10 December

Timing

Larry Kirschbaum, announcing that iPublish is to Close:

‘Sadly, timing is everything in business, and sometimes being too early is as harmful as being too late. The market for e-books has simply not developed the way we hoped, and given the overall economic climate, we can't jeopardize our thriving print business by carrying a money-losing operation indefinitely into the future. I believe that the day for e-books is still ahead, and that is why we will continue to be aggressive publishers and marketers of our e-book reprints.’

‘At some point reality sets in and one has to be realistic about how much of an uphill climb this is going to be. I have been wrong so far - I have been overoptimistic from the beginning, so at a certain point you have to question whether your logic is sound.’

Larry Kirschbaum, chairman of the books division of Time Warner Publishing, commenting to employees and to the New York Times about the closure of iPublish, the company’s e-book publishing venture, with the loss of $13 million and 29 jobs.

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26 November

The Book Rule, OK

Those who have already seen the film version of the first J K Rowling title, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, will have been impressed by the way that the film version sticks to the book, producing a wonderful piece of storytelling magic which deserves the huge success it is already achieving.

For the author it is a triumph, showing that, if you are a bestselling author like J K Rowling and are in a position to exercise tight control, you can prevent your book being turned into a travesty of itself by intrusive film-makers. Your dialogue will be used throughout and you can insist on top-rate actors to play the characters you have created. All very satisfying!

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29 October

Poetry Can Help

‘Poetry stands up well in times of stress and national crisis because it is not trivial; it is the only record we have of human feeling. ... Some people are swept away by emotion, and poetry is a way of ritualizing emotion, putting it into iambic pentameter, into stanza. Poetry provides a container that will accommodate these emotions.’

US Poet Laureate Billy Collins in the Boston Globe

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15 October

Authors’ Websites

‘It wasn't long ago that the only way readers could get in touch with their favorite author was to hope for a book tour docking nearby, or else to send a letter - sure to be tossed into a pile with hundreds of other similar missives - to the author's monolithic publishing house.

'Today, however, the loyal reader's options are many. With the advent of the Internet, as well as the proliferation of small presses, book aficionados are now seeing more variety in the marketplace than ever before. Many presses now offer chapter excerpts on the Web, as well as other enticements to get people interested in their authors.

'Some writers are taking the new connectivity a step further, developing and running their own websites, offering up such goodies as unpublished works, reading lists, e-mail addresses, and more. To have such a site is a no-brainer, as these authors tell it: They provide loyal readers content they can't get anywhere else, allow the authors to plug their friends, and lend a personal - but not too personal - connection between writer and reader.’

The Christian Science Monitor

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24 September

Who wants to be a literary agent?

‘There’s no entrance exam to becoming an agent; anyone can put up a shingle. What attracts people to it are the love of books and writers – and the knowledge that if you have the right property to sell on any given day, any given agent, even the youngest, could strike it rich, could even make the biggest sale in the history of publishing. From the oldest and most experienced to the youngest and newest, no matter how publishing has changed, there’s that sense of excitement and adventure in the belief that the very next writer coming round the corner headed towards your office might be the next John Grisham or J K Rowling.’

Martin Arnold in the New York Times

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17 September

Commenting on the fact that there are at least a dozen food-related works of fiction published in the US last year, with more to come:

'Food has become the new sex, at least in a flurry of novels in the last year or so that use cooking as Ayn Rand used architecture.'

New York Times

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30 July

Random versus Rosetta – a pithy summary of the debate

‘there is a significant general principle emerging from the US courts. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Tasini vs the New York Times that newspapers and magazine publishers did not own the rights, unless they had negotiated for them, to publish or sell on contributors’ work in digital formats. In other words, print rights and digital rights are separate. If these rulings are upheld, publishers wanting to publish digitally will have to renegotiate all relevant contracts that do not specify e-rights. Electronic rights will come to be recognised as extra entitlements, similar to audio or serial rights, and will command additional fees.’

The Bookseller

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16 July

From an article in the London Sunday Times about the differences between UK and US readers and how books are edited in the two countries:

‘American publishers assume their readers are very literal-minded and orthodox. It’s the attitude that there should be no loose ends. Well, I think the British rather like loose ends. We like things to be untidy and suggestive and peculiar and unsettling in a way they absolutely don’t.’

Bill Hamilton of the A M Heath literary agency

‘Ten years ago people would say that American editors tightened up a book and that British editors were lazy. I don’t believe that any more. I think the Americans often over-edit because they feel they have to show their influence on every page. English editors have the confidence to say they don’t need to do much because the author has got it right.’

Carole Blake of the Blake Friedmann literacy agency

But not everyone agrees with this, as is shown by this comment on a client’s book:

‘There’s no doubt the American edition is better. I felt the English editor let it go through.’

Clare Alexander of the Gillon Aitken agency

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1 July 2001

The Supreme Court gives writers control of digital copies. Three comments from those involved:

Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union and one of six freelance writers who filed the lawsuit.

'Now, it's time for the media industry to pay creators their fair share and let's sit down and negotiate over this today'

Arthur Sulzberger.Jnr, publisher of The New York Times

‘Unfortunately, today's decision means that everyone loses…The Times has lost this case and will now undertake the difficult and sad process of removing significant portions from its electronic historical archive. That is a loss for freelance writers because their articles will be removed from the historical record. Historians, scholars and the public lose because of the holes in history created by the removal of these articles from electronic issues of newspapers such as The Times.’

John Sturm, president of the Newspaper Association of America.

‘What's sad is that this wholesale destruction of historical records will not lead to any benefit to the writers seeking redress from the court.’

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14 May 2001

Mario Vargas Llosa, writing in New Republic:

‘ … I am convinced that a society without literature, or a society in which literature has been relegated--like some hidden vice--to the margins of social and personal life, and transformed into something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned to become spiritually barbaric, and even to jeopardize its freedom. I wish to offer a few arguments against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime, and in favor of viewing it as one of the most primary and necessary undertakings of the mind, an irreplaceable activity for the formation of citizens in a modern and democratic society, a society of free individuals.’

‘ … literature has been, and will continue to be, as long as it exists, one of the common denominators of human experience through which human beings may recognize themselves and converse with each other, no matter how different their professions, their life plans, their geographical and cultural locations, their personal circumstances …’

‘ Literature transports us into the past and links us to those who in bygone eras plotted, enjoyed, and dreamed through those texts that have come down to us, texts that now allow us also to enjoy and to dream. This feeling of membership in the collective human experience across time and space is the highest achievement of culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal in every generation than literature.’ 

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21 May

Author Celia Bayfield and literary agent Giles Gordon, commenting on why writers improve with age

Celia Brayfield in The Guardian

‘Writing shouldn't be about age, it should be about quality - which mostly improves as a writer gets older …There is a whole range of readers for the kind of novel that isn't being published - for the reader who wants to be addressed as an adult, who is looking for proper enjoyment in a serious sense.’

Giles Gordon

‘The older an author gets, the easier it is for them to leave behind the preoccupations of their youth, to invent freely and explore with ambition…To outsiders, an author's progression through style or genre seems natural. To the author, it can be traumatic, and sometimes fatal to the career. A lifetime of achievement requires huge efforts of will just to do the work; on top of that comes the struggle to persuade your commercial nearest and dearest that you know what you're doing …’

"The ideal author, from the viewpoint of a modern publisher, is a twentysomething babe making her debut in chick lit who'll look hot posing naked in a glossy magazine. It is far more difficult for an author to stay in print than it is to get the first novel accepted, and harder to break a mould than to create one. Modern publishing is a risk-averse industry, which does not encourage an author to change the "formula" that has produced successful "product" in the past. While popular fiction has many successful older authors, including PD James and Ruth Rendell, they have seldom been allowed the freedom to experiment.’

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Margaret Atwood in Wire on the effect of winning the Booker with The Blind Assassin after being shortlisted three times.

‘It made me a kinder, gentler Margaret Atwood. Now I am practically a blancmange. It was a great relief to my publishers. It removed a great deal of anxiety for them…. I don't have to worry about the state of my publisher's psyche anymore. The anxiety is wonderfully dispelled. I don't have to worry about them going off into corners and weeping.’

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13 April

Robert McCrum in Guardian Unlimited’s World of Books

(After writing about the high advances paid to some new authors and the huge amounts received by bestselling authors – including Forbes’s estimate of $36 million to J K Rowling and $28 million to John Grisham in the year 2000)

'The truth about advances is that they are a stark reminder that books are a business. Historically, a very few people - writers, booksellers, literary agents, publishers - have made a great deal of money out of books. What's forgotten is the fate of the countless thousands who have made virtually nothing after a life of unremitting, hard, lonely work. The average earnings of the writer in Britain are, very roughly, less than the take-home pay of a moderately industrious house cleaner.'

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6 May 2001

Jack Romanos, President of the American publisher Simon and Schuster Inc, interviewed in Red Herring on changing trends caused by the development of the e-book

’What may change radically is the way we view distribution -- whether or not in the digital world one needs to have as many middlemen in the process. You don't really need the publisher-distributor-retailer chain to reach the consumer. The day may come when we can eliminate some of the middle, including distributors and retailers. But that doesn't mean the distributors and retailers will disappear…. One of the challenges that everybody involved in this business is going to face is how to manage our traditional relationships while at the same time cultivating new relationships, often with the same people, all the while standing on ground that is constantly shifting. We are at a point in time where everybody is feeling they can test the waters as publishers. On the other hand, publishers have already figured out that going forward they will be able to have direct relationships with readers. This isn't an exercise in cutting out middlemen, and we will continue to sell through our traditional retailing partners, both electronic and brick-and-mortar...

’I think that reaching readers on the Internet is another skill set that our editors and marketing staff are going to have to add to the rest of their repertoire.’

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Penelope Lively, commenting in Boyd Tonkin’s section in The Independent on the problems facing new writers and the rise of the agent.

‘Thirty years of proximity has rather sharpened my vision of publishers, but there's no question that the new writer is still at their mercy. Publishers have changed, but they still crack the whip. And what is different? The short answer would be - conglomerates, and the waning power of the editor. Back then, the independent house was still strong; today, five conglomerates dominate the field. Hence the fight for star authors, the big advances, the emphasis on instant sales and a zooming track record…

‘Parallel with the decline of the editor has come the rise of the literary agent. When I wrote my first book, I had never heard of literary agents. I fetched up with Murray Pollinger by good luck rather than good management - an association that lasted until he retired on me, and has been the abiding professional friendship (editors move around as they never used to).

‘Agents can now call the shots, nurture a new writer, and have publishers knocking on their door. They have ceased to be middlemen and become major players. Today's new writer will be hoping above all to find a sympathetic agent, and will be advised to turn a blind eye on all that subversive stuff about Lottery-sized advances.’

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Robert McCrum, Literary Editor of The Observer, and the challenges the new technology poses to the book

‘The printed book,.... , is a brilliant ‘random access device’.  It is, as the novelist Nicholson Baker once observed, ‘a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form, no matter what happens.  If the end of civilisation comes and we lose electricity, we can hold a CD-Rom up to the light and it has a totemic value, but we have no past.

‘The printed book is also a world-class survivor. A renaissance artefact first marketed in this country by an energetic literary hustler named William Caxton, it has kept pace with virtually every technological change you care to think of, from the internal combustion engine to television.  If Caxton were to walk into his local branch of Waterstone’s today, he would not recognise the fascinating technology of our everyday life, but he would be surprised to find that the thing he called a ‘boke’ was, in its essentials, pretty much unchanged after 500 years.

‘What’s more, the printed book stands for a mode of thought – deliberate, ruminative and private – that’s a cornerstone of our civilisation.  The paper, the ink, the cover and the feel of the thing are precious to us in ways we probably can’t quite quantify.  A book offers an independent route into a shared past as well as a secret avenue into a personal future.  It is, in a word, inimitable.’

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14 May 2001

William Amos, author of Seed of Joy, in his Night Thoughts column, www.ebooknet.com, talking about Stephen’s King’s experiments with e-publishing

‘ Stephen King is not the future of e-publishing. The future of e-publishing is being written by authors like you and me – ordinary people who write works that lie outside the fad-fodder of traditional print houses. Let’s be as brave as pioneers are supposed to be, and act like the leaders we are.’

Michael Powell, the owner of the US new and used  book store Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, described by one of its fans as ‘probably the world’s greatest bookstore …a place of staggering ambition, hidden in the very humble wrapper of a worn-out warehouse’:

‘The Internet is also teaching us to reconsider the value of any given book. It used to be that an obscure text of some kind or another might sit on our shelves for years … Selling locally, even with the tourist business we get and the people who make special trips from farther away, some books just didn’t find their audience.  But we’re discovering that there is a demand for these books.  And it’s gratifying to be able to put those books into people’s hands, books they didn’t know existed or books they thought they’ve never been able to find.'

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