Pete

I think you have a fine idea there. Something like a 'fairtrade' sticker on a self-published book would be very intuitive. Consumers are becoming more conscious of the implications of their purchases and they would be the exact target market for 'anti-corporate publishing' books.

I had another thought as I trawled through the thread. A few months ago I was at a meeting where a small publisher said that she thought that media reviews were less valuable for sales than the opinions of the staff in an independent bookstore. She was very keen on the independents (publishers and store keepers) gettting together to promote books to one another and drive sales more directly than through the high profile opinions of so called media experts.

Just wanted to add these to the pot. I must get back to writing. S

a small publisher said that she thought that media reviews were less valuable for sales than the opinions of the staff in an independent bookstore.

Bookshop staff call it 'hand-selling' a book, and they love doing it - feel it's what they're for - and love being given the material to do it: info about the book, a sense of what it's about, who would like it, how to sell it. I'm sure that's somewhere where self-publishers can be really successful.

Some of the chains - Ottakars are the obvious example - also give their shops a great deal of autonomy in buying, and encourage the staff to have opinions. Apparently a hand-written label by an Ottakars assistant, complete with spelling mistakes and bad grammar, does far more to sell a book than any amount of puffery passed on by head office.

Emma

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Obviously that would be true in an independent too - I only mentioned Ottakars because that's who I heard it from!

Bookshop staff call it 'hand-selling' a book, and they love doing it - feel it's what they're for - and love being given the material to do it: info about the book, a sense of what it's about, who would like it, how to sell it

You have described my daughter there, Emma - until recently she worked in a big chain of bookshops in London and the best and most satisfying part of the job was the 'staff picks' - choosing a book she was enthusiastic about herself, which she was then responsible for promoting within the store. Early last year the chain changed its way of doing things and suddenly all promoted books were chosen by management of the whole chain - homogenising the shops throughout the country, no matter what the differences in location/type of customer might be. She got so depressed by the window looking exactly like every other bookshop in the City (top ten best sellers and 3 for 2 offers) and by the loss of the one thing that made the job worthwhile that she left to work in a bookshop on a university campus.

Sorry to hear about your daughter, Merry - hope she's a lot happier in the new bookstore ...

And yes, people like her in bookstores do make a difference - Ottakar's in Guildford have given our novel by Irene Black - The Moon's Complexion - a wonderful review on one of their handwritten notices, and we're very grateful for it!

A
xxx

Merry, she's not the only one... As Anne says, I hope she's found a more rewarding place.

Emma

Dee,

" Roger, I'm particularly interested in collective marketing and distribution, rather than collective publishing. The idea is we self-publish our own books, then deposit them at a central distribution centre, and collectively market them."

I've used the theatre analogy already on this thread, but this sounds very similar to an Actor's Co-operative. These are basically groups of actors who function as their own agents. When one is working the others are looking, not only for themselves but for everyone - marketing each others work, basically.

There are several successful ones in the north, especially Manchester. It might be worth looking some up and seeing if it's a model you could follow.

Cheers

Harry

Lovely quite from Michael Allen's The truth About Writing:

The one unchanging characteristic of the book world is that everyone in it moans ceaselessly about everyone else. Authors complain about publishers (with every good reason); publishers complain about authors and booksellers; and booksellers criticise all the other parties. Distributors, wholesalers, agents, literary critics and assorted hangers-on come in for their share of stick too.

The agent George Greenfield tells us in his book A Smattering of Monsters that the publisher Walter Harrap once actually remarked to him, ‘Ours would be a wonderful job if it weren’t for the authors.’ And, I dare say, many another publisher has said the same thing. So, before we go any further, let me state, very firmly, that there ought to be a law.


There ought to be several laws, actually, but the one I have in mind would require every publisher to go down on his knees at 9.00 a.m. each morning, face in the direction of his warehouse, and recite the following mantra ten times over: Without writers there are no books. Without books there is no publishing. Without publishing there is no free lunch.


If all publishers were required to follow this procedure, on penalty of losing a finger each time they forgot, then it is possible – not guaranteed, mind you, but possible – that writers might, just occasionally, and largely by accident, be given the credit they deserve.

As things are, the publishing world is so constructed that, to repeat the distressingly crude words of one anonymous complainant in Publishing News, writers are ‘pissed on from start to finish.’


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quite = quote. Argh!

There ought to be several laws, actually, but the one I have in mind would require every publisher to go down on his knees at 9.00 a.m. each morning, face in the direction of his warehouse, and recite the following mantra ten times over: Without writers there are no books. Without books there is no publishing. Without publishing there is no free lunch.

How true. They very slightly make up for it by applauding (I mean literally) the presence of Our Authors at trade bashes, one by one by name. Not publishers, editors, agents, overseas representatives, PR people, sales directors, productions assistants, journalists, waiters or makers of the promotional videos. Just the authors.

Emma

How nice of them.

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And just think of all those people getting paid soooooo much more than the authors.

Even the waiters by most accounts.

LoL.

It does depend which author you're talking about, but yes. (Mind you, publishing salaries are nothing to get excited about either, compared to similar jobs in other industries).

I know less about the economics, but I suspect the same would be true of photographers, potters, composers... Do artists feel about galleries the way writers do about publishers?

Emma

Don't think such artistic folk have a comparable buying relationship with the public though.

Except possibly the photographers.

Thinking about it, photography might be the closest analogy one can find, because like writing, it covers the full spectrum from the purely functional - reports, information, - to high and wholly 'useless' art. (I mean useless in the practical sense).

There are very, very, very few photographers who can earn a living taking nothing but the photographs that they want to take. The rest have to choose between doing advertising/corporate/weddings/teaching/running a shop/whatever to keep the roof over their heads, which has the advantage of subsidising their costs, or doing something else entirely and having the photography as a part time occupation, or even (pity the word's used so sniffily) a heavy-duty hobby. That's rather what the Grumpy Old Bookman thread that I posted (I think on the footballing thread) was saying. http://grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com/

Emma

Don't think photographers have a comparable buying relationship with the public. Or a comparable impact on culture.

Interesting. Depends how you count it, I suppose. Apart from novels (which the majority of the population don't buy) there are very few words sold to consumers that don't have pictures with them. Add in school photos, celebration photos (talking of which, another thread, why do we photograph christenings, important birthdays and weddings, but not funerals?), the ones that people buy in Ikea et. al. And you could argue that advertisments are consumed in the same way, only indirectly, in that their success funds the next ad, and so on.

But I think my analogy was more about how writers lives might or mightn't work, economically, rather than so much the other end of it. When it comes down to it, most artists (including writers) earn most of their living by exercising their craft rather than their art, I suppose.

Emma

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And I would disagree with you about not having a comparable impact on culture. Did you see a terrific series on the TV a few years ago about the 100 photographs that shook the world (or some such title)? You could do such a series on books, but I bet you very few would be fiction once you'd got past Dickens.

Emma

Art and commerce eh? Ever an uneasy relationship, but I don't think any but a very few people truly believes that market forces should govern our lives, least of all our culture, though of course there is immense pressure at the moment to adopt this kind of thinking, as though it were some kind of virtue. I guess we've enjoyed a long period during which time those forces have been mitigated by concerns about fairness in society and the brutal fact is that just as those concerns are disappearing from social policy so they are disappearing from our cultural world too. I don't see a happy end, I have to say.

Maybe it'll be all down to the Small Publisher to save the world!!!

Pete

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Sorry Emma, didn't really respond to your photography reply. Good points all.
Blimey you don't half give good argument. Wish I had more time.

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1984, Brave New World, The Lord of the Flies, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Catch 22, The Quick and the Dead, Lady Chatterley's Lover, anything by Solzenhitzen (sp?), The Power and the Glory, Room at the Top, The Lives of animals... this is without thinking in a few seconds...

I don't know Emma, I would hate to suspect you of arguimg for argument's sake.................

Pete