Some web work is better left to the experts. That is, people with skills and understanding. That is, people other than me.
We are back—not just from vacations and working holidays, but from the netherworld that is 404 status for the blog. In a heart-breakingly comic series of mishaps, I managed to delete both the company blog and, in trying to restore that, the entire desktop from my computer (where I’d unwisely stored thousands of files), and my Time Capsule backups of same were no longer recognizing his computer. Much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Enter the tech monkeys at Apple, the friendly folks at our web hosting service, and the snarky genius who is Symon Chow, and it is all back up and running. I’ve aged a few decades in the past couple of days, and I lost two weeks’ work on a couple of books, but you know what? That feels like a small price to pay considering the alternative.
All of which is to say only this: Backup early and backup often. Your work is more fragile than you suspect.
(First entry in an occasional series in which we bandy about useful terms for the industry. Want to contribute your own? Please email your entries to [email protected]. This first is inspired by Michael Pollan’s useful thoughts about food.]
Book-like product. These are high-profile (and high-priced) projects: Books that are purchased by publishers and published but that are not sold to the traditional book audience, or are sold on some appeal that is extra-literary.
They may be books “written” by celebrities (such as the recent deal for Hilary Duff, or Lauren Conrad’s two novels, or Jerry Seinfeld’s Halloween “picture book” from a few years back). Or books that no one outside of the celebrity’s following (mostly non book buyers) would purchase. (Think of Madonna’s The English Roses. Or Glenn Beck’s picture book.)
Such projects are written and bound and jacketed and look like the rest of the books a publisher may have in its catalogue, sure. They may even read wonderfully well. But make no mistake: They are Something Else. Book-like products don’t behave in the marketplace like regular old books, and so should never be used as a point of comparison in discussions of the marketplace. Publishers spend more money on these projects, and the projects have a much higher profile in the world. But neither the advance nor the buzz about the book have any bearing on regular old books and publishing. And these kinds of projects have been around for as long as publishing has been a business.
Instead, book-like products should be seen as a lucrative side-line that publishers engage in to help them earn in the marketplace. For all it matters, Usually, the book-like products come out of different branches of the publisher that don’t really mix with the more literary minded part of the company, and for all their bookishness, may as well be jigsaw puzzles. Or Beanie Babies. Or Colorforms.
All of which is to say, we shouldn’t get up in arms because Hilary Duff (or Lauren Conrad or Madonna or Britney Spears or whichever glamorpuss of the moment) got a big deal for a book-like product. That is just one more of the crappy products that orbit her celebrity, and its success or failure affects the real book marketplace not at all.
But am I going far enough in defining this category? Or too far? What about books that become phenomenons and leave the rest of publishing behind? Surely they no longer count as representative of anything useful, right?
Back at the start of this year, Jonathan Galassi wrote an awesome editorial for the New York Times about the value that a publishing house actually provides for a book and an author—those ineffable quality enhancers that make a book cost more than its printing, paper, and binding. Editing. Marketing. Publicity. Design. Attention to detail. Vision.
Galassi’s piece is the perfect counter to those who suggest publishers are going the way of the T-rex, that authors need only throw their manuscripts onto the Kindle. Seventy percent royalty rates! these people crow. Take that, Legacy Publishers! My audience will not be bound by the old paradigms! And then they—I don’t know, twirl the ends of their moustaches while they count their doubloons.
But is Amazon’s self-publication plan truly the first death knell for traditional publishers? One writer friend who has worn an THE END IS COMING sandwich board for the past thirty years sees it as— Well, here’s what he wrote:
The big six are irrelevant long-term, even medium-term. Why would I sell my book to them so they could place it in some projected Apple e-book store? Amazon is offering a 70% royalty. Can the Big 6 plus Apple offer that? No. Because the downward price pressure will squeeze out any superfluous element in the supply chain. And that’s the publishers.
But I’ve borne witness to the fruits of self-publication, and I can testify to you all that it is no threat to books from publishers. It’s the opposite in fact, and some kind of spectacular ugly. An anecdote [that Will Entrekin astutely points out below isn't entirely salient]:
Long ago, when I was desperately poor and pretty much willing to whore my talents out to anyone, I worked for the idiotically named iUniverse, a print-on-demand vanity press. Among its investors were the Author’s Guild and B&N, so it had the appearance of legitimacy; some titles even got distribution to B&N stores. But it was a vanity press, and even the appearance of legitimacy could not disguise the fact that 99.9% of its list was nearly unreadable dreck.
But the people who ran the outfit wanted to create a filter, something to offer the illusion to potential authors (and readers!) that there were some quality controls in place. This is, I’d argue, the issue and where traditional publishers come in: Quality control, and giving an imprimatur of some base quality to a book.
That’s where I came in.
To help potential readers sort through the hundreds of yahoos who published their books through iUniverse, there was something called Editor’s Choice. Or Editor’s Seal. Or Editor’s Paycheck. I don’t recall what the program was called, as I never saw a manuscript or finished book after my review of 100 pages.
I was paid some amount of money—seems super miniscule in memory, but maybe it was fifty dollars? seventy-five dollars?—to read 100 pages and fill out a form providing possible revision direction, and “approving” the manuscript. A couple lines of tepid praise along the lines of “The reader is aware of the author’s painstaking labor every step of the way.” Or whatever. You get the idea.
Only the most egregiously incomprehensible books were rejected, and those were almost more work to reject, becaus
