The mysteries of book data

I thought it might be useful every now and again to use this blog as a way to explain some of the more arcane (to most authors, at least!) mysteries of the publishing world. Our own authors often struggle to understand what it takes to get books online, jackets on Amazon, etc – and so did we, when we first set up. In fact, I remember struggling for the best part of a week trying to figure out how to get our books listed on Amazon …

Anyway: there exists in the UK a company called Nielsen, which is associated with the ISBN agency. When anyone publishes a book they’re supposed to send the details to Nielsen (they have a great online system called PubWeb which lets you do all this automatically). You give them basic bibliographic material – author, title, price, publication date, no. of pages, format, category etc – and they load it into their database and send a feed out to all UK retailers/other relevant parties about which new books have been published and by whom. You also are required to give distribution information – i.e. where the book can be obtained from. This basic listing is a free service to publishers. So if a book is listed on the Nielsen database you should be able to go into any bookstore or online retailer and they should be able to order it for you. As a publisher, you can supplement the information held on the Nielsen database for a subscription fee, and upload your cover images, book summary, author bio, reviews, prizes etc etc as well. Nielsen – again – then feed this information through to retailers, including online retailers like Amazon. So if a publisher subscribes to this service, you should be able to see detailed product information and cover images for your book on Amazon, for example. Except that inevitably Amazon are erratic about picking up the feeds and so sometimes the process just doesn’t work and, being as impenetrable an organisation as they are, you can’t contact them directly about any omissions relating to your books. Which is why I spent a large part of yesterday afternoon struggling to figure out why and do something about the fact that half of our book covers are STILL missing from the Amazon site … It is indeed a semi-magical process into which publishers have a little input but absolutely no control. Like so much in this crazy world of books! More exciting installments on this topic to come …

In the meantime, the first monthly issue of our new webzine, Corvaceous, will be up and running online this afternoon, and will include contributions from some of our authors – Raymond Federman, Angela Morgan Cutler, Dexter Petley, and Lisa Glass. Have a look, and we’re always happy to receive suitable submissions for future issues.

Tomorrow’s blog will be a contribution by TRP author J. David Simons, whose new book The Credit Draper is now available. He’ll be talking about what it’s like to work with a small publisher!

Sharon

Guarding the Goslings

An old friend of mine was reading One True Void recently. She lives in Tunbridge Wells, coincidentally, where a lot of the novel is set. Coincidences like that appeal to me. Anyway, she said “I really didn’t like it to start with. I put it down a few times and left it sitting for a day or so. But there was something about it kept nagging at me – and almost against my will I had to go and pick it up again.” Bingo! If I wanted to put a review on someone’s tombstone – I reckon that would be the one. Hmm, a review on someone’s tombstone?  We really are immersed in the publishing thing. Its that feeling of excitement that these books really matter.

The next job is to arrange a good shipping deal for books to Canada. Just small beginnings with a keen, focused operation that we ran into at the London Book Fair. In the long run we would hope to just send the files and do short-run prints over there. But easy does it to start with – we’ll see how Cleave and one or two others go down with the right sort of eastwards-looking audiences.

David

Monday Guest Blog by Lisa

I come in peace as Bookfox ambassador from Vulpes Libris. I am also lucky enough to be an author published by Two Ravens Press. So every Monday I shall be here discussing the serious and the less serious and hoping not to embarrass myself too much.

Today I’ve been considering the impact of books on the environment, especially in light of Eve Harvey’s article on the subject. Should I feel bad about writing novels which will be made into stacks of books? Well, I hadn’t until now, but then Raz from Eco Libris pointed out that:

Last month was released a new report ‘Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the U.S. Book Industry’, which is probably the most important report that was published recently on the environmental impacts of the book publishing industry. This 86-page report was prepared by The Green Press Initiative (GPI) and The Book Industry Study Group (BISG).

The report analyzes the environmental impacts of the industry and its biggest contributor to the book industry’s carbon footprint is the use of virgin paper. According to the report, forest and forest harvest impacts have 62.7% share of total carbon emissions. Second is paper production at the mills with 22.4% share. Methan releases from landfilled books contribute 8.2%. btw – the total carbon footprint of the industry is 12.4 million metric tons or 8.85 lbs. of carbon dioxide per a book (2006 figures).

Two more points from the report which are related to the discussion here:
1. The report estimates that the amount of books that are printed but are unsold was more than 1 billion books, or about 25% of the total number of books produced in 2006 (4.15 billion books)
2. According to the U.S. EPA, books are accounted for 762,000 metric tons of paper in Municipal Solid Waste – way too much!

This I find quite scary. A quarter of all the books printed go unsold? That’s a lot of pulped fiction and a fair few trees gone to waste. So what’s the answer? The e-reader? Eco Libris’s idea of planting a tree for every book you purchase? Increased use of recycled paper? Or simply publishing fewer books?

One thing’s for sure, for the first time I’m rather relieved that my print run was relatively modest.

Lisa Glass blogs as part of the Vulpes Libris (Book Fox) collective. Her novel, Prince Rupert’s Teardrop, is out in paperback now.

Books and more books …

More review copies of Cleave and Vanessa and Virginia in the post, out to all the literary editors, miscellaneous literary blogs … We’ve been pretty successful to date in getting our books reviewed by both the Scottish and the national press. But what’s interesting is that, contrary to most people’s beliefs, reviews don’t sell books. Apparently I’m one of about three people in the entire universe who will trawl the review pages for interesting sounding books and then go and order them. Apparently it just doesn’t happen very much. Good reviews, we’re told, are very nice for the author’s and publisher’s egos, but they don’t sell books. Which of course leaves open the big question … what does sell books? Ask that of anyone in the publishing or bookselling business and you’ll get the same answer: ‘word of mouth.’ Whatever that means. Ask someone what they mean by ‘word of mouth’ and they’ll start talking about things like ‘that indefinable buzz’ and ‘that inexpicable excitement’ … inexplicable to everyone, including us :-) But whatever it is, it seems to mean that the more people you tell about a great book you’ve read, the more word about that book spreads around and the more poeple are likely to buy it because most people trust a recommendation from a friend or peer more than they do a recommendation from a literary reviewer.

In the meantime, the gosling population (levelled out at four, so far) is thriving. Except that it’s taken them a while to figure out that legs are for standing on as opposed to sticking out at right angles or poking in your sibling’s eye while you sit firmly on your stomach and wobble a lot.

Sharon

Snakes and ladders

We just took delivery of both Cleave and Vanessa and Virginia. When the big lorry turns up with our boxes of books (and the wine delivery for some big local hotel, and a load of fencing wire for the estate up the road) we tremble in fear and anticipation. Firstly, will they have survived the transit? Just think of the prisitine, mint copy of the book you pick off the bookshop shelf – and then realise that some forklift in Glasgow has picked up the whole lot and dumped them in the back of a dusty lorry. You wish that people only handled books like the guys in museums with the white cotton gloves. But it ain’t so. Well, apart from a couple of copies at the top they were pretty well intact. Now we have to worry that the cover colours will be all wrong. Quickly see that it’s not so. Now unpack one and see if page 45 is before page 32 or not – seriously, we bought a book recently by a very famous author/ big publisher and a page of the index randomly appeared half way through and then all the subsequent pages were out of synch. Would it be our fault – would we have to pay to pulp a thousand books and buy another lot ? I’ll tell you – I haven’t unwrapped a set of examination results recently – but I have every sympathy. But as far as we can tell we have 2 new additions to the shelf with all their bits intact. (Like the 4 goslings now wildly attempting to stand on their oversize floppy feet.)

But here’s a question for you -  Cleave is an anthology of new Scottish women’s writing. A lot of the really big names right through to almost first-time writers. Short fiction, short prose, poetry and every shade between. We are very proud of it. Its the sort of project you can only make into a book with belief and energy. But have a guess at how many copies you think it might  sell? I mean, what does a small publisher actually do to break even – sell 30,000 or 400? Its more than just a random question. Lots and lots of people want to do art, and particularly writing these days.  But its an interesting question as to where all this stuff goes – and what it actually means to be published. Given that there is no public funding, and there hasn’t been for Cleave, when would you consider it a success to have put such a book out there in the shops? Somewhere in the no-man’s land between creativity and commerce – that’s publishing when you are doing it right – we think.  What do you reckon?

David

 

Books?

Books. Well, some days (weeks? months???) all we do is books and other days there are more critical issues like mothering/fathering four little goslings that have managed to hatch themselves out of the incubator and keep looking up at us as if to say ‘there has to be an easier way of coming into the world than this …’ 

But on the book front, we’re just putting the finishing touches to our last three books for the year – typesetting and editing that is, as all the 2008 covers were finished a few weeks ago (and you can see them on the ‘Our Books’ pages on the main website, along with summaries of all the books to year-end on the ‘forthcoming titles’ page). Seems odd in some ways to be so far ahead, but the key accounts like Waterstones, Borders and others require all key book information to be sent to them a good 5 months ahead of publication date to give them time to make their buying decisions. That means covers and blurbs, at a minimum. So pretty soon we’ll be looking to start 2009 books …

On which subject, we already are pretty full for 2009 and so as the submissions come flooding in (and boy, do they flood in these days) we find ourselves having to turn down so much – the good writing as well as the obviously bad – just because there’s a limit to what we can publish, and we end up having to prioritise everything that comes in. The key question then becomes ‘Can we bear NOT to publish it?’ and the truth is that more often than not, sadly, we can. On the other hand, we still get excited about the tiny proportion of really original as well as really well-crafted work that we’re sent – and it’s that combination and that alone that is going to drive the decision to publish as we move on.

Sharon

I want to talk about books…

I really do want to talk about books. I have been meaning to research the most literary independent bookshops way down south (anyone got any real favourites? Shops that really take a work seriously? I think I’ve found a few). But there is nothing more distracting than an incubator full of hatching goose eggs. Those little things make such an effort to get out. They break a tiny hole in the shell then take more than 24 hours sometimes to break free. One little fellow spent 36 hours and then died – (he/she hadn’t properly formed in the egg or absorbed its yolk). I have to go and ‘peeps’ to the little things to encourage them. There are 2 more just starting. I know people talk about the ‘miracle of life’ – but with these armour-plated eggs it really is a miracle any of the little tinks get out at all. And you can’t help – it mucks up the whole process. Promise I’ll be back onto books next time. But the suspense is killing me.

David 

Slings and arrows

The publishing business must be one of the wierdest businesses in the world, in that ALL the risk of selling the product lies with the publisher. All of it. Sounds unlikely, but it’s true. Since the collapse of the net book agreement retailers can in effect demand whatever discounts on retail price they like (generally somewhere between 40% to 60% depending on the size of the retailer and the level of promotion) and no matter how many they order, how badly they get it wrong, they have the right to return the books if they don’t sell. So a store can order 250 books on a promotion and send 220 of them back 3 months later. Unsold, sometimes in resaleable condition, sometimes not. It’s happened. It can put an entire print run into loss. Because we pay 14% invoice price to our distributors as a handling fee going out, postage to get the books to the stores in the first place, and 10% retail price to our distributors as a handling fee coming back in. Ho hum.

So, without mentioning any major high street book retailers by name, that was yesterday evening’s good news. This morning we decided to drown our sorrows in Heptovac. A vaccine against all kinds of weird stuff you don’t want to know about in sheep. Droopy kidney, soggy liver – that kind of thing. David sat on the floor of the fank (a deeply technical Highland term for a small sheep enclosure) clutching each sheep to him like a teddy bear (and trying to avoid getting a horn in his eye in the process) while I lifted its armpit (legpit?) and gave it 2 millilitres of something cloudy and very very suspicious. Most of them were profoundly unimpressed. Followed by a foot inspection (involving, amongst other things, scraping a good deal of sheep shit from out of the space between their toes) and a bit of a manicure (to be continued in a few days).

Meanwhile, we have 8 of our Roman gooses’ eggs in an incubator – notoriously difficult to hatch – and one of them started ‘pipping’ (trying to break through the shell) this morning. It can take up to two days for it to decide whether it’s going to make its way out or just give up. All I’ve been able to hear, as I’ve been tapping away at the computer all day, is David standing over the incubator in the kitchen whittering away to the putative gosling, in an alleged effort to encourage it out. (I’ve heard his singing voice. If I were the gosling, I’d stay where I was.)

Such is life at Two Ravens Press.

Go figure. Most days, we can’t.

Sharon

A very good day

Today we did royalties. In a sense it was never our money so we feel unequivocally, doubly good about passing it on to the writers whose money it is. We clearly wish that the cheques were bigger, but it wasn’t through want of trying or shoving or shouting the books from the rooftops. So, a good day.

And then, I opened my copy of Don Patterson’s The Book of Shadows. Aphorisms. How hard a form is that? I’m a lifelong lover of Nietzsche so I like to think I have an idea of the gold standard of aphorisms. I was expecting to be disappointed. I was all ready for the slap-stick comedy of someone tripping over the small step of a 3-line piece of something and nothing. But damn it , no schadenfreude this sunday afternoon – this is crushingly clever stuff. Who’d have thought it? A book of aphorisms, real ones, sold in volume by a big publisher. Yep, it was a hopeful day, a really good day.

David

Celebrity

There are times – most Fridays, in fact – when I wonder why we subscribe to The Bookseller and Publishing News, as all they seem to do is throw us into a state of frustration at what the British book world has become and how it’s reported. Take this week’s Publishing News. A lead article on the ‘Nibbies’ – the British Book Awards. A double-page spread. Those icons of modern literature who are the subject of quotes/ photographs/ individual news items? Lord Attenborough. Daniel Day Lewis. Geri Halliwell. Richard Hammond. Katie Price. Some model called Abi Titmuss – I have absolutely no idea who she is. Okay, so if you delve a bit further in the main body of the text you’ll find a teensy weensy sentence about Ian Rankin and Ian McEwan (sorry, even with Harry Potter as one of my guilty reading pleasures I can’t bring myself to include JK Rowling in this lineup) but the focus is overwhelmingly on celebrity to the apparent exclusion of anything to do with books. A couple of pages on, and another double-page spread about this year’s London Book Fair and its achievements. There are four photographs in this article. Guess who they are of. More icons of modern literature? Er – no. Gordon Brown. Margaret Hodge. Cherie Blair. Alexandra Henderson, a new agent at PFD with a background in TV and politics.

All of which brings me back to the reason why we set up Two Ravens Press, around 18 months ago now. To try to provide an antidote to all that. Some weeks it seems that the groundswell of sheer insane nonsense is just too huge. But in the meantime, all we can do is grit our teeth and insist on believing that there really are people out there who want to read the kind of work we’re publishing.

 

Sharon