Month: November 2019

Changes in Book Publishing

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There is a post on The Idea Logic blog about the seven changes that are coming in publishing over the next several years.   The Idea Logic Company is the creation of Mike Shatzkin who, according to his website, is “a widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry.  In his nearly 50 years in publishing, he has played almost all the roles: bookseller, author, agent, production director, sales and marketing director, and, for the past 30 years, consultant.”

Mike Shatzkin

Mr Shatzkin begins by describing the evolution which has already taken place in publishing, beginning when a publisher needed to own a substantial infrastructure to deliver printed books to thousands of retail locations. “Now more than half the book sales and an even greater amount of the “discovery” takes place online and a lot of the discovery and a lion’s share of the purchases happen at a single account: Amazon. You don’t need a big organization to cover a single account nor a big infrastructure to service it. The other half of the sales in the US, and sales around the world, are now facilitated by another single account, Ingram Content Group.  Ingram provides every component of the fixed-cost infrastructure that any book publisher requires and, in fact, provides all or any part of that infrastructure to an ever-growing number of publishers. . . . All the things that publishers do that don’t require a big infrastructure: finding and developing books, editing them, designing them, and marketing them (increasingly using digital opportunities to talk directly to consumers) can be delivered by a vast network of freelancers and small company service providers.”

Mr Shatzkin continues with his predictions which are excerpted below:

“1. Sales will continue to move to online. The movement of book sales from physical stores to online has been unabated since Amazon began. There is no reason for it to stop. Books have a ton of characteristics that make them perfect for online shopping. You want to shop from a full selection no store has.

2. The other big general online retailers will be Amazon’s biggest competitors for book sales. So far, Amazon has been about the only beneficiary of the shift to online buying. That may be changing. Other big retailing brands like Walmart and Costco have built robust online businesses. Ingram now enables them to carry a full line of books as well.

3. The bifurcated book market will continue. There is a whole digital-first publishing world, spawned by self-publishers, that offers (mostly) genre fiction at prices commercial publishers can’t match: $4.99 and under. The net result has been that commercial publishers are finding it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to compete in the genre fiction market of customers who measure their reading in books-consumed-per-week.

4. Publishers will progressively shed overheads for service providers. As the commercial publishing business shrinks because of reduced shelf space and increased competition from publishers enabled by the new circumstances, the big publishers will find it increasingly difficult to support their overheads.  We’ll see the number of sales forces calling on bookstores and the number of warehouses shipping to them decline progressively in the next few years.

5. Big publishers will see an ever-growing share of their own sales from their backlist. While it is getting increasingly difficult for publishers to successfully launch new books, there are new opportunities appearing on the radar every day for titles on the backlist. This is true both because digital information sources find and publicize books regardless of their age and because publishers don’t need to position inventory in stores to make them accessible to the public.

6. Amazon Publishing will continue to make inroads signing big authors; only a ruling from courts could eventually stop them. When Amazon launched their book publishing program ten years ago, they probably had about half the market share they have now. Big authors want to reach the whole public, and when indie and chain bookstores combined to effectively boycott Amazon titles, it meant large parts of the consumer base were hard for them to reach.  From here it looks like Amazon exploits an unfair advantage, being the biggest retailer competing with their suppliers for customers that Amazon owns. But for that to matter, it has to be a court’s opinion, not just mine. Perhaps as the effect of the current market circumstances on competition become clearer, a court will see it that way.

7. “Entity self-publishing” will increase dramatically, presenting more challenges to commercial non-fiction publishing. The pieces are all in place for “publishing books” to become part of any big entity’s marketing strategy. You don’t need to own a book publisher to issue them any more than you need to own a newspaper or magazine to get a story out.  Over the next few years, we will see a tsunami of non-fiction publishing from capable entities much like the tsunami we have seen of genre fiction publishing direct from authors.”

All of this makes sense to me.

Master and Commander

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I have long been addicted to Patrick O’Brian’s novels which featured Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr Stephen Maturin in tales of sea battles with French warships in the early nineteenth century.  There was an article in The Sunday Telegraph on November 3rd by Lewis Jones entitled “The Dark Story Behind ‘Master and Commander’, the first of O’Brian’s twenty novels.  I probably read all twenty, which were addictive to an ex-Navy officer like me, because of the incredibly realistic accounts of life aboard British warships during the Napoleonic era.  But more than that, Aubrey is a roast-beef British, dashing, but sometimes thoughtless character, accurately played by Russell Crowe in the film, and Maturin is an Irish-Catalan naturalist, doctor, and spy.  They are shipmates, friends, musicians, and adventurers in the series.  O’Brian had an amazing talent for concocting what looked like sure wins for Aubrey, which suddenly became disastrous, but from which Aubrey extracted a brilliant win over his French adversary.

The Telegraph article mentions some interesting facts about O’Brian, the author.  He was born in 1914 in Buckinghamshire; during the war, he worked in British intelligence with his second wife, Mary Tolstoy, who had been married to a Russian, Count Tolstoy.  After the war, he moved to the Catalan part of France where he spent decades writing, half a dozen novels, a biography of Picasso, numerous short stories and translations.  He had friendly reviews, but he wrote in obscurity and he was always broke.  In 1967, when O’Brian was at a low ebb, he received a letter from the American publisher, J B Lippencott, noting the C S Forester had died the previous year and that he, O’Brian, would be well qualified to fill the void left by Forester’s Hornblower series.  In 1969, Master and Commander was published.  By the 1990’s O’Brian was rich and famous, was appointed a CBE and the world wanted to know about him.  As an intensely private person, this irritated him considerably.   He was the eighth of nine children born to an English ‘pox doctor’ (venereologist) of German descent and an English woman of Irish descent.  He was ‘briefly’ educated at grammar schools.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of O’Brian’s biography is the speculation about how he acquired his naval knowledge.  In a 1994 essay, O’Brian himself said, “my particular friend Edward, who shared a tutor with me, had a cousin who possessed an ocean-going yacht, a converted square-rigged merchantman, that he used to crew with undergraduates and fair-sized boys, together with some real seamen, and sail far off into the Atlantic. The young are wonderfully resilient, and although I never became much of a topman, after a while I could hand, reef and steer without disgrace, which allowed more ambitious sailoring later on.”

But, in 1995, the venture capitalist, Thomas Perkins, offered O’Brian a two-week cruise aboard his then sailing yacht, a 154 ft ketch.  He later said, “his knowledge of the practical aspects of sailing seemed, amazingly, almost nil” and “…he seemed to have no feeling for the wind and the course, and frequently I had to intervene to prevent a full standing gybe. I began to suspect that his autobiographical references to his months at sea as a youth were fanciful.”

In any event his tales of seamanship and combat at sea are remarkably realistic and entertaining.  Patrick O’Brian died in 2000.

Creative Writing Classes

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I have decided to take two courses on creative writing at City Academy in London.  One is a full week, full day (10-5) class in advanced creative writing.  In addition to providing the students with a sharper writing tool kit, it covers the specific skills of novel writing, script writing (film or television) and play writing.  There is a good deal of emphasis on creative techniques and structure.  There were four instructors on this course, all of them freelance writers, some of them take commissions from the BBC and one is a children’s book writer.  All of us (six) on this course were impressed with both the knowledge of the tutors and their skills in transferring the knowledge to us.  We completed many specific writing assignments in class, ranging from five to twenty minutes, and we would read out our work to the class.

The other class is on Wednesday evenings from 6:30 to 9:00 for six weeks.  This course is taught by the head of the creative writing department, who is script writer for Casualty on BBC1.  As such, he has a flair for drama.  This course is designed to help students progress or design a piece of creative writing.  There are five students in this course; I am the only male (aside from the tutor).  One woman in her early 30’s has finished writing a middle grade children’s book about a child who is disappointed in her own achievements.  A woman in her 50’s has a musical which has been performed somewhere locally and involves repercussions from Vietnam.  These two are making final corrections.  A woman in her late late 30’s has some ideas for a novel about two female friends, one of whom has a father who has strangely reappeared.  And the other student, in her 20’s, is trying to develop ideas for a novel.  And I am there with a completed manuscript about a man who is preoccupied with fears of his death.  Agents say it is well written, it has three good reviews, but nobody has said ‘yes’, and one agent said that in needs more intensity.

So I outlined the novel last Wednesday, including the concern about intensity.  I also presented my list of ideas for ramping up the intensity.  Almost immediately, the tutor said, why don’t you make the relationship between the protagonist and his grandniece the centerpiece of the novel, having them tell the story rather than the protagonist alone.  At first, I thought, Oh, God another rewrite!, but then it began to make sense.  The current structure of the novel is around a timeline which tends to dilute the intensity of the relationships.  But, if the two narrators cover and debate each of the relationships in depth, in series, it will be much more intense.

So next Wednesday, I’ve been asked to bring a revised outline to the class.  What this involves is taking all the events of each relationship, and grouping them together sequentially, rather than allowing them to be strung out along the time line.

This will, of course involve some re-writing, some new material and deleting some existing material.  But I’m looking forward to it.