Cold Type

Book Publicity

People in the publishing industry are wondering why our new publicity division, Spence Media, charges so much less for a media campaign than most publicity firms and freelance publicists. The short answer is that our fee per booking is based on the actual sales value of media placements, not on what the market will bear. The long answer is here.

Very often, even major media exposure does not guarantee big sales, as this article from the PMA Independent, the newsletter of the Publishers Marketing Association (a trade association of independent publishers), illustrates:

Two findings emerge clearly from your reports on the consequences of major media coverage:

• Important shows and magazines—including Oprah, Today, 20/20, Money, and The New York Times—do pay attention to books that PMA members publish.
• That attention doesn’t necessarily translate into sizable sales. Sometimes hundreds or thousands of copies move off the shelves; sometimes "nothing happens."

Interestingly, the same range of results applies to books from the huge New York houses, as publicists note off the record.

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Will Your Book Be a Bestseller?

Put your book title to the test with the Lulu Titlescorer. Be sure to read about how the titlescorer was developed. It's based on real data.

Note to Spence authors: Don't email me complaining about your book titles.

Doomed Bourgeois

Joseph Epstein, on whether newspapers are doomed, in the January 2006 issue of Commentary:

My father took his paper seriously. He read it after dinner and ingested it, like that dinner, slowly, treating it as a kind of second dessert: something at once nutritive and entertaining. He was in no great hurry to finish.

Today, his son reads no Chicago newspaper whatsoever. A serial killer could be living in my apartment building, and I would be unaware of it until informed by my neighbors. As for the power of the press to shape and even change my mind, I am in the condition of George Santayana, who wrote to his sister in 1915 that he was too old to “be influenced by newspaper argument. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper but seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed.”

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Last Post on James Frey

Because nothing more need be said after this, from the January 17, Publishers Weekly:

It's every writer's sacred honor to "get it right," but perhaps the burden falls heaviest on the memoirist. As a memoirist, it seems to me, something has to have happened to you that you're burning to tell. You've undergone some kind of transformation that matters not because it says something about you, but because it says something about the world; because it touches on the mysteries of suffering and meaning. There may be great leeway in being faithful to this emotional truth, but you have to have an emotional truth to begin with. The details you remember, your stance towards the people you meet, your interpretation of your experiences: all have to spring from this deeper level; this vision you carry around like a secret; the yearning to get it right that eventually drives everything you think, say, do. You have to have some kind of love for the world, with all its terrible suffering; you have to be willing to cut off your writing hand rather than betray by a word what it's taught you. The problem is that it doesn't seem to have taught James Frey much of anything, which is why A Million Little Pieces rings false, on both levels, from start to finish.

"I have read the New Testament," Frey says. He should read it again. He should read the passage where Jesus tells the paralytic to take up his mat and walk. Because maybe our mat—what keeps us stuck, sometimes our whole lives—is the illusion that, in order to be loved, we have to pretend to be bigger, better, braver than we really are.

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It's Not the Crime, It's the Cover-Up

Well, perhaps the previous Frey post doesn't quite say it all. The reactions of Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, and Nan Talese, Frey's publisher, two members (deservedly) of the publishing industry's elite, are worth a word or two.

Nelson: I believe that a memoir is not "simply" nonfiction. While based on truth, a good memoir must share many traits with the novel. It has to have a narrative and development and denouement. And sometimes that means the larger "truth" takes precedence over absolute accuracy.

Talese: Nonfiction is not a single monolithic category as defined by the best-seller list. Memoir is personal recollection. It is not absolute fact. It's how one remembers what happened. That is different from history and criticism and biography, and they cannot be measured by the same yardstick.

In Re Frey

I think this says it all. An author fesses up in the New York Times:

In writing a narrative, it is sometimes necessary to compress or combine certain incidents for dramatic effect. I did much the same thing in the chapter of my book dealing with my prison term, although in reverse: in the interest of dramatic clarity, I expanded my 1993 arrest for jaywalking into a seven-year stint in Sing Sing for manslaughter.

Okay, it wasn't so much a jaywalking "arrest" as a ticket.

Fine, it was a stern warning. Happy now?

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Pease Don't Write II

In an amusing and sensible piece in the (UK) Guardian, Tim Clare points out that not everyone has a novel inside them. Publishing is not an impenetrable cartel, he argues, if anything, it is too open to unknown writers:

The truth is a disproportionate number of publishers are wide-eyed idealists with a frightening propensity for chucking good money after bad. As much as agents and editors may feign a cool professional insouciance, most dream of stumbling across The Next Big Thing and securing their place in industry history. While veteran authors languish in the mid-list doldrums, jammy first-timers rake in vast advances on the promise of long and lucrative careers, which frequently fail to materialise. Publishers act with one eye on posterity, leaving their accountants with ulcers the size of kumquats.

The simple fact is that unknown authors are being taken on every day, and frankly, publishers and established authors suffer because of it. The publishing industry is crying out for a high-profile hothead to disabuse thousands of needy, bumbling timewasters of the notion that nascent masterpieces stir within their loins.

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The BookScan 200

Since Nielsen BookScan published it's list of the top-selling books of 2005, a number of publishing commentators have discussed what the numbers mean (see also, here and here). I won't repeat what they've said. Here's what struck me.

Of the 200 slots on the list, only 113 are occupied by editions with a 2005 publication date. (I'm counting three of the books with 2004 dates as 2005 books, because by far most of their sales occurred in 2005.) More significant, only 60 of these 113 are hardcovers. With the exception of a few paperback originals, the other 73 are paperback or mass market editions of previously published hardcovers.

Of the 55 authors who account for these 60 books, only 11 have not had a previous bestseller. Of those, only 4 have not previously published a book.

So what? As time allows, I'll have more to say on this blog on publishing in general, but for the moment, this is simply further evidence of how imprudent it is to drop seven figures on an unknown, first-time author (such as John Twelve Hawks). There is a 99.998 percent chance that this sort of gamble won't pay off. My guess is that Doubleday is at least $500,000 in the red on Mr. Twelve Hawks' book, which, of course, was only one of many, many such gambles in 2005.

Let's Hope Oprah Is Not Too Frey-ed

The scandal over the alleged fabrications in James Frey's memoir is unfortunate for Oprah Winfrey. Frey's is the first contemporary work she has selected for her book club in three years, having taken a hiatus (more or less) from living authors in the wake of her encounter with the less-than-courteous Jonathan Franzen in the Fall of 2001.

I think Ms. Winfrey is sincerely trying to promote good books, and these incidents are a genuine shame. But they may be signs that she should return to the classics. Ms. Winfrey moved half a million copies of Anna Karenina, and if she's interested in contributing to the culture, she can hardly do better than that.

All Shall Have Prizes

An incisive discussion of literary prizes in a review of James English's The Economy of Prestige, in the New Yorker:

English believes that contempt for prizes is not harmful to the prize system; that, on the contrary, contempt for prizes is what the system is all about. “This threat of scandal,” as he puts it, “is constitutive of the cultural prize.” His theory is that when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one. No one thinks that Tolstoy was less than a great writer because he failed to win the Nobel. The failure to win the Nobel has become, in the end, a mark of his greatness.

English speculates that this willingness to speak without embarrassment about the significance of prizes and awards, and about the whole economy of cultural production and consumption, may, paradoxically, signal the demise of the prize system. “As we lose our ability or our willingness to see the prize as a fundamentally scandalous institution”—scandalous because art ought to have nothing to do with winning and losing—“there is bound to be a period of painful contraction in the awards industry,” he says. “Faced with the withdrawal of what has been by far their richest and most reliable source of publicity, prizes may after so many years of uncontainable expansion at last show some signs of fatigue.”

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