by Nessa Flax (author of Voices in the Hills)

 Regular readers here may recall a deliriously delighted column I wrote last spring reporting the acceptance of my collected-columns manuscript by Bunker Hill Publishing.

 Since then, I have been immersed in various stages of book production. It is a stress-inducing, crazy deadline, arcane process to a neophyte like me. Each step has been executed by electronic means. From reviewing cover design to seeing the work transformed into professional typeface, I have beheld the evolution of the manuscript.

 But it all existed only on my computer screen. Until last week.

 At a table in the Local Buzz, I held in my hands the stapled-together, not-yet-cut-to-size proof pages of Voices in the Hills: Collected Ramblings from a Rural Life. In my hands, I held the cover. In my hands, I held the blank-cover, blank-paged mockup of what Voices will be—feeling its heft and its physical book-ness.

It lives and breathes. It exists on paper.

 When I sat down at home—proofreading to be sure all the columns were there, in the right order, pages properly numbered, and the content scanned from one page to the next—I could curl up with my almost-a-book. No longer upright in my office chair staring at the screen.

It was in my hands.

 With the advent of eReaders and eBooks, the ultimate demise of traditional books has been predicted by geeks and publishing honchos. Lower cost for consumers and producers is a major factor. Storage is touted as another benefit. Libraries and readers can have thousands of “books” at the touch of a finger. Housing and dusting not required.

 I hope they’re wrong. I hope they’re as wrong about this as they were about the predicted demise of local newspapers when major papers moved into cyberspace. (While big newspapers have gone out of business by the dozens, small-town newspapers are thriving nationwide.)

 I hope they’re wrong, because a screen is a screen and a book is a book.

 Many claim this is a generational issue. That younger generations are more at home with electronic gadgetry than those of us who equate a computer screen of any size with work. Younger folks supposedly don’t have the sentimental attachment to books.

 Cyberspace discussions on the topic, however, give hope to booklovers.

 What I encounter is an attitude of both, like the young man who wrote: “I have 78 books on my Kindle. But all of them are not available in my country. It’s great for traveling. But I always bring a real book along. I love reading with a nice book. Nothing like flipping pages.”

 Another wrote: “If you could give an eReader that new book smell, it might have a slim chance with me.”

 My favorite was a poster who noted that eReaders are delicate gadgets: “Drop them or get them wet and they are toast. A book will last centuries.”

 Her sentiment was echoed by another—a kindred spirit—who said books will never be obsolete because “people will still want to read in the bathtub.”

 Right on.

*originally published in Journal Opinion 

Rick Santelli may have started the Tea Party with a viral rant though you might be forgiven for expecting much less of this one. It won’t be televised and won’t alter the political landscape but, for what it’s worth though here is one for the road!

I am old enough to remember encountering my first MBA in the aisles of the Frankfurt Book Fair a few decades ago. A callow youth he was then, of vaulting ambition, no Latin and less Greek, and sporting the idea that we publishers were “Brands” and that more and more profits could be made in Publishing with the “right business models”. He even suggested time could be saved by having meetings standing up rather than around an editorial table. I am reliably told he still has not read a book with a reading level above 5^th grade which, as we know and the advertising mantras will tell you, is the ideal target level for all sales “messages”, TV ads and political sound bites included.

Since then we have been afflicted with a variety of systems entirely inimical to books and the welfare of readers. The barcode now sits, like a flat carbuncle, on the back of every book. Useful no doubt for some (it apparently facilitated the invasion of Iraq to a considerable degree with bar-coded tanks and the like amongst other things) and it has no doubt allowed a variety of perfectly sensible jobs to be lost in a variety of sectors from book buyers and book sellers to warehouse folk . Every bookseller now, as it were, should know the value of nothing but the whereabouts of everything.

We have an impossible list of categories (Bisac categories for the cognoscenti) that only have a remote connection to any book you care to name but which allow some to make decisions unleavened by anything that could be described either as a reading activity or as the execution of judgment and taste whilst dictating the shelving of books in such a manner as to be only locatable by computer!

We have not only a system of Just-In-Time inventory compounded by a returns system that is honored, it would seem, only abusively, indiscriminately, and at random. There was a time no doubt that returns made sense as for example when booksellers were encouraged (as they still are in France) to stock a wide range of books which would otherwise be impossible in a small independent bookstore. And that is on top of demands for punitive discounts from chains and the like who in addition don’t seem to care in what condition they return books.

The demise of the independent bookstore hangs in the balance but there was a time when museum bookstores used to reliably harbor the best choice of their specialty, science books in science museums, art books in art museums. Now what do you get slipped in between the endless “impulse buys” and junk toys? A few books that by and large happen to coincide directly with a current exhibition, remainders, and possibly, a few books by staff. I am reliably told that this is often by edict from on high, an edict which often forbids the sale of books associated with allied and similar museums and never mind such things as the sale rate of any item.

There used to be a joke about nuns who no longer sold candles because they kept running out of them. There was a time when booksellers were booksellers and words like “product” and “merchandise” had not eclipsed the word book.  And there has to be a time soon when we take a long look at what we are doing and go back to selling books with content. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to start here at www.bunkerhillpublishing.com .

#Occupy Back to Basics

Our world has definitely become electronically determined and most of us are running full speed into this commercially controlled revolution anxiously awaiting the next device to enhance our lives. Not only are we falling prey to these idiot devices, an apt (no pun intended) description I came across in an article last week, but we are subjecting our kids to them as well. I recently read that a mother was dismayed that her 4 year old was sharing her electronic reader with her 2 year old brother and she observed when her todler was holding his board book, he kept running his hand over the page hoping that it would turn.

In order to gain a love of reading we have to be given the pleasure of being read to. Whether it be, by words alone or words with pictures to highlight the story, nothing is better than being taken on a verbal journey. Just observe a group of very energetic 3 year olds at story time in pre-school or the local library, fully engrossed and quiet.

Yes these electronic devices are helping simplify our lives but let us all be very careful that we don’t let them take total control of them, forever changing the way we find pleasure in certain basic joys.

Self-publishing, OccupyWallStreet , and what we have to do.

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal is entitled, almost disingenuously, “Secret of Self-Publishing: Success”. The author, Jeffrey Trachtenberg, makes a number of valid points about electronic self-publishing, and indeed brings some interesting facts to the table, but his basic and rather obvious thesis goes something like “there’s nothing like success to breed success” (or “established authors have an easier time of it all”) which chimes well with the outlook of the WSJ, Mr. Rupert Murdoch’s American flagship.  Mr. Trachtenberg gives as his prime example, a certain Ms Nyree Belleville who purports to have “earned half a million dollars in the past 18 months selling direct rather than through a publisher”.  Which as Harry Baum in his Self Publishing Review had blogged earlier, is “Pretty awesome indeed for a writer whose publisher unceremoniously dumped her for lack of sales last October (2010)”.

 I was moved to tweet a bleat (on BHPanimalwatch and Bunkerhillpub) as I think there are at least two sides to this story.  I suggested that there was a time when bestselling authors were nurtured by publishers to support lesser known and new writers such as Mr Trachtenberg’s second example, a Ms Eve Yohalem who has so far reported a gross income of $100 against an outlay of some $3400 on her first self-published collection of short stories. This, as everyone knows, is now well nigh impossible as all Publishers’ capital (financial and moral) has been eroded continuously by first the chains, then the internet and now I think self-publishing.

I have long griped about the deleterious effect of the Harry Potter series and the accompanying circus on the future of publishing but lest anyone accuse me of pontificating let me repeat my own Mea Culpa in the matter of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It must have been on the 8^th of July 1999, a Thursday, that I was shopping in the rather picturesque town of Tenterden in Kent; a Cinque Port no less. I had wandered in to the local branch of Waitrose, the rather up-market English supermarket chain.  There on the end of all and every one of the lavishly stacked food rows, were rack upon rack of Ms Rowling’s latest tome priced at an alluring discount of 50% off the then somewhat daunting price of twenty English pounds. What to do? My two sons had been badgering me for days to get over my prudish, and no doubt snobbish, distaste for the author’s poor style and worse grammar, and buy them the book. In that moment did I pause and think to withdraw to the local bookshop (not an independent but a Waterstone’s though none the less part of my world) and buy them one copy to share? No I bought two at half price and sheepishly dropped them into the trolley with the week’s groceries. And what was to be the ultimate humiliation (apart from the endless enthusiasm of my boys)?  Not the clear and subsequent knowledge that, as headlined in all the next Monday’s papers, the book had broken all sales records, but the small detail tucked in at the bottom of some of the articles stating that 70% of sales had been made in non-bookshop outlets. I had contributed four blue fivers to one of the most blatant examples of capital flight from my business ever. A paltry thirty percent of all those millions if that would stay in publishing and feed booksellers meager margins.

And now we have the same prospect with self-publishing.  This time it is the flight of traffic as well as capital that is at stake. If Amazon and other electronic outlets dominate bricks and mortar and paper and print, then no one will visit a bookshop and any customer selection will be reduced to a truncated, if carefully targeted, number of negative options (as books are in danger of becoming).  If publishers and booksellers can’t sell books it’s not a wonder that the likes of Ms Belleville take their wares elsewhere but they then leave publishing, which begs the question of why Ms Belleville would be writing in the first place. If it is only for money (and that’s hard to believe as writing is such a somatic as well as intellectual activity that even the hardest of hearts can hardly be indifferent to the pleasures it affords) then we should wish her and her kind Godspeed but if, as must I think be the case, that like Ms Rowling she enjoys everything that publishing a book means as a common endeavor of readers and writers and those who publish, the Commons of book-making if you will, than I believe they should reconsider the direction and find ways of working within a system that as I said elsewhere, needs #occupying not emptying.

But then I would say that now wouldn’t I? If writing becomes nothing but a vehicle for making money and publishing is found wanting in its ability to make that money then publishing becomes a circular firing squad and the community dies. If on the other hand judgment is exercised at all levels and content and meaning come before market and money then we will live in a richer world once again. That richer world will need building as without a market of course we cannot sell books. We have to create markets with and for what we do, not do things to fit a market, any market, much less an existing moribund one that has learned to sell nothing except the lowest common denominator of the latest fashion, and electronically at that.  

Call and Response

The call of #occupyWallStreet is infectious and irresistible, as has been, and is, the message of the #ArabSpring, the #indignados, the #acampados, the #tentcities  from Tunis to Cairo, through Athens and Madrid, Paris and London, Berlin and Rome, even Tel Aviv and Manama and now cities across America. Democracy has discovered space, has broken out of its ritualized boxes onto the street.  The police seem to think that a well ordered street should be a silent and empty one when they should be protecting it for democracy. The politicians seem to want a “demand”, as set of “reasonable” ideas that they can grasp, possibly debate but ultimately control and return to whatever shaped box they can fit them into. That will be as maybe but in the meantime the important thing is for the 99% to reoccupy the space from which they have been excluded by those who have replaced a more open democracy with a closed system of profit taking that has sucked the energy out of everything positive in life today;  this includes publishing I might add.

Publishing used to be a protected democratic space in which the call and response of ideas operated to the exclusion of those who would exploit education, enquiry and curiosity for money; those with a preference for a bottom line of profit for the few (1%) who backed the easy profiteering of asset stripping, conglomerate verticalization, chain operations and out of town Malls that have swamped us these past thirty years. There was a simple protection device called retail price maintenance which prevented the undercutting of bookshop space by higher margin but less useful products made cheaply on the backs of third world labor.  Publishing then gave way and tried to mimic the new idea but there was no way they could beat the heavy artillery of Gap, Starbucks, or Banana Republic with Waterstones, Borders or Barnes & Noble peashooters.

That was before word of mouth (our kind of “call and response”) was drowned out by outlandish advertising budgets, “coop” placement fees, deep enforced discounting  justified as “retail power” but actually nothing more nor less than capital flight, the bleeding of profits from the bookselling system into the hands of anonymous “shareholders”. It was something like the old enclosure system that dispossessed rural folk and forced them into wage labor in the factory farm or city sweatshop in the 18^th and 19^th century. Something like what’s going on in Africa today as land speculation precedes predicted food shortage – call it by its real name Famine.  It doesn’t feel like that in publishing because you can live without ideas for much longer than you can live without food or water. But dispossession it has been.  And that is why we need to #occupypublishing , to respond to the call of #occupywallstreet with a real debate about how we can sustain our imagination rather than corporate profits and bring back open independent bookselling.

The kids on the street are not poor or destitute but they have realized that you cannot live by bread alone, (though bread on the table is now becoming the main issue for a larger and larger portion of the 99%) and that is why the Whingers of Wall Street are sounding a lot like Marie Antoinette with her “Let them eat Cake” attitude that lost her head. Publishers should #occupy their book space again and resist the eviction of physical (codex) books from their polity by kindle & ipad-happy chains and conglomerates with their shuttered pay wall websites.

How we do this needs debate on the street with readers, thinkers, students,  workers, passengers, travelers, writers, teachers, firemen, even the police and publishers, real people, but let’s abandon that catch-all, and insulting moniker that has diminished us all and not talk to each other as ‘consumers’ any more. Let’s talk to each other as productive human beings instead. Consumers are slaves to the 1%.  The 99% should re-#occupypublishing!

Spring and autumn, Spring List and Fall List, Publishers have two seasons not four.  Summer and winter are, in a way, seasonal interludes between the other two.  Yes books are published every month but the vast majority fall into these two periods.  As the Psalmist wrote “He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting”.  Not on publishing though, not just yet.

It was in the late eighties that some corporate wonder with an MBA attached told me not only that   publishing was a “sunset industry” but that publishers were really “Brands for Products”. He even showed me a new fangled thing that was already called PowerPoint to explain whatever bit of what he said he thought I didn’t understand.  I told him PowerPoint wouldn’t win any graphic design awards and, as to his dusky comment, reminded him that we lived in a Copernican world and what goes around, including the earth about the sun, comes around. The man was really a newspaper executive and in the music business too so I feel entitled these days to a little schadenfreude on both counts.  The man didn’t reckon on us publishers discovering the ipad and the e-book.

And so we head into the future not just with an e-book plan but now an App strategy. Makes you feel young really when you launch into things you know nothing about. As always it’s who you know and not what you know and we now have an e-person and an App-person who are both clearly slated to give us and our authors a run for our money.

Talking about running for money we are having an interesting if friendly contractual and semantic tussle with an author and a lawyer in California. The issue is what is Dramatization and what isn’t. Apps apparently (no pun intended) have muddied the water. Not in my view but there you go. To me what is Theatrical and Broadcastable comes under Dramatization and what is not (ebooks and Apps) can be comfortably stabled in the electronic publishing rights clause.  Everything falls into one or the other. We’ll see.

Today seems to be the day for contract queries. Here’s another from closer to home from a co-publishing partner who is worried about competing with their own book. Don’t, is the simple answer if it will undermine sales in the first one without any significant benefit to the second. The matter is alas complicated by the fact we are not publishing the second book. Often books can compete and increase each other’s sales but that does need planning.

I quoted my favorite contract line to another author who has promised to dine out on the quote: Viz: An old mentor of mine, and a lawyer no less, insisted that punctuation ought to be eschewed in contracts as it was often the lazy person’s way of avoiding issues or the hard work of making sound syntactical sense in a clause. He would also append those lovely, now long neglected, initials E & OE to the bottom of his covering letters – Errors and Omissions Excepted.  The acronym could cover a multitude of sins from hangovers to spelling.

Publishing has a thousand moving parts and far more than the day moveable type was invented (1040 AD by Bi Sheng in China) which makes it difficult at times to keep one’s eye on the Big Picture. We are publishing a marvelous children’s book about two butterflies and their adventures in The National Gallery in DC and things are coming together. They have an education department second to none and they like our book. That’s a big detail. A small detail would be my regret at not mentioning the author’s previous job at the National Portrait Gallery in the jacket flap copy. I hope the NPG book buyer will overlook the fact and indulge us.  Mr. Wyeth, our rep in DC, will no doubt berate us though. It would have made a good talking point for him.

A Green Garden

The author of our forthcoming The Green Garden has e-mailed a mild protest about the type on the cover, doesn’t like it and nor do her friends.  Small details on covers tangle us up. Is type chosen for image, for sales, for beauty, for composition or at random? It’s a typeface designed to indicate our author’s impeccable green credentials and note the recyclable, eco-friendly feel we thought we had created. Watch this space.

The big picture is tangled up too in all the small details of e-book publishing that we are about to dive into. Our two Vermont authors are about to get the treatment so watch out for Henry Homeyer’s Organic Gardening: published whole and in part (Print $17.50 Whole e-book $9.95 and $1.00 each for 12 monthly bits). We thought of publishing Willem Lange’s Dream of Dragons verse by verse at a dime a stanza but opted to push out the whole lot at $10.95. Big picture? I think e-books are essentially unshelvable and therefore will never replace the serendipity that our minds demand from books. Small detail? Folks are nuts about e-books by and large (in both senses of the word) so here we go!

from the Back Room at Bunker Hill

Library

List Price: $35.00
Sale Price: $29.95
Savings of 15 %

DESCRIPTION

A bibliophile and library lover’s dream gift book of gorgeous photographs of the world’s treasure houses of books, from the great reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale and the now vanished library in Sarajevo to the humble remodeled train depot in Cleveland, and the old jail house in Macon, both in Mississippi. Libraries are inhabited by books and people. The drama within the world’s libraries is composed not only of magnificent walls of books, and tables full of students but also, the homeless seeking shelter, small children, patient librarians, lovers in the stacks,and old folk resting awhile. Each exquisite photograph is accompanied by a charming and moving quotation from book lovers as diverse and Malcolm X, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Victor Hugo and James I, King of England.

REVIEWS

via Amazon.com (c) 2010 – “For worshipers of books, the library is the ultimate temple. It is also, perhaps, the most democratic of institutions, “one of the very few . . . on earth,” writes photographer Diane Asséo Griliches in her introduction to Library: The Drama Within, “where any soul may walk through its doors free, and depart enriched.” This collection of Griliches’s black-and-white photographs of libraries, full of those rich gray tones that bring to mind late-afternoon sun streaming in on the stacks, is a testament to the sacredness with which we imbue these keepers of the book. The text is complete with an introduction by former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin and bookish quotes strewn throughout.”

via Amazon.com (c) 2000 – “If you’re interested in what goes on in libraries around the world, then this is highly recommended. If you’re a librarian, this book is mandatory.”

via Amazon.com (c) 2000 – “The actual photos in this book were recently on display in the Newport Beach Central Library. Accompanying the photos are wonderful quotes, all relative to reading, books, education, and libraries. When the display moved on, we were delighted to find the book and consider it a real treasure. It reminds residents how fortunate they are to have libraries in their communities, and inspires one to visit libraries featured in the book. A great book for children and adults alike.”

PRODUCT DETAILS

Softcover: 144 pages
ISBN-10: 0826322859
ISBN-13: 978-0826322852
Language: English
Dimensions: 9.7 x 8.2 x 0.5 inches
Weight: 1.4 pounds

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Diane Asséo Griliches has been involved in music, theatre and fine art photography for many years. Her other books are Teaching Musicians, A Photographer’s View, and An Appalachian Farmer’s Story: Portrait of an Extraordinary Common Man(Mercer University Press). She lives in Cambridge, MA.

No shows booked at the moment.

Bert Dodson

Bert Dodson is a painter, teacher, author and illustrator. He has illustrated over 80 books for children . He is the author of Keys To Drawing ( North Light Books, 1985), Keys to Drawing with Imagination, (2006) and NUKE A Book of Cartoons, vols. I and II.( McFarland and Co., 1986 and 1988).He co-authored, with noted biologist, Mahlon Hoagland, The Way Life Works ( Times Books, 1995), and Intimate Strangers; The Story of Unseen Life on Earth (ASM Press, 1999, Needam, et all). He was animation designer for the four part PBS television series, Intimate Strangers (1998). He illustrated over 30 opera stories for children, a series commissioned by The New York Metropolitan Opera.His work appears in Vermont Life, Northern Woodlands, and Dartmouth Medicine.  He regularly exhibits his watercolors and drawings. He has drawn and painted over 200 portraits. He lives in West Fairlee, Vermont, and works in his studio in Bradford, Vermont.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Helping Santa

List Price: $17.50
Sale Price: $14.88
Savings of 15 %

Grandmas are wise beyond their years and often give us memories to cherish for the rest of our lives. Helping Santa: My First Christmas Adventure With Grandma is the story of one of those enchanting moments. Read More…

Favor Johnson

List Price: $17.95
Sale Price: $15.25
Savings of 15 %

With all the elements of a classic American winter folktale, Favor Johnson: A Christmas Story has been a favorite Vermont Public Radio story for twenty-five years and is now a bright and lively picture book. Favor Johnson is a compelling curmudgeon, a loner who lives on a farm with his livestock and faithful dog. Read More…