The Publishing World Post # 10: "Drama, Drama, Drama."

I’ll never again assume that the publishing industry can’t keep up with Hollywood’s sex, scandals, and gossip. If it working in the field wasn’t enough to convince me that no office will be free of its fair share of sordid tales, the Judith Regan scandal certainly is. The New York Observer published a large feature on Regan’s history—with News Corp, inside the publishing industry, and in life in general—and by doing so offered a better perspective on her decisions and the current lawsuit. Not that my opinion of her has changed for the better. The article unabashedly revealed more intimate details of her love affair with Bernard Kerik, implied a sexually-charged—love-hate-power triangle between Regan, Rupert Murcoch and Jane Friedman, and offered defenders and critics of both sides of the story. In the end, I still believe that this drama is not the possible “smoking gun” that the article briefly speculates on and is certainly “ther next sensational, headline-grabbing project.” Another one of my least favorite people, Ann Coulter, just succeeded in pulling her records from Palm Beach County’s information logs in order to keep her critics from stalking her. The New York Daily News appropriately put that clip in its Gossip column. For some reason, I feel compelled to feel no sympathy for a woman who “called 9/11 widows ‘witches.’” The saying, “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen,” certainly applies. On a better note, professional reader and translator Esther Allen republished an article in the Guardian last week (it also recently appeared on American PEN’s Web site) about the powerful place of the reader’s report in publishing: “The lowly minion who authors it can do something no after-the-fact reviewer, however powerful and unkind, can accomplish: stop the book from being published in the first place.” Her experiences offer insight into a few of her decisions and their effects on specific books. The article, though not groundbreaking, is certainly a great resource for students of the trade who have not seen the same effects first hand. I very much enjoyed Allen’s personal account and her willingness to offer logic behind her decisions and her ability to pull back and admit that she could truly have been wrong. That admission is something all Americans—and maybe all people in general—seem to have a hard time doing, and from what I’ve heard about today’s fiction market, the blind curves in the road lead to trouble often enough that such honesty is a valuable key to staying afloat.

Happy Post #101!!!!

100th Post!!!!!

Happy 100, everyone! Now I feel like an experienced blogger...as if 3 years behind me hadn't been enough...=D

The Publishing World Post #9: "The Good, The Bad, and the Poorly Chosen News"

The news I found this week seemed, more than ever, to resound with big names in the business. Last week, Ken Follett made headlines because his recently released World Wtihout End is on several best seller lists and because his upcoming trilogy The Century made was a hit in the rights market, including an American deal for $50 million. This week Oprah has immortalized Pillars of the Earth—one of my favorite books for a few reasons—and sealed his presence beyond the demand of mass market and pop fiction thrillers. I intend to supplement my Follet collection with not only the special edition of World, but a first edition of Pillars and the new Oprah book club paperback. Not that Follett needs the royalties. Doubleday signed Joe Torre for a co-authored book about his career (a memoir or an autobiography? Not much word yet) for an undisclosed amount of money. One can only assume that the “major acquisition” will be a profitable one. Following up with my article from last week, RDR Books offered to postpone publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon in light of the lawsuit brought by Rowling and Warner Bros. Since the preliminary injunction is set for Febuary 6^th, 2008, it’s likely that further stories won’t be released unless information about the evidence for or against Rowling’s case is leaked to the press. And seeing as though it’s JK Rowling we’re talking about, it’s highly likely that someone will sniff out a press-worthy rumor at the least. Also press worthy is a note that the hype about Harry Potter 8 is thus far disconnected from any official Rowling writing. If someone is writing James Pottera and the Hall of Elder’s Crossing, it’s not her. The speculation about Warner Bros’ involvement in the mysterious Australian Web site is still circulating in the broader web community. The New York Post ran a scandalous review of The Unsinkable Heather Mills that made enough waves to attract the notice of PW’s “Morning Report” yesterday. Apparently Post writer Cindy Adams found the biography’s manuscript amusing since she brushes over bits and pieces of Mills’s life with callus distain and brags about her personal involvement in publishing details about Mills’s and Paul McCartney’s 1999 wedding (The book does not tell how it was me, in a front-page N.Y. Post headline, who exclusively broke the news they were to be married in Ireland’s Castle Leslie—I even gave the menu and the setup—but I shall overlook that…”). I feel a bit sorry for Mills who seems to be the victim of her own interviews and self-assured vanity, but Adams’s article gave me a very bad taste in my mouth. I’ve heard of bad reviews, but this one barely bothers talking about the quality of the writing: she focuses on laying bare the sordid lows and materialistic highs of Mills’s life instead. Compared to the literary blog which some have said is merely inappropriate to carry the weight of the future of the book review, this article is proof that there are bigger forces to be dealt with. Newspapers—in print or online—shouldn’t be a venue for this kind of personal vendetta. And as for vendettas in the publishing world at large, none is more shocking than Judith Regan’s accusations against HarperCollins and News Corporation. Three major sources led me to the “facts” of Regan’s case: a PW article, a New York Times article, and a New-York-Times–published, 75-page .pdf file of Regan’s complaint. According to the PW article, the complaint “centers around Regan’s relationship with Bernard Kerik, former New York City police commissioner and close confidant of Rudolph Giuliani, Republican candidate for president.” Intrigued—since I had missed this connection in previous coverage of the drama—I continued to the New York Times article that detailed a greater involvement in the smear campaign, including alleged participants like Publisher’s Weekly Editor in Chief Sara Nelson. The article essentially summarizes the official complaint as best as twelve paragraphs can manage, but the real winner is the .pdf, which lists the case’s background, Regan’s personal “climb” to “[building] a Publishing and Media Juggernaut” and 124 authors whom she has published. While the case seems to be well-made—from what I can see by glancing at the more interesting subheads through out the document—it’s certainly going to be a long haul. Her demands for “no less than $100 million” from HarperCollins and NewsCorp are certainly stiff, though between the two corporations, I’m sure someone will be able to handle the bills if she wins. And with the writers’ strike continuing, Borders installing TVs in their stores, and the National Book Awards being announced tonight, it certainly isn’t a quiet week in publishing.

The Publishing World Post #8: "Rights, Wrongs, and our E-Future"

I began the week with an article that offered me a great deal of comfort. In the heat of the arguments against Google’s e-book program and in anxiety over my proclaimed attempt to tackle Digital Rights Management in my final essay, I’ve been drained of my fodder to stoke the fires of support for e-books; it’s hard to agree with Google’s attempts, and in the face of the great DRM megalith, my faith in the arguments for e-books faltered. The torch, however, was not dropped in this past month. Buried in the blog section of PW is David Rothman’s E-Book Report regularly addresses rather large issues in the e-book world (recently including “How to Read an E-book in a Bathtub,” “Locking up Dickens: DRM is a lit and biz toxin,” and “‘Novel’ e-book site to woo young laptop-toters—and grandmas too”). The article that most recently caught my eye is a reaction to an evaluation of e-libraries published in The New Yorker. Since the article claims that the magazine “is as wrong about e-libraries as Martin Luther apparently was about paper books,” Rothman mainly addresses the same closemindedness in his adversary’s article that I’d experienced recently. He rightly complains that Anthony Grafton “barely mentions the Internet Archive's Open Content Alliance and refers not once by name to Brewster Kahle, the brilliant MIT-educated founder of the archive who for years has been addressing the ‘Can we do it?’ details of a universal library” and in doing so “chooses to don blinders and downplay visions like Brewster's or mine [Rothman’s]--not fully attainable today but certainly worth striving toward.” The beauty of this blog is it’s rich content pointing to examples—good and bad—of the advances in/detractors of electronic media, including a link to books.google where an interested reader can peruse a copy of Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier by Robin P. Peek and Gregory B. Newby that includes a chapter by Rothman on his actual proposal for “A Virtual Central Database.” Also good fodder for a discussion of Digital Rights Management was a PW article about the Rowling/Warner Bros. lawsuit against the publisher RDR Books for their involvement in a web-print project that hinges on content that could be ruled Rowlings’ individual intellectual property (in which Warner Bros. has a large stake, of course). The information is already published online on the Harry Potter Lexicon (also the title of the intended book), but Rowling says that since her own Harry Potter encyclopedia will be definitive and will profit charity (at least in part), “I cannot, therefore, approve of ‘companion books’ or ‘encyclopedias’ that seek to preempt my definitive Potter reference book for their authors’ personal gain.” Would an addition of “Unofficial” or “Fan-Written” to the title allow RDR to publish the book fair and square? In other lawsuit news, the New York Times just released an article about authors suing their publisher for steeply discounting books sold to clubs and subsidiaries, thus cutting author royalties “a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme”—or at least, that’s the authors’ argument. One plaintiff is quoted with a touch of humor—an not entirely at Regenery’s expense: “it suddenly occurred to us [plaintiffs] that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance. Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?” The Times, being a publisher itself and having a deep connection to book publishers the world over, seems to side a bit more with Regenery’s lawyer who states “No publisher in America has a more acute marketing sense or successful track record at building promotional platforms for books than Regnery Publishing. These disgruntled authors object to marketing strategies used by all major book publishers that have proved successful time and again as witnessed by dozens of Regnery bestsellers.” After all, these writers were responsible for signing their contracts. I agree that the difference between $4.25 per book and $.10 per book is a huge and honestly ridiculous disparity between royalties, but I’m a full proponent of authors and publishers being equally responsible for what is included in a contract; both parties have a grace period in which to negotiate and clarify terms. If the terms in the contracts are actually misleading, I can see this case being much stronger. I still find it sad that our society is so litigious that even legal issues seem to begin and resolve thanks to the headstrong maxim “It’s better/easier/wiser to ask forgiveness than permission.”