Redhammer clients David Yelland and Michelle Paver together share the No. 8 and No. 9 position in Amazon’s “Hot Future Releases” list for their respective titles “The Truth About Leo” (Penguin) and “Ghost Hunter” (paperback edition, Orion).  “This is an exciting time for us”, says Redhammer’s Peter Cox. “The charts are there for the taking for the right authors with the right books – and we want to represent them.”

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

If history books exist in the future, they will surely record that the year 2010 was the defining moment in our exodus from analogue to digital publishing.

Yet of all the extraordinary things to have happened thus far,  the most far-reaching has also been the least-publicized.  Steve Jobs may have grabbed the limelight, but it’s Macmillan who have truly changed the game.

…and authors will be rewarded with a well-deserved 90% royalty…In case you blinked, here’s the bottom line.  Publishing is moving away from the traditional wholesale/retail  model to the agency model.  Macmillan can take credit for this adroit solution to their recent spat with Amazon.  Briefly, it means that the digital sale is concluded directly between the publisher and the customer, for which Amazon (now demoted to a mere publisher’s agent) receives a commission.

Just think.  Publishers will be free to set their own prices: reminding grizzled insiders like me of the good old Net Book Agreement days. But unlike the NBA, the agency model is not subject to the prohibition on anti-competitive agreements that proved to be the NBA’s death-knell.  And there’s more: publishers will become increasingly adept at marketing direct to consumers; supermarkets will no longer murderously sell our hottest products below cost price; and authors will be rewarded with a well-deserved 90% royalty.  I made that last bit up, but the rest is pretty kosher.

So – good times, yes?

I’m no Cassandra, but some of this is giving me pause. For a start, Amazon caved too quickly for my liking – over a weekend.  “Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles” says Amazon, ominously.  If I were a publisher’s chief executive, I’d be a tad concerned by that “M” word.

More worrying is the possibility that this rather delicate arrangement might be misconstrued: that the only practical change that consumers or regulators see is a sudden absence of price competition.  And what would happen then?  I asked Stuart Richards, a partner in the IP department of Fasken Martineau, to explain.  “If an agreement is not regarded as a genuine agency agreement,” he told me, “then depending on its terms, it may be found to infringe Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning Of The European Union.  Such arrangements could also, if the tests are met, constitute an abuse of a dominant position”.  And that’s not good.

Agency model or no, Apple are squeezing publishers mightily to discount e-book prices in their new iBookStore.  And Amazon will not accept being less competitive. My nightmare scenario sees e-book prices even lower than they are now – with a massive European lawsuit thrown in.

Of course, this won’t happen.

Will it, chaps?

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

Call me crazy, but I’m wildly optimistic about the new decade. In fact, I believe it will be publishing’s Golden Age.

Before you phone for the men in white coats, hear me out. No, I’m not in denial. Yes, I do realise that our industry’s collective problems have never been more acute. Nonetheless, in times of great turmoil, great opportunities arise. In evolutionary terms, we are leaving a time of stasis, and entering one of speciation. Small furry book-rodents are about to vanquish grotesquely proportioned publishing dinosaurs. Which are you? Here are seven rules to help you survive.

1.  If you don’t enjoy a scrap, get out of the business now. And I don’t mean become an agent. The once clubby world of publishing is dead, RIP. The future belongs to the pugnacious: grab what you want, it’s all there for the taking (hey, it worked for Google, didn’t it?). This is the magic decade: the future will be what you and I make it today.

dispense with anyone whose title includes the word “strategy”2.  Please—get to know your customers. Research the heck out of them. Hang out with them. Get drunk with them. Spend less time in the office, more in pubs. Or bingo halls. Or woodworking. Or wherever your instincts tell you there’s a market.

3.  If you wouldn’t stand naked on a street corner hustling your latest book, don’t publish it.

4.  Become a media whore. Publishing used to be centrally relevant to our nation’s cultural life. Back in the 20th century, my first book scored both the BBC’s “Six O’Clock News” and “News at Ten” (gee, when was the last time that happened?). Get in the media’s face! Evangelise them until they call security; you’ll win.

5.  If you run a big corporate publishing company—don’t. Corporatism is the enemy of great publishing. Be honest with your shareholders—the stark truth is, they will never again achieve the adipose ROIs (return on investments) of yesteryear. Then do a management buyout and give your most prodigious talents a piece of the action.

6.  Cherish genius. Where are tomorrow’s Anthony Cheethams or Judith Regans? Plan to nurture the new crop of brilliant mavericks. Publishing is by definition anti-establishment, we thrive by giving the finger to the status quo. You are a publishing rebel, and so are all your brightest people—love them for it.

7.  Sack your new media consultants. Also dispense with anyone whose title includes the word “strategy”. They spread fear and confusion, and actually know far less than you and me. You can trust me on that, by the way—I’m not a consultant.

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

Chief among the siren lures of publishing’s Brave New Digital Future is the dream of doing away with the ­middleman.

From this side of the desk, the poor old retailer is usually perceived as publishing’s Achilles’ heel. It’s every author’s mantra that no book ever receives adequate instore display. Little do authors realise that the humble space they do receive has often been keenly negotiated by the publisher, or secured through bribery (sorry—I mean “marketing contribution”).

To think that publishers can suddenly acquire sophisticated consumer skills is worse than delusionalEvents of the past chaotic year have made publishers anxiously aware of how closely their own fate is entwined with that of the retailers. Hence the mesmeric attraction of digital trading. At a click of a mouse, all those troublesome retailers, wholesalers and distributors will disappear, to be replaced with one vast “digital warehouse” of files . . . earning money 24 hours a day, with a marginal cost per transaction approaching zero. And if you’re lucky, or maybe just plain devious, author royalties can be contained to pre-digital levels. Let the good times roll, bro’ publisher—it’s a new golden age!

Well, not so fast.

Publishing’s wet dream of deposing the retailer is predicated on one vast and potentially deadly misapprehension: that all retailers do is put books on shelves for people to buy. In fact, retailers conduct complex, expensive and frequently fraught relationships with customers. They are the vital part of our business that is consumer-facing.

That skill is all but absent in today’s publishing houses. Traditionally, a publisher will deal with people like me (agents), with authors, with “the trade” and with their own employees. At no point have they ever been consumer-facing. In many cases, they have gone out of their way to isolate themselves against any contact with consumers.

To think that publishers can suddenly acquire sophisticated consumer skills is worse than delusional—it is potentially fatal. If you need proof of this near-vacuum of consumer skills, look at most publishers’ first efforts at their own websites: bland, corporate, pointless and dead. Granted, many of them have now appointed “directors of digital strategy”. Yet this only ghettoises the problem: it allows the rest of the organisation to bury its head in the sand, and get on with “business as usual”. As we say on the net—publishing fail.

This is the real debate we need to be having in publishing right now: how do we transform our culture to become consumer-facing?

I’m listening . . . but I don’t hear anyone talking.

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

Agents are in trouble. You may not immediately agree. Flushed with success from the London Book Fair, a bloat of “nice” deals in your hand, perhaps a brace of “good” ones and a certainly a babel of foreign rights, it may well seem as if the Publishing God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

How wrong you are. I’m not saying that for some agencies—the older ones—the Dom Pérignon won’t flow for some time yet. But for newcomers to our game, uncushioned by the easy money that dead authors scatter in their wake, winter has already arrived. And to those friends in publishing who, only a few months ago, were beaming at me from across their desks, and are now contemplating joining the motley ranks of agents, I have some sage advice: don’t do it. Do not spend your final pay cheque following this path. You will lose it all.

Here is why. First, there are far too many of us. Did you hear Peter Roche at the Orion authors’ party this year? A record of sorts was achieved: more agents than authors for the first time. I think Peter gave a wry smile when he announced that. Perhaps they’ll change the name to the Orion agents’ party next year.

today’s neophyte will struggle to make a barely mediocre livingBut that’s not all publishers are thinking about. Yes, they’re looking at us. Eyeing us greedily. Stateside, most major publishers now have their inhouse speakers’ bureau (why didn’t literary agents do this years ago?). And even the independent speakers’ bureaux now have their inhouse literary agents, too. All the agents can do is look on dumbly, and wonder how we missed that particular trick.

HarperCollins’ launch of mega-slushpile Authonomy is another blow. Agents are no longer the gatekeepers to the enchanted kingdom. “Come straight to the publisher” is the message to the world’s would-be writers. With vanity publisher Lulu (I’m sorry—that should be “self-publishing company”) ready and waiting to pick up the inevitable rejects, agents are effectively out of the frame. But did anyone notice?

I could go on. About the way that showbusiness agents have muscled in to our field and are creaming off most of the best deals around now. Then consider the massive, accumulated resentment most would-be writers feel towards agents (check out AgentFail—it’ll shock you). Seriously, we don’t have many friends out there now.

Fact is, this used to be a business in which even the mediocre could make a brilliant living. Today’s neophyte, though brilliant, will struggle to make a barely mediocre living. Go figure.