Speculation has been running at fever pitch: What’s this year’s theme of literary agent Richard Curtis’s end-of-year poem? And which publishing executives has he singled out for poetic immortality?

For seven or eight years in the mid 1980s and early ’90s Publisher’s Weekly ran Curtis’s annual summary, in tongue-in-cheek verse, of the highlights and lowlights of the year in the publishing industry. The annual rhymes carried such titles as, “Merger, He Wrote,” (1986), “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Industry of Mine” (1989) and “Stop the Millennium, I Want to Get Off” (1990).

After a hiatus of some fifteen years, the verse-atile agent returned to PW in 2007 with “The Year of the Platform,” which boasted such lines as

Are our values turning asswards
When opening books requires passwords?

2008′s effusion, “The Coming of the POD People,” had this memorable doggerel:

Agents now submit their schlock
By means of email as dot-doc.

In 2009′s poem, “The Yr of the Tweet“, Curtis solidified his claim to a place in Westminster Abbey when he managed to devise a rhyme for “Shatzkin”.

What delights will 2010 (The App) reveal?  How about this one:

They tossed in every kind of crap
And designated it an app.

Click here to read it in its entirety. Many of Curtis’s verses plus his prose spoofs are collected in The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires.

Reading Cory Doctorow’s serialized account in Publishers Weekly of his self-publishing venture is like watching a man walk across the United States.  We thrill to his courage and determination and root for him to prevail when he wanders down a wrong path or finds his way blocked. We know many people will extend a hand out of the goodness of their hearts.  When it’s over some will applaud his amazing achievement. Others will say he could have done it better, faster, and cheaper by driving an air-conditioned car from coast to coast.

Whichever way you look at it, Doctorow is – or says he is – weeks away from crossing the finish line with his book With a Little Help. We have been chronicling this pilgrim’s progress as he attempts to beat publishers at their own game, using every resource at his disposal to not just self-publish his book but make a profit as well.  So far he’s he’s done the latter: in advance of publication date he reckons “Total expenditures to date: $3,959. Total income: $10,000.”

When Doctorow announced his scheme we asked What Can We Learn from Cory Doctorow? Our answer then was: Everything. But now we’re not so certain.  Yes, we believe that With a Little Help will be published, and yes, we believe it will make money, and yes, it’s been an entertaining adventure.  What we’re far from sure of is whether it will yield any practical results, the kind that any publisher – major, minor, or one-person – can scale up. He has created his Spruce Goose with chewing gum and bailing wire and though we’re sure it will fly, it’s hard to understand what we can apply to our own processes that will make us better publishers.

For instance…

• Contemplating the problem of shipping his $275.00 hardcover edition, Doctorow decided to wrap the books in burlap coffee sacks, and luckily came across a London coffee roasting firm that had a surplus of them and gave them to him for nothing.
• To affix an SD (Secure Digital) card to each book cover, a reader friend created a “quick and dirty duplicator app” enabling him to load cards onto the books. The price of the friend’s services? Free.
• Doctorow obtained another service by barter. “While on the road, I put out a call on Twitter for someone to help me tweak my launch template—after all, the different audio/hardcover/paperback/e-book choices can be hard to present in a clear way. I offered a limited edition hardcover in exchange… A designer named Andrew Crocker came through with a brilliant design and even put together the HTML/CSS template, saving my Web master, Mike Little, some time.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, and it would be hard to find a more inventive improviser than Cory Doctorow.  But what’s the takeaway?  Can Hachette’s David Young cadge burlap sacks from a coffee roaster?  Can Simon & Schuster’s Carolyn Reidy get someone to design a launch template in exchange for a free book?

There is a lesson that all publishers can learn, and that is to think outside the box and seek creative solutions to difficult problems. Doctorow’s brilliant use of social media and network of devoted fans and friends point the way to approaches to the publishing game that conventional houses are clueless about or are just beginning to explore.  But for publishers to apply on a wholesale basis Doctorow’s one-of-a-kind experience – that just isn’t going to happen. When we’re talking about total expenditures not of $3,959 but a hundred times $3,959, creativity invariably yields to expediency, conventionality and risk-adversity.

Read how Doctorow’s book stumbles toward publication day in With a Little Twitter Help.

Richard Curtis

Photo by Leslie Curtis

Publishers Weekly‘s Craig Morgan Teicher and Rachel Deahl have surveyed leading e-book publishers and learned that with one exception, none of them is paying advances.

The exception is E-Reads.

Teicher writes that “Most e-book original publishers interviewed by PW do not offer advances, explaining that the rules in the e-books world are different from traditional print publishing.” Literary agent Richard Curtis, founder of E-Reads, doesn’t seem to have read the rules. Though E-Reads has worked on a 50-50 profit-sharing basis from its founding ten years ago, Curtis realized that in order to attract authors and agents he had to offer a business model they understand, and there’s nothing authors and agents understand better than advances.

Curtis also told PW he foresees a day when e-book rights will be an independent marketplace similar to the one for audio rights. Writes Teicher: “Curtis said that he sees advances as incentives in what is becoming an increasingly competitive marketplace, where authors and agents may withhold e-book rights when they sell print rights in order to get a better deal for the e-book.”

Actually, Curtis quietly revealed the news a few months ago, but PW picked up on it. In a Digital Book World interview with Emily Williams, co-chair of the Book Industry Study Group Rights Subcommittee, Curtis disclosed that “we’re beginning to pay advances.” For an industry that has operated on a back-end, no-front-money model, this is a significant precedent.

The interview was conducted in connection with a DBW webinar on the subject of literary agents who are also e-book publishers. Curtis launched E-Reads in 2000 in anticipation of the digital revolution and it currently carries a list of some 1200 previously published titles in science fiction and fantasy, thrillers, romance and general fiction and nonfiction. Also participating in the September 14th event are Arthur Klebanoff, founder of Rosetta Books, and Scott Waxman, who recently launched Diversion Books.

Typically, when making deals with mainstream publishers agents throw the e-book rights in for no further advance money.  The explosive sales growth of the e-book industry now makes prepayment of royalties more feasible, and being the first to offer them gives E-Reads a competitive advantage to augment its industry-leading 50% royalty, twice the current going rate offered by trade book publishers.

The story of Curtis’s founding of E-Reads – it was called “Curtis’s Folly” by some of his mystified colleagues – how he built it into one of the leading independent e-book publishers in the business, how digital technology has enhanced his approach to agenting, and his surprising views on the future of print publishing may be read on the Digital Book World website.

And you can read Teicher’s PW article here.

John Douglas

To Cory Doctorow, capitalism is something that other people are conspiring to do to him, and DRM is the weapon they’re doing it with.

His antipathy to kapitalizm is understandable in view of his Trotskyite upbringing, but history has demonstrated that beneath every socialist’s flesh beats the heart of a capitalist. The latest installment of his Publishers Weekly series tracing the odyssey of his self-published book bolsters the impression that if he could turn the tables he’d be as exploitative as any publisher that ever kneed an author in the groin.

His article is called Doctorow’s First Law, suggesting that his quest for truth in publishing has at last reached bedrock. What is the First Law? “Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won’t give you a key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.”

We suppose that Doctorow’s discovery will seem like a blinding epiphany to some of his acolytes, but for anyone who has been around the book industry track for more than a decade it comes as something of a Duh. Warfare between author and publisher, and between publisher and retailer, has existed since the earliest recorded words. Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement, reported in the New York Times Book Review that “Horace, the tame poet of the emperor Augustus, made the obvious comparison: booksellers were the rich pimps of Roman publishing and authors, or even the books themselves, were the hard-working but humiliated prostitutes.” (See In Ancient Rome, Every Author Was on a Roll).

Doctorow is blessed to have come into the publishing world long after the bitter campaigns of postwar 20th century when screwing authors was a blood sport. Perhaps a better First Law would be that 21st century publishing is a collaborative effort among three capitalistic entities: authors, publishers and booksellers. Though there are occasional imbalances, none of them can so dominate that they drive the others out of business. Such is the complex ecology of our enterprise that if you destr0y one you destroy all.

Doctorow writes that he is “more than happy to offer my otherwise free books for sale in any vendor’s store, of course, but only if the vendors agree to carry them on terms I feel I can stand behind as an entrepreneur, as an artist, and as a moral actor.” Well, Mr. Doctorow, publishers have terms too, and if you listen to them long enough you come to understand why they need to impose them.

All economic systems are about control of capital.  Cory Doctorow is no different – he’s just more entertaining and colorful about it.  Robin Hood was colorful too, but withal he was an entrepreneur who happened to redistribute capital via the business end of a longbow.

Read Doctorow’s First Law.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

When he announced his self-publication experiment in Publishers Weekly we asked “What Can Publishers Learn from Cory Doctorow?”

Our answer was – everything.

Since then we have tracked Doctorow’s lurching progress toward publication of his story collection With a Little Help, and at times it’s seemed that he could learn more from publishers than they could learn from him. In his monthly journal in PW he has reported his mistakes with searing candor including one doozy that any rookie editorial assistant could have foreseen: he failed to notice that book publishing is a complex venture that relies on other people.

In his latest column, however, he hits paydirt with a priceless epiphany, one that every publisher should write over his office lintel.  It’s that “The Internet makes it cheaper to coordinate complex tasks than ever before.”  How much cheaper?

“Too cheap to fail,” declares Doctorow, and like the bumbling magician who misleads us into thinking he doesn’t know what he’s doing, the author pulls a rabbit out of mid-air.  We understand at last why his experiment will succeed: because he’s not in the least afraid to fail.  Why should he be?  Not only has it cost him almost nothing, he has in fact already made money on it.

“I consider With a Little Help to be a Silicon Valley experiment. My upfront costs are minimal. I’ve spent $2256 getting into production, and taken in about $14,400 in payments. I’ll probably spend another $200-$300 before I ship, and that’s the last money I should have to spend without taking in money first: every time someone buys an on-demand book from Lulu, I’ll get paid without expending any capital. I’m printing and binding my short-run hardcovers in lots of 20, after being paid for them. The audiobook CDs are also produced on-demand by a third party, which means no capital costs for me, either. Setting up the donation page took a few hours fiddling with PayPal, and even if I never take in a penny in donations, I’m not out a penny either.”

But if you think Doctorow’s achievement is in getting his book published or in making money, the joke is on you. Abandon your establishment thinking, he urges, and look at how Silicon Valley IT engineers regard experimentation. Whereas publishing a traditional book is fraught with such expense that editors quake at the prospect of making a mistake, book publication the Silicon Valley way is dirt cheap.

“Unlike New York publishing,” Doctorow reminds us, “Silicon Valley’s products remain experimental long after they reach the marketplace. Google can change its search layout in seconds flat, try it out on a million searchers, crunch the data, revise the experiment and do it again, a hundred times a day if they wish. And bad ideas can be just as interesting as good ideas, because when it doesn’t cost anything to find out how bad an idea is, you can afford to be pleasantly and enormously surprised when it turns out that, say, people really do want to play Pac-Man on their search-results page.”

Read New York Meet Silicon Valley and if you don’t get it, read it again.  Eventually you will,and you’ll be a better publisher for it.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

Posing as the chief digital officer of a Big Six publisher, E-Reads’ own Richard Curtis got a sneak peek at Floppatronic’s new Pfleeber reading device and has reviewed it for Publishers Weekly.

His verdict? “‘Kindle Killer’ is an overused term,” writes Curtis. “but if anything deserves it more, we’ll eat our laptop.”

Curtis awards the device 4 1/2 stars, withholding a full five because of the gadget’s dumb name.  Here are some features he finds so compelling:

• Its 8.5″×5.5″ dimensions are almost Grecian in their perfection.
• It weighs a mere 15 ounces, yet it’s more flexible than the Plastic Logic Que.
• Its operating system is 50-pound paper stock bound on the left-hand seam.
• The bright ivory-white surface enables us to make out 10-point text clearly in ambient light even at an astounding 20-degree reading angle.
• The pages make a satisfying pffftt with each activation, simulating the sound made by the iPad.

In fact, the Pfleeber sounds suspiciously like another and quite familiar reading device but we can’t quite put our finger on it. The fact that Curtis’s review appears on PW’s “Soapbox” page where his satires are often published leads us to wonder if our leg isn’t being pulled…

Check it out here and see if our suspicions are correct.

Publishers Weekly‘s “Soapbox”, traditionally the last page of every issue of the magazine, gives civilians a forum to voice their opinions or relate their personal, book business-related experiences. Yours truly has often stood on the Soapbox haranguing the people like some demented prophet of yore, and it is the place where my end-of-the-year doggerel appears.

A recent Soapbox by Kermit Hummel, editorial director of Countryman Press, examined the difference between Amazon and Apple using a different criterion from the usual technical ones.  Hummel looked at bookstore experience, and by that measurement Amazon leaves Apple completely in the dust.

He starts by summing up the blessings that Amazon has bestowed on a book retailing model that had been mired in an archaic mindset, arguably somewhere between 16th and 18th centuries.

Perhaps the greatest contribution made by Amazon to the book industry over the past 15 years has been the depth it has provided to the book-buying experience. The astute focus on searchability and on taxonomy is reflected in those other titles that appear on any given search page. Amazon both revitalized deep backlists and enhanced the shopping experience with those constellations of titles. Amazon took this associative tool further with the invention of Search Inside the Book. These tools and tricks went a long way toward giving online book buying some of the look and feel that previously had been the domain of the well-read independent bookseller. Yes, the idea is to sell the buyer another product. But it also gives obscure corners of the backlist some light.

By comparison, says Hummel, the Apple shopping experience is “grim”, and, even more unfortunately, you don’t discover just how grim it is until after you’ve bought and used the iPad. What’s wrong? Its bookstore is utterly oriented to bestsellers.

“Does anyone actually try looking any further on the App Store than the top 25?” he asks.

The pathetic taxonomy of the App Store, with all of 20 “categories,” makes it impossible to just look around. Everything is buried beneath that single echelon of the top 25 (conveniently segmented into top 25 paid and top 25 free). With iBooks numbering only 60,000 currently, this problem is only going to become more and more apparent as huge numbers of titles are added into the mix over the next weeks and months.

Bottom line? “Apple is at present simply a lousy bookseller,” concludes Hummel.  Read it in full in Soapbox: Apples and Oranges

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

In our posting about Cory Doctorow’s second article in Publishers Weekly (about his Lovers Quarrel with Audio) we found an appropriate illustration, a baby clapping hands over ears (below).

Doctorow has gone one better and sent us a photo of himself (r.) in the same pose.

Thanks, Cory!

Just to summarize, in his second PW piece Doctorow describes the challenge of getting audio versions of his books produced. His only condition is that he has to be satisfied, and that’s a bit of a problem, because Doctorow’s satisfaction quotient does not sit on the same coordinates as those by which the rest of us measure pleasure. Still, in chronicling his adventures in audioland he does not come off as unreasonable. To the contrary, his annoyance with proprietary restrictions, generically known as “DRM” – Digital Rights Management – is something that bothers e-book readers as well as audiophiles.

Doctorow’s quest for an ideal audio experience will benefit all of us and, we hope, enable producers to give customers better products and services.

Check out Can You Hear Me Now? and you’ll see what we mean.

The short answer? Everything.

Doctorow, whose brash and sometimes subversive-sounding publishing strategies have made him a folk hero to his fans and generated intense controversy in the mainstream publishing community, has laid siege to the very ramparts of that community by wagering that he’s at least as good a publisher as they are. Maybe, even, a better one. And he’s thrown down the gauntlet in the industry’s very own trade publication, Publishers Weekly.

Doctorow describes his undertaking as an experiment. The book is a collection consisting almost completely of reprints of previously published stories. It’s called With a Little Help and it’s his third collection. “It will,” he declares, “be available for free on the day it is released.”

“Free” notwithstanding, what he hopes to accomplish is, simply, to make money publishing his book, or at least not lose any. He will achieve this by using the same contrarian (or at least counterintuitive) tactics that have succeeded with previous books, including giving them away.

How will we know if the experiment is a success or failure? Doctorow will chronicle it as it unfolds in a monthly column for PW, the first of which appeared in the October 19th issue. His entertaining article is a canny template for a publishing program that utilizes both print and digital media. Of course, this is something that every traditional publisher is trying to do, but here’s the problem with every traditional publisher: they’re all hobbled by a brick and mortar mindset (and overhead) that makes it impossible to achieve what one determined individual can do – at least, one bold and determined individual named Cory Doctorow. Though he acknowledges lots of help from his friends, he also, obviously, holds with Rudyard Kipling’s observation: “Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne, He travels fastest who travels alone.”

Doctorow’s template for success includes:

• Low overhead: My capital expenditures have to be as low as possible. In the ideal world, every object I make available will either cost nothing to produce or will be physically instantiated only after it has been ordered and paid for.
• E-book: free, in a wide variety of formats: I have always released my books in three formats (text, HTML and PDF formatted for two-column portrait printout), and my readers have always followed up by converting them to an astonishing long tail of other formats for their preferred readers.
• Audiobook: free, in a wide variety of formats: I’ve always taken great pleasure in reading my works aloud. I’ve done 150-plus installments of a podcast of me doing just that. But I’m no pro. However, many of my friends are pro voice actors, and I’ve called on them to each record one of the stories from the book.
• Donations: whatever happens: I have never solicited donations for my works before, despite the urgings of True Believers who would like to see my publisher cut out of the loop, because I wanted to be sure my publisher was in the loop. This time around, I’m the publisher, so let’s see what people are interested in giving.
• Print-on-Demand trade paperback: $16 (approximately; price TBD) Lulu.com produces beautiful books, objects that look every bit as good as the Lightning Source trade paperbacks that Ingram will sell you, provided you know what you’re doing when you design them. A designer, I am not. But John Berry, who designed my essay collection, Content, for Tachyon, is.
• I’m also offering a custom-cover package for people running events or giveaways: for a setup fee (I’m thinking $300, but that’s not fixed in stone), I’ll sell you as many copies at Lulu’s cost as you’d like with your own cover on it.
• Premium hardcover edition: $250, limited run of 250 copies:My office is in Clerkenwell, in London, close to several artisanal binders and some damned fine printers. My favorite binder is the venerable, family-owned Wyvern Bindery, which has agreed to bind a fine limited edition of With a Little Help for £20 a copy, in quantities of 20.
• Commission a new story: $10,000 (one only):I probably underpriced this, but it’s too late now. The idea was to give my readers the chance to commission a story to be added to the collection at a later date—thus benefiting from an additional burst of publicity and possibly selling a second copy of the “expanded edition” to people who wanted to get the compleat text.
• Advertisements: TBD: Since the paperbacks are print-on-demand, and the electronic files can be trivially modified, I’m going to sell a single ad unit on a time-limited basis: a half-page, or 500 pixels square, or five lines of text (depending on the image), at a price to be determined, in month-long increments.
• Donations of books: TBD: Since the publication of Little Brother in spring 2008, I’ve run a donation program for my books wherein I ask librarians, teachers and people who work in other “worthy” institutions (halfway houses, shelters, hospitals, etc.) to put their names down for free copies. I publish this list online and mention it in the introductions to all the digital copies of the works.

Doctorow sometimes seems to have a chip on his shoulder, and some skeptics will try to knock it off. In fact blogger Michael Stackpole has spilled gallons of e-ink to do that very thing, including calling Doctorow a “snake-oil salesman” and his experiment “rubbish”. Entrenched establishmentarians will also try to take Doctorow down. That would be a mistake. They would be far better off studying his strategies and learning from them, something he makes easy to do with his wit and articulateness. I wish him not only to not lose money but to make a bundle. Maybe that will take the starch out of some publishers that are not just stuck in the last century but are proud of it.

Bravo to Publishers Weekly for offering Doctorow a forum. Read Doctorow’s Project: With a Little Help. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

Richard Curtis

Douglas Rushkoff is author of Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back and he’s written a feel-good “Soapbox” guest editorial for Publishers Weekly telling us “why scaling down is good for publishing.” I’m not sure the fired, laid-off, and otherwise redundanted victims of last winter’s Wednesday of the Long Knives would characterize themselves as joyous forerunners of an upswing in the fortunes of our industry; nor do Rushkoff’s opening comments evoke buoyant optimism: “Borders is verging on bankruptcy; Barnes & Noble is closing stores; and major media conglomerates are closing imprints and ejecting talent faster than they gobbled it up in the 1990s.”

And how about this passage for making sure we know how dark it has become before the dawn:

Over the past year, we’ve watched venerable imprints fold into one another and great talent be almost randomly ejected. Knopf’s revered name is now subject to the corporate-speak of “Knopf-Doubleday.” HarperCollins created Collins, then crossed it off the spreadsheet, in the process booting Brenda Bowen’s children’s imprint; one of the most talented publicists in the industry, Larry Hughes; and the brilliant Gillian Blake, whom they had just snatched from Bloomsbury. Doubleday closed Morgan Road and lost an irreplaceable asset: one-woman publishing-powerhouse Amy Hertz.

But if we forcibly restrain cynicism we’ll come to his thesis: “While this makes for some bleak headlines in the short term, it bodes well for the future of a publishing industry that operates on a scale more appropriate to the medium we’re all creating and selling.”

We’ll grant him this one: “Publishing is a sustainable industry—and a great one at that. The book business, however, was never a good fit for today’s corporate behemoths. The corporations that went on spending sprees in the 1980s and ’90s were not truly interested in the art of publishing.”

Whether Rushkoff makes the case that the meltdown of the trade book publishing industry is a forerunner of the Age of Aquarius we’ll leave to readers of his editorial, We’ll Be Back. But some may take exception to his conclusion: “Now that publishing has revealed itself to be a bad growth industry, it is free to rebuild itself as the vibrant, scaled and sustainable business the reading public can support.” Even Dr. Pangloss might shrink from such soaring wishful thinking.

All sneering aside, we join the editorialist in hoping that tomorrow will truly be a better day for our poor battered industry.

Richard Curtis