Anyway, two years later, Deep Vellum—the press Will was figuring out while he was here in Rochester—officially launched on May 8th (which happens to be my son’s birthday, and that of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon). Here’s the press release:

On May 27, 2014, Deep Vellum, an independent non-profit publisher of books in translation, launches in New York City, timed to Book Expo America. Its debut authors are recipients of numerous international awards and worldwide acclaim, several of whom have never before been available in English.

Led by Publisher and Executive Director Will Evans, Deep Vellum was founded to connect the world’s greatest contemporary writers of literature and creative nonfiction with English-language readers through original translations, while facilitating educational opportunities for students of translation in the Dallas community, and promoting a more robust book culture in Dallas and beyond.

“I was inspired to start Deep Vellum when I learned just how few literary translations were published each year in the U.S. and how many timeless works of literature remain to be translated into English,” said Evans. “I wanted to start Deep Vellum in Dallas because this is an exciting, vibrant, ever-evolving city that supports the arts and big bold ideas. My dream is to publish the world from Dallas, raising the profile of world literature in America’s book culture, and promoting the cross-cultural dialogue that comes from reading translated literature.”

Deep Vellum is pleased to announce the publication of its debut book Texas by Carmen Boullosa this fall. Highlights of the fall list include:

Texas by Carmen Boullosa (October): Loosely based on the little-known 1859 Mexican invasion of the United States, Texas is a richly imagined evocation of the volatile Tex-Mex borderland, wrested from Mexico in 1848, in the combustive time just before the American Civil War. Described by Roberto Bolaño as “Mexico’s greatest woman writer,” Boullosa views the border history through distinctly Mexican eyes, and her sympathetic portrayal of each of her wildly diverse characters—Mexican ranchers and Texas Rangers, Comanches and cowboys, German socialists and runaway slaves, Southern belles and dance hall girls—makes her storytelling tremendously powerful and absorbing. With today’s Mexican-American frontier such a front-burner concern, this novel brilliantly illuminates its historical landscape is especially welcome.

Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories by Mikhail Shishkin (November): The first English-language collection of stories by the only author to win all three of Russia’s major book prizes and a worldwide celebrity, including five stories that have been published in various English-language sources (Words Without Borders, Read Russia Anthology, Spolia, the Independent, New England Review) and several previously untranslated stories (including two previously unpublished in any language). Shishkin is the first and only writer to win the three major Russian literary awards (the Russian Booker, National Bestseller, and Big Book Awards).

The Art of Flight by Sergio Pitol (December): Winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2005 (the “Spanish-language Nobel”) and considered one of Mexico’s greatest living authors, Pitol makes his English-language debut with The Art of Flight. Also the first book in Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” which Deep Vellum has signed to publish in full, this collection of essays and stories blends the genres of memoir and creative essay in an imaginative swirl of reflection and contemplation as Pitol looks back on a life lived through literature and travel.

Sphinx by Anna Garréta (Feb 2015): A debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of OuLiPo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Raymond Queneau, among others. Sphinx is a remarkable work of literary ingenuity: a beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, “I,” and “A***,” written completely without any gendered pronouns or gender markers referring to the main characters. Sphinx is not only the first novel by Garréta to appear in English but the first work by a female Oulipian published in English.

The Indian by Jόn Gnarr (March 2015): The Indian is a highly entertaining, bittersweet autobiographical fiction by the world-famous Icelandic comedian and Mayor of Reykjavik, Jón Gnarr, described by VICE Magazine as “boundlessly creative and extremely compassionate.” Diagnosed as a child as “retarded” because of his severe dyslexia and ADHD, Gnarr spent several years in a “home for retarded children.” He finally escaped, only to find himself subject to ridicule in regular schools for being slow and red-headed. Subjected to constant bullying, young Gnarr watched Westerns, always rooting for the Indians to defeat the bully cowboys. Taught in schools throughout Iceland, The Indian resonates with young readers as much as with parents of children with emotional and learning issues as with readers of world literature. The Indian is the first novel in a trilogy on Gnarr’s youth that Deep Vellum will be publishing in its entirety.

Deep Vellum has been awarded grants from a number of cultural organizations, including the Hemingway Grant from French Cultural Services office, for Anne Garréta’s Sphinx; the Transcript Grant from the Prokhorov Foundation for Mikhail Shishkin’s Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories; a PROTRAD grant from the Mexican government’s FONCA program for the Sergio Pitol and Carmen Boullosa novels; and a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses.

Distributed by Small Press Distribution, Deep Vellum’s books will be featured both domestically and internationally. Deep Vellum is fiscally sponsored by The Writer’s Garret, a nationally recognized literary nonprofit.

For publicity inquiries, contact Erin L. Cox at erinlcox@gmail.com or 347-581-0211.

That’s a pretty impressive list of titles . . . I’ll be surprised if Consortium doesn’t jump on this and start distributing Deep Vellum with their spring 2015 list.

Also, Will’s been on a publicity tear of late, including about Deep Vellum, and with KERA in Dallas.

Congrats, Will, and I know we’ll be reviewing all of these books on Three Percent as they come out . . .

At the time I talked to Arnon about doing two of his other books—The Man without Illness and The Asylum Seekers—since we all love his work so much, and thought that Open Letter could serve as a home for some of these older books. He seemed thrilled about this.

We made an offer to his new representative, Oscar van Gelderen (who took over Arnon’s properties after Ira Silverberg went to run the Literature Department at the NEA, but is primarily a Dutch publisher), and after following up with him a half-dozen times—he held our offer for months upon months—we received the following reply this morning:

Dear friends,

It took some time before we could respond to your offer, the reason being we are looking carefully at the publishing situation in each country wherein Arnon is published.
And although we have enjoyed working together with Open Letter on Tirza, we have decided not to accept your offers for Arnons books. Sales for Tirza have been quite poor, as far as we can judge (when do we receive royalty statements/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/), and visibility in the media has been limited. We love the Open Letter list, its quality, but we feel Arnon needs a publishing house with more sales power. We dont mean this in a disrespectful way, au contraire, we know how Open Letter operates and we can see the upsides of that strategy too, but we need more power and marketing force in order to get Arnon the breakthrough he deserves (in each and every country).

For the moment we have put things on hold in the USA and UK, we want to decide in a later stage whom we want collaborate with. Arnon is currently writing his novel about his mother, a book, we feel, with lots of sales potential. For us it would be thé Grunberg book to break open the market, get him out there, and find the readers he truly deserves.

In the meantime, please send us some more information regarding sales of Tirza, we are curious to know how it sold sofar.

All the best,

Oscar van Gelderen
Arnon Grunberg Agency

Yeah, it’s still pretty disrespectful, buddy.

First off, if you’re interested in reading about Tirza, here’s a link to the and here’s one from the

The sales have been modest—over 2,000 copies, but still—which is one reason we’re moving to Consortium for sales distribution. We’ve been doing all sales representation ourselves (and with the help of the fantastic George Carroll out in the Pacific Northwest), and that’s much more complicated and difficult now than it was 10 years ago. Literary books—in translation, in a crowded marketplace—will probably always sell between 1,500 and 4,000 copies on average, but hopefully Consortium will push us toward the larger end of that spectrum.

Back to kvetching: Last April, Arnon sent me a translated version of an article he had written about Greece, in hopes that I would be able to find a magazine interested in publishing this. Under normal circumstances, this would be an agent’s job; my assumption was that Oscar doesn’t know that U.S. landscape as well as I do, and was looking for some help.

So, for no money or other considerations, I spent some time talking to various publications and eventually got Andrew Leland from The Believer interested and the piece appeared in the September 2013 issue of You’re welcome, Oscar!

Putting aside my emotions for a second, let’s consider how wise a move this is on Oscar/Arnon’s part.

In case you’re not aware of Arnon’s publishing history in the U.S., in 1997, Farrar, Straus & Giroux brought out his debut novel, Blue Mondays. A few years later, 2001 to be exact, St. Martin’s brought out Silent Extras. Three years later, Other Press brought out two of Arnon’s books, Phantom Pain and The Story of My Baldness. Then, in 2008, Penguin brought out The Jewish Messiah. And finally, in 2013, Open Letter publishes Tirza.

For a lot of international authors, that’s a damn fine run. Over the course of 16 years, five different publishers brought out six of Arnon’s books. The part that might be troubling is the five different publishers. Conventional Wisdom states that if a publisher sells an acceptable number of copies of a particular author’s book, they like to go on with that author, build a backlist, etc. My guess—and maybe I’m wrong—is that FSG, Penguin, Other Press, didn’t get the attention and sales that they were looking for, which is why they only did 1-2 books then moved on.

From a typical agent’s perspective, this is not a good thing. Publishing people talk, partial sales information becomes accessible, and any new editor considering a new book from this author can look back on this pothole-filled publishing history, and . . . probably think long and hard about signing on the author’s new book.

So, in contrast to having a situation in which Arnon had a publisher willing to do 3+ of his novels—more than any other previous publisher—Arnon is now going out into the marketplace with a lot of baggage . . . I wish him luck. All I want is to be able to read more of his books—something that probably won’t be possible (Especailly for his backlist titles) for the foreseeable future.

Then again, there always is the self-publishing route . . .

This week, Tom is joined by Nate, and they grit their teeth to discuss The Master (P. T. Anderson) and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino), after having forced one another to finally watch each other’s favorite movies of the year. Also on the docket are the likes of: Rust & Bone, Magic Mike, Killer Joe, Moonrise Kingdom, Argo, and, god help us, Lincoln. (And no one, at any point, talks about soccer.)

This week’s music is the theme song to Tom’s favorite: .

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

Publisher Pearson says it has agreed a deal with German media group Bertelsmann to combine their Penguin and Random House businesses.

Under the terms of the deal, the two businesses will be run in a joint venture called Penguin Random House.

Bertelsmann will own 53% of the joint venture, while Pearson will own 47%.

First off, I think “Random House Penguin” is a much better name, mainly because of the ambiguity—is it a Random-House Penguin/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ or a Random House-Penguin/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Makes the new über-publisher seem both literary and playful.

The tie-up between Penguin and Random House marks the first deal between the world’s big six publishers. The others are Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster. It would bring together the publishers of the Fifty Shades series and Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks.

I keep reading this “Fifty Shades AND Jamie Oliver” line, and, to be honestly ignorant, I have no idea what it signifies. “This new MegaPublisher will publisher Super-Successful Book #1 PLUS Super-Successful Book #2!!!! ZOMG!!” Honestly, if you told me right now that Random House already published both of these, I’d totally buy it. It’s not like these are two random products suddenly being lumped into one administrative mess: “It’s going to combine Twilight and Gilbert Sorrentino!! Holy shitsnacks!”

Anyway, on to the real content: the creepy consolidation of two massive publishing entitles:

Pearson chief executive Marjorie Scardino, who is leaving the firm at the end of the year, said: “Penguin is a successful, highly-respected and much-loved part of Pearson. This combination with Random House… will greatly enhance its fortunes and its opportunities.

“Together, the two publishers will be able to share a large part of their costs, to invest more for their author and reader constituencies and to be more adventurous in trying new models in this exciting, fast-moving world of digital books and digital readers.”

In case you’re wondering, “be able to share a large part of their costs” equals “eliminate redundancies, especially in terms of personnel.” I hate to be the voice of cynicism, but all the “No jobs will be lost! We will rule the world together!” lip-service being paid to Penguin and RH employees has about a 99.9% chance of turning out to be utter and complete bullshit.

Based on recent results, combining the two firms will create a business with annual revenues of about £2.5bn and about one-quarter of both the UK and US book markets. [. . .]

“In the UK the market share will be around 27%, so they may have to divest themselves of some non-core interests,” said Philip Jones from the Bookseller magazine.

27%/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/! That’s fricking INSANE. And in no way can this be good for the book world. I don’t want to get into all that right now—I have sales calls to make, classes to teach—but putting so much power into the hands of one entity that produces a limited amount of books, yet will be defining culture, is fucked.

Which, for many, will bring to mind Amazon’s position in the marketplace . . .¹ Speaking of Amazon:

“Amazon has 90% of the ebook market – if [the competition authorities] allowed that to happen, how can they block a merger that gives Penguin Random House 27%/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/”

And that’s really what this about, isn’t it/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Making a company big enough to negotiate with Amazon in a way that will reap it shittons more money and profit. Great.

*

By random contrast, I just want to point out about the “semi-socialist” Bundesliga. (Referred to as a “soccer paradise.”) It’s a really interesting contrast between the free-spending, unmonitored Premiere League in the UK, and the less-profit motivated Bundesliga in Germany. Not only is the quality of the Bundesliga better—there are more teams with a legit chance to win the title, in contrast to the Chelsea, Manchester x 2, dominance in the Premiere League, or the Real Barcelona duo in La Liga—but the clubs are financially better off (Munich made $230 million last year, which exceeds the commercial revenues of Arsenal and Man United combined) AND more people are attending the matches.

What does this have to do with RHP/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Nothing, really. But the idea that there is an alternative model to flat-out late-age hyper-charged capitalism—one that can be more successful in all the key areas—is a very captivating one.

¹ This is a bit of a flawed analogy though. Amazon is a provider, a retail outlet that takes what is made elsewhere and dominates the chain from production to consumption. By contrast, Random House Penguin will control what is made available. This is a stark and horrifying difference. Amazon is predicated on the idea that “more of everything is better”—more books sold to more people in more formats equals more money—RHP is all about the production and sale of products that will benefit itself only. For all of the issues that people have with Amazon’s corporate practices, they are geared towards providing customers with what they want, when they want it, and at a reasonable price—it’s their tactics to achieving this that are circumspect. RHP will be about blockbusters and leveraging its enormous impact to restrict buying options, or at least direct customers into buying its products for the benefit of the corporate shareholders. In my mind—in which product diversity trumps everything, since the things I like are often not in line with mainstream anything—this RHP situation is a million times worse.

So after spending 13 hours flying to and from Atlanta (WHERE THEY LOST MY BAG), I came back home to Rochester and which Jens Bammel, Secretary General of the International Publishers Association, read on my behalf.

It’s really cool that he was able to do this—I felt horrible for having to miss the conference—and also cool that Ed Nawotka ran it in Publishing Perspectives. You can read the whole thing at the link above, but here’s a bit from the end, where I tried to tie everything together into some points of advice for everyone:

The Long Term Is the Only Race Worth Winning
We have entered a confusing age in the evolution of books and publishing. After ages of conglomerations conglomerating and other inward mingling trends (e.g., B&N making the same books available everywhere in the country, like McDonalds hamburgers), the world has suddenly fragmented. Certain books are only available on Amazon, there are 10,000 for every sub-genre of a sub-genre, and readers live everywhere, accessing it all in a plethora of ways.

This is daunting to some, exciting to others. For a small press looking to do books that fit a particular niche (a la Open Letter), this is a fantastic situation. Unlike years past when we fought for space in the same five review outlets and tried to convince the same booksellers to handsell our books, we can now go directly to our customers, and can cultivate an audience in ways that never existed before.

So, to sum this all up into one list of tips and anecdotes, here are some thoughts on how authors, translators, agents, and publishers can take advantage of this situation:

Agents: Quit screwing around with e-book rights. I know that for some, this is the touchiest of touchy subjects, but when an agent doesn’t sell us the e-book rights to a translation we’re publishing, I want to condemn them to a dark circle of hell. Audiences are diverse, readers like to read in all formats, why would anyone stop the momentum a publisher might have with a book in the hopes you can sell these later to some larger company/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ This is ridiculous and my experiences with Zone and Children in Reindeer Woods—which sold out quickly and were unavailable while we reprinted and sat around NOT having the e-book rights—point out the stupidity of this agenting policy.

Translators: Community is your greatest hope. Most everyone in the book industry is whiny. And underpaid. And underappreciated. Translators more than most. But in a world in which expertise exists outside of the conventional outlets (newspapers, magazines, radio shows), translators can be extremely valuable in cultivating a community of readers interested in a particular book/set of books. Make all the connections you can—books aren’t sold through reviews or advertisements anymore, they’re sold when one reader talks to another reader.

There are also bits for Publishers, Authors, and Everyone, but you have to to read those . . .

You can find info about all our available ebooks by clicking here (In case anyone’s interested, the best-selling ones from the last week are: The Golden Calf followed by The Pets, and then Guadalajara and Death in Spring.)

After making our pricing announcement, Ed Nawotka of asked me to write a piece explaining our decision, some stuff about ebook pricing in general, and my problems with the $.99 ebook.

Here’s a link to which includes this:

But what’s really at the top of the e-book best-seller lists/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ As of this very moment (10:10 pm on Wednesday, June 8th), here are the top five and their prices: A Little Death in Dixie by Lisa Turner, $0.99; My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler, $1.99; The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, $5.00; Summer Secrets by Barbara Freethy, $4.99; and The Help by Kathryn Stockett, $9.99.

So aside from The Help, which is the 9th bestselling book in paperback, the top five are all $5 or less. And aside from The Help, none of these books are in the top 10 for Literary Fiction paperback sales. So what does this mean/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/

At BEA, Keith Gessen introduced me to the works of John Locke (probably not the one you’re thinking of), a best-selling Kindle author whose books are all sold for $0.99. He made over a hundred thousand of dollars in royalties last year — far exceeding the wildest dreams of most every mid-list (if John Locke is even midlist) author in the country. Having read the opening of one of his “Donovan Creed” novels, I can assure you that he’s not selling all these books due to his talent. No offense intended, but let’s be real about this — it leads to a much more interesting conundrum.

And . . .

Ed wrote the daily “conversation piece” for Publishing Perspectives, which he entitled

As discussed in today’s feature story, you can now buy any number of e-books for 99 cents or less on Amazon. Few would mistake what’s being sold so cheaply as high literature, but one has to acknowledge that it takes skill to craft something that a large audience of people will enjoy.

In the wine business, the fact that you can now buy drinkable box wine in your local gas station/supermarket has indeed expanded the audience for wine. The hope is that drinkers, as their palette becomes sophisticated, will move up the price scale to sample more challenging fare. [. . .]

Can the same be said for the book business/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Certainly just think of fiction as red wine, and non-fiction as white, each goes with a mood, setting, circumstance.

Ultimately, the question is not whether inexpensively priced literature entice new readers and serve as a gateway for readers to discover new writers, but can it ever compete, at lower prices, with the John Locke’s and Amanda Hocking’s of the world/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ And, at the end of the day, does it matter so long as everyone’s needs get met/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/

In my opinion, the answer is no, not when — to go back to the wine analogy — the cheap stuff can get you just as drunk. Of course, you also have to remember that with the cheap stuff, once the buzz wears off the hangover is often much worse — and you’ll have an even harder time facing yourself in the harsh light of day.

Be sure to check out the comments—that’s where the real fun comes in . . .

In a session titled “Is Piracy Good for Sales,” [Garrett Kiely] the Chicago press director did not suggest that piracy be encouraged or legalized. But he made a case for ignoring pirates — and even appreciating piracy that might, in some cases, boost the visibility of certain titles that otherwise would have languished behind a pay wall.

The University of Chicago Press has published hundreds of titles in e-book form, including a number of “trade” books, which are aimed at a general audience and are considered more likely to become profitable. But when the press recently analyzed which of its books were being pirated, it found that most came from the more obscure, less lucrative parts of its list.

“The majority of the titles that were infringed upon were scholarly monographs,” Kiely explained. “It’s very hard to find a correlation between the appearance of these books on these sites, and lost sales. In some cases you can’t help but think that . . . obscurity might be our biggest problem, rather than piracy.”

The cost of combating piracy — a tedious and sometimes fruitless exercise — may, in such cases, far exceed the cost in lost sales from having those titles available for free, he added. Allowing more obscure titles to change hands freely on the Web might even result in buzz, which could eventually translate to more sales, Kiely added.

Yes.

Unfortunately, I suspect there are still about 159 panels on “how to combat piracy” that I’m going to have to suffer through/write about before publishers come to terms with their misguided attempts at stopping motivated readers from swapping their books.

Most often they deserve it for many of the same reasons that we like to make fun of book ads. I’m totally ripping off Richard Nash here, but if every company advertised its products the way book publishers do—a picture of the product with three quotes saying how great it is—capitalism would’ve crumbled long ago.

And just look at All the “You Might Also Like . . .” crap is annoying at best, especially since it’s followed at the bottom by “New Books Similar to This One.” And where’s the info about the book (ISBN, price, page count)/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Near the bottom of the listing in all italics. You’d never know it, but if you click on the image of the book cover, you get to read an excerpt! And what’s up with all the ads and “Hot@Harper” shit/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ My six-year-old daughter has better aesthetic sense than the people who designed this.

BUT, occasionally a corporate press gets it right. Like with FSG’s monthly newsletter/website. (Granted, this is apples to oranges in comparing to Harper’s trainwreck, but I’m willing to bet Harper’s monthly promo emails are as aesthetically confused.) Not only is this site elegant, it looks like something you’d want to read, and the marketing aspects of it are subdued and enhanced with interesting content. Such as between Marion Duvert and Richard Howard on Roland Barthes (Barthes/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Can’t imagine another “big” publisher referencing him—AND Samuel Beckett—in their monthly promo-newsletter):

So he called me just to say hello, and say that he would like to come to New York, and could I show him around a little bit because he had never been here.

I said certainly, and that I looked forward to it very much. He arrived. He had the first copy of, I think, Mythologies in print. The first day was very proper and careful. But we got along very well. It was apparent that he had made the right choice, and that we were going to be friends. I suppose that means I met the man first. But he came carrying a book, and I think he knew that I was a translator; and he wanted me to see it. I did translate right away three or four of those pieces that were published in various periodicals here. That was the beginning.

I don’t think he ever again read any of my translations [of him]. I don’t think he had any . . . it isn’t that he didn’t have interest. He would say that he didn’t know English well enough to have it make any difference; it was just his satisfaction that they were in English. At the beginning I think there was some interest in that fact, but I never heard from him again on that subject.

I would ask him questions. I remember calling him up once and saying that he had referred to somebody inadequately or incorrectly, as I just knew. Did he want me to silently correct the mistake/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ He said, “Oh, of course. Do whatever you want. I have no idea.” And then there was some question of some king or even Egyptian pharaoh, and he said, “Well, make it up. Make it up. I don’t remember the case myself. If it’s not correct in the French text, just make up something.” He had decided that I was trustworthy, and he could rely on me to take care of such things, and there was no further discussion about it. He was not an anxious author about his translations.

This month’s issue also includes with Edith Grossman and Natasha Wimmer on Mario Vargas Llosa, both of which are pretty interesting:

Chapman: You’ve translated a number of García Márquez’s novels—another Latin American Nobel laureate—who is lionized as much for his influence as for his writing. Do you also see the Vargas Llosa imprimatur in younger writers/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/

Grossman: I can’t really answer that question except in the broadest terms. Vargas Llosa’s influence may lie in the intertwining of the personal and the political. García Márquez’s influence is more stylistic, I think: the intertwining of fantasy and reality, perhaps. They both owe a great debt to William Faulkner and, most of all, to Miguel de Cervantes. On the other hand, the impact of the Latin American Boom on young writers everywhere was enormous, and I don’t think Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie, for example, would write the same way without that older generation of Latin American writers.

Chapman: Speaking of the next generation, what was your reaction to Granta‘s “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” list/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/

Grossman: I was very happy that Granta devoted an issue to young Spanish-language writers. In fact, I translated one of the stories, by a Peruvian, Santiago Roncagliolo. He’s a wonderful writer—I did a novel of his, Red April, a couple of years ago.

Kudos to you, FSG, for figuring out this interwebs thing and how 21st-century digital marketing can work. If you’re interested, you can

There are two main points in here, both of which are valid and will play out over the ensuing years: 1) advances for literary novelists (especially debut writers) are down from the “golden days,” and 2) ebook sales are increasing while hardcover sales are decreasing, and the economics of this seem disadvantageous to everyone.

One of the interesting assumptions in here lies in that “golden age” crack above. As Trachtenberg points out, a lot of literary novelists receive “small” advances from their publishers:

In some cases, independent publishers are picking up the slack by signing promising literary-fiction writers. But they offer, on average, $1,000 to $5,000 for advances, a fraction of the $50,000 to $100,000 advances that established publishers typically paid in the past for debut literary fiction.

Let me try and break this down a bit: First off, within the past decade, the number of fiction titles being published has skyrocketed. Click on the top press release on to download a pdf of publishing stats from 2002 to 2009. As you can see, fiction has basically doubled, from 25,102 books published in 2002 to 53,058 in 2008, and a projected total of 45,181 in 2009.

In terms of opening the doors to more writers and making more forms of literary expression available to readers, this is a great thing. But unfortunately, book sales (regardless of format), don’t really keep pace with this. Apples to oranges here, admittedly, but the indicate a decrease in net sales for publishers of $.4 billion.

It doesn’t take a MBA to see that with slow growth in sales and rapid expansion in offerings, something has to give.

For anyone who doesn’t know how advances works, here’s a brief overview: in the traditional publishing scheme, authors are offered an advance for the rights to their books. Although certain behavioral economics-based stuff comes into play here (reputation of the author, perceived bidding wars, friendships and loyalties), in the most pure economic sense, advances should be based on what an author is expected to earn back through sales. So, if you expect to sell 3,000 copies of a $15 book, and are planning on offering a 8% royalty rate, a $3,600 advance would be appropriate. Other things can figure into this, such as foreign rights or film sales, or whatever, but generally speaking, this is how this should work.

Just going with those numbers for a minute, in this case, the publisher would receive $45,000 in total revenue from these sales, which has to cover the author’s advance ($3,600), the printing costs (~$6,000), bookseller discounts ($22,500) and marketing expenses ($3,000). (Typical Digression: I’m taking a pricing class now in which one of the main tenets is that you don’t include fixed costs—salaries for salaried employees, sunk costs of overhead, etc.—when figuring out whether to take on a “project” or not. Most publishers will include these costs in order to demonstrate just how fucked they are when it comes to publishing books. I’m going to let these go for now, because it is impossible to figure fixed costs when analyzing what it costs to make a book. We operate with low overhead and next to no employees. Random House does things a bit differently.)

To pull this back to the article at hand, this is where I think Trachtenberg ends up focusing on the wrong thing. His main beef seems to be that it’s totally screwed that publishers aren’t keeping food on the plates of literary authors. And as someone who loves, loves, loves, writers and their books, I agree that this situation sucks. Do I wish all my writerly friends could get $200K every four years in order to live well (enough) and have the opportunity to write a genius work during this period/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Absolutely. But for that to happen, from a semi-sane economic perspective, they’d have to sell 167,000 copies of each of their books. That’s quite possible if your name ends in Larsson or Franzen, but for most literary writers/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Fuck. And. No. Five figure sales are decent for the majority of writers, with quite a few of those 50,000 works of fiction selling far, far fewer copies.

One could (has/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ will/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/) write a series of articles about why these sales are so low (blockbuster model, crappy distribution schemes, more attention paid to nonfiction than literary fiction, the Internet, etc., etc.), but the main point is that there’s a fairly direct correlation between sales and an author’s earnings.

And here’s the weird leap in the article: As Trachtenberg points out, royalties for hardcover sales are much higher than those for ebooks. (According to the graph, an author get $4.20 on the sales of a hardcover, $2.27 on an ebook.) This is absolutely true, but the thrust of the article seems to make this some sort of zero-sum game in which the growth of the ebook market will eventually overtake the sales of hardcovers, and suddenly everyone will be twice as poor as they used to be. (Not to sidetrack this already rambling post, but these royalties—15% for hardcover, 25% for ebooks—aren’t standard throughout the industry. Just saying.)

What he doesn’t mention is that a) this has been the case since the existence of paperbacks (numbers I work with: 10% royalties on hardcovers listing for around $25, 7.5% on paperbacks selling for $15, which means an author earns $2.50 for a hardcover sale, and $1.13 for each paperback unit), and that b) this is simply price discrimination with different customers buying different forms of the products at different prices. It’s really not all that uncommon or as catastrophic as it’s being portrayed.

The nagging assumption here is that no one will buy the hardcover if a cheaper ebook is available, thus screwing the entire payment system. That ebooks cannibalize sales. But there’s not a lot of evidence for this yet. I’ve heard a number of anecdotes contradicting this and stating that people who wouldn’t buy the hardcover are buying ebooks (thus expanding the audience), or more disruptive to the WSJ argument, that giving away free ebooks has led to increased sales of the title overall.

If anyone has hard data, send it along. The only thing cited in this piece is that “sales of consumer books peaked in 2008 at 1.63 billion units and is expected to decline to 1.47 this year and 1.43 billion by 2012.” Is the decrease in sales of hardcovers/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Trade paperbacks/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Mass market titles/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ And the insane growth in ebooks (estimates that these will make up 20-25% of total unit sales by 2012), is that reflecting only a decrease in sales of hardcovers/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Or are these replacing the mass market romances people used to buy/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ All the data here seems weak and speculative.

I know this is longer than Clarrisa, but quickly, there are two final things I want to say . . . First off, rather than focus on ebook pricing and the backwards slow-to-adapt struggling publishing industry, we should instead focus on audience development. We simply do not live in a culture that can support 50,000 works of fiction a year on sales alone. Period. If we all paid full price for 100+ novels a year, well then, maybe. [Insert witty joke about the total impossibility of that happening in a culture that still supports American Idol.]

Check this quote from Nan Talese:

“We aren’t seeing a generation of readers coming along that supports writers today the way that young people supported J. D. Salinger and Philip Roth when they were starting out.”

Yep. We aren’t. And probably won’t.

Also, this whole “author’s deserve $50K advances for simply putting words on paper” argument is weird to me. I don’t mean to sound like an elitist, but seriously, of the 50,000 works of fiction published in 2008, how many deserved to be/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ 20,000/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ 100/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Somewhere in between, surely, but the point is, some books are simply printed, others are works of art that won’t appeal to everyone, and a select few are picked up by the mainstream culture and make tons of money.

I’m a bit touchy about this article because it seems to be attacking indie presses (“they only offered a $3,500 advance! Cheap bastards!”), which is misguided, and because it’s reinforcing a publishing system that is failing. And next week, there will probably be a piece about how Random House’s advances are way too high and that the blockbuster model is ruining our culture. There’s just nothing sane here.

To counteract the latent vituperative bent of this post, I think everyone should check out Incredibly innovative, great authors, zero advances, quick turn around time for books, and only selling through their website. This is a different option. It runs counter to everything talked about above, and, if successful, could provide some ideas that other publishers could learn from. Learn and adapt. The answer isn’t always to freak out; sometimes topics deserve reflection and thought, and sometimes there’s a third way to do business.

PP: Author Cory Doctorow has framed this debate as price elasticity versus price discrimination, with Amazon believing that lower prices create more demand and publishers holding on to the belief that differing products released over time maximizes profit. Does this properly characterize the actions these companies have taken/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/

RM: I disagree with Cory on both accounts. On the Amazon side, price elasticity is about choosing the right price to make the most profit. Amazon has been choosing to sell e-books at a loss for some time. That decision indicates to me a different strategy. Could it be about the profitability of selling devices and taking a loss on the content/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/ Maybe it is about capturing market share while the e-reader market in its infancy and creating lock-in with consumers/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/

On the publisher side, price discrimination doesn’t exactly describe the choices they are making either. Price discrimination implies that prices fall over time as perceived value of the product falls and the choice by several publishers to create a second window for e-books, their most profitable product, after the release of the hardcover, doesn’t match up. There are again other motives at play. Windowing e-books protects hardcover sales and the retailers that depend on them.

PP: Digital distribution creates a variety of new opportunities for how products can be priced including the price of free. What sort of experimentation should publishers be considering/College/translation/threepercent/tag/future-of-publishing/feed/

Dynamic pricing is the biggest opportunity for publishers. For example, if a new release catches on, the price of the book should be increased. I am not suggesting doubling the price, but adding one or two dollars to the retail price creates a huge impact on the profitability of that title. Hospitality managers change the price of the rooms at their hotels constants to match current demand. Publishers should consider the same.

Yeah, I’ll bet that would be a breeze. And that readers would totally love watching prices fluctuate based on how many times they see someone reading a book on the subway. You could join a book club and pay $2 more for a title than you would’ve had said book club never existed. Dynamic pricing would be a lot simpler with ebooks, especially those sold directly from publisher to reader, but I get a headache just thinking about implementing something like this with print books, bookstores, and wholesalers with constantly fluctuating prices. And looking to the hospitality industry as an example of what publishers should do made me vomit a little bit in my mouth. Next thing you know we’ll all be aping the airline industry and charging extra for the cover or page numbers or some such thing . . .