When the editors of the trade publication Publisher's Weekly announced their list of the 10 best books of the year on Monday, outrage flared across the Internet: Not a single book by a woman made the cut. Comments on P.W.'s Web site likened the list to "a flier tacked to the wall at a men's club," and the fledging feminist literary organization WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) set up a wiki page inviting visitors to add titles to a list of "great books by women" published in 2009.
And of course there was a Twitter hashtag (#fembooks) for those who wanted to express their displeasure in real time. Tweeters pointed out that women buy the majority of books sold in the U.S. and usually make up about half of the authors on any given New York Times Bestseller list. Others complained that classic novels by men get trumpeted as "must reads" while those by women are often pooh-poohed by male readers as "not to my taste." Charlotte Abbott, a literary journalist, floated the idea of an American version of Britain's Orange Prize, which goes to the author of the year's "best full-length novel in English." (American novelists are eligible for the Orange Prize; Marilynne Robinson won it last year for "Home.") That suggestion was greeted with a mixture of enthusiasm and worries about "ghettoization."
What's at issue isn't sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper's magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation's literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that "women writers will not write about anything important -- anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise."
Explaining P.W.'s list, editor Louisa Ermelino wrote, "We wanted [it] to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration ... We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the 'big' books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male." Yet, according to Miami Herald blogger Connie Ogle, Ermelino sounded less apologetic when quoted in a press release, characterizing the list as not "the most politically correct."
Anyone who's ever had to compile such a list -- and admittedly, there aren't many of us -- will feel an awkward sympathy for the P.W. team. Two years ago, while settling on Salon's picks for the year's best works of fiction, we wound up with five novels by men. This dilemma precipitated a lot of soul-searching, only partially soothed by the reminder that most years the majority of the books on our fiction list are by women authors. Should we swap out one of the titles by a man for another we liked less, simply because it was by a woman? The WILLA wiki implies that the editors of P.W. simply didn't bother to read books by Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro when selecting their list, but that's highly unlikely. Chances are that they (like me) didn't think the Lorrie Moore novel and many others posted to the wiki were up to snuff. Something similar happened at Salon when it came to the fiction of 2007. In the end, unable to find books by women that we liked better than those five novels, we opted for honesty, which we consider the critic's first responsibility.
Without tipping our hand, I'll merely say that it's unlikely Salon will suffer the drubbing P.W. has endured when we run our own 10-best list in early December. But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that's ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That's a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.
On the other hand, few things are more subjective than judgments about how "great" any given book is. Those real, long-standing cultural biases mentioned above live in the heart of every critic to one degree or another, and we'd be shirking our duty if we didn't try to account for them. Writing off such qualms as mere "political correctness" is, in its own way, just as dishonest as exaggerating your admiration for a book simply because its author is female, or dark-skinned, or from a far-off nation. I don't doubt that P.W.'s editors are entirely sincere when they say their list reflects their unvarnished preferences. Still, the fact that those preferences can't encompass one woman author among 10 books (fiction or nonfiction) picked from the 50,000-plus titles they claim to have sifted through suggests that their horizons might need a bit of deliberate widening.
Fortunately, most years bring enough good books that we're able to choose from a fairly diverse array of candidates. If we adore two novels (or histories, or biographies) to about the same degree, we do take factors like an author's gender or the size of the book's publisher into account -- the same way we try to maintain a mix of literary tones and moods, from the slim, intensely personal memoir to the majestic and well-footnoted doorstop. The key question remains, is the quality of our final list diminished by those decisions, or enriched by them? We like to think that, like us, most readers appreciate some variety in their literary diets.
Over the weekend, a momentous game of chicken took place in the book industry. As the dust clears, it looks like the world will be a much less friendly place for Amazon.com's e-reader device, the Kindle.
After negotiations on e-book pricing between Amazon and publisher Macmillan broke down on Thursday, Amazon retaliated by removing all Kindle editions of Macmillan books from its online store. It even went so far as to stop direct sales of the print editions of Macmillan titles, as well. (Customers could still buy the print books via Amazon, but only through third-party sellers and without the minimum-order shipping discounts and other benefits of buying directly from Amazon.) Sunday night, a posting from Amazon's "Kindle Team" announced that the company would capitulate to Macmillan's demands, but as of this writing, you still can't buy such bestsellers as Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" or Robert Jordan's "The Gathering Storm" from Amazon in either Kindle or print editions.
This dust-up is the culmination of a long-standing feud between Amazon and book publishers. What triggered it, however, is something new: the introduction of Apple's iPad.
Publishers have hated the Kindle since it was introduced because they believe Amazon is using its clout to artificially force down the price of e-books. Amazon retails the Kindle editions of new releases, bestsellers and many other books for a standard price of $9.99 -- which is less than it pays for them itself. Amazon takes a loss on the books, presumably in order to sell more Kindles, and also, most likely, to cement its dominance of the e-reader market. Publishers have long assumed that, once Amazon has the Kindle locked in as the default e-reader and has accustomed buyers to that $10 price point, the company could compel publishers to lower their wholesale prices on e-books.
What's changed is that Apple has agreed to sell e-books through its forthcoming iBooks store according to what's known as an "agency model," much like selling on commission. Publishers will get to set the price of books -- from $5.99 to $14.99, with new "hardcover" releases ranging from $12.99 to $14.99 -- and the retailer will take 30 percent. Under this arrangement, as John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, pointed out in a statement, the retailer stands to make more money off the sale of an e-book than Amazon is making now, and the publisher makes less. Book publishers are willing to accept -- no, advocate for -- this for a couple of reasons: They want more control over the value of their product and the prospect of an Amazon lock on the e-book market makes them very, very nervous.
However, Amazon refused to consider switching to such an arrangement. Macmillan retorted that in that case it would jolly well subject its e-books to "extensive and deep windowing." This means that the e-book versions of new titles would be released months after the hardcover, as was the case with Sarah Palin's memoir and Stephen King's "Under the Dome" last fall. Whereupon Amazon pulled all Macmillan titles from its store, print included, thereby dragging even those customers with no interest in e-books into the fray
Watching this news wend its way through various niches of the Internet has been fascinating in its own right. If you happen to keep up with Web sites and Twitter feeds affiliated with authors and publishers, you'll mostly see cheering for Macmillan and Sargent. He maintains that he is defending the "long-term viability and stability of the digital book market," which is in danger of seeing the value of its products gutted as a loss leader to sell gadgets. Discussions in geek-oriented Web sites accuse Macmillan of bully-boy price fixing.
How to make sense of this? Here are a few things, not all of them widely understood, to consider:
You're not really paying for an object. Most consumers believe that e-books should be a lot cheaper than print books because the publisher has been spared the expense of paper, printing, binding and shipping/distribution. However, only about 20 percent of the cover price of a new hardcover goes to those costs: about $5 out of $25. Retailers take from 40 to 50 percent, and after that, the majority of the cost of a new book goes to author royalties, editing, design, marketing, publicity, overhead and so on. But these elements aren't material or tangible, and as a result, consumers seem to be skeptical about their true worth. Or, more to the point, their value now seems to be unstable. By comparison, when iTunes was first introduced a decade ago, hardly anyone believed that most of what they paid for when buying a CD went toward manufacturing the little silver disk and its plastic case.
Nobody knows how many Kindles are out there. Or, rather, only Amazon knows. The closest it's come to revealing actual sales figures is a remark Jeff Bezos recently made about "millions" of Kindle users. Steve Jobs once said that the market for dedicated e-readers (devices used solely for reading) was too small to interest Apple. The fact that Amazon punished Macmillan by squeezing sales of print books as well as e-books suggests that cutting off the publisher's e-book sales alone couldn't cause sufficient pain.
IPads could well convert large numbers of people to e-books. Most of the tablets will be sold to people who plan to use them for watching video, browsing the Web, listening to music and checking e-mail -- not for reading books. But once they've got the thing, the barrier to checking out the e-book feature is relatively low. I bought my iPod, for example, to listen to music and podcasts, and only later discovered the audiobook-download retailer, Audible. Today, audiobooks are the main thing I buy for my iPod, and I'd never paid much attention to them before that. To read a Kindle edition of a book, on the other hand, you'd have to be an e-book convert already -- enthusiastic enough to fork over $250 for a Kindle right out of the gate. And you'll have to buy a lot of $10 e-books to make up the cost of the device in savings off hardcover prices.
Actually, you can read Kindle books on other devices. True. I've read them on my iPhone. But how long will Amazon be willing to subsidize my smart-phone reading if it knows it can't sell enough Kindles to pay for the loss it's taking on $10 e-books? While Amazon claims to be motivated purely by a desire to provide consumers with low prices, its altruism will probably not extend past that point.
Not all Kindle books cost $9.99. A paperless copy of "Developments in Structural Engineering" by B.H.V. Topping will set you back a cool $496. Other titles cost pennies or nothing at all because they're in the public domain or because their publishers hope that a (temporary) giveaway will ignite word-of-mouth recommendations or stimulate sales of books by the same author. Other Kindle editions cost about the same as the print version, and I've even heard of some (unsubstantiated) sightings of Kindle editions that cost more.
Reports of the Macmillan/Amazon clash prompted a lot of tirades along the lines of "most books aren't even worth $10," but this assertion is fairly meaningless. The Topping book costs 50 times more than the Kindle edition of "Wolf Hall" (if you could still buy the Kindle edition of "Wolf Hall), but I wouldn't pay $1 for it, while I'd probably pay more than $10 for "Wolf Hall." Yet some people somewhere are willing to pay 500 bucks for "Developments in Structural Engineering," even if I doubt they're glad to do it.
If the only new books you've ever bought are $7.99 mass market paperbacks, then any e-book priced higher than that will naturally seem exorbitant to you. But in that case, you probably wouldn't be in the market for a hardcover (or a trade paperback) of "Wolf Hall" or "Game Change," either. If you don't especially want a particular book to begin with (and for each individual, this is the case with the vast majority of books), of course it's not going to be worth $10 to you. The current tussle is largely over new, high-profile releases that some people are willing to pay more to read right away.
A person can only read so many books. Ask most people why they don't read more and they'll say it's because they don't have enough time, not because books cost too much. (Which isn't to say they don't wish books were cheaper, it's just not the deciding factor.) Yes, you know this already, but it's worth remembering when observers insist that lower book prices will lead to increased sales. Because, indeed, they will; many of the best-selling titles in the Kindle store are free. The publishers of "Developments in Structural Engineering" would probably sell more copies, too, if they only lowered the price to $1. However, I still wouldn't buy it at that price, and the apparently spectacular costs of producing it are unlikely to be recouped by whatever modest sales increase is triggered by a whopping $495 discount. Few books have a broad enough appeal to be subject to mass-market economics, and so each title has to strike its own balance between cost and price, which is one reason why publishers want to regain their control over prices.
Price may not matter as much as convenience. If I'd convinced myself to spend $250 on a Kindle with the argument that I'd never have to pay more than $10 for a book to read on it, I'd be angry, too -- just like the Kindle owners who complain on Amazon pages whenever titles exceed $9.99. But was saving money on individual books really the main reason they bought the device in the first place? Or was it the ease of getting the books you want right away and being able to carry dozens of them around with you in a lightweight package? If you want to read for free, you can go to the trouble of visiting the library. If you don't mind waiting, you can pick up a used copy of any book for a song. If you're not particular about which books you read -- does anyone fall into this category? -- you can download so many free, self-published titles from Amazon's Kindle store to read on your home computer that you never, ever have to pay for another book again. But if you want exactly what you want when you want it, with minimal effort on your part, you often have to pay a bit more.
Ultimately, if the iPad takes off, the Kindle is in serious trouble. In order to maintain the complete, current selection of titles that is one of its device's great features, Amazon has to be willing to come to terms with publishers. Publishers, eyeing the prospect of millions of new iPad owners -- people who'd never have bought a Kindle, but are game to try out iBooks -- now feel more free to threaten to restrict Amazon's supply of e-books if their terms aren't met. If the iPad offers all (or nearly all) of the convenience of the Kindle, plus color (imagine the graphic novels!) on top of the ability to watch videos, surf the Web and check e-mail, many potential Kindle buyers will be happy to fork over the extra cash for an iPad instead. (If they're penny pinchers they probably wouldn't be thinking of buying a Kindle in the first place.) And without the potential profits from sales of Kindle e-readers to subsidize it, that standard $9.99 price tag is unlikely to last long. Without it, how much is the Kindle itself really worth?
If you read a lot but aren't an author yourself, you're probably unaware of the fact that new books are now supposed to have trailers: video advertisements that are often, but not always, presented in a format similar to a movie preview. In fact, if you're not an author you've probably never even seen a book trailer unless you happen to visit the Web site of a favorite writer or scroll down a book's Amazon page until you stumble over a link to "related media." Yet new and veteran authors are commonly told by publishers and independent publicists that a trailer is now an essential element of any book's marketing campaign.
A visit to a dedicated trailer site like Book Screening or a search for "book trailer" on YouTube reveals just how many of these videos there are, and a random sampling will quickly convey a sense of the low average quality. Typically, a trailer will open with text, fade to a stock photograph or a bit of vague footage (clips of bad weather seem particularly popular, as a metaphor for emotional intensity, no doubt), then back to text and so on. Good voice and acting talent can be expensive, as can effective music, so either the soundtrack comes from a pal strumming lamely on a guitar or it's been "borrowed" from a copyright holder who will, it is hoped, remain none the wiser. Some trailers are so rudimentary they're just a still shot of the cover attached to an audio recording of a live reading. Anything more ambitious can cost the hopeful author as much as $3,000.
The publishing blog Galley Cat has been mulling over the merits of book trailers for a while now, pointing out last year that a video of memoirist Kelly Corrigan reading an essay about breast cancer went viral in late 2008 and helped put the paperback of her book, "The Middle Place," on the New York Times bestseller list. Yet the video -- a home recording of Corrigan reading at a gathering, complete with a barbecue grill in the background -- gives no indication that it's promoting a book until the final frame. (Indeed, the essay Corrigan reads wasn't even in the hardcover edition, which presumably got most of the promotional push.)
Like any number of inspirational and heartwarming speeches that have gone viral, this one has its own independent and self-contained value that just happens to be a slice of the main attraction of "The Middle Place," Corrigan herself. It's not an ad; it's a free sample.
Most authors, however, aren't memoirists, and a clip of an unknown novelist shuffling around his apartment in sweats, tapping on a laptop, is no way to sell, say, a novel about a hacker punkette who helps a disgraced journalist bring down a Swedish billionaire. That's one reason why the trailer for "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is so lame.
Still, it's a masterpiece compared to the snoozer for Kathryn Stockett's "The Help," in which what sounds suspiciously like that same neighbor's guitar noodling accompanies a series of quotes taken from the book's reviews.
Technically, Stockett has a book trailer, but since it's no more than a recap of the book's back-cover blurbs and takes five times longer to read, it hardly counts. Nevertheless, the lack of a kick-ass trailer hasn't kept "The Help" from parking on the bestseller lists for months on end.
True, there are (a few) good book trailers as well as (many) unbelievably wretched ones, but who really chooses a book on the strength of a trailer? The video for Kazuo Ishiguro's recent novella collection, "Nocturnes," is a pleasantly arty short, but it conveys nothing about the experience of reading Ishiguro's work or even the content of that specific title.
Ishiguro's trailer is, however, unlikely to actually repel readers. Genre authors, who tend to get lower advances and less promotional support from their publishers, may have it worst of all when it comes to trailers, especially when their stock in trade is fantasy. Mind-blowing science fiction about nanotechnology or interplanetary travel is pretty hard to reproduce on your Flip HD, and affordable actors seldom measure up to the gorgeous heroines and heroes of romance. As Sarah Wendell, a co-founder of the Web site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and coauthor of "Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels,"
That's a significant risk to take, and for what purpose? It's the rare video that succeeds at making a book look enticing, as the animated trailer for Scott Westerfeld's "Leviathan" certainly does.
And even so, how many readers outside of Westerfeld's devoted fan base are likely to see it? As a general rule, people don't go looking for ads on the Web (unless they're -- inexplicably -- seeking commercials they've already seen and liked on TV). If they are motivated enough to search for Westerfeld's name on YouTube, look his books up on Amazon or seek out his Web site, they've already made it past the most formidable barrier: the crushing obscurity in which the vast majority of authors languish.
The thinking behind book trailers seems to be this: Publishers believe that they are losing readers to YouTube and other forms of visual media and entertainment. They also know that getting their author on TV will sell tons of books. Unfortunately, appearances on "Oprah" and the "Today" show can't be ordered up at will. But if they can turn books into videos, or at least align them more closely to the glorious Shangri-la of television in some way, they might just get the chance to partake of the mass market's bounty. There's a blind faith that book trailers, simply by virtue of being video and a form of new media on top of that, will magically make this possible.
Alas, Web videos are even more numerous than books, and as with books, the vast majority of them go unwatched and uncelebrated. A few manage to command that most mysterious of all magical powers, word of mouth, and become sensations, but that kind of success is as impossible to force as an "Oprah" booking. In the meantime, an author's energies have been funneled into a project that's unlikely to yield many results.
Or perhaps that's the point. Authors invest their dearest hopes in their books, and it can't be easy to tell them that no one really knows a reliable method for making a book a hit. A trailer, at least, is something they can do, and a fun thing at that. Yet it's an irrelevant thing all the same. Ultimately, the better a video is, the more it makes you want to watch more video, and the more it reminds you of what a book can't do, which is ravish us with images, movement and sound. Isn't what a book can do -- allow a reader and writer to build together an immersive, imagined and intimately shared world -- the thing we really ought to be advertising?
Last summer, the publishing house Bloomsbury USA drew substantial criticism for featuring a white girl with long, straight hair on the cover of Australian author Justine Larbalestier's "Liar," a young adult novel about a girl whom the author describes as "black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short." At the time, Larbalestier blogged not only about her own disappointment but about similar examples of cover whitewashing, and the pervasive belief among publishing professionals that "black books don't sell" -an assumption apparently based on the premise that a "black cover" is the primary characteristic distinguishing such books from better selling titles. "Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them," said Larbalestier (adding in a footnote, "And most of those were written by white people"). "Until that happens more often we can't know if it's true that white people won't buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with 'black covers' don't sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with 'white covers.'"
Eventually, after the blog-driven uproar grew loud enough, Bloomsbury changed the cover to better reflect the protagonist's appearance. "I hope that the debate that's arisen because of this cover will widen to encompass the whole industry," Larbalestier wrote, continuing:
I hope it gets every publishing house thinking about how incredibly important representation is and that they are in a position to break down these assumptions. Publishing companies can make change. I really hope that the outrage the US cover of "Liar" has generated will go a long way to bringing an end to white washing covers. Maybe even to publishing and promoting more writers of color.
Apparently, though, the kerfuffle didn't even get Bloomsbury thinking too hard. The same publisher has done it again, releasing Jaclyn Dolamore's "Magic Under Glass" -- the protagonist of which is clearly described as having brown skin -- with a young white woman on the cover. Bloomsbury's fear of losing the white market was evidently greater than their embarrassment over the "Liar" debacle -- unless, of course, what they chiefly learned from the "Liar" debacle is that you don't need to put as much money into publicizing a novel if its packaging is sufficiently controversial (in which case, you're welcome, jerks).
I'd put my money on the former, though. Larbalestier's cover was the first to gain significant attention for whitewashing, but it wasn't the first, and thanks to the enduring strength of the simplistic "covers with people of color don't sell" belief, no one should be surprised it wasn't the last. In an article on race in children's publishing, Mitali Perkins quotes Ursula Le Guin, who said at BookExpo America in 2004, "Even when [my characters] aren't white in the text, they are white on the cover. I know, you don't have to tell me about sales! I have fought many cover departments on this issue, and mostly lost. But please consider that 'what sells' or 'doesn't sell' can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If black kids, Hispanics, Indians both Eastern and Western, don't buy fantasy -- which they mostly don't -- could it be because they never see themselves on the cover?" (Three years later, the advance reading copies of Le Guin's "Powers" were "released with a white model on the cover despite the protagonist's Himalayan ancestry.")
Let's assume for the sake of argument that covers with people of color on them don't sell, and it's only because of the cover images -- not a lack of publicity and marketing support from the publishing house, the books being crappy, the authors being unknown, the booksellers shelving them incorrectly, the sad state of book sales in general, or all of the above. Even if this were a scientifically proven fact, there would still be good reasons for publishers to stop trying to fix the problem with white models. For starters, there's the plain dishonesty of it. That's apparently not a major concern, judging not only by the persistence of cover whitewashing but by the charming words of an anonymous publisher who told critic Jessica Mann that the decision to put a female corpse on the cover of a crime novel with a male victim was made because "Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don't." Since most readers never pay attention to who published any given book, the bait and switch probably has little effect on publishers' credibility, granted -- but you'd think they'd be more concerned with damaging the reputations of authors who supply the basic product. In Larbalestier's case, it was particularly problematic because her protagonist was, as the title suggests, a liar. Nevertheless, she writes, "I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she's a girl, that she's a teenager, that she's black, that she's USian. One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it's led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn't look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles." Of course, authors are a dime a dozen, and those who don't sell -- even because of problems created by the publishing house -- can always be dropped. Still, actively sabotaging your own authors can't make very good business sense, can it?
And beyond that, I'm going to out myself as a Pollyanna and make the radical suggestion that maybe sales numbers aren't the only important factor to consider here. Yeah, I know, faceless corporations, profits, shareholders, blah blah blah. But the decision-makers here are still human beings -- and more important, so are the consumers. In addition to the high probability that publishers have created a self-fulfilling prophecy where covers featuring models of color are concerned, they are hurting people with their current practices. Blogger Ari of Reading in Color writes in an open letter to Bloomsbury:
I'm sure you can't imagine what it's like to wander through the teen section of a bookstore and only see one or two books with people of color on them. Do you know how much that hurts? Are we so worthless that the few books that do feature people of color don't have covers with people of color? It's upsetting, it makes me angry and it makes me sad. Can you imagine growing up as a little girl and wanting to be white because not only do you not see people who look like you on TV, you don't see them in your favorite books either.... Do you know how sad I feel when my middle school age sister tells me she would rather read a book about a white teen than a person of color because "we aren't as pretty or interesting." She doesn't know the few books that do exist out there about people of color because publishing houses like yourself don't put people of color on the covers. And my little brother doesn't even like to read, he wants to read about cool people who look like him, but he doesn't see those books in bookstores and now he rarely reads.
Putting a white person on the cover of a book about a brown-skinned character doesn't merely imply that people of color aren't worth as much to publishers; it pretty much says it outright. Because the only reason to do it is the assumption that a book won't hit its sales target unless white people buy it -- i.e., that white people are the market that really matters. When you look only at the numbers, that's probably true to some extent -- a higher percentage of white people means a bigger pool of potential consumers -- and it's true that white people often don't buy books by and/or about people of color. But I can make an educated guess that one other thing is also true: Books by and/or about white people fail in much larger numbers, if only because so many more of them are published in the first place. And that hasn't stopped publishers from signing up new white authors or putting white models on their book covers.
So really, publishers, if you're so convinced that a book with a dark-skinned heroine won't sell unless readers are tricked into thinking she's white, then just be honest about all of it -- admit that you don't want to risk publishing books about characters of color. Admit that white people are the only audience you really care about. Admit that you don't give a tiny rat's ass about that adolescent girl walking through a bookstore, trying to find a story about someone who looks like her and learning --probably for the umpteenth time that day -- that only white people can be pretty or interesting. But if you're not ready to admit all that, then you need to be putting people of color on covers where appropriate and supporting those books with real publicity and marketing budgets, so they stand a chance of not fulfilling your prophecy of doom.
Meanwhile, as consumers, we can put pressure on publishers to stop engaging in a deceptive, racist and hurtful practice, and explaining it away with a tired axiom that helps create the very problem it defines. Unfortunately, the most obvious protest, a boycott of these titles or Bloomsbury altogether, would hurt innocent authors and reinforce the impression that the market doesn't want books about people of color. But as Anna North at Jezebel suggests, there's no reason not to send a bunch of angry letters. Adds Ari at Reading in Color, "We should keep blogging, emailing, writing about this issue" -- Bloomsbury's been shamed into doing the right thing once before, at least. And as Larbalestier said back in July, perhaps the most important thing we can do -- especially white people, who could easily read nothing but books about ourselves, and far too often take that option -- is prove the prevailing wisdom wrong. "When was the last time you bought a book with a person of colour on the front cover or asked your library to order one for you?" she asks. If you want to see more of them, here's her best advice: "Go buy one right now. "
Unless you’ve been trapped under a very large P.C. for the last year, you’ve likely heard the about Apple’s rumored new tablet device (now being heralded as the “iSlate”). The device is thought to be an 8 (or 10, or 11) inch flat iPod-like gadget that will be a mix between a Mac laptop and a Kindle. Most rumors suggest that it will have a touch interface and video capabilities, and, thanks to today’s Wall Street Journal, it has a likely release date: March. (According to the article, Apple will show it to the public later this month.)
Although anticipation has already reached a fever pitch (just take a look at Twitter’s most popular topics on most days) book publishers have an especially vested interest in the gadget. While there have been numerous electronic book readers coming out in the last year (including the most recent, The Skiff), few have managed to capture the public’s imagination beyond the Amazon Kindle – which hasn’t exactly done much for publishers’ bottom line. Many people in the beleaguered industry are hoping that device will do for reading what the iPod and iTunes did for music. A survey among booksellers claimed that an Apple e-reader would one of the main factors that will help push digital publishing forward.
But will the tablet be the game-changer they’re hoping for? The internet is buzzing with opinions, rumors -- and wishful thinking.
"Contacts in the US tell us Apple is approaching book publishers with a very attractive proposal for distributing their content …. Apple will split revenue 30/70 (Apple/publisher); give the same deal to all comers; and not request exclusivity. We believe the typical Kindle/publisher split is 50/50, rising to 30/70 if Kindle is given ebook exclusivity"
"As innovative as it is, we believe the Kindle has disgruntled the publishing industry (book, newspaper, and magazine) by demanding exclusivity, disallowing advertising, and demanding a wolfish cut of revenue. The tablet is set to change that. It should also make ebooks more relevant for education by simplifying functions such as scribbling marginalia.”
“There is reason to believe that the four-month delay will be a one-off gambit on the part of Schuster and Hachette. Under this theory, the publishers will take advantage of Apple's new tablet, which will coincidentally launch four months into 2010”
"A simple, reliable interface for gaining access to paid content can do amazing things: Five years ago, almost no one paid for music online and now, nine billion or so songs sold later, we know that people are willing to pay if the price is right and the convenience is there."
"Publishers will need to envision multimedia content from the beginning. Once consumers get used to this kind of rich media, they will not be content to read text alone. They certainly won’t pay a premium price for it. They will expect hyperlinks, audio, video, and other multimedia bells and whistles … We will eventually think of [print books] as ‘souvenirs’ (to quote Tim O’Reilly) or decorative artifacts for our home or office. Most people will consume content digitally."
"This is a form of storytelling that needs a tablet. A big, page-sized color screen with lots of resolution and a touch interface for turning pages and navigating from panel to panel."
"As soon as a book includes video, a publishing house becomes a production house and a writer becomes a director/editor. Stephen King's prose might send chills up your spine, but the local cable commercial quality video blurb sitting beside it won't have the budgetary love of a Hollywood flick, at least, not unless Stephen King or somebody else is going to take a paycut (or sell a LOT more books)."
"Once the various tablet devices and smartphones collapse into super-ultralight PCs, the tablet-optimized publications will find themselves regarded by consumers as just another Web site, and the proprietors who thought they had a new, impregnable platform from which to sluice profits will be right back where they started—one site struggling against many."
After 164 years of publishing, Scientific American -- "probably the [United States'] most venerable source of science news written for a general audience," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education -- finally has its first female editor in chief, Mariette DiChristina. A 20-year veteran of science journalism, DiChristina has been Scientific American's acting editor in chief since June, but now it's official.
In an interview with Fishbowl NY, DiChristina didn't seem too fussed by the historic significance of the promotion -- "I think anybody who is a position of leadership should feel a sense of responsibility. And I don't know if mine is any greater or less because I'm a first for the magazine. I know I'm very honored and grateful" -- but she also underscored why it's so important: "I have two young daughters; one of them wants to be a scientist, and the other one wants to be the editor of Scientific American." Granted, those are probably the only little girls in the U.S. who could name the editor in chief of Scientific American, but the symbolic value of DiChristina's achievement still shouldn't be underestimated.
It seems like every other week at Broadsheet we're writing about another study that found girls have the raw material to be just as good as boys at math and science, but are held back by a lack of confidence, support, role models and mentoring. (And even if enough of them make it all the way through college with their desire to pursue science intact, as soon as a field starts approaching gender equality, its perceived value begins to drop.) However many strides women have made in the workforce, we're still unaccustomed to seeing them in leadership positions in science-related professions, and still arguing endlessly about whether that's a function of nature or nurture. Mariette DiChristina's achievement at least drags us an inch closer to a world in which other people's young daughters will see "scientist" as a viable career goal -- and maybe even find fewer obstacles on the way there.
The National Book Foundation will present its annual National Book Awards in downtown Manhattan Wednesday night, at a gala event in the glittering, Greek-revival setting of Cipriani Wall Street. The ceremony's organizers labor mightily to bring glamour to a notoriously dowdy industry, and no doubt the evening will be thrilling for both nominees and winners.
Literary awards are more than just ego boosts these days. As the critic James Wood observed a few years back, "prizes are the new reviews," the means by which many people now decide which books to buy, when they bother to buy books at all. There are some 400,000 titles published per year in the U.S. alone -- one new book every minute and a half -- according to Bowker, a company providing information services to the industry, and there are fewer people with the time and inclination to read them. If you only read, for example, about five novels per year (a near-heroic feat of literacy for the average American), you could limit yourself to just the winners of the NBA, the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle, the Booker Prize and then, oh, a Hugo or Edgar winner -- or even a backlist title by that year's Nobel Prize winner. You'd never have to lower your sights to anything unlaureled by a major award.
On the other hand, if you've just self-published a book on parrot keeping or your theories on how the world could be better run (a favorite topic of retired gentlemen), what can you do? If you weren't able to find a publisher who wanted it, you can also expect to be routinely disqualified for review in the general media and, above all, for prizes. Yet have no fear, you Cinderellas of the publishing game, because (to nab a line from someone else's promotional campaign) there's an app for that.
An e-mail press release for a book crossed my desk not long ago, prominently garnished with a large medallion proclaiming it a winner of "The National Best Books 2009 Awards." For a moment, I misread that as "National Book Award," and did a double take, which is surely what whoever came up with that name intended. Curiosity about the National Best Books 2009 Awards led me to the Web site for USA Book News, produced by an outfit called JPX Media, which claims offices in Los Angeles and New York.
USA Book News is essentially a roll of press releases, featuring reproductions of the covers of relatively new books, accompanied by their flap copy and links to author Web sites. It's a somewhat random mix of titles, ranging from the very high profile, such as Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol," to the solid mid-list, like a new biography of Clint Eastwood, all from established publishers. Any self-published author would be pleased to see his or her book in this respectable company, although the company itself would be oblivious to the fact. "I have never heard of this site, was not asked; nor was I informed that my book was listed there," Shel Israel, author of "Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods," replied to my e-mail inquiry. To the extent that any mention might help an author, he's pleased to be included, but "I have no evidence that this listing has helped me in sales."
Why bother to set up a Web site regurgitating cover art and promo copy that anybody can find on Amazon.com? The answer, of course, lies in the National Best Books 2009 Awards, a contest that features no fewer than "150 active categories," including three subcategories of "Animals/Pets" and 13 subcategories of business books. There's a prize for the best children's book on the theme of "Mind/Body/Spirit" and for the best history of media and entertainment. By all indications (JPX Media did not respond to phone calls requesting information), everyone who enters in any category winds up listed as a "finalist," and some categories are so specific ("Mythology & Folklore") that they have only one entry.
Best of all, as USABN's Web site freely promises, "the National Best Books Awards are the ONLY Awards Program in the nation that offers direct coverage to the book buying public for every entry." Like the Special Olympics, this is a competition that everybody wins. If you enter the 2010 contest by the end of this year, they'll even throw in a "six-month full-color listing on USABookNews.com," which is "valued at $1500.00!" despite the fact that none of the publishers whose books are listed there now seem to have paid for this service or even to be aware that it's been provided.
Every winner and finalist -- i.e., everyone who enters -- can purchase gold medal-style stickers announcing the fact, which can then be slapped on the cover of the book, making it look deceptively similar to books that have won legitimate prizes like the Newbery Medal. The fee for all this is $69 (about what you'd pay to nominate your book for the National Book Awards or the Pulitzer), though you do have to pay it for each category you wish to enter; if, say, you want to send in your children's book about Mind/Body/Spirit issues in the history of the media, you'd have to pay $138 to enter it in both categories.
That's still not much cash to shell out for a bogus award that will impress those friends and relatives who haven't heard of the National Book Awards in the first place and will perhaps even (briefly) deceive the few who have. Yet with 150 categories, the takings do add up. A press release for the National Best Books 2009 Awards claims "500 winners and finalists," which comes to the nonshabby sum of $34,500 (and that's before whatever markup they get on the stickers) -- not bad for the cost of setting up a basic Web site with content that can be cut and pasted from the Web in an afternoon or two. Nowhere on USA Book News does it say who, if anyone, actually reads the books submitted to the awards; presumably, the winners could be chosen at random.
In short, the National Best Books Awards are vanity book awards, a new twist in the age-old practice of profiting off the dreams of aspiring writers. Ironically, real awards like the NBAs may not be that much better at selling books than the NBBAs. As publishing maven Michael Cader recently told the Wall Street Journal, the fiction nominees for the NBA "tend to be as a group not commercially successful, and the act of being nominated spurs modest commercial interest but tends not to drive sales in any significant quantity."
It's quite possible that someone who wins an NBA tonight will have earned less in royalties from his or her book than JPX Media will make by running a fake-out of the NBAs. There's simply more money in selling services to would-be writers than there is in selling actual books to readers, since the former are rapidly coming to outnumber the latter. And that, certainly, is nothing to celebrate.
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New York Times Drops Plagiarism Ban, Urges Recycling
