HarperCollins U.S. to try new publishing model

In a move that should have people talking at the upcoming London Book Fair, HarperCollins U.S. has announced plans to launch a new-style publishing program. The man in charge is publishing veteran Robert S. Miller, who is credited for building Disney’s Hyperion publishing program.

According to a press release from HarperCollins:

As President and Publisher of the yet-to-be-named entity, Miller will publish approximately 25 popular-priced books per year in multiple physical and digital formats including those as yet unspecified, with the aim to combine the best practices of trade publishing while taking full advantage of the internet for sales, marketing and distribution. Authors will be compensated through a profit sharing model as opposed to a traditional royalty, and books will be promoted utilizing on-line publicity, advertising and marketing.

The references to leveraging the web sound like the usual breathless PR-speak, but compensating authors through a profit-sharing model does indeed sound like something new and notable. Who knows what it’ll mean for the authors in practice, but it’ll probably be an experiment worth watching.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has posted an article examining HarperCollins’ plans, in which it reports that Miller also aims to reduce (or altogether eliminate) costly returns. The article doesn’t make clear how he plans to do this, except to say that:

The new group will also release electronic books and digital audio editions of all its titles, said Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins, a unit of the News Corporation.

“At this moment of real volatility in the book business, when we are all recognizing things that are difficult to contend with, like growing advances and returns and that people are reading more online, we want to give them information in any format that they want.”

Oprah’s online freebie makes for good publicity

As the debate about whether to publish on the Internet continues to rage in publishing houses and ivory towers across North America, Oprah’s latest stunt is adding fuel to the fire.

Last week, author Suze Orman made her book Women and Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny available free on Oprah’s website for a period of 33 hours. More than 1.1 million copies were downloaded. Even so, the book remains a bestseller and ranks No. 6 on Amazon.com.

Shocker: Bush lied

It’s probably one of the more effective advance publicity efforts in recent memory: former White House press secretary Scott McClellan now says Bush, Cheney, and other high-ranking White House officials knowingly had him lie about Scooter Libby’s involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame. (More here.)

That news comes in a brief excerpt from McClellan’s memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong with Washington, that’s been posted on the website for publisher Public Affairs. The book itself won’t see release until next April.

McClellan claims innocence, saying he was unwittingly lying to reporters on Bush’s behalf. We’ll have to wait a few months to see how much of his book is inside-scoop and how much is simply the former press secretary covering his own ass.

Oprah talks about If I Did It

If you’re like us, you’re probably getting real sick of hearing about O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional If I Did It, but attention must be paid when the queen herself, Oprah, thrusts it back into the limelight. Yesterday, she invited the Goldman family onto her show to discuss the book and their decision to publish it, a choice for which they have been criticized. According to MSNBC, which has posted a good summation of the show’s highlights, Oprah said it was a “moral, ethical dilemma” for her to give more publicity to the book:

Winfrey acknowledged that her program often promotes books and authors, yet, she said, “I don’t want to be in the position to promote this book, because I, too, think it’s despicable.”

The MSNBC piece ends by stating that, as of yesterday, If I Did It was No. 8 in sales at Barnes and Noble and No. 52 on Amazon.com. According to a more recently updated piece on The Book Standard website, however, the book has subsequently shot up to No. 1 at Barnes and Noble and No. 2 on Amazon.com. Way to go Oprah…

Kerouacapalooza at the Gladstone Hotel

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s seminal On The Road – as well as launch a pair of Kerouac-themed books – Toronto’s This Is Not a Reading Series held a “Kerouac Legacy Party” at the Gladstone Hotel on Sept. 5.

Ian Brown inspects author Ray Robertson’s muttonchops. Robertson was launching his new novel, What Happened Later (Thomas Allen Publishers).

Publicist Debby de Groot fears losing her soul in the camera’s flash. Author Stephen Finucan, on the other hand, appears to welcome it.

David Creighton (right), who was launching his book Ecstasy of the Beats (Dundurn Press), makes a point as Robertson and host Jian Ghomeshi listen.

Dundurn design and production assistant Erin Mallory, owner Kirk Howard, and new sales and marketing director Margaret Bryant.

House of Anansi’s Laura Repas with her copy of Robertson’s book.

Local chef Sacha Gatien Douglas hoists one for Kerouac with Catherine MacGregor of HarperCollins Canada.

Novelist Michael Helm and his wife, Juanita Des Barros. (Note designer Bill Douglas going postal in the background.)

Poets Ken Babstock and Karen Solie.

Ghomeshi gets cozy with Thomas Allen publisher Patrick Crean and publicity manager Lisa Zaritzky.

Robertson in a publicity sandwich between Thomas Allen’s Laura Palumbo and Larissa Chalmers. (Warning: staring directly at the pattern on Robertson’s shirt may cause dizziness and/or nausea – though it seems to have had a calming effect on Bill Douglas…)

Alicia Hogan, Thomas Allen senior editor Janice Zawerbny, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Shirley Hudson, and author Paul Quarrington.

Random authorial musings

Over at the Insider’s Blog on the Random House Canada BookLounge website, Todd Babiak uses an author guest post to talk about book clubs – or, more specifically, his awkwardness at book club meetings. Since publishing The Garneau Block, he’s been invited to appear at several gatherings, he says, and he always overdoes it when it comes to tie-wearing, boob-staring, and hummus-eating.

I always wear a suit, which is always too much. The host invites me in and I sit down in a comfortable chesterfield and smile. As we introduce ourselves, I investigate, by the tone and tenor of their voices, whether any of them disliked the novel. Women in book clubs always seem to be attractive and intelligent, so I worry about being caught checking them out (after two glasses of wine, my gaze tends to linger). And, of course, I worry about eating too much hummus and horrifying these lovely readers with my garlic breath.

Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) has also blogged at the Random House site, and his entries range from the morbidly amusing (increasingly violent sketches he has drawn to accompany his signature in books, and the follow-up entry about how Brits and Canadians respond to his sense of humour versus how Americans respond) to the annoyingly whiny (publicity is hard and journalists are manipulative hacks).

Bookmarks – Poe mystery solved, and more

• You know that mysterious figure who visited Edgar Allan Poe’s grave every year? Nevermore. And it turns out it was all a publicity stunt cooked up by the guy “who led the fight to preserve the historic site.” Yup, we feel dirty too. (Associated Press via The Globe and Mail)
• ECW’s 800-page book about relatively obscure folk singer Steve Goodman is profiled. (The Seattle Times)
• Now that the O.J. Simpson book is going ahead, the victims’ families are fighting it out. (Forbes)
• Stephen King walks into an Australian bookstore …. (Yeah, it does sound like a joke. Punchline at the link.) (BBC News)

Craig Davidson: still fighting

You might remember a certain boxing match last fall between Craig Davidson, author of The Fighter, and poet Michael Knox. Well, Davidson’s book was just published in the U.S., and this week he fought again in New York City, battling American author Jonathan Ames, and is now the proud owner of an 0-2 record. Davidson’s account of his most recent match is prefaced by an odd and long-winded bout of soul-searching about the criticism he takes for these publicity efforts:

Nothing for me to get bent out of shape about, but I do sometimes. And not because I fared poorly—I didn’t win, I don’t think so, but I aquitted myself as well as my abilities, which are slim as far as they pertain to boxing I’ve discovered, are concerned—but … yeah, I guess just because some people tend to seek to trivialize and downgrade and castigate this particular endeavor, which, from my perspective, is not something I’ve wanted to do but something I’ve felt to have been necessary, strictly-speaking, both for the sake of the book, my publishers, and for the sake of myself 50 years down the road, wherever I may be, so that I can look back with the assurance I gave every shred of myself to this career when I could.

Well, we like it more than his last bout of soul-searching.

Update: Gawker has photos, and it looks like the fight was quite the side show.

Review embargoes are all about money

The argument has been made, with respect to last week’s iPhone Tickle-Me-Elmo Harry Potter midnight madness, that breaking the embargo on the book’s contents just ruins it for readers. According to Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times, however, review embargoes are usually just about money.

Here it’s necessary to distinguish between the newspaper critics and the cyber crooks, who may have posted sections of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the Web. That’s theft, and if we don’t protect the intellectual property of even fabulously wealthy creative people like Rowling, they’ll have less and less incentive to produce the things that entertain and delight us. Her publishers are right to go after these looters with laptops with every lawyer they hire.

Embargoes on reviews and discussions are another matter. All the outrage surrounding this particular book notwithstanding, contemporary publishers impose these blackouts not in the interest of readers but to protect the carefully planned publicity campaigns they create for books on which they have advanced large sums of money.

This is the economic imperative that leads publishers to withhold the contents of even nonfiction manuscripts that contain news that the public has a vital interest in knowing.

It’s also why newspapers, including this one, routinely break those embargoes without any pang of conscience. Our first and most compelling obligation is to our readers’ right to know and not to the commercial interests of publishers.

Rutten goes on to note that the before-the-witching-hour reviews that did appear were very respectful in terms of not giving away the book’s shocker ending, in which Harry discovers that he was a ghost the whole time, the ape-planet was really Earth, soylent green is made out of people, Ron was Keyser Söze, and Hermione was a guy.

McJob: fun, well-regarded, much-desired employ?

A Guardian commentary column reports that McDonald’s is picking a fight with the dictionary. The fast-food chain doesn’t like the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “McJob,” which, in the Canadian version, is: “a low paying, low status, and usually unstimulating job with few benefits and little possibility of advancement.” The BBC credits Douglas Coupland with coining the term in 1991’s Generation X.

According to McDonald’s, however, its jobs are only awesome, so the chain wants the word eliminated. Last year, the Golden Arches launched a publicity campaign in the U.K. to redefine McJob and “set the record straight,” said an April 21, 2006, press release. Posters were splashed around that declared, “McProspects – over half our Executive Team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob,” and “McOpportunity – two pay reviews in your first year. Not bad for a McJob.”

But, strangely enough, those clever taglines don’t seem to have been persuasive. And so the chain has locked its sights on the OED. You can sign a petition here to “change the current definition of McJob to better reflect the reality of service sector jobs.” Go now, to beat the rush!