Magnifico

This past week we received finished copies of foreign editions of a couple of our books: The Drop Edge of Yonder in French and Some Things That Meant the World to Me in Italian.

Some Things That Meant the World to Me is published in Italy by Elliot Edizioni.

The Drop Edge of Yonder is published as 'Zebulon' in France by Editions Christian Bourgois.

Erotomania: A Romance is published in Spain by Tusquets Editores.

The cover that I really love is the Egon Schiele painting for Erotomania.

Our Bright Future

Barnes & Noble will sell their Nook in Best Buy stores. Amazon's Kindle will be available in Target. This week, in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, Barnes & Noble announced they will return to television advertising to spotlight the Nook.

Here's my pull-quote:

"Companies will have to create demand, which will take a lot of advertising," says Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Put into context, Kindle sales "account for 2% of Amazon's revenue and its e-book sales account for an additional 1.5%." Once the handful of multi-national corporations who stand to profit lobby people through advertising and successfully convince them that they absolutely need these e-readers, then those percentages will rise.

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I originally wrote this piece last fall that they posted at The Rumpus. From the time our distributor made the opportunity available to us in the winter of 2008/2009, we basically dragged our heels on making our titles available electronically until this spring. Now, three of our titles are available for download as e-books (Some Things That Meant the World to Me, by Joshua Mohr; The Drop Edge of Yonder, by Rudolph Wurlitzer; I Smile Back, by Amy Koppelman).

I'm on the fence about doing more, and I'd love to hear back thoughts and opinions.

My concern -- as the e-newsletter Shelf Awareness points out -- is that "Amazon seems to be engaging in some odd pricing strategies . . . pricing some hardcover and paperback bestsellers at e-book levels." They're taking a dramatic loss selling these hardcover books that retail for $25 at this price, further elbowing out local independent bookstores while single-handedly setting an industry-wide pricing standard of $9.99. This amounts to Amazon devaluing everything that a writer or a publisher does!

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E-Doldrums

I have several messages saved permanently on my cellphone’s voicemail. Every month or so I trudge through the parade, when I’m required to re-save them. There’s a message from my wife and business cohort, Eliza, telling me that our daughter, Rio, has successfully managed to stand on her own. Another one, chronicling Rio’s first steps. Several from Rio, as some words inch out, Eliza gently prodding her along in the background.

And then there’s a stew of Two Dollar Radio-related messages. There’s one from independent publicist Lauren Cerand, saying that she saw Erotomania: A Romance, a novel by Francis Levy, in the window at City Lights. I also have saved messages from nearly every one of the authors we’ve published at Two Dollar Radio over the last two years informing me that their author-copies have arrived. They sound satisfied, and what they have to say always makes me smile.

I remember talking with Larry Shainberg, whose book Crust we published last October. I was asking Larry about Samuel Beckett, whom he was fortunate enough to meet on a handful of occasions and befriend (Larry also wrote a Pushcart-winning monograph on Beckett for The Paris Review). Larry told me that he went to see Beckett in Europe, and the pair was returning to the hotel where Beckett was staying when the desk clerk provided him with his mail, which contained the author-copies of one of his books. I don’t recall that Larry mentioned which book of Beckett’s it was, but I remember him saying that it didn’t matter whether it was your first book or your fiftieth, there’s still that feeling of intense satisfaction and joy that arrives with finally holding your book in your hands.

As a publisher, I derive a great deal of satisfaction myself when the finished book arrives. Recently, when copies of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s second and third novels, Flats and Quake, which we’re re-issuing in a back-to-back edition, came from the printer I immediately broke out my camera and took pictures. Certainly, some of the glee could be attributed to the fact that the book looked as we intended: we were nervous about the flipped/upside-down pages.

I’ve learned that publishing is a drawn-out process that above all demands patience. There is that initial burst of enthusiasm after reading a remarkable submission, then the re-kindled energy over presenting the title to the reps at sales conference, but the real flood of excitement comes upon holding the finished product in my hands. That’s when it’s real, the transition complete, when I find its spot on the bookshelf in my office: it is now a book.

As a publisher we’ve dragged our heels in embracing e-books (or even acknowledging their presence). Through our distributor, Consortium, we’re able to partake in their parent company’s program, that allows publishers to make their books available electronically rather painlessly, albeit with a modest fee. But it took us at least eight months to sign the contract, and we’re still, now, months later, resolving any further contract entanglements with authors.

Part of my reluctance is my inability to resolve in my mind the bitter truth of what we’ll be stamping our brand upon. As a publisher, I know e-books are a cheaper product – both to produce and consume (providing you can foot the tab for the e-reader) – and I’m certain that writers do too. What makes anyone believe that readers won’t arrive at this realization as well? Once the honeymoon with their sleek new gadget ends, they’ll start to demand more for their money. As a commenter to Nick Harakaway’s blog post on e-books points out: “I wouldn’t pay more than $10 for an eBook, because at more than that, I want more than I’m getting. I want a dust jacket, I want something physical. There’s an inherent belief (and I agree) e should never cost as much as its old world equivalent. You really do get less.”

Gimmicks such as Simon and Schuster’s snigger-trigger “Vook” are just the tip of the iceberg. Soon, because of the lack of page-count constraints, e-books will come complete with deleted chapters, a writer’s and editor’s cut, and alternate endings. The result will resemble more a videogame fantasia than a traditional “book.” And I don’t want to read that.

As Emily Pullen, of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, so aptly points out in a blog post: “Creating digital literature and harnessing the medium’s unique capabilities requires a specialized knowledge of programming languages. As such, it is software engineers and computer programmers (the techies) who are best suited to use this new literary medium, not the traditional Writer.”

Most likely, it will be several years and rungs on the evolutionary ladder of the Vook before even its initial potential can be imagined. In the meantime, at Two Dollar Radio we’ll casually make our books available electronically. At our size, the potential fifty dollars a month from e-book sales can make a difference. But I don’t expect many messages from authors calling to share their enthusiasm at their e-books arriving. And I won’t blame them.

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As a post-script, I'd like to mention that of the three writers I notified that their "e-book" was available, only one wrote back, (a succinct "Cool!") while the others casually disacknowledged my note. No writer spends their hours toiling by themselves in a dark room to birth an electronic book into the world.

There's this amazing preface to Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, which I'm really stoked to read (finish), where Lanier says: "The vast fanning out of fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.

"And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.

"The words in this book are written for people, not computers."

It's a Jungle Out There.

I wrote this piece that appeared on The Rumpus about sort of confronting e-books as a publisher. I say "sort of confronting" because my "confrontation" as well as my interaction with e-books thus far has been entirely passive, and I still don't necessarily know what to think about them.

Still, I find it remarkable that with all the hoopla and the prospect of gobbling up a new gadget, the only people (I'm counting friends and family-members, not publishing industry-friends) I know that own an e-reader are my exceptionally active and travel-prone in-laws.

Generally, I don't think that e-books are a bad thing, nor do I think that they compete with print books. In the grand scheme of things, I find myself subscribing to the school of thought laid out by the new owner of the Harvard Bookstore, Jeff Mayersohn. In a piece on the Huffington Post, after discussing the print-on-demand Espresso book machine his store recently bought, he very incisively and wisely closes by saying:

"If the physical book survives, the model of centralized production and long-haul distribution is obsolete. The corporate book hawkers are doomed and they know it - unless they can convince you that the physical book is the dinosaur and not they."

Which is a much more convincing and honest reaction than any I've heard on the e-book debate. I think it also goes quite a long way toward underlining the prospects for the future of book publishing's "three-hundred pound gorilla," Amazon.

What is the future of Amazon? As the print-on-demand Espresso book machine circulates and becomes more accessible, it seems that if Amazon doesn't offer an option where shoppers can pick up their orders the same day as their order is placed then they will become obsolete. (Which itself is a silly thought, bringing us back to where we started, shopping from our neighbor's store.)

To me, it appears as though by offering e-books Amazon has begun re-branding themselves as a tech company rather than a retailer. By setting the standard cost of e-books at $9.99, they've also devalued their base product considerably.

I'd say Amazon's future is pretty bleak, and they have to know it, which is why they're placing such a bloated emphasis on e-books.

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I didn't set out to write all this.

My point was to say that beginning in April, we will begin making a couple of our titles available as e-books: Some Things That Meant the World to Me, by Joshua Mohr; The Drop Edge of Yonder, by Rudolph Wurlitzer; and I Smile Back, by Amy Koppelman.

This Kid Is Like...

I've enjoyed reading which authors and books Joshua Mohr's first novel Some Things That Meant the World to Me have been compared to. There's been Denis Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Haruki Murakami, and Franz Kafka.

I really enjoyed Darby Dixon III's well-written review in The Collagist, which brings up Michel Gondry:

Joshua Mohr’s debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, is where Michael Gondry would go if he went down a few too many miles of bad desert road. Replace the director’s Science of Sleep-style clouds-of-cotton whimsy with harsh whiskey and hot sand and you get a sense for the dark world Mohr constructs. Dark, yet not pitch black: he pits his vision of ugly realities against one of basic human kindness. It is this tension that gives his engaging novel its emotional power."

And, today, Some Things got another truly awesome write-up in Fiction Writers Review, by Tyler McMahon, who, in one review, brought up Bright Lights, Big City, Fight Club, Less Than Zero, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, and Jesus' Son. Oh, and Nirvana's Nevermind. Peep this:

"If you’re one of those anachronistic thirty-somethings that still quaintly reads books then you may know the rare and exquisite pleasure of stumbling across one that seems to be written by, for, and about your contemporaries. I had that experience recently when I read Joshua Mohr’s debut novel. Imagine Fight Club if you were told about the schizophrenia on the first page, none of the personalities were as pretty as Brad Pitt, and the narrator spent the rest of the book with the gun in his mouth. The energetic prose [...] will likely draw comparisons to Bright Lights, Big City or perhaps Less Than Zero."

Joshua Mohr Reading Dates.

Joshua Mohr, author of Some Things That Meant the World to Me and the forthcoming Termite Parade, has added some additional reading dates in the Bay Area.

Sept. 24 - Dog Eared Books, 8:00, Babble On reading series

Oct. 6 - University of San Francisco (MFA reading series), 7:30

Oct. 17 - Litquake's Litcrawl event, Artillery Gallery, 8:30

One Thing That Meant the World to Me.

I'm pretty excited. We're going to be publishing a first novel by this writer named Joshua Mohr, a terrificly talented new voice.

The title alone packs a wallop: Some Things That Meant the World to Me.

Stephen Elliott, author of Happy Baby said this about the book: "A startling debut. Joshua Mohr takes us to a different city, but a city we know, populated by the dark side of ourselves."

Feast on this first paragraph from the novel:
I’d like to brag about the night I saved a hooker’s life. Like to tell you how quiet everything else in the world was while I helped her. This was in San Francisco. Late 2007. I’d been drinking in Damascus, my favorite dive bar, which was painted entirely black—floor, walls, and ceiling. Being surrounded by all that darkness had this slowing effect on time, like a shunned astronaut meandering in space.

It's sharp, it's potent, it will make you swoon.