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Well, that's interesting. But before you go thinking this will answer all your questions and make your life perfect, let's remember what we know about Bookscan, ok?

Looking for a little light reading/book chat/way to procrastinate whatever tasks are on your to-do list today? Head on over to the excellent Mother.Write. (Repeat.) blog, where I’ll be answering reader questions about all things books until 5pm. today.

If you are the sort who, instead of writing your pages, dithers on the web, checking up on the news and reading blogs and watching Orson Welles drunk outtakes, then you may well have seen Jackson Pearce’s screed against book pirates. Some background: She’d tweeted a few days ago that she must subsist off of ramen because she is broke, and meanwhile her books are being downloaded illegally. People responded to the tweet (apparently in support of book piracy—arrrrr!), and she answered those people with this charming video in which she costars with a pirate puppet.

But to my mind, both she and the people she’s answering are missing a bigger question, which is this: If those downloaded copies of the book(s) weren’t available on a pirate board, would the people who download them instead have purchased copies? That is, what is the actual impact of these downloads on sales?

There’s no way to be sure, of course, but I’d argue that the effects are negligible or positive. And that, considering that piracy is unavoidable, best then to find ways to make it work to one’s advantage—such as using a Creative Commons license. (For a better explanation of all of this, see Cory Doctorow’s post at the Guardian—which additionally has some startlingly frank talk about how artists should not expect to make a living from their art; in short, don’t quit your day job.)

The thing is, people who download illegally? They aren’t going to buy the book anyway. They’re just not. (Or a few may, but the lion’s share never will.) They are part of the culture of ferreting out uploads and taking what’s available. They are never going to wander into a bookstore real or virtual to buy the book. I know several of these people—they have files of all the latest movies and albums and like to boast about what they’ve “got” recently.

They are habitual thieves of a sort, but never mind that: They do talk up what they’ve got. They are one part of word-of-mouth. A scurrilous part, surely, but a group whose activities and talk may well spur awareness of a project—whether album, film, or book. As Doctorow has said elsewhere, his biggest fear isn’t that people will download his book for free, it’s that they will have never heard of it.

If the piracy of intellectual property is unavoidable (as it seems to be), then the only recourse is to create art that creates fans—people who are willing to support it. I have had friends “slip” me downloads of albums that I then went out and bought (in some cases—as with Frank Turner—six copies over time, more than paying him back for the brief time I “pirated” his album). I’ve become a fan, and it was because of that first sample. It may well have to be this way for authors, too.

What do you think? Is free the way of the future? How are authors going to make a living once everything is digitized and available for the price of a little bit of poking around the internet?

My complaint is a simple one.

Look at the picture there on the right.

See the stack of books to the right? See the stack of books on the iPad? Which one reminds you of the stories still to be read, the books you want to reread; which one literally occupies a space in your conscience (as well as on your bookshelf)?

But I’ve found in my experience that when I look at my iPad, I don’t see books. I see an iPad. On the device is Middlemarch, a Jonathan Ames novel, a Charlie Huston mystery, a couple of P.G. Wodehouse books, and a half-dozen nonfiction books I thought I wanted to read once upon a time.

This could just be a sad side effect of the way I consume books: Some people buy and read books on a strictly one-at-a-time basis. Me, I tend to buy three at a time and leave them on the bedside shelf so that I have an array of choices when I finish one book and move to the next. Today I’ll put up Mockingjay and then go back into the final hundred-and-fifty pages of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. And then I’ll browse my shelf to see what matches my mood, and that’s what i’ll read next.

But I don’t “see” anything to read when I glance at the iPad. And when I open the iPad, I am distracted by the many other applications available on it. So instead of making reading more of a presence in my life, it has the opposite effect: It makes reading just one more media application. Provided I even remember the dozen or so books I have downloaded on the device.

I love e-readers—honest, I do. Before I had the iPad, I read on a first-generation Kindle, which comically ugly and poorly designed, was still a damn sight better than carrying around a satchel full of books and manuscripts. And the iPad’s reader is pretty spiff, as are the other reading apps—GoodReader and Nook—but the iPad (and before it, the Kindle) don’t fit into my head and consciousness in the same way.

Am I alone in this? Or is anyone out there finding that these e-readers make books out of sight and out of mind?

Hey, I'm as insecure as the next artist. I used to be far more insecure than anybody I knew.
My sister-in-law said her husband felt guilty for even being born. Move over, brother-in-law: I did too.
And nobody gave me enough reason to feel otherwise until I turned 40. That's pathetic -- The great Scarecrow might have said: I should've thought of it for you. The Tin Man might have rejoined: I should have felt it in my heart.
But apparently, like Dorothy's return home, this is one of those things one must find alone.

It's still a struggle. I still think I sometimes don't deserve good things. (When my kids were little I used to cry at night because things were so good -- my kids were wonderful and healthy, I had a good job... and I was sure it couldn't last. I cried over what might happen. As my kid would say, that's messed up)

The best way to get rid of the insecurity is to do something you love -- and keep doing it, and do it so well that others notice.
Suddenly you have an excuse to still be alive.

I've done it. My Ellie McDoodle books are a modest success. Thank you, Universe and everyone in it, especially my fans, my agent, the wonderful people at Bloomsbury, handsellers at bookstores, and all the writers and illustrators who nudged, pushed, yanked, prodded, bumped me up along the way. And the teachers who didn't write me off as an insecure mess, which surely I was.

So now I am happy.

But now I get these fellow illustrators and kids' book writers bawling in my ear, "We don't get any respect for what we do! The world despises us! We're not real writers!"
Well, speak for yourself.
At this point in the game I'm calling it artificial insecurity.
If someone's not respecting the hard work and education it took to get to the skill level you're at, then
1) they have an axe to grind (a spouse wishing you'd bring in more money, perhaps?)
2) they are jealous, wishing they could do what you do, better than you
or
3) they are ignorant and in need of a whack on the side of the hea-- no, a little education.

So what's your answer to them?
Here are some responses you may use, free of charge.
- I'm sorry honey that my work in this field didn't pay off yet. Disrespecting my work and my goals isn't going to bring you and me closer together and it's not going to help pay the bills faster.
- I deserve a shot at a career that makes me happy. So do you. This is mine. Find yours.
- Children's books teach our next generation. Don't even suggest that's not a worthy and honorable goal.

But please don't tell me and your fellow creatives that this constant insulting of our industry means the crabbers are right. Because they aren't, and I refuse to be brought down by ignorance.
When you walk around with a "Kick Me" sign on your back, people will gladly kick you. They think you want it, so they're just being helpful -- and besides everyone's got a little bit of a sadistic streak aching to come out in socially-acceptable ways.
Just don't extrapolate your personal insecurity onto everyone else in the profession.

My work pays my bills. Nobody gets hurt from what I do. I'm breaking no laws. I'm not inspiring evil, or even bad manners.
Some schools and libraries treat me very well. From reading my books, some kids are inspired to write and draw and read more, and to sketch in nature. Some adults are inspired to find a new career or create something unusual. That's impressive. You can't tell me kids' book writing and illustration is an inferior profession. I just plain don't believe it.

I know you're concerned, now. Just my raising the issue makes you wonder if I am truly at peace with this. Well, I'm developing the

[Today's post comes via the dizzyingly sharp Jennifer Ung, who once upon a time interned for one of us here at Upstart Crow (albeit at a different company). Jennifer has just returned from a season in England, and we thought her observations on the two markets well worth sharing. Especially fascinating are explanations of how, though united by common language, American and British teens are so different that teen novels in each market don't "translate" to the other.]

I’m an intern.

By MTV-reality-show standards, that probably means that I’m the go-to person for coffee, bagels, and general mind-numbing office work. I entered the interning realm thinking I’d end up doing tedious, unpaid work I didn’t care about but did only for the sake of furthering my barely fledgling career. Much to my complete and utter surprise, every single place I’ve interned at so far has treated me like a princess. And who am I to complain? I love being a princess. Especially one who gains valuable experience in possibly the best industry in the world (!).

Hyperbolic metaphors aside, interning at two literary agencies in New York City has given me valuable insight into this super cool, ultra close-knit community known as children’s books. I particularly fell in love with all things YA. I became the kind of person you’d find staying up all night reading the latest Hunger Games novel (ahem, ican’twaitforaugust!), or stalking the stories in the Publishers Weekly Children’s Bookshelf to discover new debut titles worth reading. I absolutely adored the fact that I could flip to the acknowledgments section of a YA novel and find the author thanking other fellow YA authors. It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside knowing that I am pursuing a career in an industry full of people who actually love what they are doing—and even better, love the people they are doing it with.

I chose to study abroad in London this past semester with the intention of learning about children’s book publishing as it happens on the other side of the Atlantic. I interned at a well-established literary agency that works with many children’s authors and illustrators. Now, in comparing literary agencies in the US with literary agencies in the UK, I understand that I may have to make sweeping generalizations that may not completely and accurately characterize either side. And you should also know that my experience is slightly skewed by the nature of what I did at each internship—more YA in the US and more middle grade/illustrated books in the UK. But I shall press on anyway!

The business side of things at a literary agency is fairly consistent between the US and the UK. An aspiring author sends in a submission, and within four to six weeks, we respond with either a “Yay, may I see more of your manuscript?!” or an “Ah, sorry, this just isn’t the right project for us.” And if the unsolicited submission happens to receive a “yay” response, it probably takes another few weeks to determine whether or not we will offer representation.

What most people don’t realize is the sheer number of unsolicited queries that enter the mailboxes of all literary agencies. At the agency in London, we would receive maybe 20-30 a day via email. By post? Probably another 20-30. It adds up—especially when you

If there were a Ten Commandments of Publishing, “Thou Shalt Be Patient” would definitely fall somewhere between “Always Revise, Ye Children” and “Sippeth Much Coffee.” I don’t know how many times I’ve had to say “these things take time” or “we need to be patient” or “hey, what’s over there?” before bolting in the opposite direction over the course of my young career, but it’s been plenty.

Chances are, if you’re going to be serious about getting published, you’re going to be expected to wait at different points: to figure out the plot, to find time to write, to hear back from your critique group, for an agent to respond to you, for the coffee to finish brewing, for revisions to be completed, for an editor to read your manuscript, for an offer to be finalized, for the contract to be negotiated, for the cows to come home, to receive an editor’s notes, for the publishing house to pick the perfect cover, and for the release date to finally arrive. Then you get to start all over (minus some steps, of course, like the cows) for the next book.

What I find encouraging is when all this waiting and patience finally pay off. I recently sold a project that, for me, was a perfect example of the importance of patience. The author had written the story, revised it, and worked on it with her critique group. She then submitted the manuscript when my former agency was holding what we called a query holiday, which was a one month period at the end of 2008 into 2009 when we allowed writers to send 20 pages of their story without an attached query.

Here’s the time line from the author’s original submission to accepting an offer that I hope will give you a good example of the needed patience in this business:

• December 2008: Book is one of over 3,000 submitted as part of the Query Holiday
• January 7th, 2009: I request full based on 20 pages
• February 11th: Ask if the author is willing to do a revision
• Feb. 16th: Send her revision notes
• March 30th: She sends revised manuscript
• April 15th: I set up phone call, offer representation, and ask the author to do another revision
• June 23rd: Ask for a final polish on the draft
• Mid-July: Switch agencies
• July 29th: Send out project
• November: Send project out to a few additional editors
• January 2010: Receive first serious interest (one year after first reading the project)
• February 2010: Interest intensifies
• March 10th 2010: Set up auction
• March 12th 2010: Accept offer
• Fall 2011: Anticipated release date

There’s no set formula for how long this process typically takes. Some works reach shelves more quickly while others take even longer. Regardless of whether your book flies from your fingers and into an editor’s waiting hands or is the result of a long period of fine-tuning and hard effort, you’re still going to be in for a wait, and patience is an absolute necessity.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some more commandments to write. I wonder what number “Always Save Your Work, Ye Fools” should be…

It is springtime here in New York, and as happens every spring, young hearts turn to thoughts of the Bologna Book Fair.

Or my old heart does, anyway. Every year, children’s books publishers and agents from all over the world gather in Bologna to buy and sell the rights to published and forthcoming books, to catch up with each other about trends, and to eat some truly excellent food. It is four days of constant meetings from nine to nine (some over drinks and dinner plates, true, but meetings nonetheless). From these meetings, many sales of properties are made to far-flung territories.

This can be a great benefit for a writer, the sale of individual rights to different countries. It means that the writer receives separate advances for each territory, and that each of those advances earns out on its own schedule. So even if the publisher in the US stumbles and the book does poorly here, it may still sell well elsewhere and the writer will still earn royalties. These separate income streams make it easier for a writer to actually make a living from writing.

Which is why we hold on to foreign and other subsidiary rights when we sell a project to a publisher. It can mean taking a smaller advance up front, or the outright rejection of an offer, and it can make us unpopular with certain publishers. Why? Because the publisher, of course, wants these rights, too.

When the publisher controls those rights and sells a foreign license, the advance for that foreign sale—and any royalties paid—are first applied toward paying back the publisher for the advance given to the author. Conceivably, a book could earn back its advance for the publisher without ever selling a single copy in the US. Good for the publisher, not so good for the author.

Not long ago, I had a conversation about this very subject with an editor, in which she explained her position. Namely, that an author should want the publisher to keep rights, because that makes it “easier for the publisher to earn back the advance and makes the writer more profitable for the house.”

Which sounds nice on the face of things, but has all sorts of buried sentiments and assumptions lurking within. Let’s unpack that sentence, so that we can see how very wrong-headed it is.

For one thing, the implication is that the publisher will be happy with the author and continue to publish that author happily for the next forty years if the publisher earns back its advances by recouping the money through foreign sales.

But that’s just not true. Foreign sales matter almost not at all to a publisher’s decision to publish future titles by an author. If the author’s books bomb at home and continue to tank domestically, while the publisher will be happy it recouped its advance in the foreign sales, it won’t feel any love for the author. The publisher will have covered its bets on the author, but it will also likely stop betting on that author at all. And the advance, while it may be large, is a mere fraction of the cost of bringing a book to market. So collecting some foreign advances (typically smaller) will do little to offset the actual cost of publishing a book.

So let’s say the publisher fumbles the publication in this market, but the book is a hit in France—well, the entity that most benefits is the publisher, not the author. Which, to that editor’s mind, makes perfect sense. The publisher, after all, gambled; why shouldn’t it earn back its money first?

But why should the publisher expect that the author will support the publisher? If anything, it should be the other way

(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

In 1974, one of the great editors in the history of children’s books, Susan Hirschman, launched Greenwillow Books. She had left Macmillan (a long-ago and vastly different company from the one that exists now) for reasons of principle, and was asked by William H. Morrow (a long-ago and vastly different company from the one that exists now) to create a new children’s line.

The name of the imprint came from a picture book by Elizabeth Coatsworth (called Under the Green Willow); the logo was inspired by the book and created by art director Ava Weiss; and the inaugural list, in 1975, included many of the giant talents Hirschman had published elsewhere—Ezra Jack Keats, Anita Lobel, Tana Hoban, and others—making Greenwillow’s debut one of the richest and most fully-formed the industry has seen before or since. (I am cribbing freely from the masterful Minders of Make-Believe by Leonard S. Marcus, which, if you care at all about the history of children’s books, you should go out and read. Seriously, it’s worth the ducats.)

And the publishing program hasn’t slacked off since that first list.

Greenwillow’s author roster reads like a Who’s Who of notable children’s books creators since the seventies: Kevin Henkes, Lynne Rae Perkins, Paul Fleischman, Anita Lobel, Peter Sîs, Aliki, Douglas Florian, Chris Crutcher, Diana Wynne Jones, Jack Prelutsky, Naomi Shihab Nye, James Stevenson, Arnold Lobel, Paul Zelinsky, and on and on. There are so many beloved books, by so many adored creators, that it is hard to believe that Greenwillow is only thirty-five years old.

Morrow was later purchased and absorbed by Harper Collins, who, recognizing a perfect thing when they saw it, kept Greenwillow Books as a very nearly autonomous imprint within the company. These days, Virginia Duncan runs the imprint, with a half-dozen brilliant people on her team, and they maintain Hirschman’s dedication to publishing tomorrow’s classics.

To celebrate the anniversary, the group has created an anniversary blog with tons of fascinating and informative guest posts. Well worth bookmarking to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just what goes into many of the very best books in the business.

Oh, Jeff Bezos. There was a time when I was a true believer. I bought the first generation Kindle relatively early on—March or April of ‘08, thereabouts. I was impressed (or flattered, anyway) by the letter from you that came with it, complimenting me on being a daring early adopter, one of the few, the proud—

The ripped-off.

Mind you, it did work for just over a year. Sure, the back came off all of the time, and the clumsy design meant I was always turning pages by accident (seemed like every edge of the damn thing had a page flip button). Sure, reading off of a gray screen is nowhere near as fine as reading off of a crisp page, but hey, it’s a new technology! It’s trailblazing of the sort that heralds a new era! It’s—well, how the future looked back in 1982! Sure it’s a homely little device, but who besides Steve Jobs ever said technology should be pretty and appealing?

For my four hundred bucks, I got about thirteen months of use out of it before the screen froze up. Now half of the screen is one of those cutesy sleep screens, and half of the screen is functional—there are still books and manucripts there, half-legible behind the stuck phony prettified image of Emily Dickinson.*

When it froze up, I shot Amazon an email. I was told that the warranty was only for twelve months and to call them to be walked through a hard reboot of the device. I dawdled on making the call, because I was launching a business and so on, and everything else in life fell by the wayside.

Finally I called. Rebooting? Didn’t really work. But I was informed that, despite being out of warranty, I could send in my Kindle and another hundred bucks to Amazon, and they would send me a refurbished Kindle. Which, judging from how these things work, would last about a year. Could I get a further discount on the new Kindle, which is already discounted to $260 or so? No. I could only get the old, tired, lousily designed first generation. Because that, my friends, is the reward for early adopters.

So instead, I used my Kindle to support my off-kilter kitchen table and decided to wait for the Apple iSlate. Yes, it will be a backlit screen that will tax the eyes, but a person can dim that to a point where it will be less bothersome. And page flips can be done with a dragged finger. And doubtless I’ll be able to edit on it. And I can’t help but think that there will be many, many, many options for downloading books that will allow me to avoid Amazon’s proprietary e-book system entirely. And customer service at Apple is a wonder; when my first iPhone went on the fritz, the service guy there said, “Hmm, did you drop it? It looks like there’s a dent here.” I said, “Umm …” And he said, “Let’s just say that you told me you didn’t drop it, and I’ll give you another phone.”

And just like that, they won my business for the rest of eternity.

*That digitized image of Emily Dickinson featured on the Kindle save screen? It is a bastardization of the only known photograph of ED, which is of her in a black dress with her hair pulled back. Shortly after her poems became popular after the turn of the century, she was included in an anthology, but the editor didn’t like the original image—thought it was too severe. So the image was doctored—she was given ridiculous bangs and a fluffy white collar and dress. When the ruse was discovered, there was an outcry and the image was removed from circulation by most self-respecting publishers. Leave it to Amazon to unearth this horror and to repeat exactly the judgmental, pru