Books vs. reviewers, in pictures
One of a book publicist’s jobs is to get reviews for books. Which is tricky these days, what with the shrinking book sections (accompanied by shrinking staffs). According to an April post on GalleyCat, traditional publishing houses published almost 300,000 books in 2009. Now count the number of book reviews in your local newspaper. Or on your favorite book blog.
This isn’t news, of course. We’ve all known for years that book sections were getting leaner. But the other day, Murderati had a post by Tess Gerritsen about what book editors are up against and I thought it was really informative and fun because she took some photos. Gerritsen visited the offices of The Philadelphia Inquirer, where an editor told her that the newspaper receives 800 books for review consideration every month. Once the book department has weeded out the books they won’t cover, this is their “under consideration” pile.
And then I found more photos.
Over at the Dallas Morning News, book editor @mmerschel tweeted that he receives about 400 books a week. Which means that if he neglects shelving books for a couple weeks, this is what happens.
These books are under consideration for coverage at I Just Finished and Stimulating Conversation: shelf 1 and shelf 2.
And these are awaiting review at Linus’s Blanket.
Every Day I Write the Book, with several “to be read” shelves (and piles), already posted lots of photos in “The TBR Pile in Pictures.” (Her friends call her bedroom “the bookstore.”)
The upside is that book editors and bloggers LOVE. BOOKS. Their efforts to champion books and reading are much valued by those of us in the publishing industry. But as the pictures illustrate all too well, there are a lot of us and not a lot of them, and that can create log jams.
One day, all (or at least most) galleys probably will be available electronically (as well as in print for those reviewers who prefer hard copies of books), searchable not only by publication date, book title and author name but also by genre and key word / phrase. (Netgalley is a service that provides electronic galleys and has signed up several publishers as partners, but it’s been slow going.) Book catalogs too will also be available online one day (and also searchable by publication date, title, author, genre, key word, etc.) If reviewers can quickly, easily and securely search for what they want, that will obviate the need for book publicists to send out thousands of books — most of which end up discarded.
But until then, book reviewers, feel free to send me pictures of your “to be read” piles / shelves / bins / rooms and I will add them to the Flickr set. Also, what are publicists doing (with regards to book mailings) that you love / hate? And what do you think about electronic catalogs and galleys? Would you use them? Have you used them and what do you think?
Comments can be posted below or sent (with or without photos) to bookpublicityblog[at]gmail[dot]com. (Let me know if you’d like your photos and / or comments to be anonymous.)
Morning Brief — Wednesday, April 22
I’m trying not to gripe so much (what can I say — I’m a complainer) so today I’m just linking to a few fun (and informative) posts.
Allan Mott from Bookgasm provides an amusing “analysis” of books vs. Kindles in Paper or Plastic?: The Books vs. Kindle Showdown.
Via Booksquare, Joanna Penn from The Creative Penn introduces us to The Publishing Quadrant: Where do you belong?
And you must check out this priceless photo from Moonrat over at Editorial Ass.
The ebook question
As a book publicist, I spend a fair amount of time pondering ebooks. Will ebooks really catch on? (For all the talk about ebooks, anecdotally, I’d say pretty much, well, no one actually owns an ereader.) How much should publishers charge for them? Will the “iTunes of ebooks” emerge or will we still be reading ebooks in half a dozen formats? Will publishers continue to struggle with DRM (Digital Rights Management) to protect files from being pirated or will we throw caution to the wind? When will book publicists be able to promote upcoming titles with egalleys and ebooks? How do booksellers feel about ebooks? Why can you preorder thousands of (tree) books on Amazon, but when it comes to Kindle books — which would seem like natural candidates for preorders — only 118 not-yet-published titles are available? These are the issues that keep me up at night. (Actually, nothing keeps me up at night as my college roommate will attest, but that line sounded good.)
At any rate, these are the issues that are keeping a lot of people up during the day. Last week on Talk of the Nation, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg debated the cultural effect of the Kindle. And All Things Considered considered DRM. On Monday, Oxford University Press executive Evan Schnittman (quoted in the ATC story) posted about the economics of ebook publishing on his new blog Black Plastic Glasses and tackled a question oft bandied about by ebook fanatics: why aren’t ebooks free? The piece was picked up in short order by Teleread and GalleyCat and garnered dozens of comments.
Meanwhile, as publishers and readers work through the thorny issues that have hamstrung digital publishing — and while we all await Apple’s rumored ereader — don’t forget your Smell of Books. (And no, this is not an April’s Fools Joke. Or is it.)
The future is (maybe) now
Yesterday, after a 15K race, a hair cut (apparently my cut hair weighs 0.6 pounds, thank you very much) and an unfulfilled trip to Best Buy’s Geek Squad (Apple is looking better and better), I was lazing about on the couch, catching up on old episodes of Gossip Girl and 24 (yes — I watch both shows, which I realize is only slightly less bizarre than admitting I was riveted by both the series finale of Battlestar Galactica and the world premiere of Nora Robert’s Northern Lights). I was, at the same time, attempting to sort through the stories in my RSS reader (which numbered 11,000+ a couple days ago. Apparently it might not be such a good idea to try to follow more than 300 blogs when you’re holding a full-time job that does not consist of following blogs.)
Over the past month, Teleread, my favorite ebook blog, has posted numerous pieces about the new Kindle, Amazon’s iPhone Kindle application, the Sony / Google partnership and more. It hit me, as I read one of their stories about digital newspapers, that this is something we fantasized about years ago. When Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban opened in 2004, we oohed and ahed over The Daily Prophet, delivered to magicians (in real time and with “flash,” i.e., animation, to boot) on a piece of parchment. Experts predicted we’d have that soon too — news delivered daily on a tablet screen. Welcome to the Kindle. Or the New York Times application for the iPhone. How fast time flies.
Speaking of flying, for those of you new to the Twitter scene, some fellow by the name of James Bridle is at least a year ahead of you: he’s published My Life in Tweets. Then there’s the Twitter story begun a week ago, featuring dragons (as best I can tell).
We’re at a crossroads in book publishing — ereaders are gaining popularity, yet digital publishing is bogged down by pricing, format and DRM (Digital Rights Management) issues. On the publicity end, reviewers are beginning to ask for electronic review copies and publishing houses are starting to work with companies like NetGalley, yet the process of getting ebooks to reviewers remains cumbersome and plagued with fears that electronic material can easily be pirated. (Providing reviewers with ebooks does not simply save time, money and space — ebooks can also facilitate the review process since they are searchable.) Faced with both improved and increasingly accepted technology on the one hand, as well as thorny distribution issues on the other, now is the time for authors, publishing houses and journalists to collaborate — to share ideas and suggestions so we all can continue to promote reading and literature.
Talking and tweeting
Yesterday evening I attended the Women’s National Book Association’s Book Marketing on the Web panel. (Recap here.) It was an informative discussion, with the panelists highlighting the importance of authenticity and knowledge. Panelist Fauzia Burke of FSB Associates pointed out that online publicity / marketing is incredibly time consuming because pitches must be personalized for blogs and websites, which is one of the reasons why author Abby Stokes advised authors to take on (at least some) of the responsibility of promoting their books.
Content aside, the panel was interesting for couple reasons. At the start of the discussion, the moderator had announced a Twitter hash tag for those people who might be live tweeting the event. I whipped out my phone, but felt a little awkward since most of the audience seemed to be, well, just listening. I sure was tickled, though, when it became apparent that not one, but two of the panelists were themselves tweeting! Now that’s what I call multi-tasking. Both Ron Hogan of Beatrice.com and Kelly Leonard who heads up the Online Marketing department at the Hachette Book Group, monitored — and contributed to — the Twitter stream, but never missed a beat in the offline conversation. (I’d definitely need practice to do this.) They were able to get real-time feedback from both audience members who were tweeting, as well as from people not in the audience who were “listening in.” Who needs a live feed when you can just follow the Twitter stream?
A second issue of note came mid-way through the panel, when the talk turned to ereaders and Peter Costanzo from the Perseus Books Group took out his second-generation Kindle and passed it around. So despite the hype, despite Oprah, despite this being a room full of hardcore readers and writers, the Kindle is still an uncommon enough device (due in no small part to its outrageous price, I’m sure) that it merited a show-and-tell. Still, the march of the ereaders continues: today Sony is expected to announce a deal with Google that gives Reader users access to a half million books in the public domain.
Amazon, Kindle and iPhones! Oh, my!
I was scrolling through my New York Times yesterday morning when lo! Amazon releasing a Kindle application for the iPhone? With alacrity I set about downloading said app — a painfully slow process, what with the wonky Edge in the concrete bunker of an auditorium in which I was sitting.
On the subway ride home, I tested out my Phindle. Although I found it amusing that I could simultaneously enjoy Kanye and Stephanie Meyer on the very same device (and by “simultaneously enjoy” I mean “be equally distracted by” since I can’t quite imagine how Bella swooning over Edward makes us harder, better, faster, stronger), it’s no Kindle killer. For the iPhone users among you, it’s adequate and convenient, but pages must be turned with a flick and you can’t view them horizontally. Plus, the iPhone battery is, well, an iPhone battery. Still, I’m guessing that somewhere at Apple heads are rolling.
As a human being, ebooks interest me because I live and die by my gadgets. As a book publicist, I want to know more because I’m starting to get more requests from journalists for review copies of books in an electronic format. I would love to shoot off PDFs of our books to reviewers — saving time and money — but that of course raises the concern that nefarious deeds could be committed with a PDF easily resaved as text.
Sarah from Soho Press blogged the other week about emailing a book to a reviewer. As Sarah points out, this saves loads of time, money and trees. Not to mention space — some of the massive tomes we publish are simply begging to be categorized under “Weapon, lethal.”
As a book publicist, how do you feel about distributing ebooks to reviewers rather than mailing hard copies? As a journalist, would you want the flexibility of an electronic copy of a book? For those book publicists who have sent out ecopies of books (or for those folks who have provided free downloads of a book in an attempt to promote it), how do you ensure the book — or large parts of it — cannot be easily reproduced? Do you care? Weigh in at will.
***
Yesterday when I updated my list of freelance book publicists, I did (or didn’t do) something idiotic and a lot of people couldn’t access the document. I’ve made a change so this revised revised list should be viewable whether or not you have a Google account or are signed in. Also, if you haven’t already seen it, Bella Stander maintains a list of freelancers too. Her list is smaller because she only lists people with whom she has worked (and whose work she recommends). I took the other route and listed everyone who submitted information, so I think you get the best of both worlds.
EBooks — promotion and reviews
There’s been plenty of talk about eBooks over the past few months (years), but between klunky readers and the half dozen eBook formats, they’ve gotten off to a rocky start. Leave it to Oprah to up the ante. (For anyone who’s been living under a rock, Oprah announced on Friday that the Kindle has “changed her life.”)
On the review side, GalleyCat ruminates on digital book review sites, i.e., sites devoted to reviewing eBooks, and the possibility of an IMDB for books.
All Book Marketing talks about promoting eBooks — do you guest blog? Place ads? Comment on related blogs to drive traffic to your book / site?
Morning Brief — Monday, July 14
I saw Hancock this weekend (pretty much what you would expect — fun) but I particularly got a kick out of the fact that Hancock gets a makeover by a PR guy. I’ve never sent an author to jail (nor have I ever sent one on tour in spandex) but it was still amusing.
***
The New York Times reports that NPR will be cancelling The Bryant Park Project as of July 25.
***
Galleycat reports that ebook sales are on the rise.
***
Robert Gray from Fresh Eyes Now talks about (a random selection of) book groups.
Do free ebooks increase book sales?
Recently, several houses including HarperCollins, Random House and St. Martin’s Press have tried giving out free ebooks. The jury seems to be out on whether this move affects sales and if so, by how much. Today, TeleRead posts some feedback from a couple Tor authors about how they feel their free ebooks affected hard copy sales.
