As per usual Kassia gets it right where other just try (I include myself in the others category)
Here
Why this is news to anyone I really, really do not know: Discounting Can Be Detrimental!
Here
John Scalzi (New Favourite Author – I’ve read the Old Man’s War trilogy in less than a week taking out the delivery times) has a rant of epic and amusing proportions about the SFWA election. Well worth reading for the passion and sense he projects, firmly.
Here
Won’t someone please think of the children
And stop using words like emissions?
For the record the story is here and the goal is noble!
Such as it is,
Eoin
[Hat Tip to a certain industry exec who showed the way!]
It pays to work for a publisher
in what can be described as a moderately innovative trial I have been given some books to disperse
3 Copies of The Wordmdigger’s Daughter by John Farrell
Molly and her husband Frank work on a large country estate in the 1920s. Hardship has already claimed the lives of three of their four children. Their remaining child, twelve-year-old Angel, is the focus of all their love and hope for the future. When Molly overhears a friend of the master of the estate lay claim to their young daughter, they steal away in the dead of night and take to travelling the roads of Ireland. Falsely accused of stealing from the estate, they become fugitives.
Now branded as criminals, they disguise Angel as a boy to avoid being identified as the thieves who fled the estate. They are helped by sympathetic farmers along the road but their lives are governed by the terror of being discovered, and above all, by their fear of what will happen to their daughter if they are caught. Their only hope lies with the ‘Brotherhood’ and with some influential Americans who befriend them, offering the possibility of escape – but at a terrible price.
The first three e-mails to commissioning AT mercierpress DOT ie get em (include your address for posting).
This is fun!
Eoin
They Can’t Eat You*
One thing I have learned since I started blogging is that asking can result in only two answers; Yes or No. The rest is variation on a theme.
I first learned this when I cheekily asked to meet Richard Charkin, then CEO at Macmillan, for a meeting at a point when I needed advice and direction. He was very active in the blog world, being at the time the only CEO of a major publisher blogging on a daily basis. He agreed and met me for lunch in London and we had a great chat about publishing, blogging and the future.
So, determined not to let his move to Bloomsbury be the end of his blogging as it seems to have been, I e-mailed and asked again. The result is below:
**
Eoin wrote to me a week or so ago asking if I‘d write a guest blog for him. I had a bit of travelling ahead of me (London-Delhi-London-Berlin-London-New York-London) and so agreed to try. Of course I failed to write a word on the planes as I suffered a mixture of lack of inspiration, fatigue and laziness. But now guilt has reasserted itself and blogging is on my mind.
From December 2005 until September 2007, while I was working at http://www.macmillan.com I compiled a blog. I’ve spent this morning editing out possible copyright infringements and writing a preface because, amazingly, Macmillan want to publish a print version (on demand of course) for students of publishing etc. It made me realize how much I owed to guest bloggers and commentators and friends and how I owed Eoin a short piece for his blog.
Yesterday’s London Times had an interesting piece in the Business News section – A novel Idea May Not Be Lucrative. The author’s conclusions are hardly earth-shattering. Most novels don’t earn very much money for their authors (or their publishers) but people enjoy writing books for reasons other than money. What is extraordinary is that the piece is the lead article in the business section of a major newspaper. The fiction publishing industry is tiny and hardly any of it is available to investors (in the UK only Penguin, part of http://www.pearson.com , and http://www.bloomsbury.com , my employers are fiction publishers and quoted companies). Sales of some novels are spectacular but even the most spectacular compare in revenue and terms very unfavourably with, for example, a drug, a car, an airline, or an oilfield.
As an industry we should be very grateful for all the attention (and I am) but why this journalistic obsession with the economics of books and fiction in particular?
Thanks Richard. I know that there are a good dozen readers who will be buying that book and they are not students either! A great way to turn on its head our obsession with media coverage. I’ll need to think a little more about this.
Eoin
* Bob Parson’s 16 Rules (corny and wise, a good combination)
** The Charkinblog banner was sourced from http://charkinblog.macmillan.com/
Update: The Digitalist has some good words on Content!
Without content there is no internet, there is no context, there is no point in contacting in the sense that I understand Rushkoff to be using it. Pretty much everything in media is changing true, but the one thing that is not changing is the position of content as the ultimate driver of why people go to where they go and do what they do. While the context of watching a TV show or reading an article may have changed (e.g. distribution channels have migrated to digital) and the ways in which I interact with others around it has evolved I still want to watch something interesting and read something informative. Other factors are always going to be secondary to that.
Content, in whatever form it takes, remains the sine qua non of media. Despite the high profile given to various forms of aggregation, search and networking it seems pointlessly iconoclastic to suggest a displacement as such. Rather I see it more as shifts around content, altering it but not ultimately detracting from its centrality.
I’m an ordinary man
And in many ways I think I represent the crux of the problem the publishing industry faces. I’m an atypical book buyer (I buy many, perhaps too many books) and I also consumer digital content voraciously.
Books, books, good for the heart
I love books. By that I mean printed, bound, paper books. I like hardbacks of old books. Ones that smell musty and have been opened rarely. I love paperbacks, light and easy to carry, almost disposable once read. I love the thoughts and ideas books contain. Every one a treasure of knowledge and information stretching back to its author or its translator. Perhaps it is a newer edition of a classic text or a transcription of a famous oral tradition, perhaps the narrative account of a historical event, the diary of a participant, the now out dated analysis of political events of previous centuries, or indeed a frivolous novel designed to subvert the social mores of the day> perhaps it is none of these things, merely the dry recording of naval stores aboard ships in the Eastern Mediterranean in the years after the Napoleonic Wars. One way of the other I love them.
The web, the web, good for the heart
I love the web, the twisty paths of knowledge you can take, the leisurely reading of varied topics, from politics to anthropology, from science to seasoning, from gossip to goose recipes. That I can jump through the library catalogs of the University of Michigan and peruse the shelves of the British Library online. I like that images enrich my idea of the world almost effortlessly and that references and recommendations offer a much deeper understanding of the world, the concept, the time, or even the place I am reading about.
Rivals for my heart
In one sense these two loves are not opposed but in another they are. I cannot both read books and surf the web. At least not simultaneously. The task of reading requires dedicated standalone time, i can read and surf but not read books and surf. Not even e-books work for me and thus the reason I believe they have little future as standalone computer based products. I think the web page and the web browser will dominate reading of all sorts in the future, not just short form articles and brief blog posts but for magazines, newspapers, journals and books.
E-books will just not work, why would I close my browser and use a different, standalone app when the experience of reading in a broswer where connectedness abounds is so much better?
Add to the mix O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference last week
And I think you’ll see an industry that is making a desperate attempt to get to grips with the future and kind of flailing around. So much so we are willing to listen to just about anyone who has an idea about where we should be going. Some of those ideas are brilliant and some are quaint, but all of them have potential.
if I was to fall down on one idea it is the one that say that content is no longer king. Somehow I struggle to buy that. I guess I’m a dinosaur then. I’ll think on it some more.
The truth of course is none of us know what is going to happen and although we will claim we saw it coming when it happens, we won’t have. Possibly we will be lucky if we can adapt in time to survive when it does, possibly not.
If I sound sanguine I am, because I remain convinced that what I love; the knowledge and information, the ideas and thoughts, the concepts and contrivances will survive, distributed digitally or in beautiful or cheap volumes of printed ink, it really won’t matter. One way or the other, I suspect I’ll be involved in the process that makes that happen too. Its want I want to do, so I’ll just have to make it happen.
Convinced I’m not obsolete, yet!
Eoin
For the record. Sara Lloyd @ The Digitalist Blog and George Walkley @ Life As Beta Geek were indespensible in following a conference I wish I could have attended.
Oh and tomorrow I have a surprise guest blogger, worth reading!
Eoin Purcell's Blog 