The next generation of ereader will surely be more of everything.

Of course, the fine-tuning of the perfect ereading device is not the issue. The ebook business is building itself without the perfect device. eBooks are not going to be the next big thing; they’re going to be a thing. A part of a complex mix of reading choices. With that in mind, let’s think about ways we can blend ebooks into the publishing culture without pain.

I lied: there’s going to be pain. The pain will come for those (textbook industry, anyone?) clinging to old business models. So let’s play. Here are my thoughts, in no particular order.

• Rethink Royalties: A few things here. I’ve read a lot of blah, blah, blah about royalties and profitability from ebooks. Most of it makes no sense at all. In keeping with that tradition, I’m going to throw out a royalty rate for ebooks: 30% of wholesale/what the publisher receives. Calculating royalties off retail is a silly artifact of a business that ceased to exist long ago.

  30% might seem high (and it’s a starting point, not a rule), but there’s a bit of logic here. This leaves 70% of every dollar received for the publisher. That amount offsets distributed overhead, including editorial costs, distribution and storage and data centers, knowing that retailers are currently doing most of the fulfillment, and other costs, because there are fare more costs than I can list here.

  Getting hard numbers is, well, hard, so I can’t do a tidy little P&L.

  While I cannot make guarantees, offering a reasonable royalty to authors is a gesture of good will, especially since many authors remain wary of this new business model (even though it’s not really so new). Which leads to:

• Resist Rights Land Grabs: Maybe it’s because my background is in the motion picture industry, where rights are often granted piecemeal and distribution terms are clearly defined, but enough with the hoarding of rights. It’s a given that the notion of “in print” changes with the availability of ebooks.

  And it’s natural for authors to balk at the idea that a publisher can, theoretically, own distribution rights for decades. While I am not one who believes books will disappear from our lives, I do believe that we’re due for many changes — some of which might even stick — in the publishing business. Of course publishers want to lock down rights to content in order to be positioned to meet new opportunities, but it’s insane for authors to give up their stake in said opportunities.

  Publishers are already seeing a slow trickle from established authors (see: Terry Goodkind) who are seeking better deals outside the traditional industry. It is a dangerous thing, alienating your bread and butter. Rethinking royalties and negotiating rights in good faith are fine starts. You’re not the only game in town.

• Get Over Your Fear of Piracy: Piracy exists. I mean, we’re still living in an age where pirates board ships and make off with goods (the mind boggles that this is possible, but there you have it). Piracy exists. You can throw up every lock in the universe, but, if someone want to pirate, they’re going to pirate. Stop living in fear. This goes for authors and publishers, but right now, I’m talking to authors.

  Let’s stipulate that a few things are debatable: the number of “lost” sales due to piracy and the actual pervasiveness of true piracy. It’s stealing content, but given the lack of profit motive in most of these instances, shouldn’t we be looking deeper at root causes and reasons?

  For example, look no further than Kirk’s post on reading Thomas Pynchon on the Kindle. Given the number of times he’s purchased various versions of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (because you need the rare Japanese CD edition), I know that he’d happily pay good money for an electronic version of the Pynchon catalog. There are no legal versions of these books available.

  This is such a pervasive problem that I’m thinking I need to start a new BS feature: Not Available on the Kindle. I was emailing back and forth with an author, and thought, “I should just buy the book now.” Grabbed my Kindle and discovered that this book, published in 2007, was not available in a Kindle edition (it was recently released in paperback, and a Kindle edition is now sold).

  Authors need to be more proactive about getting their books out there. One thing that is absolutely certain is that you cannot make sales if you do not make your books available. I think there’s an economic theory behind this.

  Withholding content doesn’t stop piracy. Withholding content doesn’t increase sales. And withholding content because you have this precious notion of how your book should be read is just plain arrogant.

  Oops, did I type that?

• Discourage Proprietary Solutions (or, Support The Reader!): Wal-Mart is shutting down its music servers. Customers who bought into this DRM’d content are being told to burn it to CD or lose it. Imagine, for a moment, that a year from now, Amazon pulls the plug on the Kindle. Decides it was a grand experiment, but too costly in the long run. Imagine that Amazon further decides to shut off access to the Kindle servers, meaning people like me lose access to their purchases. Yes, I know, but it’s a proprietary format, and we all know how well those fare in the long run.

  This is not a far-fetched notion. Wal-Mart is the latest in a string of retailers to do this to consumers. I believe that one of the many reasons music piracy remains so robust is because consumers simply cannot trust the people in the industry to do the right thing by them.

  I hate that I am locked into the Amazon system with my Kindle (though, honestly, given my life schedule, Amazon is generally my preferred retailer for many products). There is no competition for my reading dollar, if I want to do my little part for the environment and reduce the number of physical books coming and going from my home by reading as much as possible on the Kindle. I should be able to buy a book wherever I choose and read it however I choose.

  Of course, this swings the other way: I can’t read my Kindle books on my laptop. Or my iPhone. I am locked into one retailer. Do you really want that to happen? Do you really want your customers owned, lock, stock, and ereader by Amazon?

  The real bottom line is that nobody from publisher to retailer to reader should be locked into anything. It’s a crazy way of thinking when you know full well that tomorrow won’t look anything like today.

• New Business, New Pricing Model: Now that you’re in league with the publishing devil, you’re understanding why the music business is hating on its bargain with the music devil. The music folks created the iTunes business model, more through aggressive failure than active lobbying. They finally got the business they wanted, but the other side of the bargain was loss of pricing control.

  Granted, nobody in the music business wants to sell songs for less than ninety-nine cents. They’re angry because they want to sell for more. The music industry’s ostrich-like attitudes are the topic of another rant.

  I like the idea of flexible pricing. For example, I see a 2008 edition of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice listed for $7.95 for a print copy, with no Kindle edition available (I do know that I can get free electronic versions of this book from other sources, but follow along with this example. Thanks.). Now I have at least two print editions of this book, including a really old one that I stole from my mother, but I wouldn’t mind a well-formatted version, perhaps with some nifty indexing that helps me navigate the text. And I’d like it to be, oh, in the two dollar range.

  I think one telling sign when it comes to the value of books, versus the perceived value (as defined by retailers), is the used book market. It’s not a slam dunk comparison, but there is some value in noting how these books are valued in this so-called secondary market.

• Think Beyond The Book, And Don’t Forget Serialized and Subscription Content: I can’t remember where I read it, but someone declared serialized content dead. As providers such as DailyLit have shown, there is a market for serialized content. It’s all about the right content and the right market (and, yes, right marketing).

  Another concept that excites and intrigues me (and also ties into the “think beyond the book meme”) is subscription content. I’m already getting the Los Angeles Times delivered to my Kindle on a daily basis, and, yes, actually reading more of the newspaper because it’s more convenient for me. What about literary journals or other periodical content? I’d love a broader range of subscription content, and I’m happy to pay for it.

  Yeah, this plays into the device/content independence thing. I want a cloud system that lets me control my access to the content I’ve purchased.

For related thoughts, Jane’s post “10 Things Epublishers Should Do for Readers”. Great minds and all that.

In fact, there are no Pynchon novels available in any ebook store. At least not in any of the ones I’ve checked. That includes the Kindle store, Sony Connect, Fictionwise, the Palm eBook store, and eBooks.com.

I understand that most of Pynchon’s novels qualify as extreme backlist, and, as a result, are not exactly a high priority for digitization. That makes perfect sense to me. And it doesn’t really matter that much because my search ultimately lead me to a source of free Pynchon ebooks that work perfectly on the Kindle.

Not only that, this same source has well over 1,000 titles of similar backlist fiction, all available for free download.

I’ll leave the exercise of finding this so-called digital lending library to the curious reader. If it takes you longer than two minutes you might want to pick up a copy of Google for Dummies — a title which, fortunately, is available in the Kindle store.

For the record, I would have happily paid for the Kindle edition of any of Pynchon’s books. I’ve purchased print editions of each multiple times. Unfortunately, buying an official ebook edition is currently not an option.

While I could use this experience as an excuse to rant about any number of issues, including the slow pace of book digitization and the sorry mixed-up state of the ebook market, with its multiple competing and incompatible formats, I would like to focus on one particular issue that, so far, seems to be off the radar for nearly everyone in the publishing industry — the analog hole.

As the television, recording, and motion picture industries have discovered, it doesn’t really matter what system you put in place to protect your digital media products. As long as long as a physical copy exists, your product can and will be copied.

The process of digitizing a printed book is trivial. Sometimes it seems like the only people who have a problem with book digitization are the ones running publishing houses.

So, why aren’t publishers more concerned about the analog hole and bootleg ebooks?

My theory is that many publishers still don’t believe that ebooks and ebook readers will ever be mainstream. They see ebooks as a niche market that adds up to a very small slice of their overall revenue.

That may be true — for now. But, what happens in a few years when off-brand eInk reading devices are available for $99? By then digitization will be even easier and books will be fair game for the very same file sharing networks that are being used to distribute every other form of entertainment. Suddenly, book piracy ad hoc digital lending libraries could be a very real problem.

Publishers need to start taking digital content distribution seriously, or they risk falling into the same traps that other content industries have fallen into. They can start by ramping up the supply of backlist content. If we learned one thing from the early days of digital music piracy, it’s that consumers can’t buy a product that isn’t for sale.

In the near future, consumers who are looking for content to load onto their $99 ebook readers will find that content wherever they can. If the digital marketplace for ebooks fails to provide consumers with the titles they’re looking for — or provides those titles in an incompatible format, or at an unreasonable price given the limitations of the digital format — then those very same consumers will find their reading material online through rouge sources.

In many ways, the publishing industry’s challenge may be even greater than that faced by the recording industry. Everyone knows you can read books for free by checking them out of the local library. If you happen to find a digital version of the local library — and it’s offering books you want to read, but can’t find anywhere else — what could possibly be wrong with that?

Yes, piracy is wrong. That should go without saying. But, another thing we’ve learned from digital music piracy is that taking the moral high ground doesn’t get you very far. Sometimes it’s easier (and more profitable) to give consumers what they want.

The future of publishing is not about technology or widgets or free samples.

It’s no wonder that we endure a never-ending succession of “it’s the end of the world as we know it” articles about the publishing industry. New York Magazine has given us the latest, a gloomy piece chock full of quotes from gloomy industry professionals. It’s only when you take a step back that you realize the article misses a whole bunch of important points.

Noted statistician Philip Roth estimated, fifteen years ago, “…there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.” If this were even remotely true, then the New York publishing industry would have collapsed ages ago. Lordy, how would they make the rent on those Manhattan offices?

What is really meant by this, and what is really meant by this article is that a certain segment of the publishing industry is in jeopardy: literary (with a capital L) fiction. More specifically, literary fiction from New York publishers. Look at who is doing the hand-wringing, who is doing the worrying. If this is the end (and it’s not), then what, exactly, is ending?

This is where the New York Magazine piece misses the boat. It sees publishing through the eyes of the literary crowd, not the reading, writing, publishing crowd. Out here in the real world, readers decide what they want, and, man, they want a lot of stuff. We’re talking, in a single purchase, a gluten-free dummies book and Bridge of Sighs and The Keepsake. With a Stephenie Meyer title thrown in to see what all the fuss is about.

Get it?

There is much to be done for the publishing business to become a lean, mean, 21st (and beyond) century machine. The industry as a whole is woefully behind when it comes to digitization of books. Never mind that the ebook market is tiny; online motion picture distribution wasn’t a huge business in the late 1990s when the movie studios made a concerted and expensive push to fill their digital warehouses. Now, though certain recalcitrance exists, those entities are prepared for new media models, some with every title in their extensive, decades-old library.

The publishing industry is also woefully unprepared to think beyond the book. Flat, bound, linear. Nice and very useful. Never goes out of style. Except, oh, when book is not the best means to distribute information, content, or story. If publishers don’t move beyond the form, they are in danger of shifting gears from publishing to just printing (thought stolen directly from Kirk Biglione).

And don’t get me started on the money flow. Bob Miller’s HarperStudio, which seems to be the focus of the NYM piece, only to drop off the face of the article, naturally strikes fear in the heart of authors and agents, but if the entity succeeds (and I’m betting on it, frankly), then expect the business to go that way. While the talent side of the equation is understandably fearful, this will mean that publishing houses will have to put up, too. You want your authors to give up something? Then you’ve gotta make it worth their while.

This ain’t your mother’s publishing business.

Resistance to change, I believe, is more firmly entrenched in the New York publishing culture than in the publishing business as whole. If you want to blow your mind, find a listing of all the publishing houses in the United States of America. Stunning. Monoliths necessarily shift very slowly. Look beyond NYC for change, and look beyond New York to understand that this is not the end. Not even close. As Carolyn Kellogg of the LA Times’ Jacket Copy notes:

Independents, who aren’t the focus of this piece, have been creative in terms of both business models and marketing, in ways that bigger publishing houses are just now beginning to explore.

I don’t think publishing’s condition is as dire as the New York Magazine article suggests. I think publishing is fundamentally broken, mostly because a business that relies on mega-hits to justify its existence — when those mega-hits are reliant upon capturing the imagination of a broad spectrum of the nation’s citizens — cannot sustain itself as it exists today.

I also think that there’s strong evidence to support a theory that those who are entrenched in the business are too far removed from the readers to understand how to identify potential hits. Let’s ponder the following quote for a moment because I think it illustrates what I see as the fundamental disconnect between publisher and reader:

“What I’ve heard from editors is, ‘My judgment doesn’t count any longer,’?” says Kent Carroll, who left his company, Carroll & Graf, after it was sold to a mini-conglomerate, and who now runs the boutique Europa Editions. “There used to be a reason to get into publishing,” says Carroll. “Whether they know it or not, they all want to be Maxwell Perkins. It’s a kind of secondary immortality. They didn’t flock to publishing because they want to publish Danielle Steel.”

Dude, did you go to BEA in Los Angeles this year? Did you see the line of people waiting to meet Danielle Steel? Not my favorite author (though, full disclosure, as a teenage girl, Danielle was in my library), but man, that line. A room full of free books, books as far as the eye could see and beyond, yet people stood patiently in a long line to meet Danielle Steel. I kept circling back, watching as she kept signing and smiling, and the line never seemed to get shorter. Amazing.

You don’t have to read Danielle Steel, but you have to accept this fact: people buy her books and people read her books. There was never a Golden Age of Publishing where people bought only high-brow fiction that elevated the mind. It’s a figment of your imagination. When it comes to fiction, readers flock to books and authors for varying reasons, one being the deep satisfaction that comes from a story that touches them.

Don’t insult the readers, man. It’s just bad form, and you really, really need people to buy your books. The person you think isn’t a “serious American reader” will surprise you. Isn’t the person you imagine when you close your eyes. You don’t know what’s going on in the life of a Danielle Steel reader — just found out she has cancer, just developing the habit of reading, just learning English, just wanting to escape into a story because it feels so good — and negative attitudes about the Danielle Steel reader is what will kill New York-attitude publishing.

If you believe people only flock to publishing to enroll at The Maxwell Perkins School of Editing, then I have this really cool unbuilt bridge in Alaska to sell you. We’re talking about, I’m sorry to say, a tiny, eensy segment of publishing. It’s the smaller percentage of fiction, much less the publishing industry as a whole. Real publishing consists of so much more than this. Look at the numbers. Literary fiction is how much of the pie?

Publishing, like the rest of its entertainment brethren (and I understand that even thinking they’re part of entertainment world pains some in the industry. Get. Over. Yourselves. Thanks.), caters to a diverse audience. Those who see the sky falling are those who see their niches not performing. In part because those niches never were as big and profitable as legend suggested.

And that’s the reality publishing needs to face. If you’re a big, commercial house — defined as a publicly traded company or part thereof — then you need to understand that your job is make money for the shareholders. You play the game well, and you get to slide some of those books that don’t contribute to the bottom line onto the list, because you never know what might reach out and grab the larger audience.

If you truly want to be Maxwell Perkins, then do it. Be true to your vision. The world needs you. Truly. I believe we’re going to see a serious re-imagining of major publishers in the near future. There will still be the pet projects, the authors who are loved yet don’t make money. But accept the necessary focus on Books That Make Money (Without Risk!). The stakeholders are not the readers, they’re not the authors, they’re not editors.

They’re the shareholders.

This means that, in a time of contracting budgets and attention over-saturation, the silliness that is overly generous advances and tea leaf reading — oh, the hype — makes one cringe. If you’re working for a mega-corporation, then you’re working for the man. You don’t get to whine about commercialization of the industry and the way things used to be. You’re not working for a business that, deep down inside, loves books above all else. You might, your boss might, and your boss’s boss might, but the people you answer to, they’re not all going to find deep reservoirs of patience for failed ventures.

Everyone answers to someone, there’s always a money man lurking in the shadows. If you want to be a part of the New York publishing machine, this is the pact you make with that devil. Consider it a challenge because this is not the end unless you fail to see the yin and yang of publishing. Stop pretending that some books are more important than others — they’re not. Stop thinking that you’re in an industry that’s something it isn’t.

People get into publishing for a lot of reasons, and if you don’t believe me, visit a bookstore. Look around. Publishing is a business, and businesses, best I can tell, exist to make money (though this is not always a hard and fast rule). Most readers — sit down, take a deep breath, this is going to hurt — read non-fiction and commercial fiction. And so much more.

That’s the publishing industry. The end is only near for those who fail to grasp reality. Everyone else will find a way to make what they love most about this business work, in a way that works for them. The future of publishing is not about technology or widgets or free samples; the future of publishing is about giving readers what they want.

These deals seem sexy, with tossing off the words like “exclusive” in the press release.

Now we have Globe Pequot Press offering biographies of the potential First Ladies (in 2008, that’s a slightly annoying term), prior to print release, to Kindle customers only. In the case of the Cindy McCain biography, that one only goes to print if her husband wins the election. You’ll be able to get the Michelle Obama biography win or lose, apparently.

Now, I applaud Globe Pequot’s smart decision to make these books available in electronic editions prior to print release because these election cycles, though they seem endless, move rapidly, and we simply don’t have time to wait for traditional publishing practices. When books are clearly time sensitive, it makes sense to use non-traditional means to get them into the distribution stream rapidly (see article from the Wall Street Journal for more emphasis on this point. Amazon’s statement notes this with a touch of neener-neener-neener:

“We’re pleased to offer Amazon Kindle customers the chance to read Cindy McCain’s and Michelle Obama’s biographies months before the print editions come out later this year,” said Ian Freed, vice president of Amazon Kindle. “Using Kindle’s wireless delivery, customers who purchase these timely books can start reading them in less than 60 seconds.”

Of course, what is not noted is that is exclusive deal leave out readers who, oh, own the Sony eReader, iPhones, Palm devices, laptops, desktops, and other devices suitable for reading electronic books. It should be noted that the non-Kindle ereader population vastly exceeds aggregate Kindle ownership.

Basically, Globe Pequot has decided that it’s so important to get these books out to the reading and voting public in a timely manner that they’ve…cut out the majority of the potential market. Go progress!

Amazon has a vested interest in forging exclusive deals to both solidify its market share and hogtie its customers to a device (as a Kindle owner, I am both happy with the ease of purchase and uncomfortable with what this seamless relationship between Amazon and me means). Globe Pequot has a vested interest in, what? I’d imagine that making its customers happy would be a start.

These deals surely seem very sexy, what with tossing off the words like “exclusive” and satisfaction in “less than 60 seconds”, but, until the Kindle reaches iPhone-like market penetration (and not seeing that happening, for reasons outlined in Kirk’s article), exclusive means disenfranchising readers at a time when fulfilling reader wants — convenience, flexible formats, and good prices — should be wallpapered in every publishing office in the world.

Your customer doesn’t care about corporate bragging rights. Your customer wants the book now or as close to now as is possible. Not only should readers who want ebooks get the format they prefer, but readers of print books shouldn’t have to wait so long for books that might not be relevant weeks from now. Things change too fast to play by the old rules.

When I started working in the Booksquare mail room, I mistakenly assumed it was going to be some kind of a dream job. Blogger’s hours, free books, and plenty of wine. What could possibly be better?

Little did I realize the Booksquare wine cellar is NOT for Booksquare employees. Sure, we’re welcome to bring our own from home, but the BS corkage fee makes it cost prohibitive.

And now that I’ve been here a while, I realize that blogger’s hours aren’t so great. Especially when you’re not the blogger.

But there are always those free books. Yep, plenty of free books.

Let me tell you about the free books.

I’m drowning in them. Literally. The Booksquare mail room is inexplicably tiny. And we get a LOT of books. Some of which I would never read in a million years. Sad but true, most of these books aren’t fit for lunch in the servants quarters.

Why are you sending these books to us? What on earth makes you think we will read them, let alone review them?

I thought to ask one day how this all got started. It’s quite an interesting story, actually. Apparently we expressed interest in one or two books over the years. That’s all it takes to get yourself labeled as a “book lover” and once that’s happened they put your name and address into some sort of database.

Eventually mailing labels are printed. And reprinted. And reprinted again.

You people are printing a lot of mailing labels! And stuffing a lot of boxes. Well, they aren’t really boxes. Most of them are the most annoying corrugated cardboard, sealed tightly with some sort of super-glue that makes them nearly impossible to open. I can’t tell you how many nails I’ve broken on your damn book packaging.

How much do you people spend on postage? Seriously?? Not to mention printing. And labor. Someone has to put all this stuff together.

Will someone please assure me that child slave labor is not involved?!

Some of you — mostly thoughtful authors — think to ask before sending your books. That’s nice, but in many cases equally annoying. In addition to handling the Booksquare snail mail, I’m also responsible for fielding all of the unsolicited email inquiries we receive. You wouldn’t believe some of the queries we get.

Like this one, received just yesterday (altered ever so slightly to protect the identity of the author).

Dear Sir,

As a book lover I know that you will want to read and review my new book. It’s a civil war adventure about a time-traveling bishop and the women who love him.

The early reviews have been very flattering. As one critic noted “the story moves along surprisingly briskly for a 1,239 page novel.”

I am currently waiting for a shipment of books to arrive from the printer. I will send you a copy as soon as it is ready. Please reply with your mailing address.

Also, please be kind enough to confirm by email after you have received my book.

Sincerely,
[Name withheld to protect clueless but well meaning author]

Clearly [Name Withheld] didn’t bother to read Booksquare before sending this very personal message. Unfortunately we are simply not prepared to send out automated rejection letters. And if we were, it would only depress you.

Believe me when I say that I understand your enthusiasm for book blogs, what with the death of newspaper book reviews and all, but you’ve got to understand how this whole blog thing works. You can’t just go mass mailing every “litblog” in the world willy nilly. In the mail room that’s what we call SPAM.

But enough of my complaining. I do want to see you people succeed (why, I am not entirely sure). So, here are a few helpful tips from the Booksquare mail room intended to provide you with better book coverage, and me with more free time. Time that I can use to read books that I actually want to read.

1) Stop sending physical books. What, are all of you made of money? We have this thing called the Internet. Use it. Trust me, your reviewers know all about the ‘net, as they call it. Find out what formats each reviewer prefers and arrange for digital transfer (if you don’t know what that means, please find someone who does and explain your situation).

For you authors out there, this should be easy. I mean, after all, you wrote the book. I assume you can make a PDF file. Think of the money you’ll save on postage, printing, and packaging.

2) Target your pitch. Send your book to the right publications. And by right publications I mean, a) blogs and websites that actually review books, and b) blogs and websites that actually review the type of book you’ve written and/or published. Booksquare is simply not interested in time-traveling bishops.

3) Think beyond the review. There’s more to promoting your book online than just getting reviews. For example, you may have noticed that authors frequently guest post right here on Booksquare. It’s easy for authors because, well, they’re writers. It’s good for the BS Lady because she’s intrinsically lazy. That’s what we in the mail room call a win-win situation.

4) Get some help. If you are at all baffled by any of the other things you can do to promote your book online (besides mailing physical copies to every blogger and his brother) you might want to get yourself a little education.

I could go on, but saving the publishing industry is not part of my job description. Besides, it’s closing time and I’m late for happy hour.

[BS: I'd like to thank Bernadette for feeling so comfortable in her job that she's able to speak her mind so openly. She has a few good points. Especially the part about the wine -- she's welcome to hit the $2.00 jug wine whenever she wants. She's also right about the laziness. Think beyond the review. Most especially, she's right about the physical versus virtual books. The mail room is not nearly as spacious as the above rant indicates. The Kindle, however, is huge and ready for more books.]

Case in point: When I was getting my MFA, a classmate of mine won the Associated Writers Program contest for his collection of stories, and it got published by the University of Massachusetts Press. The person who was the contest runner-up, and who therefore didn’t have his collection published, was a young writer named Tom Perrotta. Now, if Tom Perrotta had won that contest, would you know who he was today? Possibly not. The writer who did win that contest, though he subsequently published a novel with a trade press, you likely haven’t heard of. Or, if you have, it’s because he’s made a name for himself in the blog world and has gotten a book contract as a result of that. In other words, to the extent that he has succeeded (and he’s a good writer), he has done so despite his having had his story collection published, not because of it.

Back to Matrimony. With a first novel that had weak sales as her ammunition, my agent, who’s both respected and powerful, had trouble selling Matrimony (In the case of Swimming Across the Hudson, she sold it in less than a week, based on the first fifty pages), and were it not for the fact that someone very high up at the house she eventually sold it to loved the book, it might not have sold at all.

In the end, I’m one of the lucky ones. Matrimony was published by Pantheon, a terrific publishing house, and I had the considerable support of a great editor, publisher, publicist, and sales force. The house spent money on coop and advertising and sent me on a long book tour. The reviews were well-timed and very positive. Within ten days of publication, Janet Maslin reviewed Matrimony very favorably in the daily New York Times. Two weeks after that, Jennifer Egan did the same in the NYTBR. At the end of the year, Matrimony was named a New York Times Notable Book.

All these things had a marked impact on sales (I know: I follow the numbers very carefully), as did the fact that I spent much of the past year and half putting the writing of my next novel on hold so that I could help publicize Matrimony. You don’t go visiting sixty book clubs for the mere fun of it. It takes you away from your family and friends, and from your next novel. And, in my case, book groups weren’t even the half of it. I lived on the Internet, guest blogging, getting my book out to bloggers big and small—all, it’s been clear, to Matrimony’s benefit.

Matrimony, let me be clear, is not a sexy book. It’s about the fifteen-year history of a marriage, and it’s character-driven and quiet. There are no pyrotechnics in the novel. It’s a book that easily could have gone nowhere without a lot of hard work on the part of Pantheon (and now Vintage,) and some additional leg work from me. In the end, Matrimony sold a good deal more than five thousand hardback copies and Vintage has high hopes for the paperback. And yet it didn’t sell astronomically. It did more than respectably, but if my publishers were relying on me to pay the bills, they’d be in trouble. I say all this because, if anything, the relative success of Matrimony is a testament to how tough the book business is. It took everything—a publisher that really got behind the book, great reviews, a really good cover, an author willing to drop everything else to help with promotion—in order to get the book to do even this well.

Which brings me back to my original concern about our feast-or-famine book culture—and, ever so indirectly and in the name of making this conversation at Booksquare an ongoing discussion, to the question of the demise of the LATBR. I have read with interest both what Steve Wasserman and what Kassia have written on the subject. I know much less than either of them do about the book review section. I live on the East Coast, and I never read the LATBR regularly. I wrote one review for Steve Wasserman and one for David Ulin, and both my novels were reviewed in the book review’s pages. I agree with Kassia that there’s good and bad criticism in print just as there’s good and bad criticism on the web. And it may very well be that the LATBR had it coming to them. And newspapers, it is true, are a business in trouble, and a sense of entitlement isn’t going get a book review section to come back.

All that said, I think there’s something that a book review section at a major newspaper offers that may be harder to find on the web. That’s the all-important inadvertent reader. Someone, that is, who would never buy the L.A. Times for the book review section but who nonetheless is stuck with it when the paper arrives. He ends up glancing at it and discovering a book he hadn’t known about. And seeing it next time he’s at the bookstore. And maybe buying a copy. What I’ve been trying to argue in this post is that it’s the inadvertent reader and the inadvertent book buyer who’s crucial, particularly for literary fiction, where the number of potential readers is so small and needs desperately to be expanded. This is why coop is crucial, why independent bookstores are crucial, why book review sections are crucial. They’re all avenues for making us aware of books we otherwise wouldn’t be aware of.

Now, the web can do this too, certainly, and a lot of the literary blogs have done a great deal to call attention to books that otherwise wouldn’t be known. But I think inadvertence occurs much less frequently on the web. Yes, a person who loves literary fiction might learn about a book on The Elegant Variation that she otherwise wouldn’t have known about, and that’s no small thing. But what about the person who doesn’t love literary fiction—or, more to the point, doesn’t realize that she in fact would love literary fiction if only it were placed in front of her? If you’re reading The Elegant Variation, you’re already part of the choir. But the choir is going to have to get a lot bigger if writers of literary fiction are going to make a go of it.

We all need inadvertent readers. In the same way that Michael Chabon developed a strong gay readership when, as a result of Mysteries of Pittsburgh, people mistakenly thought he was gay, I’ve gotten some inadvertent readers based on the title of my novel. Someone sees a novel called Matrimony and they might think they’ll be reading Jodi Picoult. Then they read Matrimony and discover it’s the farthest thing in the world from Jodi Picoult. In certain cases they’re angry—they feel duped—but in other cases—this is what a writer hopes for—they discover that there’s more to life than Jodi Picoult. That is one of the things I’ve been doing in visiting book groups: expanding my reader base and, in the process, trying to educate people who might otherwise be reluctant to leave their comfort zone about the pleasures of literary fiction.

In any case, it’s not an either/or proposition, and in this publishing climate, the loss of every book review section, every independent bookstore, every book blog cuts deep. The publishing world knows how important the New York Times Book Review is, which is why publishers continue to advertise there even when it’s not seen as cost-effective. The fact is, it is cost effective, certainly in the long run, because the loss of the NYTBR would be a huge, almost unfathomable blow.

I believe individual readers should have the same attitude toward writers that the big publishing houses have toward the NYTBR. Protect what you value. Buy books. I can’t tell you the number of times people have said to me, “I loved your book so much I lent it to five friends.” This is flattering, but it doesn’t help me with Bookscan. Every time a used copy of Matrimony gets sold on Amazon, that’s another sale that doesn’t get counted. People who are committed to books need to support writers because if they don’t there won’t be any of us left.

OK, at the risk of having ended on a preachy note, I want to thank Kassia again for having me as a guest blogger, and having allowed me to be so long-winded!

Fine print: Joshua Henkin’s website. Go. Buy Matrimony: paperback or (yay!) Kindle edition. Comment below — it’s free!

Thank you to Joshua Henkin for this great two-part look at book clubs, sales, and the industry.

Hello, everyone, and thank you, Kassia, for lending me your bully pulpit. I’m here to offer a novelist’s perspective on the publishing industry on the day (at least the day that I’m composing this) that Oscar Villalon seems to be out at the San Francisco Chronicle book review, a section that may soon suffer the same fate as the LATBR.

My novel Matrimony has just come out in paperback, so I’m starting up the second round of book touring and publicity. In that connection, I was recently asked the following question by an interviewer: “What do you believe is the basis for this country’s love for literature and books?” Were we living on the same planet, I wondered, much less in the same country? In fairness, the question was about book groups, and according to a report of the Independent Book Publishing Association, over five million adults belong to a book group.

I don’t know whether those numbers are accurate, but there’s no doubt that the proliferation of book groups has been a boon to publishing. Certainly Oprah has helped keep the industry afloat, and the myriad book groups across the country have risen in no small part thanks to Oprah. I talk about book groups from personal experience. Since Matrimony was published last October, I have participated in close to sixty book group discussions of Matrimony in person, by phone, and online, and I expect to do many more now that the paperback has been released. I have never been a member of a book group (as a novelist and a professor of fiction-writing, my life is a book group), but I can safely say that I now have had more personal experience with book groups than most people on this earth.

I have written elsewhere about my experience visiting book groups, but in short, though I approached the endeavor with a good deal of wariness (I started out thinking of book groups as a kind of Ladies who Lunch and I expected my own experience to be If it’s Tuesday it Must be Darien), I have been pleasantly surprised. Not every book group member is a sophisticated reader (not every MFA student is a sophisticated reader, either, nor is every book critic), but quite a few are, and they are passionate about what they read. More important, book groups are creating new readers. People usually join a book group for social reasons, but reading a book is part of the deal, and so a reader is created out of someone who wasn’t one before.

But the news is not all good. I was struck by the fact that most book groups are reading the same twelve books. Water for Elephants, Eat, Pray, Love, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, The Kite Runner. I’m not casting aspersions at these books, a number of which I haven’t even read. But even if you love these books, they certainly aren’t the only good books out there.

In any case, what interests me more than the popularity of these books is the manner in which they get selected, because the process says a great deal not just about book groups but about American book-buying in general. I’ve seen it so many times it has become a ritual. 9:30 comes, sometimes 10:00, even 10:30. The book group members are getting tired. Husbands are waiting at home (yes, it’s true: book groups are populated almost entirely by women), and everyone needs to wake up early in the morning. When’s the next meeting, and what book are we going to discuss? People have to choose quickly before everyone disperses. Does anybody have an idea?

Someone says, “How about The Memory Keeper’s Daughter?”

Most of the people in the group have heard of it. One person knows someone who loved it; another person knows someone who hated it. But it’s a known entity. Does anyone have any other ideas? People are unsure, silent. Someone glances at her watch.

“O.K., then: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter it is.”

I’m not saying this is how it always happens. But you’d be surprised how often it does. If people haven’t heard of the book they don’t want to read it, so name-recognition rules. Oprah chose it, so we’ll choose it. It’s not even as thought-out as that. In a world with too many choices, people choose what’s familiar. It’s as true of books as of anything else.

This is why, though writers hate negative reviews, a negative review is much better than no review at all. The old adage is true: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Two weeks after the review has come out, no one remembers what the review said, but when a person comes across the book at the bookstore, he says to himself, I know I’ve heard of this somewhere, and the writer just might have himself a sale.

But “comes across the book at the bookstore” is key. There are too many books competing for too little space. As readers of this blog no doubt know but startlingly few others do (I discovered this first-hand from talking to book groups), the space in the window and on the front table at Barnes and Noble and Borders is bought by the publisher. It’s called coop, and because books tend to be impulse buys, if you don’t have coop for your book, you’re going nowhere. The reason that the average hardback book has a shelf life of six to eight weeks isn’t that people have short attention spans. It’s that the book quickly gets restocked to the back of the store, and, shortly thereafter, it’s returned to the publisher. Once your book is out of sight, you’re only going to sell copies to people who walk into the store intent on buying it.

It’s for this reason that if a writer were given a heap of money and told she could spend it however she wanted to market her book, I’d recommend that she spend part of it focus-grouping different covers (I’m astonished that publishers don’t focus-group their covers; the cover is the single most important thing in getting someone to buy a book, and you have only a nanosecond to attract a reader’s attention), and I’d have her spend the rest on coop. (Remember, this is a hypothetical. With rare exceptions, authors have little to no say over their covers, and coop is prohibitively expensive. Even if the author could afford to pay for it, he wouldn’t be allowed to because publishing houses have a limited number of slots and are therefore forced to choose which of their books get coop.)

In any case, the placement of your book in the bookstore is probably the single most important determinant of its sales, as Borders recently discovered when, as an experiment in some stores, it started stocking fewer books but placing more of them face-out. The results were startling (though they shouldn’t have been): Borders sold many more books. In fact, as I’m writing this post, I just clicked onto the following from Reuters: “The Borders Group, the bookseller, posted a lower-than-expected quarterly loss, helped by TIGHTER INVENTORY and lower costs.” [emphasis added].

There you have it. The way bookstores make money is by stocking fewer books. This, of course, is bad news for writers, especially for those writers who haven’t yet established themselves. In Los Angeles, the loss of Dutton’s is reflective of what’s going on everywhere—independent bookstores are hemorrhaging nationwide. This is a huge problem because independent bookstores were an important stopgap against the problem I’m talking about. At a place like Dutton’s, what’s at the front of the store is not as crucial as it is at the chains, because you have booksellers who know books and can recommend something to a customer. What’s more, these booksellers help determine what gets placed at the front of the store.

In the same way that we buy coffee from fewer and fewer stores, we buy books from fewer and fewer booksellers. Our choices get constricted, our taste gets streamlined, so when a book group decides what to pick next, its members choose one of the ten or so books that come to their minds, which are the same ten or so books that come to everyone’s mind, whether they’re in Hoboken or Fayetteville or Evanston or Anchorage. As with the economy at large, the book industry is feast-or-famine. Nowhere was this made more clear to me than in Rachel Donadio’s endpaper “Promotional Intelligence” in the New York Times Book Review a couple of years ago. Donadio noted that in 2005 “almost half of all sales in the literary fiction category came from the 20 best-selling books.” That’s an astonishing and disheartening statistic.

Take my own case. When Matrimony came out last October, I was essentially an unknown writer. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, had come out ten years earlier and did well critically but sold only about five thousand copies in hardback. My graduate students think that selling a first novel is hard, but selling a second novel is even harder, unless you’re one of the handful of writers whose first book takes off. I have quite a few friends who have written really good second novels that they can’t sell because their first novels sold poorly. Prior to Nielsen Bookscan, agents could fudge their writers’ numbers. Now those numbers are incontrovertible, spat back from a computer.

Fine print: Joshua Henkin’s website. Go. Buy Matrimony: paperback or (yay!) Kindle edition. Comment below — it’s free!

I was relieved to learn I wasn’t crazy, that the unorthodox cover worked, but once that relief wore off, I started to realize that far more reader interactions like that are necessary, that the conversation about books that goes on in our culture now, gorgeously exemplified by Jeff’s house here, needs also to be going on much, much more in the whole apparatus that surrounds the words, houses the words, frames the words, makes it more or less likely you’ll read the words. I’m sure most folks don’t want to see inside the sausage factory, but I’m betting there are far far more than we’re currently admitting to the sausage factory, and if we expect y’all to eat our damn sausages, we’re going to have to spend more time with you guys figuring out how best to make them.

• “The Customer Is Always Wrong” - Richard Nash (blogging at Jeff VanderMeer’s place)

It’s insanity to suggest someone should carve these rights in stone now.

It is not how the artist creates the work that defines the experience: it is how the viewer/reader/listener/casual observer interacts with it that matters. Every time you reread a book, aren’t you having a different experience? Is every word, every phrase, every insight exactly the same the second, third, eighth time? Why authors want to define our experience is beyond me — authors should want that experience to be as rich and varied as possible. Once the book is published, it is no longer the author’s to shape.

Terry Goodkind has recently elected to have his works published in electronic format. While one source says he’s held back those rights, just as JK Rowling did, because of his insistence of maintaining the integrity of form and format, the announcement in Publisher’s Weekly puts a more financial spin on the deal:

When asked why Goodkind opted to be published in e-book by an independent, in Rosetta, Goodkind’s agent, Russell Galen, said Rosetta “offered us much better terms.” [Arthur] Klebanoff [CEO of RosettaBooks], who negotiated the Goodkind deal with Galen, added that he thinks the size of a publisher is also less important in e-book publishing. “Obviously Random House has a compelling argument when it comes to what it can do [in publishing] a phsycial book,” he told PW. “But in e-book [publishing] the people selling the books are Kindle, Sony Reader and various other e-tailers. So, whether the title is fed by Rosetta or Random House makes no difference.”

The second part of that paragraph is fascinating and very much the topic of today’s thoughts. Why should an author give over his or her epublishing rights to a traditional print house? What advantage comes from this sort of arrangement? I am not asking a rhetorical question. In a new distribution landscape, what advantage does a traditional, print-based publisher offer?

First, let us begin with a truth: because Goodkind held back his rights for so long, he created an underground market for his works. Keeping these rights close doesn’t keep ebooks from being created and distributed. Witness the Google results for Terry Goodkind ebook. One surefire way to combat the pirates is to make legal editions easily available at a reasonable price through legitimate retailers…and then do everything in your power to make sure those search results appear first, before the pirates. People are lazy, don’t make pirating a more attractive option than buying legal.

That ought to be the first law of digital media: Make legal products easier and more cost effective than pirated products.

As some publishers tell me, a major challenge to their digital migration is getting authors and agents on board with this new distribution channel (and that’s all it is, a new distribution channel). I can see why, but look at the example above for the obvious drawback in holding back these rights. The reason Goodkind’s agent stated for choosing Rosetta Stone over Random House: it’s the money, stupid. And that’s something publishers, traditional publishers, have to face.

The competition is not located in a shiny Manhattan office building. Publishers are no longer competing just with each other, announcing pre-empts and huge advances. As the market moves online, the money has to change. Goodkind and authors like him have the power to do it — if and when Rowling enters into the ebook market, if her agent is half as good as reputed, you don’t think she’s going to settle for relatively small royalties, do you?

As publishers like Random House try to redefine concepts such as “out-of-print”, savvy authors and agents will be more diligent about defining tight deadlines for contracts (in fact, I’m a bit surprised this isn’t happening more frequently). Firm deadlines allow authors to renegotiate terms, especially as the digital market grows and evolves. While publishers love the idea of locking someone into 2008 rules, it’s a safe bet to say that this landscape will be vastly different in ten years.

It’s insanity to suggest someone should carve these rights in stone now, when the future’s so bright, blah, blah, blah.

Of course, digital rights and how they’re compensated are just a small part of the overall challenge. That’s another topic for another today. Yeah, just call me your little ray of sunshine.

On paper, this probably seemed brilliant. Amazon has great distribution. By working with BookSurge, a division of Amazon, print runs could be managed. The problem, of course, is obvious: not every book buyer shops at Amazon (in fact, most don’t, odd as it seems). The repercussions were great: Barnes & Noble cancelled their order (Borders stayed in the game, for what it’s worth). If you’re a small press hoping to make a decent profit, losing these sales is pretty significant.

Significant = painful.

Amazon wants to rule the world. They haven’t hidden that goal. Barnes & Noble, however, continues to own the face-to-face market. Chelsea Green, whose ability to find traction in the distribution chain is very much dependent on the kindness of strangers (including smaller bookstores, who are reportedly not happy campers), can’t afford to play favorites. One hopes, for the sake of their bottom line, that Amazon offered incredible financial incentive to the publisher.

Remember: most readers don’t give a flying fig about the delicate behind-the-scenes deals. They hear about a book, they want the book. If the book isn’t available at the retailer of choice for that consumer, it will take a powerful amount of motivation to force that person to seek out other retailers. Is this “exclusive” window worth taking that kind of risk?

Perhaps only those political books that are fabricated out of holey cloth are destined to top the bestseller lists (when, pray tell, are we going to see serious analysis of those sales figures?) and this book will garner respectable but not blockbuster interest. It’s near-impossible to predict the future*, but if there’s one truth about this new world we occupy, it is this: your fifteen minutes is much shorter than it used to be. You don’t mess around with initial distribution.

Granting an exclusive window to Amazon has certainly garnered headlines for Chelsea Green and its book Obama’s Challenge. But those headlines are, sigh, running in the industry press, not permeating the mainstream consciousness. This book has a limited shelf life (unless I’m wrong and it turns out to be one of the seminal texts on Barack Obama), and Chelsea Green made the mistake of choosing old school tactics over smart distribution.

After all, we’re living in a “give to us now, how we want it, when we want it, where we want it” world.

* - Big fat lie — we do it all the time here at BS.