June 2007
It wasn’t only the larger UK publishers strolling the aisles of Book Expo last week; on the initiative of Arts Council North West, fifteen small press editors and literature professionals from the North of England and Scotland were there too. We learnt a lot in our five days in New York, and have returned bandying fresh terms, such as ‘social networks’, ‘platforms’, ‘attention economy’ and ‘digital natives’. By day our programme took in publishers large and small, from the lofty air conditioned offices of Knopf to the powerhouse of New Directions, publishers of Neruda and William Carlos Williams. Each evening we were guided by Time Out’s literary events listing. One of our number found herself judging a poetry slam into the small hours. We overheard old boys discussing the Paris Review in a diner. I hoped to squeeze into a Paul Coelho bookstore event only to discover he had decided against coming to the States. Joyce Carol Oates was more reliable, appearing twice in the city that week. We caught her New York Times session where she talked about recently completing her latest novel and ‘missing the misery of it’. She likened this state to a rubber band – no longer was she a rubber band that’s stretched, but merely one ‘just lying there’ .
Inevitably industry messages were mixed and much was familiar. Booksales are flat, fiction has been in trouble since 9/11 and the competition from other media for readers’ attention is ‘tough and getting tougher’. Book reviews in newspapers are in serious decline. A cloth edition of poetry in Barnes and Noble has ‘the shelf life of a yoghurt’. On the positive side, community reading programmes could boost a book’s sale by 40,000 copies and freshmen reading programmes are growing too. Curt Matthews, CEO of the Independent Publishers Group was upbeat, telling us the book business for smaller publishers has never been better, and described it as a golden age. The advent of the huge bookstores and internet (‘Amazon is like going to heaven’) meant there was room for ‘the goofy niche books’. He told us that a coffee table book on Pez dispensers had sold 15,000 copies. His view was that for every book that’s failed because it’s too narrow, one hundred have failed because they were too broad. Those working for Bloodaxe and Carcanet discovered the challenges of poetry publishing are shared by editors the other side of the Atlantic too, but poetry itself is more popular than ever. Alice Quinn of the Poetry Society of America described audiences of between five hundred and a thousand for poetry readings. Garrett Kiely, president and publisher at Palgrave addressed us about print on demand and ebooks. His boss Richard Charkin sat in on the session, putting forward his view that poetry was perfect for the internet. We even made it onto his blog.
As reported elsewhere, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, the overwhelming theme was digital. The BEA/Writer’s Digest Writers Conference preceded Book Expo by a day. Jodi Picoult gave an inspiring keynote address. She is a one woman industry – as she’s actively writing one book, she’s editing another, researching the next and touring with the last. Her words ringing in our ears, we broke into groups. ‘Get Known before the Book Deal’ introduced another major theme – the need for an author to establish a platform by website, blog and building a community. This was developed by other speakers over the next three days, including Chris Anderson who described the route to publication for The Long Tail. At a Meet the Editors lunch we heard Will Schwalbe of Hyperion and Judy Hottensen of Miramax talk about the dangers of cold email and how to build an author. When asked for a final piece of advice for the audience, Schwalbe advised new writers never to use those jiffy bags which explode with fluff when they are opened. There were mutters around my table from agents ‘Whoever heard of an editor in chief opening the post? Surely his assistants do that!’
At a session earlier in the day, the same agents had described themselves as either ‘nurturers’ or ‘sharks’. ‘Can’t I have a nurturing shark?’ opined one writer. There was an opportunity to find out, as the conference ended with a grand Pitch Slam session, giving the 500 writers present the chance to present their projects in three minutes to over sixty agents and editors. As you can imagine, the noise was immense.
Posted on Jun 04, 2007 - 07:19 PM