After the H.B. Fenn collapse: an insider’s perspective

Published in the April 2011 issue of Q&Q

A disclosure, to start: I have a vested interest in this story. On Sept. 28, 2010, I watched, devastated, as 11 of my colleagues at Key Porter Books were let go. A few more – myself included – were laid off in mid-December. And February brought more bad news: the bankruptcy of H.B. Fenn and Company, which left 125 employees out of work. Those people were my colleagues, too: H.B. Fenn owned Key Porter and supported its publishing program, both financially and with human resources.

I spent 11 years at Key Porter – a dog’s age in publishing. I joined the company as a junior editor, and worked most recently as editor-in-chief. The place felt like home to me; my authors and colleagues were family. A wacky, dysfunctional family, to be sure, but family nonetheless.

Recently I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about this family. Publishing is highly competitive, but it’s also oddly close-knit. Publishing people talk, a lot. We talk about books and writers. We talk about politics and sports. We gossip. And we support each other – in the office and out. So what happens when that support system vanishes?

Here’s the interesting thing: it doesn’t. If there has been any good news among the piles and piles of bad, it is that it takes more than a few layoffs to destroy a family.

***

“It is unbelievable how the employees of H.B. Fenn/Key Porter have stuck together,” says Phil Clarke, former IT manager for H.B. Fenn. “Within hours, I had offers for letters of reference, recommendations, notes of sympathy. All office politics went out the door and everyone just banded together.”

Former corporate and special sales manager Paula Sloss, who lost her job as part of the Key Porter layoffs last fall, had a similar experience. Key Porter co-founder Anna Porter, who had sold the company to Fenn in 2004, leapt into action on behalf of her former employees. Names and contact information flowed Sloss’s way, and doors that might once have been closed swung open.

At H.B. Fenn, rumours that something big was about to happen were rampant in the weeks leading up to the Feb. 3 mass layoffs. “After seeing the layoffs with the loss of Hachette [in 2009] and Key Porter, I knew it would be hard to reach people down the road,” Clarke says. On the morning of Feb. 3, he spent half an hour writing his personal contact information onto the back of his business cards. “I wrote it down on 50 cards in total,” he recalls, “and when I left I had 16 remaining in my pocket.”

Katherine Wilson, senior marketing and publicity associate, was also worried about staying in touch. “We all knew that we might not have access to our e-mail,” she says. As she was trying to figure out what to do, Marco Castro, a member of the IT team, came by. “Marco was going around the office, helping people export their contacts onto disc.”

By noon, the news was official. After clearing out his office, Clarke went home and started a Facebook support group called “Those affected by H.B. Fenn’s bankruptcy.” It was live by 2 p.m.

“I invited some key people, and they invited their people, and it just spiralled,” Clarke says. By Thursday evening, there were 20 or so members. By midday Friday, that number had doubled. At the time of writing, there were 68 – more than half the people who were let go.

Not surprisingly, the earliest posts were about how to cope. Employees in a bankruptcy situation do not receive severance or termination pay; they can, however, apply for assistance through the Wage Earners’ Protection Program and E.I. Thanks to the Facebook group, and a few industrious ex-employees, a step-by-step process emerged. Contacts at various government agencies were uncovered, phone numbers and links shared.

As people got a handle on how to proceed, the focus of the group changed. These days, you can find job-hunting tips, “good luck” wishes for those heading off to interviews, and the odd bit of venting. It’s as if, in the absence of a physical office, a virtual one has formed.

Sitting in a downtown coffee shop less than a week after the layoffs, Clarke, Wilson, and former sales manager Brad Kalbfleisch agree the outpouring of support has been the one bright spot in an otherwise dark period. “When you work with people, they don’t usually take the time to tell you that they appreciate you, that you’re doing a good job,” Wilson says. “When you get laid off, they tell you. It’s very nice.”

Clarke agrees. “I now realize how great the people I worked with are.” He picks up his iPhone and checks for messages. “I’m waiting for someone in the group to announce that they’ve got a job,” he says. “That will be the next big thing.”

The key to selling translations = field trips?

Every agent and publisher knows how difficult it is to sell foreign rights these days. It’s hard enough to find readers in the domestic market, right? Chad Post, founder and editor-in-chief of Open Letter Press at the University of Rochester, thinks the key to selling more foreign rights is the radical, old-school notion that editors and agents from different countries should – gasp – meet each other in real life. In an essay on Publishing Perspectives he writes:

It’s cliché, but there’s nothing like face-to-face meetings, and as objective, bottom-line focused we can try and be, learning about another country — its literary history and cultural heritage — really works to get editors invested.

Post also offers a list of tips for successful editorial trips, including tip #5: explain different business models:

Although Americans love to tell people why things won’t work in our country, we are always curious about other models — especially considering how the publishing industry always seems to be perennially about to implode and eat itself. It’s fascinating to learn about fixed book price laws, different e-book distribution schemes, bookseller training systems, and the like. We’re all looking for new good ideas, and by learning about the way things function in other places, the more likely we are to come up with a useful innovation.

The book world in quotes

Quillblog was on the fritz on Friday, so here is what you missed:

“At the end of the day, people need to have the courage to speak out. The predatory pricing practice by Amazon has pulled the industry along, and the Federal Trade Commission should have paid attention. Ultimately the authors will pay out of their income. This is an attack on literature so Amazon can capture control of the industry. They think they will be the iTunes of literature. It’s a monopolistic play that has nothing to do with value for the consumer. It’s an interesting scam by a very large corporation and I think we should wake up. It hasn’t helped grow the market – it has concentrated the market in Amazon. It’s been 70 years since people got away with [such actions] because the anti-trust laws used to be enforced, but we didn’t have enforcement for eight years.” -   Bob Livolsi, founder of the ebookstore Books on Board, at a panel discussion at Mediabistro’s eBook Summit (via Mobylives)

“And don’t remind me of the conversation I once had with a prominent academic, who intended the phrase ‘But it’s so effortless …’ as an adverse comment on a novel. I simply couldn’t rant convincingly enough to ensure that particular book could win a small but useful prize. The narrative’s illusion of ease – and just you try creating an illusion of ease, matey – was too convincing. A parallel idiocy might involve refusing to applaud Derek Jacobi at the end of a performance, because he looked as if he wasn’t acting.” – A.L. Kennedy, on the Guardian’s blog

“My waitress tonight was a Trillium nominated novelist — what’s wrong with this picture?” – the OAC’s literature officer John Degen on Twitter

“As the debate progressed, it became clear that, although both poets know something of the current Canadian poetry landscape, both are conservative in conception and approach. Bok, who did not challenge the moderator’s depiction of him as an ‘experimental poet’ (in fact, he embraced it), is interested in equivalencies between poetic and scientific methodological composition, while the diffident Starnino prefers a poetry where emotion is to the garment what syntax is to the clothesline. Neither question the ideological construction of the structures they inhabit, and only barely did Starnino refer to Eunoia‘s ‘success’ as defined not by critique but by the market.” – Michael Turner on the Christian Bök/Carmine Starnino Cage Match of Canadian poetry

“I don’t for a second buy Bök/Starnino as the major critical dialectic in Canadian poetry. While one, generally, comes from a traditionalist mindset and the other is avant-garde, what matters is that both men are formalists at their core. The fact that Bök wants to write in genomic code and Starnino is into sonnets is secondary to the fact that the great professional theme for both is the use of constraint as a path to artistic freedom. A more representative conversation would be between the constrainers and the free-versers. But maybe the free-versers don’t have a spokesperson who’s talented or persuasive enough to hang with these two at an intellectual level.” – Jacob McArthur Mooney on his blog Vox Populism

Bookmarks: The Advent Book Blog helps you shop, The National Post picks a shadow Canada Reads list, and more

• Richard Lea at the Guardian blog: If you can’t get Roth, Palin, or Rowling on the Kindle, what can you get?
• David Suzuki’s garbage gets combed through for incriminating Kraft Dinner boxes, and now archeologists are looking at what the Bard may have tossed away
• The L.A. Times picks their 25 favourite books of the year and actually selects some – gasp – poetry! That provoked a hearty booyah from this cubicle
• Web 2.0 marketing guru and Bookmadam Julie Wilson has teamed up with Books on the Radio‘s Sean Cranbury to offer the Advent Book Blog: Great Books Recommended by Great People
• Those funny book blog dudes at the National Post noted this year’s Canada Reads pics and wondered, what should Canada also read? Get your answers in by 5:00 p.m. this afternoon and maybe you’ll be able to participate in the alterna-reads version of the popular CBC book debate show

Best of lists take a beating – but what about critical honesty?

On Salon.com, Laura Miller talks about the controversy over PW’s best ten books of 2009 being 100% male:

What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper’s magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

Miller goes on to admit that anyone who’s had to compile a list – will feel an “awkward sympathy for the PW team”:

But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

Tamaki talks voice at the Written in Colour Symposium

On Nov 14th, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore will host the Written in Colour Writers’ Symposium, a full-day event geared toward emerging indigenous writers and writers of colour.

Workshops range from grant writing to getting your play produced to memoir and erotic writing. Facilitators include writers Tamai Kobayashi, Lee Maracle and Mariko Tamaki, as well as industry players like Cormorant Books publisher Marc Côté from Cormorant Books and John Degen from the Ontario Arts Council.

Tamaki, author of several books including the award-winning graphic novel Skim (with illustrator Jillian Tamaki), will be giving a workshop entitled You Are All Talk! about voice and writing.

“The idea is to get writers to think about writing and talk, what providing our characters with a voice means,” says Tamaki

Tamaki, who is Japanese-Canadian, thinks the symposium is relevant because culture and race are as important in the socio-political landscape as they are in the literary-arts landscape. “I think that representation is something everyone should be concerned about. People want to see themselves reflected back in the literary works that they love and so we should all have a vested interest in making sure that all different identities, readers and writers get supported.”

Tamaki notes that “colour” is a complex issue. “I write about Japanese people but I don’t like this idea that people feel beholden to put that element in their works. Like, if I don’t write about someone who’s Asian, have I messed up? Committed less of a service as an Asian feminist?”

The Written in Colour symposium will  be held at 918 Bathurst Street. Call 4-6.922-8744 to pre-register. Tickets are $15 to $30 sliding scale in advance and $30 to $50 sliding scale at the door.

Rush rocker on Atlantic Canada’s top ten

As mentioned previously on Quillblog, Nimbus Publishing will be releasing Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books this month. The editors are currently running a contest to see if you can guess the top five.

Neil Peart weighs in on his own personal top ten:

Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston
The Custodian of Paradise by Wayne Johnston
Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie Macdonald
The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie Macdonald
The Republic of Nothing by Lesley Choyce
An Avalanche of Ocean by Lesley Choyce
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
The Architects Are Here by Michael Winter
The Wreckage by Michael Crummey

Bookmarks: Amazon pays off kid, Auster and Rushdie support Polanski, and more…

• The new October writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto is former Eye Weekly arts editor and new poet,  Damien Rogers

• It’s happened to every author – you plan a reading and two people show up. Author Tao Lin shows us how to take it like a champ

• Short stories sent straight to your cell phone

• Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie have signed the petition to free Polanski.  Salon.com keeps perspective.

• Today’s Amazon irony alert: Amazon settles with student for breaking into his Kindle, and stealing his e-copy of 1984
  

• Cory Doctorow and Richard Nash discuss the future of the novel

• Dionne Brand is Toronto’s  new poet laureate

My year of writing a trendy book for the masses

If you were planning to write a My Year of Doing Something Singularly Weird or Stupid or Virtuous memoir, you better get those pitches in soon. The LA Times claims the trend is soon to be played out:

They’re not professional pranksters, exactly, but the authors of what might be called gimmick books — memoirs with premises so high-concept they could come from Hollywood pitch meetings: This year, I will take all of my instruction from self-help gurus. Or, this month, I will be radically honest with everyone I meet. Or, today I will try to behave exactly like George Washington, genteel bow, Dudley Do-Right walk and all.

The last few years have also seen many green-themed gimmick books, including Colin Beavan’s new No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process. Gimmicky or not, some have been fabulously successful, and as it gets harder to break into print, the category remains one that publishers invest in.

The article goes on to explore the king of the gimmick genre, A.J. Jacobs. The title of his next book is The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment. He spent 2004 on a quest to become the smartest man, and 2007 taking the Bible literally.

Scott Timberg posits that these stunt books may be the result of the industry’s earlier slew of poor-me suckfest memoirs, the more harrowing the childhood the better. Timberg quotes industry observer Sara Nelson:

“Poor Frank McCourt wouldn’t get published today, I’d bet.” says Nelson, “The dreary Irish childhood recounted in Angela’s Ashes, from 1996, “was pretty horrific, but in an old-fashioned way. Readers have been desensitized to that.”

Lev Grossman plots out the future of fiction

Author and critic Lev Grossman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, claims that “difficult” novels have had their day, and we are witnessing the rebirth of old skool storytelling and books that everyone can get into:

All of this is changing. The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance. They’re forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century.

[...]

This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century

There’s nothing wrong with arguing for more populist, less hermetic literary fiction, and it’s true that even some of our thornier authors are writing books that would, with all due respect, make for a good movie. (And have.) But Grossman tips his hand with repeated references to the harsh economic realities of literary fiction, noting the relatively poor sales for Nam Le’s The Boat, which received rapturous critical praise. He also admits that all those obscurantist modernist authors writing difficult books ended up producing “a full century’s worth of masterpieces before it was half over.”

In other words, yeah, you might get some masterpieces of literature, but forget about paying off your mortgage with royalty cheques.

As well, Grossman’s repeated insistence on “plot” as the single defining feature of non-difficult fiction seems to ignore what it is that really makes difficult fiction so difficult.

After all, if you were told that a novel was about a licentious older man who moves in with and marries a widower because he is obsessed with her daughter, plots to kill the new mother before he is run over by a car, takes off with the girl and is chased across the country by a smooth-talking pornographer whom he eventually murders, whom would you guess had written it?