Happy 10th Birthday Takladweep!

Exactly a decade ago today, I was a schoolgirl, emceeing a book release function. The Uzbek Ambassador to India at that time, released my debut novel in my school's outdoor amphitheater during a very sunny morning assembly. A panel comprising two of my favourite (rival) classmates, engaged in a vibrant book discussion about the characters and plot in Adventure on Takladweep. The audience asked lots of questions. I replied in long form. Newspapers and TV stations dialled in for sound bytes and one-on-one interviews. I felt full, and then the hollow ache of having ticked off a dream. Ruskin Bond's hand written letter to me arrived as a pleasing surprise. But memories from ten years back, feel so far away now!

Today, as I brace myself for new content and new media in new classrooms with new teaching tools, I am beginning to reinterpret the publishing environment and understand what it means to take the onus and responsibility to publish something (not entirely your own) as I wrap up MetroGame, the travelling App for Urban Professionals. There are no static processes. Good content will flourish, nourish and be cherished, and that is the bottomline. Apps will pass too. Publishing is for believers, die hard optimists and cautious pessimists alike. This is the present, tense. 

In search of an Icon

Been trying out some icon designs for my Travelling App for the Urban Professional. It's an interesting process, and i think with icon design you can get away with lower resolution images than you would in a book cover. I need something not grainy, not noisy, but simple and expressive. It's kind of hard, but it's like settling for the perfect gift. You'll know it when you hit it. Kind of proud of my publisher logo, though --says all I mean.  

App Thumbnail # 1

Why so grainy? Beautiful image, low res. Blurrrrrrrrrrrrr. Is a volcano misleading? Will people suspect/expect sorcery? This is from Fjallbacka, Sweden.

                                                                         Draft #2

Right now I prefer version 2, but I'm still not happy with the quality of my image. It resembles a postage stamp though. 

Yay, it's A PIG WORLD!!

Book Cultures and Book Events 2012

The book is 4D. Live events support the book. Books point us to authors, and authors are becoming transcultural to keep up with better books and new media; different branches of industry are connecting to make publishing work, whether as a oneman job or an everyman's job throughout the contagion of business models. Academics congregated to discuss the state of the industry and book culture, and some expressed that professionals (particularly publishers) should take the time out to think like academics even as they go on about their business.  

Few things struck me as memorable from the two days: 

Informal chatter from formal personnas in the p'ig (publishing)world.

Live events being great marketing opportunities, but also revolving around the book, book theater, not thankfully being simply booksy ( I'm not at all convinced by the link-article in how it judges book aesthetics) were other aspects of the two day cultural theory program.

All kinds of speakers enriched the occasion. From Slovenia's Miha Kovic to scholars from the University of Paris, Peggy Hughes, Crime Novelist and Bloody Scotland's Lin Anderson, and several well known scholars from universities and publishing houses in England and abroad, there were diverse observations on the book, facts  opinion and practices, predating the sixteenth century up into the present with predictions for the future, including Martian musings on what publishing might look like in 2025. On the other hand, ambiance and the opportunity for souvenirs were cited important factors while thinking about the future of the bookshop as a cultural venue. 

Student? Writer? Reader? Publisher? App admirer? Mixed generation

Peggy Hughes from the UNESCO City of Literature, Edinburgh, with Lumphanan press' Duncan Lockerbie

An academic pondering the future of bookshops and striking a benevolent pose  

Despite the rise of social networks, and power shift from editorial to consumer-editorial, good editors should be informed by data and consumer behaviour, rather than be driven by it. Amazon is not a bookseller, but a market grabber, a giant retailer of all things, and is certainly not a brand with a mission for books and better reading. What was especially heartening was that social media marketing took only the backdrop, as an accessory, a tool to the actual discussions on the book that took place.  In fact, budget and marketing strategy will always only wrap itself around vibrant editorial concepts. Alastair Horne discussed some extremely interesting facts about ebooks, apps and digital pricing models.

But the secret to a successful book festival is a book festival with a heart added, Lin Anderson. Authors should float about like in a bar, not glued to a high chair.

Puzzling question of the day: what is the point of a website for Damian Horner?! 

There are more cities I would like to see in the UNESCO Creative Cities list. If small countries can save the festival, independent publishers can save the industry. Bookshops  could strive to become destinations for the wealthy, offering boutique experiences for local folk. But I mean, if saving the bookshop was about saving a Crosswords or a Waterstones (how unambitious!), I don't think i really care to visit one, ever. I'd rather shop for clothes in the mall and continue buying new books on Amazon and borrowing older stock from the library.  

The utterly lucid event was held on its second day in the lovely Iris Murdoch center with stunning views of the city from this home of Dementia Studies. Of course, being bilingual is a whole other cure. 

Book Publishing in Small Markets

Mija Kovac came to class wearing two hats. One as digital strategist and publisher at the Mladinska knjiga Group, the other as the chairman of the Department of Information Science at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He gave us a well rounded insight into book publishing in small markets like his native Slovenia, where 16% of all books sold are in the English language. Slovenia he said, is the perfect example of an average nation in the EU reflective of average patterns in everything but reading habits (higher than average). 

By Dr. Miha Kovac

Problems in the Slovenian book market include the universal ones of competitive retailers and rise of ebooks, the decay of brick and mortar, apps over illustrated books, and the uncertain future of the library. More local problems that he pointed to included the fast growth of reading in English and competition from USA and UK retailers and small markets having not enough resources for R and D and investments in digital infrastructure. 

However, people are buying 3 times more electronically, and the threat is not so much to protect copyright as it must to protect the buyer, he suggested. The MKG owns over 57 bookstores with about 454 employees, ploughing back a turnover of over 25.5 million Euros each year, closer to a third of the Slovenian market. The company (conglomerate) enjoys strong warehousing and distribution services, and publishes on a principle of low print runs with a high number of reprints, a functional successful mechanism in a small market like Slovenia where good content is sought, regardless of the price (despite the absence of a Net Book Agreement). Though there is a high penetration of English language ebooks in Slovenia, there is no data to support the increased circulation in the years. In fact, it is his dream to create metadata crawlers that effectively tag information about books and publishers, as a book's metadata influences best what we buy as it algorithmically makes some appear more often than others.


 'Ebooks are changing the landscape even in those countries which pretend they don't have an ebook market.' 

Problems faced in the Slovenian book market include competition from ebooks and etailers, breakdown of brick and mortar, apps as competitors to illustrated books, and the uncertain future of libraries. 'Ebooks are changing the landscape even in those countries which pretend they don't have an ebook market,' he opined. Will libraries exist in a climate where books are being sold for about 1-2 Euros? And if libraries and brick and mortar bookstores disappear, the entire book will disappear from the urban landscape altogether, even as book organisations increasingly latch on to technology companies. Ebooks and apps should be treated as a spin off enterprise, and when combined with more European Union and local funding, could make better headway. Whether Apps and ereading are a distraction or an accelerator to the educational experience, remains a much debated topic. For the future, as information continues to digitise, he offers that publishers should have more links with technology companies and universities, and learn from other branches in the industry.    

He talked about the importance of the appearance and semantic web of the author in times where certain authors may sell well only within a certain cultural context, and remain unnoticed in others. And, Amazon is evil not just because it is killing the book market, but because it lacks a genuine interest in dealing books, 'all it wants is more customers', he reflected, embodying the emotion of a true blue publisher. 

Dr. Kovac's ongoing two day talk is a power-prelude to the weekend's much anticipated Book History and Book Cultures Conferences at University of Stirling. 

Watch this space for more. 

Publishing Scotland Conference 2012

Edinburgh, 27 February, 2012 - As part of the group from Stirling International Center for Publishing and Communication, I attended my first business conference in Scotland at the Royal College of Physicians, which was also the first time that Publishing Scotland opened its doors to publishing Students, thus bringing down the average age of the conference-attendee by a couple of decades at least, joked a member. The CEO Marion Sinclair's welcome address made it clear at the outset that 'the walls had been breached', and disintermediation was a clear concern for the present and future. Subsequent speakers' presentations were filled with running metaphors of marriage (wedding cake, pre nuptials, divorce etc.), but there was moderate positive feeling in the air for *what was to come* with book buying, book selling, and book publishing. 

With my classmates images courtsey Publishing Scotland
Photographer: Sandy Young

With Printers' Exhibits during lunchtime
Photographer: Sandy Young

I particularly enjoyed the keyote address by Mr. Alan Clements, Director of content, STV who mentioned the lack of communication between Scottish book publishers and producers resulting in the lack of quality local ideas to improve Scottish programming at STV as he analysed the pressing trend to homogenize Scottish identity in the sea of mainstream English programming and future gazed into what lay ahead for media and the culture. Steve Bohme from Book Marketing Limited enchanted everyone with his allusions to confetti in explaining the key retail market trends and increasing relationship between book buyers, book sellers and book publishers. The talk by David Walters of Nielsen further addressed the overall decline in all genres in the Scottish book market in 2011. Jon Reed, offered his social media marketing expertise, even if he came down as a bit of a repetition from the slides of our regular classroom sessions (his miles-wide internet presence to thank!), as he waned on about harnessing our social media impact in the usual ways. There was an immensely uplifting talk about Metadata,  a panel that brought together leaders of small publishing enterprises showcasing the very small scale (size) of Scottish publishing. Representation from the Society of Authors brought to the fore nightmare stories about agents and publishers and the surge of hope that e-publishing brought for authors. An interesting segment by two Edinburgh and Glasgow libraries' direction of/partnership with cultural festivals, and their ambitions of a library imprint, emphasized their growing importance in the publishing value chain, offering much fodder for thought as well. 

All in all, a very insightful daylong session, that as some argued, begged for some London perspective also. The panel discussion on Apps, entrepreneurship and the new Scottish publishing was useful, but a lot more could have been talked about the digital format of the book. 

Technology is electricity, and writers are not entrepreneurs

Technology always existed, in the way, opinions always did. Talking of digital conventions replacing the old, is like saying there is more electricity in the house. Technology cannot work in isolation of Media, and good (profitable) publishing is becoming increasingly data driven, than we care to know. 

As ebooks compete for recognition and visibility, worldwide, they have gained traction with users in huge numbers. I am very ready to give up the physical book completely (I remember trudging long distances as a schoolgirl in sweltering summers burdened by at least five kilograms of weight of my bookbag everyday) , as long as the culture and values of books continue. The convenience and ease of the internet, and its hardly social nature, is what tempts me as a reader. The omniscience of the book, in a digital world is here to stay. No more recycling paper, but washing eyeballs. Hail oculist. 

Writers are not risk takers, but helpless creatures born out of desperation. An urgency, that has clearly nothing to do with risk but survival. Writers write, regularly, with nothing at stake but their own poor selves. They could hardly be called entrepreneurial for breathing. Significant people have tried putting this across to me at varying junctures with varying degrees of politeness/kindness and sympathy. 

The most exciting news this Valentines Day was of Bloomsbury's entry into India, following Simon & Schuster, Lonely Planet, agent Aitken Alexander and the Hay festival. Bloomsbury India will first be looking at taking on marketing and sales people and editors will follow in due course. The new MD for Bloomsbury will be Rajiv Bedi, who is also ex MD of Pan Macmillan India. In such a climate, it would indeed be worth exploring what UK publishers are doing to maximize their profits by entering global markets. It could be the topic for my Masters dissertation, at least. 

A Dwindling Second Hand Book Trade

Wherein veteran bookseller and trustee of the Wigtown Book Festival, Shaun Bythell offers a first hand account of the slowing business of used books, customer behaviour, and the lofty forces of online retail.

I bought my shop ten years ago.  For the first eight years, we saw a steady rise in takings though the shop, then the credit crunch hit, and we noticed a significant drop.  Analysing the figures, it became clear that over those first eight years, although the average amount a customer would spend had increased, the number of paying customers per year had steadily decreased, so when we got to September 2008 and the banks started to collapse, people naturally started to spend less.  The combination of the decline in paying customers and people spending less has meant that we've been hit pretty hard.

The steady drop in customer numbers is interesting in that I don't think that we've seen a decline in the number of people coming through the shop.  I think, if anything, that has possibly increased.  Over the ten years that I've owned the shop, I think increasingly people who were uncomfortable buying things online (largely due to paranoia about credit card security) have become more comfortable with online buying.  Certainly Amazon's turnover has soared in the past ten years, and there is probably a direct relationship between the increase in online sales and the decline in high-street sales. And this isn't just about second-hand books, it's about almost everything.  

People come into my shop with (blank) notebooks, and they scribble down titles, then go buy them on Amazon

The high-street is going through a pretty painful transition, and you can't blame people for buying things online when they can be so much cheaper - of course they'll be cheaper if you can cut out the middle-man, which is what the internet does.  The problem is that a significant number of people are employed in the high-street, and they are all losing out to the boom in online buying.  The customer ultimately loses out too, in one regard.  I've noticed in the past couple of years that a lot of people come into the shop with notebooks.  In the past these would contain lists of book titles which they were looking for.  Now they're blank, and they scribble down titles which they find in my shop, then go and buy them on Amazon.  If this trend increases, my shop will no longer be here for them to browse in.

The only way to really make online selling really pay is to become a mega-lister.  

When I got into this business ten years ago, selling on the net was in its relative infancy, and if you listed a book on ABE you could ask for way more than you could in the shop because there were relatively few people doing it, and buyers who were desperate to get hold of a particular title would pay a high premium for it.  Now, the online market is flooded.  Many thousands of business are now selling online, primarily through Amazon, and price-matching software and smart databases mean that hundreds of thousands of titles which would have been in the £5 - £25 bracket in most shops, can now be picked up for a penny on Amazon.

So, what do you do?  You join them, and put your stock online.  We've always listed our top-end stock on ABE, and it has more or less covered its costs and left us with a small margin of profit - I have someone employed full-time listing books.  Now I've taken on two more people to list the shop stock of 100,000 titles.  We're making progress, but slowly.  Listing online is far more costly than people imagine.  The big sites, Amazon, eBay, ABE and Alibris, take roughly 20% of your turnover, eBay charges an Anchor Shop fee of £350 a month, our database management company also charges us a monthly fee based on our sales, wages cost me about £500 a week, at the moment our postage is about £1,000 a month, add to that your stock purchase cost and other miscellaneous costs, and there's not a lot left at the end.

The only way to really make online selling really pay is to become a mega-lister.  There are about ten of them in the UK, and they have literally millions of books.  I've been to one of these operations and it is not the way I want to go.  It was like a Dickensian workhouse.  They buy books from libraries, charities, and other institutions by weight, so 40p per kilo or something like that.  They're not interested in individual books, but vast quantities.  It's all about volume.  

The one which I visited is in a massive warehouse.  The books come in on pallets, and a couple of people put them on conveyor belts from where they go to about ten people standing at their workstations.  They each have a PDA with a scanner on them.  The PDAs are wirelessly linked to Amazon, and preset to reject anything that doesn't fall within their preset parameters (eg, must be worth over £2, must be above 500,000 in the Amazon rankings etc).  The rejected books then go onto a conveyor belt and into a skip.  The skip is collected regularly, and they get paid by the ton for the rejected books which then go for recycling.  The non-rejected books are automatically listed on Amazon, numbered,  and put into labelled boxes which go onto numbered shelves where they stay until someone orders them.  There is a team of people whose job is to pick the orders, and another team whose job is to put them in jiffy-bags and stick labels on.  Another team deals with email inquiries.  When it's time for a break a claxon sounds, and when break is over it sounds again.  Most of the staff doing this are graduates on minimum wage, they don't even need to read the book's title, or write anything down.  The place which I visited employs about 60 people.  This is what small dealers have to compete with.  It's like Tesco vs. a corner shop.

Malicious false reviews can put you out of business

Does selling online through Amazon etc. encourage people to come to the shop?  No.  People look at your feedback and if it's OK they'll buy from you, but there is no brand loyalty.  The brand loyalty is to Amazon, and the customer is king.  Sellers live in fear of negative feedback, which can be on the whim of a customer - a complaint about a defect which was clearly listed but which they didn't bother to read in the description, or about delivery time which is largely down to the post office, not the seller, anything they feel like complaining about, they can, and there's nothing you can do about it.  Look at Trip Advisor - malicious false reviews have put hotels out of business.

When I bought the shop ten years ago, it was partly because I was drifting through life, and saw it as a chance to get stuck into something which seemed like an idyllic lifestyle.  It was for a while, and I'm sure it will be again, but at the moment it's a question of adapting to survive, as it is for most of the high street.  I think a lot of innovation has happened as a consequence of online selling, the most obvious being Currys and Comet whose staff were notoriously ill-informed about their products.  Now, they are superb.  They all know their range really well, and are incredibly helpful.  Sites like Amazon have responded by allowing customer feedback on products, so I suppose the high street will have to innovate further.  Ultimately, to survive, the high street will have to offer more of an experience than shopping online, enough that people will want to return to shops.

Publishers think the hardback has a future, but it will have to raise its game, become an object d'art beside all things digital

My customers in the shop are all adamant that they love books, love book shops, and that they'll never buy a Kindle, but that is exactly what people were saying ten years ago about records and CDs vs. the iPod, and look at how that has turned out!  I bet less than 10% of people under 20 years old have ever bought a record or CD.  There's a lot of discussion in the book/publishing world about whether the future of books is digital, and of course nobody really knows.  Publishers generally seem to feel that the hardback has a future, but like Currys and Comet, it will have to raise its game and become more of an objet d'art, possibly with things which the digital version can't offer.  The holiday paperback seems to have a less bright future, with many publishers tending to think it is going straight to ebook.  Amazon's venture into book publishing is also throwing up a lot of interesting questions; let's hope that there's still a place for the small independent bookseller to make a living in ten or twenty years time.

Anyway, if all that sounds a bit whingy and pessimistic it doesn't really reflect my attitude to book selling, more my worst fears.  I still utterly adore my life and will do what it takes to make sure it stays the way I like it.

Shaun Bythell, Owner of The Book Shop, Wigtown

Thank you very much Shaun Bythell. He can be visited at the annual Wigtown Book Festival in September and at other times in his shop.