Oh, What Can It Mean?

The Monkees' "Daydream Believer" video is a nearly perfect deconstruction of an art form from within.

Of course, it helps to start with good raw material: a fine pop song by Kingston Trio veteran John Stewart which spent four week at #1 on the Billboard singles chart. Add the groovy psychedelia of late 1967, before the trend went sour.

But what makes the video great is the Monkees themselves: four young performers starting to chafe at the limits of the television personas that have made them famous, rich, and creatively unfulfilled. So they chip away at the very nature of the music video, revealing that they're only pretending to play their instruments and then competing to lip-synch the lead vocals. But they've become such practiced comedians that they can do that without destroying the enjoyment.

All that makes this literal version of the "Daydream Believer" video simply redundant. It's already deconstructed itself. The result is like listening to people recite Monty Python routines at length.

I find "literal" remakes work best with music videos that are pretentious and hint at a narrative thread amidst all the imagery, such as a-ha's "Take On Me" and Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Those deserve deconstruction. The Monkees--they already did the job forty years ago.

Sleestaks and Other Monsters

Here are two things which never meant as much to me growing up as the media implied they should:

• The Sid and Marty Krofft TV show Land of the Lost, shown on Saturday mornings from 1974 to 1976. Sure, I watched more episodes than was healthy, but it wasn't really that gripping. We shouldn't use "classic" as a synonym for "anything we remember from when we were eleven."
• The supposed dirty play of the Detroit Pistons' Bill Laimbeer. According to the Boston press in the 1980s, he was the second coming of Attila the Hun. That same press had little to say about, for example, Larry Bird being the nastiest trash-talker in the league.

But the fact that Laimbeer played one of the antagonistic Sleestaks on Land of the Lost as a college job, as documented by the Pantopticist--that I find very meaningful.
The current publicity about the underperforming big-screen remake of Land of the Lost its second run on television in 1991-93. That cast included one of my high school classmates, who probably was watching the original Land of the Lost on the same Saturdays that I did. Since he hung out with the athletes, he might have cared about Laimbeer.

The Value of Bricks and Mortar

From a comment by Book Hound after Edward Champion's interview with Sherman Alexie over his emotional overreaction to the Kindle (since qualified):

One time, I was in the indie bookstore near my apartment in NYC, and the clerk handed me a copy of “Flight,” and he was like, “This book is amazing, you have to read it. The author has enjoyed an amazing career.”

And I was like, “OK, how much does it cost?”

And he was like, “$14. Plus tax.”

And I was like, “But I can get it on Amazon for $10 with free shipping.”

And he was like, “Oh.”

Then he covered my hand with his and said, “But can you get this amazing human interaction on Amazon?”

And I was like, “Stop being so tactile and eccentric.”

(I'm reading the verb “like” here to mean “say something of nearly the same meaning and emotional tenor, but probably not expressed quite so pithily, or at least think of saying it within a few minutes afterwards.”)

Batman, Robin, and the “Much-Maligned Sound Effect”?

The first issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Batman and Robin magazine went on sale this week. One of its features, according to Morrison, is a novel treatment of sound effects. In an interview posted on the IGN comics site on 11 March, Morrison said:

I've asked him [Quitely] to re-introduce the much-maligned sound effects to superhero comics but in a way that integrates them more closely with the art.

And eight days later an interview on the CBR site quoted Morrison on the same point:

And he’s producing things like sound effects, because nobody does sound effects anymore. Everybody has given up on them, so what we’ve done is incorporate them into the artwork. When someone hits water, the water rises up and makes the “splash” effect. It just looks fantastic.

And this is how it looks.
Here's the sound of explosions during a high-speed chase.
And in Quitely's Gotham City, the sound of the new flying Batmobile firing a missile inside a highway tunnel is "BWKSSSSssssss."
But is the sound effect truly "much-maligned" in superhero comics these days? Has everyone indeed "given up on them"? A peek into DC Comics's other superhero magazines shows that's not so. It's true that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen did without sound effects, and that's the platinum standard for superhero stories--but it's also more than twenty years old. 

Perhaps what Morrison meant (besides hyping his upcoming work, as such interviews are supposed to do) is that comic-book sound effects have been the domain of letterers, now created with computer fonts rather than by hand. He and Quitely are clearly doing sound effects differently, incorporating them into the art from the beginning.

As for the other aspects of this magazine, I was a little disappointed. Parts were great fun, such as an opening chase scene that alludes to Mr. Toad's wild ride, and a new skyscraper headquarters for the new Batman/old Robin. We sense the friction between him and the new Robin that will define the arc of this series. But the story seems disjoint enough that I wonder if it was chopped up and stitched back together in different order.

Six pages from the end we see Commissioner Gordon up on the police station roof, shining the bat-signal into the sky. His men are skeptical this will work since Batman hasn't been heard from in a long time. But then, plunging through the skylight's beam come Batman and Robin! What a dramatic moment!

Except that we've already seen Batman and Robin in action on ten earlier pages. They've already delivered a criminal to the cops. And the previous page has shown us that they're up in the sky, about to test their new parachute-capes. 

The only surprise, therefore, is for Commissioner Gordon--and we never see his reaction. (Maybe in issue #2.) We readers are left wondering if Batman and Robin just happened to be out skydiving when the bat-signal was turned on. 

Furthermore, Quitely's and colorist Alex Sinclair's full-page image of the Dynamic Duo's descent (Robin in the lead, as shown in thumbnail here) lacks the deep, black shadows that have dramatized Batman stories for seventy years. What was no doubt intended to be a great moment left me, as I said before, a little disappointed.

Representations of Race, Realities of Publishing

Various folks have been discussing the representation of racial and ethnic minorities in American children's books. This commentary has focused on such matters as writing across culture and race, and whether the rules of the Coretta Scott King Award are still apt.

This spring's SCBWI New England conference had the theme "Many Voices," and after my workshop I grabbed the opportunity to attend presentations on ethnic inclusivity by Mitali Perkins and A.C.E. Bauer. (Click on their names for their blog entries about those workshops.) I also attended a presentation on publishing for minority audiences by editors Louise May of Lee & Low and Bobbie Combs of Two Lives, and a panel they were on alongside illustrator Floyd Coooper and agent/bookseller Jennifer Laughran.

But in all that discussion, I haven't heard many acknowledgments of some big realities about the publishing industry today. Namely:

1) American children's-book professionals have never been more ideologically open to books for and about children of color. There are more people of color in the industry, and at higher levels, than ever before. Most publishing pros are ready, even eager, for books about children of color; they're almost all intellectuals from coastal cities, after all.

Of course, it's still possible for people to have unrecognized biases. The publishing world is still disproportionately non-Latino white. But on the conscious level, book editors and other "gatekeepers" aren't trying to ignore authors of color, or stories about people of color. They love finding a profitable market for those authors and stories.

2) Children's books have never been more widely distributed. The superstore expansion of the 1990s means that metropolitan areas which used to have bookstores that stocked 10,000 titles are now served by stores with 30,000+ titles. "Big box" stores and discount warehouses stock children's books as a loss leader; that inventory brings in mothers to shop. And of course Amazon, BN.com, BookSense, and other online retailers (such as Oz and Ends's favorite, Powell's) can make hundreds of thousands of titles available within days.

3) The book industry has never had better data on what is selling well. Publishers once relied on anecdotal feedback about what titles were actually selling out of bookstores, hoping for reorders instead of returns. Now BookScan, Ingram, and Amazon sales figures are available each week. The big chains closely track their inventory. Publishers can find out which stores in which neighborhoods and states are selling their books best.

4) The big US publishing companies are wings of large, publicly traded multimedia corporations which are designed to, and by law required to, maximize profit for shareholders. They're not entirely efficient. But a corporation competing on the stock market doesn't have the luxury of leaving easy money on the table. A corporate publisher isn't out to publish for the greater good, nor to reflect its founders' biases. It exists for one reason: to sell books at the highest profit. The organization is basically set up to keep individual employees focused on that goal.

What do those realities mean to the question of publishing more books about children of color?

I think they mean that exhortations to publishing professionals to put aside prejudices or worries aren't going to have much effect. Most book editors know that "the market has changed" since we were young; after all, many of them were young much more recently than we were. Book editors already know there are families seeking books about children of color.

The challenge isn't convincing individual gatekeepers. The challenge is convincing those editors' corporate employers--and the corporations they work closely with, such as the chain booksellers--that there's enough money to be made from those families to justify publishing more books than they already are.

Yet, as I said before, those corporations know more about where in America particular books are selling than any of us do. They're in the business of reaching book customers and selling books. And the reach of bookselling is as deep and wide as it's ever been. If there's a big untapped market out there, then they have every incentive to spot it, and to develop more titles for it.

On the other hand, those corporations have every incentive not to expend extra effort on segments of the market that have been limited or unprofitable. Especially when other storytelling media compete for everyone's attention, large portions of the overall American population read few books, and book sales are at a plateau.

What could make a profit-seeking publishing corporation wary of adding more titles of any particular sort? A smaller potential market. Less money in that market. Higher costs to reach that market. Adequate success in that market with existing products and sales channels. All of those factors are in play here. And those are the real obstacles to tackle.

Celebrity: “a weird sort of energy”

One of the most common laments among children’s book creators and fans is that publishers put out too many “celebrity children’s books.” Which I think highlights both the appeal of those books and the problem with them: even from critics, they command more attention and emotion than their numbers really deserve.

One of the best ways to think about celebrity came to me from Michael J. Fox, who should know a bit about the topic. He’s called celebrity a “weird sort of energy” which draws people’s attention as gravity draws mass. Fox has been trying to use that energy to bring attention to Parkinsonism.

Attention is something most books don’t get, and can’t get enough of. So it makes sense for publishers to be pleased with books that bring their own attention-getting “energy” with them.

We’re almost all susceptible to the pull of celebrity. If an Englishwoman you never saw before showed up at your door and offered to read her children’s book to your kids, would you invite her in? Probably not. If you recognized that Englishwoman as Julie Andrews, you’d invite her in and call the neighbors and take photos and post them on your blog...

Celebrity also has its downsides, of course. Just as we look more closely at books by celebrities because we “know” them from TV, so we feel entitled to criticize their books in ways we’d never treat other beginners--without reading them, for example. Again, celebrity “energy” breaks down normal barriers.

Publishers justify issuing popular but unliterary books of all sorts by saying that the revenue they bring lets the firm publish poetry and first novels--i.e., books that don’t sell well, or are risky investments. Unfortunately, the situation isn’t really that simple.

One factor is the evolution of privately owned publishers started by book-lovers into book divisions of publicly held multimedia conglomerates. In that world the law requires executives to focus on returns for shareholders, not literature, even though book executives recognize that good-quality literature can be most profitable in the long run. If book A is very profitable and book B is less so, then one way the company can maximize its profit numbers is by not publishing book B at all.

The most profitable book, however, is the sleeper: small advance, big and long-lasting sales, grateful author, impressed colleagues. That's why even big corporate publishers keep taking their chances on little-known authors. No one can be sure what books will hit and what will miss, even with celebrity authors.

Celebrity books often impose costs on other authors, not just on literature with a capital L. Many celebrity authors siphon disproportionate time and attention from promotional staffs. Usually a firm arranges TV interviews, events, tours, and arranging such promotion for people used to Hollywood publicity standards takes more resources than publishers usually have. Being published at the same time that one’s publicity department is working on a celebrity book isn’t a good spot to be in. That “weird sort of energy” takes over and alters the normal workings of the firm.

Years ago, Jerry Seinfeld hosted a TV special on celebrity before he himself became such a big one. The program was coproduced by the long-defunct magazine Spy, which shows how long ago this was. Among the show’s explorations of celebrity was an “experiment” that started with leading people on a movie-studio tour into a large bare room. A small square box was painted on one corner of the floor. A hidden camera overhead tracked the movement of the people, randomly milling about.

Then the experimenters introduced a celebrity--Ricardo Montalban!--into that environment. He stood in the square and chatted politely with anyone who wanted to talk. And the camera recorded that:

• As soon as Montalban entered the room and stood still, the people formed a tight crescent about three feet away from him. It was like watching iron filings pulled into lines by a magnet. A “weird sort of energy” indeed!
• After Montalban left, no one would enter the square where he’d stood--except one woman, who did so for just a second and as a self-conscious lark.

I’d like to think that publishing personnel have some immunity to celebrity energy from seeing how the media machine operates. But about ten years ago I was at a publishing sales conference, presenting the new books I was editing for the upcoming season, and word spread like lightning that there was a celebrity in the hotel.

By a strange coincidence, the celebrity was...Ricardo Montalban! I still remember seeing him far across a lobby, a very tan man in a very white suit, moving slowly and gingerly on the arm of a companion. I remember the discreet buzz that passed among the editors as we spotted him.

I don’t remember what books we published that season.

Confirming the True History of Harry

Back in 2005, I set forth a hypothesis about how Scholastic's purchase of U.S. rights in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone produced extra press attention in Britain, which gave the book an aura of magic and helped to make the American firm's gamble into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I repeated that thesis here in 2007.

I was pleased to see that Harry, a History, a chronicle of the Potter phenomenon by Melissa Anelli of The Leaky Cauldron, confirms my understanding of events. The following passage starts on page 54, just after Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic bought the U.S. rights to the first book for a $105,000 advance.

The auction was huge news in Britain, and hardly anyone failed to notice it, least of all Bloomsbury [the London publisher]. The Sun, the British tabloid to whom the racy New York Post would be considered a modest cousin, offered Jo Rowling big bucks for her life story. She didn't sit with the tabloid, but Bloomsbury did want her to tell her story, preferably to the mainstream press in an attempt to get the Harry Potter story seen as a breakout hit that shouldn't be relegated to the children's review pages and specialty magazines like Carousel and Books for Keeps.

"Partly because we loved the book as grown-ups, and partly because of the very newsworthy sales of the book, we took the view that this was a story that we could place in the news pages," said Rosamund [de la Hey, marketer]. "We were very confident that here was something a bit special, so it gave us the brash confidence to go for the moon."

Two days before publication, the Herald in Glasgow published a story in a way that would become very familiar: "Three years ago Joanne Rowling landed in Edinburgh with a baby under one arm and dog-eared manuscript under the other." A few days later Eddie Gibb in the Sunday Times ran a story called "Tales from a Single Mother." In the first week of July came Nigel Reynolds's story on page three of the Telegraph in London: "$100,000 Success Story for Penniless Mother." . . .

The truth combined with assumptions and romance minted her as an icon for struggling young mothers everywhere, whether she liked it or not. . . .

Press around the auction ensured that the first printing of 2,500 paperbacks and 450 hardbacks wasn't enough; the books went into a second printing only four days later.

The small first printing is why those first hardcovers are so valuable today. When it came time to set a print quantity, Bloomsbury was still cautious.

That doesn't take away from the effect the first book had on its readers, as opposed to people reading about it in the press. Anelli also describes (without specific dates) how Bloomsbury began to take in fan mail for Rowling. Some of those letters began "Dear Sir," so--assuming they weren't junk mail--those readers had enjoyed the book without seeing any of the welfare-mom press coverage.

Closing the Circle with Cathy's Ring

The Cathy's Book trilogy by Sean Stewart and Jorden Weisman is about to come around to the end with Cathy's Ring. It feels like only a short time ago I was writing on the SCBWI New England email list about the first book, which was controversial because the authors had made a deal with an advertising sponsor.

Lost in the kerfuffle was how Cathy's Book promised to interact with readers in new ways, with a website, telephone messages, and other digital media tied into its fictional mystery. That book became a bestseller, but such is my demographic that I can't recall ever having actually seen a copy.

Which needn't stop me from writing about it, right? Publishers Weekly reported that the third book comes or is marketed with:

• "Cathy’s actual ring"
• a glow-in-the-dark poster
• a video trailer
• an original song, “I’ve Lost My Way: Cathy’s Song”
• the Cathy’s Ring website with
• discussion forums
• activities
• a MySpace page
• a Facebook page
• a Flickr page

And that's not all! The magazine adds:

To promote Cathy’s Ring, Running Press enlisted the help of Expanded Apps to create iPhone apps for the series, which will contain the text of the books and utilize the iPhone’s phone and internet access, as well as touch/motion sensitivity (phone numbers, Web sites and videos will be embedded within the text in the apps).

So that means this "book" required writers, artists, and the usual book production experts, plus a jewelry designer, a video director, video crew and actors, composer, musicians, music producer, software app designers, and website designers. Have I left anyone out?

Once upon a time, an author could create most of the original content of a book by sitting in a room and typing for a long time. Of course, there were always many more people involved in producing that book and bringing it to the attention of readers (i.e., publishing it), but the core creation was solitary.

That's obviously not the case with Cathy's Book and its sequels, or other interactive, multimedia "books" that will follow its model. A lone author is unlikely to create all that stuff. This is authorship by studio. In the future, we authors will have to learn to come out of our rooms. For now, I suspect many of us are hiding under the beds.

Ooh—Scarry!

Sterling, the book-publishing wing of Barnes & Noble, has republished eight of Richard Scarry's books. These aren't his best known titles, which are still under contract with Golden. But they all fit into his trademark "Busytown" mode of anthropomorphic animals and crowded pages.

My favorite among them is Richard Scarry's Find Your ABCs--one of the best alphabet books out there, with an ingenious use of colored type. That stars of that book are the inept detectives Sam Cat and Dudley Pig, and Richard Scarry's The Great Pie Robbery and Other Mysteries collects three more stories about the pair.

Sterling's website offers a long account of the man's life, from Boston to Gstaad. An even longer, less reverent, and yet apparently accurate bio appears at rotten.com.

Alan Taylor used Flickr to document how Scarry updated his Best Word Book Ever to keep up with social mores after a quarter-century had passed. I understand some stories that played on ethnic stereotypes have dropped from Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy World, one of my childhood favorites, for the same reason. But cost-cutting might also have factored into that change.

Scarry would be ninety years old this year, so Sterling is promoting their eight titles with giveaways. The first stages are open only to people "employed by a school, academic or professional library, or retail store." But Publishers Weekly also said:

The second giveaway, 90 Books for 90 Birthdays, will be a one-day sweepstakes held on Friday, June 5 (starting at 12 a.m. EDT and ending at 11:59 p.m. EDT), and is open to any Scarry fans. Those who wish to enter can submit their names and addresses to sterlingkids@sterlingpublishing.com.

But darned if I can find anything about that on Sterling's website today.

POD Overtakes Regular Printing

Last week was all about the comics, so this week I'm gonna try to make Oz and Ends all about book publishing.

The biggest news of last month was a milestone in how books are produced. Publishers Weekly had the accurate headline: "Number of On-demand Titles Topped Traditional Books in 2008."

(GalleyCat's "Self-Published Books Up 132 Percent" was off the mark since not all print-on-demand titles are self-published--though self-publishing has migrated to that technology. In fact, POD books will see grow most in unit sales as regular and specialty publishers take advantage of the technology.)

The spread between the two ways of printing books is only about 2% of the total:

The number of new and revised titles produced by traditional production methods fell 3% in 2008, to 275,232, but the number of on-demand and short run titles soared 132%, to 285,394.

And the spread will probably widen. Will on-demand sales revenue eventually top the corresponding number for printed books? How about on-demand units? I suspect not for a long time--not because printed books will come back but because sooner or later electronic formats will bite off some of the market now served by POD.

What frightens me about this news is that Bowker counted well over half a million "new and revised titles" coming out in 2008. I'll link those numbers with news from packager Michael Cader and industry consultant Mike Shatzkin about the industry in the past. As Shatzkin tells the tale:

Part of what I learned from Michael is that the annual output of new titles as measured by Bowker from the 1920s until the 1970s was about ten thousand titles per year.

To feel confident in that comparison, I'd like to be sure about how Bowker counts "new and revised titles" and how Cader's source did. Are they looking at the same swath of the industry? Are we comparing trade books to all books, including textbooks, specialty reports, etc.?

Furthermore, if Bowker now counts by ISBNs used, then there's a problem because publishers can assign ISBNs to special editions that never get into stores, to catalogues, even to the pieces of cardboard used to build special displays. By doing so, they can manage everything in their warehouses on one inventory system. But that would mean Bowker's count of "new titles" would be much too high.

Whatever the specifics are, the rise in titles issued is a clear sign we're moving closer to Authorgeddon. Sorry. Wish it were any other way.