This interview with Pete Yarrow, co-writer of Puff and co-author of Puff,the Magic Dragon book which we've just published took me straight back to 1963. I couldn't find an original version so here is a much more recent performance

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,
and brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.

I was at a boarding school with little heating and little entertainment bar sport. The highlight of the week was the Sunday afternoon singles chart lists on the radio. The Beatles were riding high, Presley released Devil in Disguise, Gerry and the Pacemakers released the best-ever football anthem You'll Never Walk Alone and who could forget Brian Poole and the Tremeloes and Do You Love Me? (now that I can dance)? In the middle of all this edgy stuff came the sweetest little song from a clean-cut American folk trio.

I'll bet that as soon as you saw the title of this blog you started to hum the tune in your head. I also bet that most of you never knew how to spell Honah Lee - and what on earth is it? Buy the book (and CD) and find out.

Finally, just in case you missed this wonderful advertisement for Western education...

The posting on author royalties continues to generate interesting comments but perhaps the most challenging response comes from Evan Schnittman on the excellent OUPblog. He argues for a single payment for all standard publishing rights in a title for a defined period - and then spoils the purity of his propsal by introducing 'kickers' for higher than anticipated sales, which is a royalty by any other name, but let that pass. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says but his penultimate paragraph bears reading:

'The state of book publishing requires a radical change to the standard business practices that have existed for decades. This has to happen from within the core assumptions of the most basic elements of the business. Retail price vs. gross earnings are just window dressing on the real problems of trade publishing.'

The author of Typo, David Silverman has uploaded a video about booking a hotel room - it's a joy.

It's the first day of September which means Autumn is with us. It also means I have to compile the monthly statisitics for this blog. August was a relatively quiet month (unsurprisingly) with 77284 visits against 84682 in July but 80% up on August 2006's 42944. It brings the total visits to the site to over the million at 1,068,510.

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.'