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I confess to feeling nonplussed when the publicist wrote to see if “Horn [ed note: AARGH] will review The Rabbit Who Wants to Go to Sleep,” the self-published bestseller that Random House picked up for a rumored seven-figure advance. I mean, yes, the Horn BOOK will review it in the Spring 2016 Horn Book Guide because that publication reviews non selectively, but, really, why are you asking me this? Is somebody making you do it? I felt one step away from a drunk Reese Witherspoon bellowing at a cop who didn’t know who she was.
But, okay, Rando, here’s what Horn thinks. The Rabbit Who Wants to Go to Sleep is a book designed to help parents get their kids to go to sleep. It has sold so many copies (already, I mean, but clearly RH thinks there are even more suckers out there) because it probably works as advertised. The text is long–really, really long– and droning and uneventful, and it will bore the brats right into dreamland. Authorial directives are everywhere, telling parents where to whisper, where to provide emphasis, where to yawn: “The name of the rabbit, Roger [ed note: fuck you], can be read as ‘Raaah-gerr’ with two yawns.” The combination of boredom plus suggestion will induce a hypnotic state in both parent and child and cause Chandler to walk around the apartment with a towel round his head like a girl make them very, very sleeeepy. (Despite what the Amazon reviews will tell you, this is not “magic.” Now, I would have thought that the kind of parent susceptible to The Rabbit Who Wants to Go to Sleep might have been horrified at the prospect of hypnotizing their offspring because that is how demons get in, but anything for a good night’s sleep, I suppose.) Mission accomplished.
If the seven-figure-advance rumor is true, I’d love for someone to do the math for me. Can this book (or books; the author and publisher are threatening a series) earn that much money back? Won’t parents figure out that Goodnight Moon–cheaper, prettier, and a billion times classier–does the same thing?
The post Wake me up when it’s all over appeared first on The Horn Book.
The Gawker debacle has been very entertaining. I read and respect the site too much to enjoy the clusterfuck in a schadenfreudey kind of way, but I am enjoying the intellectual stimulation provided by the whole host of journalism questions set bristling. What’s a public figure? Was the subject in question a public figure, or a behind-the-scenes media rival? Would Gawker have pursued the story had the hooker been a lady? Would the commentariat be as outraged had the hooker been a lady? Will Twitter ever let the “die on that hill” metaphor die on that hill, already?
My take briefly: The story should not have been pursued. The editors should have known better. The publisher should have been–previously–clearer that this kind of story was no longer acceptable, and he should have taken his objections directly to the editors, not to the directors. Taking the story down, however symbolic, was the right thing to do. Rather than resigning in a high-minded huff, the editors should have considered that perhaps all the people screaming at them might have had a point. The advertising director sounds like a dick.
I’ve been very lucky that in nearly twenty years at the Horn Book I’ve never had to have the kind of conversation that should have gone on at Gawker. Reduce expenses, increase circulation, get your monthly reports in the month they are actually due, Roger–I hear those things all the time. But none of the people who has served as Horn Book publisher has ever tried to quash content. And in cases where outraged subscribers or aggrieved advertisers have complained, the publisher has always backed me up. Thank you, gentlemen and lady.
But when I read that one concern of the Gawker publisher was that the post in question might have lost them advertising dough worth seven figures in one week, my first thought was that I wanted to be very clear with you all about the relationship between Horn Book content and the advertisers who support it. (Actually, my first first thought was SEVEN FIGURES IN ONE WEEK? GIMME SOME.) So here’s the lowdown. You can’t buy a review in the Horn Book. Advertising in the Horn Book Magazine pages doesn’t get you anything beyond exposure for whatever it is you are advertising. Not advertising in our pages has no effect on our decision whether or not to review your book. The decision to give a book a starred review is made by the editors in consultation with the reviewers. As far as articles go, we welcome suggestions and submissions from all comers, but you can’t buy one of those, either.
There are two venues in which Horn Book editorial and advertising intersect. One is our Talks With Roger series, in which a publisher will pay for me (not pay me) to interview a given author or illustrator and disseminate said interview to our Notes from the Horn Book subscribers and on our website. These are friendly interviews–if I feel like I can’t be friendly to a given author or book, I turn the interview down. While we run the edited interview by the sponsor, it is only so they can offer factual corrections; they have no say over the content. The other advertorial product we create is the Fall and Spring Preview, a labelled supplement to the March/April and September/October issues of the Magazine. In these, a five-question interview of an author or illustrator of a new book faces a page of advertising from said book’s publisher, who pays for both pages. I write the questions but the publisher selects the book. Neither advertising in the Preview sections nor sponsoring a Talks With Roger gets you a review in the Magazine. (Reviews in the Horn Book Guide are essentially automatic, as the Guide is a nonselective source reviewing all new hardback books for children from U.S. publishers listed in the current print edition of Literary Market Place.)
I hope this is all clear, or clear enough. (It isn’t always. More than one Talks With Roger subject has tried telling me how “honored” he or she is to have been “chosen” for an interview, and while I try to let them down gently, I do let them down.) Please leave any questions in the comments.
The post Can’t buy me love appeared first on The Horn Book.
After seeing some alarming comments on Read Roger and Facebook I feel the need to point out something I thought everybody knew: the Horn Book, like our sisters at SLJ, Booklist, and BCCB, does not charge authors or publishers for book reviews. Publishers Weekly and Kirkus do offer fee-based reviewing services but these are in addition to (and labelled as such) their regular reviews, which are free. Personally, I think reviews you have to pay for are a waste of money and a source of the worst kind of mischief.
People have also questioned the relationship of advertising pages and review coverage, and this is totally fair game for examination: do advertising dollars buy reviews in a quid pro quo arrangement? Absent the presence of damning emails or something, I think it would be hard to prove either way, because advertisers tend to spend their money in places that are saying nice things about their products. This is not absolute, though: I once heard our wonderful ad director Al tell a marketing director at a Big Five publisher that they should be buying more ad space because we were giving them so many good reviews. Her response? “Sure, but how many of those are starred reviews?” It’s never enough. But, no, at the Horn Book we don’t review (or star) books on the basis of who is buying advertising pages. (We do offer products such as Talks With Roger that are paid for by publishers but are clearly labelled as “sponsored content” and are separate from our review coverage.)
Something I have intuited (or outright heard) from some publishers, large and small, is that they think of reviews as part of their promotion efforts. This makes sense from their point of view, in that they use reviews for marketing purposes. But we don’t work for the publishers, we work for our readers. Smart publishers know that this is in their best interest.
The post The buck stops over there appeared first on The Horn Book.
. . . if we worked the way Yelp is accused of doing?
"Oh, we can make that 5-in-the-Guide totally go away, no problem. A star, you say? Well, let me tell you what I can do . . . ."
I remember some years ago my friend Mary K. Chelton raising a ruckus in the Letters column of SLJ, implying that positive reviews (in SLJ and elsewhere) bore an interesting relationship to advertising in the same pages. And I myself have pondered the practice of book award committee members being wined-dined-and-sixty-nined by publishers. While I know of no instance where a review or an award has been even attempted to be bought or sold outright, it behooves us all to keep the lines as bright as possible. At the risk of boring you with this anecdote for the tenth time, I remember a BBYA committee I was on arguing about what Gary Paulsen might have meant by some ambiguous turn of phrase or plot, I forget just which. One member brightly announced that she knew exactly what was meant because "Gary told me while we were dancing last night." It's not the dancing I minded so much as its bumping into the evaluation process.
I'm perplexed by Amazon's statement about their showdown with Macmillan, where, after pulling that publisher's print- and e-books from Amazon.com, they (paradoxically) go on to defend the free market as the best friend to the little guy:
We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative. (from the Kindle discussion board)
So the idea is that if a book from Macmillan costs too much, a reader will choose a less expensive book instead. Really? Is that how we buy books? I can see taking a risk on a book that is cheap (the top five Kindle best "sellers" are not cheap, they are
free) but I can't see wanting to read, say,
Finger Lickin' Fifteen, and settling for something else because Amazon wasn't selling it (the situation now) or because it cost more than some other book. I do understand the bookseller's reluctance to allow publishers to set prices (although I also kind of wish I was
back in Germany, where book-discounting is verboten, thus allowing independent stores to compete) but I'm not buying its logic. Unless--the reading culture of e-books becomes a completely different thing from that of print books, where you don't care so much about reading the new Janet Evanovich as you do for reading whatever the hot e-book du jour is, whose price might only be a buck.
Collecting Children's Books has had a couple of interesting posts about books such as They Were Strong and Good and The Rooster Crows, which have been bowdlerized to reflect changing standards of "appropriateness" in regard to depictions of nonwhite characters. Those are two among several if not many; Mary Poppins, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Dr. Doolittle are some of the others. What I hadn't realized until Peter pointed it out was that changes like these are sometimes made without any acknowledgment of the fact within the new edition; kind of Orwellian, yes?
Many years ago I was on YALSA's (then YASD) Intellectual Freedom committee, and we had a bit of a tussle with Scholastic, which was asking authors to make "word changes" (read: remove obscenities) from their books before Scholastic would reprint them for its lucrative book clubs. Two things were at issue: Scholastic did not want to acknowledge, in the paperbacks, that changes had been made, and, in the cases of books that had been named to the Best Books for Young Adults List, the publisher wanted to be allowed to say that the expurgated editions were BBYA winners. No and no, although we only really had the power to enforce the second.
To me, the weirdest part of Scholastic's argument was that since it was the author making the change, an affected book was still a BBYA choice. And some committee members bought this argument, as well as buying into Scholastic's emotional blackmail that we were "punishing the authors" by disallowing the BBYA designation. Well, tough: why would we want to reward authors for caving to commercial pressure? The money would have to be enough.
Boston Globe writer David Mehegan has a great piece on what's going on at Houghton Mifflin. Don't skip the comments, either--lots of perspectives from people who used to work there.
And don't miss the aforementioned Patsy Aldana expounding at some greater length on just what money and publishing have to do with each other, for each other and to each other.
Rachel presents the Ultimate Web Watch (the new overlords may have something planned but we don't know just what yet).
And don't miss the Cynsational interview with Groundwood publisher Patsy Aldana. That is one lady who tells it like it is:
Over the course of your career, what are the most significant changes you've seen in the field of publishing books for young readers?
The abandonment of the once great British and American houses of the tradition of the editor-driven list for a new reign of TV tie-ins, merchandising, and the need to make more and more money.
Could somebody do this math for me? If Sarah Palin did in fact receive seven million dollars for a book contract, how many copies would the publisher have to sell to recoup its cost? Would it be possible?
Yes, I intend to use song references for my blog headings until I get good and tired of it.
Well, it's not like we wouldn't do this if we thought we could get away with it.
Review by Becky Laney, frequent contributor
Number the Stars is a Newbery winner. It is the story of a young girl, Annemarie, and her family. The book is set during World War II in Denmark, 1943 to be precise. Annemarie and Ellen are best friends. The two live together in the same apartment building. The two go to school together. The two do practically everything together. But all that is about to change, you see, Ellen and her family are Jewish. And while the soldiers--Nazis--have been occupying Denmark for over a year, their policies are about to change. There is danger in the air, and everyone--young and old--can feel it. This is the story of two girls, two friends, and two brave families. I always enjoy reading about the war and the holocaust from the danish perspective. For one thing, the resistance movement is strong, powerful. Denmark was a nation with people who cared, who took risks, who did the right thing, who saved lives. I think this book can be read and enjoyed by everyone--no matter your age--despite the fact that it is a "children's book."
By:
Emily,
on 11/19/2007
Blog:
Deliciously Clean Reads
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Review by Becky Laney, frequent contributor
I’m not unfamiliar with
Lois Lowry. I’ve read
Number the Stars. I’ve read
The Giver (which is one of "Our Favorites"). And I had really loved those books. Enough to buy my own copies instead of relying on the library. But I didn’t expect to be so swept up with her newest book
GOSSAMER. I expected it to be good. But I didn’t expect it to be a WOW book. It’s like this book was written just for me. Instant connection. Instant love.
What is it about?
Gossamer is the story of Littlest. What is Littlest you ask? She isn’t a human. She isn’t a dog. (You’ll have to read it to get the joke). She’s an imaginary creature of sorts. A dream giver. Or to be more precise. A dream giver in training. If you’re like me you’ve always wondered why you dream the things you do. Wondered why certain fragments fit together in your dream in a completely random way. Sometimes in a wonderfully pleasant way. Small details of your life--whether recent or from years or even decades past--suddenly confront you in your dreams. The answer is provided in Gossamer. Dream givers. Benevolent creatures that bestow dreams to humans. One dream giver per house...unless you’re training a little one. Thin Elderly is training Littlest and their household is an interesting one. An elderly woman and her dog...until one day an eight year old boy (foster care???) from an abused background moves in with her over the summer. Can an old woman and two dream givers bring peace and joy to an angry boy? Or will his nightmares follow him? Can good dreams overpower bad with a little loving help? It’s a simple story really covering a wide range of human emotions: anger, pain, shame, guilt, despair, love, joy, peace, hope, laughter.
This gathering, this dwelling place where they slept now, heaped together, was only one, a relatively small one, of many. It was a small subcolony of dream-givers. Every human population has countless such colonies--invisible always--of these well-organized, attentive, and hard-working creatures who move silently through the nights at their task. Their task is both simple and at the same time immensely difficult. Through touching, they gather material: memories, colors, words once spoken, hints of scents and the tiniest fragments of forgotten sound. They collect pieces of the past, of long ago and of yesterday. They combine these things carefully, creating dreams... (13).
If the premise doesn’t get you...perhaps Littlest will. She is a lovable, memorable character.
Sixty-nined? By pubishers? Nononono.
I know, I know. But I have a friend who always adds that little fillip to the cliche and it just rolled off my tongue. So to speak.
I couldn't help but notice that, too. I'm planning to repeat it later today. I'll give you credit.