The Book Closes on BOOKED!*

Posted 28 September, 2007 in Book News | No comments

Quill & Quire is reporting that the organizers of BOOKED!, the Toronto literary festival staged to coincide with the Book Expo Canada trade show and conference in June, will not resurface in 2008.

You’ll recall that the inaugural 2007 event was a bit of a mixed bag: certain high-profile events (featuring authors such as Stephen King and James Patterson) were well attended, while others were sparsely attended or cancelled altogether.

Apparently the organizers of the festival have decided that the lacklustre showing in 2007 did not have to do with first-time hitches, but was the result of more systemic problems. The Quill quotes from the weekly newsletter of the Canadian Bookseller’s Association (one of BOOKED!’s sponsors), which says the reason for next year’s cancellation is that “formidable competition for the public’s attention from events like Luminato [a new Toronto arts festival], consumer shows and, frankly, good summer weather, have led the BEC Task Force to conclude that repeating the event will not achieve the desired results.”

Hmm … I wish I’d said that.

*Sorry: I’m feeling dreadfully uninspired today.

Careful What You Write

Posted 27 September, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

In the movie Seven, Detectives Somerset and Mills track down the killer they’re after by paying off a federal agent — who Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman, calls “a friend from the Bureau” — to access the FBI’s database of library records. By looking at the lists of “flagged books” that have been fed into the FBI’s computer, Somerset and Mills are able to put together a profile of the man they think they are hunting for. But Mills, the younger detective played by Brad Pitt, is skeptical: “It could get us the name of some college kid writing a term paper on twentieth-century crime.”

In the context of the film, it is quite clear that the tactics Somerset and Mills employ are, at best, ethically sketchy.

They pale in comparison to the new Dark Web scheme cooked up by Hsinchun Chen of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona. According to an article in Wired, this ambitious plan will scour the Web and monitor the writing patterns of bloggers and other Web writers, then compare syntax, vocabulary, style, etc. against the writing patterns of known terrorists as a means of assessing who is likely to be involved with terrorist organizations, or who is most susceptible to radicalization:

The University of Arizona’s ultra-ambitious “Dark Web” project “aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web,” the National Science Foundation notes. And that analysis, according to the Arizona Star, includes a program which “identif[ies] and track[s] individual authors by their writing styles.

Calling this new technology “an invaluable tool in the war against terror,” the National Science Foundation writes:

One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating ‘anonymous’ content online. Writeprint can look at a posting on an online bulletin board, for example, and compare it with writings found elsewhere on the Internet. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. The system can then alert analysts when the same author produces new content, as well as where on the Internet the content is being copied, linked to or discussed.

Of course, the NSF article goes on to point out, there are risks involved with this kind of project: “‘They [terrorist organizations] can put booby-traps in their Web forums,” Chen explains, “and the spider can bring back viruses to our machines.’”

Silly me. When I heard “risks” I was thinking more of some political blogger who happens to use similar syntax to known terrorists getting picked up off the street and loaded onto a plane for Syria. But in the war on terror, I suppose this kind of “collateral damage” is perfectly acceptable.

(via Bookninja.)

Stunning … Extraordinary!

Posted 25 September, 2007 in Book Reviewing | 6 comments

I was startled to pick up a copy of the trade paperback edition of Craig Davidson’s novel The Fighter and find my own words staring back at me. Specifically, the back cover blurb, attributed to the Quill & Quire (where my review of the book originally ran) and not to me personally, reads as follows: “The Fighter is a tough, brutal, blood-soaked book that leaves its reader feeling pummelled, battered, and beaten, but nonetheless strangely exhilarated.”

I was happy to see my comment used, since it was a fairly accurate summation of my feelings about the book, but it’s nevertheless a somewhat disorienting experience to have your words crop up in a context other than the one in which you intended them.

Some reviewers enjoy seeing their names appended to books and advertisements, since they are able to bask in a kind of reflected glory as a result. Certain reviewers even seem to craft their reviews for the sole purpose of providing ready-made quotes that the publisher can excerpt on subsequent editions of the book under review.

I’ve never written this way, in large part because I’m leery of having my words taken out of context and distorted to serve someone else’s ends. A review of 350 words, such as the Quill review of Davidson’s novel, has by necessity to be incredibly compact and concentrated; the reviewer doesn’t have a lot of space to get the point across, and must pay strict attention to the language and context of the commentary, since there’s not really room to clarify or qualify the judgements being rendered. As a result, when taken out of the context of the review proper, any single sentence or phrase can potentially be made to take on a different meaning or tenor from what was intended.

Zach Wells nicely sums up the dangers inherent in having pieces of a review appropriated for publicity purposes:

I have an intense distaste for the blurb qua literary sub-genre, but one can’t prevent someone else from quoting you.* In the cases of [John] Smith and [George] Johnston, I was pleased to find out I’d been quoted, since I genuinely admire both poets’ work and the excerpt was in tune with my overall opinion. But I’ve also been quoted in publisher publicity bumph, completely out of context, an ellipses eliding the true substance of my commentary.

This is where blurbing gets truly dodgy. A reviewer will write, “So-and-so’s book is a triumph of faulty thinking and poor logic. Its intense lack of focus is only equalled by its extraordinary bastardization of the English language.” Then that reviewer will pick up the paperback edition of the book and see this: “A triumph … intense … extraordinary!”

Don’t believe me? Consider this.

*Case in point. Sorry, Zach.

And the 2007 Frank O’Connor Short Story Award Goes To …

Posted 24 September, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

… Miranda July, for her collection No One Belongs Here More than You. That “sproinging” sound you hear is Moonlight Ambulette jumping for joy.

Promoting Books in the Internet Age, and Other Thankless Endeavours

Posted 24 September, 2007 in Book News, Publishing | No comments

Further to last Thursday’s post about publishers focusing on splashy openings for big books, then summarily abandoning them, this article in the New York Times analyzes the difficulties inherent in trying to manage a mega-opening without doing irreparable damage to relationships with media outlets and readers alike:

The task of unveiling a big book— especially one with great news interest or enormous popular demand — has changed dramatically in recent years as players in an increasingly competitive news media seek to be the first to unveil content, and the Internet makes it more difficult to keep books under wraps.

Increasingly, publishers have been relying on embargoes of books they think are going to be blockbusters, such as the latest Harry Potter novel and high-profile books by George Tenet, Bob Woodward, and, most recently, Alan Greenspan. These titles have been subject to sales embargoes and embargoes on reviews and commentary, often because the publishers have promised the first kick at the can to a particular media outlet.

In the case of the Greenspan book, The Age of Turbulence, the publisher, Penguin Press, gave the promise of being first out of the gate to 60 Minutes, which was scheduled to interview Greenspan on Sunday, September 16, the day before the book’s official release. That promise was broken when the Wall Street Journal leaked information online about the book the previous Friday. The New York Times and the Washington Post followed suit on Saturday, effectively scooping 60 Minutes‘ exclusive.

The lesson for book publicists may be simply this: in the Internet age, it’s virtually impossible to keep something big under wraps, so why expend so much energy trying? As the Times article points out, “The gentlemen’s agreements that once existed between publishers and media outlets have long since fallen by the wayside, as embargoes are seen as catnip to reporters chasing news.”

In the case of the Greenspan memoir, it was established news organizations that broke the embargo. But the growing army of “citizen journalists” online love to scoop the traditional media outlets, and don’t necessarily have any qualms about breaching copyright laws to do so. The first review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows appeared in the New York Times, it’s true, but the person who took digital photographs of the book and posted them online was apparently unaffiliated with any major media organization.

The harder publicists try to keep information under wraps, the harder the Net denizens are going to work to uncover that information. There is evidence that certain publishers understand this and are trying to use it to their advantage. In Canada, both Anansi and HarperCollins have reading groups on Facebook (you can find them under Anansi Review Crew and HarperCollinsCanada — The Reading Group, respectively), which offer participants advance copies of books in exchange for online reviews and discussion of the titles. (Anansi stipulates that in addition to providing a review, the person receiving an advance reading copy must also supply five contacts to whom the review will be forwarded online. The HarperCollins reading group currently has no such stipulation.) Instead of fighting the Net’s “citizen journalists,” Anansi and HarperCollins have essentially co-opted them, making them de facto partners in publicizing the houses’ books.

The Anansi group is instructive in this regard. The rubric on the Anansi Review Crew page offers group members the “opportunity to read and review our books months before they are available to the general public,” which essentially feeds into the “first-past-the-post” mentality that is so prevalent amongst the mainstream media these days. That, along with the opportunity for members of the general public to get “an insider’s look” at new titles prior to publication, seems to be the major selling point used to attract members to the group.

As for whether these groups are an effective alternative means of promotion, Deanna McFadden, digital marketing manager at HarperCollinsCanada says, “Absolutely.” According to McFadden, “There’s a lovely element of word of mouth attached to the group — not just in attracting new members but in our readers taking their experiences and sharing them offline.”

This method of promotion must seem like an enticing alternative to increasingly unworkable embargoes and easily broken promises of exclusivity to media outlets that are constantly falling over each other in their attempts to be first with a story. The danger of cutting these media outlets out of the equation, of course, is the concurrent loss of accountability and professional standards that this entails.

The worry here is not just that if the burden of publicizing books is downloaded onto “citizen journalists” at the expense of professionals, people like me will be out of a job (book reviewing doesn’t pay that much, anyway). There is a real danger that the “reviewers” chosen by publishers to receive free books will feel compelled to say nice things about those books, if only so that they can continue to receive them.

McFadden downplays this concern as regards the HarperCollins group. “We’ve tried to create a space where our members can speak freely about the books they receive,” she says. “We actively try to foster discussion that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the reading copies are given away.” And perhaps this won’t have the effect of creating unreasonably biased readers: after all, professionals get thrown free copies of the books they review, too.

Regardless, with embargoes routinely being broken, and with news organizations lowballing publishers on serial rights (Newsweek reportedly payed $1 for the first excerpt rights on The Age of Turbulence, in part because they suspected that it would be publicized elsewhere before their excerpt ran), the idea of grassroots publicity over the Internet must seem like an attractive alternative to publishers. Whether it will have a beneficial effect on sales in the long run is still an open question.

I Was Wrong

Posted 24 September, 2007 in Film | 1 comment

Boy, was I ever.

At the end of last week, I predicted that the Brad Pitt western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford would knock The Brave One out of top spot at this weekend’s box office.

I should have known better.

The combination of a title that most people won’t be able to remember and the three-hour running time should have clued me in.

The Brave One was indeed kicked out of the top spot, by Resident Evil: Extinction. Number two went to the Dane Cook comedy Good Luck Chuck. Both films received dismal reviews. Resident Evil: Extinction, which as of this morning scored 28% fresh on the Web site Rotten Tomatoes, made $24 million at the box office, according to the tracking site Box Office Mojo. Good Luck Chuck, which scored a disasterous 3% fresh, raked in $14 million.

By contrast, In the Valley of Elah, Paul Haggis’s Iraq-themed drama, which scored 68% fresh, finished in seventeenth place with a total haul of $1,257,000, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which also scored 68% fresh, made a disasterous $144,000, failing even to break the top twenty-five in its first weekend. The only potential bright spot here is that David Cronenberg’s masterful thriller Eastern Promises (89% fresh) had a strong second-week showing with $5,747,000 in fifth place.

But the one-two punch of Resident Evil: Extinction and Good Luck Chuck displays the wisdom of crowds, and it sucks.

Lost in the Noise

Posted 20 September, 2007 in Book Reviewing, Publishing | No comments

Daniel Green provides a fairly accurate, if somewhat cynical, assessment of book reviews in today’s media-saturated society, viz.:

The process of book publishing and book reviewing has become indistinguishable from that which rules the release and reviews of movies: build up interest over that opening weekend, whose box office receipts tell us what we need to know about the quality of the “product” in question.

This has been the norm in Hollywood for some time: movies aren’t judged by their staying power, but by how well they “open” — that is, how well they do in the first three days of their release. Very few films that open at number one on a given weekend stay there for long; they are quickly displaced by the following weekend’s big release. Last week’s box office champ, the Jodie Foster revenge film The Brave One, which displaced the previous week’s champ, 3:10 to Yuma, is likely to be bumped this week by tomorrow’s release of the Brad Pitt western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. In today’s Hollywood, no one stays on top for long, and most films are quickly forgotten once the opening weekend push dies down.

Sadly, there are signs that the same phenomenon is occurring in the realm of books, where publishers target reviews in major publications on the weekend of a given book’s release, then largely forget about those titles and move on to the next “big” thing. This results in even the heaviest of hitters getting only a very short kick at the can to make an impression on readers.

This is not true one hundred percent of the time, of course. Although Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows experienced a serious drop-off in the attention paid to it in the media after its July 21st release, I still see people reading or carting around hardback copies of the book practically daily in my travels. This is anecdotal, naturally, and there’s nothing to say that these people didn’t purchase the book in July and are only now getting around to reading it, but it still appears to have legs over a longer term than just a few weeks in the summer.

Likewise, Alan Wiseman’s speculative non-fiction book, The World Without Us, continues to chug along apace, selling steadily two months after its initial release.

However, with book reviews in major media outlets hemorrhaging pages and publishers clamouring for coverage of their biggest stars, it’s little wonder that most titles flash and burn instantly.

There are dangers inherent in this approach to promoting books. With publishers fighting to have their books reviewed on publication, and with newspapers and magazines competing for readership, everyone wants to be first out of the gate, which often results in reviews being written too quickly, with not enough time for thoughtful consideration on the part of the reviewer. Reviews in every major publication frequently fall over themselves to declare a major new work “significant” or “an important addition to our literature,” without being in a position to know whether these statements are true or not. The only real indicator of significance is time, which is the one thing that is being routinely taken out of the equation when it comes to book reviewing.

Too often what gets lost in the shuffle are those books that need time to build an audience; books that require word-of-mouth promotion or hand-selling on the part of booksellers. If a book like Matthew Firth’s spectacular 2006 collection Suburban Pornography garners the few reviews that it can expect to receive in the first couple of weeks of its release — when the reviews are likely to be lost in the noise of other, higher-profile new releases — and is then summarily ignored, it is never going to sell up to its potential.

It’s important for readers, reviewers, and publishers alike not to get suckered in to the attention-deficit approach to marketing books that focuses on large early returns to the exclusion of all else. There are some titles that need care and nurturing over the long term if they are to flourish. It would be a shame to sacrifice these on the altar of Hollywood-style front-end promotion.

What Are They Thinking?

Posted 19 September, 2007 in Music | 2 comments

Item, from today’s Globe and Mail, page R3:

Punk legends the Sex Pistols announced yesterday that they will stage a one-off gig in November to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their controversial album Never Mind the Bollocks.

I saw the Sex Pistols in the ’90s, which is something I’m almost ashamed to admit. The Filthy Lucre Tour: at least they were honest about their motives. But the show was shite, and seeing the Sex Pistols without Sid Vicious is like seeing the Doors without Jim Morrison. It’s not even the same band.

Next thing you know the Doors are going to stage a reunion tour with Ian Astbury of the Cult on lead vocals. Oh, hang on a tick …

That Rending Sound You Hear Is My Heart

Posted 19 September, 2007 in Book Reviewing | No comments

Here’s one to get all those “crisis in book reviewing” folks’ hearts racing.

New York Business.com is reporting that as of September 23, the New York Times Book Review will be augmenting its bestseller lists, separating mass market and trade paperback titles and including twenty titles each, up from the current list that amalgamates the two formats and only includes fifteen titles. Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous bestseller lists will also increase in size, from five titles apiece to ten.

This doesn’t mean that the Book Review is getting bigger, however: the extra page for the steroid-enhanced bestseller lists will mean one less page of editorial content.

Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus explains that separating the mass market list from the trade paperback list will better serve his readership: “Now you have a list [the trade paper list] that corresponds closely to what we review and what we gauge our readers are interested in.” This is because the putatively higher-quality literary fiction and non-fiction that dominates the trade paperback format often gets bumped from the amalgamated list by mass market titles that sell in high volume through big box stores or through non-traditional bookselling outlets such as Wal-Mart.

Fair enough, but, if its true that the NYTBR readership focuses predominantly on literary fiction and trade paperback books anyway, why have a mass market list at all? Who is your audience expected to be?

Furthermore, the loss of one page of editorial content in favour of bigger bestseller lists that are presumed to attract more advertising dollars seems a bit suspect, since New York Business also reports that ad revenue for the Book Review was up by ten percent last year, and is on track to increase another ten percent this year.

The NYTBR is the only quality, stand-alone book review in an American newspaper, since the Los Angeles Times folded its books section into the body of its paper earlier this year; to see it diminished like this is somewhat disheartening, particularly when the stated rationale for the move doesn’t exactly compute.

New Kid on the Block … Sort of

Posted 18 September, 2007 in Book News | 1 comment

Okay, so obviously Ben McNally isn’t new to the world of bookselling in Toronto, but his newly opened Bay Street bookstore — the eponymous Ben McNally Books — is.

It’s got its own Web site and has already been profiled in the Globe and Mail, wherein McNally, with characteristic sly humour, defers a query about his benefactors in the new endeavour:

He is vague about his backers, offering only that they were people who had a specific interest in him and who also had low financial expectations. “They’re not neophyte businessmen,” he says. “They knew that this wasn’t the best use of their money.”

I haven’t had a chance to check out the store yet, but I fully intend to. If you’re in Toronto, you should do likewise.

Contact info is as follows:

366 Bay Street
Toronto, ON M5H 4B2
Tel. 416-361-0032
info@benmcnallybooks.com

Go on, support independent bookselling. You know you wanna.

[UPDATE: The Quill & Quire online is reporting today that there is a bit of controversy surrounding the old Books & Brunch series that McNally administered while he was manager of the Toronto location of Nicholas Hoare Books. Seems McNally has inaugurated his own Sunday brunch series, called the Globe and Mail / Ben McNally Brunch Series, prompting Nicholas Hoare to suggest that McNally “poached” the idea when he left.

For their part, Nicholas Hoare Books have hired Nicholas Pashley, former purchasing manager for trade publications at the University of Toronto Bookstore, who enjoyed a restful retirement of two months’ length, to act as “ambassador at large” for the store. One of Pashley’s duties will be to administer a rebranded version of Books & Brunch, which they are calling Hoare’s High Tea.

McNally may have Globe sponsorship, but there’s no question in my mind who’s got the better name.]