Midlist Madness

By PT Editors
June 1, 2000
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Crisis management was the reigning publishing paradigm when, in 1998, George Soros’ Open Society Institute funded the Authors Guild Midlist Book Study. So it was slightly ironic when, at a meeting last month featuring study author David Kirkpatrick, several participants pronounced the midlist in satisfactory health and certified that it had never been as well published as it is today. Despite objections from S&S’s Alice Mayhew and Walker’s George Gibson (who had reservations about too many books being published), enthusiasm for the quality of midlist publishing came from the likes of panelist Roxanne Coady, the lone bookseller on the panel (B&N having apparently not acknowledged their invitation), who raised eyebrows when she waxed sanguine over the book section of Entertainment Weekly and pouted that a certain glossy publication devoted solely to books was simply “not trashy enough.”

Of course, the study did note that while the number of titles has not declined, midlist market share has suffered as mega-sellers have gone through the roof but midlist numbers have remained flat. The crux of the issue, Kirkpatrick concluded, was that chains, superstores, and online booksellers might have miles of midlist on the shelves — in fact, linear shelf space devoted to sale of trade books in this country, if laid end-to-end, would stretch from NYC to Caracas — but those books are lost without heavy marketing support. And, chain-store merchandising policies being what they are, the cost of marketing new books has soared into the stratosphere. He noted that publishers’ marketing budgets for midlist titles typically amount to less than $5,000 to cover advertising, book tours, and other promotions, but that it can take $10,000 just to get a book slapped on the table at the front of your local superstore. Declining library purchases and dwindling indie booksellers, Kirkpatrick said, have done nothing to help matters.

Peter Osnos then stole the show when the discussion turned to author advances. He told would-be authors that writing a book is crazy, big advances are bunk, and a day job is a writer’s best friend. A prime case in point was Tina Rosenberg’s Pulitzer- and NBA-winning The Haunted Land. Sales were in the respectable teens when the awards and rave reviews arrived. Then another 30,000 copies or so were shipped — 70% of which were returned. The upshot was that some titles, no matter how worthy, may simply not be meant to sell more than 10,000 copies. The debate then veered abruptly into the sphere of grants, foundations, and fellowships, indicating that the real crisis was not midlist publishing but indeed how to pay the mortgage and feed the kids.

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International Fiction Bestsellers

By PT Editors
June 1, 2000
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Dictators’ Desserts
Trujillo’s Dominican Feast and Franco’s Fall in Spain, Plus Cremer Redux in Holland

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa conquers lists in both Spain and Argentina with The Goat’s Feast, a novel that’s captivated critics (it “makes one’s flesh creep,” one wrote admiringly) and has been hailed as a revival of Vargas Llosa’s best literary modus operandi: his sprawlingly complex “development novel.” Detailing the Dominican dictatorship of Leonidas Trujillo (nicknamed “The Goat”), the new book examines Trujillo’s 31-year reign of terror through the eyes of Urania Cabral, a famous lawyer living in the US who returns to Santo Domingo to face her father, who had bequeathed her to Trujillo when she was a young girl in order to ingratiate himself with the dictator. When Trujillo’s attempted rape of Urania failed, however, her father fell from favor and the girl was banished from the island. The Goat’s Feast is described as an arduous documentary work in the literary tradition of the “dictator’s novel,” constructed “with the precision of a clockmaker laying siege to reality.” FSG will publish in the US, and other rights have been sold to France (Gallimard), Germany (Surhkamp), Italy (Einaudi), Portugal (Dom Quixote), and Brazil (Siciliano). See the Carmen Balcells agency for rights.

Dictatorship also rears its head in a novel that popped up on the Spanish list last month, The Agony of the Dragon by Juan Luis Cebrián. The book is a “history of a world coming apart,” specifically Spain under Franco, that is explored through the author’s personal memory of the Franco regime and its decline, as well as through Cebrián’s sharp journalistic lens. The book is said to be the first volume of an ambitious trilogy about the generation that brought democracy to Spain. Cebrián was born in Madrid in 1944, and was a founding editor of El Pais from 1976 to 1988. More than 40,000 copies of the new work have been sold in Spain, with rights still available from agent Antonia Kerrigan in Barcelona.

Also in Spain, Lesbian Lover, by the 83-year-old José Luis Sampedro, has been rocking the charts — and seriously updating the mucho macho “latin lover” paradigm — with an ardent romance in which a woman’s desire to meet a non-sexist male is fulfilled by a man who happens to be a fetishist and enjoys submission. The book has been described as an “awe-inspiring” text that is “completely divorced from the repressive sexual education which is prevalent” in Spanish society. The author’s motto? “Love, and do whatever you like.” No foreign deals have been reported as yet; contact the Carmen Balcells agency.

Cataclysms of a different sort are quaking France this month, where Baldassare’s Odyssey details events in that pre-apocalyptic year of 1665. Everyone, of course, is anxiously awaiting the dawn of 1666, predicted in the Book of Apocalypse as the world’s grand finale. Hero Baldassare is a skeptical rare book dealer in what would be present-day Lebanon who sets out to forage for a book that’s been damned in Muslim scripture. Lover Marta tags along for the adventure, which ends up in London by way of Chios and Genoa, and includes plenty of blockbuster murders, storms, betrayals, and even the Great Fire of London — but nary an apocalypse. Rights have thundered out to the UK (Harvill), Italy (Bompiani), Greece (Oceanida), Norway (Pax), and Turkey (Yapi Kredi), among other lands. See Grasset for details.

Elsewhere in France, bondage abounds in Philippe Djian’s new novel Vers Chez les Blancs (it’s untranslatable, according to his French publisher). The book details the exploits of a bitter, washed-up writer — whom critics have compared to Djian himself — who distracts himself by arranging sexual encounters for a younger, more successful and fashionable writer. The old lion eventually has an affair with the other man’s wife, and pornographic playtime ensues as our “Leporello of letters” indulges. See Gallimard for rights.

A revival has hit Holland, where the picaresque novel based on the life of artist and one-time enfant terrible Jan Cremer is back on the charts after 37 years. I Jan Cremer was published to critical revulsion in 1963, when literary watchers called the brash young Cremer vulgar, immoral, and even fascist as he “cocks a snook” at bourgeois society in a “raucous, roaring, bawdy, imaginative” look at the weaknesses and conceits of himself and his fellow-men. Cremer went on to become a respected painter and, incidentally, is still involved in humanitarian projects at Unesco, Unicef, and The Red Cross. Recently reissued in a jubilee edition, the book has been translated in 12 languages and published in 30 countries; rights are with Sterling Lord Literistic.

Also in Holland, sportswriter Jan Mulder tackles the charts with Victories and Defeats, the first book of a two-volume collection of articles and columns he’s contributed to newspapers and magazines over the years. Mulder, who together with Remco Campert writes a daily column on page one of the major Dutch paper De Volkskrant, has been called “the greatest column writer on sports in the Netherlands,” and wins celeb status for his weekly appearances on the popular Dutch talk show Barend & Van Dorp. Volume two is due out in October. See De Bezige Bij for rights.

In Italy, The Irresistible Glamor of Time has been stopping watches everywhere with its accessible exploration of the mystical and scientific foundations of temporality. This nonfiction essay is written by the acclaimed scientist Antonino Zichichi, who teaches physics at the University of Bologna and made a splash last year with Why I Believe in Him Who Made the World, which has sold more than 120,000 copies in Italy (rights to which are handled by Linda Michaels). The new book traces the philosophic and theoretical dimensions of time from the resurrection of Christ to atomic clocks. No foreign deals have yet been made; contact Pietro Formenton at Il Saggiatore.

Of note in Australia, Huckstepp: A Dangerous Life is an investigative novel — “part true-crime and part biography” — of charismatic Sydney crusader Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, who was found strangled in Centennial Park in 1986. Five years earlier, she had accused New South Wales detectives of murdering her lover and quickly ended up on any number of hit-lists, none of which kept her from dallying with Sydney’s underworld. The book tracks police corruption and takes a hard look at the criminal justice industry as it probes Huckstepp’s untimely death. Rights are available for all countries other than Australia and New Zealand; see Cathy Perkins at Australian Literary Management.

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Pushing the Envelopes

By PT Editors
June 1, 2000
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Direct Marketing Days NYC 2000

The “e-” prefix firmly attached itself to this year’s Direct Marketing Days in New York, where direct response pros from dozens of industries gather for an ever-lengthening shindig at the Hilton each May. Indeed, d-marketing gave way to e-marketing as fifty percent of the sessions were devoted to aspects of the online world, from “How to Translate Classic DM Creative Techniques to the Web,” to “Successful Web Prospecting and Retention.” That didn’t mean that at the accompanying exhibition there weren’t the requisite envelope sales guys (where else would you score a package of white “number 10s” as a giveaway?), the credit and collection agencies, and of course, the post office — US, Canadian, English, and German. These old-line marketers, however, are clearly fighting a losing battle. The Direct Marketer of the Year was AOL’s President of Marketing Jan Brandt — once an employee at Newfield (Weekly Reader) Publications; last year it was Priceline’s Jay Walker, coincidentally also an ex-book continuity guy — while the opening day luncheon speaker was not even a marketer, but a futurist: James Canton of the Institute for Global Futures.

Though the “clubs and continuity” panels that used to be dominated by Time-Life, Newfield, Book-of-the-Month and others have been given over to abstractions like “affinity marketing” and “back-end analysis,” there was a notably stronger showing of publishing types at the podium than in recent years. Seth Godin, onetime book packager and bestselling author, gave a keynote address asserting that “Success Online is a Ten Letter Word” (all together now, starting with a “P”). Reader’s Digest’s Tom Ryder spoke to a full house on the second day of the conference, highlighting his achievements since taking over as CEO. He singled out the books division as an area of growth, mentioning Books Are Fun as a “fabulous business,” with 19 million books and gifts sold last year through 60,000 schools, as well as hospitals, businesses, etc. He called condensed books a “wonderful business for us,” and promised more books in each of the categories (home, health, family, faith, and finance) that RD is targeting. Some observers expressed skepticism about the company’s forward-looking agenda, however, noting that the CEO presented his grand vision in what can only be described as a dressed-down Word slide show. Power Point, what’s that?

Two marketers from BN.com were on hand, one speaking about catalogs as a feeder to the company’s website, while the other, Roe Johnson, presented BN.com as “An E-Mail Marketing Case Study” where new-offer tests, emails targeted to customers’ buying patterns, and customer retention efforts are the order of the day. She described the 100 million emails they will send out this year, not to mention the 100+ “BN Insider” newsletters they will generate for various segments of the buyer and registrant list. Many of these are co-branded, with the affiliate getting a percentage of any subsequent sales. Then there’s the MyBNlink service, which allows companies without a website to become an affiliate, and is BN.com’s fastest growing program. Meanwhile, efforts to coordinate the catalog, online, and in-store buying patterns of individual customers are in the works. Even rival Amazon.com hasn’t had to tackle that database dystopia.

When all was said and done, the stats showed a deep divide between traditional direct response companies and their web-only, VC-funded cousins. The average customer acquired by direct mail costs $71, while one acquired by email (whose lists are costly and whose customers loathe spam-like mail) runs a whopping $286. Yet online companies throw 55% of their email marketing budget at acquiring customers, and spend only 45% on customer retention. Meanwhile, traditional marketers spend only 12% on email acquisition, and 88% on retention. Email retention (which costs as little as $2 per customer) also offers companies opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and introduce viral marketing initiatives. Flonetworks’ Regina Brady estimates that a graphically enhanced message to a customer can achieve an astounding 85% click-through rate, and a 16.5% pass-along rate.

But the biggest stat to come out of the conference — in case it’s not obvious yet — 5.4% of the rest of your life will be spent online, with 8 – 9 months of that spent reading email.

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Book View, June 2000

By PT Editors
June 1, 2000
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PEOPLE


Reader’s Digest announces that Harold Clarke, most recently President of Random’s Children’s Publishing Division, has been named VP Publisher New Market Development, for RD’s Global Books and Home Entertainment Division, reporting to SVP and President John Bohane. Speaking of exurban, Janet Harris has left Workman, where she has overseen all sales, to become Associate Publisher of Storey Communications in Vermont. And even farther afield, Mike Winton, COO of Publishers Group West for 21 years, has decided to leave the company.

HarperCollins’ Michael Morrison has been named Publisher, Morrow/Avon, but will continue in his role as EVP of the General Books Group. He has also joined the Executive Committee. Craig Herman has left HC to become VP, Marketing Director of Pocket Books. He was previously VP of Marketing for the Adult Trade Group.

Roger Cooper, formerly at BookSpan (née Doubleday Direct/Book-of-the-Month Club) is consulting on editorial, strategic alliances for iPublish, the new epublishing division of Time Warner Trade. And congrats to BOMC vet Alice van Straalen, newly named Editor at Anchor Books. Another erstwhile BOMCer on the move: Tracy Brown moves to Ballantine on June 5 as Senior Editor. He was formerly at Owl/Holt, and before that, Editor in Chief of BOMC. . . Finally, Karen Daly, formerly at Doubleday Direct, now heads up BoardRoom’s book publishing efforts.

Little, Brown’s Bill Phillips has resigned effective July 1. Meanwhile Deborah Baker, formerly of Kodansha, has been named Senior Editor at LB, replacing Jennifer Josephy, who went to Broadway. . . David Gale has been promoted to Editorial Director of S&S Books for Young Readers. He was Executive Editor. S&S has “redeployed” its academic marketing department to the web, with four lay-offs, including VP Director of Academic Marketing Dino Battista, and Academic Marketing Manager. Lyda Shuster. As it happens, Vintage just hired Keith Goldsmith from Library of America to be its new Director of Academic Marketing.

Meanwhile Marcia Burch, who left Penguin Putnam after having spent her entire career there, has become VP, Director of Publicity at S&S Trade Paperbacks. Celia O’Connell has resigned from the Center for Literary Presses to pursue a joint MBA/PhD degree in cultural studies. Candidates are lining up for the Executive Director position, with frontrunner reported to be Elizabeth Bogner, formerly of S&S. . . Will Lippincott has resigned as Publisher of the New Republic and is talking to book publishers about a position. . . Debby Tobias, who spent many years at Warner and other publishers, has gone to Zagat to oversee their sales. Ruth Pomerance, formerly head of AMG’s NYC office, has moved to USA Films as EVP Development and Production (phone: 212 358-4775).

VIRTUAL PEOPLE


Lucinda Karter, Foreign Rights Dir. at Norton, defected to rightscenter.com. . . Contentville wins the award for the biggest publishing outpost, with 5 (to date) émigrés: Annik LaFarge (ex-S&S); John Conti (formerly Ballantine); Paul Schnee (Pocket); Kasumi Parker from Time Warner’s rights department; and a young assistant from Riverhead, Hanya Yanagihara. Susan Dalsimer (formerly Miramax), who was working on a freelance basis, left when the project was completed.

DEALS


Sarah Ban Breathnach has signed her first deal at Scribner for her new imprint, Simple Abundance Press: Barry Dolnick’s Instructions for Your Discontent, from Emma Sweeney at Ober. It’s about dealing with life’s bumps through karma and power. (Dolnick used to publish with Crown.) The advance was not disclosed.

Two literary agents sold their own books (through agents) last week: Craig Nelson, to Viking, via Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and Henry Dunow, to Broadway Books. The latter’s, titled Which Way to First?, uses Dunow’s experience coaching his son’s Upper West Side Little League team to explore his Jewish roots and relationships, and was sold by Betsy Lerner. . . Tod Shuster in the Zachary Shuster Agency’s New York office sold The Last Good Time, by Jonathan VanMeter, to Doug Pepper at Crown for a “very substantial six figures.” It is “Sopranos-esque” and tells the story of Skinny D’Amato and the 500 Club, a casino/cabaret where Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin got their starts. It darkens when Skinny’s son commits a series of brutal murders.

DULY NOTED


George Plimpton, Robert Coover, Gene DeRose (Jupiter Communications) and a well-connected Board of Directors announce the Electronic Literature Organization (eliterature.org), “to promote and facilitate the writing, reading and publishing of literature in electronic media.” It will partner with the ALA, Academy of American Poets and others.

In a long-anticipated move, BN.com unveiled “Barnes & Noble University,” a collection of free courses for which users can sign up on a first-come, first-serve basis, developed with notHarvard.com. The list, which includes “Choosing the Right Diet,” as well as “The Interactive Wedding Planner,” doesn’t offer many synergistic opportunities to sell books through Textbooks.com, which the Riggio family owns, but perhaps those courses are in the works. . . And Suzanne Somers, inducted into the Books for a Better Life Hall of Fame this very year, has been named Response Magazine’s Marketer of the Year. In a 10-page paean, the article manages to refer to the actress’s complete oeuvre of titles, including publisher and date of publication. Watch those sales soar.

PARTIES


Scholastic’s Dick Robinson was honored at the UJA’s annual black-tie dinner on May 24, and Peter Mayer presented the Scholastic CEO with his award. Katie Couric was the MC. On the same night Harper’s threw a party in Grand Central for its 150th anniversary, which lured those industry folk who felt like a party but couldn’t pony up the $600-per-seat charge that the UJA was asking. Then there was the downtown crowd who popped into Three Lives Bookstore to see author Marty Asher read from his new novel, Boomer. Afterwards friends and Knopf/Vintage colleagues (the latter being his publisher and the former, his employer) hosted a dinner for Asher and the book’s designer, Chip Kidd.

Dave Eggers was perhaps the closest thing to a publishing exec at the pre-BEA party for rightscenter.com, held May 25 at the Angel Orensanz Foundation. The converted synagogue on the Lower East Side was filled with new media types and beautiful people, including Chloe Sevigny and Parker Posey, who came out to listen to indie-rock god Steve Malkmus perform (sans his band, Pavement).

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NEA at the Barricades

By PT Editors
May 1, 2000
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The Cultural Agency Gets Real on Books

Chances are the National Endowment for the Arts ranks somewhere down there between, say, Sears and Pets.com on the candidate list for publishers’ future business partners. But the organization that helps fund National Poetry Month and gave Michael Cunningham a fellowship more than a decade ago has re-branded itself as a “potential partner for ventures,” in the words of NEA literature director Cliff Becker, who set forth an ambitious, partner-powered agenda for the cultural agency at the Publishers Lunch Club in New York on April 5.

Citing a loathsome “culture of deliberate obsolescence” and a “marketplace that rewards homogeneous expression over innovation,” Becker summoned publishers to lock arms with the NEA at the barricades of the culture wars. Noting that just six authors accounted for 63 of the top 100 bestselling books of the 1990s, he said commercial publishers are distressingly close to consigning mid-list fiction, literary translation, and poetry to the historical dustbin. On that note, he went on to summon the spectre of Joseph Goebbels chucking Hemingway, Zola, and Proust into the bonfires, and suggested that increasing media consolidation is putting America’s literary heritage in jeopardy.

“The endowment’s role,” said Becker, “can and should go further” to help those in the book business fight the good fight, and that includes hooking up with publishers to seed the literary community with know-how and, when possible, cold cash. The endowment has met with the book community to help build a stronger audience for contemporary literature, in light of the fact that some 20% of America’s adult population is not literate enough to read story books to their children. The NEA is also working to cross-pollinate commercial and nonprofit ventures by forming liaisons between the two publishing worlds; looking into how reading habits develop and why people select the books that they do; and launching a major program with the ALA that links libraries, writers, and audiences through readings at libraries in all 50 states, for which the NEA committed $500,000 over two years.

Becker begged those assembled to remember that the NEA’s grant programs aim to broaden audiences by supporting book fairs, reading series, and literary journals. Not to mention the Literature Fellowships, which have helped sustain 35 out of 49 National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Pulitzer Prize winners since 1990. All but two of those 35 winners received their fellowships before receiving the award, often 10 to 20 years earlier, Becker said. He hastened to point out that in supporting fabulous new talent, the NEA can be most beneficial to the book biz’s bottom line: “These are not writers who generally lose money for their publishers.”

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International Fiction Bestsellers

By PT Editors
May 1, 2000
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Spiritus Mundiw
Chimoni’s French Miracle, Lama Love in Germany, and Italy’s Sci-Fi Satire

Anyone out there remember Mr. God This Is Anna, a UK bestseller for Holt in 1975 that’s been in print at Ballantine since 1976? Well, it’s back to the future in France, where a similar title has just been published: Annaëlle Chimoni’s Le Livre D’Annaëlle, which purports to be the first-person story of an extremely gifted and severely disabled eight-year-old girl. Using a new method (espoused in the US by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Carol Lee Berger) that allows autistic or mentally handicapped children to communicate, Annaëlle has offered up a truly miraculous story. Born to a family of practicing Jews, Annaëlle speaks as an erudite adult, knows her “previous life” in detail (during which she was married to a rabbi in the Warsaw ghetto and died in a concentration camp), and recites the Torah. Early reviews of the work have been compelling — although with a preface by the Grand Rabbi of France, Joseph Sitruk, an endorsement is hardly necessary. We’re told 7,000 copies have sold thus far in France, amid interest from Spain, Italy, and Israel. Rights are available from Sylvie Guéric-Bertrand at éditions du Rocher.

Meanwhile in France, the extremely prolific Philippe Sollers (37 books since he started publishing in ’58 at the age of 22, of which 19 are novels) has delivered what L’Express refers to in its review as “the last volume of his memoirs.” The idea is that one novel of his leads to another like a musical suite or a spiral theme, with each piece fitting together to make a life. In the book at hand, Obsessive Love, international corporate lawyer Dora Weiss meets the author at a party at some vague point in the future. They wine and dine one another and eventually our hero decides that one sees and even thinks better when in love. The book has been sold to Spain (Seix Barral) and Greece (Ekkienes); contact Florence Giry at Gallimard for rights.

Rave, pre-pub reviews have also been pouring in for The Only Lover by Jean- Claude Lattès and Éric Deschodt, the dynamic duo that the French press is hailing as “the new Collins and Lapierre.” Lattès, of course, was president of Hachette for more than a decade, while sidekick Deschodt is a journalist and author of 15 books, including a volume on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published last month. The new historical novel recounts the arrival of Vasco de Gama in the south of India at the end of the 15th century, and examines the profound impact of the Portuguese on the region of Kerala. Set for publication by Éditions du Seuil on May 5, the book is a main selection of Le Grand Livre du Mois, and Seuil is pulling no publicity punches (half-page ads in Le Monde; a trip for two to India to the bookseller who sells the most copies; an entire segment of Bernard Pivot’s show devoted to India and the authors on May 19). Mary Hall Mayer will auction US and UK rights at the end of May; see Gloria Gutierrez of Carmen Balcells for Spain and Ursula Bender for Germany.

Speaking of Germany, bestseller-meister Bernhard Schlink is back in action with his new collection of stories Flight From Love, which he undoubtedly hopes will soar even higher than his previous novel The Reader (an Oprah book-of-the-month). The new collection is comprised of seven stories about the entanglements of love, which are a considerable danger for a “baffled generation that always trips over the snares of its past.” The book hasn’t stumbled, however, with rights sold in 11 countries. According to Carol Janeway at Knopf, which publishes Schlink, no pub date has yet been set. See Diogenes in Switzerland for rights. Diogenes, by the way, doubles its pleasure this month with another German bestseller, Doris Dörrie’s first novel What Do We Do Now? The book concerns the 40-year-old aspiring-film-star-turned-fast-food-entrepreneur Fred Kaufmann, who grumpily follows his teenage daughter to a Buddhist monastery in southern France in hopes of dissuading her from falling in love with a Tibetan lama. Spiritual wisdom carries the day, and Fred’s journey is transformed into a search for self-enlightenment. Rights have been sold thus far in Finland and France; contact Diogenes’ Hedwig Janès.

Carrying forth the spiritual torch in Italy, bestselling author Stefano Benni’s Spirits is said to be a fierce and comic novel that begins, appropriately enough, with the end of the world. The surreal work is jam-packed with an audacious supporting cast that includes Elvis, a presidential dog named “Baywatch,” a frozen tunafish boss called “Musashimaru,” not to mention “all the great and servile heroes of Usitalia.” Er, right. Benni is also known for his sci-fi political satire Terra!, which was published by Random House in 1985. Some 130,000 copies of the new one are in print, with rights thus far sold to Lindhardt & Ringhof in Denmark. See Lieselotte Longato at Feltrinelli.

Argentina is going gaga over a historical novel with a slightly more down-to-earth cast in The Enlightened, by Marcos Aguinis. This one sports American religious fanatic Bill Hughes and Argentine torturer Abaddon, who between them spread a white-supremacist message and other bad juju across the lands. Aguinis is said to be the most widely read author in Argentina, and has won the Planeta España (the only Argentine so far to receive it) and the distinguished Great Honour Prize from the Argentine Society of Writers. His novel The Upside-Down Cross has sold close to 700,000 copies, and rights to the new one are under consideration in the US, but no deals have yet been struck. See Atlántida’s Jorge Naveiro. Also on the list in Argentina, Paulo Coelho’s The Manual for the Warrior of Light is said to be a small-format collection of philosophical thoughts and stories that’s being marketed as a gift book for the ruminative, pipe-smoking set. It actually posits that each of us is a “warrior of light” who can understand the miracle of life. Rights have been sold in nine countries since the book’s release in 1997, with 300,000 copies sold in Italy and 200,000 in France. See Mônica Antunes at Planeta.

On a last note, Australian Catherine Ford’s first novel NYC is set for publication on May 1. The book follows a young Australian bound for New York City to meet her birth mother. Ford’s collection Dirt was a big hit down under (“so damn stylish,” wrote one reviewer; “a voice full of promises,” sighed another) and she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s best six young fiction writers in 1999. See Emma Gordon Williams at Text Publishing for rights.

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Internet Sluggers: The Baseball Online Library

By PT Editors
May 1, 2000
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When it comes to selling baseball books, you won’t find any curve balls at the Baseball Online Library, a vast repository of searchable baseball lore that recently began featuring excerpts from new and backlisted titles, with links directly to that major-league slugger, Amazon.com. As the first sales from the site were batted home last month, the library proved an instructive case study for how publishers can deploy content on the Internet to market topic-specific books.

“We want to give publishers free advertising and free sales opportunities,” explains James G. Robinson, editor-in-chief for the Idea Logical Company, which produces the online library. Baseball maniacs have been flocking to the free site, which is hosted by CBS SportsLine, a portal that racks up eleven million page views per day and is the primary sports content provider for AOL. Fans sift through profiles of some 6,000 ballplayers and peruse a complete baseball chronology from 1845 through the 1990s, with selected entries linked to relevant book excerpts provided by publishers. Once at the excerpt, visitors are naturally offered the chance to purchase titles, leading to what Robinson calls a “win-win-win”: the publisher sells a book; SportsLine takes home a cut of every sale through its affiliate relationship with Amazon, and gains additional advertiser-friendly traffic for the site; and the Idea Logical Company scores a wealth of free content.

Although just 18 titles were listed last month (including a sneak preview of S&S’s Me and Hank, Sandy Tolan’s new memoir about Hank Aaron), there are plans to add as much content as possible, all fully integrated into the site’s database of baseball trivia. While certain publishers have not yet seen the advantages of lending content to the site, S&S stepped right up to the plate with an initial round of 12 titles, with more on the way. “It’s a perfect match,” says Sandy Flynn, senior marketing manager for S&S Online. “They make it very easy for a baseball fan to come to their site, learn about baseball, and then purchase a book.” Flynn says syndicating content has been a major focus for S&S, so much so that the publisher maintains its own site where partners can download title information, jacket images, excerpts, and even, as in the case of Stephen King’s e-novella, special buttons and banner ads. Flynn says that other S&S partners include CNN, which uses the publisher’s assets when an author or topic is mentioned in the news, and programs such as Good Morning America, whose reps contact the publisher for excerpts or title information to place on their Internet site when an author appears on television. Flynn hopes to work more closely with the Baseball Online Library to use S&S’s content in similar fashion when baseball-related features appear on SportsLine’s main page.

The Online Library recently launched an email update for baseball buffs that notifies them of new additions to the site, and Robinson is working on adding more links to and from other baseball sites. All of which should help fend off competitors such as TotalSports.net, which is excerpting serial chapters of Darryl Brock’s new novel Havana Heat, and carries online updates of the Sports Illustrated 2000 Sports Almanac and other titles. As Robinson points out, the beauty of such sites lies in the maximum exploitation of a narrow niche. “To most people, this is a lot of meaningless information,” he says. “For baseball junkies, it’s gold.” Proof of that concept lies in the fact that the first book to sell from the site wasn’t the Aaron book or even Ted Williams’ popular Science of Hitting, but the seemingly arcane Baseball in World War II Europe (Arcadia). And the same holds true for any niche market. As Robinson puts it, “It’s replicable. It doesn’t have to be baseball. The whole point is to get an audience for your book. And it doesn’t get any more targeted than this.”

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Dot-Com Defection

By PT Editors
May 1, 2000
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Is the Grass Really Greener In the Internet Economy?

As Ross Perot might have said, there’s a giant sucking sound sluicing toward Silicon Alley. And as anyone in publishing will tell you, the by now epic saga of dot-com defection — young turks storming out of investment banks, law clerks leaping like lemmings into the dot-com beyond — is sweeping before it scores of content-types who have turned on, tuned in, and dropped out of their old-media careers. Whether it’s IDG’s Steven Berkowitz traipsing off to YourDoctor.com, or the ex-Harper duo (Linda Cunningham and Joana Jebsen) who morphed into e-publishers at Questia, it seems the writing on the digital whiteboard is plain enough for even Luddites to read.

“Publishers are going to have a big problem retaining anyone younger than 25,” admonishes Bill Jensen of the Jensen Group, a management consulting firm that specializes in change and communication strategies. “Millions of people that might want to consider publishing are asking themselves, ‘Why should I want to work for you?’ And they’re not coming up with good enough answers.” Indeed, the hyperbole can hardly beat reality as assistants are whisked off to start-ups for salaries said to be as high as $60,000 (provoking one flabbergasted publishing veteran to moan, “What does this business run on but lunch and assistants?”) and even buttoned-down Wall Streeters are ripping out cuff-links and collar stays (with Citigroup giving employees cut-rate discounts at J. Crew and Banana Republic to ease the fashion crisis) to keep the best and brightest from alighting at the mere mention of the words “suitless in SoHo.”

Yet it seems it’s going to take more than Birkenstocks in the publishing boardroom to keep the book biz solvent in human capital. Full-time jobs at new media companies in New York City soared 151% to 104,665 last year, according to a study prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the New York New Media Association. Full-time publishing jobs, by comparison, drifted up just 5% to about 59,000. And Internet firms in the city cavalierly predict a 37% annual increase in the number of industry jobs through the year 2002, presumably with or without the Nasdaq’s cooperation. In other words, you can bet the cherry-picking of old-media talent isn’t going to let up anytime soon.

Living La Vida Loca?

“They drink a lot more coffee in Silicon Alley,” was how one dot-commer proudly summed up the cultural gulf between his erstwhile book publishing career and the terminally buzzed e-conomy lifestyle. And then there’s that certain je ne sais quoi of the startup experience, wonderfully evoked in another deserter’s tale of bumping into a publishing colleague last seen in a Condé Nast cubicle. “I feel like you just ran away with a 22-year-old boy!” the colleague stammered, blushing at the sight of the deserter’s standard-issue black leather pants.

“You really have to have a certain personality to want to work for a dot-com startup,” says Karen Kelly, former editorial director of Rodale imprint Daybreak who ended up at Careerbay.com last December. “There’s no status quo. There’s no infrastructure. You have to be ready to roll with the punches.” And the flip side of not having “to worry about stepping on someone’s toes who’s been there for 50 years,” as she says, is a delirious experience of freedom: “When you have an idea, you can run with it. You get to do a lot more innovating.” Now vp and publisher for the site, Kelly recalls swooning the minute she heard the company president’s do-or-die motto: “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.”

We’re not in Midtown anymore, Toto. “I’m impressed at how much responsibility is given to young and intelligent people,” adds Ted Hill, the 39-year-old publisher at Macmillan Digital Reference who left to become director of business development for About.com last July. Having made the leap, he says, going back to trade publishing would be like living on Neptune. “We don’t talk the same language,” Hill says of his former publishing colleagues. “In publishing, it’s sell-through. Here, it’s all about monetizing page views, RPMs [revenue per thousand impressions], and stickiness.” Despite his bullpen-style office and the sometimes grueling hours (“I’ve got newborn twins at home, and I’m still working 11-hour days.”) the new job still beats publishing hands down. “We’re working in an arena where you can conceive, launch, and develop a successful business in three months,” Hill says. “You can’t even get an editor to review a manuscript and buy it in that amount of time.”

“Say no to slo-mo” could also be the motto at VitaminShoppe.com, where former Workman e-publishing director Anne Kostick was hired as director of content development. “There’s a stately procession of business in publishing from season to season, from advance to pub date to drop ship to reorder to remainder,” she says. “None of that applies to ecommerce.” And compared to publishing, the whole gestalt of the web world is more like a crash course in chaos theory. “Book publishing is very linear,” Kostick says. “First you do something, and then someone else does something, and eventually the book reaches the customer. Site development is far more of a simultaneously collaborative effort.”

Others are just pumped to take their crack at global domination. “I work for a company that really sets the rules,” says Ina Gottinger, senior director of market development for Fatbrain.com. “That gives me a kick almost every day.” Gottinger, who worked in trade publishing for 12 years and was most recently director of marketing for S&S Online, decamped to San Francisco when the retailer offered her the job. Now, despite the two-and-a-half hour commute, and the fact that she logs more hours at her desk than she ever did in New York, Gottinger thrives on the challenge of creating a new market from the ground up. “My job changes almost every day,” she says. “People out here have to adjust their priorities. As for those who like to have a very clear plan, maybe Silicon Valley’s not the place to be.”

The Cats Come Back

Alas, the grass on the other side of 14th Street isn’t always 32-bit, true-color green. “The labor can be menial, the hours endless, and the compensation is about 50% of what I was earning before,” gripes one defector. “One could add that there’s no security, the benefits packages aren’t as good, and the perks have disappeared.” Just ask 31-year-old Colin Dickerman, who was a senior editor at Rob Weisbach Books but found himself out of a job when the imprint was closed following HarperCollins’ purchase of the Hearst books division. He went to content development at self-improvement site dreamlife.com for just six weeks before seeking a better home at book packager Melcher Media.

“Maybe I just picked the wrong one,” he jokes about dreamlife, which recently featured a live e-dieting chat and a primer on how not to get lost in love. More seriously, he says, his experience indicates that many Internet sites lavish attention on the business and technical side, relegating editorial matters to an afterthought. “Content is the last thing some of these places think about,” he explains, “and that is certainly reflected in the budgets they create.” For Dickerman, the buzz of working for a startup wasn’t enough to make those secrets to healthy eating worth his while. He realized he could stay involved with meaningful content in the publishing world, but retain the freedom to work on a wide range of projects by joining a small, vibrant publisher such as Melcher.

What’s in store for the larger houses? “Publishers should definitely be worried about this,” says Mike Delisle, vp of new media for Management Recruiters International. “What they have to do is start recognizing how valuable people are. They have to focus on skill-set development and managerial mentoring. Obviously, people at dot-coms have a better opportunity to be closer to where things are happening. Those opportunities are not communicated to the rank and file at large organizations.” Random House, for its part, is beginning to see the light. “Our recruitment and retention efforts are a priority of enormous importance to us,” says spokesperson Stuart Applebaum, “and one that Random House CEO Peter Olson has personally taken an interest in.” Initiatives on the table include a close look at salaries (managers say they’ve been told to offer $30,000 starting salaries as of July 1), training programs, and mentoring opportunities. And at the Random sales conference on May 2, Olson is expected to beg executives for creative strategies to keep employees from hitting the ejector button. Moreover, such high-flying rhetoric is being translated into practice. One Random staffer, who attempted to flee but was lured back with a counteroffer she couldn’t resist, says the company has indeed vowed to “think outside of the box.”

In the end, the best way for publishers to give employees the freedom they crave may be to spin off their own dot-com shops, à la the New York Times Company’s New York Times Digital division, or Macmillan USA’s InformIT portal, focused on IT professionals. It would at least keep many in publishing from facing the dilemma expressed in an email from one Random employee who got away: “I felt increasingly that I was being forced to choose between doing the same-old, same-old at a trade house at a time when trade houses may become less and less relevant, and, on the other hand, an industry that had a future.” Or, as About.com’s Ted Hill concludes, “There are a lot of challenges to the Internet, but at least they’re new ones.”

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Book View, May 2000

By PT Editors
May 1, 2000
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As PowerfulMedia’s Inside.com launches in the next week(s), look for Publishing Trends columns, which will run periodically during the month.

PEOPLE


Maureen Golden is leaving Workman Publishing at the end of May, after less than nine months in the company. Golden was previously at B&N. . . Also leaving in late May is Paula Duffy, who has been Publisher of The Free Press for the last three years, to become Director of the University of Chicago Press effective August 1. Meanwhile Senior Editor Paul Golob is leaving The Free Press to join the staff of The New York Times as an editor on the op-ed page. His responsibilities will include assigning, soliciting, and editing pieces to appear in the NYT. Ever since it became known that Doreen Carvajal was leaving the Times book beat for the culture desk and that Dave Smith was looking for a replacement, it seems as though she’s been writing more than ever. When called for an update, Smith gave a jovial “no comment.” . . . Steve Zeitchik will be leaving PW Daily and moving to San Francisco to be an editor at the Industry Standard.

Michael Fragnito, most recently at Viking Penguin, has gone to B&N to oversee ebooks. Meanwhile, Christopher Sweet was named Editor in Chief of Viking Studio. He was previously Executive Editor. . . Lisa Rasmussen has been appointed President and Publisher of Dorchester Publishing. She was previously Director of Sales at Avon.

Frances Coady, who is currently running Picador UK, will be the new chief of Picador US (subject to a green card, presumably), replacing George Witte. . . Angus Killick has been named VP Marketing for the Penguin Putnam Young Readers Division, replacing Audrey Cusson, who has left to run a bookstore in Woodstock, NY (see PT 4/00). He recently joined the company, after working for DK Ink. Sandee Yuen, former Associate Director of Publicity at Doubleday, has been named Director of Marketing and Publicity at Bloomsbury USA. . . Tony Chirico has been appointed to the newly created position of EVP, COO of the Knopf Publishing Group, giving him a greater role in the group’s imprints. He was previously EVP, Director of Operations. . . Libby McGuire was named Publishing Manager at Little Random. She was national Accounts Manager at S&S. . . .

Steven Sussman, most recent of Exley Giftbooks, has established Sonschein Sales with Paul Sheinberg of Granddreams. They will be selling 30 proprietary titles into the retail marketplace for display marketer DSMaxx. They will also represent titles from Tormont and Robert Frederick, as well as Granddreams and their own imprint, Better Than Broccoli Books, and have established their own sales force and will service all levels of retail (mass market, drugstores, traditional trade, etc.).

VIRTUAL PEOPLE


Long time Amazon.com fixture, and now mom-to-be Mary Engstrom Morouse has left the company. Meanwhile, Carl Gish, formerly general manager (with Libby Johnson McKee) of books has moved on to consumer electronics. Libby is sailing around the world with her husband. Lyn Blake has taken over the books business and, sources tell us, is doing a great job. Speaking of sources, the Daily News reports that Jeff Bezos has bought an apartment on Central Park West, NYC, for a modest $7.5 mil.

Jack Hoeft, former CEO of Bantam Doubleday Dell, is now President and CEO of MedHelp.com, a b2b site in the healthcare field. . . Becky Michaels, asst Dir of Advertising and Promotion at Little Brown has just resigned to join perksforyou.com, which launches in August. . . Justin Schwartz, formerly of HarperCollins, has become Senior Editor at Lechters.com, the offshoot of the housewares store whose CEO is now David Cully from B&N. . . David Hisbrook is at Xlibris. He was most recently at B&N.

DEALS


Hyperion’s Leigh Haber topped Ballantine in an auction for the novel Carter Beats the Devil, which agent Susan Golomb sold for a cool $687,500 . . . Co-authors Matt Drudge and Julia Phillips engineered their $300,000 deal with NAL’s Louise Burke by themselves, as, according to Phillips, their agents didn’t “get” it. Sources from the house reportedly said the ms was “too hip, too funny” (although the reader admitted not being familiar with The Drudge Report). Also rumored is a minimum 50,000 first printing with the in-house assertion that it should be a LOT higher as pub date approaches and the terrible twosome bring their own marketing skills to bear. . . .

The Rights Report says Ebury Press will publish a book by Mark McCrum on Castaway 2000, the original BBC television series about a group of volunteers who spend a year on the remote island of Taransay. The series has a UK viewership of nine million, and is the model for several US shows being spawned on equally remote islands. Julian Alexander at Lucas Alexander Whitley sold the book for a “six figure” sum.

Holt’s Denise Cronin reports that after Stacy Schiff won the Pulitzer for Vera, UK rights to Ben Franklin in Paris, Schiff’s next magnum opus, have been sold to Bloomsbury. There were seven publishers in the auction, which ended with four of them submitting sealed bids, with Bloomsbury topping them all.

DULY NOTED


As though buying A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for the most $$ Vintage has ever paid for a reprint ($1.4 mil.) weren’t enough, Marty Asher, Editor in Chief of Vintage, now gets to experience being a Knopf publishee. His own novel, Boomer, comes out May 10, with a first run of 25,000, and second serial rights have already been sold to Modern Maturity (no joke — they claim a readership of 20 million). A tour is planned, and in New York and Chicago Asher will be joined by Chip Kyd, who designed and illustrated the book. It is, btw, a must see/must read. . .

Books Update from NYTimes.com is a new email that will be sent out weekly to registrants. The email includes NYTBR highlights, book-related news, and links to book-related features at nytimes.com (audio interviews with authors, first chapters, etc.), and will include information about new books coming into the stores. Register at http://email. nytimes.com.

Themestream hopes to be the Internet’s source for articles, information, and gear related to consumers’ personal interests. Part vanity epublisher, part clipping service, and part etailer (hence the “gear”), the site claims to have 1,700 topic areas. It’s got close ties to Netscape (the management team came from there), and S&S as an early content source.

PARTIES


Francine Prose celebrated the publication of her new novel — an academic satire called Blue Angel (yes, like the movie, which plays a role in the plot) — at, where else, the University Club. Our correspondent writes that Prose was surrounded by a host of media types — Vanity Fair’s Wayne Lawson, Elle’s Pat Tower, the TBR’s Michael Anderson, The Daily News’ Celia McGee, Inside.com’s Sara Nelson — as well as authors Patricia Bosworth, Honor Moore, A.M. Homes, and Robert Polito. Notable in her absence was Prose’s longtime editor Sarah Bershtel — well, longtime until agent Denise Shannon moved Prose to Robert Jones of HarperCollins. Prose’s numbers have apparently improved dramatically.

MAZELTOV


To Wendy Weil, on a Big Birthday, and many more to come! The agent who boasts among her authors Alice Walker and Fannie Flagg celebrated in style with a party which included clients and friends. And happy birthday to agent Robin Straus, also celebrating an important decade (not the same one, though) in style.

WE DIDN’T KNOW WE NEEDED THEM


Four technologies we discovered in April: HP’s PocketPC Jornada, the newly introduced Palm-sized Windows CE-run handheld. The Clear Type we’ve been hearing so much about makes reading a breeze. . . Unlike earlier iterations, the CardScan 500 for Palm Pilots and PCs picks up data accurately, and displays it in the original format in the electronic rolodex it creates in your PC. However, when you want to transfer it to your handheld, the data is reformatted to conform to that program’s fields. . . Vindigo is a free application that was created with the NYT’s online site, New York Today. Download this to your Palm Pilot and every time you hot sync, info on restaurants, movies, shopping, etc. is updated. . . Publisherslunch.com was launched this month by Michael Cader of Cader Books, with useful links to the book pages of newspapers and magazines; publishing stories; and top news items. There are, however, some egregious typos, including the misspelling of the publishing industry’s trade journal, listed here as “Publishers Weakly.”

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Authors Take to the Web

By PT Editors
May 1, 2000
Comments Off on Authors Take to the Web

“You can’t get yourself on Oprah,” says Carol Fitzgerald of the Book Report Network, “but you can get yourself on the web.” And that’s the business plan in a nutshell of three new ventures — AuthorsOnTheWeb.com, PreviewPort.com, and YourNextBook.com — aiming to bring authors and audiences together on a browser near you. Without further ado, here’s a brisk tour through this trio of slightly differing business models.

Fitzgerald’s AuthorsOnTheWeb.com is the “Internet design and marketing division” of the Book Report Network (which includes bookreporter.com and teenreads.com, among others), and will develop distinct, branded sites for individual authors, to be paid for by author, agent, or publisher. Fees run from $300 plus a $50/month maintenance charge (special charter prices) to $7500 or more for the site of your dreams, including options for trivia games, reader comments, a community leader, and the like. The idea is to make information about an author’s backlist readily accessible to the public, regardless of who published the books. Plans also call for a yellow pages–style “vortal” for publishing and authors on the web, reading group guides, advice for writers — not to mention a premium partner relationship with Amazon.

PreviewPort.com, by contrast, is a more centralized collection of author sites founded by Susan Bergman, and will give authors free pages or have them plunk down cash for more elaborate sites. Partnerships with the likes of S&S, FSG, and Holt will help highlight newly released books, while a business alliance with iCopyright.com will support downloadable content (articles, stories, poems, e-books, etc.), for which permissions will be cleared and fees seamlessly collected from the public. An online bookstore known as Cargo will sell books in multiple formats, including print, audio, and e-books, available for shipping or downloading as desired. Those authors maintaining a “Deluxe Portfolio” will also have the special capability to sell reprints of their shorter works directly from their sites.

Lastly, YourNextBook.com aims to create a kind of virtual authors’ pavilion of distinct authors’ pages. “Authors are our partners, not our clients,” says founder Joshua Horwitz, and YourNextBook aspires to be a frictionless interface for authors and readers. As part of the deal, an author who signs on to have a site developed on the YourNextBook network will receive an equity stake in the company, plus a share in the revenue, which will come from advertising. The site is expected to operate independently of publishers, and will link to booksellers, with no particular preference for which bookseller makes the sale (though indies will be specially courted). As noted elsewhere, a somewhat eyebrow-raising feature of the site will be an emphasis on authors’ book picks, whereby authors will be asked to provide annotated lists of recommendations, with royalties paid to the author on any sale that originates from their page, whether it be that author’s work or, say, a friend’s book that they happened to recommend. All of which inexorably brings to mind that timeless reviewers’ refrain: You plug my book, and I’ll plug yours.

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