Skip to main content

Does anyone care who publishes a book?

Amazon has recently moved into book publishing. It's not entirely surprising - they've already bought a print on demand service, and a very successful at 'publishing' Kindle ebooks. Yet some have reacted with horror. 'Would anyone buy a book published by Amazon?' they ask.

Frankly, I think this is a response seen through the misleading eyes of the publishing business. I want to take you back to the old days at the massive Foyles bookshop in London. They used to (for all I know, the still do) have their books arranged by publisher. So you would have a bookshelf of Penguin books, another bookshelf of Random House books and so on. It was a nightmare. No one goes into a shop saying 'I want a Random House book.' They either want the latest book by author X or a book in category Y. No other way of organizing a bookshop than authors within categories makes any sense. The only situation where you might want to group a publisher's work together is where they effectively define a category (and that's pretty well limited to Mills & Boon).

So why would anyone even realize they're buying a book published by Amazon, let alone have it influence their buying decision? This, incidentally, is why publishers waste their money putting a lot of effort into their websites. Just like bookshops, you should concentrate on authors and categories. So set up author websites, certainly. And category websites (like www.popularscience.co.uk) absolutely. But it really isn't work working too hard on publisher websites.

Here's a quick test for anyone who still feels that who published a book is important. Who published these books in the UK?:
  1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon) paperback
  2. The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco) paperback
  3. The Ascent of Man (Jacob Bronowski) hardback
  4. Notes from a Small Island (Bill Bryson) paperback
  5. American Gods (Neil Gaiman) paperback
  6. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) paperback
  7. The Lost Symbol (Dan Brown) hardback
  8. Inflight Science (Brian Clegg) paperback
If you got most of them right, and you don't work in the publishing trade, you're in the wrong job. I would imagine the vast majority of people would get zero out of eight. And that's something that publishers forget at their peril.


(Answers a bit further below)
.
.
.
.
(Isn't this exciting?)
.
.
.
.
.
.
(Nearly there...)
.
.
.
  1. Vintage (Random House)
  2. Mandarin (Reed)
  3. BBC Books or Book Club Associates
  4. Black Swan (Transworld)
  5. Headline Review
  6. Faber
  7. Bantam (Transworld)
  8. Icon Books
Labels:

Comments

  1. Unknown11 May 2011 at 12:13

    Yes, you're so right - my score was zero!
    Large publishing houses are also going to have to compete with the self-published authors (and those from small presses) in terms of prices. I'm a little scared the public is going to opt for cheap £3 books from a poorly edited self-published book instead of £15 for a traditionally published book.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
118 comments
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...
25 comments
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...
6 comments
Read more