Or, Why Yes, That Looks Just Smashing with Your Latte!

How publishers begin moving beyond the bookstore, and, yes, beyond the Nora Roberts available at the supermarket checkout line, for retail space for books, and whether or not this is news

For those who have spent hours in front of the bookcase agonising over whether Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past (or, for the more modern and edgy youth, In Search of Lost Time) goes better with your crisp fall outfit, publishers may have inadvertantly come to the rescue. Albeit they probably won’t help you decide between those particular titles; they most likely will have suggested one of their own recently published titles, via convenient product placement.

In order to combat flagging booksales, which are down by 2.6 percent compared to the corresponding period last year, and, I might suggest, in order to find a home for this fall’s influx of books, publishers are placing titles in other retail stores. According to the New York Times article, “Selling Literature to Go with Your Lifestyle,” “publishers are pushing their books into butcher shops, carwashes, cookware stores, cheese shops, even chi-chi clothing boutiques where high-end literary titles are used to amplify the elegant lifestyle they are attempting to project.”

Yes, for years, books have been stocked in supermarket check-out lines, in clothing stores like Urban Outfitters, and a few appropriate titles were often included in hardware stores or kitchen shops, but these alternative locations are accounting for an increasingly large portion of many publishers’ sales. “It’s a way for the book business to stay alive,” explained Abby Hoffman, who serves as the vice president of sales and marketing for Chronicle Books in San Francisco. “Anyplace that sells merchandise is a place to sell books.” And indeed, Chronicle Books sells the majority of its 350 offbeat titles each year to places like high-end grocery stores, children’s clothing stores and wineries.

Grocery stores? Of course. Some examples of what the the New York Times article dubbed “the oddest places” are, in fact, not so odd. In this respect, I agree with Galleycat, who I thank for pointing me to this story; in the wittlily titled piece, Like, wow, books can be sold in other places, Sarah says, “[T]his is a news story? Because duh, books *can* be sold in other places.” But wineries? (”Yes, we find that mysteries go best with our Pinot Noir. May I suggest some recent titles?”)

With appreciation for Galleycat’s well-executed mockery, there is some news in the story (shocking as that may be). It may not be quite the news that its author, Julie Bosman, has fashioned it to be, but the breadth of the current alternative retail market and the lengths that publishers, store managers, or both, are going to in order to promote booksales in these enviroments, are both new indications of the current market. Of course, as Galleycat points out, cheese shops can sell books, and they always could, but unless my Cheese-Shop Attendance has been too sporadic to make a resonable assessment, I don’t think they always have.

Penguin Group is selling books at cattle auctions, for example. Speaking for myself, that’s news, and perhaps moreso when you consider that it’s apparently a more successful marketing plan than Penguin’s production of a serialised novel. Locations such as farm-supply stores are ideal targets because there may not be a nearby vendor whose job it is to actually sell books. Barbara O’Shea, president of nontrade sales for Penguin, explained, “There is nobody selling books, so we’ve gotten these places to sell books.”

The most striking bit of actual information is the coordination of books to merchandise, hence the title of this post and introductory persiflage. In Anthropologie, the black-and-white “A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005″ is paired with a sleek black ensemble, a pop-up book named “One Red Dot” corresponds to polka-dotted sneakers, and a yellow sweater is not complete without the book “The Persistence of Yellow.” Meanwhile, Time Warner Book Group changes the color and design of its book jackets to coordinate with a store’s merchandise or display, and HarperCollins has done some advance research to discover the shades that other stores are planning to decorate in for spring, so that they can apply the same delicate tints of “margarita and sangria” to their own book design. (”But my book is called ‘The Blue Cafe!’” “Tough! Blue isn’t in for spring!”)

Topical organization is logical—the cookbooks in Williams-Sonoma, or even the Jean-Paul Sartre with the skinny black pants—but I contend that with pure aesthetic correlation, the marketing campaign has reached a new level. Under this scheme, the clerk at the winery will say, “Yes, I recommend this book with a dark red cover to go with your Merlot.” It’s not innovative. It’s just sad.

But the fact is, the publishing companies are apparently doing very well with these “alternative retail” marketing spaces and color schemes, a fact illustrated in multiple examples. True, Starbucks’ placement of Mitch Albom’s For One More Day may have propelled it to the top of the lists, but it probably would have been a bestseller, anyway. But 4,500 of the 12,500 total copies of Ann Vokwein’s Arthur Avenue Cookbook were sold through Mike’s Deli in the Bronx.

And at Simon & Schuster, these “special market sales” have grown by 50 percent in the last four years. “The publisher now has a responsibility to put books in front of more eyeballs,” said Jack Ramanos, the president and chief executive of the publishing company. “The market was always there, but I don’t know that most publishers were as aggressive about trying to develop it 10 years ago as they are today.”

Is it news? I offer the closing paragraph of Julie Bosman’s NY Times piece:

“You walk into Restoration Hardware and you want the couch and the vase and the nightstand, and then you want the two books that are on the nightstand,” Ms. Rosen said. “The books complete the story.”

Putting aside the fact that “Ms. Rosen” is not, as far as I can tell, elsewhere identified within the piece (if I’ve missed it somewhere, please point it out), let me respectfully disagree with the honourable members from Galleycat and PersonaNonData (whose nice thoughts on the piece I came across halfway through this post), and vote that yes, it is news. However, I would not file it under “Innovative and Exciting New Marketing Ideas” so much as “Evidence That the Second Coming is at Hand, or, at Least, We Are Propelling Towards a Kind of Cultural Doom.”

The Glass-Half-Full side of Thomasina ventures to assert, however, that unless somebody buys “One Red Dot” to go with their sneakers, there will be no one to publish all the other books. Including, of course, my color-coordinated copies of Ulysses.

A couple of excellent responses to this article appear in The Phoenix. It wins extra points for saying the article “chills to the bone.” I concur. The Publisher’s Marketplace piece sums up nicely: “What if the merchandise looks like crap? Should the books blend with that, too?”

Lest our admiration for Kiran Desai become tinged with some unnattractive jealousy, consider that it’s not easy being the youngest woman to ever win the Man Booker Prize, whose shortlist I discussed in an earlier post. Bring to mind the detractions of fame. When you become a famous film star, you never know when someone is going to leap out of the rubbish bin to snap a photo of you bending over to organise the recycleables with your hairstyle resembling a nest of no less than three weasels, and when you create literary history, the town you have immortalised may suddenly threaten to burn your book as a show of concern.

Desai won the Man Booker Prize for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss whilst I was away. Desai is following in the tradition of her mother, Anita Desai, thrice shortlisted for the Prize. (And she’s not the only one: the Man Booker comittee also followed in the ‘tradition’ of this year, staging a double-upset by not shortlisting the top people expected to win, and then not giving the Prize to the shortlisted people expected to win, either.) Kiran thanked her mother, to whom the book is dedicated, during her acceptance speech, saying, “To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine. It was written… in her wisdom and kindness, in cold winters in her house when I was in pieces. I really owe her this book so enormously. A minute isn’t enough to convey it.”

In addition, the book is very much a product of the younger Desai’s cross-contintal life. Born in India in 1971, she went to school in Delhi and Kalimpong before moving to England at the age of 14 for schooling. Soon thereafter, she moved to the United States, attending Bennington College and studying creative writing at Columbia University. She now lives in the U.S., but spends part of the year in India; the author revealed that she wrote “the Indian bits” of The Inheritance of Loss in India, so that she “wouldn’t be too distanced from it.”

The novel itself, as all of this suggests, oscillates between Kalimpong, in the northeast of India, where orphan Sai encounters the movement for Nepalese independence while living with her embittered grandfather, and New York, where the son of the cook who serves Sai and her grandfather is struggling to find work as an illegal immigrant. Parallels between Desai’s life and that of her teenage heroine emerge: both have grandfathers who moved from poverty in Gujarat to Cambridge University; both attended a convent school in a Himalayan town. Desai’s aunt had a house in Kalimpong that served as in inspiration.

But apparently, its autobiographical resonance is precisely why, in the opinion of some, it must become kindling. “It is a one-sided account that tells you about [Desai's] fears about Kalimpong. The central character Sai is obviously a self-portrait and you can feel her estrangement from this dark, ominous place where Nepalese are just transient interlopers in the landscape,” said Anmole Prasad, a local lawyer.

The main argument and book-burning movement, which has been apparently circulating on that hotbed of rationality and clearsightedness the Internet Forum (some self-deprecation is included in that statement), is that Desai portrays the characters of Nepalese descent in an unsympathetic light. “Condescending statements” about Nepalese Indians apparently present these characters as “petty criminals, too stupid to do anything but work as labourers,” as reported by the Guardian.

The Nepalese rebellion, seen through the lens of the relationship between Sai and her Indo-Nepali tutor, is described in the book as the result of being treated “like the minority in a place where they were the majority”—which sounds like a reasonably sympathetic assessment of the town’s predominantly Nepalese residents. But others are complaining that the bloodshed of the rebellion is not sufficiently emphasized, and others are complaining, apparently, because you should only be allowed to write about things which you have experienced from the inside. “Really the book is just an outsider’s view of Kalimpong and the events that took place here,” said Bharat Mani Pradhan, a social worker in Kalimpong, dismissing the validity of the book.

Correct me if I’m misreading this: apparently, half of those angered by her portrayal of the Nepalese Indians object because it’s clearly autobiographical, and the other half are annoyed because it has no personal connection. On the other hand, as I have pointed out in similar situations, one also has to doubt the sanity of anyone who would propose the burning of a book, that he, ostensibly, purchased. The gesture seems to say to me, “Take THAT! And take your tiny but compiling royalty while you’re at it!” It’s hardly a cost-effective fuel, not to mention usage of time. As Penguin, the publisher of The Inheritance of Loss, waves off the complaints as “individual’s opinions,” and “not an issue for us or Ms. Desai,” defending the novel as “pure fiction,” it seems that the only solid conclusion one can make is that people rather enjoy getting annoyed about things.

After all, Kiran Desai is not following in her mother’s footsteps alone. At 35 years old, she outsed the former Youngest Female Booker Prize Recipient, Arundhati Roy, who won in 1997 for The God Of Small Things at the decripit old age of 36. The God of Small Things created a similar hue and cry amongst the residents and ruling communist party of her home town in Kerala, a state in southern India. Perhaps it is only an indication that you’ve written a good book.

Thanks to the admirable Booksquare, through whom I found the Guardian article; visit a thriving discussion of Desai’s Booker Prize win at SepiaMutiny; Modal Minority has a fantastic point about the book brouhaha that is even more artfully balanced than the lovely piece to which it responds—and furthermore wins my Undying Admiration for quoting Yeats.

Yes, I confess I had not read the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction until now, when it is nearly 2007, but in theory I have repented of this fact prior to my death and consequently cannot be held accountable for it in the book-lined heaven towards which I aspire.

Marilynne Robinson’s second work of fiction, Gilead, deserves both the Pulitzer and my monumentally-less-prestigious Repentance for Not Reading It Earlier. Admirers of her debut novel, Housekeeping, which garnered the Ernest Hemingway Foundation award for the best first novel from PEN American Center, a PEN/Faulkner fiction award nomination, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, no less, have been equally rewarded in their patient wait for this quietly stunning, deeply compelling book.

The style of the novel is clean, careful and profound. It assumes the form of a long letter written by John Ames, a 76-year-old preacher, who has spent the majority of his life in Gilead, Iowa. Ames has been diagnosed with a heart problem and has little time to live; he writes to his son, the beloved product of a marriage to a much younger woman, and much too young himself to understand any fatherly information the elder Ames wishes to give him. Ames fills this gorgeous ‘letter’ with all the things he wishes he could pass on to his child: his own family history (his father and his grandfather preachers before him), impeccably composed and heartfelt descriptions of the events of his current waning days, and, most preciously, with the truths about life he has gathered—truths about his own life, about all human life, and about spiritual life.

But lest my opening paragraph about a book-lined heaven lead you astray, you need not be Christian, religious, nor even have significant appreciation for Christianity or religion in order to appreciate this book. Part of its strength is Ames’ deep love of the human and of worldly existence, which is the only appreciation you need share to be drawn into its pages. It must be said that the novel may be slow to capture you fully, but if you persist in putting together the mosaic of its prose, the last half of the book will be a rich reward. Mysteries of the past, like sacred mysteries, surface; some resolve fully, some remain partially obscured, the truth a conjecture of tangible facts.

I am tempted to compare the book to water—in its clarity, in its beauty, in the way water is both transparent and reflective, tossing the fragments of the sun, the sky, the heavens back upon themselves. Only after this comparison leapt to my mind did I recall Ames’s suggestion that, in a sense, all water holds the capacity to bless, that water is, in and of itself, a blessing. The link of metaphors holds. This book is a blessing.

Connexions has compiled a list of a few of the 75,000 memorable quotes and beautiful moments in this book; read a really spectacular review that makes me ashamed to be ticking on a keyboard at Eve’s Alexandria.

Meta-Blogging: The Newest Literary Craze
So New, It’s Not Yet a Craze
And its Literary Merit is Also Up for Debate

After a work-induced unvacation from my blog discussions about blog discussions, I have returned to discover that the confusion surrounding Adrian Murdoch’s UNinvolvement with Simon and Schuster’s Imperium promotions has not yet been resolved. Perhaps it has been quietly sorted out, but I find no further explanation on Mr. Murdoch’s blog, Bread and Circuses, and I am somewhat loath to prod the bemused man about investigation, when I am responsible for unknowingly bringing the falsehood to his attention. And after all, the main aim of Bread and Circuses is genuine classical scholarship, not a possibly misguided rendition of Nancy Drew and the Occasionally Befuddling Habits of the Publishing Industry. Like other blogs I know. Ahem.

For those of you just tuning in on your radios at home, or for those of you too overwhelmed by the enormity of my persiflage in the last post to follow the link to the corresponding comments, let me explain. I read an article in the LA Times about the large amount of big-name books to be released this fall, in which, amongst other things, publishers noted that they were approaching bloggers to publicise new books in an effort to combat the crunch of advertising space. According to Josh Getlin, the author of the piece, Leah Wasielewski at Simon and Schuster had contacted Adrian Murdoch to promote Imperium on Bread and Circuses. I quote the original article:

At Simon & Schuster, for example, publicists and marketing directors have been reaching out to bloggers to boost Robert Harris’ political thriller “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”

“This isn’t something I was doing a year ago, but I think it’s a huge opportunity for us now,” said marketing director Leah Wasielewski. “I got a fantastic response from some bloggers, and it makes sense because this approach allows us to target consumers directly and gauge their interest. You go right to the source.”

Among the sites that Wasielewski contacted were Bread and Circuses (http://adrianmurdoch. typepad.com/bread_and_ circuses), which deals with the later Roman empire; Prettier than Napoleon (http://bamber.blogspot.com), a blog on literary and legal issues; and Mental Multivitamin (http://mentalmultivitamin.blogspot.com) a literary site. All three generated reviews of “Imperium,” she said.

But Adrian Murdoch was never contacted by Simon and Schuster. About anything.

I found out about this because he was kind enough to call my attention to this error. BookInfo was not the only blog to take this aspect of the story and run with it; a cursory blog search revealed that other literary meta-blogging had perpetuated the myth, both at Population Statistic and at SmarterCompany.com.

So the question is: how did the rumour get started, and why? It’s true that Mr. Murdoch posted a Spectator review of Imperium; did Ms. Wasielewski find the post and assume that the blog must have been contacted? Or did she recognise Bread and Circuses as central enough to the community of blogging classicists to risk fabrication for the publicity, as one of the comments on Bread and Circuses surmises? “[Y]ou’re obviously someone they rate highly enough to make it up,” notes Tony Quinlan.

They’re both slightly unsatisfactory propositions, and I don’t simply mean from a moral standpoint. If Bread and Circuses already included a review in a blog post, why try to claim credit in retrospect? What publicity does it gain? It would appear to me to actually be a stronger recommendation for the book that someone posted a review about it without receiving a free copy, rather than bartering electronic words for printed ones.

Population Statistic’s author, Costa Tsiokos, when made aware of the incorrect information in the LA Times article, suggests that perhaps “the reporter flubbed it,” smartly noting that “the article never explicitly says those bloggers actually received books through S&S.” Very true. But “publicists and marketing directors have been reaching out to bloggers to boost Robert Harris’ political thriller Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome… Among the sites that Wasielewski contacted were Bread and Circuses (http://adrianmurdoch. typepad.com/bread_and_circuses), which deals with the later Roman empire… All three generated reviews of Imperium, she said” is an especially crafty piece of misinformation, if it was intended.

Perhaps it was merely miscommunication; it would not be the first time in history that the facts got unintentionally garbled from one person to the next, and I should probably put away my magnifying glass, pipe, and Deerstalker cap. But the question intrigues me in part because so much publicity about how blogs are good for publicity seems to be swarming around in the air, and never conclusively landing on the bowl of fruit. The fact that even part of one of these stories is incorrect, whether or not the error was intentional on anyone’s part, is the solitary dim shaft of light shed on the verity of the phenomenon as a whole. Though perhaps I should not seek reasons from the kind of people who also promote websites via paper fans.

And as an alternative to the blogs-as-answer-to-a-publisher’s-prayer brouhaha currently in circulation, an article found with thanks to PersonaNonData, is ready to warn us that blogging is “un-Christian,” at least according to the Reformed Church of God. (”Presumably, as simply the ‘Church of God’ they were mad bloggers,” quips Michael Cairns, the author of PersonaNonData.) Much of this is simply blathering on blogs - mindless words and idle communication. Blogs can be summed up as people talking about almost anything, but really nothing. There is no purpose to much of the contents - no direction,” explains Kevin Denee. Well, praise be! I’m saved from the double sin of meta-blogging hereafter.

At least until tomorrow.

In which new meaning is brought to the term ‘book release,’ and also in which Young Thomasina wonders whether the Blogs as Publicity phenomenon is a creation of the media, publishers, or her own overactive imagination

Yes, there can be too much of a good thing. This fall, bookstores will be crowded even before the customers/rabid fans (as in ‘fantatics‘) stampede in, with a near-superfluity of ‘brand-name’ authors jostling each other in book form on the shelves.

Lest you think I am only indulging my linguistic hyperbole, consider this: “blockbuster” authors John Grisham, Steven King, Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz, John Le Carre, Robert Ludlum, James Patterson, Michael Connelly, David Baldacci, Tess Gerritsen and Danielle Steel all have new books this fall. Should that list be insufficiently intimidating, consider that literary favourites Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, Cormac McCarthy, Mary Gordon, Richard Ford and Alice Munro will also have new titles on the shelves, while infrequently-publishing-but-well-beloved authors Thomas Pynchon, Charles Frazier, Thomas Harris and Joseph Wambaugh will issue their latest. In nonfiction, Michael Lewis, Gore Vidal, Bob Woodward, Frank Rich, Bill O’Reilly, Andrew Sullivan, John Ashcroft, and Barack Obama will also be releasing books. With such a bevy of names, it seems as though they really are releasing the books, much as one might release a large bucket of live minnows into a stream, or horses at a racetrack, or perhaps the entire aviary at the zoo.

All of these books will be released into the wild between now and Thanksgiving, which is typically the largest season for publishing, but everyone in the industry is experiencing doubts about whether or not the market can handle this many big-name books. “It’s raised the bar for everyone in the business, at the most crucial time of the year,” said Sandi Mendelson, who has been a publicist for books for years. Meanwhile, Michael Cader, the founder of the industry website Publishers Lunch, worried: “There’s a legitimate question whether this is too much at once.”

Some speculate that publishers were simply too eager to compensate for what has been a moderately dull year in publishing so far, with no ‘breakout’ book defining the earlier seasons. Book releases are planned just like movie releases, and many publishers have apparently aimed their blockbusters at the heavy season, with the result that the heavy season now resembles the monsoon. Jerome Kramer, the editor of Kirkus Reviews, echoed this point of view exactly: “Publishing is caught up in the blockbuster mentality,” he said, “and there was a clear pattern this year of saving everything up for the holiday season.”

The article in the Los Angeles Times explained that it was more difficult for publishers to schedule or hold back the release date than it is for those in Hollywood, on the grounds that the former are at the “mercy of their writers’ abilities to actually deliver manuscripts.” A lamentable plight, no doubt, but not a terribly logical justification, as studios are at the comparable mercy of their screenwriters, in addition to their producers, directors, cinematographers, assitant directors, location scouts, second assistant directors, casting agents, second second assistant directors, possibly moody actors, costume designers, possibly scandal-plagued actresses, sound designers, hair and makeup artists, editors, catering companies, key grips, and, quite frequently, the weather.

Pardon my digression. I simply got into the habit of making gigantic lists at the beginning of this post and haven’t gotten out of it. The point is that those in the book industry have now published themselves into a corner, and are not only worried about who is going to buy ten books in a month, but how they can possibly acquire the marketing room to advertise to those people who have rash and impulsive book-purchasing tendencies such as my own. There is simply not enough window-space in Borders, or, most importantly in the eyes of a publisher, the appearance of an author on a TV show or interview. “There are too many new books to fill these slots on news, cable and magazine shows,” said David Rosenthal, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster. “So you have to think outside the box.”

And “outside the box” apparently means “inside the computer,” because Simon & Schuster has—excuse me while I faint from surprise—decided to go to bloggers to publicise the new political thriller from Robert Harris, entitled Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome. Simon & Shuster contacted Bread and Circuses, Adrian Murdoch’s blog on the later Roman empire, and the literary blogs Prettier Than Napoleon and Mental Multivitamin.

“This isn’t something I was doing a year ago, but I think it’s a huge opportunity for us now,” raved Leah Wasielewski, marketing director of the publishing company . “I got a fantastic response from some bloggers, and it makes sense because this approach allows us to target consumers directly and gauge their interest. You go right to the source.”

The irony (perhaps) is that the blogging response is not always prolific or positive. Only Prettier Than Napolean features a review written by the author of the blog; she calls it “a fine book” and praises the fact that “modern attitudes do not intrude.” From the point of view of someone who has not read the book, it is informative, specific, offers detractions as well as admiration—the kind of review I’d like if I were, say, the marketing director of Simon & Shuster.

It’s clear, though, that the publishing company remained honest and didn’t buy anyone out, because Bread and Circuses and Mental Multivitamin only include or link to different reviews, neither of them jubilant. Bread and Circuses’ embedded Spectator review says of the novel: “This novel is a hill with several hazy peaks, but no summit. Just after Harris’s regulation 400 pages, it doesn’t end. It stops. …Meanwhile, there are unsettling infelicities on almost every page.” The excellent review that Mental Multivitamin links to, The View from the Foothills, is equivocal: “It’s by no means a bad book, and I’m not sorry I spent the time with it; and I might even cock an eye at the sequel that Harris is clearly planning to write. But I didn’t cordially love it, either, and it lacks some breath of life that I can’t quite put my finger on.”

On the other hand, perhaps this is the all-publicity-is-good-publicity theory, as favoured by scandal-plagued actresses mentioned above. After all, I diligently went and searched out the posts on Imperium, and perhaps this is all that was supposed to happen. I know about the book now, do I not? Imperium Imperium Imperium. Still, Daniel Menaker, editor-in-chief of Random House, may have actually had a slightly more accurate view of blogging publicity when he confessed that for him “the Web is like a teenager’s room. It can be very messy, and you don’t quite know how to bring order to it. But you can’t ignore it. You have to deal with it.”

Maya Reynolds writes about the same too-many-good-books ‘conundrum,’ with the suggestion that it is “Time to Visit The Bookstore.”

Penguin Group publishing company has been working very hard promote direct sales via its website, provided, apparently, that the marketing campaign be slightly illogical. A fortnight ago I investigated the promotion of their website via a new set of serialised novels in the nineteenth-century tradition, but I still could not have foreseen the marketing of their online presence through the distribution of thousands of fans.

No, not ‘fans’ as in ‘fanatics;’ excited book-lovers were not hurled out of the backs of vans at people blithely listening to their iPods on the sidewalk. ‘Fans’ as in ‘the implements waved back and forth in front of the face in order to cool oneself,’ last widely seen in primary school classrooms made of accordions of folded paper, or in—ta da!—nineteenth century salons. Either I’ve cracked the code of their bizarre marketing schemes or I simply relate everything to the nineteenth century tradition, anachronism that I am.

According to Publisher’s Weekly, the fans-as-in-cooling-implements advertised a 25% off discount on one side, and on the other, Penguin branded gear, including a tote bag, baby clothes, tea cozy and salver. (No, I made the last two up. But it would follow the trend, wouldn’t it?) 5,000 fans were handed out in New York City over the course of four days. The promotion did not occur elsewhere in the United States or in the United Kingdom: this is the summation of Penguin’s attempt to “take its bookselling presence to the next level” and raise “consumer awareness through advertising.” But no one except for heat-afflicted New Yorkers reads books anyway, right?

Like Kassia at Medialoper, who wittily titled her article on the subject, ‘How Not to Sell Books,’ my initial befuddlement passed into deeper confusion. In an echo of the ‘Glass Books of the Dream Eaters‘ website’s failure to deliver, Penguin’s main bookselling website is not particularly well put-together in order to facilitate the online sales. Medialoper summed up the website’s situation as follows:

Not a word about this sale, not a peep about the promotion. The closest the website comes is a series of links for “Shopping Tools”. I kid you not.

There is no storefront, no encouragement to buy books. The campaign truly appears to be limited to the handing out of fans.

The 25% off campaign has since expired, so it’s not surprising to find no mention of it currently; even so, the website has hardly styled itself as bookseller. On the other hand, neither did the promotion of fans.

Because I know we are all just chewing on our keyboards waiting to hear what Google Book Search is doing next, and because it’s really quite unsanitary to chew on keyboards, here is the update. Most recently, Google struck a bargain with the Complutense University of Madrid to scan all the books its library holds.

The library’s collection comprises 3 million works, placing it after the National Library as the second largest in Spain. Public domain works such as those of Cervantes and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz will be available through Google; apparently, books that are still under copyright will also be partially accessible, under the searchable but not downloadable compromise that Google asserts is not copyright infringement. If the Madrid’s library will, in fact, contribute copyrighted materials to the scanning process, it will be only the second university to do so, after Michigan University.

According to the Reuters article, the Complutense’s library will be “the first library in a non-English-speaking country to join” Google’s efforts. I assume this is journalistically correct,but it might potentially be misleading, as Google announced that it was creating alliances with publishers in India six days earlier.

“We have already tied up with thousands of publishers in the US and UK and are now in talks with several Indian publishing houses over the past few days,” said Gautam Anand, Google’s strategic partner development manager. Though he shied away from naming the publishers, deals with Indian publishers such as Orient Longman, Sage Publishers, Roli Books, Orient Paperbacks, Diamond Publications and New Age International have evidently already been effectuated.

The distinction may simply arise from Madrid University laying title to the first non-English speaking library involved with Google Book Search, versus India’s publishers. In the press release for the Spanish library, a Google spokeswoman said, “We already have other non-English-language books, but this will be a huge boost to our Spanish-language content, as well as other languages.”

Or perhaps Google is only scanning the English books published in India; after all, India publishes approximately 28,000 books in English every year, a figure that falls behind only the U.S. and the U.K.

This is only one of many indications that India is swiftly becoming a major publishing force worldwide; their exports in publishing, which came in at a scant 330 million rupees in 1991, has increased exponentially to stand at 4.6 billion rupees today.

The entire Indian industry is “worth Rs.80 billion and it is growing by over 15 percent every year,” according to Shakti Mallik, president of the Federation of Indian Publishers. Its various publishers attribute growth to advancements in marketing, including email lists, personalised phone calls, preview booklets with summaries and excerpts, and affiliated blog discussions. Blog discussions! Do those work?

In which Young Thomasina fancies the citadel of professional reviewers being dealt yet another blow with the battering ram of bloggers, and receives her comeuppance for use of overextended metaphors

Lest we fully believe that one can only become a national bestseller via online word-of-mouth if you are leant some help from Amazon.com (as was Keith Donohue’s nevertheless snappy book The Stolen Child), let us examine the newest book that has taken the publishing industry by surprise and by storm. Diane Setterfield’s debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, has topped the U.S. Bestseller lists, once again despite a large amount of notice in the conventional press. It just warms the cockles of my book-loving blog-loving heart.

42-year-old Setterfield quit her job teaching French at Harrogate College six years ago, and began tutoring part-time instead, in order to give her time to bring her ideas for a novel to fruition. Diane and her husband Peter Whitall, an accountant, lived frugally in order to make ends meet while Setterfield scribbled notes and made plans for the novel’s story and shapes. A period of frustration in which she put the notes away was brought to a close by a creative writing class, and she began to compose the novel in earnest. Now, after over five years of scrimping, Setterfield finds herself an overnight millionaire.

The mystery, centered around a young antiquarian bookseller and an aging best-seller author who wants her biography written, edged out established authors such as Fredrick Forsyth, Jennifer Weiner, James Patterson and Anna Quindlen to surge to the top of the best-seller lists. Setterfield also holds title to being the first British novels whose debut hit number one in the United States since Nicholas Evans’ The Horse Whisperer in 1996—a book which had the significant boost of a pre-existing film deal.

Setterfield’s Cinderella story is precisely the kind about which all writers dream; with the book rights nabbed for £800,000 in the UK and more than £526,000 in the US, the promising author will now have the leisure to spend time doing precisely what she loves most: writing. “If you ask anyone who has ever thought of writing a book how they feel about getting their work published, they will tell you that nothing could be more thrilling,” Setterfield beamed. “Any serious writer would view it as an enormous privilege to be able to devote the best of their time to what they love and that is what I will now be able to do.”

One aspect of the Cinderella story is puzzling: the Faery Godmother only exists on one side of the Atlantic, and not the side where Setterfield herself lives. While it has sold over 70,000 copies in the U.S., last week it only sold 600 copies in the U.K. The fact that it has done so much better in the U.S. has begun to attract the attention of U.K. publications under headlines such as “British teacher becomes a literary sensation in the US.” The Times article suggests that blogging may be the cause of this discrepancy. “I suppose it’s a new form of word of mouth,” Setterfield said of the blog publicity.

But isn’t the blog community basically a global one? If blogs are responsible, why should they only have affected the bookbuying community in the U.S.? I tried to do more research, and found that opinions about the verity of blog-powered purchasing are divided. Sassymonkey at Blogher.com is both excited and credulous—and for good reason: she first encountered The Thirteenth Tale on a blog. Conversely, Rebecca Swain Vadne at the Orlando Sentinel uses one of my favourite words, ridonkulous, in assessment of the possibility.

I was somewhat relieved to discover on Galleycat.com (though Rebecca’s site, Shakespeare’s Coffee) that Barnes and Noble placed the story as their number one recommendation, and that Borders ran similar promotions. On the other hand, with due respect, I’m not quite sure I’d place the Power of Blogging all the way at Ridonkulous; other things may be at work here besides paid marketing, and perhaps Americans are simply more swayed by blogs or more attentive to them. Or perhaps, as Galleycat suggests, “American people can only take one new thing per year,” and this fall, it’s The Thirteenth Tale.

In the end, however, I heard about this book on a blog. Unlike The Stolen Child, which attracted me via the patented Sell-to-Thomasina-by-Quoting-Yeats promotional scheme, and which I read utterly oblivious to the vast internet marketing campaign, I came by The Thirteenth Tale through precisely the forum which may have made it a success. And now I am planning to go out and obtain a copy, not to vindicate my Blogging Hubris (see comeuppance, above), but because it sounds like a novel for people who love books. Look for a review sometime after I make it through my current stack.

Or: How The Stolen Child Gets to Ride Around in the Amazon.com Shopping Cart

When I reviewed Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child a couple of weeks ago, I was blithely unaware of the Amazon.com brouhaha surrounding the novel, having, I suppose, buried my head in a book literally and figuratively. But it turns out that the online purveyor of books has played an integral role in the book’s success, to the dismay of those who normally fancy themselves integral to a book’s success. Not only that, but Amazon has announced further plans to become Godparent to The Stolen Child by optioning the film rights and is now attempting to peddle the project to a studio and filmmaker.

Amazon.com’s involvement with the novel began with its decision to send free copies to the website’s top customer reviewers, in return for which the recipients would post summaries and their opinions online. The significance of this? The Stolen Child made it to the number one fiction seller on the website, despite being ignored by many major reviewers in professional publications. Furthermore, this form of solicited word-of-mouth propelled Mr. Donohue’s work to the Top 25 of the New York Times bestsellers list.

I enjoyed the book, and think its popularity is deserved, but the situation provokes some thought. An NPR broadcast, available as a podcast at NPR.org wonders what an age of consumer reviews will do to those for whom reviewing is a profession. Critics contend that those who are paid to read the book have the ability to lend weighty thought to its issues and societal contriubtion in addition to its capacity for entertainment. Meanwhile, on Fashiontribes.com, Lesley Scott asserts that “whether the traditional media likes it or not…a new generation of critics is on the rise.”

Following (one might guess) the success of its first campaign, Amazon.com purchased the film option for The Stolen Child. As far as I could discover, no partners for the film have yet been nailed down. This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that Amazon is not offering to co-finance the film; its contribution would take the form of advertising and promotion on its existing website. This is, perhaps, a smart decision for the company’s first project outside of the (sizeable) world of its own website, but it may not contribute much added clout. After all, as the Variety article points out, Starbucks’ promotion of ‘Akeelah and the Bee’ apparently did little for the film.

On the other hand, it may simply be part of Amazon’s current attempts to broaden its horizons, culminating in an announcement this month that it will offer TV programmes and films as part of its Amazon Unbox service. This follows on the heels of its expanding web TV programming, which has at its forefront the Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher, a weekly interview with artists and authors. In fact, Keith Donohue’s interview on the show apparently spawned a lot of the interest that led to the decision to option the film. “We are always trying to innovate, based on listening to customers and the things they’re passionate about,” explained Laura Porco, Amazon director of merchandising. “This was a book we passed around to our editorial and merchandising teams. Everybody was excited by Keith’s voice and felt this could be a great movie.”

Isabel Wang comments sagely on Amazon.com’s marketing strategy at her blog isabel says. Meanwhile, Keith Donohue talks about appearing on the ‘Fishbowl’ and his opinions on making the book into a film at ‘Underground Writing’ on the book’s website; any blog post about optioning a film that ends with discussion of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy is a blog post that has won my respect and admiration.

Part II in BookInfo’s aptly if uncreatively dubbed “Advice from…” Series brings an interview with a literary agent and some rough guidelines from an editor to the fore. Both are courtesy of the cornucopia of information that is mediabistro.com.

AvantGuild spoke to Ted Weinstein, who became a literary agent after fifteen years in the publishing industry, working in such fields such as marketing, business development, and writing. His agency, based in San Francisco, focuses mainly on nonfiction, working with journalists and academics, and finding out this kind of information about any agency that you are considering is paramount.

For example, the chief recommendation that Weinstein has in terms of submission etiquette is to do proper research and look at Weinstein’s website. Guidelines are available both for the kind of work the agency handles, and how best to submit. Nothing will eliminate you from consideration faster than failing to do basic research and consequently including material contrary to an agency’s wishes. And nothing could waste your own time, as well as the agency’s, more than submitting to an agency that does not handle your kind of work. Weinstein said that he only accepts one or two percent of unsolicited material, but largely because so much of what he receives is not in the genre that he represents. With serious writers who have adhered to the submission guidelines, says Weinstein, “the odds are better because the overall quality is generally better.”

Mediabistro also shares the experience of Bill Belcher, a travel and adventure writer who put forth his newfound knowledge after spending several months editing LA Weekly’s OUT THERE section. Belcher’s advice on “How Not to Piss Off an Editor” is a succinct list of a few things not to do, such as:

Don’t:

• Send in a “rough draft.” I only want to see your best, finished work.
• Send me a complete ms when I ask for queries (pitches) only. I can scan a pitch quickly and tell if it’s of interest and not something we’ve already done or already have in the works. I don’t have time to read the entire story to figure this out.
• Send me a 1,200 word ms when I’ve asked for 650 and suggest I cut it.

These are only a few of his suggestions; read the article for the full take. Becher’s ‘Do’ list is even more succinct, but very often Goofus is more useful than Gallant when it comes to literary submission etiquette. The unwritten post “How to Impress an Editor” often has the most to do with submitting a well-written piece—and that’s a whole different task.