Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

Hello – my name is Peter, and I’m a book thief.

There, I’ve said it.  It’s a weight off my mind, I can tell you.  I’ll come quietly – you don’t need to use the cuffs.  Well… just this once, then.  Make sure they’re nicely lubricated.

Last year, I stole oodles of books.  JK Rowling, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer, Lemony Snicket, Michael Crichton… all these authors and more were my victims.  I stole blatantly in public, even on Sky Television – so there’s no doubt about my guilt.  My thievery was even splashed over the front page on The Times.  Please… won’t someone stop me before I do it again?

Well, I have done it again.  Go to my agency’s home page and you can watch a video of me stealing another book, just a few days ago.  And you know something?  Both I and countless thousands like me can be certain of one thing – our crimes will not be punished.

Shoplifters are not tolerated on the High Street.  We employ CCTV, security guards, undercover detectives, RFID tags and a host of other measures to deter “five-finger discounters”.  When we catch them, it’s blues-and-twos or Black Morias and a summary hearing at the Magistrates Court.  But online – well, that’s different.  Because the truth is, no-one appears to give a damn.

After last year’s publicity, I had hoped that the industry would have responded robustly and quickly.  Instead, there was much hand-wringing and pious talk about the need for “public education”.  But nothing substantial has changed.

My favourite website to steal books is Scribd.com.  After last year’s exposure, they claimed to have tightened up on piracy.  But as you’ll see from my most recent video, Scribd is now smugly charging users to download a pirated e-book!  This is surely intolerable.

For years, it has been obvious that the West-coast venture capital elite have no respect for our profession.  They can have an entire business financed, launched, pumped and then dumped in the 18-month timeframe it takes us to get one book out.  And they will cold-bloodedly eviscerate any existing industry to build their own website traffic (look at newspapers, look at music).  Play by these guys’ rules, and we will get burnt.

We must do three things.

First, we must print a clear warning in every book that scanning it and posting online is stealing vital income from much-loved authors.  Next, we can eliminate piracy-hosting sites by attacking their source of funding.  And third, we can and must lobby to remove any vestige of legal protection from these sites.  Lobbying works for other industries – why not us?   The alternative is, to be blunt, economic annihilation.

And frankly – if we lack the willpower to protect our own goods, maybe that’s what we deserve.

This column first appeared in The Bookseller on the 10th September 2010

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

Strolling back from a publishing party last week (yes, we still have them) I dropped into Apple’s late-opening Regent Street store to observe the fanbois fondling their iPads.  Imagine a petting zoo for adults, with shiny little tablets instead of guinea pigs, and you’ve got the scene.  The hushed atmosphere is one of awed devotion: if Jobstown’s next product were the iFlagellate, there would certainly be blood on the floor here.

Apple is, of course, a deeply tribal company, and has adroitly leveraged the faithful to become the world’s largest tech company.  Yet publishing has always been the quintessential tribal business.  We obsessively organize ourselves into houses, imprints, authors, series, festivals, reading groups, prizes and genres.  No other business has had so many opportunities to profit from its inherent tribalism, and no other business has so consistently failed to seize the potential it offers.

The  defining quality of a tribe is whether it is inclusionary or exclusionary.  Most publishing tribes define themselves by whom (or what) they exclude. “Did you go to Random Penguin’s party?” No?  Then you’re clearly not one of us.  “Have you read Murakami’s latest?” No? Then you’re patently not my intellectual equal.

Exclusionary tribes rarely thrive.  When Mancunian mill worker Ann Lee founded the Shakers, her curious prohibition on procreation sealed their fate from the outset.  Awesome furniture, but lousy marketing.  From a peak of six thousand believers in their heyday, only three Shakers remain today.  Successful tribes flourish by both proselytizing and procreating.  Publishing does neither very well.

And yet, the tools exist.  When I founded the online community The Clan (www.torak.info) for readers of Michelle Paver’s series Chronicles of Ancient Darkness some six years ago, my aim was to create an inclusionary tribe.  I wanted hard-core fans, the sort that would go out on the net and evangelize for us.   Even though the series has now come to an end, The Clan goes from strength to strength.

You can’t build a tribe overnight.  Litopia, the net’s oldest community for writers, has taken many years to evolve.  We’ve certainly taken a few uncertain steps along the way, but here’s another benefit of tribalism: the community will guide you, if you let it. A healthy tribe trusts its members, because without them it is nothing.  A tribe is a conversation, not a monologue: the more power and authority you devolve, the stronger you become.  That’s deeply counter-intuitive to most of the type-A personalities who currently dominate publishing’s top-down management structure.

But, hey – even if publishing withers – I’m sure we’ll leave behind some awesome intellectual furniture.

This column first appeared in The Bookseller on the 24th June 2010

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

What is it about this business that makes us so allergic to the idea of competitive selling?

When I first became an agent, I was shocked to discover that “respectable” agents did not compete against each other for business. In fact, I initially avoided joining the Association of Authors’ Agents for precisely that reason: it’s only in recent years that they’ve relaxed their position on members competing for other members’ clients.

I can think of no end of talented authors who are today poorly or even negligently represented…Even now, any agent who overtly prospects for business is widely considered to be, well, wide. “Be wary of an agent who solicits you,” cautions the queen of literary scam-busters Victoria Strauss. “Good agents don’t need to advertise—or to solicit. Questionable agents, on the other hand, often derive much of their clientele from solicitation.” No wonder poor old Andrew Wylie is called the Jackal. Clearly the likes of Roth, Bellow, Mailer and Rushdie didn’t realize that Andrew was “questionable” when he enthusiastically chased after their business. Your fellow agents may hate you, Andrew, but I bet your clients love you. And so do I, for making our business a bit less pompous.

Even outside the cloistered and ultimately rather petty agents’ demi-monde, the situation is oddly similar. You would think that, in a declining market, all the major publishers would constantly be at each others’ throats in a never-ending, blood-drenched struggle to woo blue-chip authors away from rival houses. In fact, this kind of competition is surprisingly infrequent (tellingly, no publisher that I’m aware of has the equivalent of a dedicated new business unit) and when it happens, sporadically, it inevitably boils down to a cash bidding war between houses. How unimaginative.

In my old industry—advertising—the pitch was a reality of everyday existence. Far from being a scurrilous activity, the art of effective pitching was celebrated, rewarded and actively developed as an essential skill. Beyond that, it is obviously in the client’s best interests.

I can think of no end of talented authors who are today poorly or even negligently represented. Is it fair to deny them the possibility of better representation simply because the more atherosclerotic parts of our industry consider competition to be ungentlemanly?

The lifeblood of business is competition. Other industries thrive on it: we can too. I’m calling for a major rethink of our attitude to this subject—and an appreciation that fair competition can only benefit authors. Until that happens, we’re not really in business at all—we’re just dilettantes.

This column first appeared in The Bookseller on the 23rd April 2010