Eoin Purcell's Blog

Eoin Purcell

Seen in passing

But I really wanted to talk about two things
The first is this, the wonderful new editions of Alexander Dumas that harper Perennial have out. They are damn pretty and my pictures don’t do them justice so please go check them out*:

The Count of Monte Cristo
The Last Cavalier
The Three Musketeers

Two things strike me about them:
1) They take the current obsession with all things “Boy’s Own” and “Commando” and spin it on in a nicely sophisticated way, to rather special results.

2) The internals are beautifully clean and crisp, so much so that I’m pretty sure they spent some time considering how best to reset the texts. This is rare in new editions of popular classics and something I really like and admire. Go Them.

The other thing is Quercus
Reading The Bookseller article on their ambition I was struck squarely by two things (2 being the number of the day!), the first the enormous scope of their ambition:

“Management believe that we now have in place the strategy, the organisational structure and the publishing programmes to take the business to £20m over the next three years.”

That has to be admired.

The second thing was how unlike The Friday Project this operation is. I don’t mean that in a harsh critical way, more as an observation of what The Friday Project was and what Quercus is. Whereas in essence The Friday Project tried to parley its web based author base into a trade publishing environment with some success, Quercus is dominated by unabashedly commercial trade publishing and a twin track contract publishing business.

Now those who read this blog will remember that I have respect and admiration for what The Friday Project tried to do. Quercus is well funded, steady and building scale rapidly. Its books, especially in the non-fiction arena, are the kind of books that tend to be stacked high at discounts come Christmas and sell in large numbers.

Perhaps we all might learn something form watching their operations.
Eoin

* The 342 offer was on in hughes & hughes airport stores!

Declan Burke’s rather enjoyable book The Big O was recently acquired by Harcourt for publication in the US.

Declan has posted that its due out there on 22nd September. And that he will be going a nice little book tour:

In other news, the Grand Viz (right) would have it known that he will be callously abandoning his infant daughter Lilyput and the radiant Mrs Viz to attend the Bouchercon in Baltimore, and is planning to travel around the northeast for a week or so afterwards, for the most part in the company of the ever-lovely Kelli Stanley, doing readings and sundry other events designed to keep Princess Lilyput in the style of diaper to which she is accustomed. A number of venues have been good enough to confirm that they will be widening their doors to accommodate the Grand Vizier’s monstrous ego, but any and all suggestions as to interesting venues specialising in crime and mystery fiction would be gratefully accepted. We thank you for your cooperation. Peace, out.

Well good for him!
Eoin

I’m trying to figure out how I missed this for 3 weeks
I’ll blame it on my obsession with this. In any case this is a killer feature for me:

As long as I have an Internet connection, every change I make is saved to the cloud. When I lose my connection, I sacrifice some features, but I can still access my documents (for this initial release, you can view and edit word processing documents; right now we don’t support offline access to presentations or spreadsheets – see our help center for details). Everything I need is saved locally. And I do everything through my web browser, even when I’m offline (the goodness that Google Gears provides). When my connection comes back, my documents sync up again with the server.

It’s all pretty seamless: I don’t have to remember to save my documents locally before packing my laptop for a trip. I don’t have to remember to save my changes as soon as I get back online. And I don’t have to switch applications based on network connectivity. With the extra peace of mind, I can more fully rely on this tool for my important documents.

Or at least I think it is. Google, being Google, have a nice little video to back the launch up too:

All fired up about The Apprentce but gutted that Claire is still in it
Eoin

If you are into books, than read Personanondata
But if you don’t read it now, start with these two guest post from Mike “Beware the end of Trade Publishing” Shatskin*. Read them, Here and Here.

But why read stuff like this you ask?
Basically because our industry is more global than we often realize day to day. For instance, Penguin, Hachette and Random House all now have offices in Ireland. That means a French, a British and a German conglomerate operate units in our territory not to mention the other German influence through Gill & Macmillan.

It’s vital to know exactly what their other units and worldwide operations are doing and thinking in order to do my job properly**. I imagine it would help author’s too to stay abreast, but certainly for publishers, these trend and opinion pieces are important.

Watching too much number crunching,
Eoin

* Links a bit funny but should work sometime.
** Alternatively I’m just a nerd, but I prefer the alternative explanation.

Eoin Purcell

You read it in the comments here first (Here)
And now a blog post on Authonomy’s Development blog confirms it, we are close to a private beta launch:

The blog’s new and impressively yellow rebrand heralds the imminent arrival of authonomy’s private beta launch. While we’ve still a little way to go on the full development (there’s plenty of bells and whistles to be added), a site like authonomy is really nothing without its community. And on that basis, we’ll soon be delighted to invite the first few hundred names on our email list to set up residence, behind closed doors, in the very first incarnation of the site.

Let the fun begin!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Weidenfeld hits back
So Bodley Head and Random think there is life in serious non-fiction and judging from his comments, there is life in Lord Weidenfeld too. And he stands by serious non-fiction according to the bookseller:

Weidenfeld called the Observer story “a mischievous and misleading bit of journalism”. He said: “It is a complete misrepresentation. We particularly take pride in our distinguished list of biographies, history and current affairs titles. We have written off some of our non-fiction list, but not at the expense of serious historical authors. We are still bringing out major celebrity memoirs. What we have rid ourselves of is middle of the road journalistic popularisations whose time has gone and do not have much of a market.”

You have to admire the fire there. Read the rest here.

Oh and here is the link to Bodley Head that I forgot the other day,
Eoin

Prompted by a comment
It’s a long tome since it was announced and the development blog has been quiet since February.

Anyone know what is happening there?

If so, let me know!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Bodley Head thinks not
I’m honest enough to acknowledge that if I was the average buyer of books, our industry would be in a fairly fantastic position. Firstly I buy too many (even with a mostly effective book buying bar I’m tallying about 5 or 6 a month) and I buy expensive (a weakness for serious non-fiction and hardback new release genre fiction). I’m rarely swayed by 342 offers unless someone does it across the range when I take advantage to pick up a selection of backlist titles I have eyed for a while (mostly non-fiction).

In any case, I am not the average reader and that makes for a tricky time for serious non-fiction publishers. In fact there have been some signs that serious there will be thin times ahead and the dumping of books by W&N as mentioned twice before on this blog is just the tip of the iceberg.

There is an interesting piece in today’s Independent (the London variety) which paints the market in a very negative light:

Anecdotal evidence abounds that high-quality works of history fail to arouse the level of support in the retail trade that they once did. That, in turn, inhibits editors who seek to commission more of the same.

Dissing retailers is easy enough for most book people but the really harsh words though are reserved for publishers:

Too often, even the most dedicated houses have been content to print good popular history rather than really publish it. That attitude no longer suffices. Given high-street resistance, 50 per cent and more of likely sales for many top-notch histories will soon come from online outlets. Which means that publishers have to toil to recruit and retain virtual communities with a passion for the past.

All this makes the relaunch of Bodley Head as “a list devoted to quality non-fiction” quite a strange and perhaps a brave move. You will find a fascinating article on the topic by imprint publishing director Will Sulkin in Publishing News:
So why The Bodley Head? Why now? What does Random House think it’s doing?

Well, for a start, if you’re a major player in any field then you need to know you’re playing with a full deck. We didn’t have a World’s Classics list, so we started Vintage Classics. (And what a success that’s turning out to be.) We haven’t had a Penguin Press, so we’re launching The Bodley Head.
And this, for the first time, allows Random House to concentrate its formidable resources on the acquisition, design, marketing, publicising, production and selling of quality non-fiction – to become a specialist in the field. It gives the likes of Misha Glenny, Jonathan Powell, Roger Penrose, Karen Armstrong, Simon Schama, Nicholas Stern, Stephen Greenblatt, Norman Davies, et al a purpose-built platform for their wares – somewhere the texts can be hand-crafted and polished by a peerless editorial team and sent out into the world in the best shape and with the best chance of reaching the broadest possible readership.

I like the idea here. Basically he is saying We did it because we could!! How is that for confidence? You have to admire the ambition too.

Hoping it works,
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

As far as DRM goes
I knew it would be fun to have G&M’s Digital Development Manager blogging. For instance, here is part two of his series on DRM:

Here’s how it works:

1. I visit a website to order a book
2. The website requires me to register (not perfect in terms of web usability but a fair compromise and fairly universal these days)
3. I order an e-book from the site in my choice of format.
4. The site back-end takes the XML source of the book and starts the process to create my copy of the book in the format I chose.
5. While creating the copy of my book it pulls information from the membership database to add to selected areas in the book and to create a custom header (This copy of RUINAIR has been personalised for XXXXXX).
6. The customised e-book is placed in a digital library linked to my member ship account for me to download at any time.
7. An email is automatically sent to me letting me know that my book is ready for download.

The data we pull from the membership system can be your name, billing address, email address, phone number, order number or any combination of these. Its not a device locked DRM but how many people will be willing to share files that have their email address or phone number in them.

I like this idea but mainly for the reasons I expressed in my comment on the blog:

Now that is smart!

I especially like the concept because where you can add DRM in such a fashion you can add value that is specific to the consumer.

Think of it, if you can pull their membership preferences you can slip in ads for their pre-selected genres and topics, extra info on authors they like and other stuff they would see as enhancing the e-book/digital product!

If you can make DRM a value added, then I think you have a winner. That is of course if e-books is the way forward and not just webpages and access rather than a physical/digital product.

Very nice,
Eoin

I was tagged by Rowan over at Fortify Your Oasis. The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

1) Oddly is Strategy (Second Revised Edition) by BH Liddell Hart [9780452010710]
2) The sixth, seventh and eight sentences on page 123 read:

If this be true, it forms an ironical final triumph for the strategy of indirect approach and its decisive ‘pull’.
In 1815, after his return from Elba, the size of Napoleon’s forces seems to have sent the blood to his head gain. Nevertheless, in his own fashion he used both surprise and mobility,and in consequence came within reach f a decisive result.

And I tag in turn: Trifles, American President’s Blog, History is Elementary, David, and Declan.

Nice day after the rain,
Eoin