What Andrew Wylie looks like after he hears a Stuart Applebaum quote

Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie must be back from vacation — according to a Financial Times report he’s issued a new threat: “a broad expansion of his digital publishing business to include up to 2,000 titles if traditional publishers refuse to improve digital royalties.”

According to the FT, Wylie says he’s “failed to reach a satisfactory compromise after nine months of discussions with all large publishing houses.”  Now, he says, “If we do not reach an accord, Odyssey will grow. It will not publish 20 books, it will publish 2,000 and have outside investors and make itself available to other agents.”

But he’s only doing it for holistic reasons, he says: “I am only trying to make a point in order to underscore the importance of getting the right terms with a view to uniting the two [print and digital] revenue streams.”

But it doesn’t look as if the big houses are taking the bait: The FT says other publishers such as Penguin have told it “that Mr Wylie has limited bargaining power because rights to e-book publication have been written into authors’ contracts since the mid-1990s.”

Nor did Random House — which seems to be a particular target of Wylie, in that his Oddysey Editions is launching with mostly Random House authors — appear to be shaking in its books: “Our position is unchanged. Random House will not do new business deals with a literary agency which sets themselves up as a direct competitor of ours with our titles,” said company spokesman Stuart Applebaum.

The news seems bleaker than usual these days, observes Jessa Crispin a her newest column for PBS, “Bright Books for Dark Times.” Worse: “It’s not just that the news is bleak, it’s the powerlessness that everyone feels. When it’s a torrent of oil spilling into our oceans, deep underground, it’s not the kind of thing you can roll up your sleeves and solve yourself. It’s the same with most of the news: everything is just too big to do anything about yourself. And watching the politicians squabble is not exactly reassuring.”

If you’re a literary person like Crispin, you turn to your books on occasions of powerlessness — and from her library, she offers “a reading list, about humor in dark times, the strength of community, and people who, no matter how far gone things seemed, shook off apathy and got to work at tipping the scales back to something resembling balance.”

Among the books on her list:

“A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter’s Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial”
By H. L. Mencken

The axis of religion and science has become so sadly polarized that each side seems to believe that if they admit middle ground exists all is lost. So the “New Atheists” continue to insist that all belief in the divine is simply delusional, and fundamentalists want to alter our textbooks to omit basic scientific fact.

And while everyone is probably familiar with “Inherit the Wind,” the staid and slightly dreary films (it was remade — a lot) about the original fight for the teaching students evolution, less known is H.L. Mencken’s original account of the same trial, “A Religious Orgy in Tennessee.” It’s a wild story, and told in the usual rabblerousing Mencken style. It may be a battle we are still fighting, but it started with one teacher and one incomparable Clarence Darrow.

Matthew Honan holds A.J. Jacobs responsible for the rise of “stunt books” — “like when you read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and wrote about it in your best-selling book The Know-It-All.” And then there was  Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically (”about your attempt to hew to every one of the Bible’s precepts”). And Jacobs is supposedly at work on a new one called The Healthiest Human Being in the World.

Now, says Honan, “everyone else is following your stunty lead: Dozens of scribes seem to have learned that writing about a wacky self-experiment is the key to a fat advance.”

Which gave Honan an idea. “I wanted to find out what this sudden rush of stunt books tells us about our country, our place in the world, the state of our humanity. And there was just one way to do so: with a stunt of my own. I would spend a week reading only this genre.”

In a hysterical column for Wired, he details his week’s reading:

Ed Dobson’s The Year of Living Like Jesus, an evangelical rip-off of Jacobs’ book. And Dobson isn’t the only copycat. Ammon Shea wrote Reading the OED after Jacobs’ Know-It-All was released. If anything, maybe I’m being too original. I resolve not to covet my neighbor’s donkey for the rest of the week. A few days later, I confront another stunt-book trope: burnout. It hits its apex when I read these sentences from Just Do It, Douglas Brown’s story of having sex with his wife every day for 101 days …

The kicker: Honan realizes that even his stunt isn’t original when he comes across a blog, “My Year of Everything, in which former MTV host Dave Holmes recounts his attempt to read a different stunt book every week for a year.”

How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since? This series takes an ongoing, insider’s look at the campaign to get Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone on the bestseller lists, by Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson ….

You have achieved some kind of zen level of marketing when you achieve meta-marketing, a place where things begin to feel a little out of control, but in a good way — i.e., our marketing campaign about our marketing campaign has achieved an unanticipated amount of attention. On Tuesday alone this week, it was featured on Publishers Lunch and the British equivalent, BookTradeInfo. We got a lovely shout-out on the great blog about international publishing, Publishing Perspectives (”the series should be mandatory reading for any small presses trying to get past what Johnson calls ‘the echo chamber’ of American publishing”). One of the country’s better literary journals, the Virginia Quarterly Review, wrote a lovely commentary about us. And that’s just some of the places I’ve heard of. Then there were all these aggregators I hadn’t heard of — such as BookNewsMatters. Meanwhile, one of my spies tells me that the same day, the publisher of Bloomsbury Press sent a link to the series to all employees.

Meanwhile blogs and twitter accounts were touting the series before and since — for example, there’s this post at the ever-great Bookslut, and at Geof Wisener’s wonderful A Natural Curiosity, and on the Chatter, the blog of the great Los Angeles indie bookstore Diesel, and this tweet from publisher Thomas Riggs & Co. in Montana.

Thanks one and all — getting attention from people we respect like that makes us feel danged lucky. And forgive us tooting our own horn, but the lesson here is twofold: 1. Marketing is about tooting your own horn, and 2. There’s a huge element of luck in all marketing campaigns.

Everyone seems to have shut up about the Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie - Odyssey Editions - Amazon brouhaha, but there was one new, eloquent statement about it all yesterday, from American Booksellers Association head Oren Teicher, posted at the ABA’s Bookselling This Week:

The issues sparked by evolving business models in the rapidly developing world of digital publishing are multifaceted and, at times, complex. However, from the perspective of independent booksellers one important reality is unchanged: Diminishing the availability of titles and narrowing the options for readers can only harm our society in the long run. That the Wylie agency has sought to distribute these works through a single retailer is bad for the book industry and bad for consumers. Books — in whatever format — are crucibles of ideas and unique expression, and we should be doing all that we can to expand, not constrict, readers’ access to them.

Blonde and Wet, the Complete Story was the top-ranked ebook on the iPad’s top-ten bestseller list Tuesday morning, reports Heidi Blake in a Telegraph story. Three other erotic novels were also on the list. By day’s end they’d all disappeared.

According to the Telegraph, “analysts said it was unlikely that all the erotic titles could have dropped out of the list at the same moment without being deliberately removed.”
Apple had no comment on the charges (although a Guardian report notes Steve Jobs is on the record about not wanting pornography on the iPad).

Meanwhile, “The most popular author among iPad users was, until yesterday, Carl East, a 55-year-old from Hull with more than 70 erotic books to his name. His titles, which are available for as little as 49p, were first, second and seventh in the chart before they disappeared.”

East was said to be “overwhelmed by his new found success,” and says, “I keep pinching myself to see if I am awake and sometimes I wonder, is this really happening to me.”

How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since? This series takes an ongoing, insider’s look at the campaign to get Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone on the bestseller lists, by Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson ….

The cover for the initial, hardcover release of Every Man Dies Alone

It’s almost impossible in modern book marketing to have a successful book without someone acting as a public spokesman for it, preferably the author. It’s something authors like to complain about in public (while hectoring their publishers behind the scenes to for god’s sake get them on Oprah!) but there you have it. The author’s role in the blurred land between marketing and publicity has become more essential then ever. For example, there’s the infinite world of outreach — speaking to book clubs, visiting booksellers — which can go on for years. Then there’s the fact that so-called “off-book” features — essentially, anything that isn’t a review, such as author profiles or interviews — are de rigeur nowadays, and have grown to the point where they usually have more of an impact than even a great review.

And yes that includes reviews in the New York Times — a review there, like almost no place else, can still have a big impact. But a feature there, in my opinion, trumps even that. (Getting both leads to what’s known in indie publishing as a “heart attack.”) Every Man Dies Alone got a wonderful review there that made the many booksellers who put stock in Times reviews take notice and put us on display. But I could never convince the Times features editors to take my call. (Let’s just say they don’t pay attention to indie publishers the way the Los Angeles Times does.)

Okay, so in the case of Every Man Dies Alone, we knew that we had the most amazing off-book author of all time: a fascinating ex-con who had substantial substance abuse issues, was involved in duels and embezzlement and wrote books in code while incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum, who stood up to the Nazis and was blacklisted and helped sneak money to Jewish writers — what’s not to love? What’s more, by all accounts Hans Fallada was a warm, chatty, friendly guy, quick with a joke and a smile — perfect for speaking to reading groups. There was only the one hitch: He’s dead.

Combine this with the tendency of places like the Times to ignore indies and favor authors who are beautiful, young, blond and related to staffers and you’ve got a problem.

What to do?

Normally, a publisher in this situation would have called in the translator (think of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky out shilling for Tolstoy). But in this instance, we had a translator who wasn’t inclined or available.

But then we thought of something better when I saw that Hans Fallada’s oldest son, Ulrich Ditzen, had recently published a book about his relationship with his father. From there, we got lucky — it took me weeks to track him down, but when I finally got him on the phone, he gave me precisely the right answer to the question: “Do you speak English?” We brought him over for the launch.

It turned out to be one of our smarter moves. The 79-year-old Ditzen was deeply touched by our efforts to resusciatate his father’s work in English, and although not in the best of health he did a series of interviews on behalf of the project that, given how moved he was and the tragic nature of his father’s life, were truly stirring events.

Still, we weren’t able to generate as many interviews as you’d think — although we’d had a terrific Times review, as I say they don’t necessarily carry the weight they used to and we did not immediately generate all the great press we eventually got.

Which means we had a long effort in front of us with no ready spokesman.

It was time for some more improv. I was, at this point, probably the leading expert on Hans Fallada in the US. I was also more genuinely passionate about his work than perhaps the author himself was at the end. We took a page from Barney Rossett taking the stand on behalf of D.H. Lawrence and offered up Hans Fallada’s publisher — yours truly — as a spokesperson for the absent author. We decided to also try and broaden the appeal of that by pointing out there were interesting tangential story lines — for example, discussing what this story says about modern publishing or works in translation in the American or British market, say.

Surprisingly, there were some quick takers. For example, there was a great, in-depth interview with Kevin Sylvester for the CBC. More recently there was my talk with Leonard Lopate at New York’s local NPR affiliate, WNYC. There were interviews with newspapers — such as my recent talk with Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune. And as time goes on, I’ve been speaking — both remotely and in person — with more and more book clubs and reader’s groups.

My favorite appearance, though, was when I appeared on a television show with an exhausted Ulrich Ditzen at the end of his American visit. Tired, not feeling well, and weary, too, I think, of speaking in English, it was a thrill to sit next to him as he held on to do a very difficult thing: speak in another language on TV. But I think his steely effort came across, and in the end, this was one of the most successful things we’ve done to support the book. Filmed the day after publication, but not aired until over a month later, it lifted us onto the Amazon bestseller list within hours of its broadcast. You can see it here:

The Andrew Wylie / Odyssey Books / Amazon / Random House story took an ugly turn yesterday when two different hastags popped up on Twitter: @EvilWylie and @GoodRandomHouse.

Among their first posts: “Sizzling summer deals! Evil Wylie just posted e-book rights to Philip Roth’s backlist on Priceline. Name your price!” (@EvilWylie) and “True Fact: @EvilWylie is the reason there are reception issues with the iPhone 4.” (@GoodRandomHouse)

True, they do go off topic sometimes, such as when GoodRandomHouse posted, “Strange…Janet Evanovich just left the @GoodRandomHouse offices, and now nobody here can find their watches or jewelry.”

However their wrath is generally more focussed, and seems destined to take down everyone in the business with them. For example, we first read about this on Publishers Lunch — and no sooner was that post published than the following appeared at @EvilWylie: “Evil Wylie loves @publisherslunch because I love eating publishers for lunch.”

This is getting out of hand, I tell you ….

Andrew Wylie stands up from his big, empty desk

Fall-out from the announcement of the exclusive deal between Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie’s new Odyssey Editions and Amazon.com continued unabated Monday.

Things kicked off with a typically blithe, anti-publishing statement from the Authors Guild, saying “publishers have brought this on themselves” by paying “bargain-basement e-book royalty rates.” They say the rate quickly becoming standard — 25% of net — is “contrary to the long-standing practice of authors and publishers to, effectively, split evenly the net proceeds of book sales.” Of course, except perhaps — and I emphasize perhaps — for extremely rare deals for authors in the supreme sales ranks of, say, Stephen King, 50-50 deals are unprecedented in big publishing ….

So, ignorance or fibbing on the part of the Authors Guild leads it to cheer Wylie for declaring that, by Jove, 50% is what he’s going to pay … to authors whom are already being publicized and marketed by someone else. They don’t call him the Jackal — preying off the work of others — for nothing. As Boyd Tonkin noted in a perceptive commentary in The Independent,

In truth, the Odyssey Editions proposition looks full of holes: from legal doubts about whether he [Wylie] really has unassigned electronic rights, to the cost of designing, promoting and selling the e-books. With no help from publishers, Wylie has to create every aspect of his electronic imprint. That will wipe out much of the cost saving that should allow authors to receive a more ample royalty deal when a digital edition simply replicates a printed one.

On the other hand, Tonkin goes on to ask, “Does he care? I doubt it. He has scored already. The insulting offers for digital rights made to many authors by the trade-publishing giants have come into the spotlight. Wylie-Odysseus has called their bluff.” Except, er, Boyd, you just pointed out that the publisher’s rates make more sense than Wylie’s ….

Well, whatever, I guess — Mike Shatzkin, in an in-depth and often enlightening analysis at his Idea Logical blog, essentially agrees:

Even if the publishers pushing back manage to win this round with Wylie, and they well might, I don’t think the 25% royalty can hold for very long. As more and more of the business shifts to ebooks, companies without the legacy costs that big publishers have will find it easy to pay higher royalties than that and agents will keep doing the math about how many sales they can afford to lose and still end up ahead in dollars with a higher ebook royalty. As Amazon should have learned in their fight with Macmillan in January, it isn’t smart business to draw a line in the sand marking a position you ultimately can’t defend.

At least all concerned do agree on one thing — as the Authors Guild statement puts it: “any direct agreement between a literary agency and Amazon is troubling. Amazon has, time and again, wielded its clout in the industry ruthlessly, with little apparent regard for its relationships with authors or publishers or, for that matter, antitrust rules.”

Square Books' window display

A similar opinion of the deal with satanic Amazon prompted one of the more creative responses of the day: leading indie booksellers, Square Books of Oxford, Mississippi set up a display in its store window of all the books that would be unavailable as ebooks during the two year term of Wylie’s deal with Amazon. (See photo.) Included were works by Dave Eggers, Richard Flanagan, Mary Gaitskill, Ian Frazier, Philip Roth, Anne Lamott, Hendrik Hertzberg, Wells Tower, Richard Yates, W. H. Auden, I. F. Stone, and Saul Bellow. The company also posted a commentary labeled “Welcome to Wylie World” on its website, which read, in part:

HOW TO GET TO WYLIE WORLD? “DOWN THE RIVER”

Amazon is the company that, when Macmillan Publishing refused to agree to the company’s price demands, removed the ”buy” button from all the company’s titles. Amazon is the company that, once threatened by the George Orwell estate for selling 1984 without their permission, electronically removed the text from its customers even as they read it.

Amazon manufactures a reading device, the “kindle,” which requires its owners to buy digital merchandise exclusively from Amazon – a bit like our selling you books that you could read only by using the bedside lamp you must also purchase from us.  And this would be the only way you could read these books. Wylie’s authors’ electronic books will be available only via the kindle, only via Amazon, a soiling of first amendment principles that many of the agency’s authors, such as Arthur Miller and Salman Rushdie, have fought so hard to protect.

As you look at this display, we encourage you to think about the ramifications of this effort to vertically integrate the book industry and limit or exclude access to information and free expression ….

Meanwhile, by day’s end, the rumbling was becoming evident from across the pond: another big publisher, and another big retailer, had joined the protest. As a story in the Financial Times reports, HarperCollins UK CEO Vicotria Barnsley announced the company “will vigorously protect its rights and our authors’ interests by ensuring their work gets to the broadest possible audience.”  A Bookseller report notes that she added, “The only winners in this are Amazon.”

Victoria Barnsley

The Bookseller also notes that David Kohn, the head of the UK’s biggest bookseller, Waterstone’s, said it was “very disappointing to see that some of our best writers’ work is to be only available in such a limited fashion. It does not help build the market, nor does it serve readers well.”

On that, everyone seems in agreement.

Is it possible to have second-hand ebooks?  Maybe sorta, says Nick Harkaway in a story on Futurebook.

“It does sound a bit like a bad gag or a swindle,” he notes, because “What’s actually happening, of course, is not the transfer of a physical object, but the transfer of access rights or data. Data don’t depreciate, so there’s no real reason to discount the product because it’s been used.” So re-selling is of no benefit to anyone.”

However, he postulates:

Suppose you could return your ebooks if you decided you didn’t want them, in exchange for a given value, to be redeemed against further ebook purchases? You’d never get back the full value - and your supplier might choose to say you could only ever get a maximum of 25% off any given single purchase, so you’d have to bank credit.

And/or…

What if you could retain access to your own book files, but get a similar reward by selling them on as well? That turns every fan of a book into a reseller.

Both of these options have the additional benefit to the publisher that they get to keep selling the same thing in a way they never have before with second hand books. The consumer gets cheaper stuff and the assurance of a virus free download… and of course, the buoyant continuance of the industry, which isn’t bad in itself.