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       VS.          

*SPITA: Severe Pain In The Ass

Amazon says it slashes prices and offers free shipping on big orders to offer consumers the best deal possible AND to increase profits for authors by driving up sales. Publishing houses say they’re having their operations hijacked. A couple of months ago, Hachette, #4 of the Big Five publishing houses, drew a line in the sand when Amazon demanded a higher cut of the company’s e-book sales. The behind-closed-doors disagreement has turned into an international media spectacle and, quite possibly, a defining moment for the coming years of publishing.

While the other four major publishing houses are not getting involved, not to mention the thousands of smaller presses that are just happy to be here for the ride (Thank you, Amazon, for a significant portion of our sales!), everyone in the industry is watching this cat-and-mouse game unfold and wondering where it will lead.

Should Amazon get to dictate how much publishing companies charge for physical copies and e-books? Should Amazon have the right to publish a book on its own when the publisher has failed to supply enough copies to the literary leviathan’s warehouse? Should Amazon be able to pull books at their own discretion, delay delivery to punish “bad publishers,” and remove certain books from promotions for the sake of retribution?

Interestingly, the French Senate recently passed a law (the anti-Amazon law) forbidding the American company from offering free shipping in an effort to get more people to buy their literature from local bookstores.

Read the entire New York Times article here.

Or as The Guardian puts it: “Authors’ incomes collapse to ‘abject’ levels.”

When I started writing in 2000, I was warned there’s little to no money in the craft. When I stopped lecturing at my university of seven years in 2004 to pursue writing as a full-time gig, many around me thought I had consumed significant amounts of turpentine before reaching this decision. Why, after all, would you give up a decent job at a respectable university to do something that will most likely mean financial ruin? Don’t think I haven’t thought about that question a few bazillion times over the last decade.

According to the U.K.’s Authors’ Licencing and Collecting Society (ALCS), median annual earnings for professional writers have fallen to £11,000 (about CDN $20,000), a drop of 29% since 2005. I can’t even write down what my royalties were last year for fear of breaking down into an apoplectic shitstorm of tears.

As one writer who’s published five books through HarperCollins said, “Being a writer can’t be treated like it’s a job. It maybe was once, but no writer can treat it as such nowadays. There’s no ground beneath your feet in terms of income, and you can’t rely on money to come when you need it.”

They say you need another job to pay the bills if you’re going to be a writer. However, as I am learning, some of us actually need two jobs on top of the writing to make ends meet and live above the poverty line. The moral of the story here is very clear: unless you’re Count Wilhelm von Moneybags IV, keep your day job for the rest of your life if you want to become a writer. Otherwise, you risk having to give up everything material in your life. And if you think that’s even mildly romantic a la 1920s Parisian cafes, hanging with Hemingway and Stein on your way to becoming a starving artist, I’ve got news  for you – it ain’t no fun.

Read the full article in The Guardian here.

It’s official: I’m on Twitter as of today. You can find me and my technicolor dreamcoat at:

@harrisrh88

My last novel was 165,000 words, or approximately 4.3 million characters. I now have 140 characters to make use of per tweet. Put another way, I have roughly 1/30,000 the space to express my thoughts compared to The Immortal Flower.

This could be trouble.

When you publish a book, it’s a pretty special feeling. But when you see a friend you really care about publish their very first book, it’s an even more special feeling. Just before moving to Mexico a couple of months ago, my near and dear friend of many years, Maria Amore, published a vegan cookbook that is nothing short of amazing. So says the carnivore who had never made a vegan dish before reading through every single recipe in this book.

You can read my review online at Goodreads or buy the book through Amazon. It’s also available on Kindle.

Congratulations to Maria and all the best with her future culinary endeavours. The world’s kitchens are better places because of your vision and passion.

Choosing 10 works of fiction was hard, but choosing 10 nonfiction books is even more subjective. An author may do a wonderful job of writing about something, but if you’re not interested in the subject, it probably won’t do much to turn your crank. Some would disagree and say that good writing always inspires a reader, but in my humble opinion that simply isn’t true. For example, there isn’t a single business/management book out there you could pay me enough to read.

However, as with the fiction list I posted a few days ago, it’s interesting to see what others consider “seminal” nonfiction works. When I searched out the Modern Library again, I burst out laughing that Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard could invade this list, too. Whatever. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d say Tom Cruise owns the rights to the Modern Library. However, the Readers’ List is scarier than the Top Gun factor. It really gives you a sense of the far right-wing, gun-toting, religiously zealous, 2nd Amendment-loving American nonfiction reader.

I hope my list is a touch more eclectic and may inspire some readers to go out and pick up a copy of one or more of these books. Although my list is not really a Top 10 – more like 10 books that have really made me think – I can’t say enough about Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity. Anyway, let’s get to the lists and see what people are saying…

THE BOARD’S LIST

1. The Education of Henry Adams (Henry Adams), 2. The Varities of Religious Experience (William James), 3. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington), 4. A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf), 5. Silent Spring (Rachel Carson), 6. Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (T.S. Eliot), 7. The Double Helix (James D. Watson), 8. Speak, Memory (Vladimir Nabokov), 9. The American Language (H.L. Mencken), 10. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (John Maynard Keynes)

 THE READERS’ LIST

1. The Virtue of Selfishness (Ayn Rand), 2. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (L. Ron Hubbard), 3. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Leonard Peikoff), 4. 101 Things to Do Til the Revolution (Claire Wolfe), 5. The God of the Machine (Isabel Paterson), 6. Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life (Michael Paxton), 7. The Ultimate Resource (Julain Simon), 8. Economics in One Lesson (Henry Hazlitt), 9. Send in the Waco Killers (Vin Suprynowicz), 10. More Guns, Less Crime (John R. Lott)

 RICHARD’S LIST

1. Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity (Dr. Sharon Moalem), 2. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Jared Diamond), 3. Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl), 4. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (Margaret MacMillan), 5. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Stephen Hawking), 6. Death in the Afternoon (Ernest Hemingway), 7. Japan at War: An Oral History (Haruko Taya Cook, Theodore F. Cook), 8. What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures (Malcolm Gladwell), 9. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (Jon Krakauer), 10. The Guns of August (Barbara Tuchman)

Other titles almost on the list:

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris), No LOGO (Naomi Klein), Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Lynne Truss), The Rape of Nanking (Iris Chang), In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (Nathaniel Philbrick),  Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience, 1900-1950 (Donald N. Clark), A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson), Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Herbert Pix ), India: A Million Mutinies Now (V.S. Naipaul), The Korean War (Max Hastings), The Executioner’s Song (Norman Mailer), Hiroshima (John Hersey), The Last Honest Man: Mordecai Richler: An Oral Biography (Michael Posner)

Per an article in engadget.com:

“Brick-and-mortar book stores have clearly been on the decline for a while — just look at Barnes & Noble’s rocky finances. However, there’s now some tangible evidence that the pendulum has swung in favor of internet-based sales. BookStats estimates that US publishers made more money from online orders and e-books in 2013 ($7.54 billion) than they did from old-fashioned physical retail ($7.12 billion). While the difference isn’t huge, it suggests that a large chunk of the American population is content with buying books that it hasn’t seen in person.

There is a bit of a dark cloud to this silver lining, at least for the booksellers. BookStats notes that e-book sales jumped about 10 percent to 512.7 million copies, but revenue was flat between 2012 and 2013; it may have been lower prices that triggered a surge in demand, not a renewed interest in going digital. With that said, researchers warn that their data doesn’t include books without ISBN numbers, so quite a few self-published e-books may have slipped through the cracks. Even with that wiggle room in the data, it’s evident that there’s a transition underway — you just shouldn’t expect to see the corner bookstore disappear overnight.”

I was curious about this question, so did a little sleuthing. UNESCO estimates that 1,024,587 books were published “this year” around the world, but doesn’t specify the date. Its statistics from countries are drawn from all sorts of years.

Wikipedia says the U.S. led the charge in 2011 with 292,014 in new books and new editions. The Yanks have a lot of famous books, so new editions could total as much as 50% of the total in my opinion. Maybe more.

China, U.K., Russia, India, Germany, Japan, Spain, Turkey and France round out the Top 10 (S. Korea at No. 12, Canada at No. 20).

What’s interesting about the lists is what they define as “books.” Having lived in Korea for a long, long time, I saw that books come out every day from publishers and independent hagwon (cram school) presses. The number is staggering. I should know. I write some of them! But what constitutes a “book” by UNESCO or Wikipedia seems to be very different from the number of “bound editions of volumes of writings.” Literary prose? Non-fiction works? Great. But what does that really mean?

It brings to mind the  question of what makes a book a “real book.” I don’t have the answer. But everyone who’s been to East Asia knows there are so many textbooks, dictionaries, reference guides, manuals and so on and so forth also knows that it’s hard to imagine they publish less “material” than any region of the world.

It also raises the question of self-publishing vs. traditional publishing. In North America the Big Five rules: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, and Penguin Random House (yes, they merged in 2013…like Microsoft and Apple coming together…world domination!). But then you also have Bloomsbury, publisher of the not-so-famous J.K. Rowling and Margaret Atwood, and Canadian publishers McClelland & Stewart and House of Anansi, both of which have published Sir Knight the Rt. Hon. Michael Ondaatje (kind of love the guy…if you haven’t read In the Skin of a Lion or The English Patient you’re missing major pieces in your English reference library).

Everyone else gets lefts in the dust. Including self-publishing houses, which aren’t allowed to enter books into any single major literary contest except the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award! (K, my book may be there in the Young Adult category, but this is NOT shameless promotion. NOT. Definitely NOT.)

In any event, there are a lot of books being published these days, especially in ebook format. That number will only continue to grow, and that’s a good thing in some ways. More books equals more variety; it also means fewer profits for all of us little scribes and inkhorns.

And then there’s online sellers versus brick-and-mortar stalwarts! But that’s for another post……….