Download - Understanding Book Publishing - For Writers

Understanding Book Publishing -

For Writers

by

Willliam McClymont

-------------

Minimalist Books is an imprint ofFat Boy Intermedia Ltd

yA devilishly good read

Published by Minimalist Books,

which is an imprint of

Fat Boy Intermedia LtdRoom 106 Roland Lewinsky Building

University of PlymouthDrake Circus

PlymouthPL4 8AA

www.minimalistbooks.com

First published 2010

ISBN-13 978-0-9548563-4-2

Printed and bound in UK

Copyright©William McClymont

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, recorded, stored in a retrieval system, by any form or by any means, electronically, analogue or digitally, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Set in Gill Sans Light 12pt

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be re-sold, lent, hired out or circulated without the prior consent of the publishers in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Published by Minimalist Books,

which is an imprint of

Fat Boy Intermedia LtdRoom 106 Roland Lewinsky Building

University of PlymouthDrake Circus

PlymouthPL4 8AA

www.minimalistbooks.com

First published 2010

ISBN-13 978-0-9548563-4-2

Printed and bound in UK

Copyright©William McClymont

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, recorded, stored in a retrieval system, by any form or by any means, electronically, analogue or digitally, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Set in Gill Sans Light 12pt

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be re-sold, lent, hired out or circulated without the prior consent of the publishers in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

y---------------------

Contents

7 A Bit of Background17 Inside the Publishing World25 The Author’s Perspective - What Writer’s Really Want29 The Authors’ Perspective - Writers’ Circles39 Book Publishing - A Brief History57 Desktop Publishing, (DTP), What made it possible65 Wind of Change93 Culture Shock107 Oligopily in the market place 115 The King Is Dead, Long Live the King125 Publishers’ Perspective137 Revenue Streams149 So! What’cha Gonna Do ‘bout It?165 A Little Education

Acknowledgements

It must be said that this book could never have existed without the help of certain people who, through their greater knowledge, enduring patience and wealth of experience which they generously afforded me. I include a special thanks to the following gracious people, Simon Flynn of Icon Books, with his gentle nudging which made me think deeper. Also to Toby Mundy of Atlantic Books who gave me much of his time and wisdom. Both Simon and Toby were extremely generous for no other reason than that they are fine people and they love the business of publishing. For this I will always remember them. Timesonline for the kind use of their information about RTL Also to The Bookseller magazine’s Independent Publishers Catalogue for their valuable information.Steve Hannaford of Oligopilywatch.com for his wonderful and vast knowledge on the subject and his kind permission for the use of it.Verso Books for their kind permission to quote from The Business of Books, 2000 by Andre Shiffrin.Dolly Jankienanan deserves a medal for her constant cajoling, bullying and generally putting up with me and causing me to finish this book. Robin George Hooppell, (RG), was valuable for his patient assistance in refining this book from a writer’s perspective and helping me consume large amounts of lovely Lavazza.

Cover design by William McClymont Book design and layout by William McClymont usingInDesign

Understanding Book Publishing –

For Writers

by

William McClymont

y

Understanding Book Publishing –

For Writers

by

William McClymont

y

Writers should

know what’s going on

in the book trade

Check out

cut and paste these

http://www.booktrade.info/

http://bookfinder.com/about/booksellers/

http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/

http://www.publishers.org.uk/en/home/

http://www.societyofauthors.org/

6

If you are a writer and don’t understand why you cannot get an agent or even a smell of a publisher for your book and the inside workings of the book trade and publishing industry seem to be impenetrable, then read on. This book will explain how and why the book world got to where it is today and why your book is in the doldrums no matter how brilliant you think it is, unless you are a z list celebrity. Over the years I’ve known so many people, writers and musicians, genuinely talented people who got nowhere, who were ignored in preference to malleable nothings and then ended up in front of a train. I’ve seen life long friends left tired. broken and bewildered from the sincere effort of being ex-cellent rather than mediocre and commercially suc-cessful. They were good at what they did, they were better than good, they strove to be the best, but that is not required. What they did not understand was the workings of the innards of their chosen profession, be it music, art or writing. For sure, be-ing creative is not enough. By ignoring the business of the business, they sacrificed themselves on the

Firstly -A bit of background

7

alter of commerce for some altruistic dream while the mediocre counted the money, so there is no correlation between intellect and financial success. The proof is all around us. Sometimes intelligence, and wisdom are no substitute for animal cunning. So what I am saying is, write your book to the best of your ability, never give up, quality is still valuable but team it up with some guile and understanding of the book trade rather than shouting in the dark.

I must make it clear at the outset that I’m in no way speaking on behalf of any publishing house, large or small, no global media conglomerate or pushing an agenda. I only tell you what I know from my knowledge and experience, telling it like it is from the perspective of a small publisher, in fact, a micro publisher building up to small.

Within the hierarchy of the publishing world there are different kinds of publishers. There are academic publishers, university press publish-ers, as well as trade publishers, self-publishers, and web publishers. Then there are e-book publishers, audio book publishers and there are small publish-

A bit of background

8

ers. Most publishers haven’t even reached small yet, that is the ambition of many publishers when they begin. However, it is a quantum leap to get from a beginning to small, even with many years of expe-rience, knowledge and good contacts. The precise definition of a “small publisher” is clearly defined later on page 125.

Now, I make no apology for my opinions and it has been said that this book is very opinion-ated. Good! It’s meant to be, that’s a good thing. Anyway, for a writer, if you haven’t got an opinion, what have you got to say unless you are just reciting facts or telling a story. Too many books, like much of the media, have nothing to say. They’re just cotton wool, namby pamby pink lint with no stuffing, noth-ing in them, worse than a vegetarian hamburger. Many people will not agree with much of what I have to say, especially if they are protecting a vested interest and I don’t expect them to, but that’s fine, as the chances are, I probably wouldn’t agree with them either. We do not all see things from the same perspective and their perspective

A bit of background

9

might not be the same as mine. Some people like to keep their head in the sand and might feel that their bubble could be burst if the truth about the publishing industry were to be faced. Some try to meet it head on, others are dazzled by the lights and freeze. However, it should be remembered that publishing is an industry and not a science. Throw enough of the gooey stuff at the wall and some of it will stick, it might not smell great but who cares if it sticks. Now what sticks might recoup its costs and a percentage of that will make enough profit to cover the losses of the others.

It’s a bit like playing on the financial mar-kets, such as Forex for example, where you trade in the foreign currencies. If you do a hundred deals and fifty are losers, twenty are sort of comme ci comme ça and the remaining thirty are winners, it’s okay. If the thirty winners win more than the losses of the fifty losers and then you have a profit. However, for the fifty losers, that requires a reas-sessment

A bit of background

10

So, as I said, publishing is an industry not a science, and furthermore, it’s an industry that does not like change. Most of the changes that have taken place in the last five and a half centuries have been forced and happened over the last thirty years or so. Markets and industries prefer stabillity, and for this industry it is a rate of change that’s a bit too quick for some people. Most of these changes were forced from outside as a result of exterior pres-sures like mergers, takeovers and new technology. The “gentleman’s profession” has had to put down its quill, sup less claret and come into the twentieth century. I know, and you know, that it’s now the twenty first century, but you can’t hurry a good thing, they‘ll get there, perhaps against their wishes, but to be fair, they’re still in shock and awe at the arrival of the digital age and what Napster and the I-pod did to the music industry. I will come to that in more depth later. So, I only tell it from my point of view and I only speak for me.

Many people enter publishing straight from university. It is a bit of a cliché that seventy five per cent of publishing employees are women in their

A bit of background

11

mid twenties and called Emma. Now, even I don’t believe that, though it is a rather popular name, however, some prophecies do become self fulfill-ing. So, William is my real name and not a nom de plume, so it’s a fact that I’m not called Emma. Also, I am constantly reminded by those around me that I’m considerably more than twenty five and I’m male, at least I was the last time I looked.

My greatest passion is ideas, writing and art, and back in the 1980’s, due to a rather convoluted situation, I inadvertently became a publisher of fine art prints and became a publisher member of the Fine Art Trade Guild. However, some time later, through another complicated state of affairs, I found myself writing again and as I now knew something of the process of publishing, I turned to books and book publishing. I also took it upon myself to do a Post-Graduate Diploma in Publishing and then an M.A. in Publishing. This was fairly useful as it brought me up to date with current procedures and also allowed me contact with contemporary publishing practices through the experience of working with a couple of small, though very successful, dynamic

A bit of background

12

mid twenties and called Emma. Now, even I don’t believe that, though it is a rather popular name, however, some prophecies do become self fulfill-ing. So, William is my real name and not a nom de plume, so it’s a fact that I’m not called Emma. Also, I am constantly reminded by those around me that I’m considerably more than twenty five and I’m male, at least I was the last time I looked.

My greatest passion is ideas, writing and art, and back in the 1980’s, due to a rather convoluted situation, I inadvertently became a publisher of fine art prints and became a publisher member of the Fine Art Trade Guild. However, some time later, through another complicated state of affairs, I found myself writing again and as I now knew something of the process of publishing, I turned to books and book publishing. I also took it upon myself to do a Post-Graduate Diploma in Publishing and then an M.A. in Publishing. This was fairly useful as it brought me up to date with current procedures and also allowed me contact with contemporary publishing practices through the experience of working with a couple of small, though very successful, dynamic

publishing houses. It’s true that most publishers in the UK are small companies. You’ll find the large corporate publishers, in general, are the publishing arms of major global leisure companies, like BMG, Disney, Warner Bros etc.

Since the early eighties, there have been a great many changes in publishing. After two centu-ries of stability, and things happening more or less the same way, most of the changes came about as a result of new technology and new proprietors. For good or bad, this permanently changed how things were done and new methods paved the way for different types of companies. As the situation pro-gressed, there were takeovers and mergers which changed the nature of proprietorship from what started out as people who were literary types who were interested in books, to conglomerates that are predominantly interested in business, with books now being a commodity and only one facet of that business.

Now a pessimist would tell you that the publishing bottle is half empty, as all the changes

A bit of background

13

meant loss of jobs and the old skills lost and with traditional companies disappearing or being ab-sorbed into bigger corporations and re-emerging as just an imprint of the larger entities. But as with most things however, whether this turns out to be good, bad or indifferent might depend on where you are sitting. Then again, an optimist will tell you that the bottle is half full and the choice is greater as more books are being published and through more outlets than ever before.

There were parallels with other industries so we could see where it would all go. A para-digm already existed. So, in conjunction with the new digital technologies available, opportunities seemed to arrive quicker than anyone could cope with. As some new companies joined the publishing fraternity, some dissolved, but overall, publishing as a dynamic ongoing activity is still thriving and will continue to do so, as long as people want to read the printed word. What cannot be said with any certainty is the form that this publishing will take. It might be that the end product, a book, is delivered on the old dead tree conventional paper, or maybe

A bit of background

14

electronically like an E-Book, or downloaded from the internet, to your phone, palm top, web book, laptop, PC, Kindle, I-Reader or a chip implanted at the base of your skull, a wireless connection, or in some other form of e-reader that we haven’t yet thought of using. Only time will tell, as the final decision will probably not be made by the reader, but by those companies who invest their money to drive the technology.

A bit of background

15

-----------

Authors in the scheme of things

as ingredients of the publishing recipe

There’s more to a book than just the writing

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Now, if you regard yourself as a serious writer, that is to say, one who intends to be a published writer rather than one who just writes “heavy stuff ”, and you want to inhabit this world of the book trade, then it would be more than useful to understand the nature of the business you are trying to get into. If you want to be a car mechanic, you need to know a bit more about cars than how to just drive one. You need to know the nuts and bolts of it and what things do. If, for example, you want to have a restaurant, before you jumped in with both feet, you would find out about the elements that make a good restau-rant as its more than just the food. It’s the ambience, the décor, the qualities of the chef and the front of house staff, the financial management, the public’s image and perception of it as well as the menu. Is your chef going to be a Gordon Ramsey, Gordon Brown or Gordon Bennett, or just a gay Gordon? So, what goes in your restaurant? What is appropriate for the place? On the menu, you have the style of the food, the selection, and then there is the quality of the ingredients that make it up and the costing and financing of it. There are a lot of considerations. Well, the recipe for a book is no different.

Inside the Publishing World

17

Just as when someone decides to own a restaurant or be a chef, they have to understand the nature of that world, so for someone who wants to be a writer, that is, a professional writer, one who is paid and published, it is no different. You must at least have some knowledge of the nuts and bolts of how it functions. It is not necessary to know how to do all the jobs that are involved, but it is necessary to know what they are and who does what. If you understand what and why things hap-pen, then you will find it a far better experience. In your current field, you will have people you know and trust that you deal with all the time. They are part of your milieu, the world you know and inhabit. Everyone else is an outsider. You trust the people in your circle, they’re part of what you are part of. You know them, even if you don’t like them on a personal basis, it doesn’t get in the way of your professional activity. However, it is normal and human to prefer to deal with people you know. You know their strengths and their weaknesses, their limitations and where they are likely to fall down, you can work around that. Within your sphere, you know what’s likely to happen, to go wrong. Why would publishing be any different?


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In a restaurant, when a chef makes a tasty tomato sauce for a meal, he doesn’t invite the tomato grower to the restaurant. No! The to-mato grower is an outsider. He is a supplier. He takes the tomatoes from the growers, adds a bit of this and a bit of that and hey voila! A sauce! Now if his sauce becomes famous and there is some kudos in wheeling out the grower because he is also famous as the global organic tomato expert who happens to grow the finest organ-ic tomatoes on the planet, then he will do that.

To a publisher, the author is a supplier, the same as the tomato grower is to the res-taurant or a printer is to books. However, the public sees it the other way round, they see the book and the author, not the publisher, as in the nice restaurant, the customers see the food, the décor but not where the food comes from. Now I know a lot of you are thinking, it’s not the same, authors do book signings. Yes! Well, some do, some don’t. Some love it, some hate it. Others believe it is just an utterly pointless task and demeaning to sit in a shop with the pub-lic ogling them like they are in a zoo. Oh! Look! There’s a writer, shake his hand. For publishers,


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it’s also expensive to send an author around the country on yet another book signing event. There are the travel costs, hotels, food and time, there’s marketing materials etc. None of this is free, and some authors might have to do several sign-ings and events a day to make it cost effective.

Now, for the year 2008, Nielsen Book showed that in the UK alone, 120,947 books were published, in America there were double that and in Europe, there were more than half a million. Book publishing in Europe amasses a turnover of 23 bil-lion euros annually. Now if the authors of all these books had to queue up in Waterstones to scribble their signature, just imagine it. So maybe it’s better for the writers to do what they do best, and let the poor publishers get on with what they do best.

Writers are essential for publishers. They supply the meat and drink that makes up the book. Without them, there would be no books. They are the tomato growers. Without the tomato growers, there would be no tomatoes, and therefore, no to-mato sauce. It’s a very similar situation in the film in-dustry. Anybody seen the Robert Altman film, “The Player”? There is a scene where the executives are trying to do away with writers, as they’re an


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unnecessary expense? For the movies, it sums up the commissioning process really well, but also for books, it is the much the same, though the veneer in Hollywood is a bit different from the veneer in the UK, that’s all. Writers are not in the milieu of the publishing environment inside the publisher’s office as part of the production activity. They are on the end of a phone, on the outside looking in. They are beavering away over a hot laptop somewhere with a gin and tonic, and when they are ready, they will supply the manuscript. That in essence, is the extent of the rapport between the publisher and the writer.

Of course, the writer is an integral part of the process, but apart from supplying the content, there is little involvement in any decision making. They agree a date for the delivery of the manu-script and it is expected to be there by that time. If it isn’t, then chaos ensues and the publisher can demand a full return of the advance. Don’t forget, an advance is just that, a sum against expected sales, it is not a gift, a bung or some bunce for the author.

Many years ago, an author, a good friend of mine, the top man in his field with a book in the bestseller list, was commissioned by a publisher to do a coffee table book.


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Apart from knowing that he was an expert in the field who had a bestseller in a particular sub-ject, they knew nothing about how he worked, or in his case, how he didn’t work. It was a disaster. They paid him a substantial advance and he twiddled his thumbs and panicked. After a time, they cut their losses, as well as all ties with him. He is still a highly reputed speaker on his subject, but not a writer. If they really knew him, they would have known the history of his bestseller and how it came about. They would then have known that he couldn’t write to save his life. He is a really nice man, but never a writer. So, when possible, to avoid situations like this, people do business with people they know, if they can.

However, generally, most people only see things from their own point of view and disregard the other’s point of view as “their problem” while at the same time expecting the same “others” to consider their position. It’s a bad attitude, but then, it’s human nature and when push comes to shove, we all do it. If you look at the publishing process as looking at a big cake, you can see your slice, but your slice on it’s own is not the whole cake, it’s only one point of view, remember, it’s only a morsel and some morsels are bigger than others.


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check out---------

cut and paste these

www.britishcopyright.org/ www.babash.com/ www.completelynovel.com/ www.bookbrunch.co.uk/

23

Don’t write for your egoleave that behind

write because you have something to saya point to make

information to impart

24

What Writer’s Really Want

Most authors want to know one thing. How do I get my book published? Getting their book published is their top priority, after that, then they’ll think about the money, the deal and whatever else there is, but first, get into print.

Many people join writers’ circles, which helps to a point. It gives them a sense of belonging, part of this abstract literary community. However, will it help them to get published? Well, no! A lot of them do “Creative Writing” courses, well, sounds great, but if they were already creative types they would be doing it by now. How could you say to Salvador Dali, “Hey! Salvador, you should go on a course on how to be a creative artist or one of them surreal-ist painters.” It’s ridiculous. It’s what he was already, inside, that is. The creativity is what he added to his art with his highly skilled and well-trained painting techniques. The conventional artistic training was not in itself the finished article. It was what came from within the man that made the finished article, albeit with the help of some absinthe.

The problem with any training course is that you go in as raw talent with potential, then

The Writer’s Perspective

25

come off the production line exactly the same as the rest, unless of course you add something of what is inside you, your soul, the inner being. All writers need something to say, a story to tell, but it must be worth hearing and be told fresh, with a different voice that makes them heard above the cacophony of voices of the multitude of writers. There are many people who have something to say, but they do not express it well enough for a publisher to invest time, money and effort in it.

Now that the world and his wife has a computer, they all think they could write a book. Well, yes! In theory at least, but would it be worth reading? Can they tell a story in an interesting way? Who knows? In some ways the PC is the scourge of writing. Before, anyone who was serious about writing had to use a typewriter, know how to spell and with the help of a gallon of Tippex, they were off. But now, there are programmes that do the plot, help you create the characters, make you a genius in a week with the “secrets” of creating a best seller. It’s a doddle, anyone can do it and you can publish it yourself. Oh yeah! So you can, but when you look objectively at the efforts that hit the streets, actually, that’s not accurate, hit the net, you can see the difference.


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Like bloggers and tweeters, because they pound the keyboards it does not mean that anyone anywhere is going to read it. The sheer volume of blogs is such that unless it’s a bona fide, recognised daily or weekly professional blog for a company with a waiting audience, most are talking to them-selves. Now, for the first time in history, there are more writers than readers.


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Yakety Yak!

Where’s the product?

28

Writer’s Circles

Every week all around the country, writer’s circles meet and most start out with the same drab question and get the same drab answers. The first question of the evening is usually, “any successes this week?” The response is predictable. They look round at each other to see if a rival has scored. “I got a rather nice rejection letter,” says one. “I’ve just got my article published in the Hill Walker’s & Pub Crawler’s Gazette,” says another. Somebody might get an article in Take a Break or a local church rag.

In any case, publishers are conspicuous by their absence around writer’s circles and don’t see them as a fount of potential for their ventures. They have no input in them, there is no kudos in them. Yes I know, I can hear you say, “but there are so many good writers in these circles. “ Well, maybe. So why do you think there are no publishers knocking on the door looking for writers?

Well, the truth is, writer’s circles, although the individual writers may be very earnest about what they are writing, are by their nature, amateur pursuits. Book publishing by contrast, is a serious professional business. Thereby lies the difference.


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So, to the writer, they are perfecting their art, their craft, however, to the publisher, they have a business to run, and in business, as we know, most people prefer to deal with people they know, or people who know people they know, or are of that ilk. Ex-public schoolboys understand other ex-pub-lic schoolboys, even if they did not go to the same school. They understand how they think, feel and how they tick, in short, it is safer. After all, publish-ers aren’t adventurous types that go in for high-risk events. They leave that to other folks who then write about it, and then they publish the story of it. As I stated earlier, they spread the risk with the gains covering the losses.

So, the question is, how do you as a writer get your work published if you don’t know a pub-lisher? It’s almost like asking how do I become a freemason? Answer - 2B1ask1.

Let’s simplify it a bit. Look at it this way, there are two doors, fiction and non-fiction. I know it’s stating the obvious but sometimes it’s necessary to do so as the obvious is not obvious to every-body. Well, if you are writing non-fiction, then send a book proposal to a publisher after phoning to find out who in that company is likely to be the


30

person who deals with the subject you intend to write about. Make sure that you include in your proposal the outline of the content, the audience, describing the reasons why your book should be published and whatever similar books exist and why yours will add something to the existing list. Also, make sure you let them know why you are the one to write this book and what your creden-tials are for writing it. Are you an expert in this field? Is this your professional experience? Do you have specialist knowledge of this subject that makes you significantly better placed than anyone else to write this? And of course, are you able to write it in a way that is compelling enough for someone to invest money in?

Of course, it’s worth bearing in mind that it might land on the desk of someone who knows absolutely nothing about the subject, never mind knowing anything about you. So, you have to write your proposal in such a way that it will excite them. Look at it from their point of view. They will be asking themselves a few questions, such as, is there a need for this book? If yes, then they might be wondering if you are the best person to write it. They might have other authors who could do it better. Also, is this the right time for a book like


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this? What factors make it the right time? Whatever you do, make sure you write your proposal in a professional manner and include whatever writing experience you have, what you’ve had published, articles, short stories, prizes won if any. If it relates to your professional expertise, say so and why. If it is about something profound that changed your life, explain it. Check the publisher’s web site and their submission guidelines to see what to expect.

If however, it is fiction, then get an agent. An agent knows who is looking for what. They know who nearly got “that book” in an auction but didn’t and are now looking for something to fill the gap. Good agents know everyone and what they want and how to play one off the other. They are slick salesmen.

Often, publishers don’t always know what they want until they see it and sometimes it’s a case of chasing the market. Harry Potter is success-ful, suddenly a million keyboards are churning out more of the same. The music business is the same. Oasis broke through the market and then suddenly every A&R man wants an Oasis. They didn’t want them last week when nobody had heard of them. But that was last week, this is this week.


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So! How do you get an agent? Well, that’s the tricky bit. An agency knows it can cope with a certain number of clients and do a good job for them. They know what their optimum number of clients is. If they take on someone who is unknown they are going to have to spend time and effort on developing that person, which means less time on the others already on their list. Now ask yourself, are they going to drop someone who is bringing in money to accommodate you? You’d need to be very special.

Now agents also deal with authors of non-fiction, so no matter who you are, get an agent, but if you are doing non-fiction you can go direct to a publisher. However, the process for the two is the same. Send a book proposal to the agent but first, check their web site, see what they spe-cialise in and who in the agency deals with what particular genre. Make sure the book proposal is as comprehensive as previously described. So, how do you get an agent? Well, some cynics, of which I am one, would say the same way people think you get a publisher. Send them your material, leave it to ferment in their slush pile, then patiently wait... and wait... and wait.


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If the name “Slush Pile” sounds derogatory, it’s meant to. It’s not meant to sound warm and friendly like “here’s that lovely pile of new submis-sions that these naive hopefuls keep sending in. For slush, at least in this context, right click your mouse in Word and look down at the synonyms. Of yeah! Look! It says, sludge, mud, mire. You’re a writer, you understand words. Choose the one you think is mostly likely to be in the publisher’s mind. Pile, right click again. Oh look! Mound, heap, mountain, mass, stack. Oh! So I deduce from that then that the slush pile is just a heap of mire, a pile of crap? Hmm! Well! What else could it mean?

Surely all that sweat, tears and labour, the wringing of hands, the writing and re-writing must be worth more than that? Says who? Just because you’ve written a book, doesn’t mean that some-body else has to publish it.

When I was a young man, I went on a scriptwriting course. I loved it. It taught me a lot, especially about being disciplined with my writing. Words are the currency and must not be wasted. If they are not doing a job, they don’t belong and should be kicked out. I was so happy with myself I began writing script after script. A couple of years


34

later I was working in a well-known London casino. A regular punter who used to come in every day was a very famous Hollywood screenwriter, he was well connected and knew the industry backwards. Though I saw him every day, I didn’t know what his job was. One day in a casual conversation he told me he wrote scripts. I said that I write scripts. He said, “Who asked you to?” I was taken aback.

“I didn’t know I needed permission to write”, I replied, “I thought I lived in a free country.” He looked at me as if I was nuts, a naive fool. I looked back as if I wasn’t.

On reflection, he was right. I was young at the time and it took me a long time before I really understood his question. He didn’t write a word unless the deal was done and payment agreed. He wrote for money and was the second highest paid screenwriter of the time after William Goldman.

I wrote for love and payment was hoped for, but not in itself the motivation. To me writers write because they have a story to tell, or some-


35

thing to say that may be of interest to other people. They do not need permission to write it. It is what is within them and they are only expressing their deep urge, an innate freedom of thought and the day that ends will be a sad day for the world.

There’s more to writing than a pile of adjectives.


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Write what you know abou

t

Don’t waffle

Write from the heart

Do you have a structure?

A musican playing “free form” or “jamming”,

playing what he feels like, is not the same thing

as a musician with a musical structure and

feeling what he is playing.

Free form is doodling, just waffling, bullshit in

sound. In writing, words are the currency, don’t

add words you don’t need, make every word

do a job.

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540 years of stability...then came along a big cuckoo in the nest in the shape of technology and corporate business to elbow book and literary people aside

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Since Johan Gutenberg invented his print-ing press in 1440, not very much had changed in the printing process for around 550 years until the coming of desktop publishing and digitisation. These changed not only the methods of printing, but the manipulation of text, images and mode of trans-port used by the information contained within it and the users of that printing, i.e., the publishers.

Book publishing has survived world wars, revolutions and other threats. Writers have been witch hunted as in the fifties McCarthyism trials, fatwas have been imposed on them, others have been threatened, imprisoned and even murdered throughout history as some people see books as “dangerous” as they can turn a key in the mind of the reader.

There are some enterprising publishers who see these events as good opportunities to create more books, the politics of the wars and revolutions and the histories of these events, with the memoirs of key characters, their thoughts and experiences. Send a writer to jail for his thoughts and half a dozen books come out about it. Kill a fly and twenty come to its funeral. For the cynics, there are no real disasters, only more lovely book oppor-

Book Publishing: A Brief History

39

tunities. The danger with this attitude is that a sense of complacency can set in, and a feeling of being impervious to all eventualities, but that is just ar-rogance. Even the people who inspire political de-velopments that instigate the divisions that end in war are publishable An idea is not worth living for if it is not worth dying for. All religious leaders know that. So did Marx, Engels, Lenin and even the now omnipotent Mr Hitler, and they all wrote books.


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Conventional Publishing Until the Early 1980’s

For any serious writer it’s worth under-standing at least the rudiments of a brief history of publishing and the nature of the industry. Before desktop publishing arrived in the 1980’s, conven-tional publishing followed a fairly straightforward and routine, though labour intensive course, which was therefore a very expensive process.

The publishers through the editor would commission a work by an author, prepare the con-tent, send it to a designer or in-house production department to assemble for the printer. On reach-ing the printer, it would be prepared for printing in the standard manner of the time, that is, the text would go to typesetters and compositors who would then physically set the type by hand, choos-ing the font and its size, the leading and the kern-ing for the spacing and manually create each page ready to be made into a printing plate. Plates would be made of photographs and images and it would all be assembled and then put in a section.

Historically, book publishers commissioned authors to deliver books to them either after the


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author proposed a book which would be accept-able, or if the author was known to the publisher, they would invite the author to write a book for a specific subject or purpose. At this point, an editor would be appointed and the process would begin with a schedule being drawn up and agreed with the publisher and the author. This was pre-comput-ers and scanners.

Technically, the process followed five stages,• Origination, the original text, photographs, illustrations, images or artwork would be prepared to camera-ready film, i.e., they would be photo-graphed and put on film to make plates. • Plates would have to be made from the films.• Text would be prepared by typesetters.• Printing plates would be made from the negatives for each colour, cyan, magenta, yellow and black and each colour would have its own separate run through the presses to build up the image. • Finally when the text is printed over the colour you have the end result of image and text together as one.

Now publishing companies have their pre-ferred way of working tailored to their own busi-


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nesses, their customers, their markets and their personnel. They develop a modus operandi that is right for them reflected through their authors and the type of books they issue to the public. The publishing industry is, in general, poorly paid, and so employees are not there for the money, but for their interest in books. It’s fair to say that people in publishing generally love books.

This process was the way publishing had operated unfettered for decades. It went on until an invention came along that would in some way render their way of working obsolete or would give them a strong commercial imperative for change.

In the first instance, there were two of these commercial imperatives together, a dou-ble whammy to the industry. These were desktop publishing and the personal computer. After that it would be commercial threats such as mergers be-tween two similar sized companies when suddenly one larger company would emerge to dominate and have a lot more market share and influence. Other similar companies juxtaposed next to them in the market have effectively been diminished. If, for example, there were five companies of similar size working alongside each other for many years


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then suddenly, two of them merge, then the three who are left look somewhat small next to the two merged companies that are now one big one. If any two of the remaining three companies get nervous and merge then the last one of the original com-panies is now dwarfed by the two larger ones it is now trying to compete against. It has few options, it can either continue hopefully in an attempt to keep its market, it can become more specialised and be-come a niche publisher, or it can merge with one of the larger ones and become a part of the largest of the new groups.

This was the case throughout the eighties and nineties when there were mergers and takeo-vers throughout the whole of the publishing industry. Large companies were involved in many takeovers, such as Collins, which at one time were already a huge company then became HarperCollins. Others followed such as MacMillan and Random House. The actual methods of publishing would still be done the traditional way, though now the nature of publishing companies was changing and were be-coming global. Conglomerates by their very nature are more interested in accountants than editors.

Despite all of this, it was business as usual


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until along came “digital”. This new digital technol-ogy changed the way not only publishing operated in recent decades, but society itself. It affected eve-rything from banking, medical services, the military, commerce and education. So, what has been the effect of this on the process of book publishing and how it’s done and what are the key advances that moved the process forward and why?

The new publishing houses, the global en-terprises were not book people at all, they were business people focused only on profit. They saw books only as “product”, a commodity and in many cases books are a promotional tool to promote their other products. Andre Schiffren1 says in his “The Business of Books” published in 2000, “They wanted to establish early on that they did not care for the old intellectual and cultural standards. They were there to make money and for no other rea-son.”

Bertelsmann, who are part of Bertelsmann Media Group, BMG, had taken over Random House, Bantam, Doubleday and Dell. As they are a media group, books are only one arm of the company.

1 (Schiffrin, Andre. 2000, The Business of Books. P 111).


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Perhaps the most telling statistic published about Bertelsmann is that four thousand account-ants were reported to be working at its headquar-ters – many times the number of editors in all its holdings worldwide.2

Many of these merged companies were doing much the same thing before in the film in-dustry, the music and the entertainment industries. They saw all these things as mass-market enter-tainments. Corporations like Warner’s eventually became Time-Warner-AOL-EMI, covering all of these industries. They want a guarantee of success, so they produce films with tie-ins, such as the book, the toy, the soundtrack CD and the DVD. They distribute the film, the “product”, through their own global cinema chain, the soundtrack album is released through their record company and sold through their shops like HMV, which is owned by EMI. Until recently, part of Virgin was too. The mu-sic publishers will be theirs too and of course, the performing artist signed to their label. It has gone beyond capitalism and is now mutating into imperi-alist capitalism.

2 (Schiffrin, Andre. 2000, The Business of Books. P.115).


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So publishing as an industry, which had with-stood wars, revolutions and threats, by the process of time, was now being jeopardised by outside in-fluences which were more damaging to it than any-thing else that had gone before. Wars and the like were opportunities to capitalise on and produce the books of the story of the event. However, the ramifications of this new threat, i.e., the takeovers by people who neither cared for, nor were inter-ested in books, but rather only in the fact that they knew books sold annually in units of millions, was largely not understood by the traditional publish-ers. Anyone employed by the new proprietors who disagreed or was a dissenting voice was shown the door.

The traditional publishers, people who loved books of a literary nature as opposed to producers of entertainment media accessories, one way or another had become a dying breed. Conglomerates, big corporations and global com-panies work to standardised procedures, financial plans and profit margins. So did the traditional pub-lishers of course, however, in a different way and with smaller margins. For them, profit was what al-lowed them to continue to operate and keep their businesses afloat in the pursuit of their activity of


47

producing good books. They took risks that some books would take a long time to sell. Some authors take a long time to gather any real momentum with the public. Throughout history there have been im-portant writers like Kafka, Dickens and others who took time to develop the public’s awareness of them. The media, as we know it today and take for granted, did not exist. There were no chat shows to do interviews and to promote the latest book, no internet, no radio or blogs. Establishing an author took time and was nurtured. There were only lim-ited library, journals and newspaper opportunities.

Multi-national global corporations as we see, are not interested in that sort of approach they want the result now. For them, it makes no differ-ence what the “product” is, even that great internet bookstore Amazon, will sell you almost anything.

So it isn’t only dissident voices in these companies that have been taken over who have been shown the door, but the traditional publish-ers themselves. It is as if these companies had been invaded by a corporate virus that has sucked the soul out of them and their industry. They have been replaced with the husks of books for TV and film tie-ins, celebrity books to prop up mediocre televi-


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sion programmes and magazines. There are cook-ery books to go with the celebrity TV chef who is in turn sponsored by a supermarket chain that sells the book at discount, across from the ingredients on the shelves, fodder for the masses.

Next time you go into any bookstore chain, check their top hundred book chart and see what the content is. Count the number of books of lit-erature. In there somewhere, are still serious book lovers publishing books as before. So, they might be overshadowed, but they are still there, though small in number. They are the small Georgian build-ing nestling between the canyons of glass and steel modernity. They are there not because of mergers, but despite them.

There is a place for pap or people wouldn’t be buying the stuff. In a real democracy you can produce as much pap as you like and sell it and somebody will buy it. Something for everyone as they like to say, a euphemism for mid-range, mid-price mediocrity. Today the situation is confused in the way that books are now promotional tools for a corporate purpose, rather than something to be read. Of course, their audiences do read them, or at least, they look at the pictures.


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Mergers of big companies, whatever indus-try, usually follow the same line. A statement is is-sued crowing about the qualities of both compa-nies explaining why it makes good business sense to merge. Of course, they are determined they will retain all the traditions of the old company and no big changes will occur. Not to worry, nobody is go-ing to get fired. After a little while, another state-ment says cost effectiveness has now to be consid-ered, as they have discovered overlaps within the new company. Some departments might have to merge. It‘s then realised that accounting, shipping and warehousing are ineffective in separate build-ings so they get merged. Why have two sales forces? It’s now one company, so the sales forces will get amalgamated as it does not make economic sense to have both of them covering the same sales terri-tories. Of course, there’s a realisation of an overlap in editorial as well and so further rationalisations have to be made.

While all this was going on, another situa-tion was fomenting which no one understood the ramifications of at the time as it was in its infancy. That was digitisation. As the new technology devel-oped, not to use it could be a mistake as a competi-tor might use it and gain an advantage over you.


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Drawing an analogy of the effect of digitisa-tion and desktop publishing and the way it changed the partner industries of both printing and pub-lishing, one could compare it with the reformation within the shipping industry with containerisation of the partner industries of shipping and docking in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and their global effect. Up until the 1960’s, stevedoring compa-nies supplied dockers as hired labour to shipping companies for the loading and unloading of ships through an agency called The National Dock La-bour Board. This industry had always been a closed shop and no one could become a docker unless their father was one before them. This continued in the docks from the beginning of time as organ-ised labour, until a process came about which firstly, threatened the power of the dockers’ unions, and secondly, made dockers practically obsolete within a few years. With only 10% of the work force re-maining, the dockers unions had fewer members and therefore less funding. The process that caused this was containerisation. Traditionally, in dock, each hold of a ship was manned by twelve men below, twelve men ashore, a foreman, a checker and a winchman. With the advent of containerisation, a


51

huge crane with one operator and a man on deck is sufficient. Containers are of standard sizes, are watertight, are easy to pack and unpack, and once locked, they are secure. Special container ports were built for container ships, which then worked on particular routes.

Together, all of this changed the economy of scale and the way transporting of goods was done, which was the main purpose of shipping. The net result was that containerisation and its process became global. The new imperative of commercial considerations altered the way things had been done for centuries and many good companies with long traditions disappeared in the blink of an eye. Tens of thousands of men were redundant.

In the printing and publishing industries, compositors, camera-ready artists, platemakers and apprentices were all an essential part of the old process. However, as before with containerisation, in the blink of an eye, the converging emergence of new devices, like the personal computer, with compatible software and hardware, rendered them obsolete. The conveyance of the information gen-erated also changed to keep apace and that then became global.


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As we now see, the publishing industry was under attack from within by the predatory multi-national corporations which had invaded the busi-ness rather than from outside. External influences like wars, politics and the like, which publishing had always managed to survive up to this point and in fact, profit from was nothing compared to now.

So this is the broad brushstroke of the commercial landscape that conventional publishing was operating in and the influences they had to deal with. Sadly, for the traditional publishers whose main interest was in publishing books rather than balancing them or cooking them, after a couple of centuries of tranquil comfort and safety in the “gentleman’s profession”, as it has always been re-garded, they failed to notice that another predatory type of publisher was sneaking up on them. Perhaps they failed to act out of inertia, or fear, or it might simply be that they had no answer to it. Whatever it was, they did not respond sufficiently for their own survival.

Alongside all of the mergers and takeovers were the new technological developments that could both increase their productivity and profit, and at the same time, decrease their costs, if they


53

got it right. It goes without saying though that this could only happen if they had the money and re-sources to invest in it in the first place. As we can now see, this new publishing revolution is not just one revolution of a different style of company en-tering the market but many small simultaneous revolutions going on at the same time, cogs within wheels. This new breed was like a giant angry cuck-oo climbing into their cosy little nest and devouring all in sight.


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Coverging interests,

but in who’s interest

Converging interests can bring about changes, some good, some not so good,

depending where you are standing

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What made it possible

So we can now see that the nature of the industry is changing, but as it was a convergence of circumstances there were many influences at work at the same time. One of the key elements of course was desktop publishing, (DTP) without which not much would have changed. It would have been like having containers with no container ships or container ports. Now nobody sat down and said “lets invent desktop publishing and change the world.” Nevertheless, the personal computer and its software together with the commercial impera-tives produced a result that did change the world. Sometimes it only takes one man with a vision, or a few with similar interests and converging circum-stances, to inadvertently produce something that nobody ever dreamed of. This is the case with DTP where a handful of people changed so much.

Society is not static and therefore by its na-ture is ever changing, and for any industry, it is no different, as it must keep apace with the develop-ments. However, so much depends on whether the changes are organic changes from within or forced changes from outside. As we have seen, the glo-bal conglomerates through mergers and takeovers

Desktop Publishing, (DTP)

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were squeezing traditional publishers out. Nonethe-less, this new breed of publishers performed their function of book production in much the same way as before. It was their motivation and criteria that were different, that is to say, their view that mod-ern publishing was now an arm of the entertain-ment industry rather than just a literary exercise to produce books of fine reading. The actual book production side of things still had to be done the same way using the technologies of the day that were available.

The difference now was that as these new companies had significantly more resources than the traditional publishers and so they could respond to whatever technological progress presented it-self that they felt they could capitalise on. Whereas previously, the process being that when the manu-script arrived it had to be checked by editorial staff, proofread and sent to either a printers or in house print department where typesetters and composi-tors toiled to make up the appropriate page and get the kerning and the leading right and choose the suitable typeface, now, on the horizon, this was about to come to an end with the advent of com-ing new technologies.


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So, what were these technological develop-ments that drove the changes to create the birth of this DTP, (Desk Top Publishing)? In fact, they were twofold. It was in the hardware and in the software that facilitated a greater and now more flexible ease of use.

Although many companies were involved in the computer industry, three particular companies contributed to the progress of publishing more so than others from the late 1970’s onward. These companies were IBM, which specialises in hardware and who invented the “personal computer”, Apple Mackintosh who invented their own hardware and software to run their own operating system, and Microsoft that specialises in software for use on IBM or generic machines.

Other companies like Adobe created pub-lishing programmes for use in both systems, such as Photoshop that altered the way photographic images could be manipulated. This particular pro-gramme had a profound effect on the way image editors operated. Instead of laboriously cutting and pasting and then re-photographing and copying, they could now alter their image on screen and re-tain it either in the system, or on disc to retrieve it


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later on. In fact, Photoshop would never have hap-pened if Apple had not created their Mackintosh. However, one piece of equipment that was another part of the jigsaw was the GUI or Graphical User Interface.


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A Mention of Software Programming

The first generation of codes used to pro-gram a computer was called machine language or machine code, it was the only language a computer really understood, a sequence of “0”s and “1”s that the computer’s controls interpreted as instructions electronically. The second generation of code was called assembly language. This Assembly language turned the sequences of 0 and I into human words like ‘add’. Assembly language is translated back into machine code by programs called assemblers.

Next, the third generation of code was called high level language or HLL, which has human sounding words and syntax (like words in a sen-tence). Now, in order for the computer to under-stand any HLL, a compiler translates the high level language into either assembly language or machine code. All software programming languages need to be eventually translated into machine code for a computer to use the instructions they contain. As the end user, you do not see the code used to create computer software programs. However, you do use the results, and the end products of today’s software programming, are software programs that are easy to use by the consumer.


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With the arrival of new programmes, and personal computers, everyone connected with publishing had greater control over their work and were more mobile and flexible.

As would be expected, the major publishers that now belonged to conglomerates, were better positioned to benefit from the new advances. They had cut back on production and editorial costs and the duplication of backroom staff and sales teams when they merged two publishers together. They mirrored this in their other media businesses to magnify their influence. They also had the money to invest and they could promote one division of their company through another as their newspaper, their magazine and television arms could promote the books the publishing division were pushing. Also, if this was related to some celebrity, TV or film tie-in, the promotion for their book is then amplified. Each product then promotes its sister product.

As the marketing, promotion and the public relations gathers momentum and generates more interest, for the bigger publishers this becomes self-fulfilling as nobody wants to be involved in some-thing with no interest. For the smaller publishers, this was not possible, it was an uneven contest. For


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the big publishers, they got bigger and many small ones went to the wall, yes, the same one the writ-ing was on.

Therefore, what all this means is that the technology was only beneficial if you had the re-sources, the know-how and the capacity to use it. For the new publishers this was fine, they have it all, the finance, the media companies for the pro-motion and the tie-ins to promote their product. For them, books are entertainment rather than lit-erature. They do not see books, but product, profit margins, the bottom line. The content of the book is less important than the ability to make money. So for certain, it made them more efficient.

However, for the traditional publishers, it was a very different story as they were unable to compete, their names only now survive as imprint labels within the conglomerates offering credence to their new masters, who exploit the reputation of long standing names.


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Look out! Here comes a media group!

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Cultural Changes Within Publishing

As we have seen, conventional publishing as it had been for the previous two or three centuries, has just about disappeared. Publishing people, book people, that is to say, people who were interested in making books, their content and what they had to say rather than the money, are now thin on the ground. They have been replaced by massive multi-nationals, conglomerates and global media compa-nies whose interest is not just books, but product, and especially where one product of theirs pro-motes a related product in another division of the company. Therefore, to the new companies in pub-lishing, books are only a part of the operation and not even the main part. Television programmes, computer games and films bring home the bacon and books are in a supporting role as part of the marketing strategy.

On 14th December 2008, The Sun-day Times published an article furnished by AFP, (Agence France Presse), which ably illustrates the point. A media company, BMG, (Bertelsmann Media Group), which already owns Random House and all their imprints, not to mention Sony Records and the rights of X Factor, which they distribute through

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RTL, is busy consolidating its position. LONDON (AFP) – Pan-European radio and television broad-caster RTL Group is looking into a possible takeo-ver of state-owned Channel 4, The Sunday Times newspaper reported. The paper said RTL, Europe’s biggest broadcaster which is 90 percent owned by German group Bertelsmann, has asked investment bankers at JP Morgan to weigh up a takeover bid for the struggling television channel.It said RTL, which owns 42 television channels in 10 countries, has long been trying to expand in Britain. It already owns Channel Five Television here. Indus-try regulator Ofcom believes Channel 4, which is state-owned but funded by advertising, needs up to 100 million pounds of annual support to contin-ue producing public-service programming. Article: Sunday Times RTL mulls takeover of Channel 4.1

I use some examples here to illustrate the point that media companies do not work in total isolation, but in conjunction with one another. One example of this, though perhaps an extreme one due to the massive commercial success of it, is the blockbuster film, Titanic. (1997), by James Cameron, who is credited as writer, director and producer.

3 Timesonline December 14th 2008

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Two books were published in relation to this film, one being James Cameron’s Titanic by Douglas Kirkland, the other book was Titanic and the Making of James Cameron by Paula Parisi. How-ever, the film was not made from a book as in most other cases, the film was made first, then as one of the packaged media events a book was released within a package and the two books mentioned above being released separately. This is an exam-ple of where the writer/ director/ producer cre-ated the project without the book, but books came from the project.

Other examples of where books came be-fore the screen versions are the Harry Potter se-ries by JK Rowling and the Lord of the Rings series by JRR Tolkien. At least JK Rowling is alive and able to enjoy some of the rewards, but in the case of Tolkien, he is a posthumous success. When Tolkien was alive, The Lord of the Rings series had a modi-cum of interest in the 1950’s but didn’t really cap-ture the imagination of the public. In the late 60’s to early 70’s, it was revived again as some hippies latched on to it and some of the ideas were used to produce artwork for posters and rock shows. In1978 an animated film version of Fellowship of Ring had only a ripple of success and struggled to

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recover it’s $4,000,000 budget, but then, that was back in the old days before CGI, (Computer Gen-erated Graphics). Ah! Progress!. At the time of the animated version in 1978, a promise was made that the films of the next two books would follow, but that never happened. A couple of decades later though, when the new Lord of the Rings series was eventually made, they reached a phenomenal gross, which even by Hollywood standards, is staggering.

Book publishing and the film industry have always lived hand in glove. In its infancy, the film industry used to plunder books for stories to make films. They waded through every conceivable his-torical drama and re-wrote history to suit their films. Many films originated as books long before the organised book/ film related projects became more co-ordinated. Many stories were re-written as other stories or musicals such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet which then became West Side Story, (1961) and Bizet’s Carmen became Carmen Jones, (1954).

As with most films today, the books and films promote each other with the soundtrack CD with the hit single from the film. In the case of Titan-ic, it was “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion.

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For many other films there is also the computer game and the merchandising products such as the dolls of the characters in the book along with other toys that go with it.

The film Titanic had an original budget of $135,000,000 but James Cameron, its director, was way over schedule and budget. In order to protect what had already been invested, and their careers, the studio were forced to extend the budget by a further $65,000,000. Worse was to come, the ad-verse reviews were killing off the film at the box of-fice and original interest was tepid, so much so that in fact it became a point of cinema history when it became the first film to be released on video while it was still being shown in the theatre.

However, Titanic started to refloat when Celine Dion’s song from the film, “My Heart Will Go On”, was a massive hit after being promoted heavily throughout the world. The irony being that Cameron did not want any songs in the film al-though that is what actually saved the project in the end. Of course, each time the song was played on the radio or television, it promoted and bolstered the film as well as the public consciousness of it.

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According to some sources, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, (2001) grossed $860,700,000 worldwide. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, (2003) grossed $1,129,219,252 world-wide. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. (2002) grossed $921,600,000 worldwide. These figures are only for the first two years after release. Video and DVD rentals, television and other versions materi-alise and generate other revenue streams as time goes on and the final amount may never be known as each time a new type of technology surfaces, an-other version hits the streets, like Blueray or HD.

The budget for Titanic was extraordinary even by the standards of Hollywood. From a project that was sinking faster than the Titanic itself, the film was near disaster and already released on video, it went on to become the largest grossing film in the history of cinema. This was a case of victory being snatched from the jaws of defeat. It had to be as so many other companies were also attached to this project. There were three major production com-panies, 21 distribution companies, 22 special effects companies and 58 other assorted companies.

A lot of people stood to lose if this film flopped so there was a concerted effort made by

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all to turn a negative into a positive. It now has 13 versions on VHS, 10 soundtrack CD’s and 15 DVD versions including a boxed set with the book. The film also won 11 Oscars, with another 76 wins of different awards and 48 nominations.

So, how is this film relevant in terms of pub-lishing? It is because this is the new culture of com-merce that publishers have to survive in and com-pete against. As I have just illustrated, big publishers as we know, are now part of media corporations and this is their world. They are all looking for a Titanic, they are looking for a major success. The financial investment is such that nothing less will do. They have targets to achieve and market share to attain. Though not all are on the scale of Titanic, but certainly it is their aim in principle.

Of course, there are still publishers out there who wish to just sell books like Harry Potter or film related books. The film gross for the first five Harry Potters films has already reached $4.5billion with two more films due for release. Each film has a computer game of the film, no figures are avail-able for numbers of games sold. Each film has an estimated budget of $125,000,000.There are also still publishers though who in fact love books as

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literature, but as we see, they are now a minority. They want books whether they are from a new writer with something to say or academic books or textbooks or whatever.

The problem is here that they breathe the same air and occupy the same space as this other larger corporate animal. When the independent publishers try to promote their book or just simply have a book review in a newspaper or a magazine, television or radio programme, it will probably be in one owned by their larger competitors. Publish-ers, who are still book people, are in a similar situ-ation to music people who have to share the same space as record industry people.

The music business stratosphere, i.e., where people play, record and promote music, because that is what they love and feel and is their inner driving force, has been invaded by record company people.

Record company people’s primary inter-est is not music but profit from records sold, units shipped and large amounts of airplay gained. If the music on the disc is good, that will not be a prob-lem, but it will be if it is unsold. The music on the

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disc is not particularly relevant to record compa-nies as they are not there necessarily to generate music, but revenue.

However, some confusion arises here for consumers, as to them, the music and record busi-nesses are synonymous with each other. This in part is exacerbated because in order to sell their product, they both have to use the same mode of transport in order to reach their audiences. Out-wardly, they look the same, they do the same thing, but in reality, they are not the same. Both their products are carried on CD’s, DVD’s, downloads and then promoted through airplay and television. Moreover, record companies are normally divisions of the same multinational media companies that have divisions that have taken over long standing publishing companies that are now the “new” pub-lishers. What they did in the music business, they are repeating in the book world. Waterstones is for example owned by HMV, which in turn is owned by EMI, Electrical Mechanical Industries, and is part of a larger group again.

So we see, the nature and culture within the publishing world has changed in a relatively short space of time, over a period of just twenty years

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or so. As these changes were taking place, another dimension was added that had a rather profound effect, not just on publishing and business in general, but on society globally, and that is the world wide web.

Of course, it must be said that it is not just the publishing industry here that is changing, but also the nature of how business itself is conduct-ed. Also, it has a consequence in how the public receives information through media and in turn it affects what they think and feel. For the current younger generation, this is their perceived wisdom and is purveyed to them by the media view of the world as reality.

As with the other accepted fallacy that the music and record businesses are synonymous, an-other popular mistaken belief is that the internet and the World Wide Web are the same thing, when in fact they are two totally separate entities.

There are many different kinds of programs that use the Internet, electronic mail, for example, was around long before the global hypertext sys-tem. Videoconferencing and streamed audio chan-nels also use encoded information in different ways

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and different languages between computers (“pro-tocols”) to provide a service. The “net” has linked computers and the “web” is an abstract space of in-formation. On the net, you find computers, where-as on the web, you find documents, sounds, videos and information. On the net, the connections are cables between computers; on the web, connec-tions are hypertext links.

The web is only there because of the pro-grams that communicate between computers on the net. The web wouldn’t exist without the net. So without getting too bogged down with the techni-calities, suffice to say, they are not the same thing and that needs to be understood.

The World Wide Web was to change pub-lishing in ways that previously could not have been envisaged. Before the web, publishers had control over the content of their books, and therefore by implication, what was available to the reader. They were the link between the author and what they had to say to the public and also in turn, what that public would be allowed to know.

The modern publishing world as we know it, grew out of the old establishment order of the

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Period of Enlightenment when gentlemen visited the coffee houses of London, Paris, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Warsaw, Berlin and the other commer-cial centres of Europe to swap the latest business news and read the daily newspapers of the day. Gentlemen did business on a handshake. Life was leisurely and slow. Prior to that, the church was the establishment and the keepers of the knowledge and wisdom, which they bestowed on the people as they deemed was good enough for the plebs to know. Their interest was not market share, but information control and monopoly. They had no competitors and had a free run.

So from the late 1700’s, as publishing devel-oped and the churches had less influence, it fell to the newspaper and book publishers to control the flow of information between the source and the public. They were in fact, the media of the day. They were the arbiters of all good taste and knowledge. Their decisions determined what the public would know or not know. If they did not want something to be said, it wouldn’t be. They exercised their form of censorship, wittingly or otherwise. It was not necessary to collude, connive or conspire in this, as their mutual interest was sufficient to do this for them. Anyway, there were no other forms of media

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available. Besides, the public in general were largely illiterate so it didn’t matter as in fact, the publishing world, the establishment and middle classes were not addressing them, but themselves.

Old habits die hard and with the same old stale entrenched thinking and attitudes, deliberately or not, even today, it’s the same. Now however, anyone with a computer and access to the “web” can post their writing and images, music or blogs. They can twitter happily and anonymously in their alter ego. They can say whatever they like from any country in the world, the middle of the jungle or the middle of the Sahara. If content was more im-portant than financial reward, then it is straightfor-ward, create it and post it. Now writers can bypass the publishers and do it themselves.

The problem facing posters though is one of how to get paid and why anyone would want to pay for their writing in the first place. People could write entire books and post them as a PDF file if they had no concern over doing it for free. Out of copyright books are now available for free. Sud-denly there is so much available to read. However, publishers could not put new titles up for free. They would be giving away the goods. No self respecting

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hooker would give away the goods first and hope to get paid later. No, it’s get paid, then laid. No other way has credibility.

Now publishers’ use of the web is different, it’s a shop window, a way of telling the world what they do and why they do it and what they have for sale. To a large extent, it is the book trade talk-ing to itself. But then, the book trade, i.e., the pub-lishers, writers and booksellers have for centuries mainly been the middle classes talking to the mid-dle classes. Sadly, children’s books are devised along the same twee lines of the old Janet & John books, nice books for nice children, that is, not those work-ing class oiks who grow up to watch soaps and become “chavs”, Council House And Violence.

The publishing world, mostly old fashioned Tories in the main, have run the book trade and the media for generations. However, they missed a trick. As I said before, book publishing is largely the middle classes, or the aspiring middle classes, the would be’s if they could be’s, talking to themselves. There is an assumption that the working classes don’t read and their children, if they read at all, only read comics. The same patronising attitude perme-ates “Auntie BBC”, where it seems that you have

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to have been to Cambridge to work there, and if you are in comedy, then you should have the good sense to have followed the tradition of having come from the Cambridge Footlights.

Like I said, people do business with people they know, safety in numbers. Commercial channels and satellite stations are still held in disdain and per-ceived as some vulgar tabloid edition of television for the plebs, the chav channels.

The BBC, mainly the comedy element of it, reminds me of a private club of chums appearing on each others “witty programmes” in some reciprocal circle. The BBC has more polite, highbrow comedy with amusing remarks, with well rehearsed spon-taneous ripostes, whereas ITV is lowbrow, unless the same BBC employees are doing the well-paid voiceovers for the adverts. It is repeating the same mistake as the publishing world. They are ostracis-ing a big slice of the population through their innate snobbery and their protectionist ideals to preserve a society of people they feel are “like them”. On the other hand, the tabloid punters, the plebs, are seen as an underclass that only come out to vote or buy products as they are led to the market by the nose, the cattle class.

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This is they same old straight-jacketed, narrow minded mentality that pervaded Glasgow Rangers Football Club to their detriment until the mid eighties when they signed their first Catholic. Before then, it was said that they are not against Catholics, it is just that there has not yet been one good enough to play for them. Uhu! Their policy ostracised a big section of the football market and excluded them from signing players who thought differently from them. With this logic, George Best, Pele, Michel Platini, Diego Maradonna, Gabriel Bat-tistuta and most of the Braziilian, Argentinian, Ital-ian and German players and most of South Amer-ica could never be deemed good enough for the mighty Glasgow Rangers. Thankfully though, Grae-me Sounness came along and shed some light on the matter.

This same arrogant, bigoted, apartheid still exists in publishing where the middle classes and the establishment jealously keep a stranglehold on books, the media and anything else that can turn a key in your mind. It is still perceived that the working classes, the great unwashed, have nothing to con-tribute, nothing to say, and if you let them in, then before long we would not recognise this country. The same was said about the Jews, the Irish, West

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Indians, Africans, Muslims and anyone else who didn’t have skin like milk and the complexion of a white rose. The country would be turned upside down. Maybe that would be no bad thing. Perhaps if we turned a few people upside down then maybe some of the money they ripped off from the pub-lic they hold in such contempt might just roll out of their pockets. Perhaps that is exactly what the conglomerates are doing in a different way. The old guard are worried and are now beginning to take on the persona of King Canute as they are being swept away in a tide of change. They have become passé, just some remnant of a bygone era like their ridiculous past in architectural relics now seemingly quaint, stuck in a time warp and refusing to come out, arthritic in their thinking, not able to keep up, living in the past.

As web publishing develops, one of the problems with selling on the internet is how to dis-play your goods but not fall victim to piracy. If it can be copied, then you’re vulnerable. Because text is visual, it’s susceptible, as is music, to both piracy and plagiarism. It took many years and well-publicised legal battles before the record industry got control of the situation.

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The opportunity on the web for unknown artists, musicians and writers to reach an audience through free downloads or samples is clearly some-thing to be considered. Nonetheless, to the estab-lished artists, musicians and writers, they regarded downloads that are not paid for as lost revenue and amateur. That was the case until the record industry got to grips with Napster who in 1999, encouraged free downloads from peer to peer with a specially created file share programme. After various legal battles over the next couple of years, an agreement was struck and people now pay for the downloads. They are quantifiable and now everybody, including the artists, loves them. What it boiled down to is that they found a way to get paid.

Readers, who want to buy books on-line though, would be more likely to go to a booksell-er’s web site rather than a publisher’s in order to buy. Publishers’ web sites therefore are rather lim-ited in what they can achieve. They are good as a device to inform the trade of what they are doing, or to inform prospective writers with proposals on how to make them. Other than that, it is still the job of distributors to distribute and sellers to sell.

What is changing because of the web is the

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way in which they are sold. It is no longer neces-sary to trudge around the bookshops trying to find a book that might not be in stock and then have to wait for it to be ordered. It’s now more the case that people will buy through Amazon or someone similar at a lower cost and wait for it in the post. For the reader, it’s more convenient, cost effective and they don’t even have to carry it. For the small bookshop, it is ominous. They can’t carry large stock, so will probably have to order it. Neither can they compete on price as they don’t have the buying capacity of the book chains, supermarkets or the likes of Amazon, so for them, unless they specialise in some niche, the writing is on the wall. As we have seen in previous chapters, not only that, but that is where many of them will be heading.

As technology was becoming available and publishers respond to this availability, they were now trying to adapt it to their particular businesses. How publishing was carried on as an industry up till the early nineteen eighties, over the next twenty five years or so, was to change so much, it’s now barely recognisable as the same profession. Many skills have gone as they have been incorporated into the software programmes. Typesetters and compositors are no longer necessary. Fonts can

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be changed by the click of a mouse. Spellcheckers correct your mistakes. Cutting and pasting, drag-ging and dropping take the labour out of the task of manipulating text or images. Not only that, you can do it all without leaving your desk, including of course, the printing of it. Photoshop, PageMaker, and the amazing Indesign offer the opportunity to complete books or magazines and send them to the printer either as a PDF e-mail or on a CD, SD card or other recordable device.

So the nature of publishing has changed and morphed into what we have today. Few of the traditional publishers, the book lovers who publish to keep ideas and thinking alive, still remain active. In the interests of their ilk, they are still working, low key perhaps, but while the patient is breathing, it still has a chance of recovery. Large companies, as we see, have a different purpose and are driven by their accountants and their other media arms to safeguard profits and market share and position. They are not driven by the content of books or what they convey, but by the unit sales. Where old style publishers would be happy to publish a book that wouldn’t be an instant success or even cover its cost, provided they felt that the author might in the future become successful, and then at a later

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date, sales would catch up as readers went back to their earlier writing, global companies don’t. Now it’s a quick hit, in, out, grab as many sales as possible in the shortest time.

Big publishers don’t develop writers in the same way independents do, they have to satisfy the criteria of the shareholders and the parent compa-nies. That said, there are still small some publishers who publish for the love of it, and a small profit in order to continue. In fact, ten companies have formed The Independent Alliance precisely for that purpose. As they collectively share the same vision, as well as the distribution and sales team, although it is owned by Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann, BMG, they can do very well in a dog eat dog world where even the distributors they have to use are owned by the larger conglomer-ates. However, they are not a threat to any of the big companies and do not even compete against them for market share.

As the personal computer developed and the public began to have them at home, it was only a short step for them to go online. This in itself had a profound effect on the whole subject of books and reading. People became more used to reading

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on screen even if they did not particularly relish it. It was quick, convenient and most of all, it was there. If they could read articles from newspapers, maga-zines and online articles and then books, it may not be too difficult to persuade them to read E-books.

Now the idea of an E-book being down-loaded and read on screen may not have an imme-diate appeal, but if it was less than half the price of the paper, or dead tree variety and you don’t even have to go out for it, then it might just be possible. It should be remembered that books are tactile, they have a feel, a smell and an aura about them. They are portable, don’t require batteries or to be plugged in, they are already complete and easy to use. Well, tell that to the media companies who are trying to create the next I-Pod, Walkman or device that becomes a generic term in its own right and grabs the biggest slice of your dosh.

At last year’s the London Book Fair, there were various companies showing us the way of the E-Book, the next generation of e-readers and though the market is small now, they are totally confident that it won’t always be.

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So with these devices and online e-books on PDF files, we have so much choice in how to read a book now, that we will be totally confused as to which method of reading we should pursue. So in the light of all these changes, not only in the industry of books, but in the way in which they are delivered to us, a lot of people may prefer to wait a bit in case the e-book goes the same way as Betamax videos, 8 track cassette decks and other modern equipment. They promised us so much but delivered so little or were thwarted by other newer, cheaper, crappier versions of the developing technology that did the same thing.

However, it may well be not so much the material changes that are the most significant, but the cultural changes. Before, you could enter a bookshop like Foyle’s or Dillon’s and each shop had a feel to it. Now Dillons has been absorbed, neutralised by Waterstone’s in a takeover, similar to Ottakar’s.

There was a corporate identity, but now you go in and you can smell the Costa Coffee from the back of the shop. After a hard afternoon’s browsing the shelves, buy a book then have your coffee with marshmallows and your carrot cake. If they don’t

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sell you books, they’ll sell you something. You could buy another book for the cost of the coffee and cake. But then, you couldn’t spend your conscience money or contribute to the poor ethnic producer of the coffee with a “charitable donation” from the Fairtrade profit. As you are unlikely to find books that are going to stimulate your cerebral process too much, try the caffeine instead, I do.

In today’s bookshop chains you can also find an array of exotic recipes, green ways to make your life better and to improve you as a person. You can find titles that will inform you of how the various celebrities enhanced their bank accounts in line with their body parts. There are so many books on display, yet most are disposable, instantly forgettable. Finding the new Henry Miller or books by Jiddu Krishnamurti are not going to jump out at you. Choose from the wonderfully varied range of somewhere-way-down-the-alphabet television personalities and twenty one year old sports stars peddling their memoirs along with people who are famous for being famous. The nine year old “star” of Slumdog Millionaire even has a book deal for the book of “her life”. Even Wayne Rooney had a £5 million book deal for five books of his life before he was twenty one. What life!

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So there is room for just about everybody in the publishing world from Wayne Rooney to the omnipotent Jordan, a.k.a. Katie Price. Whether it is good or bad may be reflected more in the reader’s expectations rather than anything seriously objec-tive. Whether the book is any good can only be determined after the reader has parted with their money and read it. Radio interviews, media atten-tion or notoriety seems to be a surer way to get a book published than anything else. In a world where publicity drives sales it is almost impossible to sell something by someone who is not known to the public at large. Being good alone, is not the criteria, being known is.

So, it is in this new commercial climate in which we have altered our perception of books and the printed word, what we do with it and what we expect from it. However, I must point out that I am less pessimistic on the basis that things come and go, but human nature does not change. As the French say, “Le plus ça change, la plus ça reste la même,” or the more it changes, the more it stays the same. No matter how many changes we make, people will always love stories, they might not always think of them as literature, but stories will never lose their popularity, how they will be

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delivered to their audience might change, that’s all. Raconteurs, oral story tellers through the centuries never envisaged mechanical recording, but now we have more stories available in every form in every language. Mechanical recording did not end it, it just made it more stable, more commercial and a static record of it. When you are drawing up the guest list of your next dinner party, do you include people because of how much they eat or for the stories they tell and their entertainment value?

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The sedate world of publishing was due for a wake up call

when it came, it was loud, brash and arrogant

Ye Olde Worlde publishing houses

have gone, replaced by

Blackberry, I-pod clutching Audi

drivers, Top Gear aficionados

Marketing has replaced literacy,

Yeah! Sor’ed! Know what ah’m saying?

Media speak has replaced English

Street cred has replaced integrity

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The new British Library was formally opened in St Pancras in 1998, replacing the old one in Bloomsbury. For a long time, prior to the new building, the old British Library was a much loved British institution, a major part of the life of scholars, researchers, authors and publishers and was within walking distance of Bloomsbury, Russell Square and Covent Garden.

This neighbourhood had long been a big literary ghetto and the bookworm quarter for the intelligentsia of London. Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road, and tangential side streets off of them had many bookshops. The adjacent area contained the offices of established publishers such as Taschen, Thames & Hudson, Simon & Schuster, Reed Elsevier, Routledge, Penguin, Orion, Weiden-feld & Nicholson, Victor Gollancz, Cassell, Dorling Kindersley, Allen & Unwin.

These companies were mainly housed in offices with small rooms in old buildings that go back to before the 1770’s and the famous Period of Enlightenment. This seems apt, for in part, it is pre-cisely because of this that the takeovers happened. Old buildings housed old companies with old ideas and methods that were easy meat. To put this in

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perspective, the commercial climate was changing but they weren’t. In other industries such as those of oil, banks, whisky, motorcars, supermarkets and film companies the process of oligopoly was taking place. Now it would be the turn of the book world, both in publishing and in selling.

Supermarkets now come into the catego-ry of oligopolies, as there are only four main large companies who control the majority of the mar-ket with all the others picking up the crumbs off their tables. However, they don’t compete on price, whatever their clever clogs advertising and promo-tion says, but on market share. They know only too well that shoppers do not buy one item at a time but a basket of items. If the individual item price comes down but the overall basket price remains the same, there is no tangible advantage to the cus-tomer unless they take the time to shop around.

We have the big four of Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisons and Asda. Between them, they take up 74.5% of the market, the other six smaller ones sharing a mere 25.5% between them. Tesco, Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Auchan, (the last two are both French), operate and compete internationally. This is significant when we consider their buying power

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from their suppliers and their selling power to the public.

Take Tesco for example, they already oper-ate in the UK, Eire, USA, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Turkey, China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand. It is speculated that it’s future will also be in India, Russia, Italy and Portugal. Good for them, but is it good for us?

Now if you’re a supplier to Tesco and they want your product, the potential for distribution is really enormous. As many supermarkets now sell books, though at heavily discounted prices which is attractive to the public, it is not so attractive to the publisher. However, they can move large numbers of them and make your book a best seller.

Bloomsbury, who publish the Harry Potter series, could never have imagined how successful the books would be. The demand has been be-wildering, but there has been a side effect to this and that is, the demand has also created substantial competition to supply the books. You would expect Waterstones and WH Smith to have stocks of the book and also the small independent bookshops. However, Amazon had the book available on pre-

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order months before its release and you can also get it at the supermarkets. Tesco and Asda sell the book at a heavy discount. Amazon sells it online for less than the cover price. Bloomsbury has set the cover price at £17.99 but in some shops the book was selling for as little as £7.99.

What happens here is that companies like Tesco and Asda do not make a profit out of sell-ing the book, for them it is a loss leader, one line in thousands on the shelves. For independent book-sellers, it is stifling. They just cannot compete. It is not a level playing field. They don’t have tens of thousands of other products to offset their lack of profit. They only carry one line, books.

For the small booksellers, this should have been their bonanza, the publishing event of the year, instead it’s a disaster. A big cuckoo has climbed in the nest and eaten all the worms. So we can conclude from this that Tesco and their ilk are re-ally only good for Tesco and their ilk. On the other hand, to be fair, they have never actually claimed to be otherwise. The irony being that these are super-markets that are pushing Fairtrade products from third world countries. What about fair trade for here?

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So the supermarkets have now added books to their list of lines available. However, that does not mean they are going for the more cer-ebrally endowed market, they are only interested in best sellers, celebrity books and tie-ins. Anything else that might be mentioned near a Booker or Whitbread or Orange shortlist would be given short shrift, unless it got a mention on the now defunct Richard and Judy Book Club, which became the most influential instrument in British book sell-ing, mirroring Oprah Winfrey as the US counter-part before it crashed to ground on the Watch Channel. Another irony being, not enough viewers were watching.

Within this group of oligopilist supermar-kets, there are other oligopilist companies that sup-ply them, approximately six of them, such as Uni-lever, Kraft, Nestlé etc, and similar mega companies, control around 60,000 lines in a large supermarket. What they want is shelf space as it’s important to create public awareness of the product. That’s why cornflakes come in giant colourful boxes that are half empty. Instead of filling the box, they fill the shelf, thus keeping competitors off of it.

Margaret Thatcher, remember her, that well

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loved, by some, ex-British Prime Minister sang the mantra of “choice“ that the commercial world should offer the paying customers. However, as she was only spouting the mantra, making the pitch on behalf of the global corporations and not doing the offering, it had a hollow ring to it. It seemed yet again another device of smoke and mirrors, an-other illusion of something promised, but yet again with no substance, and Joe Public is lead like a bull by the nose to products chosen for sale.

One technique retail oligopolies use is to flood the shelves with an artificial variety of similar products made in almost exactly the same way, so that smaller companies that offer real variety can be elbowed out. The beer industry is a great exam-ple of this trend. The American beer market offers a clear illustration of the point in pseudo-variety in the supermarket.

It is fairly simple, I know this from personal experience in the whisky market. Although whisky is slightly different in as much as each whisky has dif-ferent characteristics, it is the range on the shelf that changes according to the marketing strategy. I was commissioned to create and publish fine art prints for United Distillers Group and Seagram in order

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for them to push certain brands at certain times in different international markets. Limited edition fine art prints of images of their distilleries were sent to whisky agents around the world as corporate gifts, but these were really high quality reminders hang-ing on their walls to sell more whisky.

Steve Hannaford at oligopiliywatch.com il-lustrates this very well when he says,2

“In one famous episode of The Simpsons, Homer Simpson takes a tour of the “Duff ” brewery. What the viewer sees (but Homer doesn’t) is a master pipe which divides in three to supply three enor-mous vats, one labelled Duff Regular, a second Duff Light, and a third Duff Dry. The point here is that these three varieties (and we might add Duff Ice and Old Duff) are essentially exactly the same. They represent not variety, but the illusion of variety or “pseudo-variety.”

However, where no supermarket would fill more than a few yards of its shelf space with regu-lar Budweiser, which on its own would not make a big impression, it is more than happy to include

4 Steve Hannaford oligopolywatch.com

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Bud Light, Bud Dry, Bud Ice, Bud Ice Light, Mich-elob, Michelob Light, Michelob Dry, Michelob Ul-tra, Busch, Busch Light, Busch Ice, Natural Light, and Natural Ice, all from the same company, in this case Anheuser-Busch, which owns 46% of the US beer market.

This apparent and distinct “choice” fills up many yards of shelf space. It would be interesting to know how many drinkers in a blind tasting could differentiate one of these beers from another. Now this is only one company, but here is a look at the other oligopoly competitors. Miller (over 29% of the domestic beer market) sells Miller High Life, Miller High Life Lite, Miller High Life Ice, Miller Lite, Miller Lite Ice, Miller Genuine Draft, Miller Genuine Draft Light, Miller Ice House, Milwaukee Best, Mil-waukee Best Light, and Milwaukee Best Ice. Coors (10% of the market), in the same way offers Coors Light, Original Coors, Coors Artic Ice, Coors Artic Ice Light, Coors Extra Gold, and Coors Dry.

The fourth major American beer manufac-turer, Pabst (which has taken over Stroh’s recent-ly) offers similar beers: Pabst Blue Ribbon, Stroh’s, Stroh’s Light, Schlitz, Old Milwaukee, Old Milwau-kee Ice, Old Milwaukee Light, Schmidt’s, Schaffer,

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Schaeffer Light. Choice? What choice? Oligopolies offer pseudo-variety. Oligopolies try to master three basic forces: shelf life, shelf space, and mind space.”Steve Hannaford. So, as with the supermarkets, we see that only three companies, Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors, make up 85% of the beer market in the US.

A similar situation exists with the petrol companies and petrol stations with Shell, BP, Texaco and Esso. With whisky companies, it’s a similar situ-ation. There are only half a dozen major news sta-tions globally and the TV networks, radio stations and news media buy in the news from these agen-cies leaving the local news for the small fry. So don’t be too surprised when you see the “top story” on any channel in any country in any language is gener-ally the same or a variation of it.

Even in football, the people’s game, it is the same. In every major league, there are three or four teams who dominate year after year. They draw the biggest crowds, the biggest sponsorships, the lion’s share of TV money and the biggest names to play

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for them. Globally, in The World Cup, every four years, the same four teams dominate, Brazil, Ger-many, Argentina and Italy. The rest, no matter who they are, are just pretenders, the “also rans”, to use a horseracing term, as after the first, second and third, also ran were...

Conglomerates, oligopolies, are not really interested in products for their intrinsic value but for the revenue generated and the way in which it allows the company to expand. They will have a percentage target to grow by each year, whether it is in terms of market share, revenue, units sold or a permutation of these will depend on the company, but expand they must, for if they standstill, they go backwards. When they have excess revenue, they prepare other takeovers in other industries or countries. They must use the profits to grow.

The Federal Trade Commission, (FTC), the American equivalent of the British Competition Commission, allowed the merger of Sony Music and Bertelsmann Media Group, (BMG) and the new conglomerate will be called Sony BMG. To-gether, they will have a 25% share of the market just behind Universal Music, but still ahead of EMI and Warner with about 12% each. As the massive-

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Bertelsmann owns various televisions channels and many of the big publishers such as Random House and its imprints, the different arms of the company can promote the other, i.e., the book division puts out books of the programmes such as X Factor, the winner of which is signed to their record la-bel and will then be promoted as news on Chan-nel 5 News as it owns Channel 5. This of course, makes good business sense, but products like this take up shelf space in the shops and successful pro-grammes spawn successful spin-offs like the books of the show.

Independent small publishers though do not own television channels to promote their books dressed up as news, nor like EMI, do they own a chain of bookstores like Waterstones. Therefore their leverage is zero, so their commercial viability is constrained. In fact, the Independent Alliance has to rely on Random House for its sales and distribu-tion through Faber and TBS so they’d better behave themselves.

The industry will therefore be dominated by these four giants - in economic terms, the four firm concentration ratio will usually be around 80% meaning that the four largest firms in any industry

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will account for 80% of the total sales of the market concerned.

Bertelsmann are one of only eleven global media groups listed in Media Directory 2007. An-other is Time-Warner, who in 2006 saw it being taken over. The biggest trade publishing deal of 2006 was when the transatlantic giant Time-Warner was sold to the large French company Hachette Livre. This propelled Hachette ahead of the Random House Group to be the UK number one publisher, controlling a list of imprints including Orion, Hod-der & Stoughton, Headline, Sceptre, Mitchell Beaz-ley and Cassell. Random House reacted by doing a deal with the BBC, to buy a majority stake in its tie-in publishing arm BBC Books.

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So! After the big boys,

look out!

Here come the really big boys!

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As with other industries before them, we can see the pattern emerging as takeovers and mergers bind these companies together. They gel into the arms of the industries that have bigger, wider interests. These companies, in order to di-vest themselves of their profits, though they are not philanthropists, wish to garner more after dominat-ing the domestic market, by dominating the global market. As someone said, the world is not enough.

For a planet with a population of six and a half billion people, all of which are potential con-sumers, only eleven major media groups does not seem much, especially when you consider that the media is where most people get the bulk of their ideas and information. Wow! So much power and influence in so few hands.

Oligopolies are a group of three to four companies who prefer to control the market by competing on market share rather than price, whereas with a monopoly, one company domi-nates. However, this is the next best thing to a car-tel where these companies, because they cannot kill each other off, might find it easier to collude in order to control the market together. They will buy up the opposition if they cannot bump them

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off. The problem arises when there is nothing left to buy up and they own everything, what then? They behave with cultural commercial imperialism, in fact, it goes beyond that, and it becomes “impe-rialist capitalism”. The have to expand into other markets.

Some people might wonder what all this has to do with publishing. The answer is simple. Every-thing! It is through publishing and media that people receive their information, ideas and develop their identity and the sense of who they are, what they are and what they aspire to. Magazines, newspa-pers and books show them what to eat, wear, think and feel. They are told what they should acquiesce to and what they should find abhorrent. It is what turns a key in their minds though that is not to say that they have no mind of their own or and cannot think for themselves. However, it can reinforce their prejudices, bolster their bias or elucidate what they can’t quite grasp, but more than anything, the media sells more products, subliminally and directly.

There’s only one real solid, tangible thing in business and that’s sales. If you don’t sell, you don’t survive. If you stagnate you become vulnerable and if you are vulnerable, you will be devoured. If your


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industry is vulnerable, it will be taken over and when they need more markets they will create them and allow the next tranche of hungry buyers to join the fray. It might be enlarging the European Economic Community. Israel participates in football through UEFA and FIFA and they take part in the Eurovision Song Contest. How long before they join the EEC along with the Mahgrebian countries of North Af-rica like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco? There are a lot of people out there waiting to buy washing machines, televisions, DVD recorders, you name it, they want it.

It will be sold to them when the time is right, right for the industries involved when they’ve exhausted the stocks of the old stuff. Then the mar-ket will be ripe for when the new media hardware is ready and will have the products to go along with them, the films, the software, the games, all the merchandising. It will be a bonanza for whoever has a finger in the pie.

So, like it or not, that is the future. In time, we will have a planet with only a handful of huge oligopolies for each industry. Last year, we had many international banks, this year we have a lot less due to closures, buyouts, bailouts and takeovers.


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As weak governments on both sides of the Atlantic bail out the banks, the banks bankers are now the governments, who have now formed their own oligopoly to control the banks. The back door nationalised banks have arrived and we didn’t see it coming. The governments, us, are left with the debt as the Federal Reserve and the real banks melt into obscurity with the bailouts. You can be sure they will emerge again as offshore versions of a global economy. What’s next? Who decides? Who asks us?

We are now witnessing the death of the dollar and sterling and the rise of the Euro, but behind it is the agenda of a one-world currency, whether it will be the Euro or the Amero remains to be seen. There’s nothing new in it. The Amero was first proposed by The Fraser Institute in 1999 and is a unified currency for North America, Can-ada and Mexico. It was modelled on the Euro to help facilitate free trade in the territories of the North American Free Trade Agreement, (NAFTA), to make it the currency of the Americas. Don’t for-get, the American government does not own its currency, The Federal Reserve does, it even says so on the notes.


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Meanwhile, politicians, a great many of whom are lawyers by profession, are there as the entertainment side of business. Somebody once said that politics is rock’n’roll for ugly people, but it’s more than that, it’s the PR and propaganda depart-ment of anonymous globalisation, putting in place the fiscal mechanisms for their imperialist capitalist leaders. Suppliers will line up the products while the supermarkets will flog them. The media will make the sales pitch and send us all home to bed with a smile on our faces and a glow in our bellies. Then like No 6 in The Prisoner, if you can see enough to know you are a prisoner, you will be truly unhappy, but for all the others who cannot see, ignorance is bliss.

Eventually, we might all be doing our shop-ping in the company’s store. Amazon started out not much more than a decade ago as an online bookstore and expanded into just about every-thing you can think of. Few can match it.

When you look at supermarkets in any ma-jor country, there are only around four major chains. Petrol stations offer you Shell, BP, Texaco, Esso and a few more, but the whole market is controlled by only a few. Even in sport, football for example, in


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England there is the Big Four, Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. In the Italian league you have AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventas and Roma. In Spain you have Real Madrid, Barcelona and the rest. In Portugal there are Sporting Lisbon, Porto and Benifica. In France there are Marseilles, Paris St Germain and Bordeaux and so on. In every football association in a major country only three or four clubs dominate, the rest are just for target practice. The big teams need someone to play against to show their superiority. In world football, you have Brazil, Italy, Germany, Argentina and then you have the also rans. When you examine each industry it is the same in each country, only a few major players, a handful of banks. A handful of insurance groups.

The real danger lies when they expand with their imperialist intent and buy up foreign rivals. Like in France where America’s General Motors bought Peugeot, and in Germany bought Opel, and decades ago in the UK bought Vauxhall. Volvo and Jaguar were bought by Ford, though Jaguar was then sold on to Tata in India and so it goes on. Look in your crystal ball and you will see that in not many dec-ades as they all cannibalise each other and perform in their incestuous ways, in time the global number of large companies will gel into one. So now super-


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markets in Britain now sell insurance, cars, houses and offer banking services. They dominate your life and infiltrate your information with loyalty cards that provide them with more information than you could imagine. Such is the future. Some are even now considering becoming publishers. Why not, they’re already killing off the bookshops. They own the point of sale and the public are too apathetic to care, particularly if the product is cheap.

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markets in Britain now sell insurance, cars, houses and offer banking services. They dominate your life and infiltrate your information with loyalty cards that provide them with more information than you could imagine. Such is the future. Some are even now considering becoming publishers. Why not, they’re already killing off the bookshops. They own the point of sale and the public are too apathetic to care, particularly if the product is cheap.

When nine year old actors

get a book deal for

the story of “their life”

it says something about the industry

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So publishing as an industry, over the last three decades, has been subjected to rapid changes. Whereas some of this was essential and desirable, on the other hand, for some companies, this was not the case. Sometimes it was not the act of pub-lishing itself that changed, but the ancillary trades of the production, the printing and the booksell-ing and their methods that changed, thus causing a consequential transformation in publishing and its methodology.

As we know, the advent of desktop pub-lishing sparked a revolution within the printing trade, particularly newspapers and magazines that were very labour intensive. For the proprietors of these publications this was a boon to rid itself of large numbers of the staff and their unions, which appeared to have a stranglehold on the industry. Overnight almost, but only after much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the newspaper sector of publishing, large numbers of compositors and typesetters had to find new careers. Acres of floor space, which itself is very expensive, was not now required. For any companies with in-house print-ing and production departments, they could now make a massive saving. For smaller companies, they could manage without this and use independent

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companies and freelancers to provide the services of printing and production. In some ways, it meant that publishers could just get on with the job of publishing instead of managing hordes of workers. As this coincided with developing technology, it meant that as digital telephones, faxes and com-puter programmes became more available, work could be done elsewhere and sent “down the line” by fax. As the internet came on-stream it could be sent by e-mail as photographs or whole books.

As this was happening, other people came to eat at the table, mostly uninvited, in the shape of conglomerates that liked certain companies so much they decided to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse and bought them up. This caused many problems, as the new owners, who were not always publishing people and had no knowledge of the industry, were able to impose their other cor-porate knowledge and agenda on the companies they acquired. In time, some of these new compa-nies merged with others and grew in size seeking market share. This in turn created more problems as doubling up of departments meant that a ra-tionalisation of the number of employees brought about further redundancies.


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As these new publishers have different cri-teria from the literary types who populated the publishing world before, the nature of the content of books began to change. Books became more of a commodity rather than an oeuvre by an author. They had to have more commercial appeal and pay their way. This meant that where a publisher could previously nurture a writer he believed had talent, this was not possible as the books had to balance. In his stable of writers, a publisher would not now offset the earnings from one writer to cover an-other with the effect of stifling the development of new writers and authors.

The new publishers are to book publish-ing what Hollywood is to cinema. They peddle easy books, easy to read, easy to sell and easy to forget. It is good to see though that there are still some small publishers around, like Atlantic, Canongate and Icon, who can show that there is still room in the market place for books on real literature and real subjects. That is not to denigrate the likes of Wayne Rooney or Katie Price, they have their fol-lowers too, and if they wish to produce books for those followers, then that is a good thing, but it would be wrong to suggest they are in the same mould as serious writers. It goes without saying that


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there is more to books than serious writers, but it is a double edged sword as there is also more to books than cookery and celebrities and frivolous TV tie-ins about how to paint a room. The book industry, all sides, publishing, selling and distribution are going through changes akin to what the film industry did decades before.

As a reaction to the dominance of the ma-jor studios, film festivals like Venice, Cannes and Sundance began to flourish. This is important to publishing, as it shows that despite having to oper-ate in a system of oligopolies, it was still possible to create something of value and significance not necessarily based on finance but what the artist or writer has to say. It is still possible to have ideas, they are not completely stifled, though they might be difficult to express.

How this applies to books is not difficult to see. Apart from trade fairs, like London Book Fair and Frankfurt, and in America, the BookExpo events, literary festivals and book fairs are springing up everywhere. There is The Edinburgh Internation-al Book Festival, The Bath Literary Festival with The Hay-On-Wye Festival, which has now been going for more than twenty years. These have become


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important dates on the book calendar. The real sig-nificance though is not so much their popularity, but the fact that people are still interested in books enough to create, run and attend such festivals de-spite the pap on offer in the shops. So, perhaps like Sundance, some of these festivals will develop as if in some parallel book world to the bookshop chains, the on-line sites like Amazon who now sell everything as well as books. Could it be that in time, Amazon will become the global “company’s store” as all the others will have gone out of business.

Although I am not a believer in conspira-cy theories, though that is not to say conspiracies don’t happen, I am a believer in self-interest. In in-dustry, professional bodies like The Royal College of Surgeons, The Royal College of Physicians, The Whisky Association, The Publishers Association and a long list of others have been set up to look after their members interests and the general interest of their industry. It is common sense in a dog eat dog world to protect your own interests and if possible control that market.

Of course, if big business knows anything, it knows how to take over a market, control it and make money. In time, it may be, that they create


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their own rival bigger festivals using their own writ-ers and publishers and media companies to pro-mote them. Why not? They already sponsor literary prizes such as The Orange Prize, Whitbread Prize, and film and music awards. It’s good and relatively economic promotion in a positive light, almost phil-anthropic in helping the arts, buying kudos, another commodity, but selling product.

The publishing industry changes by the day and more changes will be coming. We are head-ing towards a future of accelerated change. After all, how long has it been since the emergence of the web and how it has changed so many things along the way, particularly how business is done, people communicate and the media forms that are now currently available. Previously, we had an era since the 1950’s of television dominance not only with entertainment, but also in all advertising and information and how the public was reached. How-ever, it was a one-way street with the public being advertised at, everything was from the perspective of the public as the recipient. Now it is different. With the web, the user can also be the broadcaster with podcasts, internet television or radio stations, and they can be the publisher with web sites and blogging. As they become better known, they can


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reach a subject specific audience against the mass media going out to a mass audience where only a small percentage might be interested in any spe-cific subject. Mass media is also related to mass ad-vertising, which is related to audience numbers. As audiences dwindle from newspapers and television and has been declining for years, it will come to a critical point where it becomes less viable and the advertiser will switch to another medium. Already large amounts of money are being invested on spe-cifically and individually targeted advertising on the web. As web crawlers search out specific subjects, the publishers of these specific web sites will realise they have a revenue stream opportunity.

The upshot of all of this is that publishing will always be with us, though not necessarily in its cur-rent form. People will always crave information. We are an information lead society, we are information junkies, and without information we cannot make an informed decision. So now the conglomerate publishers will have to adapt to the new circum-stances, it will be a situation of adapt or die. New internet entrepreneurial bloggers will publish and rise to be the stars on their new community within their chosen field. As people have not given up on books and seek out literary festivals, thus replicating


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the serious film buffs, they will ensure the survival of the book. They want the printed word, the feel of paper, the smell of the ink and the author’s auto-graph. Technology changes, but then, human nature doesn’t. It looks like a case of the king is dead, long live the king. Perhaps after all, we will have order out of chaos.


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A different point of view, another reality

and remember,he who does the paying,

does the saying

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If I were a publisher, what would I be really looking at? This isn’t a question that a writer would normally consider. Why should they, they just want their book out. For example, if I’m sitting with my publishing hat on, before I commission any books, what do I have to consider? Well, if for example, I was a small publisher, I know that small as a word, is relative, as in John Cleese looking down on Ronnie Barker who in turn looks down on Ronnie Corbett, but still, small in this context, small as in publishing, is when you have to rely on other people’s sales teams, distribution etc as you are not big enough to have your own.

The Independent Publishers Catalogue1 shows that according to Nielsen BookScan the to-tal for the Independent Alliance was £48.2M. It also points out that, “Small publisher is defined as a publishing group whose total sales through the UK Total Consumer Market in 2008 totalled less than £5.3M”.

5 The Bookseller magazine’s Independent Publishers Catalogue for the 52 weeks ending 23/08/08

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The Independent Alliance describe them-selves like this on their web sites, , “a global alli-ance of ten UK publishers and their international partners who share a common vision of editorial excellence, original, diverse publishing, innovation in marketing and commercial success. In 2006 the Independent Alliance announced a range of exclu-sive benefits for its independent counterparts in bookselling, including increased terms, point of sale and dedicated promotions on titles from leading authors, aimed to help them promote their busi-nesses and boost sales. Together, the publishers and booksellers are a unique umbrella organisation representing shared core values - Independence, Integrity, Quality and Range - in an increasingly cen-tralised marketplace.“

Well, well! Thank God for them! Let’s all hear it for The Independent Alliance, we need more of them. Don’t stop at ten members, let in more and encourage other small companies who are trying to produce good things.

One well known hard working CEO and member of the Independent Alliance tells me he works on a margin of 5%, which is actually not very


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greedy. He’ll never make Parliament. 5% does not leave a big scope for risks or speculation. When you consider that some distributors demand up to 65% discount and only sell on sale or return and publish-ers have to provide them with a quantity of stock that may or may not sell, then that 5% looks like its getting a bit slimmer. Also, remember promotion and author tours have to be paid for, promotional material supplied and it all costs. From the 35% re-maining the author has to get paid too, so has the printer, and the book designer, the production de-partment, the publicist and the world and his wife. So, every book counts and must earn its keep.

So then, with all that in mind, it is reassuring and heartening to see that there are still real peo-ple and companies out there striving to produce real books instead of, let’s be honest, commercial pap, dross for the hoi polloi. However, it is sad that they have to form a union in order to do it and have a realistic chance of commercial and literary success.

The public’s perception of what publishing actually is, is as realistic as the public’s perception of most industries. It is not based on knowledge or experience, but on somewhat skewed information


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from television, films and the media. Anyone in any field will tell you how their jobs are portrayed on television or on film, is laughable.

Let’s look at things the other way round. As we know, not all books are best sellers, and not many are with small publishers, though clearly some are. The average shelf life of a bestseller is around six weeks. In 2008, more than 121,000 books were produced in the UK alone. How many of them were bestsellers? Proportionately, not many. So for a publisher, the competition is enormous, the risks are high, the rewards are slim and the guarantees are zero, unless you have a big name celebrity, a big hit TV series tie-in, the book of the film of a block-buster or something along those lines. So for those who can have these, they will make it a point to ex-ploit them. For those who don’t, they’ll just have to make do with the odd Booker Prize Winner or un-earth the next potential American president years before anyone has ever heard of him.

Looking through the publisher’s eyes, say you have twenty staff and a medium sized office in Central London, nothing fancy. Before you even consider how many books you are publishing you have to know how much money you need in order


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to cover your annual fixed costs. When you include the wages bill for the twenty staff, the cost of the rates and utilities, the phones and equipment etc, you already need £3m before you even look at the cost of the book production, promotion, publicity and marketing. When you work out the average sales of your titles, you realise that you need around a hundred a year with a small profit and that you need to turnover in the region of £5M a year in order to stand still. Now with a profit margin of 5%, to me, that’s a bit tight. You would need a very stable market to trundle on at that rate. In a bad year with the wrong government, the inflation rate alone could do in your 5%. Your turnover would be losing value before you can churn it out.

So, in this light, let me ask all those clever clog writers out there something. If you were the publisher under these circumstances, how would you select books for publishing? Would you con-sult your contacts to see how many celebrities you know, or would you go through your list of old uni-versity mates and old school chums that you had a laugh with years ago and have come good? Remem-bering that you have to find £5M a year before you can even stop to go to the toilet and spend a penny before you can even make one, how would you go


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about it? Of course, the answer is so obvious. You would rummage through the slush pile. After five minutes and a strong cup of tea, you’d still be recoil-ing in horror and reaching for your contacts list.

So, as most writers are dying to get pub-lished, the ones who say they don’t care are either liars or know they are hopelessly unpublishable.

Now we come to the inevitable question, what books get published? Well, before we get to that, first ask yourself this, do you know anyone in publishing? Of course not, or you wouldn’t be wal-lowing in the slush pile. So, why should any pub-lisher be interested in you? What do you have to offer them? Are you notorious? A celebrity? Maybe you’re a notorious celebrity. Got the inside story on something? Are you an expert in some red-hot subject? Oh! Too bad! So, in short, are you market-able? So, back to the question, what books get pub-lished? Well, in meerkat speak, simples! Books that publishers have paid a lot of money for in advances. Books by experts, TV tie-ins, celebrity books. Now if a publisher has invested in the author’s career through money, time and effort, they must get a return. If they have invested nothing, that will be the level of their commitment.


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Remember also, like I said at the outset, people do business with people they know. It has often been claimed that publishers are old pub-lic school types who only offer deals to their old school pals. Well, that might be true to a point, but only to a point. It is largely because they under-stand the nature of the beast. Even if they went to a different public school, the nature of the animal itself is the same. In general, they think, feel and have similar values, therefore they are less likely to get a surprise. They are comfortable with them, it’s what they know and trust. If there are any dodgy or questionable aspects, they’ve met and dealt with these types of situations and people before. They can quickly recognise them and snuff out the prob-lem.

Now if some outsider from a different back-ground came along who decided to be a writer, he might be very good, exceptional even, that is not the issue, he isn’t one of theirs. They don’t really understand what’s under the skin, the mentality, the motivation. That would be unpredictable and there-fore risky and this is a business with little margin for risk.

Publishers and agents are in the trade, so to


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speak, they are insiders, anyone else is an outsider. If they’re trying to get in, then they may even be regarded as an interloper. It’s like any closed com-munity, if you have to knock on the door, then you ain’t one of us.

So, what are you really asking the publisher to do? Publish your book, I here you say. Oh yeah! Is it? Well, what you are really asking is that he com-mits a large sum of money, resources and people, and over a process of time, their sweat and hard labour with their specialist knowledge will produce a book that you have typed. So, why should they publish yours?

Publishers need a crystal ball to have one eye on the market and the current feel and mood of society in order to see which direction it could be going. There is no point in bringing out a book at the wrong time, another Da Vinci Code a year after Dan Brown’s just looks like somebody jumping on the bandwagon. A similar book a year too early and maybe the public aren’t ready for it. It is a question of timing and being able to respond to situations. This of course is made more difficult when you re-alise that most books from manuscript to publica-tion can take eighteen months to two years. Some


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books could take longer. Icon Books, as a small pub-lisher, are very nimble and good at getting topical books out quickly. Small companies don’t have to wade through the corporate quagmire and can re-spond with immediacy if the opportunity arises.

So now we know better what it’s like from the other side of the slush pile, we can now ap-preciate why publishers don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts and leave it to agents. However, as many of you know from ex-perience and your growing pile of rejection letters, this has only transferred the problem elsewhere. The standard template letter of “this would not fit into our list” is not encouraging. Nor is the advice to buy The Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook which is where you probably got their address from in the first place. There are many books out there to tell you how to get published and most give similar ad-vice, as do the submission pages on web sites of agents and publishers. They also normally demand that you send an S.A.E.

Now this makes good sense, at least to the publishers, for a number of reasons. As explained, their margins are slim, even though in any business,


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the cost of postage and envelopes are a tax-de-ductible expense. However, by you conveniently providing the already stamped and addressed en-velope, it makes it a lot easier for them to stick in the rejection slip and post it back to you. They don’t even have to read it or write the address on it, you have already done it for them. It doesn’t really mat-ter which rejection letter you get, they all do the same thing, they get rid of you.

Many will tell you to only write to one pub-lisher or agent at a time. As you will then wait two to three months for a reply, if you ever get one, by the time you contact a dozen or so, your book would be out of date by the time anyone ever de-cides to read it. This is akin to the old practise in jobs of sending the naive novice to go to another department for a long stand. This is not advice, but contempt. Sad to say, but the truth is that unpub-lished writers are viewed with total disdain by most publishers and agents, although they will all wail and deny it and tell you how authors are the bread and butter of the business. Yeah! Well, maybe. Most of the advice comes across as a way of diverting you away from the book trade and letting them get on with the job of publishing unimpeded.


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Some people might try the other technique as used in the music business. Throw enough crap at the wall and some of it is going to stick. If you are business-like and organised enough to keep track of where you are sending it all, you are not both-ered by the cost and the time it takes to do it, you could send out your work in multiples of ten or twenty a month. Of course, there is no guarantee that you’ll get anything other than twenty envelopes back a few weeks later with very familiar writing on it, yours. As I said before, people do business with people they know... well, sometimes.


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He has a yen for the money.

Follow the money...

€ £ $ ¥ is a four letter word

Give me money

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Everybody knows that when you buy a book it has a cover price. That is what the cus-tomer sees in the shop, £15.99, or whatever. What the customer does not see however is the break-down of that amount. The shop, whether it is in the high street or online might demand, and get, up to 65% of the cover price, leaving the happy publisher, grateful to get the book in the shop at all, with a massive 35%.

Now from that portion the publisher has to pay the author, the publicist, the proof-reader, copy-editor, the book designer, the production costs, the printer, distributor, shipping and supply the books, usually on sale or return. On top of that, there will certainly be a “marketing fee” or “administration charge” for getting the books on to the front table as a promotion, for example 3 for 2 or whatever. If there is promotional material to be made for display, it has to be designed, produced and trans-ported. If there are author signings, then their costs are added, like travel, hotel, food etc.

This is not cheap and the publisher bears the brunt. Bearing in mind that the majority of books do not recoup their advance to the author, the imaginative publisher has to find other ways to

Revenue Streams

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offset the cost, not unlike a bookie laying off bets at the track. This is done through revenue streams. This is the part that the customer does not see when buying a book.

Revenue streams are many, complicated and have to be right or you’ll end up giving away money. If the book has good marketing potential, and, let’s face, why would it get published it if it hadn’t, then where exactly is the market or mar-kets? If it has the potential to travel abroad then the rights will be sold to other publishers according to their territories, usually by language, for obvious reasons. However, having said that, many books in English have to be adapted for American English and some just don’t work at all. This could be done by selling territorial rights or through co-produc-tions. The publisher in each territory will then pay the original publisher advances plus a percentage for the rights.

Agents do much the same thing and some-times more if there is merchandising and other is-sues involved. So if a book is sold in, for example, twenty countries, depending on how well known the author is, then that could become a consider-able amount of advances and the publisher would

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have recouped his original outlay with a return on it.

Now as we know there are many differ-ent types of publishers such as, trade publishers, i.e., the ones who sell to the shops, academic publish-ers, university press publishers, self-publishers, web publishers, e-book publishers and audio book pub-lishers. These publishers do not come in standard sizes, some big, some huge, but most are very small companies. All of these areas have different ways of generating revenue, which is the oxygen of the business.

On the following page is a list of revenue streams, you might even add more to it yourself.

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Here is a short list of revenue streams,

Territorial - Territories are sold according to language or coun-try, such as English - UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, the Caribbean countries, America and Cana-da.Spanish and Portuguese - cover a lot of South America French - covers Benelux as well as France parts of Canada and a swathes of AfricaSo translations may be important.Paperback rights Book ClubsReprintTranslationSerial – in newspapers or magazinesFilm & TV Rights – if it is made into a film or televi-sion series or documentary as a TV tie-inAudio booksMultimedia - computer games, CD’s, DVD’sMerchandising - Your “characters” may be market-able. The game, the doll, the toys, the sweets, wall-paper, duvet covers etcPublic Lending Rights

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Of course, enterprising people will find more streams as knew technologies arrive this list gets added to.

In the light of all of this, it is important to understand exactly what you are signing up to when you sign your contract. Most writers are too excited and grateful to get the deal and get pub-lished that they would just about sell their soul. The problem is, it’s a buyers market and the publisher is the buyer from you, but the seller to the trade or other publishers.

An agent is much the same, but is an in-termediary who can, in certain circumstances, get you a better deal. For example, if there were more than one publisher wanting your book, then the agent would hold an auction between them for it. If you have an agent, you will almost certainly be in a stronger position just by dint of fact that someone independently is willing to take the time and trou-ble to act for you at his or her own expense. Re-member, an agent only gets a percentage of what he makes for you, so if he makes nothing for you he won’t get paid.

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Although not everything is going to end up as a Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code or Lord of the Rings, it must be born in mind that most films have to be made from stories that come from some-where and mostly this is from books.

The money from films is not straightfor-ward either as when a producer options a script, whether it is from a book or not, he “buys the op-tion” even if the film is never made. The option is for a period of time, perhaps a year. This buys the producer time and enables him to find the money and get the project together in order to realise the final objective, i.e., the film. If, for whatever reason he fails to achieve that, at least a share of the mon-ey from the option will filter down to the writer. Depending on the deal, if the film is made, released, which is also not a foregone conclusion, and distrib-uted with verifiable sales and there is some com-mercial success, then some more money should come through the pipeline to the writer. It might take time, but it should come.

If the film is shown on television in different countries, it can accumulate a reasonable amount for all concerned. Then there’s the business of re-peats. Many television productions get sold in more

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than a hundred countries in many languages. Eve-rything on film or television or computer games has to be written by somebody. That somebody has to be credited and hopefully paid, although there are many legal disputes and stories of people who don’t get paid.

However, out of the 121,000 new books last year, I wonder how many reached the screen, never mind the shops. Very few, I bet. Each year at the Cannes Film Festival there’s around 1,400 films shown. After Cannes, how many are ever heard of again? Maybe if it is a major prize winner or it is one used by Hollywood to launch the next Matrix or Terminator which gives already big names a shop front and adds glitz to Cannes. At the same time they gobble up the bulk of the promotional me-dia space for the event thus leaving the minnows with the crumbs off their table. Who is ever going to hear about “the great little film” that somebody made after years of writing and film school and starving and then gets his film financed on his credit cards to try to compete against The Matrix VIII?

These blockbusters are there to kick sand in the little guys’ faces. How long will it be before the major heavyweights of books turn up at the lo-

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cal Twee-On-Dee Bookfest to do exactly the same to budding authors who are struggling to get a toe in the door? A toe in the door, no, more like nipped in the bud and a kick up the backside and a face full of sand.

So, as we see, the bulk of these 121,000 new books are instantly forgotten along with the blood, sweat and tears that went into them. Next year there will be another pile and then the follow-ing year ad infinitum. All these authors, where do they go? To some big writer’s circle in the sky? Who knows? Truth is, that’s the ones who even got pub-lished so how good were the rest and how many potential books were on offer?

If you get as far as a contract, do some homework. I know many people, particularly in the music business, who are still trying to get paid since the 1970’s for major works that sold by the ton. When you have had a number one in eight coun-tries you expect to have something to show for it rather than the regrets of earlier youthful days when someone said “Here, son, smoke this and sign there.”

So if in doubt, find a specialist lawyer who

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deals specifically in media and publishing. The Law Society may be able to guide you or The Society of Authors. Either should be able to provide you with a list of appropriate law firms. Mind you, they are likely to be expensive, so tread carefully.

In a well publicised case, the Tolkien Estate are still trying to get paid from a deal made with the film company forty years ago. Still, you can’t hurry a good thing especially when the first three films have already grossed an estimated worldwide jackpot of $6billion and they want another two films that might bring in similar amounts pro rata. It seems sometimes that you have to die to make any money, but who wants to be a posthumous hero? The lesson from this case is that the deal you do today affects not just you but your offspring as the copyright is still live until 70 years after you are. So, seller beware.

No as we see, there are many revenue streams, some more complex than others and if you anticipate success, then be prepared for it. So many people achieve success but cannot gain or retain the financial reward for their endeavours because they either don’t think far enough ahead or don’t see understand the pitfalls. Also, they are

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not organised enough in the business department of their writing. The taxman will treat them as a business if they make money from it, so will every-one who is making money from it, so why not the writer. It is the writer who is his own commodity, he should treasure that.

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Writers can be dangerous to the establishment they can turn a key in

people’s minds, implant ideas

that needs careful managementby the establishment

but

What about your options?

Read on!

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Well, now that we see how easy it is for a writer to get published, what are you waiting for? Is it really that easy? Hmm! Well, maybe if you’re a Jeffrey Archer! It’s certainly a bit easier if you are famous or a global figure or an authority on some-thing of major interest, or you’re the president of a royal society of something or other. If you are well known, you still have to be heard above the noise generated by all the other books you’re competing against.

So the question remains, what’cha gonna do ‘bout it? Well, here are some more questions before we answer the first one. Well! What are the options? What’s achievable? Will it be worth all the effort? Now I must make it clear that I make no recommendations here, I am only saying what is possible.

So! What’cha Gonna Do ‘bout It?

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Option 1

The Dreaded Slush Pile

So, let’s take them one at a time. You can send your stuff off to the slush pile in the faint hope that someone somewhere will “discover you”, like those little French wines we hear about from time to time that have escaped the attention of the big negociants. Hmm!!!! You really do believe in Santa Claus.

Now, I lived in France for many years in the Bordeaux region. So, let me tell you this then, the French miss nothing, especially those little known vignobles that only the English “discover” when they pass through on the way to their humble pied-a-terre in the Dordogne. So then, the dreaded slush pile, make up your own mind.

I know some well-intended publishers might get a reader to rummage through a stack a week or a month in case there is something of interest.

In fact, I have been reminded that only in recent history an oeuvre was found in the slush pile that became a Booker Prize Winner. So, it is not all


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doom. Other books have been found wallowing in it, but in reality, you have to ask yourself, of all the major book awards, how many come from a slush pile? In fact, how many successful books in gener-al have emanated from it? A few, perhaps, twenty might be a lot.

However, even if there were a hundred or a thousand, in relation to the 121,000 books published in the UK last year alone, if a hundred a year came out of the slush pile, it would be noth-ing. Work out the numbers for the last ten years and see how it looks. How would that look as a percentage figure, I wonder? It reminds me of the compulsive gambler who loses in the casino night after night all year long. Strangely, the night he re-members best is the one night in the year that he won and the management make sure he doesn’t forget it in order to keep him coming back.

So the publishing industry needs the slush pile and remember, an electronic slush pile is still a slush pile. So the book trade needs it, it needs writers, writers buy books, their friends and family buy books, only a fool would alienate them. That’s bad PR. Nah! Best to humour them, encourage them, like the gambler losing his shirt every night.


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At some point he will run out of shirts and start on his business money, then next the mortgage money, but he will still never believe the truth that’s staring him in the face. He will avoid reality and believe in the dream, but only dreamers dream, realists devise a plan. Of course, there might be another very good reason why a publisher might not look at the slush pile. If for example they do read your work and send you a nice rejection letter saying why they don’t want your book, then five years later they unwittingly publish a similar book, what would you be thinking? What would you be telling your friends and family, or maybe even your lawyer.


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Option 2

The Written Proposal

On the other hand, you could write a damned good book proposal that would be taken seriously by agents and publishers. You need to give them a reason to want to talk to you. You should come across to them as a serious businesslike person, someone who knows what they’re talking about. For this you need to do some homework.

If you are writing fiction you will almost cer-tainly have to find an agent. It might help if you were that guy in Iraq who saved the burning helicopter from crashing on to a crowd of schoolchildren in a market after it was shot to bits by nasty insurgents, and you landed it safely and were cheered by your mates, and it was all captured live by CNN and syn-dicated round the world. The President of United States even said how wonderful you are and now, you’ve written a fictionalised version of it.

Sure there is a market for such books but you have to go into the bookshops and study them. Check out who publishes which books, you might even find the name of an editor in it. If there’s a


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book in a similar vein to yours by a particular pub-lisher, it wouldn’t kill you to phone them and ask who the editor was for that book. They almost cer-tainly won’t want to talk to you, unless of course CNN made you famous, but at least you have a real name to address your letter to. Just by doing that one thing you will very quickly assemble a list of publishers that you know are at least interested in your subject, now for the tricky bit, getting them to be interested in you.

Rather than sending your first three chap-ters and a synopsis, write to them with a letter ex-plaining why you are compelled to write this story and why it is important.

Tell them who you see as a target audience for this and how this book is adding to the many al-ready out there and what is different about yours.

As you cannot copyright an idea, only your work, don’t forget to tell them what makes you the person to write it.

Let them know your credentials for doing this, your experience in this subject, your involve-ment in this story.


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If you have written anything before that has been published, tell them, and if you have won any prizes for writing.

Then conclude by asking them if they would be interested in looking at yours if you sent them some sample chapters.


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Option 3

Get Into Circulation Here is another option. You can cultivate “friends” in the trade. So, I hear you say, how do you do that? Remember though, you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

Find out what’s going on, who is doing what, who is who. Keep abreast of the book news by subscribing to sites like www.booktrade.info.com or www.bookbrunch.co.uk or www.theBookseller.com and others. You research your books, so why not research the industry you’re trying to break into?

Well, you could attend any publishing events you can get into, rub shoulders with the people you need to get to know. If you want to be a diamond merchant you would open your business in Hat-ton Gardens or Amsterdam, not the Hebrides as nobody is going to hear of you or come looking for you.

As I keep saying, people do business with people they know. Let them get to know you,


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somehow! Get a job in publishing even if it’s part time. If not, go to trade fairs like the London Book Fair, (LBF), or Frankfurt. Frankfurt has days for the public. The London Book Fair says it’s a trade only event, which indirectly means writers don’t belong here hustling their publishers for a deal. Okay! That’s fair enough, they pay big money to be at the fair and they have to claw it back. Until they reach their targets their heads will be down and it’s full steam ahead. They must at least cover their astronomical costs. It is the trade selling to the trade, so public, keep out!

But wait a minute! You’re a writer! If it’s be-yond your imagination to find a reason to be there then you don’t deserve to get in.

Anyway, when you do get in, for those of you who have already been to the London Book Fair, you’ll know that no one has time to talk to you. They only want to talk to people who are bigger than them. If they’re already huge, they hold court. But still, you never know who you might meet or what will happen. If nothing else, it will give you a greater insight into how the industry works. There are also lots of seminars, many of them free,


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make use of them. Watch the real world of the book publisher in action. See the publishing animal up close. Look at the whites of its eyes, smell its fear.

Like any other trade fair, it is about making sales, the selling of rights issues and business, busi-ness and even more business.

Oh, yes! And making contacts, getting in touch. One of the most important ingredients in any success is of course, perseverance. That’s why so many useless, absurdly untalented, inept people succeed, what they lack in ability, they compensate for with persistence.

Be persistent, but also be excellent at what you do and maybe you’re persistence will pay off.


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Option 4

Self-Publishing

Sometimes as we all know, if you want a job done, then do it yourself. Another option is, for some people but not all, that you can self publish.

There are innumerable print on demand companies around now. Up until only a couple of years ago p.o.d. was frowned upon, many people saw self-publishing as one step away from vanity publishing despite many famous names throughout the decades doing it. It’s nothing new, it’s just that certain people like to sneer at anything. As to being like vanity publishing, well, of course, this is not the case, it’s nothing like vanity publishing, that is not even worth discussing here.

Like anything, there are good self-publish-ers and duff ones. Some books come out and have a home made look about them, the cover design being the obvious problem. All too often they look amateur. Having said that, many traditional publish-ers put out crap covers too. In general though, pro-fessionally designed books have a look about them, all the elements of the content are blended in with


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thought and taste, (subjective). The difference be-tween a professionally designed book and a badly done self-published book is the difference between a beautiful gateau from a very nice French patisse-rie and a homemade cake at a school fete.

There are many more problems too, such as the manuscript is written in Word and taken to the printers as such. The printer will print what-ever you tell him to, it is not his job or his place to question it, just to print it. Now Word is not a programme for designing or printing books, it is for documents. It needs to go to a book designer who will not just design the cover, but transfer your Word document into Indesign or whatever he is using to make the programme that the printer will print your book from that will make it look like a book. He’ll also help you with the look of the book, the feel of it, the right font and point size, the kern-ing and leading. It will be money well spent, like ed-iting and proofreading, unseen but vital, if not done properly, obvious and amateur.

There are many reasons why people use print on demand and even much-respected pub-lishers now use it for their samplers and review copies. This option is clearly not for everyone. You


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have to spend time and money and have some computing ability beyond just word processing. You also need to be highly organised. As above, you need to be able to clearly brief the book designer and the printer. You’ll have to deal with freelance copy-editors and proofreaders, but if you can do all of this and you are sure as sure can be that you have a market for your book, then it is possible.

Unlike even a few years ago when you would have had to print a fairly large number with no guarantee of sales and a big financial investment, you can now print a few with minimal investment and send out review copies to tickle the interest.

Send out review copies to the local radio stations and local media to get some interest go-ing after which you can use other copies to punt around the bookshops yourself and point out to them that you have had some radio interest. Send review copies to magazines that specialise in your subject, or professional trade rags if that’s applica-ble.

Like that, you can get advance orders for a “launch” on a chosen date. So, for some people, though not everyone, print on demand is a viable


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option. So much depends though on your com-munication skills, energy and organisation skills to co-ordinate all the aspects and create your publicity campaign.

Effective publicity is really crucial, if you have none, how is anyone to know that your book ex-ists. You must make them interested in not just the book, but also the author. The selling of the book is now the story and you are the protagonist. You the author, are now the central character of this story and if no one can empathise with the central char-acter, the story is dead, the same as your book. If the main point of the book does not excite anyone, the book is dead.

Another useful aspect to all of this is that if your book is non-fiction and is about, say for exam-ple, your professional expertise and whatever you already give talks about, then there is an implied aspect that if you have written the book, then you are the expert. It bolsters your authority on the subject. Also, people who come to your talks and like them, might also buy the book. If these are the kind of talks where there is an entrance fee, it might even recoup the cost of producing the book.


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It’s never too late to learnthe more you know,the easier it becomes

So! Don’t believe all you hear or you’d eat all you see,

ignorance is not bliss

it’s ignorance in itself to think this

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A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but then, a little education is a big help and can go a long way. There are many courses around that will help you depending on your need. There is The Publishing Training Centre in Wandsworth in south London that has software courses, proofreading and editing, including courses for non-publishers. Checkout their web site www.train4publishing.co.uk you could find something useful.

On their web site they have a good free-lance directory of proofreaders, copy-editors, pic-ture researchers and more. At least you’d be better equipped to embark on your venture. If you go on a course that allows you to do work experience, like M.A. courses at universities, it may be worth your while to invest in that. There are now around fourteen universities offering courses. They are also listed in The Publishing Training Centre web site in the link “Careers In Publishing” under higher educa-tion. I know that maybe it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but good for some.

We’ve all heard people saying, “Oh, I could write a book about it.” Maybe they could, it might even be worth reading. However, as we now know, writing the book is one thing, getting it published is

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another. Even if you get it published, that’s only the beginning, the real test is getting it sold, that’s the hard bit. There is absolutely no correlation between a successful book and a good book.

Now it is true that many successful books are also good books, but it must be said, that’s not always the reason for their success. It could have been the result of a very effective publicity cam-paign with good sales and distribution and excel-lent PR.

There are many good reasons why a book might be successful and it isn’t all down to the con-tent. We have all bought books that have been a disappointment, the same as we’ve all bought gems that looked like throwaways. You don’t really know until you have paid your money and read it. In any case, do the cringe test. Go into Waterstones or Smiths and see their top hundred, how many of them make you glow inside and how many make you cringe? So, that’s the top hundred and if some of them make you cringe, it proves my point that there is no correlation between a good book and a successful book. We have all known great books that never had any commercial success, but there lies the problem. What are the criteria for good?

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What are the criteria for success? Is it sales or how much you enjoyed it? To the publisher it might be sales, or at least getting his investment back, though people don’t do business to get their money back, but for profit. To the author, it might be the recogni-tion of their work as well as the money. Success is subjective and also, depending who you are talking to, the answer is like shifting sand.

Now if you have a book that is good, and you have an effective sales and publicity strategy, preferably with a book publicist, (see www.publisherspublicitycircle) and it’s backed up with distribution, then you have some chance of success. It isn’t going to turn you into Random House, but you might be able to retain some of your garage space for the car rather than card board boxes of books. You have to remember too, that in 2008 almost 121,000 books were published in Britain alone and more than twice that in USA. That’s a lot of dead trees. How many died for noth-ing?

I hope this book gives you some insight into, not just the current state of publishing, but some idea of what you can do about it with regards to your own books. All writers invest a lot of thought

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and anguish into their work. For some, there is a lot of deep soul searching and introspection and resurrecting of ghosts from the past, which can be a somewhat emotional and painful experience. Many suffer for their craft, for that is what writing really is, a craft, only a few get to the dizzy heights of call-ing it art and sadly, I’m not one of them. The only resemblance I have to the starving artist is the part that says starving.

Come to think of it, most of my adult life I have been working with artists, writers and musi-cians, many of whom have been very talented but these have usually been the ones who have been the least successful. They tend to make the same mistakes though. Many feel that because they have talent, the rest of us lesser beings owe them a living. They spend so much time on their “art” that they forget about the business and organisation side of their art.

This “business of the business” is as crucial as what it is they are purveying. The ones that I have known over the years who have been very successful realised early on in life the difference be-tween what they enjoy and need for their art, and what the paying public expect from them as their

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idols. I have known loud raucous rocks stars who when at home or in private, are happier playing Johan Sebastian Bach or Greig on their Les Pauls or Stratocasters. They know that what is right for public consumption that pays the bills, and what excites them personally, are not usually the same thing. One is the job, and the other is private.

The public pursue excitement, entertain-ment, not excellence, although some might appre-ciate it, but they are a tiny minority. The proof is in the top hundred of anything, whether it be books, downloads, vinyl, or whatever. Look at the turnover of the companies who produce them, then look at the turnover of the companies who make up the Independent Alliance. Luckily there is room for us all, though some of us feel a little squeezed out.

Remember what I said at the beginning of this, publishing is not a science, it’s a business and in business, people do business with people they know. Make sure they get to know you. If they also like you, that helps, but they have to know you first to decide that. So, get involved. Get out there, join in the fun, let them see what you are made of, rise to the challenge. Wallflowers don’t dance and therefore don’t get asked to the ball, they won’t be

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at the next party. Will you? So c’mon! Do it! Don’t talk about it! Just do it!

Look at it this way. Somebody described publishing as being like two frogs mating. The frogs produce a lot of spawn, which in turn becomes mil-lions of tadpoles. Some of the tadpoles eventually get to the bank and become lots of frogs, many of which survive. In time, one of them might get on TV and kiss Oprah. Maybe that’s you.

Happy reading, and don’t forget, most of all, happy writing and get it out there.

The End

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