If you google (note lower case initial, the sign of brand domination) 'Logos' you find a number of logo companies, a journal of modern society and culture, a foundation dedicated to music in Flanders, a magazine about research at Argonne National Laboratory, a journal of Catholic thought and culture and so on, page after page of things called Logos. At last I found the Logos I was hunting.
Logos is the premier journal of the world publishing and book community. Unlike other trade journals, Logos is international in scope and focuses primarily on the deeper issues and challenges facing publishing and the book world. Appearing quarterly since 1990, Logos has featured hundreds of essays by many of the leading figures in publishing and the library community.
If Publishing News is the Daily Mirror of the publishing industry, The Bookseller is the Daily Mail, Publishers Weekly is the International Herald Tribune then Logos is the Economist.
Logos doesn't have a website. It is run as an independent charitable foundation which has an email for service and ordering - logos-Marlow@dial.pipex.com. I rung up its editor, Gordon Graham, for permission to use a review he wrote and published about Mike Barnard's Transparent Imprint. Gordon was a very successful publisher as MD of McGraw-Hill in the UK and then CEO of Butterworths and President of the Publishers Association. He is a brilliant speaker and I remember some of his bons mots such as: 'The secret of success in a corporate environment is always to let your owners have better returns than they expected but less than you could afford'; and in defence of charging for scientific information 'Wherever information is free there will be no freedom of information'.
In any event, the only problem with Logos is that its circulation is small (please do subscribe) and therefore not many people will see this review. I apologise in advance because printing it might be seen as immodest and self-serving (which it is) but I think Mike's book is excellent and I want to tell the world - or at least the readers of this blog.
LOGOS
The Journal of the World Book Community
BOOK REVIEWS
TRANSPARENT IMPRINT: How a Publisher's Decision to Tell the Truth to Authors Stirred Up a Storm
Michael Barnard
Macmillan, 2006 208 pp
ISBN 1-400-9242-4
£l0
If you work in a large publishing corporation, how do you win sanction to start a new publishing programme which has no promise of profit? The answer is by conviction, persuasive power, tremendous energy and faith. Michael Barnard has all of these qualities. His energy even enabled him to write this book about the new publishing programme just before it was launched.
The new programme was built on that notorious graveyard of literary aspiration – unsolicited first novels. So many of these are received by trade publishers that they have no time to acknowledge, let alone read, them. In fact, the Macmillan website until 2005 warned, "We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts." However, one day Mike Barnard – a career executive whose responsibilities embrace production, distribution and information technology – wondered aloud at a meeting whether "a streamline system" could he devised to handle unsolicited manuscripts, not only to encourage and do justice to authors, but in the hope of achieving an occasional bestseller which might pay for the programme.
From this casual remark was born Macmillan New Writing, with the blessing of CEO Richard Charkin. At the beginning Barnard thought that his problems would be to harness the powerful resources of the many departments inside Macmillan who would tend to regard the new programme as an orphan without a future. What he did not expect was to be scorned by forces outside of the company. Viewed inside the company as working on a shoestring budget, his "streamlining" was called, particularly by literary agents, publishing on the cheap and exploitation of authors.
The books certainly don't look cheap – each printed in hardcover and full colour, with individually designed jackets, reasonable quality of paper, head and tail hands, ribbon markers and modest retail prices (£12.99). What is missing is invisible to the outside observer or reader – no author advances, minimal print runs, standardised contracts, standard designs. Those with long memories may well feel that Barnard has resurrected fiction publishing as it used to be.
Of course, the first problem for Barnard and his team was somehow to arrange that all of the manuscripts would be read. This labour was dispersed among a team of freelance readers, and eased by requiring that all manuscripts be submitted as electronic files. Another rule was that there would be no dialogue with authors except those whose manuscripts were accepted.
The scheme was immediately popular with authors, including the 99 per cent who were rejected, because they knew they were in with a chance. And they would rather accept the formulaic terms – same royalty for everybody (20 per cent of net receipts), no rewriting, take-it-or-leave-it contract, no cash advances – than have no chance at all of being published.
Barnard was content with the usual fate of those with bright ideas: "You thought of it. Now do it. But don't spend any money." What he did not reckon with was the enormous public criticism that the announcement of the programme would attract. But he was clever enough to see this as welcome publicity. The first report, appearing in The Guardian, quoted views that "the scheme is a scam", is "atrocious and wrong", and that Macmillan was guilty of requiring authors to bear their own editing costs.
A vigorous public debate ensued in both the trade and national press. The major assault in the latter came from Robert McCrum, literary editor of the Observer, who told his readers that the launch of Macmillan New Writing meant that the "days of taste and literary discrimination at Macmillan are over." Barnard's written reply to McCrum's article, calling it "a bizarre outburst", was not published.
Nicholas Clee in The New Statesman wondered whether Macmillan was "exploiting authors' desperation". Under the heading "Publishing on the budget plan", The Washington Post announced that Macmillan New Writing was "the talk of Britain's book world".
Meanwhile, Barnard's team had read three thousand manuscripts and decided to publish just six. The programme would continue at the rate of one publication a month.
The second half of Transparent Imprint deals with the nuts and bolts of bringing together all of the elements in the publishing process through what Barnard calls "horizontal management". His book thus has elements of a publishing primer, written in a lively, conversational way which makes the reader feel it was written as it happened – as it was. Through the whole of the adventure Barnard somehow continued his regular executive responsibilities, including trips to Asia, where the books are typeset, printed and bound.
Macmillan New Writing kindly sent LOGOS copies of their first six books along with Barnard's Transparent Imprint. We don't review fiction. I don't even read it. My wife does. But I do study publishing. To me, the most encouraging feature about this book is one that Barnard does not mention, but which is implicit on every page: individual enterprise can indeed flourish in the corporate environment. It just needs the right individual to take the initiative – and the right boss to lend support.
Gordon Graham