I'm afraid: some books that are due out in paperback in the UK in March 2010 (quotes are from The Bookseller). There are just so many of them it is all a bit daunting, but I've highlighted the ones that look most interesting to me, or that have been discussed a bit in the papers and on the Internet, with links to reviews so readers can find out more, and just listed the titles of the rest in a paragraph at the end. I'm currently reading the Donna Leon book and will write a review soon. The book I'm most looking forward to of the list below is the Nicci French title, though The Crossroads by Niccolo Ammaniti looks intriguing.

About Face by Donna Leon
"another subtle and evocative tale. They just get better with each one."

Assassin by Tom Cain
A Sam Carver (Accident Man) series novel. This time, he has to "save the new American president."

What to do When Someone Dies by Nicci French
Link up with Alibi, "a TV channel dedicated to crime".

Bloodline by Mark Billingham
A DI Tom Thorne series novel.

If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr
Quercus say this is Kerr's breakthrough book. It won the 2009 Ellis Peters award for historical crime fiction.

The Neighbour by Lisa Gardner
"Orion is going big on this excellent thriller, her best for some time" according to The Bookseller.

The Last Child by John Hart
Recent winner of the CWA Steel Dagger. His previous novel, Down River, was a Richard & Judy pick. This one is "a complex tale with masses of plot, emotional, violent and compelling, all from a 12-year-old boy's point of view. It is compelling."

Evidence by Jonathan Kellerman
"Alex Delaware back on top form - but this really stars Milo Sturgis. FX TV campaign". Hmmm, although The Bookseller says "my reader was up half the night with it".

Where the Dead Lay by David Levien
Second from the author of City of the Sun, "Frank Behr again, I'd back it."

The Edge by Chris Simms
"features Manchester DI Jon Spicer. He is definitely a talent to watch, a rising star."

The Poisoning in the Pub by Simon Brett
"Lovely cosy English crime with Fethering amateur sleuths Jude and Carole in their 100th mystery."

Judgement and Wrath by Matt Hilton
"Second adventure for Joe Hunter, the British vigilante fighting Amercian criminals."

Relics of the Dead by Ariana Franklin
"....the author is ace and she just gets better. This is set in medieval Glastonbury, terrific stuff."

The Coronation by Boris Akunin
"abduction during the build-up to the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II."

A Visible Darkness by Michael Gregorio
Third in series, in this one "a serial killer attacks women on the gem-rich Baltic coast."

Cold Blood by James Fleming
"Sounds perfect for those missing Alistair MacLean."

The Crossroads by Niccolo Ammaniti
"Renowned Italian prizewinning author with a dark literary thriller, vividly written in a jerky cinematic style and featuring damaged hopeless characters in a violent tale where things go horribly wrong. It's a good read."

Trust Me by Peter Leonard.
"noir thriller full of shady men, double-crosses, car chases and shoot-outs."

Like Clockwork by Margie Orford
"A female South African "Cracker" is introduced in this gritty, Cape Town underworld serial killer novel."

Chez Max by Jakob Arjouni
"A futuristic urban thriller in the style of Chandler, a standalone by the creator of Turkish Frankfurt-based Detective Kayankaya". Sounds intriguing!

Others: 8th Confession by James Patterson; The Brotherhood of Five by Clio Gray; The Crucifix Killer by Chris Carter; Fatal Last Words by Quintin Jardine; Bones of Betrayal by Jefferson Bass; Land of Ghosts by E. V. Seymour; Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer; Tutankhamun by Nick Drake; The Brotherhood of Five by Clio Gray; The Betrayer by Kimberley Chambers; A Day and a Night and a Day by Glen Duncan; Beg to Die by Beverly Barton; Reckless by Andrew Gross (James Patterson's former co-author); Girl in the Woods by Jennifer McMahon; The Book of Love by Kathleen McGowan; The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer; The Spy Game by Georgia Harding.

Thinking beyond the Borders

Much ink and many electrons are being expended in the wake of the confirmation that UK Borders is entering administration, after a day yesterday of announcements and denials. Predictably, many of these articles and comments have gone beyond the fact of the Borders news, predicting all kinds of apocalypse for chains, physical bookshops, print books, authors, you name it. The Book Trade information service sums up articles in The Guardian, The Independent, and by Susan Hill (an author and small publisher) in The Spectator, thus:

A double ecology is evolving. Discounted bestsellers from big publishers are being sold in supermarkets, not shops like Borders. But a vibrant and more interesting trade is taking place in smaller shops. People who want to buy serious books can still find them; people who want to write are not without hope of finding a publisher. The electronic book might change everything, of course: margins on ebooks are already greater than in print. But good publishers, and creative retailers, will surely adapt to that too.

Susan Hill has stopped publishing adult fiction because whereas a novel might have sold 2,000 copies in hardback ten years ago, nowadays it is lucky to sell 500 and most sell far less. As an example of the economics of publishing, she mentions a good non-fiction book by a well-known author on a subject of interest to many, which has sold a mere 48 copies in its first couple of months of publication.

It is true, as the authors of these articles and many others state, that a smallish number of "top selling" celebrity ghost books, cookbooks and one or two others, and an equally smallish number of (mostly poor quality) fiction is both skewing the entire publishing/bookselling industry and is subject to a discount "price war" involving each other, Amazon and the supermarkets. I've observed that, for example, W H Smith couldn't (more or less - £5 per title) give away many copies of the current hardback nonfiction list over a weekend, making me wonder how much longer people will be prepared to buy books written on behalf of celebrities recycling half-digested pap, or yet another book filled with painted, sprayed, pretend "meals" full of ingredients that nobody buys to be cooked by methods that nobody has time to undertake. Fine to leave all those to the supermarkets, in my view!

Leaving aside the digression of the "bestsellers", I think there are quite a few factors and features that aren't being taken into account in the articles I'm reading in the news media and on blogs.

First, Borders is coming under attack for selling "non-profitable" DVDs, CDs, stationery, magazines and for hosting coffee-shops. But W H Smith and Waterstone's, (now) the main two UK book chains, do just the same. WHS in particular has turned around its business over the past few years, in part by drastically reducing its book stock in favour of in-store coffee shops, phone shops, post offices (that don't stock bus pass renewal forms, but will exchange your money for other currencies), computer accessory centres, etc. Similarly, in Waterstone's you can have coffee, lunch, dinner and book your holiday, as well as buy stationery, magazines, christmas gifts, calendars, souvenirs, etc. So this can't be a prime reason why Borders has got into trouble. (All three chains have cut down a lot on their DVD and CD stock over the past few years.)

Second, many of these commentators seem to think that e-readers and digital books are threatening to wipe out print books. They won't. There are situations in which digital "books" are useful - in education, as service manuals (eg when the person comes to service my boiler he accesses the latest-edition manual on his laptop), while travelling and so on. It's also confounding the argument to bring e-readers into the equation, as dedicated e-readers may be a temporary technology. As computer screens improve, when Apple produces its famous tablet, people will read books, magazines, news, watch films, etc using these devices when it suits them - as a few do now on their mobile devices or on e-readers. They'll probably still read print books on the beach, in the bath, in the hospital, while telling good-night stories to their children, and in a host of other situations.

Third, one reason why Amazon, perhaps the biggest threat to booksellers even though it only accounts for 15 % of UK book sales, rose so rapidly is that it filled a niche that customers wanted  - limitless stock of everything in print - but that booksellers themselves had not been able to fill because of local competition, technological innovation beyond their expertise, the organisational and logistical challenge, etc. Nowadays booksellers are using the internet more innovatively, for example the independent bookshops network (customers can order online and pick up their title from their nearest independent in the network, as discussed for example in this Petrona post back in 2006), and Waterstone's online. Nobody's online stock matches Amazon's, of course, partly because of Amazon itself and partly because of its marketplace network. Which, of course, enables a tiny local bookshop in Hereford or Salisbury to let me find out about and then sell me an out of print book which they have in stock second-hand. There is every reason for "physical" independent booksellers to do more online innovation and collaboration.

Fourth, publishers are in a time of uncertainty about digital formats and rights management. However, they all have long out-of-print backlists to which they own the rights, and many of them are digitising these to make them available print-on-demand. This is leading to new models of book publishing and selling, as well as writing. An author who will only sell a couple of hundred titles rather than a couple of thousand is a far smaller risk to a publisher on the print-on-demand model rather than the print-run and distribute to bookstores model. And the Espresso machine can only increase the options for publishers and booksellers. To a large extent, once these technologies are perfected (many of them are, or are nearly), it becomes more an issue of marketing than anything else - reaching your market by some other way than a publisher paying a physical bookseller to be "deal of the week" or part of a "three for two" offer.

Finally, one good aspect of all of this is that we still read lots of books, in whatever format. I read an article the other day in which the point was made that the industries and companies most vulnerable to collapse are the ones that focus on doing just one thing and doing it superbly. Those that survive are the ones that are good at looking around them. (A restatement of Darwin's argument that the species that survives is the one that adapts best to its environment.)  I think that there is still plenty of lateral thinking that can be applied to the writing, production, selling and, indeed, reading of books.

New UK paperbacks in February 2010

Finally, just in time for this week's issue, I have caught up with my archive of Booksellers. From the 23 October issue comes news of the paperbacks that will be published in the UK in February 2010. 
Among the predicted "top sellers" are Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child (Bantam, £7.99), which opens with Jack Reacher suspecting a woman on the New York subway of being a terrorist. For me, these books have become somewhat mechanical, but the Bookseller calls this "one of his best" and says that the next one (the 14th) is even better. Other predicted top sellers are Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid (Sphere, £6.99), a fast paperback publication for this novel about an internet stalker of teenagers; John Connelly's The Lovers (Hodder, £7.99), about Charlie Parker's childhood; and Alexander McCall Smith's Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (Abacus, £7.99), a series that I've enjoyed but am about three behind.
Moving to the "major sellers" category, we have The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith (Pocket, £7.99), his follow-up to the amazingly successful Child 44; and The Given Day by Dennis Lehane (Black Swan, £7.99), not strictly a crime title, being "an epic American novel of Boston in 1918/19, of strikes, poverty, racism.....action-packed and violent...", etc. Its release has been delayed from 2009 to coinicide with the film of Shutter Island.
Perhaps more interesting than any of these are some titles from the "more normal" categories, including The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Orion, £7.99), apparently "a pastiche of an Agatha Christie-style English country murder mystery, only our detective is a precocious 11-year-old girl". This book has received tremendously positive reviews in many places.
Titles I can highly recommend on the basis of having read them myself (links go to my reviews) are: After the Fire by Karen Campbell (Hodder & Stoughton, £7.99); Red Bones by Ann Cleeves (Pan, £7.99); Skin and Bones by Tom Bale (Preface, £7.99), Close-Up by Esther Verhoef (Quercus, £7.99); Shadow by Karin Alvtegen (Canongate, £7.99); and The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas (Vintage, £7.99) - winner of the International CWA Dagger for 2009.
Titles I haven't read but have heard good things about include Dead in the Water by Aline Templeton (Hodder, £7.99); Death Watch by Jim Kelly (Penguin, £7.99), War Damage by Elizabeth Wilson (Serpent's Tail, £7.99); A Visible Darkness by Michael Gregorio (Faber, £6.99); Angel with Two Faces by Nicola Upson (Faber, £7.99) and The Hidden Man by David Ellis (Quercus, £7.99). These are just a few selected titles, there are plenty more! (Including TV or film "tie-in" editions of three more of Henning Mankell's books, The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, and Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane - which must be a leading candidate for my prize for the novel with the worst "cheat twist" I've ever read.)

The future of real-world bookselling

"How Waterstones killed bookselling" and "How Waterstones crushed the publishing industry" are two articles in today's Guardian (website and G2 - the second possibly not available online) that have been aired and rehashed all over the Internet, unsurprisingly. The Bookseller.com has a good, measured analysis of the Guardian pieces, including pertinent examples of dissenting comments made by readers at the Guardian website.

The Guardian article, by Stuart Jeffries, attacks Waterstones for centralisation of its stock (little autonomy of staff in branches), complex pricing, and lack of specialist choice of books for readers. About half way through, he gets around to the reasoning behind these moves: the first of two huge changes for the UK book publishing and selling industry was the court-induced abolition of the national net book agreement (NNBA, already under pressure in any event) which opened the floodgates for book megastores. These massive shops did pretty well for readers as well as booksellers and publishers, until the second huge change - the Internet, and specifically Amazon, an unstoppable force from which "conventional" booksellers are still reeling, possibly never to recover, even as they create their own bookselling websites (not a patch on Amazon for pricing or stock).

To me, it seems ludicrous to "blame" Waterstones for this state of affairs. True, Waterstones has expanded, centralised, and sells a lot of bland fare that does not differ much from what you can get in a supermarket. But it does also offer a huge range of books for the interested browser or specialist enthusiast, and I know at least two people who like the Costa coffee shop in the basement of the Piccadilly store (as well as the lovely restaurant at the top of the shop). For his article, Stuart Jeffries interviews a few standard book industry people (for example, Tim Coates, ex-MD of Waterstones now well-known for his library campaigns; and Nicholas Clee of Bookbrunch, ex-editor of the Bookseller), but they come up with no realistic alternative for Waterstones - probably because there isn't one.

Factors to consider are that many people who like reading and who buy a lot of books will continue to use real bookstores as well as online retailers in combination. These people like browsing in bookshops but will often go online for either price or stock reasons, or both. I think Waterstones' stock in my own local branch is not bad, but I have to buy almost all the crime fiction I like to read online, because translated or backlist fiction is not cost-effective to store on the shelves - this was true even before the Internet was thought of and while the NNBA was in full force, when I worked in vacations in a bookshop and learnt some basic economics of the cost of keeping unsold, low-priced stock (an individual book) for considerable time. A lot of other people either don't buy many books over a year, and/or use the library.

A much better article than the Guardian's blaming broadside, in my opinion, is this one at the Idea Logical blog (8 November): "Can the chains provide us with better small bookstores?"  In this piece, Mike Shatzkin analyses the rise and fall of the huge bookstore in the USA, concluding that, in the post-Internet retreat of the giant megabookseller, a great stock is no longer the answer for profitability. He suggests that a solution that might work for the future is a mini-B&N or Borders sited within another large retailer. "This will require a different kind of inventory management than the chains exercise now; more of a rack-jobbing approach. But their capabilities: to source books, select books, organize books for presentation, and to deliver books all over the United States, will have more consumer demand than they’ll be able to satisfy with only their own very large stores." Waterstones might take note of this idea - instead of the Costa or Starbucks within the bookshop, the bookshop becomes within the Costa or Starbucks!

Already the bookselling industry in the real (not online) world has separated out into the "top 1000" books, sold at heavily discounted rates often in supermarkets (which only stock "top" titles); and "the rest". The question is, will it be profitable enough for booksellers to continue to sell "the rest"? And will it be profitable enough for publishers to continue to publish "the rest" of authors? People who love reading and buy a lot of books will read a higher proportion of "the rest" than of the "top 1000". But whether collectively we read and buy enough to support these industries is a question to which I don't know the answer. I do know, though, that the suggestions in the Guardian article (comfy chairs, etc) aren't going to stimulate or sustain the traditional bookselling business to the extent necessary for survival - especially with technologies such as e-readers and print-on-demand machines on the scene.

Thanks to Bernadette for sharing the link to the Guardian article at Friend Feed.

See also: The Third Player, an excellent post at The Digitalist blog, looking at the future of the e-reader and e-book market, and the possibility of Google's dominance of the whole supply chain.

About Double Exposure, by Michael Lister

In her Boucheron wrap-up post at Hey, There's a Dead Guy in the Living Room, Alison Janssen writes that "Tyrus author Michael Lister became an instantly buzzed-about author when his latest novel, Double Exposure, was cited by Michael Connelly as one of the best books he's read recently. I KNOW, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!"

So I went over to the Tyrus website to take a look at this book, and sure enough:

“Double Exposureis absolutely riveting! I sat down, plugged in and didn't get up until the last page. With elegiac prose, insightful characterization and a wonderfully ingenious plot, Michael Lister has squeezed every ounce of terror and thrills out of a dark night in the woods.”
—Michael Connelly

Here is the blurb about the book:

DOUBLE EXPOSURE
September 2009 (according to Amazon UK, available in "1-3 weeks")
216 pages
Paperback | ISBN 978-0982520925 | $14.95
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0982520932 | $24.95

"Following his dad’s death, Remington James returns to the small North Florida town where he grew up to assume his father’s life—taking care of his dying mother and running the local gun and pawn shop.One fateful fall evening, as the sun sinks and the darkness expands, Remington ventures deep into the river swamp to try out some new equipment and check his camera traps. Encountering the kind of wildlife that made him want to be a photographer in the first place, Remington gets some of the best shots of his life, but he’s about to happen upon the most dangerous animal of all—a feral, patient, sociopath who wants Remington dead."

Hmm, well, on the face of it, not a book I would usually pick up and read, but with a recommendation like this, I probably should give it a try.

Author information, including bibliography.

Read an excerpt from Double Exposure.

About Tyrus books, where Alison Janssen is Senior Editor.

Hobbyist and professional bloggers

I keep reading interesting posts on blogs and online newspapers, but can't get enough into any one of them to do more than to post a link/comment at Twitter. However, a few highlights from them:

The Huffington Post says that very few individuals in the book publishing industry are blogging, because companies don't like it. Apparently crime-fiction author Jason Pinter (The Mark, etc) was an editor at Random House and lost his job because of his blog - or so states the Huffington Post. Yet the same day, I read a PW interview with Rebecca Ford, who runs the (US) Oxford University Press blog and Evan Schnittman, the company’s vice president of global business development, who maintains his own publishing-centric blog, “Black Plastic Glasses.” A well-run blog benefits a publisher by promoting authors, the brand and encouraging debate, they say. Quite. It doesn't seem to me that there is much of a shortage of publishing blogs.

The Guardian technology blog weighs in on the just-announced US FTC plans to regulate bloggers. It is still unclear to me what exactly is planned  - and enforceable, across international boundaries. According to the Guardian, it is their relationship with advertisers that bloggers must disclose. But this isn't how many book bloggers are interpreting it, according to various discussions about what do do about declaring receipt of free review (advance-reading) copies of books and bound proofs that publishers send (often unsolicited) to bloggers. Other bloggers are, rightly, questioning how to declare a relationship with a Google ad box with automatically generated content. Frank Wilson collects some unsurprisingly negative coverage of the plans over at Books, Inq. Ed Champion puts it well in a comment to that post: "If the FTC wants to rake in some cash and keep media clean, they're better off going after the big boys, not the legions of hobbyists who clearly aren't blogging for lucre."

'Life sentences' are people who everyone knows one thing about. Dan Quayle, for example, cannot spell potato (that's my contribution). Some nice examples here. And on the same blog (Nicci French) - Murphy's law or Mruphy's Lore: bad grammar or misunderstood irony?

I barely watch any TV, let alone daytime TV, so my heart fell a bit when I saw in my RSS reader that the Guardian is running a series in which they ask readers who are at home during the day to submit reviews of TV programmes that they watch. I should not be so quick to form an opinion: this review of a programme called Pointless is rather good, even though it is a game show and (therefore, of course) I have never seen it. Chalk up another win to the "hobbyist" bloggers!

 

Indridason et al.: books for September in the UK

This is a bit of a laundry list post, I'm afraid, but I don't feel creative enough to write anything more brain-engaging tonight. The "big sellers" predicted for September by the Bookseller (5 June issue, p 29) include Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Bantam, £18.99 but half that on Amazon, probably in common with all these "big sellers"), James Patterson's Alex Cross's Trial (Century, £18.99), The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith (Little, Brown, £17.99), an Isabel Dalhousie novel, and Dick and Felix Francis's Even Money (Michael Joseph, £18.99). There are some interesting general fiction books also: Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (Viking, £18.99); A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, £18.99); and The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury, £18.99), which includes some of the same characters from Oryx and Crake although it is not strictly a sequel. I've read a couple of features about Atwood's new novel and I am half-tempted, though I could not honestly say I have enjoyed any of the four or five of her books I've read - including Oryx and Crake, which was well-written but had an utterly predictable plot and a very annoying "who cares about the reader" ending. Non-fiction-wise, you might be intrigued by Andy MacNab's Spoken from the Front (Bantam, £20), a collection of "true tales from the battlefields of Afghanistan...to convey all of the courage and hardship of British servicemen and the unique difficulties posed by the conflict". Watch out for a linked TV series.

Of much more relevance to the main theme of this blog are the regular crime fiction titles due out. Top of my list is Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill, £11.99 trade PB) - can't wait for that one! There's a Val McDermid, Fever of the Bone, her first with her new publisher Little, Brown (£18.99), and a Tony Hill series novel. Quercus has several titles due out: If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr, a new Bernie Gunther novel (£17.99), Bones of Betrayal by Jefferson Bass (£12.99), and a reissue of David Pearce's 1974 and 1977 (£12.99 each), in "gorgeous" hardback editions. Peter [son of Elmore] Leonard's second novel, Trust Me, is published by Faber (£12.99, trade PB) and Brian Freeman's thriller The Burying Place (Headline, £12.99) sounds good. A couple of very experienced, prolific authors also have titles due out in September: Lynda La Plante's latest has a publisher, Simon&Schuster, a price, £18.99, but no title (unless it's Untitled ;-) ); and John Sandford (same publisher, £12.99 for a trade PB) offers Rough Country, a Virgil Flowers novel (the character, a homicide detective,  is a protege of Sandford's usual hero, Lucas Davenport). I've heard good things about Gerald Seymour's The Collaborator (Hodder, £16.99), and Macmillan is serving up Chelsea Cain's fourth novel, Evil at Heart (£12.99). The featured crime debut for September is Walking in Pimlico by Ann Featherstone (John Murray, £14.99), a murder mystery set in the world of Victorian music hall.

Blue light for Dead Tomorrow

Via The Times today (brief, print edition, 5 June) Peter James has donated a patrol car to Sussex police that is "branded" to promote his new book, Dead Tomorrow. The author is said to have donated the car in gratitude for the force's help in ensuring that the police work he describes in his novels is accurate. Chief Superintendent Graham Bartlett said "The car is not used to respond to emergency calls but is solely for use in the local community." I can see that screeching up to an accident with "Dead Tomorrow" all over your vehicle might not seem the height of tact. (Photo from Peter James's blog  from last year - I am unsure if the Times is a year out of date or if the donation reported today is new.)

There's lots more publicity for the UK release of the Dead Tomorrow scheduled for next week. There will be interviews with the author on Radio 5 live (Simon Mayo), Radio 4, Radio 2 (Claudia Winkelman's arts show) and the Sunday Express. Dead Tomorrow is being serialised in the Brighton Argus and will be Tesco's book of the week, W. H. Smith's deal of the week, Asda's author of the week and Sainsbury's offer of the week. There will also be a poster campaign on London Underground and elsewhere, including a short code to text in order to receive a call from Superintendent Roy Grace (via the Bookseller, brief, 5 June print edition).

RAC News: Writer donates car to help force.

Euro Crime: Peter James sponsors police car.

My review of the book, which is a jolly good thriller, is submitted to Euro Crime.

Publishing and reading round-up

Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog discusses a piece at the Pittsburgh-Tribune Review on the pros and cons of self-publishing. Although it can be a way to find a market for books that otherwise may not get discovered, she writes, Sarah isn't keen on them overall. "Genova, Daniel Suarez, William P. Young may be success stories, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. And unless traditional publishing changes radically soon, which it won't because there's not enough economic incentive yet to do so, they will remain exceptions proving the rule for some time to come." "Genova" refers to Lisa Genova, who achieved New York Times best-seller status with Still Alice, self-published and very energetically self-marketed. One blog that I've recently discovered and whose posts I am very much enjoying is How Publishing Really Works - it is one year old today. Happy birthday!

Via email and spotted on numerous blogs already, the shortlist for the Theakston's Old Peculier crime novel of the year has been announced (12 male authors, 2 female). Despite the sad lack of translated fiction on the list, I've voted - have you?

Aargh, it's that time of year again - the Chicago Sun-Times has published its "summer reading picks" on 1 June (actually published on 31 May)..... three more months of this to go. Among the recommendations are Red Hot Lies by Laura Cauldwell (a new legal series), Joseph Finder's Vanished (David Montgomery's pick), Stieg Larsson's The Girl who Played with Fire, and Free Agent by Jeremy Duns (reviewed by Michelle yesterday at Euro Crime). 

A few more reviews:
Bernadette of Reactions to Reading reviews The Black Monastery by Stav Sherez, one of the books I bore away from CrimeFest (via the ever-kind Karen), still to read.

Glenn Harper of International Noir Fiction writes very interestingly on My Soul To Take, Yrsa Sigurdadottir's second novel, and compares her output with that of a compatriot, the superb Arnaldur Indridason.

Rafe McGregor explains why the rationale for inclusion in Favourite Sherlock Holmes stories is flawed. (My advice: just buy the collected works - or apparently, don't even buy them, as Rafe writes that they are in the public domain. I'd still buy them, though, they are certainly worth it and you can always pass a book on to your children, grandchildren etc, to remind them of what a printed page looks like.)

Based on Books reviews the most recent movie of The Importance of Being Earnest- quite a good film, apart from Reese Witherspoon's irritating fantasy sequences. Colin Firth, Judi Dench and Anna Massey, in particular, turn in performances that stick in the memory.

Finally, I know this is a bit mad, but I just had to smile at this response by the Times to the Ruth Padel (Oxford Professor of Poetry emerita) resignation: top ten smear campaigns.

Will the Espresso machine help booksellers?

Mr Nicholas Clee has been rather visible recently, with the publication of a new book, Eclipse, and a recent article in the New Statesman about (among other things) the effect of celebrity "authors" on book publishing (see this Petrona post) and what seems to be the implementation of the long-promised subscription-only status for his Bookbrunch blog. I look forward to seeing whether that particular plan works.

Mr Clee wrote a long piece in yesterday's Times, which I read with interest on my morning train journey (causing me to defer the crossword and sudokus until a later time), with the title The decline and fall of books. The piece follows on from some of the themes of the New Statesman piece, but this time is mainly a test-drive of the Espresso machine and opinions about Amazon's new, super-wide Kindle. Mr Clee is negative about the Espresso machine as it currently stands, mainly on grounds of the quality of the product, but also lack of choice of titles and non-functional search. He goes on to provide a sombre obituary list of bookshops that used to grace the Charing Cross Road in London, victim to cheap prices and vast stocklists of Amazon and its marketplace sellers. Even a well-stocked physical bookshop, whether a giant chain or a small specialist store, has relatively few customers at any one time, and cannot stock everything that those few may require. Hence, opines Mr Clee, the rise of the celebrity blockbuster, as publishers and booksellers search for a business model that can work under these constraints. 

He writes: "publishing the so-called “midlist”, or any book that does not come with some kind of marketing angle, has become more difficult. A book has to be “promotable”: the author will be young and attractive, or have an interesting CV; the work will tell an extraordinary story. Biographies of literary figures outside the top rank, or novels with undemonstrative virtues, do not cut it. The reason why Tindal Street Press - an Arts Council-funded imprint in Birmingham - was able to publish Clare Morrall, the Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, and Catherine O'Flynn, the Costa award-winning writer, is that no big publisher saw the potential of these authors' novels. (They do now: Morrall is with Sceptre and O'Flynn with Penguin.) Some acclaimed authors have moved to small houses: Maggie Gee (formerly HarperCollins), for example, is now with Telegram Books, and Tibor Fischer (formerly Chatto & Windus) is with Alma Books.
Practices that have been normal in the book industry for years are becoming unsustainable. You pay an author an advance - say £15,000 - that is probably too large, even though it is too small as recompense for what may have been a year's work. You print 1,000 hardbacks and manage to sell 800 copies to booksellers. Lorries bring them to your warehouse and take them out again to the shops. The book gets a few reviews, but no recognition from prize jurors. Half of the copies come back and they, along with the 200 that never left, get pulped. A year later, the paperback comes out. Richard and Judy fail to recommend it, the booksellers do not select it for their three-for-two promotions. The lorries go to and fro again and more books get pulped. No wonder publishers are looking for new authors through low-cost ventures such as HarperCollins' Authonomy, a self-publishing website, and Macmillan New Writing, which pays no advances."

This, then, is where the e-readers and the Espresso machine come in - but Mr Clee does not seem at all optimistic about the future of real-world bookshops, however the book-publishing industry transforms itself.

Trends in book publishing

At BookBrunch blog*, Nicholas Clee, former Editor of the Bookseller, draws attention to an article he wrote in the New Statesman  in the wake of the just-finished London Book Fair. He says the article "has a somewhat misleading headline: I do not think that celebrities have been the prime causes of anything." The article's title is "How celebrities saved, and then killed, the book trade".

Mr Clee then provides a quote from the article, which I assume means that he believes it to be the main message: "However, these trends are not the fault of the celebs, or of Richard and Judy. They are the consequence of the conglomeration in publishing and bookselling; of the proliferation of media; and of the undermining of a cultural consensus that could tolerate, without embarrassment, such concepts as literary excellence."

Actually I think they are mostly if not entirely to do with readers and what they are prepared to pay their money for. The full New Statesman article describes how, in Mr Clee's belief, celebrities and 'Richard and Judy' have provided artificial but short-lived bursts of life to the publishing industry - but what happens next? He describes how hard it is for an author to get published these days - authors who have already published several books can't even get a look-in with their new work, or if an editor likes a title, it will not get approved by the sales and marketing departments. Online retailers (mainly Amazon) and digital forms of content (mainly e-readers at the moment) are even bigger threats to the industry, says Mr Clee.

While I don't disagree with Mr Clee's analysis of the business model of publishers, I don't agree with him that celebrities alone are providing the "artificial" boost, and I don't agree that the boost is short-lived (although unfortunately, the Richard and Judy [a.k.a. Oprah] effect, which emphatically was not about celebrities or marketing budgets but about what someone thought was a good book when she'd read it, does seem to be on the wane). There will always be "celebrity authors" who are not authors because they are celebrities in the sense of Jordan, Victoria Beckham, Naomi Campbell and their international equivalents, but because they are James Patterson, Danielle Steel, the ghost (in both senses of the word) of Catherine Cookson, Dan Brown, Nora Roberts, Wilbur Smith, etc. (Between them, these mega-authors produce more than enough for one person to read in a year, if anyone wanted to exist entirely on such a diet.) These authors are huge sellers because their books are popular with readers - they are authors who are only famous for being authors. I don't see this category drying up any time soon, any more than I believe that the appetite for the next Miley Cyrus, Zak Ephron, Russell Brand et al. will end (most of these books will be actually written by jobbing authors, so they at least keep some scribblers on a payroll, even if they have no "literary merit").

At the core of these analyses is the fact that not many people buy much of the great bulk of literary fiction or non-fiction. They probably never did. Cultural standards have indeed changed due to mass media and lowest-common-denominators, as Mr Clee writes, but it is not possible to infer from that, that there was a time where all the people who are now reading "popular" TV- and celebrity-inspired books used to read literature. In fact I don't think it is the case. They were probably all listening to the "wireless" ;-).

The book publishing industry as a whole is not a mega-profit-making industry. There are a very few giants, but the rest do not make vast profits or even in many cases small profits. These companies know what books will sell, roughly how many copies, how to sell those copies. It does not make sense to "blame" them for not publishing literary works rather than the books that people actually buy. Yes, a cheap, highly promoted "book of the week" offer will produce a spike in sales, but those customers would not have purchased a highbrow work of literature instead if the deal had not been offered to them.

What will happen is some kind of hybrid, via print on demand or digital formats (sometimes "published" by the authors themselves); and the internet will become increasingly relevant in targeting books to readers (perhaps with libraries as the middle-men rather than publishers?). Some "publishers as we now know them" will adapt and survive, some won't - because "long tail" readerships are individually small, and there are a heck of a lot of authors producing all and any kind of material for them to choose from. Readers will certainly benefit from these technologies, but it is very tough for authors in this intermediate but not steady-state, in which publishers aren't publishing their books and if they do it themselves, they aren't going to find a large market other than in exceptional cases (such as the title selected for publication by Harper Collins's Avon imprint via its Authonomy scheme, which turned out to have been previously self-published and marketed very effectively on Authonomy by Steven Dunne, the author - read all about it here.).

*If you click on the link you might get a message stating "you are not allowed to view the blog. You will have to be a member first" (even if you are a member and signed-in). In that event, go to Bookbrunch main page, click on the blog tag, and look for posts on 24 April. What a palaver.

An interlude at the London Book Fair

 I spent a few hours at the third and final day of the London Book Fair, with Karen of Eurocrime and CrimeFictionReader of It's a Crime. Not only was it an opportunity to catch up with two of my favourite bloggers and hear about all the crime-fiction news (Karen and CFR are veritable mines of information), but it was also a chance to see some of the books that will be (potentially) gracing our shelves in the next few months. Bearing in mind the quantity lined up already for my eyes to be shifting over during the next few years given the collection I already have, I tried to be ruthless with myself about what I picked up. I have to say that Karen and CFR applied marginally less strict criteria - I trust they managed to stagger home unaided with their sacks of spoils. My own acquisitions are pictured: one book (clue: the translation) is from Karen herself and another was very kindly given to me by the publisher Simon & Schuster for my elder daughter, who numbers Philippa Gregory among her favourite authors. I have to confess to buying Emma Darwin's A Secret Alchemy the other day on this week's "buy a book with The Times for £2.99 from W H Smith" offer, so Cathy will have an interesting comparison of perspectives on Elizabeth Woodville (the cover of the proof of The White Queen, black with a red rose on one cover and a white one on the other, is much nicer than what seems to be the image on the book itself, published in the UK in September). The rest of my little collection will keep me very happy, thanks to Karen and the generous publishers at Quercus and Macmillan.

 

British thriller writers shoot themselves in the feet

"Jeffrey Archer, Matt Lynn, Martin Baker and Alan Clements launch bid to woo writers away from 'formulaic' American writing" is the headline of this ludicrous Guardian piece. The "reign of the production-line American thriller writers" that is being challenged is the crown held by the likes of James Patterson, John Grisham and Dan Brown.

While there is certainly some truth in what these British authors are saying about the contemporary book market (ghost writers, "factories" of teams producing books under one main author's byline, and so on), let's just take a closer look at the five principles of the group.

1. That the first duty of any book is to entertain.

2. That a book should reflect the world around it.

3. That thrilling, popular fiction doesn't follow formulas.

4. That every story should be an adventure for both the writer and the reader.

5. That stylish, witty, and insightful writing can be combined with edge-of-the seat excitement.

These principles are all fair enough if that's your taste, but the two authors of the "Curzon four" I have read certainly do not live up to them. In addition, there are many books that can be criticised along the same lines that are not thrillers: celebrity biographies and novels are ghost written, for example; Dickens and Zola followed forumulas; and Jane Austen did not reflect highly significant contemporary events in Europe (the Napoleonic wars).

But the whole enterprise is massively wrong-headed, and possibly just a marketing exercise to get some of these authors better-known. Nobody can tell anyone else what to read, or judge a book along the lines that these Curzon authors are doing. What one reader extols, another may not. The first duty of a book is not necessarily to entertain, if that isn't what the reader wants. Some readers enjoy formulas. And so on. The Curzon four should stop this moaning forthwith, and if they think they can do better than Patterson, Grisham and Brown, good luck to them. In the meantime, "sour" and "grapes" are two words that immediately spring to mind. If you disagree with me you are welcome to find out more about the Curzon group:

"Their not-entirely-altruistic plans to champion the cause of British thriller writing include a month-long debate on books site Bookarmy.com which will pit British writers against a yet-to-be confirmed American author; a poll to find the greatest British thriller of all time (early possibilities include The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The 39 Steps and The Ipcress File); a story competition for wannabe thriller writers; festival appearances; and a manifesto of five principles they hope will provoke debate. Promotions, blogs and live chats will be running throughout the year at a new website, greatbritishthriller.com."

All of these enterprises seem very positive and worthwhile; I only wish they did not originate in such apparently petty jealousy.

Update: Sarah Weinman's view on the Curzon four is here.

Crime novels for the rest of the year

Earlier this month (10 April) in the Bookseller, Maxim Jakubowski picked his favourites from the crime fiction, mystery novels and thrillers due to be published in the UK in the second half of this year. In his preface he notes that the total output from publishers has decreased by 10 per cent compared with last year, with "midlists and backlists" suffering as a result, as publishers put more resources into marketing a smaller number of titles. He believes there are fewer debut authors this year and notes "the recent vogue for crime in translation seems to be calming down somewhat, at any rate on the Scandinavian front, although I feel that French and Italian writers are still criminally overlooked generally." The smaller independents have lost ground, with honourable exceptions Serpent's Tail, Bitter Lemon and one or two others; Quercus and Orion are singled out for "innovative and commercial lists that are allowed to grow organically through a combination of judicious finds and big dollar acquisitions". Conclusion: the genre is still thriving though there are a few clouds on the horizon.

Of the books selected for the preview feature, there is only one translated title in the predicted best sellers, and that is, of course, Stieg Larsson's The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Quercus, October). You can count the translated titles in the rest of the preview on the fingers of two hands:The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Weidenfeld, June), August Heat by Andrea Camilleri (Picador, June), The Water's Edge by Karin Fossum (Harvill, July), The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson (Profile, November) - an author better known for her Moomin children's novels - The Stone Cutter by Camilla Lackberg (HarperCollins, August), and The Gigolo Murder by Mehmet Murat Somer. For more details of these and all European (translated and UK) crime fiction due for publication in the UK between now and the end of the year - check at Euro Crime's regularly updated lists (by date or by author).

Of course there are many titles due for publication in the second half of 2009 that are originally written in English, by authors including Michael Connellly, Ian Rankin, Frances Fyfield, Laura Wilson, Peter James, John Harvey, Val McDermid, Peter Robinson and many more.

  

Question of the day

Is the sequel a phenomenon that works for crime fiction but not for other genres? So asks Suroopa Mukherjee at the Macmillan New Writers' blog. "Do readers look for continuity? I am ill at ease with the idea of a brand name. Is this a marketing strategy? But what if the author is inspired to write differently?....How do we plan out our next book? Do we write with the Imprint in mind? How do authors deal with a contrary creative impulse? Which is the common meeting ground for marketing and creative strategies? Do readers look for brand names? Are these creative constraints faced by all published authors?"

Well, that's rather a lot of questions, not just one, but they all relate to the issue of the "second novel", and whether it is advisable (not least, in order to actually be published) to continue a theme begun in a successful first book, or to go for something different?

Suroopa writes that crime fiction is well suited to the second novel as sequel because of a "central investigating character". Her novel, not crime, is Across the Mystic Shore. Her post was inspired by M. F. W. Curran's news (on his blog Muskets and Monsters) that Pan Macmillan are not going to publish his third novel, The Black Hours, because "it couldn’t be marketed as an “MFW Curran” book. It’s quite different to The Secret War, perhaps too different." The Black Hours is described by him as a "Victorian thriller", which might interest readers of this blog - in which case I recommend a visit to Muskets and Monsters to discover more - its a very engaging blog.

New books for June

From the Bookseller (6 March 2009), here is a selection of books due to be published in hardback in the UK in June.

Dead Tomorrow by Peter James (Macmillan, 5 June)
Another Detective Superintendent Roy Grace novel; I fully expect this one to be as exciting as advertised. "Expect a very superior police procedural with James' customary tight plotting."

The Buried Circle by Jenni Mills (HarperPress, 28 May)
From the author of The Crow Stone, this time about stone circles in Avebury -- with an Indian connection.

Target by Simon Kernick (Bantam, 18 June)
Nobody believes Bob Fallon when he reports the abduction of a girl during a break-in at her flat. Author of Relentless (R&J pick) and Severed, among others.

August Heat by Andrea Camilleri (Picador, 5 June)
Eagerly awaited (my me and fellow Euro Crime fans) tenth novel in the Inspector Montalbano series.

Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo (Macmillan, 5 June) debut
Looks interesting, about a female Amish chief of police.

Midnight Fugue by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins, 28 May)
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel.

A Deadly Trade by Michael Stanley (Headline, 11 June)
Second in the Detective Kubu series set in Botswana: I enjoyed the first, A Carrion Death.

Gutted by Tony Black (Preface, 4 June)
A Gus Drury novel. Sounds very hard boiled indeed; probably not one for animal lovers, based on the blurb.

Ice Cold by Andrea Maria Schenkel (Quercus, 4 June)
Serial killer in 1930s Munich, author of The Murder Farm. Both of these short novels have won major awards.

Wicked Prey by John Sandford (Simon and Schuster, 1 June)
The 19th Lucas Davenport novel, so regular readers should know what to expect. I usually enjoy these; my main problem with them is recognising from the title whether or not I've read it.

The Way Home by George Pelecanos (Orion, 25 June)
The 16th novel by the much-admired author, who is also producer and writer of The Wire. I've only read one of his books and though I quite liked it, not totally my scene.

Hue and Cry by Shirley McKay (Polygon, trade pb) debut
Religious crime in sixteenth century Scotland by previous winner of Young Observer playwriting competition.

Night and Day by Robert B. Parker (Quercus, 4 June)
The 8th Jesse Stone mystery, sounds a bit gruesome, concerning a "twisted voyeur called Night Hawk".

Also an important if off-topic June release is The Road Goes Ever On and On: The Map of Tolkien's Middle Earth by Brian Sibley, out of print for five years but now revised and updated. (HarperCollins, 28 May).

Print your own Wikipedia

Here's an interesting development, via The Bookseller.com: print your own customized encyclopaedia, using Wikipedia. "An authoring tool on the Wikipedia website allows users to chose their own encyclopaedia content from the database choosing particular categories or subject areas they like. The book can then be previewed and ordered through PediaPress who transmit the PDF to Lightning Source to print." Apparently the service launched in the German language two weeks ago, and starts this week in various other languages including French, Italian and Spanish. English follows next week, on 1 March. Apparently the technology can be used with any database (I wonder if it works in a similar way to those nice "turn your blog into a book" services?), and is being likened to people's use of an mp3 player to pick and choose their favourite music.

 

Times of terror, things of darkness

I know that this pairing is not as good as recent offerings, but  was struck by the similarity of the covers of Time of Terror, Seth Hunter's latest Nathan Peake novel of the British navy in the times of the French revolution, and This Thing of Darkness, Harry Thomspon's novel of Captain Fitzroy and the voyage of the Beagle:

   

Authonomy author starts to blog

I received an email today from Authonomy, the Harper-Collins website to "flush out the brightest, freshest new writing talent around" (their words) or the online "open slushpile" to use another description. (The Guardian called it an "outsourced slushpile".) You probably read recently how this cynicism was not in the event borne out, when Harper Collins offered publishing deals to three authors who had uploaded their books to the site (Authonomy's announcement is here).

Today's email (and, doubtless, press release) is to say that one of the three authors, Miranda Dickinson, is going to write a series of posts on the Authonomy blog detailing "her journey from unpublished to published author". She describes in her first post the excitement of getting a book deal. I enjoyed reading her post, which starts well: .."let me start at the beginning... Picture, if you will, a small office somewhere near Birmingham airport, September ‘08. This was my workplace – and things were not boding well for my job. We’d started to notice that work just wasn’t coming in, with our bosses remaining tight-lipped about the reasons why."

Each month, editors at Harper Collins read the five titles that have received the most votes from site visitors. This month's selections are up, if you want to take a look (link in first sentence of this post). I'm quite intrigued to see how this project pans out, as it sounds as if it has got a lot better than when I last looked, which was at the time of the official, post-beta launch. My best wishes to the selected authors.

E-publishing updates from the Bookseller

I seem to get "briefing" and "bulletin" emails every day from the Bookseller as part of my (very expensive, Christmas present) subscription. I think that these mostly find their way into the printed edition of the magazine each week, but I have not really worked it out yet. Here are a few highlights, in any event:

Waterstones have sold more than 30,000 Sony e-readers since last September's launch, and about 75,000 e-books, to their surprise. (On Christmas day, Waterstones sold more e-books than physical books on their website, and Random House reported significantly higher sales of e-books over the Christmas period, which they put down to people being given e-readers as presents.) The main bottleneck, says David Kohn, Waterstone's "head of commerce", is that there are not enough e-books out there. He thinks that every conventionally published book should simultaneously be released in e-form, but I think publshers might be finding that technically and operationally hard to achieve (even if economically desirable, which I am not sure about either). Amazon may be about to launch its second-generation Kindle at a press conference on 9 February (next Monday), according to rumours reported in the New York Times. I do not get the impression that the UK and the rest of Europe is likely to be able to buy it yet. Good news for those who read Spanish, though - you can download e-books for 5 euros. And good news for schools - which will increasingly be using this form of book.

Print on demand is another e-technology that is coming into its own with a vengeance. One POD provider, Lightning Source, reports that publishers are increasingly using its service to increase print runs. A book that would previously have had a print run of 250 is now more likely to get one of 1,000, thanks to this technology and the help it gives to publishing economics. Lightning Source printed 30,000 books in its first year of operation (2001); last year it printed 2 million. It has just printed its 7 millionth book in total. I have one or two Lightning Source books and like their production values - very white paper and large, dark print.

Although Borders is not doing well in some respects, being about to close down its shops at UK airports, its website seems to be increasingly popular, achieving third place (up by 56) in a ranking by Retail Bulletin. HMV is at number 29, Play.com at 35, Waterstones  at 43, and W H Smith at 104 - equal to Amazon, which must say something about this particular list. Whatever one may think about Amazon's principles, it has a huge amount of stock on its site, and is easy to use and order (even though its browse and search functions are nowhere near as good as they were in the old Google partnership days, as I discovered yet again yesterday when trying to find books about Shelley's poems -- at least I found one in the end, which is one better than all the physical bookshops in Kingston). And returning to online for the minute, I am pleased to read today that Woolworths is to be reborn online! I wait with bated breath - but not in the hopes of finding anything there about Shelley.

A rose by other names, please

The Daily Intel blog of New York magazine turns its attention to blurb comparisons. Some examples:

"F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edith Wharton: If you write about society, you write about rich drunks, or you write about crumbling marriages and decadence, you're one of these two. If you're a boy, you're Scott; if you're a girl, you're Edith. If you're a girl pretending to be a boy, maybe you get to be George Eliot."

"Malcolm Gladwell: If you find a fascinating new way to state the obvious, you're a Malcolm."

"Hunter S. Thompson: If you are a crazy writer who did something adventurous, and your publicist couldn't even get through the book but sensed it would be transgressive, you are a Hunter. If your publicist could get through it, you are more like a Jack Kerouac."

This certainly translates into crime fiction. Here's a few of my suggestions:

• If your book has anything to do with cutting up dead bodies, you are like Patricia Cornwell.

• If you set your novel in Scotland, you are the next Ian Rankin.

• If a book has a lawyer in it somewhere, the author is compared to John Grisham.

• An exciting book - James Patterson. (Or "a female James Patterson" as was written on the blurb of a book I read recently).

Although this practice is lazy, it does have the effect of conveying very briefly the broad outline of a book. However, the comparison is often wrong. Just because a book is set in Scotland does not mean that the contents will have any similarities whatsoever to the Rebus books - I have read a few of these so I know. And such comparisons put quite a burden of expectation on an author.

Perhaps the best thing a potential reader of an untried and unreviewed author can do to rely instead on a blurb written by a popular author. In that case, you might note the ubiquity of Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and Harlan Coben. In another genre, Stephen King is legendary in this regard.

Plan your reading in 2009

If you are of the list persuasion and have by now either written or almost written your selection of favourite books of 2008, perhaps it is about time to begin planning reading for 2009. Erin Miller has complied a calendar of the "hottest releases" for 2009 in the USA. The page will be updated throughout the year as publishers announce new titles, so it might be worth bookmarking. Erin notes that John Grisham, Janet Evanovitch and Richard North Patterson have books coming out in January; James Patterson and J. D. Robb are among those in February; and Harlan Coben has a new book out in March.

DS books, e-books, new neighbours

Via Martyn Daniels: "Today HarperCollins announced its adoption of the Nintendo DS ebook application to sell a cartridge of some 100 classics ... a new and interesting diversion from the normal platform and one which is both logical and could offer a quick return as it has a ready-built audience." For my part, I am not sure if the ready-built audience is the same one as an audience for 100 classic novels. And via the same source: "Penguin Group USA today launched Penguin 2.0 which is a platform aimed at connecting readers to Penguin and also group their many digital initiatives....Penguin Personalized and Penguin Mobile."

Readerville reports that "when you tap into the Stanza catalog, the first item in the menu is Random House Free Library. At the moment, it contains just nine books... No word on the rate at which RH might add (or remove?) titles from the list—nor on whether Pan Macmillan, who recently started a catalog of excerpts in Stanza, will follow suit."

And a bit of old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar news, The Guardian has finally moved to an office next door to mine after years of building works, exploding gas cylinders, etc. I hope that means a few coffee bars in the area, as the scaffolding-clad Kings Cross station has long ejected its tenants, causing too many people to have to queue in the place that exists on the grim haul up York Way. (Kings Place, new home to the Grauniad, is delightful by the way: I've visited a couple of times with a charming colleague. I hope it succeeds at becoming a star cultural centre among the goods yards and sidings, and helps to drag this ghastly locale up by its bootstraps.)

Everybody's e-reading or e-listening

Many libraries in the UK are planning to increase their e-books collections in 2009, according to a recent survey by OCLC (the online computer library centre). Almost all (85%) of public libraries that responded expressed an interest in developing a fiction e-book collection, even though most usage of e-books so far has been of research and reference titles. (And 65 % of respondents are planning to increase their e-audio book collections.) According to an Outsell industry report on the survey, this response is puzzling because so far in the UK, most interest in the e-book format has been in reference works and textbooks. Although the Sony e-reader has been so successful in the UK that you can't get one for about a year, and the Amazon Kindle has yet to be sold here, various digital publishers are quoted as being excited about the mobile format --  which means that people will not have to buy a dedicated e-reader. I wrote the other week about Random House's greatly increased POD (print on demand) programme, and here is Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan enthusing about the i-phone, on which you can read extracts of some of the publisher's books. (More details about the books available and how to use the format are here.) I still feel it isn't me - but clearly, e-reading and e-listening are going to be increasingly popular with many, even for fiction.

POD moves up a further step

The Bookseller blog reports that Random House is to begin marketing its print-on-demand titles as a distinct list, Random Collection, in January. Random is launching a dedicated website, which will be interactive and searchable, beginning with a list of 750 titles with further books added throughout the year. If readers request a book that is out of print, the publisher says it will check out the rights to see if it can be reissued POD. Among the authors set to be available in the POD format when the new site launches are Josephine Tey, some of the lesser known Neville Shute novels, Henry Green, Patrick White, Elizabeth Bowen, all the Ebury backlist and lots of non-fiction.

I've written about this before (and I am not alone in that!), for example in this post of December 2006 , which caused a bit of a row. Seems as if time is proving me right (along with a lot of other people who think the same way that I do).

Congratulations to James Long

Congratulations to James Long, on his appointment to head of digital development for Pan Macmillan books. A very wise decision on the part of Macmillan. James's well-deserved promotion is part of a restructuring of the digital and audio departments at the publisher, as described in this Bookseller blog post.

Here's a sample of a recent post by James, about a book called Cliffhanger by T. J. Middleton, which in true literary spirit, James read near the best coastal cliff he could find. The book is an e-version of a title that was published as a conventional hardback: but the e-book (DRM-free - that is, without the ‘wrapper’ that ties the ebook file to a specific device) reveals, as James writes, "an alternative ending, a missing love scene, and other small changes not yet changed… character names, details of plot, and so on. To give us a broader understanding of why it’s an exciting accompaniment to the print book, we asked the key people involved in its creation to give us their perspective on the idea....."

The special editions ebook programme now includes Clive James's Cultural Amnesia, Sid Smith's China Dreams and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Empire in Black and Gold. You can read more about these projects by following James's links at the bottom of his Cliffhanger post.

Well done, James; I am sure we'll be reading about many future imaginative projects using the digital medium as you get to grips with your new role.

Pros and cons of Google book scan project

The blogs to which I subscribe were dominated in the past week by the news of Google's out-of-court-settlement with the Authors Guild and the AAP. These last two organizations had bought separate lawsuits against Google’s Library Search program that scans books from libraries, including books under copyright. The settlement includes a $125 million payment by Google plus the establishment of a new licensing system (via Publishers Weekly). Google's own official announcements are here, and in more detail, here.

Here is one comment: "Today is a sad day for copyright and publishing as we know it", from Martyn Daniels of the UK Booksellers' Association, in a post with the title 'The great book bank robbery'.  Lots of reasons are given in the post, but perhaps a starker one are the implications in Charlotte Higgins's recent Guardian culture blog post about why Borders' and Waterstone's sap her of the will to live. (The logic of the post has some obvious flaws, eg complaining that CDs are out of stock, but the comment discussion is pertinent.) Yes, we are all turning to the internet, to order books and, now it seems even more likely, not to bother with that and just to read them. Google, on the other hand, says that the agreement "will give readers digital access to millions of in-copyright books; second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works; and third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers."

Mac Slocum is rounding-up blog reactions from publishers, librarians, other interested parties and just "the interested" at O'Reilly Radar; links to related stories in the newspapers and magazines are also provided in that post.

Last word for the moment to Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan, writing on The Digitalist blog: "Whilst it has carefully been building up the walls around its walled garden, Kindle, Google has quietly and cunningly been working away on a plan which makes it the gateway and the marketplace for all digitised books, and without the need for a dedicated device. It must be good for there to be a strong competitor to Amazon, mustn’t it? And it adds an interesting and powerfully pro-online access dimension to the debate about whether the future of digital reading lies in digital downloads to buy and ‘own’ or online access through a subscription." Oh, and by the way, using the code OPRAHWINFREY you can now get $50 off the price of the Kindle, apparently - a case of acting quickly before it becomes redundant?

Picador partners with Amazon

Publishers grasp Amazon's Vine.

"This link with Vine is just one part of Picador's partnership with Amazon and the reason that I am writing this blog piece today is that after much work behind the scenes today is the day that we launch the Picador Store on Amazon. I am extremely excited about this launch and look forward to your comments on it. The aim of the store is to highlight Picador's fiction and non fiction publications, the new titles, the backlist and the audio editions, to Amazon's customers. Each month there will be Book of the Month as well as offers on backlist and additional information on our titles and authors."

Twiller on Twitter

It had either passed me by, or I knew but had forgotten, that Matt Richtel has for the past two months been using Twitter to write a real-time thriller called, inevitably, Twiller. The author writes: "It’s about a man who wakes up in the mountains of Colorado, suffering from amnesia, with a haunting feeling he is a murderer. In possession of only a cellphone that lets him Twitter, he uses the phone to tell his story of self-discovery, 140 characters at a time. Think “Memento” on a mobile phone, with the occasional emoticon." If you can't face reading the novel in 140-character chunks including spaces, here's a slightly longer plot summary at Matt Richtel's blog, to allow "new followers" as he calls them, to catch up.

I don't know if this is supposed to be the actual novel, but here is Mr Richtel's Twitter account. The most recent entry reads:

"as u no, im drivin deadmans bmw 2 dc. in glove cmpt: pink slip in name Dave Ito of DC; &, photo of Lev Kind (ME) but 10yr ago, in fatigues" Maybe he should try FriendFeed, they give you more space per post over there. Matt Richtel is a journalist with the New York Times and author of the previously published novel Hooked, half of which I read (in ink-on-paper, conventional bound form) a year ago but could not finish. It wasn't bad, just not my cup of tea.

Authomony aims to tap wisdom of crowds

After more than three months running in private beta, authonomy.com  finally went live yesterday (3 Sept) and is open to all. The site describes itself as a community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins:

"If you’re a writer, authonomy is the place to show your face – and show off your work on the web. Whether you’re unpublished, self-published or just getting started, all you need is a few chapters to start building your profile online, and start connecting with the authonomy community. And if you’re a reader, blogger publisher or agent, authonomy is for you too. The book world is kept alive by those who search out, digest and spread the word about the best new books – authonomy invites you to join our community, champion the best new writing and build a personal profile that really reflects your tastes, opinions and talent-spotting skills."

Top-ranked book when I looked at the site is by "Sylvia", and is called Spammer. "Ever wanted to retaliate against a spammer? Judy did, and made herself the target for the hideous fury of a Mafia boss. (Complete at 79,000 words)." So runs the blurb. I read the first page (online) but had no wish to read more of the extremely over-heated prose.

Apparently, the aim is for the publisher to harness "the wisdom of the crowds" (a.k.a. you and me) to go through its slush pile. Time will tell if the aforementioned crowds are a substitute for editor and agents, and hence an economy for the publisher at this end of their market. So far, the site is said to receive more than 50 new books a week; the publisher's promise is that someone on staff will read the ten top-rated submissions each month.

UK launch of the readable e-reader

Lots of digital book news this week, sparked by the heralded launch of the Sony e-reader in the UK. Via theBookseller.com, you can read a round-up of local newspaper coverage of the Sony Reader before its launch tomorrow (Thursday), in all of Waterstone's 205 shops as well as online and via Sony centres. "The Daily Mail claims the e-book reading device could spell "the end of the paperback". However, at the Daily Telegraph Marie Phillips, author of Gods Behaving Badly, argues that at £199, the Sony Reader is "really expensive and I don’t see what it adds". Dan Sabbagh at the Times claims that some will find the device irresistible, despite the price. "It is a significant technological advance," he said."
I was startled by one aspect of a sidebar to the Times piece: apparently Waterstones counts a "heavy reader" as someone who buys 12 books a year. This figure is quoted as an argument that the e-reader may not catch on because people don't read enough. I am shocked that reading this amount of books is considered "heavy". I can only assume that Waterstones's definition is out of whack and what they mean is "not many people buy more than 12 books a year with us because they are in addition buying them at Amazon and from other booksellers, or using a library".
According to an industry information service, W H Smith is already selling the iRex iLiad on its website (although not in shops), after Borders UK  increased the number of stores selling the device from six to twelve. The iLiad retails for £399 with 50 classic titles pre-loaded. The Sony Reader undercuts that price significantly, as well as having 100 classic titles pre-loaded. Amazon has not yet announced UK plans for the Kindle.
E-books/readers are likely to be most popular when people travel, either on holiday or if they need to use books as technical manuals when doing things like installing or servicing gas boilers. And as the devices become more common, publishers will dream up innovative ways to use the format that can't work for print, such as (again via the Bookseller) a recent announcement by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin in the USA, that it is to produce a "digi-novel". The publisher has signed a deal with Anthony Zuiker, the creator of CSI, for a three-book "multimedia series", in which readers will need to read the book, view clips, and participate online in order to complete the story. "The series will have a mystery-type flair and will focus on renegade government investigator Steve Dark. Special codes will be included at the end of each chapter in the book; the reader uses these codes to unlock film footage online that continues the storyline in the book. Readers will also be able to participate in a community portal that features alternative storylines, different characters, and, according to Dutton, "countless ancillary levels of story enrichment." "