Professional Documents
Culture Documents
London
F o r t h e l a t e s t f a i r c o v e r a g e , g o t o w w w. p u b l i s h e r s w e e k l y. c o m a n d w w w. b o o k b r u n c h . c o . u k
he Digital Minds
Conference 2012
kicked off the
London Book Fair
with a slate of
engaging morning keynotes that
put the future of publishing in
context with its past, writes
Andrew Albanese. From its new
home in the QEII Conference
Centre, a full house gathered for
what Fair Director Alistair
Burtenshaw called the LBFs
accelerator conference.
In the opening keynote, Jim
Griffin, MD of OneHouse LLC,
spoke of what he called Tarzan
economics in the digital age,
where companies cling to the
vine that keeps them off
the jungle floor, while always
reaching for the next. But the
greatest battle publishers face
is not with pirates, Griffin
said, but with the limited
time and budgets of consumers.
New technology leads to
new culture, he continued,
branding Gutenberg a pirate
as well as the Library of
Alexandria, and the makers of
piano rolls. The lesson is that
when actual control begins
to fail us, we do not answer
with more control.
Griffin predicted a shift to
more actuarial economics, for
publishing, citing the collective
models by which money is
paid into pool and distributed,
such as with radio, pressing the
need for better, comprehensive,
international rights registries.
Culture is too important to be
left to the tip jar, he pressed.
He also spoke of the challenges
and opportunities of dealing in
emerging global economies,
especially the BRIC countries,
suggesting that extending
an open hand is better than
a closed fist.
Visit us at
Stand G470
has gone down, despite (or
because of) DRM-free ebooks.
Redmayne said the Pottermore
experience is an example of
how publishers can increase
their relevance in the digital
agebut comes with a key
challenge on the marketing
side: shifting from marketing
to the trade, to marketing
to consumers.
For more on Charlie Redmaynes
Pottermore experience, check out
Tuesdays Show Daily, page 10.
3/4/12 09:52:39
16 APRIL 2012
FAIR DEALINGS
www.bookbrunch.co.uk
UP has reached an
agreement to produce
a Chinese edition of
its 29-volume New Grove
Dictionary of Music and
Musicians.
Hunan Literature and Art
Publishing House will publish
the bible of music reference in
mainland China, complete
with bilingual jackets and tables
of contents. Grove dates back
to 1878; New Grove was
published in 1980 and revised
in 2000, before passing from
Macmillan to OUP. It contains
more than 29,000 entries from
6,000 contributors covering a
wide range of musical styles.
Catherine Johnson-Gilbert,
OUPs Academic Rights
Manager, said: This agreement
has the potential to greatly
enhance music scholarship
in China. OUPs academic
publishing is increasingly
popular in the country, and for
such a large reference work to
be produced for the market is a
fantastic achievement.
Mr Sun Jia, Editor-in-Chief at
Hunan, said: My company
hopes that this agreement will
start the exchange and cooperation between music publishers of
different countries and promote
the flourish and development of
music publishing in the world.
Exhibit A
MD for C&W
www.publishersweekly.com
16 APRIL 2012
FAIR DEALINGS
Haus extends
into Annex
Haus will launch a series of
hybrid books on 23 April
with Shakespeare in Kabul,
a memoir about the 2005
staging of Loves Labours
Lost. It includes an original
manuscript of the play in Dari,
notes by Assistant Director
Qais Akbar Omar, co-author
of the book with playwright
Stephen Landrigan, interviews with the Afghan cast,
and photographs. For Alex
Millers The 13thTablet (July),
the additional information
will focus on the archaeological research underpinning
the thriller.
The material in the Haus
Annex can be downloaded
free through a QR code or a
link and is available in PDF,
epub and mobi formats.
Aida Bahrami will be on
the Haus stand (K700) to
explain and demonstrate.
UK debut for
NBN Fusion
US-based distributor
National Book Network is
rolling out its Fusion services
to UK clients via NBNi, based
in Plymouth.They range from
ebook creation to global
distribution, and 50+ clients
use some of the options in
the US. NBNi is also offering
PoD and digital short runprint options to UK clients.
NBN afliate Rowman &
Littleeld will use LBF to talk
up the relaunch of its Jason
Aronson Judaica list,
dormant for some years,
under Publisher Julie Kirsch.
Aronson will be publishing
three titles this year, rising to
10 in coming years.The list
will be all-embracing,
including academic and
trade titles and launches in
August with SurvivingYour
Bar/Bat Mitzvah: An Ultimate
Insiders Guide.
Directors welcome
Alistair Burtenshaw
www.publishersweekly.com
muniCh 1972
tragEdy, tError, and triumPh at thE oLymPiC gamEs
by david CLay LargE
sCarECroW PrEss
blowing smoke
Clash of Crowns
rEthinking thE War on drugs Without Prohibition and
WiLLiam thE ConquEror, riChard LionhEart, and
ELEanor of aquitainEa story of bLoodshEd, bEtrayaL,
rEhab
and rEvEngE
by miChaEL J. rEzniCEk
By Mary Mcauliffe
sCarECroW PrEss
rlPg ebooks
16 APRIL 2012
NewYork
One of the big books from Baror
International is the new one
from Edgar winner Joe R Lansdale,
Janklow
& Nesbit
will be
talking
up Frank
Langellas
Dropped
Names
(Harper),
which is
Jung Chang
part memoir and part
account of the actors clandestine
meetings with a collection of
bold-faced names.
William Morris Endeavor
is excited about The Witch of
Perugia (on submission in the US)
by Douglas Preston and Mario
Spezi (the duo behind the true
crime bestseller The Monster of
Florence), an account of the
murder of English exchange
student Meredith Kercher and the
ensuing Italian trial of American
Amanda Knox.
From Jean V Naggar Agency
theres Jillian Cantors Margot
(Riverhead), which is in the
vein of Loving Frank and Sarahs
Key and imagines the life
Anne Franks older sister,
Margot, had she also not died
in a concentration camp.
A notable title the Jane
Rotrosen Agency is selling is
Mark Sullivans debut, Rogue, an
international thriller featuring a
Robin Hoodlike hero.
A hot property Trident Media
Group is touting is the new
untitled work by the author of
Debt (Melville House) and one of
the organizers of the Occupy Wall
Street movement, David Graeber
(Spiegel & Grau).
One of the big books Writers
House is bringing to London
is the new novel from Jonathan
Tropper, One Last Thing Before
I Go (Dutton), which the agency
says is a laugh-out-loud/breakyour-heart family story about a
man named Silver, whose ex-wife
is marrying a really nice guy and
whose Princeton-bound daughter just confided in him shes
pregnant.
Among the big titles from the
Wylie Agency is Don Winslows
The Kings of Cool (Simon &
Schuster), a new literary thriller
from the author of Savages.
www.publishersweekly.com
DIGITAL ZONE
Key Publishers
eBook Stores
Powered by Qbend
V 805
USA
Wolters-Kluwer Law and Business
PPI
Humanics Publishing
Canada
DC Education Publishing
Spain
BlueBottleBooks
LID Editorial
The Netherlands
Eleven Publishing
Sweden
Sderpalm Publishing
India
Unicorn Books
Sterling Publishing
Studium Press
eBook Sales
Multi-channel Publishing
Custom Publishing
Presentation
Today / 16-Apr
DIGITAL THEATER 1
10:30 AM
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4/7/12 10:46:49 AM
16 APRIL 2012
DIGITAL SHOWCASE
It worked
It was a lot of effort, but the DIY route had
some awfully fun moments. The production
of the craft-object, limited edition unique
hardcovers reacquainted me with my past
experiences in prepress and publishing, and
gave me an opportunity to interact with
some of my greatest fans. And the money
was substantial, if not life-changing. The
donation button on my site worked a
treat, especially after I stopped calling it a
donation and started calling it a nameyour-price.
I also had the chance to work at length
with Lulu, an outfit I found to be responsive,
technology-driven and innovative. They are
presently the only PoD service I know of that
accepts changes to the books interior
between each printing, which is a primary
advantage of PoD, surely. My Lulu editions
are expunged of typos as soon as they are
pointed out, with footnotes crediting each
typos discoverer on the affected page. Other
PoD publishers, like Ingrams Lightning
Source and Amazons CreateSpace, use
a cumbersome process to replace book
interiors that is too unwieldy.
www.bookbrunch.co.uk
Cory Doctorow
Mistakes
I made some expensive mistakes. One was
my decision to mail review copies ($13 per
copy) from my office in the UK, instead of
contracting with someone in the USA to
receive the books from Lulu and send them
from there.
Another expensive mistake was
my assumption that Boing Boing, the very
popular blog I co-edit, would raise sufficient
publicity for the book. I promoted the book
several times through Boing Boing, but there
were very few sales directly attributable to
those posts. On the other hand, favourable
reviews on other sites, from the Wall Street
Journal to small blogs, generated lots of sales
and donations. My takeaway even my fans
like to have external validation from a thirdparty reviewer before ordering a book.
A related mistake was underestimating
the friction associated with setting
up accounts with new retailers. Far more
readers have bought books on Amazon than
on Lulu, for example, and the feedback I
received from many readers was that the
hassle of setting up a new account with Lulu
was enough to cause them to abandon the
transaction partway through.
This problem was even worse for libraries,
a traditional source of income for me,
because its transcendentally hard for public
institutions to establish new retailer
accounts. Thus I found myself also signed up
with Ingrams Lightning Source programme,
even though it charges fairly high fees,
because practically every library has an
Ingram account already.
Price matters
PoD printing turns out to be expensive. I
know that everyone says that paper and
shipping are not a major part of the clearing
price of published books, but I suspect that is
only true if you buy paper by the forest, ink
by the barrel and already have a titanic network of warehouses. For all the PoD
options, it is nearly impossible to print a 360page book at a price that is competitive with
a comparable, traditionally published one.
Administration
The remaining major challenge for DIY
writers is the administrative overhead. I
presently retail With a Little Help through
six bookstores; three PoD wholesaler/retailers; an ebook wholesaler (BookBaby); on my
own site; and my own limited-edition, personal fulfilment business. While no one of
these presents a major difficulty, collectively
they take up a fair whack of time.
Even with just one book in circulation, my
imprint generates about as much correspondence, filing and time-sucking as it would
with 20 or 30 titles. The economy of scale
would work in my favour if I wanted to do
this for a living, but it works against me as a
one-off experimenter. On the other hand, all
that administration gets easier with time.
With practice, I have whittled the administration down to a few hours a month.
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16 APRIL 2012
DIGITAL SHOWCASE
GAMA rays
s we walk the halls of the London Book Fair this year most
of us will pick up the familiar
thread of conversation with
our publishing friends about
recent industry developments, writes Casper
Grathwohl. And these days those conversations inevitably turn to the handful of technology/information giants who seem in control of our fate: Did you see the Google
announcement? How are you handling
the Amazon/Apple tension?
Outsell recently referred to these large
businesses collectively as GAMA (Google,
Apple, Microsoft and Amazon), and the
image it brings to mind of a radioactive green
juggernaut smashing its way through the
world nicely captures our collective anxiety
about their destructive power. As the chatter
about GAMA reaches the farthest corners of
publishing, Im struck by how regularly it
devolves into an us versus them paradigm
the ways in which we can fight off these
powerful usurpers who are challenging our
rightful place in the digital world. But it is
clear that publishers in combat with new
media giants is a fundamentally unhelpful
approach to the problem. We need to
develop new constructive ways to view the
landscape, and I suggest looking to the information continuum for guidance here.
Validators
Caspar Grathwohl
MORE
DIGITAL
OPTIONS
Stand H400
ingramcontent.com
16 APRIL 2012
DIGITAL SHOWCASE
Figure 1
www.bookbrunch.co.uk
16 APRIL 2012
DIGITAL SHOWCASE
www.bilbary.com
Contact:
amy.riach@bilbary.com
kate.thomsen@bilbary.com
www.bookbrunch.co.uk
www.publishersweekly.com
Visit us:
Visit
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Court Two in
Earls Court Two in
the Digital Zone
the Digital Zone
Stand: W960
Stand: W960
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16 APRIL 2012
Peter James
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www.bookbrunch.co.uk
www.publishersweekly.com
SHARJAH
INTERNATIONAL
BOOK FAIR
Gateway to the Arab
Publishing world
VISIT US AT
LONDON
BOOK FAIR
Stand U105
16 APRIL 2012
Confused logic
Hence in this swoop of mangled statistics,
twisted linguistics and confused logic, publishers, film studios, record labels and the
creative geniuses they invest in are faced with
Richard Mollet
a serious challenge. British creative industries are world leaders in every sphere. The
export performance of British publishers is
the best in the world. In any rebalancing of
the economy away from a reliance on financial services, creativity should be top of the
list as a sector to nurture which makes it all
the more stunningly weird that policy development should be so focused on weakening
the very thing that makes it all possible: intellectual property. Some reform of copyright
to ensure that it is in keeping with the modern digital landscape is, of course, necessary
(orphan works and library archiving are two
obvious areas). But radical reform is a dangerous tack. It is possible to break lots of
eggs, but fail to make an omelette.
Many of us, in engaging with government
on this, have been on the receiving end
of soothing words. Dont worry, we are
told, we only want to widen exceptions to
copyright where that wont harm your ability to license. But the comfort falls short.
www.bookbrunch.co.uk
White Paper
The consultation closed on 21 March and
the government is now in the process of
chewing through the responses and evidence
it received. It is due to publish a White Paper
sometime later in the year. The debate will
rumble on through the year with an increasing number of UK Parliamentarians quizzical at how it can be that one of the most vital
(in both senses of the word) sectors of the
Fully integrated
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16 APRIL 2012
A beginners guide
Paul Richardson identifies 20 things you should know about publishing in China
1. A big economy getting bigger?
For centuries up to 1895 China had the
worlds largest GDP and will reclaim pole
position within a decade or so. Predicted
export-led growth of 8% in 2012 may be
knocked back by recession in Europe, and
China will be overtaken by India in terms of
population, but with 1.3 billion people,
97% literate, and GDP per head running at
$7,600 a year and rising (twice Indias level),
it remains the main engine for growth in the
world economy.
3.Well connected?
Yes, but the best is still to come. Its easily the
largest internet market in the world with 513
million netizens (but that is only 38% of
the population) and 916 million mobile
phones (400 million to go). The young,
urban and educated are totally turned on to
the digital world, and almost everyone else
aspires to be.
Paul Richardson
Meyer etc.) do hugely well, as do media tieins. In 2011 the top cinema box office takes
went to Transformers: Dark of the Moon,
Kung Fu Panda 2 and Pirates of the
Caribbean: On Stranger Tides ahead of the
top Chinese productions The Flowers of
War and Flying Swords at Dragon Gate.
But the book market is not all lowest
common denominator stuff: The Unbearable
Lightness of Being and, for children,
Charlottes Web appear regularly in the bestseller lists. And China has its own excellent
BookScan look-alike, Beijing Open Book.
You can subscribe to an English-language
version and see that bestsellers in China have
a much longer life than in the West.
16 APRIL 2012
ISBN: 978-1-936332-10-6
ISBN: 978-0-9843081-9-4
ISBN: 978-1-936332-05-2
ISBN: 978-1-936332-22-9
ISBN: 978-0-9843081-3-2
ISBN: 978-0-9843081-0-1
ISBN: 978-0-9843081-2-5
ISBN 978-1-936332-37-3
ISBN: 978-1-936332-07-6
ISBN 978-1-936332-25-0
ISBN: 978-1-936332-46-5
ISBN: 978-0-9843081-1-8
ISBN: 978-0-9843081-4-9
ISBN: 978-1-936332-00-7
ISBN: 978-0-9843081-5-6
For a catalogue and to see more of our titles, visit our foreign rights
managers: Montreal-Contacts / The Rights Agency, Stand E320
BYB Ad4.indd 1
4/8/12 6:14 PM
16 APRIL 2012
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16 APRIL 2012
Organic growth
For the last 20 years we have grown
the business, slowly and organically,
assiduously avoiding the venture capital
route, which was so much the vogue in the
1980s and 90s, and which eventually took so
many small publishers down. We almost
went under ourselves in 2001 when our
UK distributor went into liquidation owing
us 150,000, while a year later our US
distributor pulled down the shutters owing
us a further 30,000. We never saw a penny
from either, but we battened down the
hatches and, with the support of our printer
Biddles, worked our way back from the
brink to the present backlist of 200 titles.
And here we are now, 30 years after
our first fax machine with 37 books
available as ebooks.
Anne Dolamore is Publisher at Grub Street.