Publishers Are Their Own Worst Enemy

We know [below] that POD titles are increasing and traditional print is dropping.

So, what makes POD attractive? Cover prices that are reduced. Royalties that accrue to the author in greater amounts. And, wider distribution through “long-tail” marketing. (A single outlet, like Amazon, carries hundreds of thousands of books, while a mass retailer is limited by store size.)

The "economic winter" that leaves traditional publishers shivering means they've virtually eliminated marketing and promotion for all except major (i.e., money-making) authors. At the same time, publishers continue to hold sacred the Depression-era practice of accepting the return of any book that the retailer cannot sell. This strange marketing practice began as a way to ensure that retailers would continue to stock new titles. In 2005, the Association of American Publishers reports that of the 1.5 billion books shipped, 455 million were returned to publishers — 31 percent! — at the publishers’ expense.

Would General Electric ever consider shipping refrigerators to Wal-Mart under these consignment conditions? Or Ford Motors to its independent dealers?

Publishers are scrambling to meet the new paradigm by discounting, spiffing (Sales Performance Incentive Fund) the big box outlets, and flirting with new techniques. Textbook publishers are raising prices to outrageous heights while introducing CD workbooks on three-year revision cycles to reduce the effect of students reselling their old texts. Price cards, like Borders or Barnes & Noble “memberships,” are resulting in a barrage of e-mail solicitations and discounting. And prices continue to rise, with e-books often marketed at over 80% of the hardcover price.

Pricing is the new battlefield. In October 2010, I searched Barnes & Noble for Special Projects in Calamity Physics by Marisha Plessl. This 2006 novel had been an immediate bestseller. Now, Amazon is discounting the trade paperback down from $15.00 to $10.50, while offering a Kindle download for $12.99. Barnes & Noble listed the trade paper at $10.80 and the e-book at $12.99.

Take a deep breath and think about it. It doesn’t take a wizard to know something’s wrong when the price of a digital product approaches or exceeds the cost of a formatted, typeset, printed, bound and shipped version that is subject to returns.

Dipping another Toe into the Rapids

Borders has declared chapter 11 bankruptcy, allegedly because e-books are stealing their cake. More than a quarter million books were published last year, but I betcha one third go back to the publishers to be pulped. In fact, the number of POD (print on demand) titles published in the U.S. increased 200 percent in 2008. In the same period, the publication of traditional titles dropped 3 percent to 275,232. And –zowee! – this week’s New York Times Book Review bestseller list has been expanded to include e-book sales.

Events are moving so fast that my head spins. Scrolling through my Palm Tungsten makes me feel like a caveman making fire with two sticks while my kids are equipped, figuratively, with Zippos. Should I buy an iPhone with a GPS app, Web access and tinny little iTunes? I rarely call people, so the telephone aspect is irrelevant, but then, younger people eschew e-mail in favor of texting. And I cherish my CDs of Billie Holiday and Chet Baker.

But maybe I can adapt slowly, the way dinosaurs turned into birds. Our WPIX-TV commentator said last night that everything is devolving onto the Internet – and now someone in Congress wants to give the President unilateral control to shut down the ‘net if there’s an emergency.

Wordsmith, author and webmaster Jon Gibbs [http://www.acatofninetales.com/] talked with our writers’ group Tuesday, and we were all enthralled with his explanation of how book marketing works (and what doesn’t work), social networking as a merchandising tool, and technological proficiency as a must-have for any writer. There went my head spinning again, and I thought I was successfully tracking developments in the publishing world.

Perhaps if I just pick at the new, digital world, the way I ate my mother’s cauliflower, I’ll see what works and what doesn’t. And I won’t need to throw away my Palm PDA just yet. Or eat cauliflower.

A Big To-Do List Staring at Me

Having a lot of chores beats the alternative: terminal tedium. I’m a third of the way through the late Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes, a neophyte’s self-published novel, and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid … I write our church newsletter and am slogging through a draft of the annual report, hoping to get this off to layout in a few days … I really want to begin researching American drinking habits in pre-Colonial days. (By the 1790s an average American over 15 years old drank just under six gallons of absolute alcohol each year.) … There’s an intriguing new writing prompt up at Every Day Fiction (These teasers are like putting jet fuel in my Zippo.) ... I need to brave the frigid attic to dig out a book that has a map of the Nabateans, Judeans, Samaria – crazy little kingdoms it would be good to know more about.

However … I did blog some new material about Holling and Lucille Holling working on a hotel mural in 1929 and illustrating a series of Indian postcards in 1941. (More on this archeological ephemera at http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com/) … I spent too much time today responding to a high schooler wanting to interview me on the King Philip’s War paper he’s writing … I framed one and hung two pictures today … sent a short book review to the Asbury Park Press … continued waiting with bated breath for two stories to be published.

But the quotidian chores interrupt. Out with the garbage, in with the mail. Time to eat, time to sleep. And if I forgo the cocktail hour then I figure the terrorists have won.

A Helluva Year Revisited

I mentioned a few wins in the blogs below. Here, for my own record-keeping, is a more complete benchmark of the year gone by:

It’s been satisfying to meet with fellow writers—some seasoned and many neophytes—twice monthly at the Manchester Writers’ Circle. Reading a work aloud and receiving comments on it is a valuable way to review, proof and critique ones own work. We now have our own blogsite, too, at http://sites.google.com/site/manchesterwriters/home.

Publishing short stories and articles are gratifying and personally validating. The works that saw print or appeared online include “Epitaph with Flowers”(February), “Girl Talk” (March) and “Misunderstood Identity” (March 2011) to Big Pulp; “Gothic Revival” (January and later included in its Editor’s Choices), and “Angel in My Coffee Cup” (August) in Bewildering Stories with a probable sale there of “Fish Stories and the Mermaid”; “Footsteps” in Everyday Weirdness (December); “Last Year’s Icon” (February) and “Day of Moving Hell” (July) in Every Day Fiction; “Joined at the Heart” (December) as Gumshoe Review’s first piece of fiction; five short analyses and commentaries on writing to Flash Fiction Chronicles; “Paying the Devil” was awarded 6th place winner in the 79th annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition (October); “Chain of Events” in Over My Dead Body! (July); and “Play Date” in Pif magazine (October).

"Philip's War: America's Most Devastating Conflict," posted to Military History Online, reprinted in The American Museum magazine (May); “Stanley at Shiloh: An Improbable ‘Indiana Jones’” published by Military History Online (July); “There’s More to Jersey Wines than You Think” in two community newspapers (August and September); and eight short humor pieces to The Short Humour Site.

Along the way, a couple of other articles were reprinted and five “flash” reviews were published by the Asbury Park Press. Reading wasn’t stinted, and I plowed through 27 books, three of which were e-books on my new Nook.

One of my favorite children’s-book authors is Holling Clancy Holling, and I got a tip of the hat from the HCH museum in Leslie, Mich., to build a semi-official blogsite as homage to this author, illustrator and naturalist, at http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com/.

It's All Gonna Get Better

It’s been a helluva year for writers, or as Mickey Spillane might put it, “as tough as a Times Square babe with one hand on your wallet and the other hailing a taxi.” But we can trust that the New Year will be better.

I hope that marketers will stop naming products and companies with exclamation points (Yahoo!) or lower case aberrations (eBay), or changing their name for no good reason (Wal-Mart to Walmart).

…That new words will continue to be coined, like locavore (buying locally grown food), Obamamaniac (self-explanatory), fang-banging (sex with a vampire), and shovel-ready (infrastructure projects ready to spend stimulus money). My favorite: googlegänger, for the person always looking up his/her name. And who knew the distorted letters I puzzle through to respond to a blog is called a captcha? (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). But I still don’t know what you mean when “you get the jones for a pizza.”

…That writers will kill needless adjectives and adverbs that allow them to be lazy. (And that young wannabes will learn what adjectives and adverbs are!)

…That young people and the intellectually challenged will stop signing off with lol and consign smiley faces to the archeological midden heap of bad communication. I’m tempted to exclaim, “WTF!” and hit the delete button.

…That reporters everywhere will remember to spell minuscule, that media is plural, and that the Smithsonian is an Institution.

…That elected officials not proclaim ordnances (subject to a statue of limitations), and that Congressional reconciliation does not mean head banging. Are they aware that election results is an anagram for lies—let’s recount?

Peace and good health to you and yours. May 2011 be a prosperous year in all ways. May your editors be benevolent and your proofreaders aware that a living language is not prescriptive.

Those Chores That Interfere

Why should I bitch because I ran ragged today through Costco, Bed Bath and Target? (“It’s good to be an aAmerican!”) No, all the chores are done, the present is almost made for our 3-year-old grandson, the larder is full, and the bank account still solvent. Least of my worries should be my writing.

I had an idea recently about metaphors because people kept telling me, “Jesus, where do you get those images?” (Well, really, it was one image--‘Her breasts were like two supermarket chickens reincarnated into flying eagles, threatening to escape her skimpy red tank top.’ It made me think that imagery is key to much of my writing being memorable. The reflection led to a 600-word piece for Flash Fiction Chronicles, up Dec. 13, at http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/keys-to-memorable-writing/#comments. In the process, I mention similes, synecdoche, zeugma, and chiasmus. Tell that to your 5th grade English teacher!

And, did I mention why I have that benevolent smile on my face as the holidays approach? “Joined at the Heart” was published by Gumshoe Review in its December 2010 issue, at http://www.gumshoereview.com/php/Review-id.php?id=2594. This was Gumshoe’s first venture into fiction. I have been peddling this story—satire that is near and dear to my heart—since 2005. Thank you, Gayle Surrette, editor of Gumshoe, for taking a chance on this piece of fiction. I remind people that a cynic is just an idealist with experience.

Book Burning Party; Bring Your Own Matches

Something on NPR reminded me that this is the date Joseph Goebbels stood in the Reichplatz helping to burn 20,000 books. At the same time, our Sunday paper headlined the fact that book banning is accelerating.

It’s Fahrenheit 451 all over again. Parents Against Bad Books in Schools (www.pabbis.org) has a list if you’ve got the matches. The organization states, “Bad is not for us to determine. Bad is what you determine is bad.” Ergo, every reader should bring his/her own criteria to the bonfire. There is no quality except that which you determine.

They recommend starting with Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Continue with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Capote’s In Cold Blood, Doctorow,s Ragtime, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and that perennial hazard to mental health, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

Oh, I can’t go on! No, wait, I can. Happily, we still celebrate Banned Books Week. Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Banned Books Week is endorsed by no less an organization than the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

Can’t happen in your town? Go to http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/Mapofbookcensorship.html and click on what’s happening in your neck of the woods. Down the road from us in Vineland, NJ, Bill Aquado and Richard Newirth's Paint Me Like I Am had its pages literally torn out by the principal of Landis Intermediate School. The pages contained Jayson Tirado's poem 'Diary of an Abusive Stepfather' and were ripped out after one parent raised concerns over the age-appropriateness of the poem's content.