Book Prices and the Canadian Publisher’s Dilemma

Posted 9 January, 2008 in Publishing | 1 comment

Arguably the biggest homegrown publishing story in 2007 had to do with the pricing of books in the wake of the surging Canadian dollar against the American greenback.

When the Canadian dollar hit parity last September, consumer grumblings about the price differentials between Canadian- and American-produced books began to reach a fever pitch and publishers started scrambling to redress the issue. In late October, Penguin Group Canada announced a plan to sell U.S. books in Canada at prices as close to par as possible. HarperCollins Canada began restickering books to close the price gap, and Random House Canada announced a rebate to booksellers who discounted their cover prices in-store.

Meanwhile, on the retail side, independent booksellers like Ottawa’s Collected Works began offering books at American prices, despite the loss to their bottom line that this policy was expected to take. Indigo, Canada’s largest bookseller chain, offered free shipping on online orders greater than $39.00, and deep discounts in-store (blithely ignoring the fact that it was Indigo’s practice of deep discounting that helped put many Canadian publishers behind the fiscal eight ball in the first place, but that’s another story).

All of this may seem like good news for consumers, who will enjoy lower prices at the cash register into 2008. But it’s not good news for retailers, whose profit margins are often not significant enough to allow them to sell books at American prices, or for publishers, who still have to pay editors, book designers, typesetters, printers, sales staff, and so on.

The problem, which consumers don’t see, or don’t take into account, involves economies of scale. The Canadian market is one tenth the size of the American market. American publishers are able to set prices lower than their Canadian counterparts because what they lose in individual sales, they make up for in volume. David Davidar, the president of Penguin Group Canada, told the Bookseller that “[w]e have entered an era of significantly lower prices, with new US hard-covers priced around $27, fully $10 less than they were two years ago. However, we’ll hope to make up in volume what we have lost in terms of price.” But Canada only has a population of 33 million, so his prognostications about increased sales volume seem a tad on the overly optimistic side.

In his book, The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada, 1946-2006, Roy MacSkimming points to a 2004 survey conducted by the Canadian Publishers’ Council. “The CPC study divided respondents into ‘heavy,’ ‘moderate,’ ‘light,’ and ‘non’-buyers, finding that heavy buyers (eighty books per year) represented 23 percent of the survey population, and moderate buyers (thirty-five books per year) 24 percent. These two groupings totalled 47 percent and between them bought 71 percent of all books purchased.” What this sunny portrait elides, of course, is the salient fact that more than half the respondents claimed to buy few books each year, or none at all.

That survey is now four years gone. A more recent Ipsos Reid poll indicated that one in three Canadians didn’t read (let alone buy) a single book for pleasure in 2007. (On the upside, the survey did find that of those who did read (totalling 69 percent of the survey respondents), the average person read twenty books in the past twelve-month period.)

Still, those numbers aren’t sufficient to allow a publisher — especially a medium-sized or small Canadian-owned publisher — to price hardcover books at $25.00 (the average American hardcover price) and hope to survive. The disparity between what consumers expect and what publishers are reasonably able to weather is daunting.

It appears that, just over one week into the new year, this situation has claimed its first victim. On Monday, Raincoast announced that it was folding its publishing division. Although the cynical account has Raincoast “long barely masquerading as a Canadian publisher,” before it stopped publishing adult fiction in the fall of 2006, it was responsible for bringing us Colin McAdam’s Some Great Thing, Anosh Irani’s The Cripple and His Talismans, and Alison Pick’s The Sweet Edge, among others. It also maintained a vibrant and interesting children’s and YA program.* So its disappearance is not a moment to be trumpeted in Canadian publishing.**

It may, however, be the thin edge of the wedge for indigenous (read: not foreign-owned — this exempts you, M&S) publishers, particularly if, as is widely expected, the country slides into a recession and consumers’ discretionary income dries up. However you look at it, the best advice for Canadian publishers in 2008 seems to be a paraphrase of Margot Channing in All About Eve: fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy year.

*Full disclosure: as editor, I worked on a number of Raincoast books, including Adam Lewis Schroeder’s novel Empress of Asia, Nathan Sellyn’s short-story collection Indigenous Beasts, Patrick Conlon’s memoir No Need to Trouble the Heart, John Burns’s YA novel Runnerland, and John Lekich’s YA novel King of the Lost and Found, all of which I admire greatly.

**Raincoast is the Canadian publisher of the Harry Potter series, but the revenue from this endeavour was apparently kept distinct from its indigenous publishing program. Whether some of these funds should have been funnelled into the Canadian publishing program as a means of salvaging it is open to debate.

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.

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.

The Influence of Publishers

Posted 31 August, 2007 in Publishing | 1 comment

Writing in the Huffington Post, Lissa Warren questions whether the general public knows or even cares about who publishes what when they are choosing books:

I don’t think the general consumer cares very much who is published by whom. I don’t even think most people notice. Tell me the last time you walked into a Borders, or a B&N, or your local independent and said, “Hmm, wonder what Simon & Schuster has been up to this week?” The companies just don’t matter.

Untrue, Ms. Warren. So very, very untrue.

It may be the case that the average reader is unable to name the publisher of their favourite book off the top of their heads,* or to name the publisher of the book they’re currently reading,** but that doesn’t mean that these things don’t matter to them, or that they have no impact on the choices readers make.

The most obvious example of how a publisher or an imprint drives readers involves genre books. A lover of mysteries will likely be well acquainted with The Mysterious Press or Castle Street Mysteries, and a sci-fi aficionado will be similarly well acquainted with TOR and Del Rey. These are publishers who specialize in catering to a particular market and the audience for these books will come to recognize the authors who are published under these respective imprints, whether or not they (the readers) are conscious of the imprints themselves.

Other houses have built their reputations on literary fare, and often have storied histories. Anansi is the house that first published Ondaatjee and Atwood; it is currently known as a publisher of quality literary fiction and poetry. And not just within the publishing industry either: two Giller nominations and eight Governor General’s Award nominations in 2006 increased their visibility among general book-buyers who were looking for quality fiction or award nominees.

And I’d bet that you’d be hard pressed to find a Canadian reader who is unaware of McClelland & Stewart’s reputation as “the Canadian publisher,” even if (s)he could not name a single author on M&S’s fall list. Similarly, Penguin Classics and the New Canadian Library are instantly recognizable to any reader looking for classic fiction, or to any university student.

This year’s Toronto International Film Festival is screening a documentary called Obscene, about Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press in the States, who was responsible for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and Waiting for Godot, among others. While general readers may not know or care about who Barney Rosset is, most will be instantly familiar with the books his company published.

Then there is the behind-the-scenes influence that publishers wield, which is less obvious, but no less important. The bigger houses have access to larger marketing budgets, can pay for co-op and placement in stores, and thus have a better chance of getting their books into the hands of readers. Those readers may not know Knopf from Doubleday (as though there’s all that much difference to begin with — Baa-zing!), but they are influenced by the publishing decisions these houses make nonetheless. When Michael Winter leaves Anansi to go to Penguin, or Russell Smith abandons Porcupine’s Quill for Doubleday, it is significant, in large part because of the expanded readership that the larger houses can tap into. The increased visibility will bring these authors to the attention of more people than would otherwise be the case; this in turn drives reading patterns and habits.

Moreover, it is often the larger houses that get their books reviewed in major newspapers and magazines. Review editors who have a limited amount of space to work with will want to devote much of that space to the most significant books in a given season. Who determines what is significant? The publishers, by what they choose to highlight as frontlist material, versus what they choose to bury in the wasteland of the midlist. Again, readers may not be aware that this is going on; that in no way means that they are not affected by it.

Readers may not care who publishes whom, but to say that “[t]he companies don’t matter” is just plain wrong.

P.S. re: Daniel Green’s assertion that “eventually, whether a book is published on paper between covers by a ‘publishing company’ or on paper between covers by the author through a ‘publishing service’ won’t matter either.” Quick, name the last self-published book you read. Gotcha, didn’t I?

*And, by the way, in answer to Warren’s questions in her article’s lede: Wise Blood, The Noonday Press. And no, I didn’t have to go to the shelf to look this up.

**On the Road, Penguin Modern Classics. Ditto.

Look Out, Chip Kidd

Posted 13 August, 2007 in Book News, Music, Publishing | 1 comment

Fancy yourself a book designer? Ever wanted to see your very own cover art on the front of a classic book? Well, now you can. The folks at Penguin UK have a promotion whereby you can purchase a copy of a Penguin Classic, and they’ll slap your preferred choice of cover art onto the “naked” covers of the chosen title.

As a promo, they’ve commissioned a number of well-known musicians to create personalized covers for the series. These include Beck’s cover of Le Grand Meaulnes (left image) and Ryan Adam’s startling oil painting on the cover of Dracula (right image). You can view screen shots of the other musicians’ creations here.

I can see it now: innumerable proud mommies throwing their children’s kindergarten finger-paintings on the covers of Henry James novels, or paint-by-number watercolours affixed to Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. This notion makes me shudder the way I shudder every time I hear “The Ode to Joy” as a cell phone ringtone.

If I were to do this, I’d choose Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and slap a nude photo of Kobe Tae on the front, or maybe one of those Britney Spears commando shots. That’s just the kind of sick bastard I am. (Hey, they are “naked” Penguins, after all.)

(Thanks to Queen B for the tip.)

History on the Fly

Posted 7 August, 2007 in Publishing | No comments

Item, from today’s Globe and Mail:

With the arrival of Quebec’s famed Vandoos on the ground in Kandahar, Canada’s fight in Afghanistan appears far from over.

At home, Canada’s publishers are facing a different battle: with each other.

A slew of books on the mission are coming to bookstores this fall, as publishers race to beat the clock.

Among the forthcoming books that the Globe article points to are The Long Walk Home: Paul Franklin’s Journey from Afghanistan (Brindle & Glass), by Edmonton Journal reporter Liane Faulder; Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery and Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army (Doubleday Canada), by the dependably mawkish Christie Blatchford; and The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (Penguin) by Eugene Lang and Janice Gross Stein.

The first two titles above are personal stories of soldiers at the front: Paul Franklin was the driver of the vehicle that was blown up by a roadside bomb in 2006, killing diplomat Glyn Berry and severing both of Franklin’s legs, and Blatchford’s book tells the personal stories of the soldiers she met on her two trips to Afghanistan as a correspondent for the Globe and Mail.

Lang and Gross Stein’s book, by contrast, “takes the reader into the backrooms of Canada’s politicking as decisions were being made about whether or not to go to war,” and this is where I start to get uneasy. Not about the book’s political agenda, which isn’t mentioned in the Globe article, but about the speed with which it’s being pumped out.

The same phenomenon occurred a few years ago in the States around the Iraq war. One single season (Fall 2004) saw the publication of Mark Crispin Miller’s Cruel and Unusual and Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, as well as the paperback editions of Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud, and Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty, among others.

The playwright Ben Hecht once quipped that trying to learn about the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by looking at the second hand on a clock. Now, it appears, book publishers, who have often in the past taken the long view, are starting to watch the second hand as well.

Call it “instant history”: no longer is the primary function of the historian to get it right, it’s now more important to get it first. The problem is that the gains in currency often come at the expense of authority. History requires thought and context; it’s not a subject that easily lends itself to rapid judgements or analysis on the fly.

Publishing, however, is a business and publishers feel the strain of the bottom line just like any other business. The result is the compulsion to ride whatever cultural wave is around at a given time, fearing that if they wait too long to produce something the wave will break and take the potential sales of a given title with it.

One of the overarching debates in Canada in 2007 has to do with the mission (notice that no one — politicians, journalists, soldiers — ever calls it a war: “mission” seems so much more neutral, more Canadian, somehow) in Afghanistan, so this is what publishers will glom onto as a subject for their books. There’s nothing wrong with this, but the almost breathless race to be the first out of the gate is disquieting to those of us who admire qualities such as introspection, context, and sober second thought.