Why Publishing Is Better Than Banking

(originally written for the Hodder blog)

When I was upgraded from Work Experience to Postroom Boy, my first paid job in publishing, my best friend delighted in teasing me about the career I had chosen: "tha' can't eat bukes, son" he would state, in unconvincing Yorkshire-ese. And he had a point. The pay was crap. Clearly there was something else that made me, and all of us, stick with bukes.

But what is it, since it's clearly not just that "we really like reading"? I think the answer is half laudable and half ... slightly tacky.

Laudable first: If you love books, and have even the tiniest impulse to share your love of books with the world, what could be more inviting than the opportunity to engage with a book – a text as they'd have said at college – and attempt to add whatever publishing Right Stuff you may have to the thing, in an attempt to get it widely read?

From editor to rep, and beyond, to bookseller, everyone gets a shot at (if you'll forgive the horrid phrase) adding value. It could be creative, it could be nakedly commercial, but it all contributes to the enterprise of making the book popular.

And now the tacky bit; our less classy reason to stay in books: we get to show off. When we go for drinks with old school friends who have been cutting a swathe through the City, say, or billing fortunes at the Bar, we know we can't compete on the financial front. But just try asking them what excited them at work last week. Specifically what bit was best. Chances are your week sounds more fun. Discovering a stunning new author, maybe meeting them and persuading them that your publishing house is their creative home. Puzzling out how to get the public to respond to their book. Even the bad bits are pretty great. Consider the "nightmare" of a steaming row in a cover meeting or a "real struggle" selling a brilliant book to a book loving bookseller. Many people would give their right arm to get paid to do either.

To address, at last, the book in hand: David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet sums up exactly what makes me love the business. I started reading it on a family holiday, alongside four people all reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Nothing against Stieg, but by God I felt smug. When you're reading a story no one has ever told before, or even come close, when you're absorbing page after page of prose which makes you grin with its wit, with the delightful surprise of the character's actions, with the sparkle of the ideas being playfully chipped your way by the author ... you're feeling happy. When you pause to reflect that you get to join in, be it with the cover art, the blurb, the text design, or the way it's conveyed to the booksellers and the public, well, then you feel privileged.

And that sums it up. It's a privilege to work on a book like this.

The One About The Man With The Banjo

Cut & pasted from the Hodder blog...

Listening to Frances Spalding on Start the Week last month reminded me of a small obsession: the value of memorable words in a book title. She thinks a good title ‘acts as a capstone’ to a work, and must be ‘wholly at one with the book’. That may well be true, but for shameless unit-shifting reasons, I say a good title is also a memorable one. And a memorable one almost always includes at least one decent noun.

Animals, objects and famous places are easy to remember. And if you can remember the title of a book, or at least a bit of it, then you can ask for it in a shop, or find it online and recommend it to a friend – that critical word-of-mouth factor that creates so many bestsellers.

This was wittily exploited by Penguin in their adverts for Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka:

This is clever for a number of reasons: most importantly it reflects perfectly the way readers actually talk about books. It doesn’t plunge immediately into detail about the plot, because readers don’t. It’s not over-reverential about the author, because readers aren’t. Instead it invites us to recall that we liked the last one so we’ll probably like this one. We can’t remember the last one’s title, or the author’s unpronounceable name, but it’s the new one from that tractors woman and we’ll probably give it a go.

A straw poll of booksellers reinforces the impression that book buyers need all the help they can get remembering book titles.

Dillons alumnus Mike Atherton (not that one, another one) remembers being asked for ‘that motorbike thing by Shaggy Vera’ (The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara). Marie recalls the classic ‘it has some sushi on the front.’ Stephanie tells me that in her days at WH Smith ‘A Cross on the Nightingale's Door’ was nearly as popular an enquiry as the correct title (Across The Nightingale Floor). Wendy reports the priceless ‘set in Greece, about a man with a banjo’ from the Captain Corelli era.

And at the risk of turning this into a post mocking book buyers, I can't resist including this lovely scene in a shop witnessed by Shona Cook, a Canadian publishing friend (the ‘me’ is Shona):

Customer: I need to get that book about cookies. It's something about cookies.

Clerk: Cookies. Okay. (types into the computer) umm... there are quite a few books about cookies here.

Customer: Well it was on TV the other day. My wife saw it on TV.

Clerk: Um. Okay. There are really a lot of books about cookies. Can you tell me anything else about it?

Customer: It's something about making money and cookies. I don't know. She was going on about it at dinner but I wasn't really listening to her.

At this point, I realize which book they are looking for and turn to the clerk.

Me: I think the book you want is called The Smart Cookie’s Guide to Investing

Him: YEAH. THAT'S IT.

Clerk: Thank you.

Me: Your wife is a lucky woman.

And, rather than get properly back to the point, here's a story from Lucy Mangan, one of our own authors, ex of Waterstone's in Bromley, demonstrating that even a great title won’t be enough for some customers: ‘There's the one who came in saying he didn't know the title (‘Fine,’ I said, moving to the database screen) – or the author (‘Less fine’) but he knew it was ‘this shape’. He drew a rectangle in the air.’

And that brings us nicely on to what happens if you don’t have a memorable title.

Despite the outstanding efforts of India Knight and The Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop among others, I reckon the (absolutely brilliant) Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewellery by Leanne Shapman will always be hampered by its impossible to remember title, despite the fact that the title is an ingenious and integral part of the novel itself. I have had about thirty conversations about it and no one (including me) has yet managed anything closer than ‘you know, the novel written like it’s an auction catalogue’. Test for yourself how hard this makes things: try and find it on Amazon twenty minutes after you’ve finished reading this.

In fact Amazon, and the importance of online search, makes a distinctive, memorable title more vital than ever. You'll need to get at least one word right to find the damn thing online.

A great title, as Frances Spalding puts it, will ‘catch passers-by’, but a bestselling title will stay in the mind of the passer-on.

Christmas card 2009

A very satisfying process, printing this year's card:



Firstly, it's a team effort. S's idea, B found the pinecone on hols in France and did the writing, which I traced onto the lino. H did nothing, the slacker.

Secondly, I learned something really important about lino printing: the reason I have been getting, literally, patchy results to date, with more mottled ink application than I'd have liked, is not because of this:



or this:




it's because I don't got one of these:




and instead rely on rather cruder means, such as:



and, this time, one of these ugly brutes:


But all done now, and happy with it. Happy Christmas!

Arf

Two stories which have amused me in the last few days:

My sister was picking up her six year old at school and happened to notice the new Ben 10 'Omnitrix' watch her classmate Max was wearing. "Nice Omnitrix, Max!" said V, all friendly and mum-like. "Thanks!" said Max, and, realising it was polite to reciprocate the complament, briefly looked her up and down, scanning for an appropriate subject. "Nice ... boobies." he settled on, and turned back to his game.

Our friend M was off work looking after his daughter when his phone accidentally called work from his pocket. His PA did the decent thing and put the call on speaker when she realised that this was the boss reading his daughter, of all things, That's Not My Fairy.

The Back of the Book

Here's a blog post about blurb I done did on the Hodder site:

What happens the instant after you flip a book over might make the difference between bestseller and remainder.

Why?

When you turn over a book, it's like clicking on a link, or raising your eyebrows and tilting your head in a conversation. It says "tell me more".

Quite often we, as publishers, bugger up this priceless invitation with a blurb that tells you all the wrong stuff, or simply tells you too much.

Research, consultants, and common sense tell us two things about blurbs:

#1: The punters neither want nor need a full synopsis.

#2: They think we sorted out all those lovey "A Masterpiece" quotes from other famous authors over drinks at The Groucho.

So what should we put on the back of a book? Here's a blurb I think works really well:

and it was a monster bestseller, sans prizes or Richard & Judy.

I think it works because:

It addresses you directly, and in an arrestingly unusual way: "HERE IS A SMALL FACT: YOU ARE GOING TO DIE".

It doesn't tell you more of the story than you need (though it does fall back on that overused 'The year. The place' thing).

It's suggestive rather than explanatory. How could your curiosity not be piqued by "and quite a lot of thievery"?

So why aren't more blurbs like that and less like dull synopses and tiresome hype?

A chap called Damian Horner (more on him later) has some good opinions on this, but my list would go:

1) Low status of blurb. There are some notable exceptions, but in most publishers it’s written by quite junior staff, like Editorial Assistants. Nothing wrong with that in itself – they're smart and they know the books – but it's an indication that the enterprise as a whole doesn't value it as highly as, say, the front cover. We can tell that the cover art is important because it is afforded the ultimate accolade of a Punch’n'Judy set-to (aka The Cover Meeting) between the most senior members of staff every week, in every publisher.

2) Publishing processes. You write the Advance Information sheet, you adapt it for the catalogue, which becomes the hardback copy, which becomes the paperback copy. Surprise, surprise, it ain't reading very fresh any more. Hard to manage freshness when you're only ever 10 minutes from the next deadline.

3) Lack of evidence. We don't, as an industry, spend that much on research, and what we do spend probably isn't too closely focussed on the role of copy. It happens, but it's not exactly common. So we don't know enough about what works.

But back to the good examples. My colleagues at Sceptre scored a big hit with this one:

When I first saw it my immediate reaction was "Arg! Can't do that!" I had a right old cringe at the notion of "we", The Publisher, addressing the reader. 300,000 sales later ... I might have revised my stance a tad.

So why does it work? It goes further than The Book Thief by making a virtue of denying you information (though the information you do get is very well judged). It, too, is arrestingly direct: "We don't want to tell you what happens in this book". It makes an unusual request of you: "please don't tell".

It was written before my time here in a very intense and thoughtful process led by Damian Horner, our marketing consultant. Now if you read 'marketing consultant' and think bad thoughts (I've been told that some people don't think us Marketing Professionals are the salt of the earth) please consider that his job here is nothing more sinister than helping us persuade people to buy books we love.

What's next? How to repeat the trick? Probably not by repeating it, for a kickoff ("We don't want to tell you what happens in ... THIS book either!!"). We have been working on an interesting new wheeze, though. It’s about getting fresh ideas from writers outside the industry. Watch this space

Cabbage

Had a work do yesterday. On a Sunday. But it turned out nice. It was the gala dinner for the Independent Booksellers conference, at Warwick University.

Gyles Brandreth was the star turn. He spoke stirringly about the value of ... independent booksellers, funnily enough, and told a few tales from his diaries, published by us and entitled Something Sensational to Read on the Train.

He described a lovely episode when he was on Lord Longford's Pornography Commission, along with an Archbishop, two judges, a Rabbi and Cliff Richard. Lord L gets out two carrier bags of utterly filthy stuff and "We spent an hour or two going through it. We'd flick through the pages going tut tut tut ... oh look, Rabbi - here's one of yours..."

And he apparently overheard Prince Philip saying to the Queen in the royal box of the variety show: "Oh look, Cabbage, they're doing something called The Full Monty. That'll be some sort of tribute to El Alamein. Marvellous".

The Coolest Canned Fish Shop In France

Plenty of highlights to pick out from our trip to the island of Noirmoutier, off the Loire Atlantique coast (no, I'd never heard of it either): bike & chariot trips with the kids to buy bread, swimming in the sea, eating camp-cooked moules ... but naturally the thing I was most excited about was discovering a great canned fish shop.

It's not that I'm even that into canned fish, but ... it just looked so good. Shelf upon shelf of gaudy, perky, colourful, traditional ahm cans of fish. What's not to like? There's something about attractive, yet basic objects displayed in volume that gives them an exuberant charm. Either that or I'm a wannabe graphic designer and twat.

Judge for yourself. How cool is this shop?