Bright "Black Friday"

I've been a poor correspondent lately, due to having some company in town, but I hope that these photos from the streets of London on the start of the Christmas season will earn your forgiveness.

Picadilly Circus

Regent Street

Picadilly Circus

Oxford Street

Light the Night

The brightness of the lights almost makes up for the sharpness of the cold . . . Almost!

Maybe I *Will* See My Book in Stores (Which Isn't Good)

I mentioned how in India I was able to work as the development editor for a new B2B Marketing textbook adaptation due to be published in October 2010.  It's finished, and it's lovely, but I had guessed I would never see it sold in person because of territorial constraints between Indian publishers and the United States.  Since my company already published a version in the US -- and since the Indian version included a red bar on the cover which very clearly stipulated the territories where it could be sold -- the belief was that it would stay on the subcontinent for life.

It was with much interest, then, that I found this article on Inside Higher Education this morning.  Remember those cheap Indian editions we made of our US textbooks, appropriately priced to a developing market?  Right now, there's a case in the Supreme Court which may bring them flooding into American bookstores, at the expense of those pricey hardback editions.  As odd at it sounds, Costco's right to resell cheaply-bought Swiss Omega watches to global consumers could send vibrations through every multinational publisher on the market.

If I'm a multinational publisher -- and right now, sadly, I'm not -- this is a difficult decision point.  Publishing wasn't built to be global, and this is one more growing pain to add to the list.  The watch debate isn't as dramatic as the glamorous rise of the ebook, but it just might bring a louder tolling of the bell.

Today's Oxford Forecast

Did you have to rub it in?

Howdy, Stranger

It's always nice to have visitors in from overseas.  It's not always nice when, the first thing you have to do upon their arrival is scarper off to class.

In my defense, today's lecture was very important.  It was about paper.

Did I mention publishers are crazy?

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Speaking of crazy, this is a wonderful new website I've been led to: a collection of the worst cover designs from sci-fi/fantasy novels.  [Good Show, Sir]  It will make you both sad and yet glad that you're not the editor who approved that particular cover design.  My personal favorite is Qhe! The Prophets of Evil.  Lovely stuff.

Playstations, Persia, and Publishing

At long last your correspondent found a reason to go to London, albeit for work instead of play.  This year's Society of Young Publisher's Conference boasted the theme "Publishing on the World's Stage", and offered a refreshing look at issues such as translation, international digital publishing, and the things we can learn from related industries like video games.

It was purposefully high-level stuff, for a very important reason: as the new generation coming into publishing, there is a good chance the bodies behind the industry's top desks are going to be nowhere near as comfortable with the digital revolution.  One bookseller told us about her former marketing manager, who used to respond to every email in person -- he didn't know how to type one himself.  Meanwhile, HarperCollins is teaming up with Nintendo to sell classic (read: out-of-copyright) literature on Nintendo's DS console.  Not exactly your mother's novel, but this is what readers are becoming comfortable with.

A certain publisher of Arabic literature even explained his use of the digital revolution in terms of international issues.  He showed a slide drawing a five-mile radius around a publishing house in Cairo.  "That," he explained, "is the distribution range of a book for this publisher."  How can that be?  Because the infrastructure isn't there.  Publishers in developed countries rely so heavily on sophisticated delivery and fulfilment mechanisms that they're almost taken for granted.  Now, thanks to the internet, even a publisher smack in the middle of the desert can send an ebook to anywhere in the world with the click of a button.  (Getting people to want that work is a different story, but . . . baby steps.  Baby steps.)

There was a lot more I could say about the conference, but what I took away from it was this:  books are a resilient commodity.  Now that the panic has died down, most people are agreed that paperbacks will never go away.  Most people are also agreed that we can't stop at paperbacks.  As publishing evolves to allow more writing to be read in more ways, our sector is becoming more and more a rights business.  Exploiting those rights, and getting an author's work out to as many people as possible in as many ways as possible, is the way forward.  There might be some technical difficulty getting from here to there, but unlike with Nintendo there is no reset button.

Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go play some Super Mario . . . I mean . . . read Shakespeare.

Was It Something I Said?

A guest speaker came in to talk about running an independent bookstore, and began the conversation by describing the logic behind his logo.  "We wanted something a bit . . . naff," he concluded.

Yes, yes, of course, we all nodded, and wrote "naff" in our notebooks.

This isn't the first stumble I've had over British slang.  Most of the time, the context will help you navigate these expressions without too much confusion.  Reversing the dates (as in, writing 15-10-1983 for October 15) is a struggle when we're working on production schedules, but after staring blankly at a calendar it's usually pretty easy to figure out.

It's more complicated when I'm the one inadvertently slipping up.  Once, when describing Thanksgiving to a classmate, I demonstrated a trace-your-hand turkey drawing (sample below).

Little did I know, the same words we use to describe the noise a turkey makes are terribly rude on this side of the pond.  There was a bit of blushing and a bit of "Oh that's nice" and we quickly switched topics to sweet potato pie.

Maybe we should stick to dessert.  Er, um . . . pudding.

Internal Illogical

Your correspondent was lucky enough to have an opportunity to attend a dinner with a visiting academic come to speak to our publishing students.  He's been doing research on publishing culture in New York and London, and in the process has done hundreds of interviews with people from all ranges of the industry - agents, booksellers, editors, publishers, and even lowly assistants.  Over the course of the meal, he was asked: Who was the best interview subject you've had?

Surprisingly, he answered: the assistants.  They were the people who had the least exposure to the internal logic of publishing and who would actually notice when someone's actions were incongruous with everyday common sense.  'Why would you do that?' they'd ask.  'In what world does that make sense?'

To someone who was still an assistant a very short few years ago, this was the best observation yet heard on my MA course.  It's a hard day when you're told, instead of sitting by the fireside with your red pen and a bunch of manuscripts, you will live your life by market share spreadsheets.  You will be running profit and loss statements.  You will be doing something called the 4 P's and analysing target markets.  In fact, the closest you'll get to a fireside is the flaming pile of garbage your author calls 'writing', which he will sometimes send you with the intention of publishing.  It's a tough thing for a 21-year-old to take in.

It does get better.  That was the other great part about this academic's speech: I felt that, eventually, everything starts to make sense.  You start to play the game, and someday you get good at it, and someday you can fight battles against online retailers and chain store discounts and the commoditization of books knowing that matters just as much as the misplaced commas on page 17.

That doesn't mean editors don't seem crazy to everybody else.  That's probably why we still let people believe that whole red pen and fireside business.  Maybe if we spread the rumor enough, it will start to become true . . . Or maybe that's just publisher's logic again.

Guy Fawkes Night

A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

Act I
FIREWORKS:  Boom!

Act II
YOUR CORRESPONDENT: Ahh! It's a scary wicker woman!
CROWD: Ahh!  Scary!  Burn it!

Act III
YOUR CORRESPONDENT: That's an awful lot of burning.
CROWD:  Agh, too much fire!  Run away!

THE END

Firecracker, Firecracker, Sis Boom Bah!

In a happy coincidence, my friends in India are just celebrating Diwali just as we here in Britain are observing Guy Fawkes Day.  What do they have in common, you ask?  Firecrackers!

I don't know much about Guy Fawkes Day besides that it's mentioned in the movie V for Vendetta.  (You know, "Remember, remember, the 5th of November.") I asked a British classmate who Guy Fawkes was and got the simple explanation, "The guy who tried to blow up Parliament."

"Oh," I said.  "So you celebrate him?"

"No!" came the reply.  "We burn him!"

"Every year?"

"Well, he tried to blow up Parliament!"

Apparently, besides lighting firecrackers, they build a large wooden statue of this chap and light him on fire on a yearly basis.  The moral of the story is: don't p** off the British.

The festivities are planned for tomorrow night, and I'm certain to attend.  In the meantime, I've already written about what it's like to celebrate with fireworks in the US, so here's a challenge to my Indian readers:  if anyone has any great photos from Diwali that they'd like me to post (with proper crediting and a link to your own website, of course!) please do say so in the comments.  And whichever holiday you celebrate, I hope it's a good one!

The Unintended Consequences of Excellent Marketing

I've spent these past few weeks buried in my marketing coursework, which is helpful given that a major portion of my development editing experience has been spent servicing a market of one professor at a time.  (Market research: "Would you like us to fix your typos or leave them?")  The best way to learn about successful marketing is to look at successful books, and of course in any publishing course the number one example you hear mentioned day in and day out is good old Harry Potter.

The Boy Who Lived is popular in India too, it seems, because all of a sudden they're losing all their owls.  Either there is a disproportionate number of wizards in Delhi or there are too many silly Muggles about.  Hopefully the authorities will take notice and head off all those Harry Potter parties on their way to Bharatpur.

Taken while birdwatching last February . . . This guy doesn't look too keen on delivering your mail.