Howdy Brownsville, New York Calling, Have We Got a Great Bio of Spinoza for Y'all!

If you're a sales rep for a publishing company, you can be replaced by a telemarketer. At least that seems to be the message communicated by Simon & Schuster.

Michael Cader reports in Publishers Lunch that S&S has cut nine field representatives, leaving but seven to service the book buying needs of a nation. An adjunct to this action is the establishment of a telemarketing group that will presumably service the needs of far-flung independent bookstores around the country.

S&S justifies its decision on "the changing nature of the market place." That phrase should be nominated for the Understatement of the Year Award. The marketplace served by publisher field reps twenty or even ten years ago is all but unrecognizable, and what's left of it is melting away like an ice cube in a teapot.

Up until the mid-1990s rural bookshops and paperback outlets like drugstores were serviced by traveling sales reps or independent distributors. These people not only understood the reading tastes of the communities on their routes but knew many of the readers personally. They knew that this bookshop catered to lovers of western fiction and that one to historical romance.

The system worked wonderfully well, but it suffered a major hammer blow in 1996 when several influential paperback distribution agencies let go of most of the independent driver/rack jobbers that covered all those rural bookstores. The reason was that the growing power of computers enabled these agencies to stock stores by remote control instead of employing human beings driving vans and station wagons. It wasn't long before stores in Tuscaloosa or Paducah were being stocked from agencies in Chicago or Toronto who knew little if anything about what they liked to read. And actually it didn't matter, because Chicago and Toronto simply shipped those stores the top fifteen or twenty New York Times bestselling titles anyway. (I've detailed this crucial moment in publishing history in The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback, Part 1 and Part 2.)

So much for mass market paperbacks. But there were still hardcover books being sold in mall bookstores, right? Wrong. As the 1990s progressed, closing of mall stores reached epidemic proportions as the major chains, especially Barnes & Noble, realized that store traffic simply didn't justify keeping them open. At the same time the rise of Amazon shifted book buying patterns from the car to the armchair. Why drive into town when you could handle the transaction at home?

Given the withering of the rural bookstore market, why should we be surprised to hear S&S declare that "new field sales team will focus on the geographic regions where our sales are strongest--urban areas with a large base of key independent retail, wholesale, and educational accounts"?

The fact that it makes perfect economic sense doesn't palliate the pain that independent bookshop owners and their customers feel to have one more tie to the publishing community severed. One store owner said it all in a tweet: "SO pissed to see my rep go. My one link to you is now someone who has NO idea about my store."

In fairness to Simon & Schuster, this erosion of bookstore culture outside of the big cities is reflected in strategies pursued by every trade publisher. But that will not mitigate the sense among our country cousins that they're having a lot of undesirable and inappropriate books shoved down their throats by (to use Dave Barry's phrase) a bunch of "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."

Richard Curtis

S&S, Hachette and Other Heavy Hitters Support Delay of E-Reprint

Literary agent Nat Sobel's challenge to publishers to hold back e-book reprints of hardcover books has flushed out position statements by two major figures in the trade book industry: Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy and Hachette Book Group CEO David Young. They're both in favor of it.

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, who covers the book beat for Wall Street Journal, has elicited that "Simon & Schuster is delaying by four months the electronic-book editions of about 35 leading titles coming out early next year, taking a dramatic stand against the cut-rate $9.99 pricing of e-book best sellers." And "David Young, chief executive of the Hachette Book Group, said that Hachette, beginning in January or February, will delay the e-book publication of the vast majority of its titles for three to four months."

Even Barnes & Noble's Chairman Leonard Riggio supports the delay in spite of the fact that B&N's Nook e-book reader stands to benefit from quick rollout of e-books tied to hardcover books. "The decision to delay the e-book titles is in keeping with the long-held practice of issuing paperback editions after the initial hardcover," Trachtenberg cites Riggio as saying.

Not surprisingly, Amazon takes issue with the mounting reaction against simultaneous or near-simultaneous e-book reprints. Trachtenberg quotes an Amazon spokesperson: "Authors get the most publicity at launch and need to strike while the iron is hot. If readers can't get their preferred format at that moment, they may buy a different book or just not buy a book at all."

You can read details of Trachtenberg's article here.

Resistance to quickie e-prints was first articulated by Dominique Raccah, CEO of Sourcebooks, who held back the e-book version of a YA novel to give the hardcover a chance to breathe. You can read her defense, Are E-Books the New Cheap Paperback Edition?, here.

Richard Curtis

S&S Boards HMS Anti-Piracy

Caroline Reidy (right), publisher of Simon & Schuster, has e-circulated a policy statement about online piracy. Notable is a description of S&S's relationship with Scribd, which she described as "a location where pirated works were easily found." Scribd has made an earnest effort to become respectable, occasioning Reidy to say "Our decision to sell ebooks at Scribd came only when we were satisfied that they would both make our works more available to online consumers and also diligently and innovatively combat piracy on their site."

S&S's anti-piracy initiative follows on the heels of one recently announced by Hachette, which has gone so far as to engage a company to monitor instances of piracy of its books. See Hachette Hires Anti-Piracy Hammer.

We don't think S&S will complain if we pirate its statement in full, reprinted below, but from here on in we'll be very careful about using S&S text. We don't want to walk the plank with Caroline Reidy's sword at our backs.

Richard Curtis
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SIMON & SCHUSTER STATEMENT CONCERNING ONLINE PIRACY

Online piracy of digital books is a matter of growing concern. Even as Simon & Schuster explores and partakes in the many new and exciting opportunities presented by the digital world, at the forefront of our digital strategy is a firm commitment to battling piracy.

Since Simon & Schuster began publishing ebooks more than ten years ago, the security of our authors’ copyrights has been a primary concern in every digital partnership or project we have undertaken. Unquestionably, however, as the digital world has expanded and ebooks have become more popular, the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing and sites that feature user-posted content has led to a higher level of unauthorized posting and sharing of our copyrighted content. Responding to these evolving threats requires vigilance and innovation.

We work to stop online piracy as promptly as we can. The Simon & Schuster legal department acts quickly to notify site operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) where piracy occurs, by issuing copyright infringement notices both for electronic versions of our books and for the sale of unauthorized physical editions at online booksellers. These notices generally have the desired result with respect to materials posted and hosted on third-party sites. Peer-to-peer file sharing presents more difficult challenges, but we are working to take advantage of evolving strategies to deter this kind of piracy as well.

More broadly, we seek to combat this situation with the wide range of tools at our command, including doing everything we can to create a robust marketplace where consumers can legally purchase the books they want in electronic formats. We have, for example, recently entered into an arrangement with Scribd, an online document site, to sell Simon & Schuster ebooks at their site. This follows a period in which Scribd attracted much negative publicity as a location where pirated works were easily found. Our decision to sell ebooks at Scribd came only when we were satisfied that they would both make our works more available to online consumers and also diligently and innovatively combat piracy on their site.

We are also working with our colleagues at other publishing houses, via the Association of American Publishers’ Online Piracy Working Group, to share information and best practices on an industry-wide basis.

As long as there have been publishers, there have been scofflaws who see fit to deprive authors of their livelihood. Enforcement is by its very nature an imperfect science. But as the potential for this kind of behavior is amplified in the digital world, keeping our content secure, enforcing our copyrights, and creating a robust marketplace for easily accessible, reasonably priced content will be the pillars upon which we build our future as a digital publisher.

As we move forward in these endeavors, the help of readers, authors, booksellers and concerned citizens will be critical. We ask that if you see Simon & Schuster books illegally posted online, you please bring this to our attention and we will review the matter and take prompt and appropriate action. We will need certain specific information in order to act effectively, and have provided an online form that may be used to notify us of any instances of abuse or infringement.

We hope you find this information helpful and thank you in advance for your help.

Losing Bidder in Cheney Book Auction Offers Advice to Winner Matalin

Ms. Mary Matalin
Threshold Editions
c/o Simon & Schuster

Dear Mary Matalin:

Richard Curtis here, CEO of E-Reads, the publishing company that made what we thought was an irresistible offer to Dick Cheney to publish his book. In case you missed our proposal you may read it here.

But I don't want to sound like a sore loser. If I had to lose a bidding war, I'm relieved it's to you. I was terrified it might end up with Harper, who would probably do the same kind of trashy treatment they did for Peggy Noonan's The Case Against Hillary Clinton, with those made-up internal monologues and transcriptions of speeches Hillary never made. At least I can be confident that your approach to the Cheney book will be utterly responsible, something along the lines of your superb editorial job on Jerome Corsi's The Obama Nation.

You described that book as "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that," and I could not agree more. Your impeccable vetting of Barack Obama's extensive connections with Islam and radical politics, his Communist and socialist mentors, his close associations with members of the Weather Underground, his involvement in the slum-landlord empire of a notorious Chicago political fixer - well, Mary (if I may), reading that meticulously documented work was an inspiring reminder of why I went into the publishing business.

Nevertheless, I hope you will not be afraid to be stern in your dealings with Cheney. If there's one thing I know about him, it's that he has the utmost respect for those who hold people's feet to the fire.

I realize that my role as underbidder for the Cheney book does not entitle me to any special consideration. Nevertheless, I am happy to share with you some of the suggestions I made to Mr. Cheney in my original pitch to him, and I hope you'll adopt them. For what it's worth, here's what I think Cheney needs to discuss to make this book a blockbuster international bestseller:

• How he helped President Bush to deceive Congress and the American people into buying into a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraq government under Saddam Hussein
• How he misrepresented available intelligence
• How he outed covert intelligence officer Valerie Plame and got his Chief of Staff Scooter Libby to take the fall
• How he steered no-bid government contracts to Halliburton, a company in which he has a multimillion dollar interest that has appreciated by thousands of percent since the war began
• How he undermined the Constitution
• How he suspended the right of Habeas Corpus
• How he subverted the rule of law
• How he instituted secret wiretapping and email monitoring of American citizens
• How he scammed America's allies with Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction"
• How he created a secret cabal of oil and other energy lobbyists
• How he sent thousands of young men and women to death and maiming in the prosecution of a "phony" war whose real goal was to exploit Middle East oil
• How he leveraged his office to create a policy of torture and brutality
  

Do these correspond to your own ideas? Have I missed anything?

Also, since it's no longer of any use to us, I might as well give you the title that we'd planned to put on the book had we won the auction:

GO FUCK YOURSELF
My Life in High Crimes and Misdemeanors
by Dick Cheney

What do you think, Mary? Is that a winning title or what?

I invite you to reply to this open letter and I promise to promote your response in the widest public forum.

Yours truly,

Richard Curtis
President and CEO
E-Reads

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em: S&S to Retail 5,000 Titles on Scribd

One way to conquer pirates is to co-opt their territory. To chase would-be pirates off Scribd.com, Simon & Schuster has announced it will deploy some 5,000 e-book editions on the website, reports Brad Stone in the New York Times. Though still in startup, Scribd has mushroomed into a hugely popular locus for writers to upload documents, including books.

Unfortunately, despite heroic efforts, Scribd has not been able to bar its doors to those passing off as their own the work of others. But, like a policeman giving a sample garment to a dog to sniff, once the website's filtering software recognizes a legitimate copyrighted text it will instantly identify and reject imposters. Call it pre-emptive piracy management.

But there's a far less subtle motivation for publishers to cast their lot with Scribd: its irresistibly low commission on sales. In the first decade of the E-Book Revolution, retailers charged the same 50% discount for the sale of digital content that brick and mortar bookstores charged for print. Foremost among the fifty percenters is Amazon and its Kindle. But of late publishers have begun to question the 50%-off shiboleth. Guru Mike Shatzkin gave sharp voice to this restive group. Pronouncing high discounts "daft," he declared "There is no comparison between the retailers’ costs and risks associated with physical books and those associated with ebooks. There is no economic justification to providing the same level of discounts."

"Now," said Shatzkin, "is the time to change this." You can read about it in detail here.

Picking up on these populist sentiments, Scribd came out of the chute charging 20% off the list price to its content provider customers, and that includes publishers. Stone quotes Scribd chief executive Trip Adler as declaring that S&S "is the first public endorsement by a major force in publishing that the social Web will play a major role in the future of book sales.”

Other standard bearers of Big Publishing may well join the rush to Scribd. The anti-piracy features are certainly attractive, but the telling factor may well be a desperate need to push Amazon and other etailers back to a commission structure that is, well, not quite so daft.

RC

S&S Follows Random in Reduction of E-Book Royalties

In October 2008 Random House circulated a letter among literary agents announcing a shift in e-book royalties from one based on list price to one based on actual net moneys received. Five months later, Simon & Schuster has followed Random's example. "Beginning March 1, 2009," writes Judith Curr, Executive Vice President and Publishers of S&S's Atria Books division, in a Dear Agent letter, "all Simon & Schuster contracts worldwide will offer a royalty of 25% of net receipts for all sales of all electronic editions including eBooks and audio book downloads."

Although publishers' royalties are presumably negotiable, the boilerplate on one recent (pre-March 1 2009) Simon & Schuster contract called for a 15% list price royalty. That means that on an e-book retailing at $10.00, the author would be entitled to $1.50. Switching to a 25% royalty on net receipts, the author will now receive $1.25. How is that number calculated? Most e-book retailers take a discount of approximately 50% of an e-book's list price. If S&S collects $5.00 from the retailer, the author will get 25% of that, or $1.25. a reduction of twenty-five cents per sale from the previous arrangement.

One significant aspect of S&S's policy statement is a clarification of the way the company arrives at list prices for e-books. Curr's letter states that "we have, with limited exceptions, adjusted the suggested retail price for our eBooks to mirror the price of the most recently published edition of the book (hardcover or paperback), rather than the discounted prices we had been using."

Translated, that means that if S&S issues a book in hardcover, the e-book price will be commensurately high; when S&S then releases a cheaper paperback edition, the e-book price will proportionately drop. The rationale (if that is the right word for it) for this approach is spelled out in a recent posting, Penetrating the Mysteries of E-Book Pricing. Kind of.

It's hard to say if 25% net e-book royalty will become "standard" throughout the publishing industry but with majors like Random and S&S leading the way, that would seem to be the direction things are headed. (By way of comparison, and as a matter of full disclosure, E-Reads pays a royalty of 50% of net receipts for e-book sales, and has done so since its founding in 2000. On a $10.00 book, that means a royalty of $2.50. At no point is the royalty rate ever reduced.)

- Richard Curtis

"Happy as a Centipede With Track Shoes," Harlan Ellison Sues Paramount and His Own Union Over City on the Edge of Forever

In an earth-scorching fulmination including a denunciation of "my once-tough, beloved Guild - my UNION", Harlan Ellison announced that he has launched a lawsuit against CBS-Paramount, Inc. and Writers Guild of America. Papers filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California cite "breach of the duty of fair representation" and "breach of the Collective Bargaining Agreement".

The specific issues are failure to account for and pay licensing and publication revenues resulting from publication by Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, divisions of Paramount, of a paperback trilogy that Ellison alleges is a "knock-off" of his famous Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever; and the failure of the Guild to support his complaints or take action against Paramount. He seeks unspecific damages from Paramount, but because he remains a loyal member of the Guild he is asking for only one dollar from the union. However, he also seeks "a judicial determination as to whether the WGA is doing what its stated purpose has been since day-one! To fight and negotiate for him and other writers."

Ellison reserves the full measure of his ire for Paramount:

“The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who ‘have more important things to worry about,’ who’ll have their assistant get back to you, who don’t actually read or create, who merely ‘take’ meetings, and shuffle papers – much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams – they refuse even to notice...until you jam a Federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you’ve made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars...from OUR labors...just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters."

And that's just for warmups. As long as you're prepared to confront both barrels of his 12-gauge invective, you can read the complete text of his press release here.

The City on the Edge of Forever is a poignant love story that takes the viewer back to 1930s America. Kirk and Spock race to apprehend a renegade criminal and restore the order of the universe. It is here that Kirk faces his ultimate dilemma: a choice between the universe - or his one true love. It became the classic Star Trek episode, winning the 1966-67 Writers Guild of America Award for best teleplay and the 1967 Hugo Award (the only teleplay ever to do so!). It was also ranked as one of the"100 Greatest Television Episodes of All Time" by TV Guide.

E-Reads has published the original teleplay of The City on the Edge of Forever as Ellison intended it to be aired. The author's introductory essay (expanded by 15,000 words) reveals all of the details of what Ellison describes as a "fatally inept treatment" of his creative work.

Ellison is determined to have his day in court. Read his screenplay, introduction, and the description of his lawsuit and you can vicariously serve on the jury.

RC