Here are some excerpts from a review of Hugh Paxton's novel Homunculus in the The Star newspaper in Johannesburg ( I cannot find the link to the review itself):

Apologies for starting with the back end of this novel, but Hugh Paxton’s afterword bears quoting. “I’m proud to say” writes this splendidly immodest British journalist, ‘”that Homunculus is probably the most bizarre work of fiction ever to emerge from the African continent (African presidents’ memoirs and autobiographies excepted).” Bizarre it certainly is. Also horribly political incorrect and remorselessly downbeat on our current continent.

In Paxton’s defence, let me say at once that he’s cynical not only about Afro-lunacy, but also about everyone who sticks their nose into our affairs, do-gooders not excepted. These include foreign mercenaries (South Africans especially); foreign intelligence agencies, foreign correspondents (such as Paxton himself); UN aid agencies and ‘peacekeeping’ forces; and the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo (remember Tokyo subway sarin gas attack?). Even those with frankly commercial – okay, homicidal as well – involvement are not spared Paxton’s satire...

...I well recall the impact Tom Sharpe made on the literary scene in 1971 with   his first novel, Riotous Assembly, set in the “Piemburg” of those days. Where Kommandant van Heerden of the SAP longed for the heart of an English gentleman. Published at the height of apartheid, its fierce mockery exposed the idiocy at the heart of the system.

Some interesting statistics from Oxford University Press about the reaction to their open access experiment for publication in the journals they publish. In essence they offer authors whose research has been accepted for publication the option of paying £1500 (or £800 if their institution already subscribes to the online version of the journal in question) to have their paper made available absolutely free to anyone in the world. Open access is being encouraged by a number of research-funding organisations and this 'mixed-economy' response is clever. OUP benefit from being seen to be scholar-friendly, they earn money from the author fees, they encourage institutional subscriptions and they still retain the vast bulk of their subscription income. They are also seen to be transparent in publishing the results of the experiment widely. However, none of this answers the fundamental question of why paying for publication is likely to result in better scientific literature than the existing subscriber sytem. Time will tell and it's great to see practical experimentation rather than hypothetical debate.

From some interesting experimental findings to a report documenting the 'bleeding obvious'. Google have discovered that 16% of visitors to the Google BookSearch web page then move on to a bookshop site (Amazon, WHS etc). Well, shiver my timbers. Who would have thought that some of the people who visited a book page on Google might have wanted to see more about the book and perhaps even buy it? Much more interesting is why on earth the remaining 84% did not visit an online bookshop.

At a dinner last night I was asked what the successful British TV show, Richard and Judy, could do to encourage even more new writing and enjoyment of literature. Their book club has been enormously successful in every way and it was really hard to see how they could do better what they already do. But there is one thing. They could invite their millions of viewers to visit their local public library and demand that the library stocks more books, particularly those by new authors. Libraries seem to have been hijacked by some politicians as out-reach centres or IT retraining camps. Libraries are there for readers and for books. Richard and Judy could be a huge force for good if they marshalled their troops accordingly. They could start by asking how much the library service has spent on management consultants, PwC, compared with their book purchasing budget over the last few years. Libraries are very definitely open access (see above) but there's no point having open access if the choice of books is limited and inappropriate.

Well, Richard offered me three paragraphs to cover the various challenges-i-mean-opportunities presented in setting up a new company, which is clearly not quite enough. Instead I thought I would offer a few of the stages that we went through prior to becoming TFP proper and hopefully Richard will allow me the space later to elaborate.

1. Plan. In March 2005 I went to Anthony Cheetham with a forward list. Yes, just a forward list. Most people in publishing know that Anthony is an experienced publishing entrepreneur, but to look at a list and see an entire business is a skill that Anthony has for which I am extremely grateful.
2. Money. A great idea is not enough. You apparently need to put your money where your mouth is so I remortgaged my house. No, no, please don’t worry about Jake, 5 and Edie 3 – the cardboard box is fine.
3. People. All of a sudden there is an office and some contracts with authors and you’re in business. The office is good as it means there is an option beyond the cardboard box but we do have to pay for it and all of a sudden we have people in it. They are ‘staff’. Another terrifying concept, for me at least.

I’m not oversimplifying. A plan, money and people is really all that you need to start a publishing company, or any company, and this is where I found myself a few months ago.

At this stage though, I found myself with some great books (in theory at least) but no sales and distribution channel. I looked at a few distribution options but they were expensive and not very satisfactory. We went to Macmillan and were lucky enough to be accepted onto their third-party sales and distribution system, but what would we have done otherwise? What should we have done? What would you do? As a bookshop, does it matter? As a Publisher, does it? As a consumer I guess it makes no difference? Is there an alternative?

I’ve failed to squeeze even a fraction of the issues I face as a new publisher into this post so I started with this initial one. I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts on the distribution issue. There are a million and one other things we face every day as a new start-up. I might cover them at www.thefridayproject.co.uk/vox but perhaps Richard might allow me to mention them here too. Who knows?

I blogged a little while ago that a team from Nature was attending and helping to organise a foo camp along with O'Reilly and Google. In spite of transatlantic flight problems and delays it happened. Timo Hannay, our director responsible for this project (andmany others of course) has his own blog, Nascent, where he reported on the meeting and has promised further updates. This is one of many examples of the 'good' Google can do. If only they'd lay off their attack on copyright.

The 2006 Beijing Book Fair has just closed. I wasn't able to attend - a strategy conference in Europe - but Macmillan had a good presence. It was, apparently bigger and better than ever. Th emost feted foreign publisher was Jane Friedman of HarperCollins. I don't suppose this has anything to do with HC's refusal to publish Chris Patten's East and West but I imagine it did little harm.

We launched Picador Asia, our new company for publishing the very best of Chinese writing in English (and other languages) for the rest of the world. Meanwhile our existing publishing such as New Standard English continue to grow at rates and in volumes which dwarf almost all other activities. However prices are very low and it will be some time before our sales in China exceed the UK.

I've just taken a look at Waterstone's new website. It's a cause for celebration. One of my concerns for the industry is that the excellence of Amazon and its clear customer benefits might result in their becoming wholly dominant. Waterstone's have shown that it's quite possible to build an attractive, clean, professional alternative on-line bookstore. And it doesn't stop with Waterstone's. Many book retailers - independent, chain, specialist, clubs - are experimenting with on-line selling and many more will do so. Some will try to compete on price (which is probably a forlorn exercise) but most will use the web to reinforce their existing skills of selection, service, local knowledge and building customer loyalty. The more routes to market the better.

One route to market which has disappointed in recent years but which we're told is turning a corner now is Book Club Associates in the UK. I think everyone in publishing wants to give them the benefit of the doubt. We all hope that they will return to the glory days when they helped build new authors such as the early titles from Wilbur Smith; where they underwrote many great non-fiction series such as Antonia Fraser's Kings and Queens of England; where they helped reintroduce classic books,  such as the Oxford History of England, to a new audience. So good luck to them but I was rather concerned by a recent quote from their Chief Executive (perhaps misquoted) in Publishing News. Are Bernard Cornwell and the Sharpe series really an example of a new author and new fiction?

'Particular successes have been facsimile editions of Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie, and collections of Danielle Steel and James Patterson. “We’re continually testing new authors – Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series for example – and I think there are real opportunities for us with combined author collections under subject groupings such as crime and thriller, science fiction, true life adventure …We’re only limited by our imaginations.'

Yesterday's entry about Google digitising out of copyright works has generated quite a few supportive emails in my in-box. Today in The Times Ben Macintyre has written a great piece in support of copyright, the need to protect authors' rights and the continued requirement for would-be users of intellectual property to seek permission to offer digital versions rather than Google's posited offer to take down material if the rights holder complains. Ben describes what I think more eloquently than I ever could:

'For centuries, artists have fought to protect their work from being copied and disseminated without payment: in 1623 the composer Salomone Rossi wrote a setting of the Psalms that included a curse on anyone who copied the contents. These days authors can rely on more than a curse.

The tutting librarian should be replaced by another authority figure policing the stacks: the copyright lawyer, ensuring that every new addition to the online collection comes with the express permission of the writer, and a royalty.

Silence is golden in a library; but the law of copyright is beyond price.'

As this is the first of September I have been totting up the numbers of visitors in August. I was expecting a fairly quiet month given the holiday season etc. We had 42944 visits, up 38% on July. Here's a graph attempting to show progress through the year:

When some executives of Google came to the Publishers Association to discuss their plans for digitising in copyright material they brought with them two 'communications consultants' better known in English as spin doctors. I wondered why. I now know.

I do not not know the business editor of the Times, James Harding. I assume he's an intelligent and diligent journalist who does his best to report and comment accurately. What then explains this article? How does an announcement that Google is digitising some classic and out of copyright books make the main leader in the business section of a great newspaper? The business impact is close to zilch. The books mentioned have already been digitised many times over and so it's really not news. Google have already press released any number of times about their various library scanning projects. And purple prose such as this:

Google may have just done for book-reading what e-mail has done for letter-writing. Yesterday the internet search engine started making classic, out-of-copyright books available to download and print free. The service makes available to everyone the dusty pages of old tomes that once were reserved only for those with privileged access to the likes of the Bodleian library in Oxford and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Google likes to boast that its mission is to organise the world’s information, but it is doing something better than that: it is is democratising it.

But the bit that's really got my dander up is where he (or a spin doctor?) says:'Inevitably, the Google service has been greeted by the book industry with the kind of welcome normally reserved for a can of kerosene and a box of matches.' This is garbage. The industry has no quarrel at all with Google over the digitisation and searchability of out of copyright works. We quarrel with them over the use of the copyright material produced by authors whose copyright we are obliged to protect. They wish to usurp that copyright without prior permission. That is our argument and it is straightforward to understand. Presumably the 'communication consultants' failed to make that clear to James Harding and he didn't think it worth finding out why publishers have reacted the way they have. The positive publicity - e.g. the headline of the article, 'Google does book-reading a huge favour' - will  certainly have justified the spin doctors' doubtless exorbitant fees but, frankly, it makes me feel a bit queasy and I wonder what else I should recognise as complete rubbish in the Times.

Coincidentally in the same issue of the paper there are big articles on page 2 of Times 2 on Paris Hilton and Jeffrey Archer. After yesterday's blog should I begin to suspect a conspiracy? I also wondered yesterday whether juxtaposing the names would increase traffic? The answer is no. We had 1628 visitors yesterday against an August average of just over 1500 a day. In scientific research, negative results can be just as valuable as positive ones, albeit slightly less fulfilling. 

I came across this headline on the blog of a celebrated British journalist Bryan Appleyard. He has written about Jeffrey Archer in the past and still writes about him a lot nowadays never favourably. But what interested me about the headline was the complete lack of connection between the two people mentioned. The only explanation I have is that Bryan Appleyard knows a thing or two about marketing as well as about journalism and that reckons that those two names juxtaposed will bring more traffic to his site.

This site averages 1500 visitors a day at the moment. Let's see if my pinching Mr Appleyard's idea can improve this number. A simplistic form of Google manipulation but most marketing ideas are pretty simplistic! I'll let you know the results of this scientific experiment although I am aware that Bryan Appleyard has written extensively about the threats to society of science itself.

Of course the problem is that if the results prove positive just about every book blurb will contain the words Paris, Hilton, Jeffrey and Archer, such is the me-too-ism of publishers' copywriters.

I've just received this extract from a marketing flyer about the forthcoming Frankfurt Book Fair:Record number of 7,223 exhibitors from 101 countries took part in the Frankfurt Book Fair 2005. 284,838 visitors came to the Fair from 121 countries, 6.3 % more than in 2004. About 30 per cent of visitors were from abroad. With these credential the fair needs to no introduction. This fair is the most important platform for the books and publishing industry to feel the pulse the market and open itself to the new opportunities. 

What this says is that approximately 100,000 visitors came from overseas. I estimate that the average cost per person of attending the fair from overseas (airfares, hotels, food and drink, transport, cost of stand, opportunity cost etc) is of the order of $5,000. That means a total of $500 million. If the average margin from selling books is, say, 10% it would be necessary to sell an additional $5 billion just to pay for attending the fair. Hmm.