Amazon gives authors more reason to doubt themselves

Agents everywhere shuddered and screened their calls today as Amazon.com allowed authors to view their own sales data from Nielsen’s BookScan. A handy map of the U.S. highlights how many copies in each state have sold. From the L.A. Times:

The data, provided by Nielsen BookScan, include nationwide sales information from Barnes & Noble, Target and other big-box brick-and-mortar retailers, from Amazon.com and from some independent booksellers. Nielsen estimates that BookScan captures 75% of print book sales in the U.S. retail market.

BookScan’s sales tallies do not currently include sales of e-books, for the Kindle or other devices.

Authors who use Amazon’s Author Central will see a geographic sales map of books sold during a four-week window, with a lag of about a week. Early Thursday, the sales figures displayed included Nov. 1 to 28; later Thursday, Amazon expects a new week to load, so the information will span Nov. 8 through Dec. 5.

This is the closest thing to real-time aggregate sales data available to publishers, and it hasn’t been cheap. Nielsen’s BookScan, now a decade old, began to find widespread enrollment with major publishers in 2004, when fees ran $100,000 and more per year.

It would have been far beyond the reach of most individual authors, if it had been available to them.

Should literary agents be afraid of Amazon?

While Amazon is keeping quiet about the meetings it held last week with top U.S. agents, several commentators have begun to speculate about their significance. Crain’s reports that the talks were “freewheeling, frank, and contentious,” with e-books and aggressive discounting being the main topics under discussion. Meanwhile, MobyLives comments that the meetings are “one of the first signs that major agents are worried about the survival of the current system of author advances and royalties.”

Taking the argument one step further, GalleyCat asks the provocative question, “Literary agents … Who needs them?”

One published author who asks to be unnamed disagrees [that agents still serve a useful purpose], “What do you need an agent for anymore, really? Why? To negotiate a meager advance? You can’t get them on the phone anyway. You’re stuck promoting the book yourself because publishers don’t put any marketing dollars into your book unless you’re John Grisham. I don’t see the whole point when I can hire an attorney to negotiate my publishing contract for a flat fee or just upload the book to Kindle myself.”

London Book Fair post-mortem

As reported in OMNI on Tuesday, most of the Canadian agents attending this week’s London Book Fair were anticipating lowered attendance. However, most were going and reported full schedules.

It is hardly surprising, then, that one of the first reports coming out of the fair is a positive one. From Publisher’s Weekly:

On Wednesday, the fair’s final day, attendees were walking the show floor in the early morning, and meeting tables at most stands continued to be filled. “Overall attendance may not be that great, but the quality of the attendance has been phenomenal,” said Frank Daniels, chief commercial officer of Ingram Digital. “People are very focused,” he said, and those who did show up “came to do business.”

In the January/February Q&Q: the life of the Canadian children’s book illustrator

The January/February issue of Q&Q, out now, features a look at the working habits of several Canadian children’s book illustrators, including Greg Banning, Marthe Jocelyn, Jillian Tamaki, and others. Also in the Children’s and Educational Publishing Special Report: a look at the limited effect B.C.’s new CanLit curriculum requirement is having in classrooms, and a story on how the government is competing with school publishers in the digital arena. January/February is also the Spring Preview issue, offering a sneak peek at the hottest spring titles in fiction, non-fiction, books for young people, and international titles. Plus reviews of 40 new books by Lisa Gabriele, Eric Walters, Alan Bradley, Priscila Uppal, and more. The full table of contents is after the jump.

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NY publishers’ descent from the high life

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich looks at the dying glitz and glam of the publishing world, which, according to Rich, once “came with a milieu that mixed cultural swagger with pure Manhattan high life.”

Stark contrasts are drawn between company parties past and those planned for the future: Macmillan, which announced mass restructuring and layoffs in mid-December last year, will trade their Hotel del Coronado spring list meeting venue for meetings via webcam. Simon & Schuster cancelled its holiday party, while one division of Random House had pizza and beer in a cafeteria room. Other “glittery and cozy traditions” of the industry that are being clamped down upon are flights, hotel bills, cocktail hours, and, of course, the lunch tabs.

Nobody expects one of the staples of the business — the long lunch — to die off completely because of these straitened circumstances. But publishers, editors and literary agents, who have often been among the best diners in the city, are now reconsidering their favorite restaurants.

Besides the flash, though, other aspects of the publishing business are being examined, like distribution of advance print galleys, the return of unsold books by retailers, and cash advances for authors.

At HarperCollins a new unit is experimenting with a model that substitutes profit sharing with authors for cash advances and eliminates returns of unsold copies from booksellers.

Jonathan Galassi, publisher of the literary powerhouse Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said the custom of accepting returns from booksellers was created during the Great Depression to persuade bookstores to take more copies. “In a moment where getting people to put stock in a store of anything, not just books, is harder because of the money it costs to front them,” Mr. Galassi said. “I think it might be counterproductive to have a return-free business at this point.”

Let’s not do lunch, say publishers

This time it’s personal. As the world teeters on the economic brink and mass layoffs become regular news, The New York Observer reports on a horrific development that’s rocking the New York publishing industry. Wait for it: editors are now being asked to – gasp – cut down on their expense-account lunches.

Much hand-wringing ensues, with various industry types implying that business can only be conducted over the consumption of expensive food in trendy restaurants. It should be noted that the article also includes a few voices of reason on the issue, but let’s ignore those and highlight instead one agent’s attempt to explain why she should continue dining out on someone else’s dime most days:

Ann Rittenberg, an independent literary agent based downtown, said she is taken to lunch several times a week at restaurants like Bar Americain and Molyvos. She said in an interview that the money publishers spend on her and her fellow agents is well worth it.

“It’s one of the best marketing tools that the editorial department of a publishing house has,” Ms. Rittenberg said. “Because really, I do find out at lunches what I need to know in order to match an editor with a book.”

Funny stuff. Also amusing is the view put forth by some that “the notion that lunch as a ritual is fading signals a sorry chapter in the history of [the] industry.” Let’s see: ever-increasing competition from other media, a tough retail landscape dominated by a few major players, blockbuster-or-bust acquisition practices, the ongoing conundrums of engaging young readers and figuring out a viable digital business model…. But the real worry is the loss of parmesan-encrusted venison over mushroom ragout.

Bookmarks: Adiga’s agent, Small Beer for Obama, and more

• Booker winner Aravind Adiga clarifies when and why he dumped his agent, and it wasn’t about money. Phew!
• Small Beer Press, a small press in North Carolina Massachusetts, is donating 20% of this month’s sales to Obama’s presidential campaign
• A chick lit author/second-tier socialite sues her sister for allegedly stealing a manucript from the author’s computer and adding herself as co-author. Snarky comments (and future chick-lit material) ensue
• Talk about re-inventing oneself: Chris Ryan, former SAS soldier and author of several military thrillers, is publishing a romance novel under the pseudonym Molly Jackson

Legendary U.K. agent Pat Kavanagh dies

The Bookseller is reporting that Pat Kavanagh, the British agent and wife of novelist Julian Barnes, has died.

Kavanagh represented some heavy hitters in the literary world, including Joanna Trollope, John Irving, and William Trevor (not to mention her husband), but she was perhaps equally well known for the scandals that seemed to follow her throughout the upper echelons of the British writing and publishing community. In 1995, she was dropped by her most famous client, Martin Amis, in favour of Andrew Wylie, nicknamed “The Jackal,” who managed to secure the author a £500,000 advance for his novel The Information. The split with Kavanagh caused a very public falling out between Amis and Barnes, who had previously been close friends and snooker buddies.

Then last year, Kavanagh caused a stir once again by resigning from the British agency Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, and inciting a raft of other agents to follow her. Kavanagh’s departure and its attendent fallout caused the editorial director of one British publishing house to confess to the London Times that the sedate and sophisticated bonhomie of London’s literati is largely a façade: “On the surface we all get on brilliantly, but on a personal level we all f***ing loathe each other.”

The notice in The Bookseller is very brief, and gives no indication of the cause of death. The only direct quote in the piece is from a spokesperson for United Agents, the firm that Kavanagh helped establish after leaving PFD:

“Pat Kavanagh was an exceptional agent and a great friend. We all owe her a tremendous amount. She was an extraordinary presence who was much loved and will be greatly missed by her colleagues and her clients. All our thoughts are with Julian at this difficult time.”

No happy ending for publishing?

New York magazine’s feature by Boris Kachka about the current state of the book business lays things out like a fractured fairy tale, more Alice in Wonderland or Bluebeard than Cinderella, and rife with poisoned apples. Corporate heads are consolidating their kingdoms, or losing them altogether; solid writers are shuffled aside in lieu of trendy, marketable ladies-and-men-in-waiting; the fairy dust of traditional marketing isn’t working; Borders is on its deathbed; Amazon is the future. Kachka says that “some publishers will transform, some will muddle through, some will die.” And of course, dear reader, the end to this story can always be downloaded on a Kindle.

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century–through wars and depressions–the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now–who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.

As for how to solve the problems currently plaguing the industry, Kachka says:

[....] As a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis–a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster–attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it’s not too late.

(Cue ominous musical soundtrack…)

Danish publisher wants controversial U.S. novel

Earlier this month, Random House U.S. decided to pull Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina, for fear its content (about the child bride of the prophet Mohammed) would “incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”

Today, the Guardian reports that Danish publisher Trykkefrihedsselskabets Library (Free Speech Library) is negotiating with Jones’s agent, Natasha Kern, to publish the novel in Denmark.

[Free Speech Library] co-owner Helle Merete Brix said that the fact that Random House was prepared to pay $100,000 for the book showed its quality, and that she was determined not to “bow to any censorship.”

Brix expects the negotiations to conclude on Friday. This Quillblogger expects Brix will hand over a lot of Danish kroner.