Andrea Levy’s 4th novel, Small Island, which won her the Orange Prize, was one of my favourite books of all time. In that novel, the Jamaican heroine finds herself in post-war London speaking a version of the Queen’s English that is unfamiliar to her English neighbours. It’s a story of prejudice and isolation as well as love and acceptance.
In The Long Song, Levy brings us to the Jamaica of the 1830s, which is full of unrest and slavery. On the sugar plantation Amity, our heroine, named July, is a mulatto born to a slave named Kitty and a Scottish overseer, Tam Dewar, who has taken advantage of his position. July is a force to be reckoned with. She is pulled into the household as a lady’s maid and we follow the drama that comes with that position.
What I loved about this novel was the post-modern nature of the narrator chatting to the reader about the consequences of writing such a tale, and the interventions by her son, the editor of her tale.
Storytude is a website and app for Android and iPhone that lets you find stories based on your location. The fictional stories based on read-world locations can be called up as a literary way to discover a city. At the moment, Storytude is focussed on Germany, in particular Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and Cologne.
For those of you who speak German:
Website: http://www.storytude.com/
Mobile partner: http://www.mobile-melting.de/
I’ll Show You Mine edited by Wrenna Robertson,
photography by Katie Huisman ($40 includes shipping in NA)
I’ll Show You Mine is the first publication of Vancouver-based educational publisher Show Off Books. The book is a series of photographs and personal stories from 60 women. The intention is not pornography or erotica but rather to accurately and objectively display the beautiful diversity of the female genitalia, as said to me by publisher Whelm King in a phone conversation prior to publication.
I admit to feeling weird about browsing a book of vaginas because there aren’t many interactions that women have, aside from porn, to be presented with labia. Puppetry of the Penis gave me the same feeling, but after 5 minutes with the “hamburger” and “windsurfer” I was thinking of Play-Doh rather than sex organs.
With I’ll Show You Mine, the lighting of the photographs brings humanity to the subject matter in a way that is not normally seen in women’s studies textbooks, clinical pamphlets, or adolescent sexual education materials. The women’s anecdotes and short stories are also coming from a place of emotional support for young women (or rather any woman) who is anxious about what “normal” looks like.
I’ll Show You Mine is an educational resource meant to counteract the pervasiveness in North American culture to let pornography set the standard for what female genitalia should look like.
Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon has sat on my bookshelf since January 2008. Then I almost gave up on it after 100 pages.
Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss lycee and has an otherwise routine, and dull, existence. Until one day, walking to school, he encounters a Portuguese woman on a bridge who is so distraught that Gregorius believes she’s going to jump. Instead she tears up a letter, throws it over the edge, panics and writes a phone number of Gregorius’ forehead.
Sometimes the smallest things change us, sometimes the most bizarre.
The encounter rattles Gregorius out of his quotidian life and he ends up on a night train to Lisbon, where he proceeds to re-construct the life of Amadeu de Prado, a doctor conflicted by religion, love, friendship, dictatorship and betrayals of many kinds. Based only on a slim volume of Prado’s published work, Gregorius finds family members, neighbours, and friends who all contribute bits and pieces to his patchwork understanding of what made Amadeu de Prado tick. Thankfully Prado was an interesting a guy.
I can’t match up my feelings of the book with the blurbs.
“A book of astonishing richness … visionary … a deserved international smash.” , Le Canard encha√Æne
“One reads this book almost breathlessly, can hardly put it down … A handbook for the soul, intellect and heart.” , Die Welt
I don’t share the enthusiasm of the French and German reviewers of the time, but Mercier has certainly provided a philosophical tale of repression, resistance and the struggle of men to achieve something memorable. I made it all the way through the book because of Amadeu. Gregorius’ measured uncovering of this figure was rewarding. There are lots of passages that are still resonating with me, but overall this was a slow read.
I tweeted about Matthew Ingram’s post Book Publishers Need to Wake Up and Smell the Disruption and received replies from my publishing friends that were inline with the comments Matthew received on his blog. But Matthew struck a chord for me, not with his outlier examples of self-published authors selling great numbers of books for less than a dollar, but with his comments about the accumulating evidence that Kindle and iPad are industry disrupters and, in particular, that they are going to continue to have an impact on author-publisher contracts. Again, we can argue about what we consider evidence, but this is my perspective from marketing, sales and technology.
1. Technology Continues to Transform the Publishing Industry
The Product Life Cycle for some categories of printed books is in decline, meaning that the revenue generated by that category has gone from development, introduction, and growth, peaked at maturity and is now in decline (declining revenue).
Cooks still want the content, but instead of buying 101 Fast and Easy Recipes they are searching Google for what they want to make for dinner that night.
And Google just made that easier by introducing Google Recipe.
In that Decline Stage, publishers have exercised all the options:
* Maintaining the product as is.
* Reducing the costs and finding new uses for the product (rejuvenating backlist)
* Lowering prices to liquidate inventory (hello front of store at Indigo)
* Promotion (reinforcing brand image, celebrity-driven)
But at the end of the day, this is a declining category. Due to brand or author loyalty, profitability may be maintained longer for some. Plus, product life cycle doesn’t map completely to a predictable sales forecast since, in the case of cookbooks, the product doesn’t stand alone. Each book category is part of a larger ecosystem, it’s not dying in a petri dish independent of other factors.
That said, Matthew Ingram’s post Wake Up and Smell the Disruption calls to mind that marketing managers do need to address the challenges that products in a declining stage are likely to face.
For example, in the case of cookbooks, would-be-buyers are also happy to access content for free online.
A common publisher argument is that the quality of a cookbook vs. the quality of an online recipe vastly differs.
Quiz:
Is the above image from a cookbook?
Or from a blog?
The fact that free content exists means that some would-be-buyers will chose free over quality, or just as good over quality, especially if free = as good as paid.
Cookbooks, Travel, Reference: the next publisher argument is that these are outliers. Maybe they are right now, but they won’t always be.
Kindle, Kobo, iPad and even mobile phones are changing the game.
Let’s just look at text-based fiction and non-fiction. I’m not talking about the reading experience of architecutre books, photography, or kids books, just basic text.
Here’s the competition in a would-be-buyer’s mind:
* Print copy, hardcover, of The Shallows for $33.50 from an independent bookseller
* Print copy, hardcover, of The Shallows for $21.00 from Indigo at a 34% discount
* Kobo, digital edition, of The Shallows for $9.99 at a 63% discount on the list price
The arguments about whether digital is a better reading experience or not are inconsequential to many would-be-buyers when presented with $9.99 vs. $33.50 or even $21.
If you said to someone, “would you like to pay more for that,” the answer is rarely “yes.”
Digital editions of books and app versions of books are directly competing with the print editions.
* an ebook buyer is the same buyer as print
* same demographic/psychographic
In terms of marketing, this is good because we know these people. In terms of sales revenue, it’s bad because ebooks do not represent a new, expanded market audience.
The power buyers of ebooks are:
* 30-44 years old
* women
* employed
* they entered the ebook market 6 months to 2 years ago
* as power buyers, they buy weekly
* urban
In terms of unit growth, sales units are up but this does not compensate for lost revenue.
In our above example, $23.51 differentiates the ebook version of The Shallows vs. the print edition.
We are seeing at least a $5 differential for ebooks vs. print.
In addition to that lost revenue, as an ebook buyer buys more ebooks, becomes more at ease with reading digital vs. print, enjoys the simplicity of buying on-demand, and is rewarded with reading on the go or at night in bed with the backlit screen, they buy fewer hardcover and paperbacks.
Ebooks do canabalize print (especially when measuring revenue dollars).
(This is the point I have mulled over the least so contemplate and critique vs. simply criticizing please.)
The four categories here are:
Dogs: Low market share and low growth rate. They neither generate nor consume a large amount of cash. Backlist titles.
Question marks: Rapidly growing but also consuming large amounts of cash. Because they have low market share, do not generate much cash. The problem child. eBooks and apps.
Stars: Strong market share but also consume large amounts of cash. Frontlist. Especially frontlist print+ebook. Stars, if well positioned, can become the next cash cows and ensure future cash generation.
Cash cows: Leaders in a mature market. Generate more cash than they consume. Generates a relatively stable cash flow. Value can be determined with reasonable accuracy. The ideal print book.
You can see, of course, the immediate limitations. I’m not sure how many publishers can quickly identify their Cash Cows, as the margins in publishing are so small.
The other issue is that the many factors of profitability are overlooked in this simplified view since the products in each quadrant are not independent of the others. A dog of a cookbook could still help another cookbook gain competitive advantage. The amplification of awareness for series, or the celebrity book that is really about giving the author competitive advantage over others on speaking circuits are other examples of how this ecosystem isn’t as simple as the above framework.
The reason I bring up the matrix is that it’s a starting point for discussing resource allocation and strategic planning for those products in a Declining Stage (print books) and those in a Growth Stage (ebooks and apps).
The growth stage is the period where sales increase as more customers become aware of the product and create demand, which fuels retailers to become interested in carrying the product.
Certainly what we are seeing with the growth of ebooks and consumer demand for Kindle and iPad.
Regardless of Matthew Ingram’s examples of outliers like Seth Godin, there are fundamentals publishers need to face:
1. Book publishing is a technology-enabled business.
2. A conversation about a technology-enabled business is a conversation about market changes.
3. We can argue about the speed of change and the type of changing coming, but we should mentally prepared for the fact that change is coming (like waves on a shore).
4. There is a lifecycle for everything. People argued to keep scrolls, but they printed those arguments in bound books. (See Johannes Trithemius)
5. Few people are successfully managing the product lifecycle in all 4 quadrants. (DRM and borrowing restrictions are not endearing consumers yet publishers are implementing these measures as a necessary way to support the required staff to keep both print and ebook development during this transitionary period. Matthew Ingram points out some of the mathematical challenges of the author-publisher contracts in his post, which aren’t endearing authors either, who I think are the glue that holds the whole thing together.)
6. “Change happens through a process, not a product” (Kate Fialkowski). The internet and ereaders have changed the way we read. Search engines, websites, wikis and blogs have changed the way we publish and share information.
7. The game changers tend to be outsiders to the industry. Music changed because of the development of MP3, which meant we could more easily share music, which led to peer-to-peer sites like Napster. Then iTunes changed the cost structure. Blockbuster > Netflix. Banking > Online Banking.
What I took from Matthew Ingram’s article was just another reminder that as Kate Fialkowski says, the game changers redefine the ecosystem, change the business models, price points, distribution systems, and support processes.
A coffee at Starbucks costs more than a $1.50 because they changed the game. They can demand $6+ for what tastes to me like shitty, burnt coffee with excessive sweeteners that will likely develop gut rot for an entire generation because they created demand for that product.
Publishers fearing the lost of authors and staff is not equal to fearing that one of them wins the lottery.
If you value an employee, you should consider that they could win the lottery and leave.
But really, the probability of an employee winning the lottery is pretty low in comparison to the probability that good people will leave the industry altogether or that the smartest will be picked off by start-ups providing incentives to acquire the best talent. See Open Road Media, Kobo and any number of interesting new ventures.
I don’t want to haggle over the definition of “lottery” but I can tell you that the folks holding the big cheques are the ones doing ebook conversion and app development.
And a happy dance can be a lottery in itself.
(People in the system are going to make money in unexpected ways. The ones who will keep making money are the ones who understand the motivating factors of their consumers and are able to repeatedly win them over. Excuse me now, I have a new iPad 2 to purchase. Let me know what books to buy.)
Publishers are looking at new models for selling their wares, and in the case of Spanish publisher ES Ediciones, pizza pairings is the choice.
La Pizzateca, located in Madrid’s Barrio de las Letras, bakes up artisanal pizza pies, calzones, and special book sidedishes. The bookstore/pizzeria has this special menu item: “men√∫ de las letras” , a slice of pizza and a book for just EUR 5. Satisfy your mind and your belly.
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, a New York Times bestseller, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman was certainly on my radar as a book that I missed reading in 2010. The first I heard of it was actually in a holiday round-up by the Guardian, then it appeared in other round-ups and the next thing I knew, Tom Rachman was doing a reading at my local bookstore, Ardea Book & Art.
So Tom, let’s see what you’ve got.
The Imperfectionists is a series of linked stories that together form a novel. The characters are various staff members of an English-language newspaper in Rome. Each character is imperfect in his or her own way, as is the newspaper they run.
The table of contents is pretty clever:
Quote:
“BUSH SLUMPS TO NEW LOW IN POLLS”
Paris Correspondent, Lloyd Burko
“WORLD’S OLDEST LIAR DIES AT 126”
Obituary Writer, Arthur Gopal
“EUROPEANS ARE LAZY, STUDY SAYS”
Business Reporter, Hardy Benjamin
…
Some of the stories were pretty brilliant. My favourites being the interspersed italicized stories of the paper’s original publisher, Cyrus Ott.
The novel, overall, was memorable, but I felt like Rachman’s writing was trying too hard to be clever. Its jolts of insight are many and often back to back, which at times is like reading a series of Jon Stewart intros.
The NY Times review highlights most of the characters and provides a good sense of the novel. I found it enjoyable, and kind of like a newspaper in that some articles are more intriguing than others.
Happy Valentine’s Day. For some this is a day of love poetry and candied hearts, for others it is a day of willfully ignoring the former. Regardless of your state, I want to share two books with you:
Both slim volumes are big on the poetry of brevity. And in honour of Saint Valentine, I have plucked some love stories for you.
Hint Fiction: Edited by Robert Swartwood
Rapunzel by James Burt
The boys waited below the tower-block for the paper planes. They fought over them, to be the one to carry them back to her.
Ideal by Ha Jin
The boy dreams of becoming a panda who makes money by meeting visitors. For such a pampered celebrity, even a girlfriend is provided.
The Time Before the Last by Marcus Sakey
He held her crepe-paper hand and summoned an autumn day, sepia and smoke, and dancing, and music that sounded nothing like the beeping of machines.
Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms by George Murray
Writing the erotic poem is like ironing in the nude, sexy for women, dangerous for men.
She looks like a million bucks, but it’s all in fives.
In martyrs and poets both, the rumour of greatness is enough to starve off criticism.
The Hunger Games trilogy is LOST meets Man Tracker meets Big Brother. In this post-apocalyptic world, North America is now Panem, a nation with a Capitol district and 12 outlying districts, each in charge of providing something to the Capitol, like agriculture, electronics, or weapons. As a measure to remind the districts of the rebellion of District 13 and the consequences of that defiance, each year the districts offer up two children, a boy and a girl, who participate in a televised fight to death. Only 1 can be named the victor, and they and their family get extra food for the upcoming year.
It’s cruel and awful, yet is a spectacle that glues Capitol residents to the tv (who are exempt) and equally engages the districts as they fearfully watch the fate of their loved ones.
The trilogy follows 16-year-old Katness Everdeen through the ordeal of 2 Hunger Games and an even deadlier match that pits the districts against the Capitol. Survival of the fittest is often about compassion, humanity, loyalty, friendship and compromise.
I really can’t tell you much about the series without giving away the plot, but it is riveting. I found the second book a bit formulaic in that the structure and outcome is much like the first, but it’s like Lord of the Rings in that you need a middle that bridges the beginning and end, which isn’t a weakness to the narrative at all.
If you missed the first round of fandom regarding this series, you might want to read it before the movie trailers hit and you’re inundated with the Hollywood version of these characters.
My review of The Sentimentalists is going to be one of those long, slow, percolating posts as I’m actually reading/reviewing the book as part of The Vancouver Sun’s re-launched book club.
Each week we start out with a group questions, converse via email and then Tracy Sherlock, books editor for the Vancouver Sun distills the conversation into its tantalizing bits and posts to the blog and Saturday print edition ( http://www.vancouversun.com/covertocover ). We finish things off with a live chat with author Johanna Skibsrud, winner of the 2010 Giller Prize, in early April.
You can also follow the conversation on Twitter @VanSunArts and use the hashtag #VanSunBooks to comment. Or comment here, I’d love to know what other people thought, and if you have any questions that I should ask Johanna.
My fellow panelists include Angela Haaf, VPL librarian; Julia Denholm, Langara English Instructor; Sean Cranbury, founder of http://BooksOnTheRadio.ca; Ian Weir, author of the novel Daniel O’Thunder; Mark Medley, National Post books editor; and from The Vancouver Sun, Brad Frenette, social media and community newsroom editor, and Tracy Sherlock, books editor.
