How long have I been going on about these romance covers that choke the ebook lists? The trend is somewhere from merely tedious to outright infuriating for all but the millions of romance consumers and the folks feeding that frenzy.…
Porter Anderson, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fellow with the National Critics Institute and has done special readings in the psychology of the arts at the University of Bath, UK. As a journalist, he has worked with three networks of CNN (CNNUSA, CNN International, CNN.com) and was on the lead development team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, D Magazine, Sarasota Herald-Tribune and other outlets. He writes the weekly (Thursdays) WRITINGONTHEETHER column at JaneFriedman.com and (Mondays) ETHERFORAUTHORS column at PublishingPerspectives.com. Anderson also is a regular contributor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Digital Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Publishing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Programme, and served as Executive Producer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copenhagen. He is based in Tampa and his primary medium is Twitter. Follow him @Porter_Anderson
BEA cupcakes: Is This ‘Women’s Work’ About Books?
So the email arrives:
I wanted to share the third video in our new video series Have Your (Cup)Cake & Read it Too! This month, BookExpo America (BEA) and Huffington Post Books are proud to unveil our new video featuring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby, as well as our very own book-inspired The Great Gatsby cupcakes. When you check out the video you will also see a very special guest—Hollis Wilder, author of Savory Bites: Meals You Can Make in Your Cupcake Pan.
Well, gosh. This one takes some sensitive wording, a calm approach, and some honesty. If you’d like to watch the tape (seven minutes, 14 seconds) it’s here. And if you enjoy it, I won’t hold that against you.
This particular promotional direction has more than one major issue. First, there’s the obvious. Cupcakes. I mean cupcakes. This is a promotion in which a fine young person describes putting a daisy on a cupcake as part of its design. To represent Daisy Buchanan.
Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, typically sells 500,000 copies each year, but in 2013 it has already shipped 280,000 copies, according to the publisher. Ebook sales have been skyrocketing, too: in 2012, about 80,000 e-book copies of “Gatsby” were sold. So far this year, sales have surpassed 125,000.
So we have the new film treatment and its associated new book cover.
Personally, I don’t see why we need that Hollywood cover when the original Hemingway-hated artwork is as classic as Fitzgerald’s book.
But this, too, I’m sure is “marketing genius.”
And you’d think all this new Gatsby-alia for a an 88-year-old landmark in literature would be all the excitement we could eat.
And then the video gives us Hollis Wilder, whose mission and book are meant to persuade us, it seems—I’m quoting her from the video—“to make meals in the cupcake tin, meals that we already make on a regular basis with our children, our families, that we’ve been making for generations.”
In a cupcake tin. Dinner. In a cupcake tin.
Inspecting a Gatsby-esque cupcake, Wilder tells us that whiskey icing “is a little big-girl for me.” Nevertheless, in the service of duty, of course, she eats the cupcake and pronounces it “not a tragedy.”
Hollis Wilder and Barbie-in-a-Cake.
Her ego unimpaired, she reminds us, more than once, that she has won the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars three times.
Which success compels her, apparently, to bake Barbie into a cake.
She shows it to us, saying, “I should be able to have a cake that looks like me to honor that [Cupcake Wars] crown.”
And all of this happens before she mentions Guantanamo. I’m not kidding. It’s quite a video. The promotion is housed on the BookBliss.com page.
You have til 5/9 to read THEGREATGATSBY. Or as I’m calling it until I read it, THEHOLDING-MY-JUDGMENTGATSBY. #cOlbertsBookClub
When I asked Huffington Post senior books editor Andrew Losowsky about this partnership, he couldn’t have been more gracious. I mean, there are fish in barrels here, and he’s really a mensch to get back to me, on his weekend, no less. Here’s his full and intelligent response:
Andrew Losowsky
We run all kinds of book-related stories on our page, serious and frivolous. These videos definitely lean towards the frivolous for sure, but that said, they do convey the idea that there is no single “correct” way to react to a work of literature. If someone expresses their creativity through baking, then we think that is as valid a method of artistic response as a painting or a song. It’s an exercise in lateral thinking that could provide unexpected literary insight, along the lines of DeBono’s Random Entry tool. It’s also not our invention, as there are Edible Book Festivals held across the country and around the world each year, in which bakers compete to reflect the essence of a book in their creations. The videos are a work in progress, but not a major feature of our general coverage, nor of our ongoing partnership with BEA, which will include panel discussions and author interviews at this year’s event.
Francis Cugat’s original Gatsby cover art
It’s important to note, of course, that the Huffington Post and BEA have every right to promote, singly and together, in any way they want to. And Losowsky is right, “There is no single ‘correct’ way to react to a work of literature.” While I may question whether cupcakes and doll desserts do anything for literature—I can’t imagine why the government wouldn’t want to support this, Mr. Patterson, can you?—mine is only one person’s opinion.
*tweets the entirety of The Great Gatsby 140 characters at a time over the course of six days* — Ristolable (@ristolable) April 29, 2013
I’ll tell you where I think this all gets a bit more serious, though. And then I’ll leave the country quickly. I’m reminded of a line from John Updike’s The Centaur. It has stuck with me for decades. Reverand March asks, “Why do all the ladies of my parish bake cupcakes once a month and sell them to each other?” And when I was searching to verify that reference, I came across—isn’t Google grand?—the reason for my real discomfort here. In Why We Don’t Need “Women’s” Ministry at ChurchLeaders.com, Sarah Bessey rather courageously writes:
You know what I would have liked instead of decorating tips or a new recipe? I would have liked to pray together. I would have liked the women of the church to share their stories or wisdom with one another, no more celebrity speakers, please just hand the microphone to that lady over there that brought the apples. I would love to wrestle with some questions that don’t have a one-paragraph answer in your study guide. I would like to do a Bible study that does not have pink or flowers on the cover.
Now, yes, Bessey is working in a different field from publishing. I think the faith is lucky to have her.
Sarah Bessey
But for those of us who find spiritual presence in the world of real literature—and for those of us who want to see women fully integrated into the genuine centers of our modern life, not left to pretty-up the frilly perimeters—there is resonance here. At least, for me. Perhaps you get this, too.
The world can give me cute cupcake designs and decorating tips, scrapbooking parties, casserole recipes, and other ways to pass the time. But truly, with my respect and love, may I be honest? If I wanted to learn how to decorate cupcakes, I would take a class in it. If I wanted to be educated on strategies for decorating my home inexpensively from Winners, I would just, you know, go to Winners. Or Pinterest.
If I wanted to talk about great, powerfully enduring books…?
the great gatsby trailers make it look like gatsby is the main character and not nick hmm — lauren (@wllflwrs) April 29, 2013
To each her own, sure, absolutely. There are, surely, women who must love baking cupcakes about books.
And did anyone wake up one morning and say, “Hey, let’s do a promotional partnership that sort of assigns women to making cupcakes about great literature?” Of course not, certainly not. I know that. You know that. The intentions are good. Look at how carefully Lowsowsky parses his comments.
Im actually pretty upset that in the future, MRSAKERS is going to let her classes watch the Great Gatsby instead of reading it like we did — Shelby Waltrip (@ShelbyLynn_24) April 29, 2013
This is simply the kind of thing we need to rethink in publishing. I’m always going on about the “cute” factor. Can you really tell me that this seven minutes of relentless cuteness is doing a thing to promote reading, writing, and the serious roles of good literature and our important trade in the world?
We need to do the best we can for books. We also need to do the best we can for women, and for men.
And we all must keep an eye out for unintentional missteps. Even the funny ones might need serious review.
Porter Anderson, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fellow with the National Critics Institute and has done special readings in the psychology of the arts at the University of Bath, UK. As a journalist, he has worked with three networks of CNN (CNNUSA, CNN International, CNN.com) and was on the lead development team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, D Magazine, Sarasota Herald-Tribune and other outlets. He writes the weekly (Thursdays) WRITINGONTHEETHER column at JaneFriedman.com and (Mondays) ETHERFORAUTHORS column at PublishingPerspectives.com. Anderson also is a regular contributor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Digital Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Publishing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Programme, and served as Executive Producer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copenhagen. He is based in Tampa and his primary medium is Twitter. Follow him @Porter_Anderson
Something close to the creative value of the work of publishing—easily overlooked in the business-first setting of trade shows and daily sales efforts— lies in What Authors Wantfrom London literary agent Jonny Geller.
In a timely blog post at The Bookseller this week, he offered some counterpoint to the market-driven maze of business hustle that gets so loud during trade shows. Here, in fact, you can read some of the distance opening up at times between agents and traditional publishing, something the louder self-publishing evangelists might have thought they’d never see.
The 90/10 (or is it 95/5 these days?) ratio of how many hits pay for all the misses is a model that cannot sustain itself.
Weighing up name-dropping everyone who’s in my London Book Fair Review/Diary, but will probably avoid http://t.co/UCHaY7UnRf#LBF13#Books
Inaugural London on the Ether column in The Bookseller’s 16 April 2013 show daily at London Book Fair
Geller’s position is that publishers in many instances are getting in the way of an author’s success:
Publishers do not intend to get in the way, but this is how they can get in the way:
By putting a cover on a book that they think the retailer wants (not the same thing as what the reader or author will like, by the way)
By pushing the book out too early when it is not properly cooked yet
By concentrating on too many other projects. Promiscuous publishing is an addiction.
I especially like that phrase “promiscuous publishing.” We see it in the too-fast output of some self-publishing people, of course, but Geller is right, we see it in established publishers’ lists, too.
Been stood up. Have 2 hours to kill. Anyone still about for a pint? #lbf13
Smaller publishers should not compete with this model anyway. If you are small, revel in your size, focus on it and don’t rest until the book you believed in and acquired all those months/years ago has found its deserved readership.
If you are big, silo out your imprints and give them character and panache and force in the market. In other words, convert the 90/10 to, say, 60/40: let 60% of your business subsidise 40% of the ones that got away.
Second London on the Ether installment, in The Bookseller’s 17 April 2013 show daily at London Book Fair.
Geller is even willing to take on what I’ve recently termed the “stinking gatekeeper” issue. I’ll quote him at a bit of length here — to be clear, he’s writing to the publishing establishment:
In the new world of self-publishing, gatekeeping is not keeping people out, but guiding people in …
Place the author central to your strategy
Wean yourselves off the addiction of Promiscuous Publishing
Publish the book beyond the first month—surely e-books allow you this strategy more than ever?
Communication is good, but collaboration is better
In a world where retailers are narrowing their range, fight harder to find new routes to the book buyer
Look again at every element of the way you interact with authors in terms of royalties, licences, partnerships. Are you offering a dynamic package?
What I like about Geller’s approach here is that he’s handling questions of business value in ways that relate to the requirements of the work, and of the authors who create that work. This is business, yes, but without forgetting the product is cultural.
Get back to the office and spend the first half an hour walking around with my London Book Fair badge on #cringe#lbf13
And it’s just that tone, that viewpoint-of-the-creator that I think can be missed in too many discussions of content-as-business, some of them, yes, at paidContent Live in New York.
Geller, one more time before we move on:
If you believe in the editors you have hired, the marketers and publicists you have engaged and, most importantly, the books you have acquired, how could you not succeed?
Click to read this week’s full Writing on the Ether column at JaneFriedman.com.
At London Book Fair no one can hear an author scream #lbf13
Porter Anderson, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fellow with the National Critics Institute and has done special readings in the psychology of the arts at the University of Bath, UK. As a journalist, he has worked with three networks of CNN (CNNUSA, CNN International, CNN.com) and was on the lead development team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, D Magazine, Sarasota Herald-Tribune and other outlets. He writes the weekly (Thursdays) WRITINGONTHEETHER column at JaneFriedman.com and (Mondays) ETHERFORAUTHORS column at PublishingPerspectives.com. Anderson also is a regular contributor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Digital Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Publishing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Programme, and served as Executive Producer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copenhagen. He is based in Tampa and his primary medium is Twitter. Follow him @Porter_Anderson
Writers in the Spotlight: Turn Your Readings Into Book Sales
with Porter Anderson
Join me in this special three-hour intensive Boot Camp session at Writer’s Digest Conference East (#WDCE) at 12:30pET on Friday, April 5. We’ll look at public presentation for the entrepreneurial author in an interactive, up-on-your-feet workshop format: come with two pages of your work in progress, ready to rock and read.
The 21st century cousin of the slush-pile submission is the query-by-tweet. Not only do we get “Dear Editor” letters, we see messages like this on Twitter. Hey, @BloomsburyPress, I’ve written a teen paranormal romance. Ppl say it’s next TWILIGHT-DM me for details!
After seeing one too many of those, I tweeted in response, Dear Authors: Twitter is not the way to query us. And this imprint is nonfiction only. If you want to get published, please do yr homework.
Caught a thief who assaulted me! Frontline bookselling, getting too old for this.
The hauteur of amateurs is hard to stomach, Ginna is right. He goes on to show you exactly how that self-importance can come across:
Instantly–this being Twitter–I received a stream of tweets disparaging Bloomsbury Press as arrogant and ignorant of the new world where “publishers need to impress and adapt, not writers. We have other avenues.”
But the publisher and editorial director of Bloomsbury Press is something of an exception in an industry that has long veiled itself behind a now-inappropriate mystique.
A year ago I singled out Ginna for his singular willingness to step forward and respond from the publishers’ camp to a powerful “agent’s manifesto” written by London’s Jonny Geller. Both men arrived with an articulate candor that should have led other traditional-industry leaders to drop more veils and speak more plainly. The whole exercise is worth your review. I dubbed it then “Ginna-rosity.”
One springtime later, the season is chillier than I’d hoped it might be. The Ginna-Geller exchange should have prompted more frank commentary than it has.
thinking of putting my Twitter feed behind a paywall — let me know what you are willing to pay: a) $1.99 a month, b) $3.99 or c) unlimited
A statement as forthright and uncomplicated as this one from Ginna’s new essay is curiously hard to come by, even today:
What I’m saying is this: If you are thoughtful and imaginative enough to write a first-rate novel, say, or a gripping historical narrative, you should be able to apply those skills to the process of putting your work in front of an editor. You should not just chuck your query letter into a mailbox addressed to “Editorial Department, Random House” or “To Whom It May Concern”. Rather than just sending your stuff to every house in the Literary Market Place from Abbeville to Zebra Publishing, you should find out whether the publisher you’re querying even has fiction, or children’s books, or whatever, on its list. You would not believe how often my imprint, which states on its webpage it publishes NONFICTION, receives queries from novelists.
Bologna trend: many people around the world of both genders find Jon Hamm attractive. MORELATERASTHISSURPRISINGNEWSDEVELOPS.
Granted, this kind of talk raises the hackles of some writers who misinterpret the rise of the “empowered author” or “entrepreneurial author” as an event of vengeance. It also is the best thing such people can hear or read. The most heavily pom-pom-ed cheerleader of self-publishing needs to remember that the widest crowd of Internet-inspired would-be authors includes a lot of people whose bad guesses at how to “have a hit” make the entire writers’ corps look bad. Ginna:
By definition, writers in the slush pile have not…gone through the thought process, or done the legwork, necessary to put a well-targeted pitch into the mailbox of a specific person, they have trusted to luck or perhaps the dazzling quality of their work, or they simply haven’t thought about it one way or the other. That doesn’t mean they aren’t gifted; maybe they are naive, untutored geniuses. But it does mean they’re not professionals.
He’s right. Ginna is correct. And I’m grateful—annually grateful, as it were—for his efforts to drop the mannered distance of too many publishers and call out clearly to the community.
I see no problem with Random House replicating its most recent financial results in the coming fiscal year. #crapshoot
As the roles and rigors of agenting adjust—and frankly seem to get only more burdensome—under the digital imperative, one of the keenest quandaries has involved how agents can reconfigure their services to support clients in self-publishing scenarios. Seemingly antithetical to the task (what would an agent have to gain from a client who’s staging his own show?), it turns out that agents can, indeed, be of considerable service to clients in the new paradigm, assisting with “author services,” marketing, publicity, international rights, and overall career management.
About to talk to people about what it means to be a writer. It means, chiefly, having a bad back.
Those who followed the debut of the O’Reilly Tools of Change Author ®evolution Day conference in New York last month are familiar, for example, with agent Jason Allen Ashlock’s positioning of this new stance as the “radical advocacy” of an industry professional whose partnership with clients can take on new depths and collaborative detail.
But as far as I can tell, no agents joined in the conversation at JaneFriedman.com as Foster proposed precise terms of representation in cases in which the Amazon White Glove Program is engaged.
There was a problem connecting to Twitter.
Jonny Geller
An agent is necessary for White Glove—it’s designed for just that and, speaking of Geller, his Curtis Brown agency in London has used it to set forth a formidable array of more than 200 backlist titles in the States for his clients, as detailed in this write-up from paidContent’sLaura Hazard Owen.
Here is Foster outlining the following (where WGP stands for White Glove Program operating in the Kindle Direct Publishing self-publishing arena:
Agent remains the Agent of Record for 3 years for work published through the WGP. For sales of foreign rights, audio rights, film rights, or a future publishing contract, the standard agent contract applies.
Agent earns 15% commission on all sales from the book for the life of the WGP contract plus one year. After that period terminates, all royalties and rights revert to the author. (Most sales happen in the first two years of publication.)
Foster’s contention, apparently based on her own experience, is that agents are—in her mind unfairly—anticipating indefinite commission on properties that exist as White Glove projects for only six or twelve months.
At a site read as widely by authors as Friedman’s, doesn’t it seem that someone from the agents’ camp might want to weigh in with a word or two on this?
It is patently unhelpful to have authors hammering away at issues of agent relations among themselves.
Porter Anderson, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fellow with the National Critics Institute and has done special readings in the psychology of the arts at the University of Bath, UK. As a journalist, he has worked with three networks of CNN (CNNUSA, CNN International, CNN.com) and was on the lead development team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, D Magazine, Sarasota Herald-Tribune and other outlets. He writes the weekly (Thursdays) WRITINGONTHEETHER column at JaneFriedman.com and (Mondays) ETHERFORAUTHORS column at PublishingPerspectives.com. Anderson also is a regular contributor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Digital Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Publishing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Programme, and served as Executive Producer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copenhagen. He is based in Tampa and his primary medium is Twitter. Follow him @Porter_Anderson
The emergence of the e-book has had a predictable impact on channels to market; with physical bookshops slow to find a viable way to be involved in the supply chain, e-tailers have had it all their own way and now account for nearly 100% of all e-book purchasing. But there has been another, less well-publicised impact too; if you buy your digital books from Amazon, you are increasingly likely to purchase your print books there as well.
The research arm of the company is reporting facts and figures on publishing at everything that even remotely looks like a conference. A winter spent crunching survey results has produced a torrent of new numbers. Living room Tupperware parties could probably book a Bowker expert with PowerPoint slides these days.
Pay enough attention to the flying facts and figures and you need nothing so much as an authoritative voice cutting through the charts and graphs with the compassion of a statistician who cares about books.
Jo Henry
That would be Jo Henry, Director of Bowker Market Research.
In the kind of cleanly written, smart synthesis of survey results I wish we had more frequently, her commentary Discovery channel hits The Bookseller’s blogs page with an artfully informed case for the UK’s beleaguered bookshops:
High street booksellers punch above their weight in the value of each book that they sell, with adult non-fiction being bought for around 20% more in bookshops, children’s books at around 25% more, and adult fiction at a whopping 50% more than books bought through online channels. They also account for nearly half of all books sold at full price and are of particular importance to the children’s market, with 41% of all purchases in this category going through high street booksellers, worth some £183m.
Henry’s comments follow Bowker’s presentation at its half-day Books & Consumers Conference in London.
Of these, some 11% — around 32.5 million — were ebooks, with consumers spending £125 million ($188.7 million) on this format, more than double the figure for the previous year.
The unfortunate thing about twitter sensations who get a publishing deal is they become unfollowable once they have a book to flog.
And from Enders Analysis comes Why bookshops matter, a logically stepped argument posted at The Bookseller by COODouglas McCabe. Here’s an excerpt, as chilly as the northern spring:
We estimate that when a bookshop closes about a third of its sales transfer to another bookshop. This means as much as two thirds of sales disappear. Some of this spend doubtless migrates online; but much of it vanishes from the book sector entirely.
McCabe puts it more plainly:
We strongly argue that the single most effective technique for dismantling the physical book sector would be to accelerate the closure of bookshops.
Douglas McCabe
And then he puts it even more plainly:
There is almost nothing that can be done to sustain the health of the network of bookshops that should be collectively considered too extravagant. Without bookshops, publishing would have to rethink its model at every level; and the role of general books and reading would be rewritten forever.
To innovate is not to reform — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) March 25, 2013
From the States, here’s a particularly troubling sideline to that last comment. Making us remember Foyles chief Sam Husain’s call earlier this year for more publisher support for bookstores, we now read Leslie Kaufman at the New York Times, in Orders Cut, as Publisher and Retailer Quarrel. She writes:
A standoff over financial terms has prompted the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble to cut back substantially on the number of titles it orders from the publishing house Simon & Schuster, raising fears among other publishers, agents and authors that the conflict may harm the publishing industry as a whole.
Leslie Kaufman
Kaufman cites unnamed sources apprised of the issue telling her:
Barnes & Noble believes that because its physical display space is so important to publishers, and because it is the last major retail chain remaining, publishers should be doing more to support it.
While Barnes & Noble won’t comment on widespread allegations of “reduced Simon & Schuster books as leverage,” Kaufman writes:
Simon & Schuster editors, as well as agents and writers who work with them, are apoplectic on the subject, since Barnes & Noble accounts for about 20 percent of consumer book spending and is a main conduit for publicizing new releases.
“Apoplectic,” she writes. Found in a straight news report at the Times, this is a strong word, one of those terms fondly misused by one’s mother when the cat goes missing for an hour. It means “extremely enraged,” Merriam-Webster tells us. And Kaufman comes the closest to making good on the phrase when she quotes agent Simon Lipskar, never one to run from apoplexy, saying:
“Without pointing fingers, authors are being hurt by this, and I think it is despicable.”
And yet, we’ve barely started our pilgrimage to data-stations of the springtime cross, Ethernaut. We’ll be back with more from Bowker shortly. Stagger on…
io ai cantautori c’ho l’allergia. #tvoi — Paolo Armelli (@p_arm) March 21, 2013
Porter Anderson, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fellow with the National Critics Institute and has done special readings in the psychology of the arts at the University of Bath, UK. As a journalist, he has worked with three networks of CNN (CNNUSA, CNN International, CNN.com) and was on the lead development team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, D Magazine, Sarasota Herald-Tribune and other outlets. He writes the weekly (Thursdays) WRITINGONTHEETHER column at JaneFriedman.com and (Mondays) ETHERFORAUTHORS column at PublishingPerspectives.com. Anderson also is a regular contributor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Digital Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Publishing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Programme, and served as Executive Producer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copenhagen. He is based in Tampa and his primary medium is Twitter. Follow him @Porter_Anderson
I wanted to share the third video in our new video series Have Your (Cup)Cake 
Personally, I don’t see why we need that Hollywood cover when the original Hemingway-hated artwork is as classic as Fitzgerald’s book.
I’m reminded of a line from John Updike’s 
Yes, it’s springtime for 
