Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

The year is 1983, and the once-proud Swiss watch industry lies broken beyond repair.  Formerly a bastion of traditional craftsmanship and old-fashioned working practices, the Swiss have been humbled by a ferocious price-war fought on the battlefield of new technology.

Sounds a mite familiar? It gets better.  Devastated by a deluge of disposable digital watches from Japan, three quarters of the Swiss watch industry has simply keeled over and died.  But then, something miraculous happens.

The man tasked by the banks and creditors to dispose of the ragged corpse of the industry has other ideas.  Nicolas Hayek reckons he can best the Japanese at their own game – and he does.  Using the same technology that had nearly obliterated Switzerland’s flagship industry, Hayek’s first broadside is the now-ubiquitous Swatch – cheap, but far cooler than anything the Japanese can muster.  Next, he hopelessly outguns them at the luxury end of the market with mega-brands such as Breguet, Omega, Longines, Tissot…  Just like books, no-one needs a top-end luxury watch.  But through brilliant marketing, Hayak makes almost everyone want one.  His visionary strategy becomes a textbook example of how to turn a full-blown crisis into a transformative opportunity.

Hayak’s business bravura stands in shining contrast to some of the grubby opportunism that’s happening in our industry at present.

My own profession, for example, is currently debating the niceties of how to put our own interests ahead of our clients – which is what will happen if literary agents become publishers to their authors.  Can anyone say “conflict of interest”?  As our trade body apparently mulls a constitutional amendment to permit this desperate folly, all I can say is – being a publisher is far more difficult than many might naively suppose.  For agents habituated to doing quick-buck deals and then walking away with the proceeds, I fear the future will be both educational and painful.

But publishers themselves – or rather, some publishers – are not beyond reproach, either.  Publishers buzzword du jour is “owning the IP”.  That’s a euphemism for cutting the author out of the financial picture; it means that “book concepts” will increasingly be originated by Henrietta in marketing and given to a team of hack writers to flesh out.  This is sweatshop labour.  It produces dross that “reads like an assembly-line product, poorly written and thinly imagined”, as the New York Times aptly wrote of James L. Frey’s latest offering manufactured in exactly this way.  I, for one, don’t want to be part of an industry that exploits authors like this.

The challenge our industry faces today is at least as momentous as the “quartz crisis” faced by the Swiss three decades ago.  We will survive – and thrive – only through courageous, strategic thinking.  It’s time for the heroes of publishing to put on their armour: the battle awaits.

This column first appeared in The Bookseller on the 29th April 2011

Illustration by Nancee_art

Peter Cox writing on Litopia

Recently, Margaret Atwood cautioned the publishing business not to forget the central important of authors (read the interview in this piece from the Globe & Mail). How very timely.

At lunch last week I was discussing this issue with someone from the film industry. We were comparing notes about the ways in which our relative industries were developing.  We came to the conclusion that we’re both headed in the same direction.

The big boys increasingly want the whole pie.

This is how their logic runs.  Why pay royalties to bothersome authors, when you can keep all the income for yourself?  Even better – why bother licensing a manuscript (that’s exactly what a publishing contract is) when you can own the whole caboodle… for ever?

That is absolutely the way publishing and the feature film business are both moving.  The studios and major publishers increasingly want to own the core intellectual property.  That right – it’s their copyright – not yours… even though you may have written it.

Work Harder, Slave!

What of writers, then, in this future scenario?  Well, they’ll still be needed – a little.  Hire them in… pay them for what they do… sack ‘em if they get uppity… then move on to the next project. The central importance of the writer is increasingly under attack.  Soon, you’ll just be the nameless hired gun.

Hack writing has always been around, of course. There have always been naive writers willing to accept any deal just to see their name in print.  You only have to think of nincompoops such as Jobie Hughes (a “minion” from James L. Frey’s “literary sweatshop” according to the New York Times) for a classic example of that.

You may be wondering, well – isn’t it Ok for writers to be minions – if they choose to be? Personally, I find the idea repellent.

Writers from Dickens onwards have fought for the idea that if you create something, you should own it.  That notion will soon find itself under increasing attack.

Guns For Hire

Movies are increasingly franchise operations, and that’s the inexorable way Big Publishing will develop.  In fact, dating back to the days of book packagers, this kind of approach has been slowly but surely gaining traction.

One company that successfully ploughs this furrow is Working Partners.  According to their website, they create series fiction ideas internally, and then hire writers under “umbrella pseudonyms” to do the hard graft.  And of course, Working Partners keep the copyright.

Working Partners are commendably straightforward about your chances of striking gold with them.  “The upfront sums for each title are relatively small”, they say.  “However, for writers struggling to find a publisher for their own work, we provide a great learning experience…”.  Well, fine.  if all you want from your writing life is a great learning experience- and that’s all that many writers obviously do want – then, great.

Unequal Partners

Let’s be clear about how the money works in these situations.  Working Partners asks writers to produce work on spec, following the series concepts, storylines, and cast lists that Working Partners has already figured out.  They then try to sell the project to publishers.  if they succeed, they get an advance – in the same way as any author would normally get an advance from a publishing deal.

The difference is, Working Partners  keep a goodly proportion of that sum for themselves.

And only a “relatively small” sum is passed on to the author.  Finally, if there’s an agent in the chain, the agent will take their percentage of that “relatively small” sum… and hopefully, the agent wasn’t planning on eating that day.

To my mind, this type of arrangement is wrong.  Most importantly, it fails to properly value the author.  Its saying that the organisation that owns and markets the concept actually deserves more reward than the person who does the creative work – and in my book as an agent, that’s just plain wrong.

Not everyone agrees with me.

Philippa Milnes-Smith, a literary agent at LAW, is quoted on Working partners’ website thus:

“We have a number of clients who have worked very successfully with Working Partners not just on one but on many titles and several different series: we have enjoyed a good long term working relationship. In addition, for some authors it’s a first real – and often invaluable – introduction to the rigours of commercial fiction market, in turn helping them to develop their individual talent and skills.”

Sorry to say this, Philippa.  But in my view, you shouldn’t be endorsing this type of working practice.

I’m sure Working partners are great people.  I’m sure they are very ethical, highly talented and nice to their pets, too.

But that’s not the point.

The author should always be at the centre of the whole process – not some anonymous hack-for-hire.  Sales agents such as Working Partners should be there to serve authors – not the other way round.  Frankly, I’m surprised you don’t see this.

And you know what?  I don’t believe this practice generally does justice to readers, either.  As the New York Times wrote of I Am Number Four, it “reads like an assembly-line product, poorly written and thinly imagined.”

Yes – that’s because it is an assembly-line product.

Things To Come

I predict we’ll see Big Publishing increasingly claim ownership of the core intellectual property, and retain writers, where necessary, to do the hard stuff… i.e. to actually write the books.  Only another ten thousand words this afternoon, and you’ll be done for the day!

This scenario is one that will continue to grow in the future and – ironically – its growth may even jeopardize external book packagers.   As Big Publishing increasingly searches for profit, it will realize the economic value of keeping copyrights for themselves.  It certainly won’t want external third parties to control them.

And yet.

I predict this disrespecting of the authorial function – for that is what it is – will carry a heavy and unexpected price for those publishers foolish enough to pursue this path.

Not every publisher will go down this route.

The less corporate will not.

The publishers who value authors will not.

And – let’s not forget that authors increasingly now have a choice.

While years of indented servitude might once have been the only way to advance in any skilled profession, authors today have a myriad of options.  They don’t need to work for your “relatively small sums”.

I think some publishers will understand this, and firmly come down on the side of the author.  Others won’t.  Same for agents.

Interesting times ahead.

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

When water becomes ice, it undergoes an astonishing transformation: something that physicists term a phase change.  Think about it: water, the very essence of fluidity, becomes hard, sharp and brittle.  Phase changes takes place when environmental conditions reach a critical point.

That moment has now arrived in publishing.  Yet the transition that most of us are expecting, even willing, to happen is far from what is actually happening.  Let me explain by analogy to the newspaper industry.  Many years ago, the wise ones in the newspaper business could see that change was coming, like some distant digital tsunami.  So they prepared.  For some, this meant throwing their lot in with “walled gardens” such as America Online (in publishing terms, think the iBookStore).  For others, it meant trusting DRM to protect their revenue… or  expecting that income from online advertising would expand infinitely.

For all their plotting, we can see now that none of these tactics worked.  Newspapers are today in extremis.  Why?

Fatally, their owners signally misunderstood the transforming nature of that digital tidal wave.  They assumed that “the news-paper” as a product would survive untouched, in a world where “news” as a commodity is free, instant and infinitely reproducible.  All they had to do, they reasoned, was to convert their paper product into electrons, and business would continue without missing a beat.  This became an item of faith, as industry commentator Clay Shirk lucidly explains:

“Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world increasingly resembled the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. ”

That is precisely the same mistake we in publishing are now making.  What we fail to understand is that our business is undergoing a phase change to an altogether different state.  It is not simply a question of digitising our paper product.  The publishing environment is not just changing: it is new and virgin territory.  Bad news?  Only if you fail to grasp the opportunities inherent in the new environment.  Here’s one.

Traditional publishing is a one-way enterprise: a small number of publishers deliver lots of product to a larger number of retailers, with little feedback going the other way up the chain.  This model worked in an age when book production and distribution were accessible only to a few.  But in a digital age, it makes no sense.

Today, we should see booksellers as local publishers – a kind of mini-HarperCollins or Random House, just round the corner.  Publishing, instead of being a highly-centralised activity, should become distributed and collaborative.  Bestsellers would originate locally, and rise up through the system.  The slushpile would become a valuable asset;  booksellers would become a digital nexus for their whole community.

Am I barking? Or is this the future?  We may find out sooner than you think.

This column first appeared in The Bookseller in March 2011

Illustration by violscraper

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

Our cherished publishing industry—which to outsiders can appear more like a part-time hobby than a serious business—is a veritable cornucopia of contradictions.

A case in point. We have a boundless appetite for new ideas which we commoditise, package and sell. Yet we are notoriously slow to innovate ourselves. Although latecomers to the digital banquet, we have learnt next to nothing from the harrowing experiences of our cousins in the music and media industries. “Publishing is not like other businesses,” executives habitually tell me over lunch with a knowing wink, certain in their belief that we’ve been granted special dispensation from the laws of physics. It feels more like a terminal case of hubris to me but I usually say nothing because, after all, they’re paying.

Similarly, publishing exists in a heteromorphic continuum of risk. A successful publisher has the soul of a gambler: they win more often than not, and they see opportunity where others perceive only peril. Rock stars such as Anthony Cheetham and Jamie Byng have this instinct in spades. Corporate publishing, however, is massively risk-averse. “We’re looking for reasons not to publish books,” one chief executive proudly drawled to me recently. A line that probably goes down well with the bean counters at head office, but it’s anathema to real publishing.

To these corporate panjandrums, publishing is merely one component in a diverse portfolio of businesses. An industry in decline, in fact, to be milked where possible, starved of investment capital, and back-burnered before ultimate disposal. That, at least, is classic business school strategy to manage businesses in waning markets. Good for them, perhaps, but fatal for us.

So let me ask you this. As we enter the most challenging year in the history of our industry, whose side are you on? The risk-takers? Or the armadillos? Will you stick your neck out this year  or curl up into a tiny armour-plated ball of denial?

You have little choice. No industry can endure 5% year-on-year declines. Our survival depends on your ability to discern the opportunity contained within the risk. Safe publishing is no longer an option: shoot anyone on sight who says otherwise.
If your company’s culture discourages risk-taking, then quit. Their fate is sealed—don’t let them take you down with them. There has never been a better time to strike out on your own: the era of publishing dinosaurs is all but over and nimble mammals will inherit the earth.

Build secret alliances with other risk-takers. Conspire against your management. Twist their arms until they scream or, even better, until they give you your head. Great publishing is never conducted by committee—subvert, divide and conquer. Go crazy pants at every opportunity—you know you’re worth it.

I wish you a dangerously successful new year.

This column first appeared in The Bookseller on the 18th January 2011

Illustration by Suzanna

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

Being a publicist today is one of the toughest and least-appreciated positions in publishing.  I salute you, publicists – unsung heroes all.

However, it was not always thus.  “This is the easiest job in the world!” trilled my publicist when my first book was published, back in 1986.  “I just send out the press releases, then they interview you!” she bubbled.

And she was right.  In that era, the media had a thirst for knowledge and controversy that only books could quench.  An unknown author such as me could, if the book were big and noisy enough, grab the limelight, storm onto “Wogan” and his ten million viewers, and thence to the top of the paperback charts.  That, dear reader, is how I entered this business.

How things have changed. Today’s author counts herself lucky to grab 1,000 viewers on some obscure satellite channel at 3 o’clock in the morning.  The BBC’s commissioning editor for arts, Mark Bell, recently proclaimed in these pages that the BBC “is alive with books and new literature”.  Mr. Bell no doubt leads a life of guileless aestheticism, and I have no desire whatsoever to trample on another man’s fond dreams, but dare I whisper ever so sweetly that now would be a good time to arise from his Ephesian slumber?

Few would seriously dispute that the BBC has been systematically dumbed down in recent years.  Critics include the former controller of BBC2 Sir David Attenborough; John Tusa, onetime managing director of the BBC World Service; award-winning Panorama journalist John Ware… the list is depressingly long and luminous.  Even the president of the Royal Horticultural Society has slammed them for dumbing down its gardening programmes!  These people presumably know what they are talking about.

As the BBC has steadily atrophied into a thought-free zone, books – the messengers of ideas, controversy, passion and insight – are simply no longer relevant to its increasingly anodyne agenda.  Books are dirty, subversive, infectious things: weapons of mass awakening.  They are about as welcome in the BBC’s sterile ecosystem as MRSA is in a geriatric ward.

The BBC is run by highly intelligent people who produce deeply stupid programmes for “the rest of us”.  Their cynically patronising attitude towards the audience is only exceeded by their craven attitude towards authority.  I could cite Hutton; I could mention Mark Thompson’s self-flagellatory admission of a “massive bias to the left”.  Thompson, of course, confuses bias with the courage to ask hard questions: boat-rocking questions that powerful people often find inconvenient

And that’s the problem.  Books rock boats – and indeed, lives.

The BBC no longer does.

This column first appeared in The Bookseller on the 5th November 2010

Illustration by rubyblossom

Until now, most fan sites on the net have been in just one language: English.

If non English readers of internationally best-selling series such as Michelle Paver’s CHRONICLES OF ANCIENT DARKNESS wanted to access the official site they had to learn English first – or set up their own site in their native language. However, today, all that has changed.

Michelle Paver’s fan site – THE CLAN – has become the world’s first trans-lingual community.  Utilising state-of-the-art background translation, THE CLAN is now simultaneously available in over 50 languages in real time.

www.torak.info

Michelle Paver’s agent, Redhammer’s Peter Cox says of this exciting development for THE CLAN:

“If you’re in Beijing the entire fan site appears in Mandarin.  If you’re a fan in Helsinki, it’s 100% Finnish.  Both the Chinese fan and the Finnish fan can communicate with each other in real time!  We are bringing readers together for the first time who previously couldn’t communicate with each other.  Now, they can!”

By clever design and programming, all 50 languages can speak to each other simultaneously and seamlessly.  Multi-lingual means one language (usually English) to many.  THE CLAN is many-to-many.  And with nearly a million posts from fans all around the world, THE CLAN is one of the biggest reader fan sites on the net.

“This is the future of author fan sites”, says Peter Cox. “It’s also the future of the net itself.  I believe most sites will soon be offering what we’re doing.  The net is by definition international and inclusive.”

Michelle Pavers books have sold over four million copies in 48 languages worldwide.

Her new novel, DARK MATTER, for adult readers will be published on 21 October 2010.

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