Frankfurt Book Fair

Like everything else in life, no matter how long one has to prepare for something, there will always be a last minute rush. Maybe the problem is that we take on too much, or maybe that is the nature of things. I am now rushing for Frankfurt, though I have little idea what I’m rushing for -- all I need to do is to get on the plane on the 30th of September. But no, I need to make a good enough impression, I must not let the side down, the side being Malaysia.

That is the main reason I have not done it earlier, participate in the Frankfurt Book Fair, that is. People (in the industry) have been telling me for almost ten years now (ever since I started publishing) that I should go to Frankfurt -- it will be an experience, it will be interesting, you will not regret it, etc, etc, they assured me. I suppose they would have been correct, except that I felt I didn’t have anything to show, apart from a few collections of uneven short stories. Sure, it was groundbreaking; sure, it unearthed some talent, and I suppose many people would have attended the fair with less. Unfortunately, (or fortunately), I felt that I could (or would) participate in such events only with a fairly respectable list -- the book industry jargon for a catalogue. Anything less would have been too malu-fying, too embarrassing. (Maybe, I’m too sensitive.)

I will be taking with me books by seven authors that I feel are of international standard. (I have several more manuscripts that would fall into this category, unfortunately, I have not had the time to work on them.) I dare say, they are better, much better, then many out there. But then we are third world, right? We need to be twice as good even to be noticed. That is the barrier, the reality we have to face. Can the natives even write? Can they even read? Did they not just come down from the trees very recently? Or, when they discover the natives can write: why are all the characters so happy? Everyone knows how miserable their lives are. Women lead terrible lives, all native fathers rape their daughters, and uncles their boys. No, this cannot be authentic, this not how natives live. Asian women are not like that. Have they not seen that Suzie Wong movie? Slumdog Millionaire? Thank God, we know better. (Unfortunately, these sentiments are also expressed by many ‘natives’ who think they are not like the rest of us.)

The barrier faced by authentic ‘native’ authors in the international marketplace is quite daunting. One can only try, without selling out to the stereotype, the cliche, the market. Silverfish is committed to developing Malaysia’s own literature (albeit, in English), our own canon, our own stories, our own history. We are committed to producing books we can live with, maintain our dignity and not cringe in shame at its very mention a few years from now.

Frankfurt will have participants from over a hundred countries. Surely, not all will be blinkered? We live in hope.

Doom and boom

It’s no longer news that the book industry is in a frenzy over ebooks. Many have already started on their obituaries for the ‘dead tree’ book. Others are steadfast in the refusal to accept any other form and insist it will last for a long time more. Both are probably right. It  depends on which book industry one is talking about -- text, reference, academic, or general. Text books will probably be the first to go digital; the weight of a students’ backpack should decide that. As for reference material, when was the last time you opened a printed dictionary? Mine happened about five years ago. Academics really don’t need to kill trees to put forward their arguments. So the discussion is really only about general books.

The biggest positive news to come out of the book world in recent times is Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which I have pre-ordered despite learning that it is over 500 pages long. (That’s how desperate I am for some good news.) The last time anyone heard of Franzen was during the Oprah Winfrey kerfuffle in 2001. How dare this pipsqueak of a writer insult their media darling, the media screamed although he, actually, didn’t. Perhaps there is a measure of guilt involved in media circles for the way they reported the incident despite the fact that it was not Franzen who unfriended Oprah but the other way round. (For those interested, some of the stories are still online.)

Maybe the media needs something to write about (and Franzen is a name the public is familiar with), and America needs a new literary hero for its own revalidation, after Iraq and the economic crisis, and to take his place alongside Salinger, Nabokov, Morrison, Wolfe, Roth and Updike. After all, he is a proven writer and a recluse -- ah, that great American literary tradition. A recent Time magazine report about his new book caught my attention. This is his first novel in nine years. “He writes six or seven days a week, starting at 7am. He’s often hoarse by the end of the day because he performs his dialogue aloud as he writes ... Franzen works from a rented office ... stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts or solitaire ...”

And, because he believes one can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the Internet, he has removed its wireless card and super glued shut its Ethernet port. It is an obsession one can only admire. I have to read that book.

Then in the other corner, we have James Patterson, currently the author who makes the most money in the world. This is interesting because, by his own admission, he does not even write his own books. His name is on the front cover of thrillers, young adult and children’s books, and he churns them out year after year, but he does not write them as much as “he relies on a team of five to help him bash out the plots”, according to a report in The Independent. Now, with the dawn of the iPad like devices, is there a limit to what Patterson can do? He could hire another five (or fifty) people and turn his into a production house ala Hollywood.

When we talk about the general book industry, we always think there is only one. There are several. The one that has adapted itself best to social networks is probably sci-fi and horror. These people collect books by numbers, editions and book covers, so I can’t see how the e-book is going to affect them. There are many other segments. But, for what is commonly known as the general fiction market, Franzen and Patterson represent two different sides of it. Though these two are largely run by the same people, the two operate quite differently. Patterson represents the sugared-water side of the business and, just as, Coke will always outsell fine wines, the likes of him will clobber the Franzens financially.  Seriously, in future, which publisher will bother to wait nine years for a blockbuster, even if it is a cultural phenomenon, when someone else can churn out nine books a year? (Not quite yet, but it will come to that.)

That, perhaps, is the true future of books: big production houses churning out ‘3-D’ versions of books. Will they still be called ‘books’, though? Will the ‘dead tree’ book die, then? Me thinks not. It will survive, like indie or art-house movies, or music. It will not make too much money (except occasionally -- like now) but it will have its connoisseurs. It will be largely produced by independents with the passion. It may become a cultural good once again -- like in Europe -- and be treated like fine wine.

And fewer trees will die, too.

Time
The Independent

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times

It seems as if not a week passes without some new development in the book industry, mainly predicting the death of the physical book. Only a few made me sit up and notice. First, a story early this month said that Barnes and Noble may be put up for sale. That is serious shit. Then there was the story of the coming liquidation of the Good Book Guide, a service I used to love and rely on in the seventies and the eighties. Finally, what Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in his SPIEGEL interview about how 'The Printed Book Will Still Dominate for a Long Time to Come'

But  have a confession. I own an iPad, and I have downloaded books. I have been watching what I do and I notice that I am only interested in the classics, and that too, classic books for children. (No, they are not for my granddaughter as some have suggested.) No book on the front list has appealed to me so far. Besides, most of the classics are free. So when I am on holiday, I will have my collection of music, DVDs, games, internet browser and email client, and a few other odds and ends that I can bring along without paying for excess baggage.

Sale of Barnes and Noble

The board of directors of Barnes & Noble have announced that it is  considering a sale of the largest bookstore chain in the US. The company operates 777 stores in all fifty US states in addition to 636 college bookstores, serving nearly four million students and two hundred and fifty thousand faculty members across the country.

Barnes & Noble originated in 1873 when Charles Barnes opened a book-printing business in Illinois. Their first true bookstore was set up by his son, William, in partnership with G. Clifford Noble, in 1917 in New York. The business was sold, in 1971, to Leonard Riggio. In 1975, Barnes & Noble became the first bookstore to discount books, by selling best-selling titles at 40% off the publishers’ list price.

The blogosphere is in a frenzy with many predicting the final end of the brick and mortar retailers (again).

The Good Book Guide calls in liquidators

News last week says that the Good Book Guide has called in insolvency practitioners to deal with the liquidation of the company because they "can't satisfy its debts as they fall due". The company is holding meetings with creditors and shareholders on September 1.

It is understood that reviewers for the monthly book recommendations magazine are among those who have not been paid, but it is not clear if there were any publishers among the creditors. No issue of the Guide has been published since April.

The Good Book Guide started in the seventies as a mail-order bookseller, supported by a recommendation magazine with hundreds of reviews by professional reviewers every month. With the advent of the internet, they became an online retailer, still publishing the recommendations magazine monthly. Obviously, they couldn’t compete with the behemoths like Amazon.

The printed book will dominate

A headline 'The Printed Book Will Still Dominate for a Long Time to Come' caught my eye recently. It was a SPIEGEL interview with Mr Markus Dohle, 42, CEO of Random House, the largest publishing company in the world. I decided to renew my faith. I came across a few gems there which I shall produce verbatim below:

SPIEGEL: Did you work your way through the literary canon in preparation?
Dohle: There was no time for that. I was set up in the United States within a few days. It went very quickly. And when I started the new position, I was in the process of reading the Random House book "You're in Charge -- Now What?" It was certainly appropriate reading material.

SPIEGEL: Aren't you worried about embarrassing yourself while making small talk about literature with authors and agents?
Dohle: I do happen to have 15 Frankfurt Book Fairs under my belt and have spent my entire professional life in the book business at Bertelsmann. I've met plenty of major authors and publishers in the process. The book industry is a very creative environment. Ultimately, however, it's about making money with books.

Now we can all panic. The death of the music industry was caused by publishers who didn’t know or listen to the music they sold. The publishing industry now has Mr Markus Dohle.

Publisher’s Weekly
The Bookseller
The Spiegel

Recommending books

I read a column recently by Laura Miller of Salon.com about the Art of Recommending Book that led me to think how easy that was when we were young. My entire childhood experience was about sharing books and music. Have you read this, have you heard that? It was a time when one didn’t have to worry about books coming back because they usually did. (Stealing from friends started later in the teen years, a habit that often stretched to adulthood.) So stacks of The Famous Five, Secret Seven, Hardy Boy -- the boys never read Nancy Drew for some reason, we were sexist that way -- and Biggles (to name a few) changed hands rapidly. Later, it was Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris (whose real name was Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin and was born in Singapore), Micky Spillane, Earl Stanley Gardner, Ian Fleming -- gosh, there were so many. Then all that stopped as if the music suddenly died. So, what happened? I have wondered about that. I suspect what happened was adulthood.

Laura Miller says: ‘Amazon and other online merchants have harnessed mighty algorithms to run their "If you enjoyed that, you might like this ..." suggestion engines, but these are still crude instruments.’ Interestingly, I have not bought a single book recommended to me by a robot in the last ten years I have been buying a from Amazon. But then, I might be the freak here. Is there a survey to show the percentage of buyers who purchase the books that are suggested? Or is it only a ‘nice’ feature?

Then there are the Booker and Whitbread (now Costa) book awards. Unfortunately, it has been several years since I have been excited by anything on their lists. I don’t think I am alone, though. A story on The Telegraph which I reported here says (to summarise): only Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach did well (according to Nielsen BookScan August 18 figures) selling 110, 615 copies. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist sold 2918 copies and Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip,2802 copies. In fact, the five finalists' combined sales, besides Ian McEwan's, came to 10,155 copies. (These figures were released before the winner was announced.) Maybe it was an unusual year, but I think not. The figure seem to suggest that books by the usual suspects still sell. Is the role of Booker Prize (and other such awards) as the arbiter of good taste in books, over then?

So what turns readers on? Newspapers, magazine and blogs? As a bookseller for ten years, I’d say that the impact of reviews are minimal, except to create awareness. Yes, there are those who come in with cutouts of reviews, bestseller lists or titles they read about, but these are a minority. What does get a book going are the word-of-mouth recommendation. “This book is damn chun man. You have to read it,” as we did when we were kids. Or if it’s a book the government has made a fuss over, like Chin Peng or The Malaysian Maverick. (That never hurts sales.)

As an independent bookshop, one of our functions is to recommend books. This is the part we enjoy the most, particularly when the customer comes back for more. Having said that, recommending books is an art. We normally start with two questions: “What are you reading now?” and, “Who are your favourite authors?” The answers to these help narrow things down considerably. Then the next question will be, “Do want something similar or would you like to try something a little different?” At this point you might detect a little panic in some cases, because of the word ‘different’. “What are these weirdos going to suggest now?” People do like things to remain the same. Forever. That’s why books by usual suspects continue to sell, and that’s why publishers continue to churn them out.

The other problem is -- and one can blame the Booker and other prize committees for it -- the idea that good books are either difficult to read, boring or both. Unfortunately, this notion is also promoted by many literary types, especially reviewers. Our first criteria for a good read is the story. Second comes the part that is a source of much debate and disagreement: is it well written? We have discussed this in our previous posts. We like simple straightforward language. Elegance is a bonus. Ostentatious and overly florid language will be regarded the same as Corinthian columns in Taman Melawati: with disdain. Third, is added value -- is it a slice of life, a comment on the human condition, or does it contain little known information?

Good books are certainly not difficult to read, but not all readers are equal. Some read more than others. So throwing someone into the deep end is not helpful regardless of how much we like a particular book.

Salon.com