In five words Cadell condemned Pride and Prejudice to remain, sight unseen, on Jane Austen’s desk for the next sixteen years until it was finally published by Thomas Egerton in 1813.
.. Protecting the identity of the writer, if she, like Jane Austen, wished to be anonymous, was also a hassle, as was the fleshing out of her authorial intentions in order to shed the most forgiving light on the work—for careful manipulation of her public image, even her anonymous one, diminished vulnerability for all involved. Was she writing to save her young, moderately-genteel family from the poorhouse? Was it because she was infirm, and in need of escape? Or was her work just for fun, a trifling diversion, properly peripheral in the life of a respectable female? Her position on this very important issue needed to be extensively elucidated, usually in a long introduction to the book—an extra expense for the publisher—and in every slice of publicity surrounding it
Algorithms Could Save Book Publishing—But Ruin Novels
Over four years, Archer and Jockers fed 5,000 fiction titles published over the last 30 years into computers and trained them to “read”—to determine where sentences begin and end, to identify parts of speech, to map out plots. They then used so-called machine classification algorithms to isolate the features most common in bestsellers.
.. The result of their work—detailed in The Bestseller Code, out this month—is an algorithm built to predict, with 80 percent accuracy, which novels will become mega-bestsellers.
What does it like? Young, strong heroines who are also misfits (the type found in The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). No sex, just “human closeness.” Frequent use of the verb “need.” Lots of contractions. Not a lot of exclamation marks. Dogs, yes; cats, meh. In all, the “bestseller-ometer” has identified 2,799 features strongly associated with bestsellers.
.. It’s sad to think that data could narrow our tastes and possibilities.”
.. There’s a wrinkle, though: Companies such as Amazon and Apple have the data for books read on their devices, and they aren’t sharing it with publishers.
.. The ability to know who reads what and how fast is also driving Berlin-based startup Inkitt
..Albazaz, now 26, sees himself as democratizing the publishing world. “We never, ever, ever judge the books. That’s not our job. We check that the formatting is correct, the grammar is in place, we make sure that the cover is not pixelated,” he says. “Who are we to judge if the plot is good? That’s the job of the market. That’s the job of the readers.”
.. Callisto studies the search terms Amazon suggests when users start typing in the first few letters, and found that people would frequently search for something that led to no results. “Consumers are searching for a piece of information, but no product exists to satisfy that consumer demand,”
.. Don’t we risk losing the distinction between what’s important and what’s popular? As NPR noted last year, books nominated for prestigious prizes like the Man Booker Prize or the National Book Award typically don’t sell many copies.
.. The computer found much to love: a strong, young female protagonist whose most-used verbs are “need” and “want.”
A Conversation with David Rose: Little Magazine Veteran and Publisher of Lapham’s Quarterly
“I hear the argument, Oh, these poor little magazines with their tiny readerships, if only people appreciated them more. It’s partly true. But the bigger side of that is, well, if only you knew how to read a budget. If only you actually knew anything about publishing.”
.. The notion that as long as the editorial quality is good, it will sell is kind of a Field of Dreams logic — if you build it, they will come. I’ve worked in magazines for 18 years now, and it’s never been the case that as long as you have a good editorial product you can sell the magazine. In fact, the opposite is true: You can have a terrible editorial product, and you can sell the magazine as long as the business makeup is sound. Shelves at supermarkets are evidence of that.
.. It’s increasingly difficult, for example, to get good ad sales staff on magazines. Nobody knows how to do it. To find someone who actually knows about the mechanics of circulation is impossible. You just can’t do it.
.. Not one of the magazines that you’ve mentioned will be able to tell you, for example, what their renewal rate is on conversion.2 I’d be very surprised if one of these magazines was able to tell you what a conversion rate was.
.. You get into situations where interns aren’t paid. I think that’s disgraceful. All of these magazines, except for The Baffler, take interns, and not one of them pays. I think that’s absolutely appalling. There’s no reason for that other than bad management. If you can’t afford the staff, you shouldn’t have the staff.3 It’s encouraging only one type of person to come through the system, and that’s the person who can afford taking an unpaid internship. There is nobody from a nontraditional background emerging through the system.
.. O’DONOVAN: For the most part, would you say small magazines should be supported by subscribers — that the majority of revenue should come from the subscriber base?
ROSE: That is never true, and certainly has never been true in this sector at all. All these magazines — and I’m talking right across Europe and in the U.S. — magazines in this sector, which we will broadly call the cultural literary sector, are completely dependent on deep pockets.Take away the donations, take away the private investments if they’re not nonprofit, and they are completely dependent on private investors. And they are massively loss making. The London Review of Books, I think the latest figure, they’re in debt to the Wilmers trust to the tune of 27 million pounds. The idea that these magazines can ever be self-sustaining is a fundamentally false one. They can’t.
Barney Rosset, The Art of Publishing
We prepared very carefully. We decided the best thing to do was send the book through the mail so it would be seized by the post office. We thought this would be the best way to defend the book. The post office is a federal government agency, and if they arrest you, you go to the federal court. That way you don’t have to defend the book in some small town. If we won against the post office, then the federal government was declaring that this book was not objectionable. That was the idea, and it worked out in exactly that way. The post office has its own special court, where the judge and the prosecutor are the same man. We brought in all these famous writers. Malcolm Cowley was a witness. He was particularly good because he was deaf and couldn’t hear the questions of the prosecutor—so he gave a lecture.
.. The judge, if you could call him that, ruled against us. We lost. Even so, I felt a great wave of sympathy coming from him, the way he stated things and the fact that he let us put all this evidence into the record. Getting things into the record was really important, because the judge who rules on the appeal only looks at what’s in the record. No new evidence is allowed.
.. In Brooklyn they came after me, the publisher, and charged me with conspiracy. They claimed that Henry Miller and I conspired to have him writeTropic of Cancer—that I commissioned him to write it in Brooklyn in 1933! That was a mistake, right? I would have been ten years old, and anyway he wrote the book in Paris. It was insane.
.. Now people come to Paris to buy the book, and they bring it back, and each book that gets into the United States is read by fifty people. What happens if you publish it and we actually win the case? In five years they’ll assign it in college courses and no one will want to read it!
.. His wife told me, When he gets here he’s not going to be friendly about this. I think you should publish it, but I will pretend I’m against it, because anything I say, he disagrees with me.
.. Science fiction or wandering between the centuries never appealed to me. But I tell you, if I knew how it was going to sell, I would have bought it. And if I knew how Tolkien, who was offered to me, was going to sell, you better believe I’d have published it. But I couldn’t understand a word of it. I mean, I didn’t object to it. It wasn’t like it was a fascist tract.
.. We were forewarned that Genet was a kleptomaniac. That night Loly was wearing very lovely earrings. We ate at a restaurant at the top of Montmartre, and Genet took us to the window. He said, Can you see the view, and all the things going on down there? The whole time Loly has her hands over her ears because Genet was trying to get the earrings off! But not a word was spoken about it. Jean Genet was a thief, but he was a real thief. He was a thief from the inside out. Like Sartre said, he was a saintly thief.
.. Do you think that it’s possible for a young publisher to do something like Grove again today?
ROSSET
In terms of editorial judgment, yes. If you had enough money. I told a friend the other night that if you want to be a publisher, you should inherit a lot of money. If you don’t inherit it, then you should marry a very rich girl. Preferably both! If you don’t have either, forget it. That’s the history of good American publishing.