The End of More Book Review Sections?

An article in today’s PW suggests that more newspaper book review sections may face extinction. The redesign of the Tribune Co., according to PW, may threaten coverage: “Amid the pending real estate sale and newsroom cutbacks, rumors have surfaced about book sections being cut at Tribune-owned papers. One freelance critic told PW that the Tribune Company is planning to slash overall page counts across the chain.” Read the story here.

Following my post about publishing out of the box, this hint of less to come helps make the point. Publishers and writers need to work together to get out the word, the words, the books, because the traditional media do not and increasingly can not. We are lucky in Portland to have a newspaper that still runs book reviews (thank you, Jeff Baker), but no one thinks that it is enough.

I will be following up on my idea for a Portland network in the next couple of days. Linda Meyer at InkandPaperGroup suggests we need a roundtable to talk through ideas. Let’s do that. (Those of you reading this post who are not in Portland are not excluded from the network I hope we can create. There is a lot of writing and publishing energy in Portland and that’s why it’s a good place to start. First Portland and then the world.)

Let me know what you think. If you’re shy about posting something here as a public comment, write to me directly at ken@kenarnoldbooks.com.

Publishing Out of the Box

Ok, I’ve been running this new publishing company for about six months now, and we’ve issued five books going on six, with four in the oven. We are printing on demand, as anyone reading these posts knows, and we’re getting ready to make our content available on various digital platforms–Kindle, Sony, etc. We want to sell our books through Amazon.com, and we’re also on Lightning Source so that bookstores and libraries can buy our wares. We thought this felt like an innovative way to go–and in many ways it is. But we are also discovering that we need to do a lot more, taking advantage, mainly, of on-line systems, viral marketing, blogs, and, I dunno, maybe cereal boxes, to get the word about our books out there.

But our books are also just books. They are in paper and bound formats. We sell them at deep discounts to everyone, keeping the change, literally, for ourselves and our authors. We know that we have to get out of the box, but at the same time we know that out there, out of the box, are videos, text-messaging, mp3 downloads, and cell phones that are not suitable for our content, which is so twentieth-century.

What to do? We, by the way, is Connie and Ken and a photograph of a dog we someday want to have. We have published 6 books in 6 months and plan four more this year. Which is to say we don’t have any time to do a lot more than publish booksin the normal way.

We think we need to set up a network of like-minded publishers–small, innovative, entrepreneurial, cash-challenged–to generate some on-line, viral, out-of-the-box buzz.  Who’d like to join in? I was thinking we might take KABlog–this what you’re reading now–and spin it off into a sub-sphere of publishers and their readers and audiences: something real, if you know what I mean, but something in touch.

Last year, a few of us were talking about a network of authors and small publishers to do marketing support in some way. This is my answer to that idea–do it through a blog medium that we set up and run for our own advantage.  If you’re interested, let me know. We don’t have to call it KABLog. We can call it anything.

Let’s talk about it.

POD Is Ok for Big Publishers, It Appears

PublicAffairs, publisher of Scott McClellan’s fast-selling memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, has had to use POD (Print on Demand) technology to fill a several-thousand copy gap in supply. Read a quick summary here from PW. Now I think it’s terrific that Lightning Source is capable of printing as many as 7,000 copies almost immediately to meet the needs of PublicAffairs.  Does this make McClellan’s book a POD title? Well, no, because there was also a standard printrun and the book is apparently being reprinted on a standard press. But if a book is POD for part of its life, is it tainted with the slime of POD publishing? Will Kirkus review it (since Kirkus states that it will not review POD titles)? Will certain bookstores I know about refuse to carry the book now that it will be coming from Lightning Source? (One bookseller told me, vehemently, “I will not deal with Lightning Source.” Not even now when everyone is screaming for copies of McClellan’s book?)

Ok, the point here is a simple one. POD is ok when a big name publisher uses the technology to handle a production problem. It is not ok when a publisher uses POD technology routinely to meet consumer and bookseller needs. Such a publisher is stigmatized by the industry for…what? Not being big? Not filling warehouses with books? Saving trees? Saving money? Using scarce resources to promote authors?

POD has been stigmatized by booksellers and reviewers primarily to keep self-published authors out of the hallways. There has been a huge increase in the past few years in the number of self-published books on the market and the only way reviewers and booksellers can think of to keep them at bay is to categorically eliminate POD books, since so many self-published authors use the technology. (It’s like using nets to sweep the ocean floor–you get your flounder and if a few thousand other flora and fauna are destroyed, well, who cares?)

The difficulty with this approach is, as we see with McClellan’s book, that the refusal to consider POD books is not in fact a categorical refusal; it depends on what book is being printed POD and by what publisher. Ok, so now we know that the issue is not POD. It’s a problem of narrowing the corridor for books that are considered legitimate.

The second difficulty then is that a few reviewers and bookstores are deciding what constitutes a legitimate book and can’t come up with anything more creative that to designate a mode of production as the distinguishing factor.

Some self-published books are actually worth reading. Many POD books are also worth reading, even when they are not self-published. Is Scott McClellan embarrassed that his book is now available from Lightning Source? Just spell his name right on the royalty check.

Ecological Mirage

Following the Lambda Literary Foundation awards ceremony in Los Angeles last week, Connie and I went to Rancho Mirage in the California desert. The area is generally referred to as Palm Springs, but there are eight “towns” in the region. Rancho Mirage is one of them. Known since the 20s and 30s as a celebrity playground for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Gerald Ford (who was living there at the time of his death), RM is not the sort of place we normally frequent. We are neither rich nor famous.

We went there because we wanted hot sun, a place to play some tennis, and a pool to lie beside. A modest resort hotel seemed the perfect choice. We were going out of season–ie, when the temperatures would top 100 degrees–and so the price was reasonable.

Leaving aside the fact that we got our sun, tennis, and pool, I want to say something about the place itself. The region is between the San Jacinto mountains and a ridge that marks the San Andreas Fault. It is a desert. But our resort and the many large mansions and gated communities all sport closely cropped lawns, greenery, pools, waterspouts, and air conditioning. One has to drive everywhere. Even the ritzy shopping area in Palm Desert, El Paseo, is a strip mall, in effect. Along the roads and highways, large vehicles crawl, eating up all the gas there is without a care.

I was struck by the artificiality of it. We were in a natural environment, to be sure. Birds flew around. Ducks waddled by begging bread. The wind blew through real trees. But the manicured environment barely kept the sands of the desert at bay. Just beyond our compound the sand blew and hills of rock and scrub baked in relentless sun. We lay by the pool sipping cold drinks. This nature was one conjured like a movie set out of someone’s imagination.

As we were leaving to return to Portland, we crossed an intersection where the sand had drifted onto the road. An SUV was stuck in the sand. Clouds gathered over the San Andreas Fault–ominously dark, the first clouds we had seen in a week–and soon we were driving through a smog or fog and splattering rain. It seemed, again, like a bad movie.

In the end, it felt like we had been in a microcosmic version of the world we inhabit, where people go about their daily business sucking up gas and energy, converting inhospitable environments to playgrounds (see Las Vegas, for example), and spewing water about as if it will never be used up. (The water in RM comes from the Colorado. A cab driver told us that there is no water rationing, although the Colorado is running low this year. Did I mention that the lawns are watered daily or that even the tennis courts are washed down daily?)

There are fields of energy-generating windmills along the highway to RM, and that’s an encouraging sign. But the energy needed to run a place like RM and the other towns in this valley is, for the most part, wasted on the maintenance of an unnecessary consumer playground. We could imagine, as we left, that in time these towns would burn up in the heat after the gas runs out and the energy to maintain the cool rooms and lush golf courses is gone. It was a vision of the future I probably will not live to see, but my children will.

And here I am not just talking about Rancho Mirage. We are all living in a mirage and just don’t want to admit it.

This morning, after writing this post yesterday, I saw an article in the New York Times titled, “Water-Starved California Slows Development.” Part of it concerns the area of the state in which we were vacationing. A water emergency was declared on Wednesday, the day we left Rancho Mirage. Perhaps the mirage is beginning to take on some solid dimensions.