What a depressing day for publishing

Ugh, publishing is doomed, and apparently, it's no longer fun.

First up, we have the hella long article in New York Magazine, which asserts that, basically, we're all screwed. Some choice quotes:
Yet in recent years, more accurate internal sales numbers have confirmed what publishers long suspected: Traditional marketing is useless.

“Media doesn’t matter, reviews don’t matter, blurbs don’t matter,” says one powerful agent. Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them....

Marketing a book these days is like playing a slot machine;
hitting one 7 won’t get you a dime. “There has to be this constellation of events,” says Daniel Menaker, whose departure was tied in the press to the low sales of Benjamin Kunkel’s much-ballyhooed debut novel, Indecision. “Not only a Times Book Review front cover but Don Imus talking about it and Ellen Pompeo actually reading the book on-camera. And Barack Obama has just bought it.”

Augh, so true! In fact, I think I have mentioned these points before in some of my rants. Not to mention, the book has to be in stores. The book can be reviewed everywhere, but if it's not sitting on a table at B&N, it's probably not going to sell giant numbers. Which brings us to point #2...

This matters because the following response from Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio is only technically true: “We buy every title published—our business is a long-tail business—less than 5 percent is from bestsellers.”

Editors insist that plenty of books get skipped. Richard Nash, head of indie publisher Soft Skull Press, estimates that one in twenty are passed over, though ten to fifteen copies are shipped into their warehouses in case there’s a special order. Many more are getting smaller initial orders than ever. That’s a very long, very skinny tail.

I'm gonna agree with Nash here. Also, sometimes they might buy 500 of a book. But 500 copies for all of the stores? Not helpful. It means that book is either sitting in a carton in the warehouse somewhere, or shoved on a back shelf. Moving on...

It’ll be rough going in the meantime; some publishers will transform, some will muddle through, some will die. And there will, no doubt, be a lot of editors for whom even this diminished era will look like the last great golden age, when some writers were paid in the millions,some of their books produced in the millions, and more than half of those books actually sold. Book publishing is still a big-league business, and that’s a hard thing to let go of. “There’s something terrible,” says an editor at a prestigious imprint, “about admitting that you’re not a mass medium.”

Oh, god. This was the golden age? Not according to Al Silverman. His new book, The Time of Our Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors, defines the golden age as the period between 1946 and the early 1980s, the period "when 'books were most beloved by a reading public.' Soon afterward, the great 'bookmen' stepped aside and the bottom-liners of business took over."

(NY Mag also references the decline when publishing became about conglomerates rather than taste: "In its heyday, publishing was a vast array of mom-and-pop shops, in which the pops tended to be independently wealthy. Their competitive advantage was not efficiency or low costs but taste....By the nineties, five big conglomerates were divvying up the spoils and their lucrative backlists. Many of the smaller companies that had been struggling, like FSG, Ecco, and Crown, were flush with corporate resources. But in exchange, they gave up final say in how they’d publish their books—or even what books they’d publish. And suddenly an industry accustomed to 5 percent margins was being run by media moguls aiming for double digits.")

Crap. I guess I was about 20 years too late. I imagine the old days of publishing were a bit like an episode of Mad Men. As Gawker puts it, "It can be difficult to know you're in a golden age. You might be too busy working. You might be too caught up in the hum of everyday life. You might live in Omaha. But here's a hint: there are usually a lot of white guys in bow ties smoking indoors." Now, that would have been fun.

--Ladytron

Sutherland doesn't like curried books after all

So, yesterday, I started writing this totes amusing post about book critic John Sutherland and how he backed down from his original claim that "If The Enchantress of Florence doesn't win this year's Man Booker I'll curry my proof copy and eat it."

As everyone has heard by now, Rushdie's newest novel was not nominated (according to jury chair Michael Portillo, "In the opinion of [the judges] taken together, Salman Rushdie's was not one of the top six books for us. We didn't have a huge debate about it."), and Sutherland has totally backed down.

But, since I was a little slow to actually finish the post and send it to the Editor to put up, I have realized that NY Mag's Vulture section already wrote it for me. Rather than try to top them, I'll just repost it here for your reading pleasure (I have also stolen their handy art work).

Back in April, reviewing Salman Rushdie's most recent novel in the pages of the Financial Times, book critic John Sutherland — even though he admitted to not understanding its plot — made this bold promise: "If The Enchantress of Florence doesn't win this year's Man Booker I'll curry my proof copy and eat it." Today, however, after the Rushdie-less Booker short list was announced, Sutherland reneged: "I vowed — publicly — to curry and eat my proof copy of The Enchantress of Florence if it didn't win. It won't. And I won't. So there." Shameful! We suppose we could understand if he were backing out of eating a tough, chewy stitch-bound hardcover first edition — but this is a soft-cover proof copy! Those things are delicious!

--Ladytron

Jessica Roy and the Literati

I feel like I should post about this, but I'm not even really sure why. By now, most of you have probably read it - and the Gawker/Jezebel/n+1 scene's reaction to it. But to sum up, NYU student, blogger, and want-to-be literati Jessica Roy wrote a piece about her experiences hanging out with the Leon Neyfakh and Keith Gessen crew for New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer.

As a publicist, I'm not part of this scene (although, we all do occasionally overlap. new york is strangely small in that way), but it sums up what I've heard a lot of people say about the industry as a whole. A number of people I've worked with have confessed that they rarely befriend people at their jobs because said co-workers are too pretentious. And it can be true. There are those people that don't have TVs and only listen to NPR and read the Times, and scoff at people like me for watching the Hills. There is a bit of aura of superiority - we publish books after all. We educate people. We produce a product that is meant to make a difference.

Which, if you think about, is kind of ridiculous. Can we really feel superior to the people over at Glamour or Maxim when we're publishing books like "Stuff White People Like" or "lolCats"? It's not as though we're in search of the next great American writer. We're in search of the next great bestseller. And I'm sure Leon or Keith can feel superior to us because, well, Leon covers the industry rather than taking part in it, and Keith runs a "high brow" lit magazine. Oh, and they're writers and highly educated.

The whole thing is just silly. And it's even more silly that we all write about it. That I'm writing about it. That people in New York have become so self-involved with ourselves that we think such things are news-worthy. Emily Gould is not famous. Nor is Keith Gessen. They are famous in a select circle of people, but because of sites like Gawker, the New York media has somehow become convinced that they are. No better than a Julia Allison type fameball, but they can feel superior to her because they've gained their fame for "deep insights" and books, rather than dating columns or talking about celebrities on national TV shows.

I don't really know my whole point with this, except that it sits badly with me. It bothers me that a 20 year-old girl was holding these people up as role-models and for what she wanted to be. Look, I read Jezebel and Gawker as much as the next girl - probaby more. And I find it hilarious. But, I would never wake up in the morning and say that my goal is to be Moe or Tracie. Or Sheila or Choire or Nick Denton. Well, maybe Nick Denton. He does have a really sweet apartment.

It just saddens me that these are the people that college students are looking up to. That these are our mentors. And that, as the book industry, we encourage it by continually publishing their work. People who tumblr and post rants and write pieces about themselves...aren't there better, more-talented, and less self-involved writers out there? Or is that just a contradiction in itself?

--Ladytron