The Publishing World Post #7: "....um??"

While other weeks’ publishing news has stirred me into introspection or analysis of some important element of publishing or another, this week I’ve seen three articles in Publisher’s Weekly that made my jaw drop (for one reason or another). First, they ran an article (sort though it was) about possible plagiarism in two cookbooks for children. The brief article shows the similarities and differences between a few of the recipes. I wonder though how many cookbooks build, play or blatantly use time-old tricks that could be considered “plagiarizing” if not noted correctly or if printed under conditions that implied that the recipes were new or innovative. Since both books focus on healthy, tasty, and traditional food for kids (grilled cheese, pancakes, macaroni and cheese), I can imagine that the article is right in saying that there can only be so many ways “to inject a dose of healthiness into mac and cheese.” I will love to see how much of a stink this ends up making in the industry. Plagiarism is terrible and newsworthy, but when two cookbooks recommend adding carrot puree to a muffin to make it healthier, I am just that much more inclined to actually try it. Moving from the small and odd to a nationwide scandal, comic book retailer Gordon Lee is finally going to trial for “two counts of distributing material depicting nudity or sexual conduct and five misdemeanor charges of distributing obscene material to a minor.” I found reference to this newsworthy topic in both the New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly—though the Times’ article was from May of this year. The actual distribution happened two years ago today at Halloween party in Georgia: Lee gave a minor a free copy of the graphic novel The Salon which depicts Picasso in the buff. From the way both articles read, the novel is less “obscene” than the graphic (metaphorically and literally) version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and quite possibly more tasteful than Playboy. It brings up the age old argument about the fine line between artistic sexual content and pornography. The ridiculous part—to me—is that the case has dragged on this long with such fervor from both sides. Hasn’t someone determined whether this novel is actually NC-17? Should I assume that the tone of both articles is turned toward the defense of poor Mr. Lee when the courts truly have a good case on their hands? I believe strongly that nudity and sexual content are much less damaging to a child’s mind than the violence aired on the nightly news and Saturday morning cartoons; but then, who am I to go against the whole FCC? Yet another article that inspired incredulity on my part will probably thrill many Bostonians and members of the Red Sox Nation world wide. An instant book is being printed about the Red Sox’s 2007 Championship series and according to Triumph Books of Chicago, 110,000 will have hit shelves by today. Now, I love the Sox and was one of the million people on the streets yesterday watching the Rolling Rally, but turnaround that short on a book that is that specific makes my head spin. The book is a text-and-photograph trade book, not a mass market paperback; how exactly did they manage to get it together so quickly? According to the article, another text-only book was “originally scheduled for spring 2008, [but] because of the Red Sox win Triumph will ship [it] within a week.” That’s a six-month shorter production time, and they’ve already decided to run 300,000 copies for the all-text hardcover. Triumph is also printing a book for Rockies fans, despite the painful series sweep. The market is certainly there, and I understand the desire to print quickly to catch the largest possible amount of interest, but I can’t imagine the amount of time and money spent in the last few days to finish these projects. Maybe these articles caught my eye because I’m not used to seeing the gory details of the publishing world—the fast (production), the furious (lawsuits), and the plagiarized. All three articles bring up very serious issues in valid contexts (though the cookbook plagiarism is debatable with out more facts to argue with), but for some reason, the details just keep me from really getting my head around them.

Or maybe I'm just tired...

The Publishing World Post #6: "Home, Sweet Home"

I feel like the publishing world has gotten a lot homier lately. Or maybe it’s just the news. Back in August, Publisher’s Weekly ran an article assuring its readers that “all [Twin Cities publishing] personnel [were] safe following [the] rush-hour collapse of a major bridge connecting downtown Minneapolis with St. Paul.” At the time, I was quite impressed that someone on the PW staff had actually taken the time to check in with all of the houses there. Many people wouldn’t expect that the cities host a respectable percentage of the nation’s publishers, nor that Minneapolis—or “The Little Apple”, as I learned from a Minnesota Daily article—“has a thriving music, arts and theater scene” and a “strong presence of a literary community.” The PW staff seemed to know otherwise, and the August 2, 2007 issue of PW Daily posted the reassuring article as their first story. Today, the first article in the PW Daily delivered similar good news regarding the safety of booksellers and publishers in Southern California: Harcourt’s offices are open (though sparsely populated), B&N closed a few stores out of safety concerns, and the indie bookstores seem to be out of the path if imminent danger. In fact, no one seemed concerned about much besides loss of profit, a blessing compared to the irreparable damage that occurs when books and fire try to make friends. But in all serious, it’s refreshing to see that the publishing industry (or at least one of the publications that seems to be an industry standard) cares about more than profits and sales and deals. The people who insure that profits, sales, and deals are made matter enough that their safety is the cause for a news article. On the other coast and the other side of the spectrum, a truly family affair made headlines in today’s Times. John Podhoretz is taking over as editor of Commentary Magazine, moving into a role that his father held until retirement in 1995. His father didn’t give him the job, but on the other hand, the Times reports that “there was no search process” for other applicants; the now former editor, Neal Kozodoy, called Podhoretz the Younger, offered the job, sealed the deal, and left office traditions like interview and applications alone. Podhoretz is a good candidate, but there must have been other candidates he could have competed with. If the publishing world is anything like my job, most publishers like to promote from within when possible, keeping inside knowledge inside the company and giving credit to those who have been most successful and motivated in their previous positions. It sounds very fluffy on paper, but it’s a practical system. Podhoretz might have been close to the job when his father was editor, but he moved on to many different places before making his way back to Commentary. I’m willing to bet that someone in the company was fully prepared to fill the role. If not, someone must have been prepared enough to put up a good fight in an interview. In the end, fingers can point all they want, but Podhoretz is now editor and will probably do a spectacular job, especially when he can go to his father for words of wisdom and accountability in regards to the magazine’s goals and vision. The publishing industry certainly is a close-knit place. Publishers like to work with established authors whom they know well. Publishers like to promote people already imbedded in the system—if not specifically their system. And at the end of the day a lot of industry contacts are strong enough to necessitate periodicals making big news of colleagues’ safety and well-being. So what if a (now middle-aged) boy gets his dad’s job? When going to work offers even a few comforts of home, it’s a rather nice place to be.

The Publishing World Post #5: "The Book Fair"

As tempting as I found the blog review of Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead, I’ve decided to neglect electronic publishing this week and focus on a much more accepted facet of the world of words: the book fair. With last week’s class on rights and all the buzz flying around the net about deals and discoveries, I decided to look into current fairs held across the country. My experiences with the Miami Book Fair had nothing to do with rights purchases; if I went to Frankfurt, however, it seems highly unlikely that I’d mingle elbow-to-elbow with bargain hunters in front of tents filled with books or stand in single-file lines waiting for Madeline Albright, Dave Barry, Ken Burns, or Scott Turrow to sign a first edition I’d picked up after a lecture. Both have their important roles in the publishing process, but with only two examples didn’t paint a clear picture of book fairs’ influence. With the help of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book I was able to get a better picture of American fairs like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, BookExpo America , the Patchwork Tales Storytelling Festival, the Sarasota Reading Festival, the Arizona Book Festival, and the Printers Row Book Fair, all of which have different purposes and methods of drawing its audience. The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is most like the Miami Book Fair: publishers sell to the public, authors talk to the public, the community gathers together for a massive cultural event, and big names dazzle the crowd. BookExpo, on the other hand, is all about the business, publisher to publisher. As a professional gathering, the BEA is much more like Frankfurt, focusing on rights, the culture of the market (not cultural events), and the future of the trade. The Patchwork Tales Storytelling Festival, held annually in Rock Hill, South Carolina, eschews all commercialism and focuses solely on words. For a few days, words and oral traditions are revitalized. Where does publishing come in? Not really anywhere. By including it—and a large helping of other word-related, but not book-specific events—the Library of Congress adds an air of credibility to an essential part of the culture and use of language, albeit it is not one found at Frankfurt or the BEA. The Sarasota Reading Festival likely draws a larger crowd than Patchwork Tales, but throws all of its events into a solid day of literacy. Like other audience-oriented book events, this small fair attracts the residents of Hillsborough County, Florida with big names like Lou Dobbs, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Gene Wilder. Attending the Sarasota Reading Festival might be less daunting than weaving through California crowds or spending a week navigating South Florida traffic. The Arizona Book Fair was the same way for years—a small, but respectable fair—but it attracted even smaller authors and smaller audiences. After ten years in the Carnegie Center (a historic and recently renovated landmark in Phoenix owned by the Arizona Public Library), the Arizona Book Fair is in desperate need of a new venue and faces a long, indefinite hiatus if one isn’t located. Money must have played an issue in the decision, though corporate sponsors like Target and Borders look like promising signs. The final fair I surveyed—the Printers Row Book Fair—has much different history. Established twenty-two years ago by the Near South Planning Board in Chicago, this fair was not initially meant to host rights deals or multi-cultural talks or the biggest bestsellers. Printers Row was “once the city’s bookmaking hub” (and well-named at that), so the neighborhood decided to attract business using its historic market. Within seven years, the one block fair had grown almost ten times its size and was actually purchased by the Chicago Tribune. Now, it’s not just a fair with a tie to the city’s history, but an important player in its neighborhood’s future and a fair as commercially successful as its Californian and Floridian competitors. Other fairs are very specific about audience, focusing on collectible books or children’s literature or a single author’s work or a theme or a setting, and fairs of all types range from bustling to intimate to unknown. But each has a purpose. When the Miami Book Fair hosts its events at the Miami-Dade Community College Campus, volunteers from the inner-city college witness the meetings of minds that they may not have imagined possible; its multi-cultural and poly-lingual focus engages the diverse community of South Florida, linguistic scholars, and publishers from around the world. School children are offered the gift of stories despite their reading levels at fairs like Patchwork Tales, and traditions like Southern “lies” are kept alive and well, even as the electronic age speeds ahead. Neighborhoods like Printers Row are remembered for their historic importance. Deals are made, royalties are boosted, elbows are rubbed, and for brief moments in every month of the year, communities across the United States are dragged away from their televisions and video games and into a literate, educated, and exciting world that I find simply intoxicating. I don’t know how many books are sold at any given fair, or how much a random publishing company could expect to gain or lose as an exhibitor, but when the Library of Congress can list one hundred and ninety fairs, most of which are in the US and held annually, it’s obvious that the tradition is not going anywhere soon.

The Publishing World Post #4: "Killing Voices--Literally"

I was at a loss as to what to investigate this month until my little brother called me to celebrate his latest college freshman triumph: news editor of the WPI student paper. We chatted briefly, but what struck him as the greatest detail of the situation was not that he was given such a great responsibility as an underclassman in his first semester, but that he would not have the restrictions on published material that were quite heavily placed on our high school newspaper. Since last week was the ALA’s Banned Books Week, I thought censorship a fitting subject, as well as one coming closer and closer to home. The ALA’s web site offers the fairly standard fare of “banned lists”—including the most challenged books of the 21^st century to the top ten from last year, with explanations like “homosexuality, anti-family, and unsuited to age group” (Richardson and Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three) and “sexual content and offensive language” (Naylor’s Alice). The Modesto Bee printed an opinion article entitled “Somebody would prefer that you didn’t read this” on October 2^nd, and in true small paper fashion, the letter backed the banned books, downed censorship, and made all the arguments any forward-thinking American would: that our First Amendment rights should be exercised for our own benefit and that banning books is just plain dumb. The article did, however, mention a few international episodes that remind readers that just because the US calls itself “censorship-free” doesn’t mean that our electronic presence on the global web isn’t threatened by forces outside the Constitution’s control. In light of recent events in Myanmar, censorship through brute force seems to be a burgeoning trend. Stateside news reporters had to keep their sources secret for fear of inadvertently alerting the Junta’s henchmen to protesters’ identities and ensuring their torture. According reporter Eric Silver, “The only manager of Gaza’s only Christian bookshop, who was abducted on Saturday by suspected Muslim extremists, was found dead yesterday” and “40 video cassette shops and internet cafes, identified with Western values, have been bombed [in Gaza] in the past year” (qtd in Seattle Pi). Wanting to hear that universal freedom of speech was on the rise, not the fall, I kept surfing till I happened upon the International Cities of Refuge Network, an affiliate of the global literacy and culture group International PEN. ICORN calls itself “an association of cities and regions around the world dedicated to the value of Freedom of Expression.” Their main purpose: aiding writers who “targets of politically motivated threats and persecution.” As of ICORN’s foundation in 2005, more than 1,000 writers were identified as in need of protection or asylum. Their seventy-three page long Case List is a terrifying read, especially when the last page lists the forty-four writers killed in 2005 and 2006, the 284 imprisoned writers, 30 disappearances, and dizzying statistics for harassment, abuse, detention, and persecution. If I lived in any of the countries listed as danger zones for independent thinkers, would I, too, be on this list? Would I be eligible for help if I were just a publisher? Writers aren’t the only persecuted bearers of the written word. The bookseller in Gaza was victim to the same horrors that authors the world over have been subjected to; publishers can’t be immune to the politics of the month, day or hour just because they didn’t write the material. Knowing that there are people in the world who put themselves on the line to make literature of all backgrounds and intents and philosophies available to the people at large makes me think hard about the work that I will one day endorse as an editor. Just because my name isn’t on the cover doesn’t mean it’s not mine, doesn’t mean that I’m not responsible for the contents, effects, and insinuations of every serif of every printed letter. With this in mind, “Howl’s” survival of the censorship bans fifty years ago this week means a lot, but the fact that WBAI didn’t read it on the airwaves for fear of an FCC fine means even more. This cannot be a safe direction for the nation that claims to be a bastion of freedom. The New York Times hit it on the nose when quoting Ginsberg: “Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.” While I began this week snidely remembering student-written articles that had to focus on high school curriculum and couldn’t insult the janitorial staff, I’m now worried about the future of my work as a publisher, my passion as a writer, and my soul as a reader. Where to from here?

The Publishing World Post #3: "Readers, Where Art Thou?"

In August, the Boston Globe published “Poll: 1 in 4 adults read no books last year; biggest readers were women, older people,” and once the article had circulated through Bedford/St. Martin's for the better part of a morning, it started a flurry of e-mails around the office. At first, we all just grumbled to ourselves about the true state of the Union, but after discovering that the poll only consisted of 1,003 adults who had answered questions in telephone interviews, I was inspired to prod the conversation beyond criticizing the three of four adults we didn’t identify with. After all, how likely are avid readers to actually participate in telephone surveys? Obviously, our many speculations didn’t add up to much since we didn’t have facts about the psychology of telemarketing, but since then, I’ve been meaning to research the issue of American literacy and tendency to read more thoroughly. When I started reading Greco’s facts about publishing profits and industry trends, it got me thinking again. Smaller reading audiences seem like they’d be cutting larger “in-roads” into publishing profits than electronic publishing. A New York Times article summarizing local National Endowment of the Arts’s Big Read programs put me in the mood for addressing it this week. Knowing that the NEA is taking such a huge step towards promoting literacy—not just American literature, but now global/multinational literature as well—I had more proof that reading is declining in the U.S. The National Institute for Literacy has a long list of Reading Facts that discuss both literacy in American children, adolescents, and adults, but the likelihood of today’s younger generations becoming readers in adulthood. Some facts were very disheartening: for example, “only about 1 in 17 seventeen year olds can read and gain information from specialized text, for example the science section in the local news paper,” and evidence of stagnation since 1980 of long-term reading assessment scores in students across three age groups (9, 13, and 17). American students are only performing marginally well when compared to other nations, sometimes outpacing a category or two, sometimes falling well below expectations in others. And the effects of reading for fun, variety of reading material, and family interaction on reading levels were staggering: “Students who read for fun every day scored the highest,” “Students who had 4 types of reading material at home performed the highest,” and “Students who discussed their studies at home, however frequently, had higher average reading scores than students who reported never discussing their studies at home.” Reading proficiency was also connected positively to parents’ level of education. So if 29% of adults are struggling with reading or cannot read at all, then their children are much more likely to struggle. And if children are struggling with reading, they won’t purchase books for fun. Nor are they likely to invest in higher education which is most often reading intensive. Nor will they purchase technical books to improve their jobs and life. When they have children, this cycle will be perpetuated. On the other hand, there still is an established readership in the US. There are still a majority of people who are literate, who purchase books, who read for fun, who pass these traits to their children. Could the advent of the blog be threatening book readership and periodical sales? I don’t believe it has quite yet. And industry statistics provided by the Association of American Publishers for 2005 and 2006 maintain that the book industry is still hovering around $25 billion (down this in 2006, but it was up in 2005). In both years, Higher Educations sales grew, as did adult and juvenile trade book sales. E-book sales were up a full 24.1% in 2006, too. So someone is buying books: books for college, to read for fun, to read on the go, to read because they’re interested in a reasonably priced easy to move with set of physical or electronic pages or in bettering their lives somehow. And though the Boston Globe article claimed that religious books and romances were in the top runners for their polled readers, both sales of both religious and mass-market books (as a whole) were down in 2006. So where does that leave my search? Not very far from where I started. I’m not so worried about the state of American readership, and a $1 billion dollar loss in the industry isn’t too bad when there are 24.1 more to support it, but I can’t help being relieved at the NEA’s efforts to continue bolstering what we all know is an American trend not to read. It does not yet seem to be epidemic, but then again, I’m sure the plague didn’t for a few months either…