Early e-publishing: 30 Million Book Giveaway! (circa 1995)

Recently I was combing through back issues of a now-defunct New York literary magazine, the very one in which I first published short fiction. That story, "What was Slain in the Sun," appeared in the penultimate issue of Christopher Street, in November of 1995. I was looking for the magazine's circulation figures (this to do with eligibility criteria for a short story contest), but what I found was more interesting than that.

There was an advertisement in pretty much every issue of Christopher Street that I looked at in the library stacks at UC Berkeley, where I work. The advertisement was printed as a full page in many issues, and a half-page in the issue in which my story appeared. It promoted a book written by the woman with whom I'd corresponded when my story was accepted for publication, Neenyah Ostram. The book she was promoting in 1995 was: America's Biggest Cover-Up: 50 More Things Everyone Should Know About the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic And Its Link to AIDS.

I haven't read the book, so I won't speak to its subject matter. What called my attention to the ad was this bold callout, seemingly so naive from a distance of (only) 17 years:

How do you give 30 million copies of a book away? On the Internet.

It gets better:

For those of you who know your way around the Internet, access to the Electronic Newsstand is free and available through the Newsstand Home Page at URL http://www.enews.com:2102 and via gopher or telnet. Please gopher enews.com or telnet enews.com and login as enews.

For those of you who don't know the Internet from a hairnet, we suggest that you modem yourself to your nearest bookstore and buy and old-fashioned hard-cover copy of AMERICA'S BIGGEST COVER-UP. [...]

For those of you who don't know the Internet from a hairnet? Port numbers in a URL? Gopher? Telnet? It's like discovering evidence of a lost civilization!!

What's "gopher" -- both the noun and verb? Gopher was a widely used protocol for distributing documents over the early internet. It presented text menus for retrieving hierarchically organized documents, which made sense in a world in which many computer systems handled text display much better than graphics. Gopher lost out to the web, as we all know now. It was invented at U. Minnesota.

Telnet was (and is) a protocol for opening interactive, text-oriented communication sessions with remote computers. It was superseded by the still very broadly used SSH protocol, which handles the same sort of communication securely (so communications between computers can't be intercepted by tapping the 'wire' between the legitimate parties to data exchange).

I know, I know, it's like trying to explain rotary phones to today's elementary school kids. Or landlines. Grandpa, what's a modem?

Leaving aside the trip down Ancient Technology Lane, what really struck me about the ad for Ostrom's book was how clearly it anticipated the sea change in book distribution that electronic formats would make possible -- a dozen years before the explosion of e-books detonated by the Kindle in 2007, and fueled now by the likes of Smashwords and iTunes and Google Play in addition to Amazon and Barnes and Noble. These sea changes are roiling the publishing industry, hard, to this day. I don't suppose that Ostrom's work was read by all 30 million subscribers to 1995's Electronic Newsstand, but it could have been. For free.

Remarkable what you can find in the stacks of a library, at the border between the pre-digital world and the one in which we're immersed today.



Thanks to wackystuff for the rotary phone image, via Flickr.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
My short story "Martin's Pond" published as an e-book
Are dust bunnies an argument for e-books?
Getting a grip on attention span
Rock, Paper, Digital Preservation

My short story "Martin's Pond" published as an e-book

In spring 2003, the literary magazine Five Fingers Review published my short story, "Martin's Pond," in the lit mag's issue #20. It was a themed issue, titled Gardens in the Urban Jungle. You can still find back issues of FFR in some public libraries -- San Francisco and New York, among the few I'm aware of; and if you dig through Amazon you can find a scatter of copies available for sale. For the most part, though, "Martin's Pond" went out of print and became unavailable after its short sojourn on the lit mag shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores.

I list "Martin's Pond" among publishing credits on my website, but for a long while it hasn't seemed right that interested visitors had no easy way to find and read out of print work included there.

Problem solved:

As of late last week, "Martin's Pond" is available on the e-book publishing platform Smashwords. It's free, and you can read it on a Kindle, an iPad, a Nook, a Sony Reader, a Kobo eReader, or on your Windows or Macintosh computer. You can open it in a web browser, or obtain and print a PDF.

And so on ... Smashwords makes it very easy: an author supplies a single file and the platform's software does the rest. Writers: check it out.

My short story -- 4400 words, about 10-1/2 printed pages as it appeared in Five Fingers Review -- describes a young man, Martin, who likes to spend time by himself at a remote pond near a small city in Northern California. Martin isn't the sharpest knife in the block; he works as a restaurant dishwasher; and his family is less than fully intact. Martin's solitude beside 'his' pond is a refuge. He's therefore pretty unhappy when he discovers that -- after six years of having the place to himself -- a stranger has begun to swim there. When she doesn't go away on her own Martin devises one plan after another to encourage her to move along. One plan after another fails. They aren't the best laid plans. Eventually ... well, you'll see when you read the story.


I invite you to download a free copy of "Martin's Pond" for yourself. When you do, I strongly encourage you to sign up for a (free) account on Smashwords so you can leave a review that will help other visitors decide whether to read it themselves. Alternately, I hope you'll leave a comment here on One Finger Typing.

Enjoy!

Are dust bunnies an argument for e-books?

Every two to ten years, whether it's needed or not, I thoroughly dust my books and bookshelves, unloading the shelves and pulling them away from the wall to vacuum the mess of cat hair, mold, sloughed skin, and whatever the breeze blows in that accretes behind the furniture. Every two to ten years, yup. I'm just that kind of clean freak.

These last couple of weeks my partner has been away (return flight: yesterday! hooray!), and it's when I'm home alone that I tend to I grit my teeth, roll up my sleeves, bust out the duster, the vacuum cleaner, the torn-up T-shirt rags, and the Murphy's Oil Soap (tm), and do what needs to be done. Hence the before and after photos, below, of the shelves on the south wall of our living room.

Before dusting:

After dusting:

Do you see the difference? Did you click to enlarge?

I assure you that when I look at the shelves from my writing table across the room, the titles on the book spines look cleaner, clearer, sharper, and shinier than before I tore these shelves apart and wiped clean each one of our innumerable and, in the aggregate, unconscionably heavy books.

You don't see any difference? Let's try something more graphic then. How about a peek behind the bookshelves?

Before vacuuming:

After vacuuming:

Have I made my point yet?

Fact #1: books and bookshelves accumulate a disgusting accretion of dust: on, over, all-around, behind.

Fact #2: it takes thankless, tedious, back-wrenching labor to rid one's home of the stuff.

Those are the facts. And here are the questions:

1. Are these facts an argument for e-books?
2. Are these facts, alternatively, an argument for my friend Bill's strategy of keeping exactly one (small) bookcase in his home, and allowing himself to accumulate only as many volumes as fit on it -- to add one more, another has to go?
3. Or are these facts, in actual fact, an argument for the value of robotic automagical nano-vacuum-cleaners, a technology that, to the best of my knowledge, has not yet been invented?

Enquiring minds wonder as they ice their lower backs.




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
It's the culture, stupid: blindered blather on Amazon, Apple, and the agency model
Bookstores
Six things about e-books

It's the culture, stupid: blindered blather on Amazon, Apple, and the agency model

Everybody who cares a lot about books, or even a little about e-books, has heard about the Department of Justice announcement last week about Apple, book publishers, Amazon, and something called the "agency model" in businessspeak.

Missed it? You can get the high level summary from Nathan Bransford's post of this past Friday, What Will the Book World Look Like After the DOJ Lawsuit? His summary, under the heading "How we got here" weighs in at less than 300 words, and describes the essentials about as succinctly as they can be described.

If you're already following the story you won't miss much by skipping the next section of this post, and picking up at What book people aren't talking about ...

What book people are talking about

For a more detailed look at the DoJ, Apple, Amazon, and this month's threat to literary culture, Nathan Bransford linked to a longer overview on Shelf Awareness, dated Thursday 12 April 2012. It's titled Justice Department Sues; Three Publishers Settle, and I'd recommend it too. Here's the issue everybody close to books is talking about, as Shelf Awareness spun the story:

Already, Amazon has "plans to push down prices on e-books," the New York Times said. "The price of some major titles could fall to $9.99 or less from $14.99, saving voracious readers a bundle."

So, in the name of antitrust, the level playing field of the past two years--agency model e-books were priced the same whether sold by Amazon, Barnes and Noble or independent bookstores--will likely revert to a situation where a near-monopoly power determines pricing and most other retailers see their already-smaller market share shrink. Although Apple and the publishers may have cooperated in ways that violated the nation's sometimes contradictory antitrust laws, for the Justice Department to single this matter out and not address other issues in the book industry or in business in general seems misguided.

More pointedly (starting with the spot-on headline) here's an excerpt from The Justice Department Just Made Jeff Bezos Dictator-for-Life, in The Atlantic on Saturday 14 April:

Readers will pay less. That's the bright side. The settlement gives Amazon carte blanche to discount the eVersions of popular titles, much as it used to. Of course, that also happens to be the dark side. Because that control over price is going to reinforce the monopoly power of the world's largest online retailer. [...]

In other words, Amazon will have two years to consolidate its hold over the fast growing eBook market by offering virtually any sort of discount it pleases -- a marketing strategy it can afford thanks to the volume of business it already does. The question, then, is what happens after that time is up? Will there be any company that can challenge Amazon in the digital market? Maybe not. Thanks to the use of DRM technology, most eBooks can only be read on a propriety device. Amazon's eBooks can only be read on a Kindle, or a Kindle app. Barnes and Noble's books can only be read on a Nook. So the larger a library any one customer builds with a single retailer, the less likely it is they'll ultimately switch.

In my own sound byte: the DoJ is going after big publishers and Apple for colluding to break Amazon's monopoly on e-books.

What book people aren't talking about

I looked -- maybe I've been looking in the wrong places, using the wrong search terms -- but what I can't find in all this kerfuffle is anybody talking about what an Amazon monopoly (or anybody else's dominant proprietary device/format) is going to mean in the long run.

Do you own books? The paper kind? More than a shelf-full? Can you say, off the top of your head, what company published them? Even if you can -- even if you can for ten percent of the printed books you own -- now that you own them, does it really matter what publisher's name is printed on the spine and the title page?

I'll answer that question for myself: no.

Not at all.

And why not? Because whoever published any of the hundreds of printed books making shelves sag all the way around my living room, and my bedroom, and even my kitchen come to think of it -- no publisher, now that I possess my books, can keep me from reading them, re-reading them, lending them, giving them away, or selling them to any of the many used bookstores within or adjacent to the city where I live.

I don't need to worry about a proprietary device breaking or wearing out, rendering it unfit for use in reading my books. Doesn't touch me or my printed books, I can still do what I will with them.

I don't need to care whether the proprietor of any digital device does or does not go out of business, relegating the library of books that proprietor sold me to the graveyard as soon as the grace period expires that corresponds to the working life of that proprietor's proprietary digital device. What graveyard, you ask? Why, the very same graveyard where BetaMax and VHS videotapes and name-your-dimension-and-format floppy disks are interred.

My books are printed in ink, on tree flakes (a.k.a. paper). No electricity is required if I don't mind reading in daylight.

And they'll outlive me.

Come to think of it, there's no reason my printed books can't outlive the corporate deaths of their publishers ... by hundreds of years. Some of my books have already outlived their publishers, that clock's already ticking.

What happens if Amazon becomes a monopoly bookseller, and Kindle a monopoly reading device, and the proprietary Kindle format the only way you and everybody you know is able to possess new books, the ones that nobody will bother to print (or print in quantity) because there's no market or profitable distribution channel for big runs of printed books anymore?

Then what happens when Amazon goes broke?

Can't imagine that'll ever happen?

In an article about corporate longevity, The business of survival (The Economist, 16 Dec 2004), we get some perspective that might fuel imagination:

What is clear is that corporate longevity is highly unusual. One-third of the firms in the Fortune 500 in 1970 no longer existed in 1983, killed by merger, acquisition, bankruptcy or break-up. According to Leslie Hannah, a business historian at the University of Tokyo, the average “half-life” of big companies—that is, the time taken to die by half of the firms in the world's top 100 by market capitalisation in any given year—was 75 years during the 20th century.

For printed books, seventy-five years is not so long. This past September I read and blogged about a book that I found in a used bookstore for six bucks. It was printed in 1926, eighty five years before I found it on a store shelf and brought it home to take its place on mine. Its technology needed no refreshing. I opened. I read. That's the long and short of it.

If you bought a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad this week, would you expect it to be functional in 2097?

If one such device -- oh, let's say the Kindle -- were the only sort of device you could use to read the new books you wanted to read, including the really really good new books that you'd like to re-read and pass along to friends and family, maybe even your grandkids someday ... and if the company that owned the Kindle were to kick the corporate bucket and render your copies of those books not only unreadable (once you can't transfer them to a Kindle XXVII Next Generation Turbo because that product died on the vine along with the company that manufactured it) ... what do you do with your decades-long investment in e-books? See where I'm going with this??

What's in a book?

Are books a set of pages, magnetized digital media, or commodity price points? Or are they vessels of culture? Both? Some are greater vessels than others, I suppose; so does it depend on the book?

There are a couple ways to look at how books as a commodity are being "reset" in the current, digital shuffle.

On the one hand, there's a war on to anchor consumers of book culture into proprietary format/device channels. You pay your chosen proprietor(s), you read your books, and you can continue to use them until the proprietor goes out of business. It may or may not be possible (or easy) to loan your book to a friend or family member, that's up to the proprietor who might well (as Amazon can today) exercise its prerogative to "amend any of the terms of this Agreement in our sole discretion." When your proprietor goes out of business and your device dies, you can buy the book again from another proprietor, or you can just ... let it go.

"Used e-book stores"? I'm guessing not. From the Kindle's current Terms of Service: "you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party." If publishers and retailers continue to have their way, e-book buyers will be paying for something that functions more-or-less as a privately-leased, pay-per-views or pay-per-device product.

If it's a book you're not likely to look at once you finish reading it, that's probably about the same as how you bought books like that in print, only you don't need to store them on a shelf or recycle them when you're done. If we're talking about books that are keepers, you may find yourself needing to 'renew' your ownership at some time or other by ponying up the purchase price again, perhaps again and again as reading technology changes -- more like a movie ticket than a printed book.

This is all pretty good for people who produce and sell content. They get paid repeatedly. By you, the reader.

On the other hand (or on the same hand but from a shifted perspective) e-books -- which could include the better part of "all books" as production and distribution channels for print dry up -- are being positioned to be sold like performances rather than as they are currently, as artifacts of material culture. Books that are worth keeping, worth re-reading, worth passing around a circle of friends or family, worth saving for when it's the right time for your kids ... well, you might be able to get the use of your original book purchase over time, and you might not. It's not going to be under your control so much any more, and it may depend on whether the proprietor from whom you bought the book in the first place is still in business, or if you're still sufficiently loyal to that proprietor to keep buying new devices as the old ones burn out.

Books published by a retailer -- a "vertical" market that companies like Apple and Amazon both hope to lock down -- may simply disappear once a proprietor goes out of business. And who will own the legal rights to republish those books? Who knows? Remember, those agreements may change at a publisher/retailer's "sole discretion." Maybe UPS and FedEx and the owners of very large warehouses will assume ownership of failed publisher/retailer assets, including publishing rights. They, after all, will be left holding the unpaid leases, and the overdue invoices for delivery of all those tubes of toothpaste and smart phones and shoes people ordered from the same on-line retailers that published and sold books.

What will the future bring?

Your crystal ball is as good as mine. I don't really know. I didn't write this post to answer that question.

I wrote this post to ask why, when book people worry about an e-book monopoly, are book people only worrying about the survival of bookstores and publishers, or about the recompense paid to editors, agents, and authors in exchange for their time, skill, and effort?

Those are important things to worry about, no doubt. I look forward myself to making more than a few bucks (or a couple copies of a literary magazine) for the hours and weeks and months I spend conceiving and revising and honing and polishing even a short story. I do have skin in that game.

But are the monetized aspects of books as important to society as a whole as the prospect of entrusting human culture to the sole ownership and control of a corporate monopoly that will surely go the way of the woolly mammoth, and probably sooner than later?

When we think about the future of books, I think we'd do well to keep the long-term future in perspective. Ready or not, here it comes.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Six things about e-books
Bookstores
Old books, new insights
Rock, Paper, Digital Preservation


Thanks to Evan Bench for the image of a stack of books at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris; to James Duncan Davidson via Wikipedia for the image of Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO; and to Akbar Simonse for his image of a crystal ball -- with books, even!

Sea changes in self-publishing at the 2012 SF Writers Conference

The most notable trend at this year's SF Writers Conference (SFWC) was the sea change in how industry professionals across the spectrum are talking about self-publishing.

Advice on self-publishing was fragmented and tentative at the past two SFWCs, in February 2010 and 2011, respectively. Some editors and agents suggested that a self-published book that sold 5000 copies might whet a publisher's appetite; others warned that less than 5000 copies sold would likely kill interest in a book; still others insisted that a book that has been self-published is a dead project as far as the New York houses are concerned ... but the track record of a self-published book might influence a decision to acquire a subsequent project -- for better or worse.

This past weekend, at the SFWC 2012 held at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, the story was nearly uniform.

Michael Larson, who co-organizes the SFWC and co-leads Larson-Pomada Literary Agents with his wife Elizabeth Pomada, said in an opening address, that "self-publishing may be the best option for you, if only to test-market your book, to see if it works."

Jennifer Enderlin of St. Martin's Press was unequivocal: There's no publisher who would be turned off by a self-published book that sold well.

Agent Dan Lazar: "I look at them [self-published books] as a manuscript." In fact, when I pitched my own novel, Consequence, to Mr. Lazar on Sunday, he had beside him a self-published (print) book written by a young writer I'd met two days before.

The voices of those who have been helping authors self publish for years & years (Joel Friedlander) or run self-publishing companies (Mark Coker of Smashwords, Brian Felson of BookBaby, Jesse Potash of PubSlush) are sounding louder.

In responding to a question during a panel discussion yesterday about the "stigma" of self-publishing, Joel Friedlander responded, "Stigma? It exists primarily inside unpublished writers" ... and Friedlander went on to assert that it is diminishing even there. That assertion resonates with the tenor of conversations I had with nearly all the writers I spoke with over the weekend.

"The times have changed," Mark Coker said, agreeing with Friedlander. He credited successful independently-published authors such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke (no, not the 17th century philosopher), who have set an example of the reach successful indie-publishing can attain. The Smashwords founder went on to assert that becoming one's own publisher has moved "from the option of last resort to the option of first resort for some writers."

Informative guidance on the what and the how of self-publishing are all over the intertubes, but a place to start for interested authors might be the guides written by Coker:

• The Smashwords Style Guide is focused on formatting requirements for publishing on that platform, but also gives a writer a clear idea of the kinds of complexities in a digital manuscript that would likely stymie conversion to e-book formats on any platform or using any conversion software.
• The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide offers 30 DIY marketing suggestions that are applicable to any writer; some of them will strike writers as obvious, some are less so.

Smashwords is all about e-books; PubSlush and BookBaby bridge the print- / e-book divide. For a novelist (a subspecies of writers of some personal interest), printed books are a connundrum: it's nearly impossible for an individual to place her/his books widely in brick-and-mortar stores. PubSlush claims it has distribution into brick-and-mortar stores through Ingram, a major distributor to independent bookstores, but it's a very new venture, independent bookstores are widely perceived to be on the ropes, and there's still the matter of convincing widely distributed buyers to place orders and keep a debut title on store shelves.

Does all that imply debut novelists ought to be thinking only in terms of e-book publication, at least until a book is proven in the e-marketplace? Some think so. I'm not so sure, but I also know I don't have room for too many cases of printed books in my livingroom.

Questions about what it all means for this unpublished novelist were ricocheting around my head all weekend at SFWC 2012. I suppose time will tell ... but in a world of diminishing advances and marketing budgets, a world in which only 7% of "traditionally published" books sell more than 1000 copies, it's fair to say that writers are taking a close look at value that large New York houses offer to authors in exchange for contracts that limit both royalties for and ownership of our work.

I can still say this: I would much rather have an agent to steer me through the thicket than go it alone. So far as I can tell, it's pretty much all quicksand out there.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Publishing ain't dead, but it's a deer in the headlights
What's that you say about self-publishing, sonny?

Thanks to Briar Press for the image of an iron Baby Reliance hand press.

Data mining the 2012 SF Writers Conference

Last February I posted on the topic of the annual San Francisco Writers Conference (SFWC). I'll be attending again this year, for the third time, and have begun to look over the (still-tentative) schedule of sessions posted last week.

The conference will be held on Presidents Day Weekend, 16-19 February, at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. There's an impressive array of speakers, and seventy-five currently scheduled sessions and keynotes. The conference has sold out, but there's a waiting list if you're inspired to make a last-minute attempt to attend. There are also SFWC Master Classes offered on Monday 20 February, for which enrollment is still open.

Like last year, after reading through the listed sessions I was curious about the big picture view of what's on offer at SFWC. Since I have last year's categorization readily at hand, from last year's blog post, I have compiled counts of sessions in the same categories (almost) that I used last year, for comparison.

(For the record, by "almost" I mean that this year I broke out poetry into its own category, rather than grouping it with "Miscellaneous" sessions; to keep the comparison honest, I broke out last year's poetry-oriented session count in the new category as well.)

Et voilà:

Category	2012 Sessions	2011 Sessions
The industry: how it works, how to work it	18	13
Promotion (platform building, etc.)	14	15
Fiction (adult or general)	8	15
Craft and practice of writing	7	9
Poetry	7	3
Self-publishing, E-books	6	4
Books for kids and young adults	6	7
Non-fiction	3	7
Miscellaneous	6	2
Total	75	73

Same disclaimer as last year: Others might count some of the sessions differently than I did, and some would come up with different categories. Since the 'raw data' is the publicly posted schedule, readers are free to come up with their own schemes ... I'd be interested to see other slices and dices in comments to this post.

Like last year, I've used Wordle to generate a word cloud (see image, click to enlarge) from the SFWC schedule. Input to this year's word cloud was limited to session names, so the cloud gives a sense of the content of the sessions without the clutter of the presenters' names (I included names in last year's Wordle). No offense intended to the presenters, natch.

The big trends I'm seeing this year include an increase by more than twofold in poetry-oriented sessions, significantly more about the rapidly-morphing publishing industry, and a better-than-last-year emphasis on the new and disruptive kidz in the class, self-publishing channels and e-books. Also, interestingly, a halving of sessions oriented specifically to fiction and specifically to non-fiction; and a slight decrease in sessions aimed at the craft and practice of writing.

Six of the eight members of my on-line writers' critique group are attending this year -- traveling from as far as the midwest and Europe -- and a seventh will be returning from overseas in time to meet us for a post-conference lunch. I'm really looking forward to spending time with my circle of working writers after a year of contact limited mostly to e-mail and Skype.

Like last year, my on-line critique group will be looking for new writers to join us -- and because we communicate via the intertubes it doesn't matter where in the world new members live. If you're attending and think you might be interested, please feel welcome to seek me out; or send an e-mail ahead of time (you can find contact info on my web site). Our group's activities and guidelines are pretty close to the same as those I summarized in my post last year, How to organize an on-line writers' group; please have a look if you'd like to know more.




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Data-mining the SF Writers Conference schedule
How to organize an on-line writers' group
Drafting vs. editing
Music, memory, nostalgia ... and the novel

Bookstores

I mentioned just the other post that I read a 1926 edition of Growth of the Soil recently, a 1917 novel that garnered the Nobel Prize for its author, Knut Hamsun. I picked up the book at Berkeley's Shakespeare & Co. Books, on Telegraph Avenue, an across-the-street neighbor of Moe's Books. Moe's -- which I've patronized since I was a university student -- is the source of, conservatively guesstimating, half the books I own.

I hope publishing-industry professionals will cover their eyes as I type this: I still buy a lot of books used.

Publishing people don't especially like the used book market, for reasons that are pretty obvious once you stop to think about it. The profit in the used book trade doesn't go to publishers, editors, agents, or even authors. It goes to readers who recycle their libraries, and to workers at and owners of used book stores. Used bookstores do leave customers with a bit of disposable income that may or may not find it's way into the coffers of a major publishing house. Probably not. Maybe a little.

I have no objection to buying new books, mind you. And I've bought a fair few, nearly every one from an independently-owned store.

Buying from an independent bookseller used to be a whole lot easier in my part of the world, when Cody's was still going strong. Cody's was a legendary bookstore that once did business in the same block of Telegraph Ave. as Moe's and Shakespeare & Co., three blocks south of the UC Berkeley campus. We're serious readers here in Berkeley, no surprise there. Thank heaven for Mrs. Dalloway's and Diesel and University Press Books and Books Inc.

But let's not gloss over Cody's. Why was Cody's legendary, anyway?

Well, leaving aside a magazine section of international scope and dazzling depth and obscurity; the shelves of literary magazines; the shelf-yards of poetry; a technical and technology section unmatched by any bookstore I ever saw anywhere; an enormous selection of travel books; more dictionaries than even a dictionary-fetishist like yours truly could possibly take home and consult; deep benches in history, sociology, and philosophy; cookbooks for every cuisine you'd never heard of; a spectacular spread of kids' books; and on, and on, and on ... leaving aside all that, there was the legendary second floor.

Upstairs is where Cody's hosted readings, many each week. There was a big room with bookshelves-on-wheels that were pushed to the walls when authors read. Hung high on the walls of this room were photos, a gallery above the bookshelves, all the way around. The photographs were portraits of well-known authors. Not random portraits of well-known authors. These were portraits of well-known authors who had given readings at Cody's. Tom Robbins, Norman Mailer, Bill Clinton, Ken Kesey, Jimmy Carter, Maurice Sendak, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Joseph Heller. Salman Rushdie dropped by once. You'd look around at the portraits and the hair would stand up on the back of your neck ... the ghosts of all those minds in that one place.

I once passed by Cody's on my way home to find lines around the block waiting to get into a reading. Hundreds of people. Maybe thousands, that's what the news articles said later. So who the heck was reading and signing books that day in 1990? I happened to come by as the revered author was being dropped off at the curb and escorted into the store. I looked. I did a double take. I nearly dropped my teeth: it was Muhammed Ali, the legend himself.

The last reading I attended at Cody's was Leslie Larson's, when she signed copies of her first novel, Slipstream. Leslie is a neighbor, she lives down the street. Andy Ross, the fellow who owned and ran Cody's from 1977 until 2006, is an agent now. I pitched my own novel manuscript to him at the SF Writers Conference last year, after thanking him for all the books he sold me. Nice guy. He passed on the chance to represent Consequence.

When Cody's closed, The New York Times reported it.

Is it obvious by now that I have a very very soft spot for bookstores?

Feeling as I do, what was I supposed to make of a colleague's bombastic comment earlier this month that he hates bookstores? Or, to be fair, he hates what bookstores have become.

This colleague went so far as to say he hopes they all close. All they are now is coffee shops, he said. And he's not even a tiny bit interested in buying a "new" book over which somebody else has already spilled coffee. This colleague is an avid reader, sharp as a razor. He reads technology books because he's a top-notch software engineer and reading technology books is what it takes to keep up one's game in that space. He reads history and economics because he's voraciously curious. So what does he do for books if he so loathes bookstores?

Two vowels: the A-word and an i-Thing. Yep. Amazon and an iPad.

O brave new world, that has such readers in't.

Do you like bookstores? Did you ever? Do you like them still? Do you still like them well enough to buy books there?






Thanks to Galaxy fm for the photo of Muhammad Ali signing an autograph for Pope John Paul II, shared via Flickr.

Music, memory, nostalgia ... and the novel

The other day I was writing a note (a.k.a. "e-mail") to a very dear friend, someone I've known since I was in high school. Without diving into the details, the correspondence gave rise to the usual, banal observation that old people like myself make -- you know, how much water has passed under so many bridges since blah blah blah.

As happens for many, I think, a song popped into my head as I typed, and I made reference to it: "Queue Fairport Convention," I wrote, tongue loosely implanted in cheek, and then pasted into the message a quickly-Googled link to a lovely acoustic rendering of Sandy Denny singing Who Knows Where The Time Goes. I found it on YouTube.



(If you like this performance, you can find it on the CD Classic Convention, one of a boxed set called Fairport Unconventional.)

Everyone who listens to music knows that it exerts a powerful pull on our emotions, and often evokes feelings and events and eras in our pasts ...with sometimes-disconcerting clarity. Nowadays, the ubiquity of MP3 players, iTunes, and the ability to find songs posted onto search-indexed sites like YouTube makes queuing up a song that pops into one's head a nearly-seamless experience. It's not even as much bother (!) as slipping a CD into the stereo, let alone setting up a vinyl disc on a turntable. Never mind the sound tracks provided to us by car radios and music-to-shop-by piped into retail stores of most every kind. Hearing recorded music is part and parcel of living in the present time, and the ability to shape one's own sound track has never been more broadly accessible.

So what does that mean to writers of fiction?

I mentioned in Monday's post, Craft and art: erasure and accent, that a question like this came up recently in my writers' critique group. One of our members referred to a singer & songwriter in a chapter she posted to the group; another of our number had never heard of the fellow (Gordon Lightfoot, if you didn't happen to read the Monday post). Others piled in, with one writer throwing lyrics to the cited Lightfoot song into our discussion thread for good measure. Some months before, that same writer included a 14-line stretch of lyrics from a song by Lily Holbrook in an early chapter of the novel-in-progress he's currently posting for critique.

I too excerpt lines from poetry, opera, and others' fiction in my own work. I already copped to inserting allusion to a painting into Consequence, my recently-completed novel manucript (check out Allusion in fiction, September 2010). Then there are the characters who chew over books or movies or TV shows they encounter, and that readers may have read or seen too.

There's much to consider here.

What's the right length of a quote from another author? Are fourteen lines from someone else's song too many? What about long runs of verse interleaved in a prose work, when the verse is the author's own creation -- as in J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, or, even more central to the work of fiction, A.S. Byatt's Possession? Does interleaved quotation distract from the flow of a story, or enhance its grounding in a culture?

I don't think there's any single answer to this sort of question. It always depends. It depends on the nature of the story, on the types of readers who will read it, on the nature and length of the quotation or allusion, on the familiarity or obscurity of the referenced material, on the smoothness or roughness of the insertion.

And to complicate matters further: How does the emergence of hyperlinked and/or multimedia e-books change the picture? As (some) books edge toward forms we now read on web pages (like blogs that link out to their subjects, or web pages that include a sound track), and readers adapt to or -- dare one imagine? -- even embrace these changes, how will the experience of reading books merge with the modern, mobile-web experience of hyperlinked life?

What do you think?



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Craft and art: erasure and accent
Aleksandar Hemon on Narrative, Biography, Language
Allusion in fiction
Drafting vs. editing

Slow reading: Tolstoy's War and Peace

You've heard of slow food, right?

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the movement:

Slow Food is an international movement founded by Carlo Petrini in 1986. Promoted as an alternative to fast food, it strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and encourages farming of plants, seeds and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem. It was the first established part of the broader Slow movement. The movement has since expanded globally to over 100,000 members in 132 countries. Its goals of sustainable foods and promotion of local small businesses are paralleled by a political agenda directed against globalization of agricultural products.

I mentioned in a January post that I'd just begun to read Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I mentioned that the novel is 1,213 pages long. I referred to "the hours it will take to read" this classic work of fiction.

That was four months ago. Almost five. See where I'm going here?

I've just finished Volume Two, Part II, which puts me about a third of the way through Tolstoy's masterwork. At this rate, I'm not even going to make it to the finish within a year, which is what I kind of sort of promised myself at the outset.

It's not that I'm not enjoying War and Peace. It keeps getting better. And I even like the pace of it, the discursive byways, the sharp portraits of characters that I suspect I'm never going to meet again. Meandering through Tolstoy, you can't miss the fact that 19th century Russians really loved to read.

I made myself a couple of promises when I started out, puzzling through the French opening in which Anna Pavlovna Scherer speaks her mind on the subject of the Antichrist, a.k.a. Napoleon. A couple of promises in addition, I mean, to the kind of sort of promise to get through the volume in a year.

First, I promised myself I would continue to read other fiction in parallel, because I knew there was no way I'd be able to put this ultra-long novel ahead of everything else on my list until I crossed the finish line. I've kept that promise.

Second, I promised myself I would keep making regular progress, however slowly, until I do finish the novel. I was determined not to set myself up as I had vis-à-vis the books I wrote about in September, in Unhappy reading experiences: Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives (still unfinished on my bedside shelf, bookmarked at page 309); or Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War (which I might or might not return to before I shuffle off this mortal coil). So far so good on that front too.

But.

A novel over the course of a year (or fifteen months at my current pace)? That's slow reading if ever there were such a thing.

One thing I wonder is whether I'd make better progress if I read on an iPad or a Kindle or a Nook. I may never know, I'm still pretty resistant to reading fiction on a screen. I have too many screens in my life. On the other hand, Tolstoy's 1,213 pages -- nearly 1,300 if you count the front and back matter -- are a compelling argument for as many books as you like in a 10 or 12 or 18 oz. device. I can assure you that it's a rare weekend morning when I throw Tolstoy into my bag and hike off to a café. I don't pack it into my carry-on when I travel. It's too darn big.

Still. I'm committed, at least for now, to "tree flakes encased in dead cow" (as William J. Mitchell described books as we've known them for the last several hundred years, in City of Bits).

Anyway, back to the question of slow reading:

Are there books you've stuck with over the long haul because you really wanted to read them but couldn't manage to plow straight through? Which books? Was it worth the time and effort in the end?


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Translation
Six things about e-books
Unhappy reading experiences

Six things about e-books

E-books are really really hot in the news (again), in significant part because of through-the-roof sales of Amanda Hocking's self-published novels ... which I am not going to write about because Kristin Nelson, Nathan Bransford, Lauren Abramo, and the author herself have already thoroughly deconstructed the hype.

Nope. I'm going to list five other things about e-books that have been news in the last several weeks, and that I think are worth a second thought. Here we go...


HarperCollins policy punishes libraries



As Publisher's Weekly explained last week, "HarperCollins -- citing the explosive growth of e-book sales --announced a new e-book lending policy beginning March 7 that will limit the length of its library licenses to a maximum of 26 loans per e-title." Librarians are furious, and Pimp My Novel blogger Eric explains how and why the publisher's policy is "completely nuts" in his post Panic! at the Library. (In a parenthetically related note, a former director of four public libraries who posts as "inHI" shared Thoughts on Public Library Funding this past Sunday on Daily Kos.)


Jon Carroll on what's dysfunctional about e-readers

Jon Carroll is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. On 2 March 2011 Carroll wrote about his experience using a Kindle. I like his columns in general, and this particular perspective was a good example of why that's so. In Mr. Carroll's own words:

"I've been using my Kindle for two months now. [...] I quite like it - it's light, it's readable, and the tabs and buttons are intuitive and easy to use. Still, it's really, in my view anyway, only good for fiction. I like the random facts and discursive paragraphs in nonfiction, in part because I can use them for my column. I did not realize until I started using the Kindle that the advantage of a real book is that I can find specific sentences and paragraphs quickly using only my brain. I remember where in the book the page is, and where on the page the quote is. This is not a matter of turning down pages or inserting ripped-up bits of paper; it's just remembering. Using that technique on a Kindle is essentially impossible. There are no page numbers, and no good way to mark passages. There's a certain sameness to the typography, a digital-versus-analog thing, that is wearying after a while. I do like how portable it is, how good it is for lines and waiting rooms, but it ain't a book. So, you know, now what?"


Are e-book sales going up? You betcha.

Here's a summary from the AAP (Association of American Publishers) report on ebook sales, from Publisher's Weekly on Feb 21: "The Association of American Publishers' domestic sales report for 2010 showed e-book sales jumping significantly from last year, rising 164.4%, with e-books bringing in $441 million at the 14 companies that reported sales, compared to $166.9 million in 2009. While all print categories were down slightly in 2010, children's/YA hardcover dropped the most, at 9.5%. The good news for reporting companies is that the significant growth in e-book sales was able to make up for the drops in print revenue, resulting in a 0.2% increase in combined print and e-book sales in 2010. E-book sales represented 8.3% of combined trade sales in 2010, up from 3.2% in 2009. E-book sales have jumped 623% since 2008, when sales from reporting companies were $61.3 million, a figure that represented about 1% of trade sales."


Random House comes around to the "agency model" for e-books

This one's a bit arcane for those who don't follow the minutae of how publishing works. The "agency model" means that a bookseller (like Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com) receives a commission on books sold at the price a publisher sets; this differs from the usual model for printed books, in which a vendor buys some quantity from a publisher and sets the price itself. Why is this important to e-book authors and buyers? Because it is a direct challenge to Amazon's lock on the market (including price-setting) for e-books, and aligns well with Apple's iBookstore business model. With his usual clarity, and the advantage of his insider perspective, Eric's The Agency Six provides a more complete explanation on his blog, Pimp My Novel. [UPDATE: About 20 min. after this post hit the intertubes, Nathan Bransford posted Why Some E-Books Cost More Than The Hardcover, which goes a long way toward explaining why bookselling looks so bloody confusing to book buyers in these perilous times.]


The iPad 2

The iPad 2 is more, thinner, lighter, faster, and -- we're told -- better that tatty old original iPad; it is an Apple device; and it may well push the boundaries of what people do with e-books. I don't plan to buy one, but Steve Jobs doesn't care because millions of others will -- starting tomorrow. Along with changes to the way books are sold (cf. the "agency model" note, above), the iPad 2 may prove a key element of Apple's strategy to challenge Amazon's dominance of e-book readers (i.e., the Kindle) and e-book sales.


Is the e-book revolution really revolutionary???

When curious about reality in all things bookish, it's generally a good bet to check on what Nathan Bransford has to say. Here's Nathan's 22 February take on reality in Do Record Stores Point the Way of the Future for Bookstores: "When you consider that the digital revolution happened in music a little over a decade ago, it's interesting to see what has happened to record stores since the rise of the mp3. Basically: carnage on a massive scale. A huge number of stores closed, especially national chains. [...] And an interesting fact to bear in mind is that digital revenue still has not surpassed physical."

Nathan cited a NY Times article of 20 Jan 2011, Digital Music Sales are Starting to Slow, Report Says: "Sales of digital music now account for 29 percent of record companies’ global revenue [...]"

He also cited a Dayton Daily News (Ohio) article of 20 Jan that asserted "Vinyl was the fastest-growing music format in an otherwise distressed year, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. The throwback format increased 14 percent, selling more copies in 2010 than any other year since SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991." The more things change...



Looking for a bottom line here? You probably can't find a straight one, but I'll propose this:

The book's not dead. Long live the book!


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Speed dating for the bookish
Losing libraries (guest post)
Book clubs in a box from the public library

Social media as author platform

In Data-mining the SF Writers Conference schedule I wrote, a week before the conference began, that I was "a bit disappointed" to see only a few scheduled sessions that touched directly on the topics of "e-books, the changing landscape of self-publishing options, and What That All Means to writers."

In the actual event, I was glad to partake of an abundance of sessions focused on giving authors and prospective authors guidance on What Is To Be Done to put any book in the hands of readers, whether the book is brought out by a New York publisher or self-published, whether it is distributed in paper or digital form.

The bottom line across all of these means of book packaging and distribution was this message: it doesn't much matter who publishes your book or how. In an age of savaged marketing budgets even for books brought out by the Six Sisters, promoting a book is largely an author's responsibility. Even a novelist needs a platform to succeed.

What does that mean?

As Christina Katz explains in her book Get Known Before the Book Deal, excerpted from Chuck Sambuchino's blog, "The wo[rd] platform simply describes all the ways you are visible and appealing to your future, potential or actual readership. Platform development is important not only for authors; it's also crucial for aspiring and soon-to-be authors. Your platform includes your Web presence, any public speaking you do, the classes you teach, the media contacts you've established, the articles you've published, and any other means you currently have for making your name and your future books known to a viable readership."

The first session I attended at SFWC, titled "Get a grip: be your own best promoter," was given by Teresa LeYung Ryan and Elisa Southard. I wasn't crazy about the style of this session, but I did find value in the core exercise.

Teresa and Elisa led the room through initial development of a "talking tagline": a way of stating concisely what an author claims s/he delivers to a reader. For a non-fiction author peddling an area of her/his expertise, the focus of such a statement is relatively easy to find: it's all about rock climbing, or building birdhouses, or paying lower taxes, or making a relationship work. For novelists, a "talking tagline" might be more elusive. The YA author sitting next to me agreed that it was easier for a novelist to describe what s/he is delivering in a particular book than over the course of many fiction projects. Nonetheless, the attempt to frame what a reader of Consequence would get out of my current novel kept running through my head as I attended other sessions and readied myself to pitch to agents on Sunday morning.

If LeYung Ryan and Southard focused on the message -- what that "viable readership" needs to hear -- sessions I attended that were led by Tee Morris, Rusty Shelton, and Stephanie Chandler focused on the means of getting that message out into the world. In a self-actuated, digitally linked 21st century, they all insisted that the means is social media.

Tee Morris and Rusty Shelton talked up Twitter in a session called "Finding Your Tweet Spot." I know, I know. I went anyway.

I've never quite gotten Twitter. I've also heard about a zillion others say the same thing -- though it's worth a nod to yesterday's blog post from literary agent and "query shark" Janet Reid, who tore into authors who make excuses for avoiding social media. At the conference, Tee and Rusty made a credible case that the ability to rapidly connect with others through a medium that encourages linking out to other social media (videos, blogs, music, any content you can imagine) provides a powerful platform for networking with potential readers and fellow-writers. Rusty offered an interesting pair of similes: if Twitter is a cocktail party, Facebook is a family reunion. If you're aim is to connect with people you know, Facebook's the place. If you're aiming to extend your circle, try Twitter.

I'm giving it a try. Tee Morris's book Teach Yourself Twitter in 10 Minutes is one way to get savvy about the platform; or check out the platform's on-line support and Emlyn's 10-tip guide to Twitter posted last week on Novel Publicity's blog (also follow the links she provides to past posts) ... thanks again to Janet Reid for pointing me to Emlyn.

(It was interesting to read a few days after hearing Rusty and Tee speak that Nearly Half of Americans use Facebook; Only 7% Use Twitter. The article, on Mashable.com, noted that "Twitter [...] is driven largely by so-called power users, and only 21% of registered users are actually active on the site. Another interesting and related Twitter usage stat: 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets." This is not necessarily inconsistent with the message I heard at SFWC. If authors, agents, editors, book bloggers, and especially people others trust & like to hear from are the people tweeting, those are the people with whom an author looking for readers wants to connect.)

Stephanie Chandler gave a presentation at SFWC titled "Storming Cyberspace" ... and a lot of what she had to say is outlined in her 22 February Authority Publishing post, Elements of an Online Marketing Plan for Authors -- a great 'consolation prize' for those who didn't have the chance to hear her speak. She echoed something Rusty said in the "Tweet Spot" session and emphasized again in another, titled "Digital Publicity": professional journalists and editors comb the web for stories & topical expertise, and you'll be glad if what they find is you ... because taking a ride in an established media vehicle, whether it's a popular blog or a well-circulated magazine or newspaper is another excellent way to get on readers' radar.

It was interesting to recognize something that happened to me late last year as proof of the fact that established, mainstream media editors are keeping a close eye on the intertubes. In November an old friend who works as an editor for a top-shelf magazine based in New York serendipitously found one of my blogs cross-posted on Daily Kos. He liked what I'd written, and jotted a quick e-mail to tell me so. This was during the middle of a weekday, East Coast time: he was working, not idly surfing. I didn't know you blogged, he wrote. I sent him a link to One Finger Typing. If my editor friend is combing the blogosphere in search of the zeitgeist, so are his peers.

[Of course -- keeping atop latest breaking trends -- the (somewhat silly) question whether blogging is over is in the air. Nathan Bransford asked it the week before last, in his post "You Tell Me: Have Blogs Peaked?" A few days later the NY Times was chewing over the same topic -- Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter -- which may or may not prove that the Grey Lady is following Nathan's blog. But take the NYT's conclusions with a grain of that Mashable.com article I linked to a few paragraphs back: "only 7% use Twitter." And then there's the damper thrown on rushes to judgment by Mathew Ingram, in his post "Blogging Is Dead Just Like the Web is Dead" (thanks to Nathan for that link).]


The self-promotion, the tracking of which channels are viable in a quickly evolving mediascape, the networking as if your literary future depends on it -- none of this is the sort of stuff I thought I was signing up for when I decided to write long-form fiction. But in a world of socially networked content, people turn more and more regularly (and exclusively!) to the internet for things to read, learn, and do. An author trying to attract a readership would be missing the boat if s/he failed to build an on-line presence.

As Janet Reid wrote yesterday, "There isn't any other option."







Thanks to GustavoG for the image of Flickr represented as a network of people sharing photos, circa 2005.

CORRECTION: This post originally misattributed Christina Katz's definition of platform to Chuck Sambuchino (who excerpted from Ms. Katz's book on his blog). Apologies for the error, which has been corrected as of 9 Mar 2011.

Publishing ain't dead, but it's a deer in the headlights

I attended the San Francisco Writer's Conference this weekend, met a lot of people, and learned plenty. I also had the unexpected pleasure and honor of falling into a hotel lobby conversation with keynote speaker Dorothy Allison, an author who I have admired since I read Bastard Out of Carolina soon after it was published in the '90s.

There was more at the conference to blog about than I'll ever get to, but I have to remark on an odd session on Saturday afternoon, when eight fiction editors from a mix of large New York houses and small presses introduced themselves to a crowd of some hundred or so writers and then fielded questions. There's a lot of anxious Kremlin-watching among authors and would-be authors in this era of e-books, major publisher consolidations, and mammoth bookstore chains going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Everybody wants to know what's next. Nobody has a clear view of the future.

The editors on the panel had a lot to say about what kinds of fiction they wanted to buy, whether authors should consider hiring a freelance editor, how self-publishing affects a book's prospects for New York publication (poorly) or a second book's prospects (a better story, depending). Good stuff, worth hearing.

Then talk turned to e-books. And here's where it got strange.

Most editors on the panel represented large New York houses. They were mostly thirty-somethings, I guessed, employed by the likes of Macmillan, Bertelsman AG, Simon & Schuster, et al. And when they answered questions about the shift in book format from paper to digital, they weren't copping to the fundamental upheaval in the industry. You can't actually blame them. They're only the tip of a huge, sinking iceberg, and they're not making decisions in the executive suites of the Six Sisters. They can't speak publicly in contradiction to their employers' Official Line. Not if they want to keep their jobs. I'm guessing they're all polishing CVs & working out back-up plans for when the next round of pink slips are handed out. I think I would be.

So the answers to writers' questions tended toward tweaking placement of deck chairs on the Titanic.

Piracy was a big issue for these editors. One trotted out the fascinating confession that publishers are worried Amazon might underreport the number of electronic books sold, since there's no physical check or balance on the retailer's unverified assertion. What we need, the editor mused, is some kind of 'phone home' record of a digital book being unlocked by an end-user. You know, like Microsoft has been printing on their software distribution media for fifteen years.

A couple of brave writers posed more pointed questions to break open the subject behind the subject. After one editor insisted that publishers were existentially bound to Amazon, however devious and untrustworthy Jeff Bezos might be, a writer asked "Why do you need Amazon? Couldn't publishers get out from under Amazon's thumb by setting up a distribution arm that the major New York houses can promote as a go-to destination for buying books without a middleman?"

The answers were breathtaking in their lack of inspiration. There was truth in each. But ... the pedantry!

"The beauty of Amazon," one editor said, "is that everything is there."

"Can you name ten books published by [insert name of any particular publisher here]?" asked another.

"Amazon handles the piracy issue," yet another explained.

And another was quick to imply that the Six Sisters would be busted for monopoly practices if they tried to move in lockstep.

Does any of this sound familiar? Wasn't there another media industry (hint: used to sell vinyl, then CDs) that has more or less crucified itself on the same sort of recalcitrance over new content formats and business models? I'm not claiming to have a prêt-à-porter solution to hand to NY publishers (if I did, maybe I could convince one to publish my own book and quit all the shilly-shallying around with agents and queries and whatnot).

But did anyone on the panel name alternate means to the NY Times bestseller lists or Amazon's recommender features to refer readers to books they might like? Goodreads? Library Thing? Facebook? Book bloggers? Book tweeters? No, no one did. Of course, none of these are an instant panacea. But nurturing and promoting a diverse ecosystem of distribution and recommendation channels has to be in publishers' best interest, right? To counter the weight of big, bad Jeff Bezos?

Why not invest in doing so?

Sure, any attempt to shift the status quo will be riddled with risk, though perhaps no more risk than sinking slowly (or not) into the tar pit of literary history. No, I don't understand the publishing business one one-thousanth as well as the least knowledgeable editor on that panel. I'm not a good businessperson in the first place. Yes, I get that Bezos has a lot of publishers by the short hairs because Amazon is a distribution channel that must be reckoned with. Yet it doesn't take Warren Buffett to see that publishers are taking refuge in sand castles as a tidal wave approaches.

Here's what editor Jennifer Joseph of of Manic D Press, also included in the panel, said of the publishing industry on Saturday: "This is the most revolutionary time since Gutenberg invented the printing press." Here's something else she said: "We're trying to fit great literature into a different way of living" [i.e., into a way of living that increasingly fails to make time or attention for books].

And what did Dorothy Allison say in her keynote the day before? In her slow Southern drawl she told the room that "publishing ain't dead." Allison was looking at the big picture, considering the simple truth that everything changes. She spoke of attending an historians' conference decades ago, before all the intertubes were fully screwed together, and hearing the academics describe changes coming down the pike exactly like the ones we're experiencing now. As she put it, "historians think long." But just because publishing is changing doesn't mean it's finished. At least not for those who adapt to its evolution.

Jennifer Joseph and Dorothy Allison -- seasoned women who have been around the block more than a time or seven -- sounded like they were grappling with things that are actually happening. Certainly more so than most of the editors representing their very large, very slow-to-respond publishing houses. Or so it seems from the oblique angle this writer has on the industry.

I have nothing against very large publishing houses. I don't think paper books are going away. I would like to see my work published by one of the New York houses sooner than later. But it's not confidence-inspiring when editors from the Six Sisters pretend they're dealing with a little brush fire burning in the far corner of Podunk ... when everybody can see that the brush fire is an inferno and it's burning in the heart of literary New York.





Thanks to wwphotos for the image of Jeff Bezos from the photographer's flickr stream.