Life as a Movie Star

Fame is a difficult burden to bear. I know.

Several times I’ve been asked to be interviewed for videos InterVarsity Press has done to highlight new books. Most recently, I have a starring role for the piece on John Stott’s fiftieth anniversary edition of Basic Christianity.

It had over 250 views on youtube.com in its first month, until I told my extended family about it and it rocketed up to over 260. So you can see the kind of load I am under.

By comparison JibJab’s “Time for Some Campaignin'” has over 1,250,000 views in two months. Now you know why the paparazzi are after me the way they are.

After we showed the Stott video at an all-office meeting, exactly zero people came up to me and told me what a great job I did. And zero told me I had room for improvement. How am I to cope with such an overwhelming response?

I also make a cameo appearance in the video Heart. Soul. Mind. Strength. That one isn’t even on youtube. A good thing too! Who knows what invasions of privacy I might suffer if it were!

Fame, however, is fleeting. I am prepared to deal with that too.

The Perfect Recipe for a Modern American Publisher

One of my favorite quotes about publishing comes from John Tebbel’s Between Covers. Tebbel recounts a conversation Mark Twain had with Frank Nelson Doubleday, in which Twain offered “the perfect recipe for a modern American publisher”:

Take an idiot from a lunatic asylum and marry him to an idiot woman and the fourth generation of this connection should be a good publisher. (p. 138)

As Tebbel’s book chronicles, there is a long, tension-filled and hilarious history of the relationship between authors and publishers. Many examples of strong, constructive and congenial relationships populate the past as well. I suspect that publishing is no more subject to these dynamics than any other endeavor involving more than one human being.

If it is more volatile, perhaps it is due to the often subjective nature of publishing. Predicting sales (and thus advances and royalties) is an art, not a science–thus it can be a point of tension. Knowing how and when to revise a manuscript is an art, not a science–thus also a point of potential tension.

Books have also been compared to being an author’s “baby.” There is a protective, parental concern that can hover over this toddler. As a parent’s identity is wrapped up with what children say or how they perform, the same can be true with an author and their book. Publishers and editors and marketers are wise to take note of these factors.

I like the idea of working in partnership with authors, as a team. We each have strengths to bring to the table and seek to establish a mutual trust that focuses on doing what is best for everyone and for the book. Is that ideal? Perhaps. But it’s an ideal that’s worth the effort.

Publishing for Profit: Redux

Off and on over the past year I’ve been commenting chapter-by-chapter on Tom Woll’s Publishing for Profit. The front cover quotes the Associated Press as calling it “the Bible for the industry.” Almost as good as Holy Writ? Well, you be the judge.

For your convenience, here’s Woll’s table of contents linked to each blog post I’ve made on the book.

I. The World of Publishing
1. C3–Commitment, Consistency, Credibility
2. The Publishing Environment

II. Managerial Organization: Strategy and Techniques
3. Define Your Niche (part one)
3. Define Your Niche (part two)
4. Make Planning Primary
5. Keep Your Staff Lean (But Not Necessarily Mean)
6. Protect Your Assets

III. Functional Organization: Strategy and Techniques
7. The Editorial Process (part one)
7. The Editorial Process (part two)
7. The Editorial Process (part three)
8. Production and Manufacturing
9. Sales . . . and More
10. Subsidiary Rights
11. Direct Response Marketing
12. Operations, Fulfillment, and Accounting
13. Electronic Publishing and Marketing
14. Returns
Conclusion

The Crystal Ball

When anybody talks about the future of publishing, the impact of the digital world is always front and center. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. It is having and will have a massive impact. Tom Woll acknowledges as much in the conclusion to his book Publishing for Profit, as well. But what is really interesting, I think, are his predictions for brick and mortar stores, which many prognosticators ignore.

Eventually, he says, superstores will find that stocking a wide array of inventory that doesn’t sell won’t make economic sense–and therefore having 50,000-square-foot stores won’t make sense either. In a few years’ time the superstore strategy will revert to the mall chain strategy.

When that happens, surprise! The independents will return to the scene. Those, he believes, will tend to be more focused on certain genres like history or mystery or travel.

Is his crystal ball clear or cloudy? I’d be interested in what you think.

Small Returns Are Beautiful

Publishers like to complain about returns, but few seem to do anything about them. How do I know? Return rates keep climbing, costing the publishing industry over $7 billion a year.

Why do books come back to publishers from stores, distributors and wholesalers? The reasons are many. Tom Woll offers a dozen in Publishing for Profit. What I find fascinating, however, is that he lays responsibility for ten of the twelve reasons right at the feet of publishers. Only two of Woll’s reasons have anything to do with those who return the books–and even with those two, publishers bear some responsibility.

Most publishers, I would guess, would assign responsibility for returns primarily to others, not to themselves. So where does Woll see publishers creating the returns problem? Among other things,

* Large advances–if they are excessive and therefore require larger sales (and therefore larger print runs) to make the project work financially, books come back.

* Overpricing–this tends to be more true of publishers tied to conglomerates that are margin driven.

* Lack of promotional and marketing support–often only the highest-profile books get backing. Many others are expected to sell on their own. Often they don’t.

* Reprinting too soon and too many–a book that is selling well can generate automatic reorders that may not be justified.

Don’t accounts bear some responsibility? Yes, if they succumb to excessive publisher enthusiasm and overbuy. Yes, if they pay for new books with returns of old ones instead of money. But you can see that publishers bear some responsibility even in these dynamics as well.

Is there a silver bullet for the returns problem? No. It takes discipline and hard work to solve. But the returns on that investment are well worth it.

What Does That Amazon Sales Rank Mean, Anyway?

One of the most convenient “real time” views of how a book is doing is to check out Amazon’s sales rank. It’s simple (the lower the number, the better the sales), it’s convenient (just a click away), and it’s empirical (gotta love those numbers). Alas, as Aaron Hierholzer says, “the Amazon sales rank is a fickle mistress.”
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Observe, Don’t Explain

“Show, don’t tell.” That advice has been given to writers as often as laptops have been turned on. Robert McKee repeats the advice in Story, his classic text on writing screenplays. Following Aristotle’s advice in Poetics, he says, “Why a man does a thing is of little interest once we see the thing he does. . . . Once the deed is done his reasons why begin to dissolve into irrelevancy” (pp. 376-77).
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Electronic Reality Check

Every couple of months our neighborhood book club gets together. This last week we discussed Devil in the White City. We were interested in the book because of its Chicago connection.

Electronic books came up in the course of the discussion and I mentioned the Kindle. I was met with a roomful of blank stares.

Now, these folks do not have their heads in paper bags. They are informed. They listen to NPR. Some are educators. Heck, they are in a book club, for goodness’ sake. But something that is all the buzz in the publishing industry was something they had never heard of.

It reminded me that I live in a big country and a small industry. Even when a book sells millions of copies, most people have probably never even heard of it. So if Amazon has sold one- or two-hundred thousand Kindles, it’s really small potatoes.

Certainly for those of us in publishing it is our job to stay on top of trends and new developments, and plan effectively for the future. But a dose of perspective can help us do that too.

“Scram, Kid. I’m Reading a Book.”

I have always been a slow reader. I’ve written here before about the anguish of trying to read a book in elementary school for a book report. Winnie-the-Pooh was simply beyond my capability. I tried to fake a report based on having read only one chapter. But I turned into an avid reader. Why?
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