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.

A call to blog

Every author with even an ounce of self-promotional instinct seems to have a blog these days, but how many editors and publishers do? According to Booksquare blogger Kassia Kroszer, the whole publishing industry needs to step up in this department if they truly want to see their authors’ works succeed.

Just as authors need to better market themselves and their books, so do publishers. While the audience for a publisher website is diverse — authors, booksellers, journalists, agents, readers, and more — talking about books on your website the same way you talk about books in your catalog simply isn’t cutting it. In printed material, you have various constraints. On the web, you have the ability to do something special: tell the world what excites you, the publisher, about a particular book. [...] If “blogging” can help you throw off the corporate chains and lead to a more natural, casual, exciting discussion about your books, then call it blogging.

Kroszer’s suggestion is certainly food for thought, but we can’t help thinking it’s maybe a little too Utopian. If we can assume, for a moment, that most publishers and editors routinely have to publish works they don’t personally care that much for, how can we expect them to muster blogger-style enthusiasm? That’s why dull catalogue copy was invented – it’s a passive, neutral voice that can be applied equally to works that editors truly love and to works that they are simply publishing to make money. And if an editor was to go on at bubbly length about a new Atwood title, say, but then stay curiously silent about the new Ondaatje, we would all suspect they hated the Ondaatje. Indeed, Kroszer practically acknowledges this herself:

Publishers, for reasons known only to them, are bizarrely hands-off when it comes to talking about their products. Sure, you get the occasional enthusiastic comment at a conference or during an interview, but the approach is more “we love all our children equally”… so we won’t talk about any of them.

Sadly, if you ask us, that’s the way it’s always been, and that’s probably the way it’ll always be.

(Thanks to Galleycat for the link.)

Agents’ secrets

Open Book Toronto recently published a virtual tête-à-tête between two literary agents, Sam Hiyate, president of The Rights Factory, and Hilary McMahon, vice-president at Westwood Creative Artists.

The article, “Artful Agenting,” is an e-mail discussion between Hiyate and McMahon over a 48-hour period. It’s a voyeuristic read: McMahon jokes about not finding the writer who will pay her mortgage and Hiyate shares his plan to represent more self-help authors. The conversation covers everything from editor’s vacation schedules to the rung-climbing history of McMahon’s career.

Coveting thy neighbour’s sales

According to Ben Kaplan of the National Post, the Canadian publishing industry is crazed with envy, obsessively checking up on their rivals’ deals and sales numbers:

Resentment among authors has been around since the first cocktail party lauded the first published word. But in the age of the internet and publicized book deals on Booknet Canada, Publishers Marketplace and the deals section of the Quill & Quire website, first-time novelists now have more tools at their disposal to keep track of opponents – and there’s a certain amount of bloodletting in the Canadian authorship game.
…

Publishers, agents and authors all want to keep tabs on their industry. And certain watershed deals – such as the twin fortunes earned by first-time novelists Anne Michaels and Ann-Marie MacDonald in the mid-’90s, Michael Turner’s deal with Doubleday for The Pornographer’s Poem in 1999 or the bidding war that broke out over Tish Cohen’s debut novel last year – attract the industry’s attention and scorn.

“We don’t only go online to check our sales, but also to check everyone else’s sales,” says Kim McArthur, president of McArthur & Co., a publisher and distributor that has seen 63 of its releases become Canadian best-sellers and 21 of them reach No. 1 in Canadian sales. McArthur believes envy is good for publishing, and that deal trackers and sales figures bring moxie to the biz. “Now you can be envious of someone and then go check their figures,” she says. “Really make yourself sick.”

It seems that we here at Q & Q are enablers. We’re sorry, everybody. We had no idea.

U.K. steps up e-book production

While the Canadian publishing industry is taking a wait-and-see attitude toward e-books, the U.K. industry seems to be chomping at the bit to get on board. According to The Bookseller, two of the U.K.’s biggest book retailers – Waterstone’s and Borders – are preparing to get behind e-books in a very big way, prompting publishers to step up the production of titles.

Waterstone’s is in talks with publishers about the supply of e-books, and is understood to be planning a July launch for its programme. Borders is gearing up to sell e-books from its transactional website, which launches in April. Commercial director David Kohn said: “We hope to have an [e-book] offer in place by the end of 2008.” Gardners is also ramping up its e-book delivery service.

Agents are being inundated with requests from publishers to clear e-book rights at speed. Philippa Milnes-Smith of LAW, head of the Association of Authors’ Agents, expressed concerns that authors were being “rail-roaded”. She said: “We understand where publishers are coming from, but we’re concerned for authors that they get the right remuneration, and also that e-books are published to the same standard as printed books. Our overriding imperative is quality not speed.” Publishers are looking for blanket clearance of rights, she said. “We treat authors individually, not as a job lot.”

The industry’s burgeoning enthusiasm for e-books is especially notable in that the U.K. doesn’t even have the big e-reading devices yet – the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are currently available only in the U.S. Basically, U.K. booksellers are just getting ready for the splashy U.K. launches of those devices later this year.

Fiction vs. non-, round 2

Not too long ago, author Ken McGoogan argued in The Globe and Mail that non-fiction books get short shrift in our culture, fiction soaking up the glam and all. Now, Globe columnist and novelist Russell Smith has stepped into the fiction corner, and it’s a pleasure to see him all riled up. (Neither piece is currently available online to non-subscribers, alas; see Quillblog passim for more on McGoogan’s.)

The real question, it seems, is who is harder done by. Says Smith:

Every fiction writer in the country knows that he or she is working in the second-least-popular genre, more read only than poetry. We know it because our editors and agents are always subtly or not so subtly suggesting that we try a work of non-fiction next. We have all had the conversations at cocktail parties with the alpha males who loudly proclaim that they don’t have time for fiction because they need facts. We know it’s not considered to be very manly or important.

Smith also rightly jumps on McGoogan’s dubious claim that non-fiction is more likely than fiction to stand the test of time. He does twist the knife a bit, though: “It’s 100 years from now. Ken McGoogan or Alice Munro?”

Disgruntled writer offers literary agents a raise

The Guardian‘s weekend edition features an opinion piece by writer and filmmaker Martin Wagner, who is obviously still stinging from the rejection letters he received from agents as a young novelist. The crux of the piece is his argument that in the relationship between writers, agents, and publishers, it is the writer – the “lifeblood”of the industry – who most consistently gets screwed.

The piece also serves as a platform for Wagner to promote his play The Agent, which satirizes the industry and is currently being adapted into a feature film. However, given his evident distaste for agents – whom he describes as “vultures” – his suggestion for improving the situation is a little surprising.

Maybe one of the problems is that agents simply don’t get paid enough? While a 15 per cent commission is plenty if you’re representing a J.K. Rowling, what about 15 per cent of an author who could reasonably call himself a success if he got an advance of £2,000 for his first novel – a mere £300 for his agent?

Which raises the question of what a “reasonably” successful author is supposed to do with a (less than) £1,700 advance per novel – but we’ll put that aside for now. In the meantime, Quillblog welcomes any other suggestions to improve author-agent relations.

Attention agents and editors: we want your deals!

Just a reminder to Canadian agents and editors to send us your deals for our weekly update on Q&Q Omni. We’re interested in books acquired for upcoming Canadian publication as well as in sales of foreign or subsidiary rights. Our deals update is put together on Wednesdays, so anything received by the end of the day on Tuesday will be considered. You can e-mail information directly here, and submission criteria here.

Maybe Mr. Rochester will buy it

While books by the sisters Brontë are popular, the house where they were born is not. It’s apparently jinxed, and no one really wants to buy it.

The Guardian reports that when the house at 72 Market St. in the Yorkshire village of Thornton went up for auction yesterday, it couldn’t command even the reserve price. Bidding stopped at £180,000 (or about $384,600 Cdn), which is less than commanded by similar properties without Brontë history. Though estate agents had tried to get Brontë fans from the U.S. and Japan interested in the building, no one really bit.

But in spite of nurturing Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë through what their father called “the family’s happiest five years,” the roomy stone-built terrace house lived up to its past – which has seen successive failures as a butcher’s shop, tourist centre, and restaurant.

“It’s a strange thing,” said auctioneer Tony Webber of Eddison’s auctioneers. “When you consider that this family gave the world the likes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre it’s hard to believe that the home in which they were conceived and born is even still available for private sale.”

The homestead has been purchased by a private investor.

Penguin Australia spends like a drunken sailor

The Sydney Morning Herald has a story about Penguin Australia publisher Ben Ball’s eyebrow-raising acquisitions. It’s not the books Ball has signed on that have raised those eyebrows, but the suitcase-loads of cash he is paying for them.

It was almost a year before Ball announced his first piece of literary fiction: a 700-page first novel by Steve Toltz, a Sydney screenwriter. Most first-time novelists are happy to get an advance of $5,000 to $10,000, so eyebrows were raised by Toltz’s advance, which was said to be more than $100,000.

Since then Ball has really been “splashing the cash,” to quote one rival. Kristin Williamson, wife of the playwright David Williamson, has apparently been given $150,000 to write about their lives together.

But what has the industry agog is the rumoured $300,000-plus advance given to the Melbourne author Chloe Hooper for a two-book deal: a novel and a non-fiction account of the recent troubles on Palm Island.

Hooper won a Walkley Award last year for a magazine article about the Palm Island inquest. Other publishers were keen to publish her book but did not expect it to sell more than 10,000 copies, a fifth of what would be needed to recoup the rumoured advance.

Obviously, whenever a publisher starts spending this kind of money for anything less than a tell-all memoir from a famous figure, the amounts are the message, a naked publicity ploy, an expensive attention-grabbing scheme.

Well, it won’t work this time, Ball! We’re on to you, so good luck getting any publicity out of this… oh, hang on.

We’re also betting that literary agents around the world are right now practising their best “G’day mate!”