Yesterday's posting about royalties has generated some really interesting comments, largely from the USA. Do check them out and join the debate.

I wrote about Oliver Morton's new book a couple of days ago and invited him to contribute a guest blog here. Being the journalistic professional he is, it arrived on deadline and here it is:

'I don’t know much about book festivals, but you don’t have to know much to be knocked out by the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which closed on Monday night. I’d been there before a few years ago, for an on-stage interview with Jim Lovelock that was a sold-out success, and this time I was there to plug my own book, Eating the Sun, at two events. But the thing that struck me, both times, was the enthusiasm of both organisers and punters, the stunning number of people and topics that they manage to get into 17 days (700 events, 650 authors, pdf programme) – and the stamina that those 17 days must require. Organiser Catherine Lockerbie, who has that stamina in spades, found time to give the Daily Telegraph a taste of what the weeks are like.

 

Good things: endlessly friendly and helpful staff; generous sponsorship in kind (and doubtless otherwise) from Highland Park, which may not be “the best spirit in the world” (among other things, forget not the Ott) but which is undeniably wonderful; a terrific bookshop; excellent chairs at the events who knew their stuff and worked hard to do their best by the speakers and by the audience; Carol Ann Duffy’s closing poetry recital; my co-presenters Martyn Amos and Nick Harberd; bumping into Ken Macleod (great short story published in Nature|recent Nature feature, both subscribers only); speaking in the Spiegeltent, which had a really great vibe to it – much more Moulin Rouge than the venue for your average talk on “The future of nature”; pretty much everything else.

 

Bad things: not being able to go to all of it; one slightly underlit lectern; err … that’s it.'

 

Guest blogging at Richard’s kind invitation; cross-posted at my own blog Heliophage. And this is a photo taken not in Edinburgh.

We've just completed our annual IT strategy day which is becoming an ever more important prelude to the budget round which follows. One of the issues is how to simplify our royalty system without compromising its accuracy and reliablity.

At one point in my career the royalty system being used didn't work properly. The angst, fury, management time, author damage and cost were staggering and I never want to suffer that again.

The problem is that the concept of royalties is a fair one but that the changes in our business have made it, in its present form (a percentage of the UK published price of a book), unwieldy and unrealistic.

The percentage is linked to a price which applies in only a minority of cases. It doesn't apply to all sales overseas; it doesn't apply to nearly all sales made in supermarkets, Internet bookshops and many bookshop chains.

In educational and academic publishing houses the system has been radically simplified by the almost universal application of royalties based on publishers' gross income rather than retail price.

However, literary agents and many authors' organisations have set themselves against this because they fear that somehow a change would work against authors' interests. I don't think there is anything to fear and there is an enormous amount to be gained from the simplification, transparency, auditability, and shared motivation to reduce average discounts to retailers. How about agreeing new equitable royalty rates based on real money not a notional recommended retail price? 

 

He's done it again, this time Cormac has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road. What I really hope is that this leads to a greater readership for all his books. Here are two.

Moving on from the successful to the not so successful, I am immensely grateful to Danuta Kean for this helpful link on how to cope with rejection while maintaining dignity and courtesy.

I am very pleased to see that a poll in today's Bookseller on 'Who should run the library service?' has Tim Coates way out in front with 52% of the votes, followed a long way back by local authorities(21%), librarians (13%), the Government (11%) and the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the quango charged with leading the transformation of the library service) in last place with not a single vote. Not a resounding vote of confidence in the responsible institution.

And finally a plug for a book published not by Macmillan but written by a Macmillan employee. It is Eating the Sun: How plants power the planet by Oliver Morton who is the Chief News and Features Editor at Nature. I'm not sure how it's come about that he's being published by HarperCollins under the Fourth Estate imprint rather than by Macmillan Science but I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles and a good book is being published by a good publisher. Give it a go. It's a fascinating read.

I spent part of the Bank Holiday weekend catching up on back issues of the trade press and came across this article Publishing's World Leaders in the constantly improving and Internet-friendly Publishers Weekly and co-sponsored by Livres Hebdo whose copyright this is. I have permission from them and the producer Ruediger Wischenbart and I would have put a (c) with a circle round it next to Livres Hebdo 2007 but I can't work out how to find that symbol.

I post the chart here as a reminder of the range, internationalism and relative size of the world's major publishers and to give perspective to some of the discussions on this blog.

As a follow-up to the Death of the Publisher? (I wish I'd headed it Death of a Publisher? - so much more literary) there is an excellent essay on the Exact Editions blog. Adam Hodgkin points out that these print-on-demand operations are likely to have a major democratising impact for authors which will result in millions more titles being published. I agree but the inevitable consequence of that will be the even greater need for publishers to continue to act as quality arbiters. My fear specifically about the Amazon initiative is that the huge additional numbers of unrefereed titles available for sale and promised exposure on Amazon by Amazon will obscure other potentially more relevant titles thus diminishing the customer experience. The bad will drive out the good.

Today is a Bank Holiday in the UK and I hurt all over. I have just discovered why it's called a bank holiday (courtesy of the Wikipedia link above):

In 1871, the first legislation relating to bank holidays was passed when Sir John Lubbock introduced the Bank Holidays Act 1871 which specified the days in the table set out below. Sir John was an enthusiastic supporter of cricket and was firmly of the belief that bank employees should have the opportunity to participate in and attend matches when they were scheduled. Included in the dates of bank holidays are therefore dates when cricket games were traditionally played between the villages in the region where Sir John was raised.

Which allows me to explain why I'm in agony. Yesterday I played my first game of cricket of the season. For one reason or another (mainly the weather and a tricky travel schedule) I have missed all this season's games of Baldons Cricket Club. I have played for this lot for thirty-three years and it shows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The club represents two village, Toot Baldon and Marsh Baldon (known by those from Toot as sin city). There is a church and a pub in each village. Above is the Marsh church. And this is the Seven Stars pub which is on the edge of the cricket ground.

Yesterday's game was fairly typical. We won the toss and managed to reach a paltry 142 having been bowled out in a couple less than the allowed forty overs. I contributed my usual two runs coming in at number 9 in the batting order. We had a great tea and then waited for the inevitable humiliation as the young, fit and clearly professional openers from Aston Tirrold set about getting the runs required with no loss of wickets and an early drink in the pub. Miraculously, our bowlers performed like international superstars and the visitors were all out for less than 100. And then to the pub. The good news was that their innings lasted for only thirty overs. I was keeping wicket and I'm not sure I could have moved an inch today if it had gone to the full forty. Here are some action photos of a previous game taken by Terry Trinder. The wicket-keeper is not me but is a successful publisher.

This one is there as much for the cottage in the background as for the cricket.

And this is our captain, Mark Denning, with hayfield for losing balls in background.

Back to the book world tomorrow.

I suppose we all have hobby horses. Some independent booksellers who comment on this blog regularly seem to be obsessed by Amazon's discounting policy and the thought that publishers are encouraging it by granting bigger discounts. I cannot speak for other publishers (and it would of course be wrong to discuss such matters between ourselves) but we grant the lowest possible discounts to all distributors and retailers. It would be madness to do otherwise. Of course, we could choose not to do business through certain channels which use discount to their customers as a marketing tool but that would result in our turning away around 80% of our business. I imagine our authors would be less than pleased at a reduction of 80% in their sales and their omission from best seller lists and they would abscond. That would leave us with a reduction of sales of 100%. Not a great way to run a business but at least we couldn't be accused of failing to support small independent book shops.

However. my hobby horse is public libraries and their apparently unstoppable demise through lack of investment in books. Major parts of Macmillan's business operate in a town called Basingstoke in the county of Hampshire 'rolling green hills, tranquil villages and ancient forests'). It is a relatively prosperous part of the UK. The library service is the responsibility of Hampshire County Council through its Libraries and Discovery Centres department. They have set up a Library Review Panel to:

• Assess progress of the service in meeting the challenges

• Gain current perspectives of national professional organisations

• Discover how other library authorities are meeting challenges and/or reversing trends

• Assess progress with the 'Discovery Centre' approach

• Inform future thinking

All well and good but they might save a lot of time and money if they simply looked at their own audited accounts sent to me by the industrious Tim Coates.

The number of books held in stock has declined by 24% over the last eight years.

Spending on books has fallen by 35% before taking into account anything for inflation.

Total library spending has increased by 43%.

Spending on books as a percentage of total spend has fallen from 13.6% to 6.23%.

The cost per visit to to libraries has increased from £2.03 to £3.28.

What does this mean? The libraries under their management stock fewer books and thus attract fewer visitors. At the same time they have been spending more money on the management of the libraries. The result is that they have become less efficient at what they do and cost the taxpayer more than they should.

What should the Library Review Panel recommend? Transfer responsibility for individual libraries to well-qualified, knowledgeable and committed librarians, cut out the local government (and central government for that matter) back-office strategy committees and bureaucracy, and spend more money on books and clean and safe buildings. Abolish themselves. I'm sure it's much more easily said than done but we need action now not words.

This excellent piece by Katherine Rushton in The Bookseller  tells the national story much better than I could. I've just spotted this great piece in today's Observer by Rachel Cooke and I reprint just one paragraph to give the flavour:

'It would not be exaggeration to say that this piece of wimpish guff makes me feel physically ill. The person who made it clearly has no idea how parlous the situation is. I do not have the space to go over all the closures, recent and mooted, here. So let me give you just one recent example. Earlier this month, a man called Yinnon Ezra, who is head of leisure services at Hampshire County Council and also, more interestingly, a recently appointed board member of the MLA, blithely announced: 'We have to ask whether fiction should remain in libraries when most people buy books.' When asked whether it disagreed with this statement, the MLA (the central government quango with responsibility for libraries) refused to do so.'

 

Yesterday's posting about the latest Amazon initiative to offer would-be authors a print-on-demand publishing solution generated some interesting comments. Clive Keeble, in an earlier comment wrote:

'I long for the time when the entire Picador backlist is reproduced at a regular price in POD format instead of all this RPU bore : heck, then I'll even open up an account with MDL. Its up to the established publishers to ensure that they have control of the market place.'

The head of Picador, Andrew Kidd, responded:

'Regarding Picador and POD, I wholeheartedly agree. We are moving forward with digitisation of our backlist, and as costs and technologies improve it should not be long before the bad-old-days of RUC are behind us.'

Great. Print in demand is a good thing. However, Susan Hill thinks the quality isn't good enough and so dismisses it. But there is a bigger problem. Anne-Lise Pasch wrote:

'When books are no longer reprinted, do the rights return back to the Author from the Publisher? If so, wouldn't a sensible step be to retain digital rights to push onto 3rd-party services such as Amazon's POD, and thereby extend the 'shelflife' of a title from disappearing into obscurity?'

Great again. Why haven't publishers done it? Well, academic publishers have and are managing to extend the lives of scholarly monographs significantly. General book publishers have been much slower. The first and most obvious and most solvable reason for this is cost. Print on demand has been significantly more expensive than conventional printing. Expensive scholarly books can stand that extra cost and still be commercially viable. £5 paperback novels cannot. But that will change and cost will become a much less significant barrier.

The real barrier now is the publisher's relationship with authors. Ironically, there are authors (and authors' societies) who value their books going out of print because this triggers a reversion clause allowing them to annul the original publisher's contract and resell the titles to the publishing market-place. With print on demand there is no such thing as 'out of print' and thus no opportunity to revert rights. In actual fact, there are very few instances of authors benefitting from the reversion clause because usually there is a very good reason the title went out of print - there was no demand - but one can understand why an author would not want to be shackled to a publisher who cared not a jot for their books. There is a lot of noise around this issue and the various trade and author associations are trying to find a way through with little success so far. Meanwhile, technology advances and Picador still doesn't have its full backlist available using traditional AND print on demand. It is very frustrating, not just for Clive Keeble but for publishers too.

And while on Picador I was delighted to see this badly-reproduced photo. It is a spread from Grafik 150 celebrating the 150th issue of the influential design magazine of the same name.

The featured covers are from Picador proof copies. Henry Hobson has written:

'After being given one of these as a random present, I have become more and more obsessed with them. Picador's proof copies, or advance reading copies, have an understated beauty about them which you just can't find in most "designed" books....However, the main inspiration comes from the books' plainness - the empty unfinished covers can't fail to inspire. Knowing that they'll never make it onto a retailer's shelves, they feel like they've been made for my eyes only.'

I agree but wonder why we don't dispense with the designed covers and simply publish with the beautiful proof covers even if it destroys Mr Hobson's my-eyes-only reverie.

The Amazon announcement which I wrote about earlier in the week is generating a great deal of debate. Mark Thwaite, who is managing editor of The Book Depository has contributed an interesting piece with good comments to the Bookseller blog with the same title as I've used here.

I have also been granted permission to reprint an excellent article about it by Dan Penny at Outsell. The only place where I fundamentally disagree with Dan is his worked example showing that an author would earn a royalty of $12.35 on a $25 book. The truth is that a 100-page paperback work of fiction will not sell for $25. If you do the maths at a more realistic $10, the author would receive $1.85 per copy. A more typical extent for a $10 novel would be 200 pages and in this case the author would actually have to pay Amazon 15 cents a copy sold, if I understand the deal correctly.

'* Amazon has launched its CreateSpace Books on Demand service, which allows authors to upload content and publish direct. How radically might this change the publishing landscape?

Important Details: CreateSpace is Amazon's new name for CustomFlix Labs, Inc., which it acquired in 2005. The new service will compete with Print On Demand companies such as Lightning Source, Xlibris and Antony Rowe, which have agreements with many STM publishers. Amazon severed its
existing link with Lightning Source in 2006, in anticipation of this new service. However, CreateSpace is not partnering with publishers, but is instead inviting authors to contribute content directly.

CreateSpace has been offering customers single CDs and DVDs on demand since 2002, and it is envisaged that its new service will provide books in just the same way, aiming to ship books within 24 hours from when they are ordered. Customers pay the standard paperback price for a book, set by the author, with no setup fees or minimum orders. For authors, books must be uploaded to CreateSpace as PDFs, and he must then purchase and approve a proof copy of his book before titles can be produced on demand.

Amazon's share of each sale is calculated by taking a fixed charge of $3.15 per copy, plus a charge per page ($.02 per black and white page or $.12 per color page), plus a percentage of the list price (30% for sales through
Amazon.com). For example, a 100-page black and white book sold on Amazon with a list price of $25.00 would earn an author a royalty of $12.35 per sale.

Implications: Timo Hannay at Nature suggests that this announcement "may just prove to be the publishing news of the decade." By accepting content direct from authors, the traditional middle-men are excluded, mirroring online self-publishing services like Lulu and as Hannay says, opening the way for Amazon to become "the ultimate clearing house for books of all kinds (and much else besides)".

But it may be a long time until this new world becomes a reality. Certainly the advantages of CreateSpace are clear - its speed of distribution, and its low cost. Authors using the service will also see its royalty rates compare favourably to those associated with traditional publishing models.

There are also a number of challenges which Amazon faces, and perhaps the main one will be looking after its content creators. Blogs about CreateSpace have expressed  dissatisfaction with the time it takes to put uploaded content for sale on Amazon (officially, "up to 21 days", but sometimes longer), and higher profile authors will want to see a certain
level of marketing activity surrounding their book. At present, Amazon runs promotional e-mails by grouping together books that correlate according to individuals' purchasing habits. It's unclear whether CreateSpace books are to be included in these campaigns - but even if they are, authors may find
that that their books are frequently squeezed out because they lack the head of steam that traditionally published books build up through newspaper or television reviews and printed bookshop sales. It's doubtful too whether the majority of authors will be as skilled as seasoned publishing organisations at producing high-quality metadata to elevate their books in
search results listings.

This is the central question - is the CreateSpace initiative, and others like it, going to create excessive amounts of network noise that will make finding high-quality content more difficult than it is today? Searching for a book on Amazon is straightforward at the moment, but once books, journals, articles, blogs and websites merge into one big amorphous blob of information, picking out the best content will not only get more difficult, but will start to become more highly valued as a service. Online peer-ranking will be important, but this is easier to do well in vertical sectors than it is across the entire international publishing landscape. Brand and long-standing author loyalty will continue to count.

In today's Wal-Mart world there may be room for specialist shops that offer higher quality products and better service - but only for those that know their products and customers better than anyone else. Online, that's where Amazon's data advantage threatens the traditional publishing industry the
most - so that's where the battle must be fought.'

I think this is the appropriate time to mention a seminar being organised by Book Marketing (BML) on the afternoon of 21 September at the offices of DLA Piper at 3 Noble Street, London (application forms from BML and more info here) entitled provocatively 'Dinosaur or Dynamo: does the bookseller have a role in the digital era?'