Amazon v. Macmillan.

If you’re involved in publishing in any way, you’re probably aware of this story:

Amazon has pulled all Macmillan books from its cybershelves. Macmillan, one of the big six publishers, includes publishing houses Henry Holt & Co., science fiction-focused Tor/Forge and the Tiffany of fiction, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Apparently the dispute arose from tensions over e-book prices. Amazon likes $9.99 for e-books, but publishers do not. The New York Times reports:

A person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute, which has been brewing for a year, said Amazon was expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books. The person did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of e-books to around $15 from $9.99.

Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, and David Isaak, all published by imprints of Macmillan, have further posts about what’s going on.

In response to Amazon.com’s strong-arm tactics some indie bookstores, beginning with Mclean and Eakin Booksellers, have decided to create Macmillan-specific pages on their websites so those inclined to support Macmillan with their wallets can do so.

And, since it’s always a good idea to support indie booksellers for any reason, here are some of the other indie bookstores I like:

Book Soup

The Mystery Bookstore

Skylight Books

And, of course, there’s always Indiebound.

I’ve read several comment threads for stories related to this and know several people think that even at ten bones ebooks are overpriced. I say you probably haven’t taken a look at publishers’ profit margins lately. Ebooks don’t go straight from writer to retailer with no cost to the publisher. Yes, the printing and warehousing costs are eliminated, but acquisitions, advances, editing, copyediting, proofing, design, PR, and royalties are not — in other words, most of the costs of producing a book remain. Let’s say Amazon’s current pricing means publishers get about $5.00 per ebook before all the above-mentioned costs are factored in. Considering that, according to at least one source, the above costs, less royalties, add up to $3.55 on average (possibly a little high, but not by too much), you’re talking $1.45 per book profit. Subtract a buck for the author — who’s now making less than half what s/he would be for a hardcover sale – and you’re down to $.45. Again, the margins are narrow. Besides which, I’d think six to ten hours of entertainment was worth the $15 Macmillan wants to sell new releases for. And if not, well, Amazon’s strong-arm tactics are still, in my view, unwarranted. They’re not merely punishing some random corporate entity; they’re trampling on all of Macmillan’s authors too, those folks who rely on their $.70 – $2.50 per book to put food on the table.

I suppose, as far as Amazon’s concerned, that’s merely collateral damage, but I count it as a pretty shitty move.

UPDATE: Let me add, it’s not certain this was Amazon’s doing, though it certainly appears that it was, and it almost has to have been (they’d still have books in stock to sell no matter what else happened). I suppose we’ll see as things progress. But, you know, if it wasn’t: oops.

UPDATE 2: Here’s a PW piece that quotes a letter from Macmillan CEO to authors/illustrators/etc. in full. The letter includes these two paragraphs explaining the deal they were trying to get with Amazon:

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digtal media businesses). The price will be set for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

The agency model would allow Amazon to make more money selling our books, not less. We would make less money in our dealings with Amazon under the new model. Our disagreement is not about short term profitability but rather about the long-term viability and stability of the digital book market.

This seems reasonable to me. It also means my numbers above re: profit margins are off, in part because most of those costs can probably still be billed to the hardcover edition (for now — long term, maybe not so much), and in part because, according to one source at least, Amazon is buying ebooks from publishers for the hardcover wholsale price rather than what I suggested above. Who was it that said if writers were good businessmen they’d have too much sense to be writers? Obviously that’s the case for me. Ah, well.

UPDATE 3: Amazon backs down. The thread following the announcement is pretty lively. Some of the anti-Macmillan crowd over there make some good points, as well. Despite some folks thinking this was Amazon fighting the good fight for its customers, Amazon’s actions were pretty thuggish, and their eventual response – an inane statement claiming that Macmillan had a “monopoly” on their own products; yeah, like McDonald’s has a monopoly on McNuggets — was pretty weak. I think, at the very least, Amazon came out a rather darker shade of gray.

UPDATE 4: Interesting analysis here.

UPDATE 5: And another from John Scalzi here.

Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain.

Roy Hoopes, author of the 684 page Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain, died last December 1, at the age of 87. Here is a little bit about him:

[A] longtime Washington journalist who was the author of an acclaimed biography of crime novelist James M. Cain and more than 30 other books, died Dec. 1 of pneumonia at the AAA Atrium Classic assisted living facility in Silver Spring. He lived in Bethesda.

The very definition of a professional writer who lived by his typewriter, Mr. Hoopes contributed to hundreds of publications and held many jobs with magazines, newspapers and federal agencies. He wrote books about the Peace Corps, the steel industry, politics, sports and Hollywood, but he was best known for his 1982 biography of Cain, the author of such hard-boiled classics as “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Mildred Pierce” and “Double Indemnity.”

[...]

Mr. Hoopes found the all-but-forgotten novelist living alone in Hyattsville. He wrote a profile of Cain for Washingtonian magazine and set to work on his biography. He talked extensively with Cain before the 85-year-old author died in 1977.

I looked up Hoopes and found the above about five minutes ago. I wanted to see what else he’d done. A lot, as it turns out, though most of his stuff is out of print, including the Cain biography. You can, however, get it used at the link above for under five bucks.

Anyway, to the book: Hoopes’s respect for Cain and his work is evident throughout, as is — rare in biographies, I’ve found – his fondness for the man. There is no sense of distaste for Cain at any point, nor is there any dirt dishing (though Cain does not always come across well).

It’s a straight forward life story told from beginning to end. And the picture drawn is of a dedicated journeyman who sweated his way into a couple of classics while mostly failing. The Postman Always Rings Twice, his second or third attempt at a novel – the earlier attempts remaining incomplete – was first released when he was forty-two, and it is still the one he is best known for.

He spent seventeen years working in Hollywood, during which time he had only a couple partial credits on movies best forgotten, and while making some nice money wrote some other books: Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, Serenade, The Moth, Past All Dishonor. If he’d died in 1946, thirty-one years before his actual death, his reputation would likely be about what it is today, though he wrote many other books.

I suppose this is often the case. Jim Thompson had written most of the work he was known for by 1952. Stephen King’s most loved novel was released in 1978 (though, personally, I think he’s written much better books since). J.D. Salinger, who died yesterday, released only one novel — sixty years ago. Harlan Ellison is best known for his stories of the sixties. Joseph Heller is still best known for his first book. Kurt Vonnegut tapped out after Breakfast of Champions. And so on. But I suppose writers doing their best work early in their careers is a topic for a different time.

What was I talking about?

Okay. Right. So Cain wrote all the books he is known for while working in Hollywood. Then, with his fourth wife (opera singer Florence Macbeth), moved back home to Maryland, where he’d grown up, to finally leave the movie stuff behind and make it as a serious writer, while not knowing that all his serious writing was already behind him.

He would publish ten more novels in his lifetime, but none would have the impact of his earlier work. (I recently read Jealous Woman, a short novel about an insurance investigator who goes to Reno to look into a suspicious death, and while it’s a fun read, it’s simply a weak echo of some of his best stuff.) And he’d face a lot of rejection.

In the nine years between Galatea (1953) and Mignon (1962) he wrote three novels for which he simply could not find a publisher, no matter how many times he rewrote them, and he was an obsessive rewriter. Cain was old news, a has-been, an ex-writer who didn’t know he was dead and so kept on putting words on the page.

But then, in the years just before his death, there was a Cain resurgence. His best-known earlier stuff was released in an omnibus edition; Tom Wolfe, reviewing a Norman Mailer book, said Mailer was all right, but no James M. Cain; a book of critical essays about him was released (though he was stung by an essay written by Joyce Carol Oates: “Though he deals constantly with the Artistic, Cain, it will be said, never manages to become an artist; there is always something sleazy, something eerily vulgar and disappointing in his work.” Cain’s lucky he never knew of Raymond Chandler’s saying everything he wrote stunk of billygoat or he’d have really been stung). This resurgence was helped by one final successful novel, Rainbow’s End.

Cain is bloated in places, and I did, I admit, find myself skimming here and there, but overall it’s a surprisingly gripping read for a biography of a man whose life was not particularly interesting outside of the writing. I think what I like best about it is that it paints a picture of a man not born with genius, but who created classics nonetheless. I admire sweat and hard work more than genius. Geniuses can hardly take credit for their accomplishments; they’re born with great gifts even they don’t understand. But I can’t help but admire a man born with a moderate talent who works his fingers to the bone to make that small talent sparkle, and who, in the process, creates for himself a place in world literature.

And now: a musical interlude.

A brief and incomplete history of the end of publishing.

I keep reading that publishing is doomed. It’s obviously in a state of flux, but I’m not sure it’s going to be changing as much as folks are predicting: agents, editors, copy editors, publicists, and so on will still be necessary. Ebooks, however quickly they snatch up chunks of the market, will never create a free-for-all self-publishing bonanza in which the general public reads the slush so “middle men” don’t have to and are thus out of jobs. Anyone who’s read slush should know this. It’s mostly awful. No one reads it for fun. They read it to find the small percentage of stuff worth reading and then pass that stuff on to an audience who expects quality. Yeah, there are some things to work out with the pirating of digital copies, and pricing, and there should probably be a standardization of release patterns for hardcover-ebook-paperback so readers know what to expect, but these things hardly seem like they’ll spell the end. 

Anyway, for fun I decided to do a Google news search for the “end of books,” the “end of literature,” and a few similar search terms. The end begins, according to the Google news archives, in Scribner’s, August 1894 (pg. 224). What might have spelled the end for books in 1894?

Notwithstanding the enormous progress which has eventually been made in the printing-press, in spite of the already existing composing-machines, easy to run, and furnishing new characters freshly moulded in movable matrices, it still appears to me that the art [...] has attained its acme of perfection, and that our grandchildren will no longer trust their works to this [...] process, now become very easy to replace by phonography.

Yes, records, phonographic books-on-tape, spelled the end in 1894.

The end of books was also predicted by the New York Times in 1894 (December 2, pg. 22), but for a different reason: the transition to cheap pulp-wood paper from linen.

Only remnants of present day literature will survive for the information of future generations, and great national collections, such as in the British Museum library, formed at great expense, and intended to be complete and permanent, will offer to the literary historian of, say, the twenty-first century, but a heterogeneous mass of rubbish, physical laws thus consigning to oblivion a literature of which but a tithe is intellectually worthy to survive.

The papermaker thus unwittingly assumes the function of the great literary censor of the age.

The Telegraph, while not predicting the end of books in 1946 (October 26, pg. 6), did note publishing was in trouble, and blamed the quality of books themselves:

Book shops in various sections report that sales are down as much as 50 percent from a year ago. The reason they ascribe is there are too many mediocre novels.

No matter when you are, books always used to be better. Just for some perspective, here are a few books released in 1946: The Hollow by Agatha Christie, The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing, Nightmare Alley by William Lindsey Gresham, Skull-Face and Others by Robert E. Howard, and The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood.

On April 22, 1951, the New York Times made note of another prediction of the end, this one made by Dr. Paul Witty of Northwestern University whose study had shown that as people watch more TV, they read less. The end result of this was clear: all TV and no books.

And The Age, on August 8, 1959, noted:

At the turn of the century some publishers were gravely concerned that the craze for cycling would oust the reading of books.

Cycling! Should I cozy up with Moby-Dick or ride my bike? I just can’t decide.

So: something is always about to replace books (phonography, TV), books always suck (both in terms of writing and as physical objects), and people are always being pulled from reading by some new technology (such as cycling). And yet publishing abides.

For now, anyway. Who knows what catastrophic event waits around the next corner? Genital massaging hover bikes with narration machines, perhaps.

A book contract laid bare.

Herman Rosenblat is — well, I’m feeling lazy today, so I’ll just quote Gawker:

Herman Rosenblat is the Holocaust survivor whose Oprah-endorsed story of meeting his wife while in a concentration camp turned out to be fake. When his publisher found out, they demanded their advance back.

Here is the Snopes rundown of the whole situation for those who want the back story.

But what’s interesting — to me — is the legal stuff: the contracts (his contract with Penguin, his advance; his contract with his ghostwriter, her advance), the lawyers’ letters, and so on. Gawker has scans of all that stuff here. It makes for fascinating reading.

A few pictures related to Jim Thompson.

Jim Thompson was an interesting writer, mixing strange, surreal fantasy with ordinary crime plots. His novels have writers who own vagina farms (Savage Night), literal trips to Hell (The Getaway), and more. If you see a movie based on one of his novels, you’re likely to get the impression that he wrote fairly standard stuff. This is wrong. His stories starts off anywhere, with a simple bank robbery, or with a trip into a tailor’s shop to buy a coat, but it’s only a surface normalcy — a pleasant façade covering the ugly guts of an ancient haunted house. With those beginnings he’ll draw you into his world and take you deeper and deeper until, glancing back over your shoulder, you can’t even see the door you came through. Unfortunately, the writers and directors who make movies based on his stuff usually rewrite his endings, giving you more of what you got in the first half of the story, but taking you nowhere.

I’ve spent the last few months reading several of his novels, as well as a biography, Savage Art by Robert Polito, which I recommend without reservation. And over the weekend I went on a little expedition to see some of the places he lived and hung out at in L.A., and photographed those places. I did the same with Raymond Chandler (though the post about it was on my old blog, and I didn’t transfer it over). It’s something I enjoy for reasons I find difficult to explain. Part of it is probably some superstitious belief that I might be able to capture some of the magic that went into their writing. This is, of course, ridiculous. Still, I do it.

Here are some photos:

6607 Hollywood Blvd. used to be the Cherokee Bookshop. It is now the souvenir store you see above. Anyway, back in the late ’60s Cherokee dealt in used books (and comics), and Jim Thompson, who didn’t have copies of many of his own novels, would get them from Cherokee whenever they came in.

This little duplex is where Jim Thompson lived with the money he got for The Grifters, which would put him here around 1963 or so. Which also means this is where he wrote Pop. 1280, which I think is his best first-person psychopathic policeman novel. Yes, I’m in the minority, but I prefer it to The Killer Inside Me.

In ’70 or so, Thompson sold film rights to The Getaway (made into the 1972 Peckinpah film), and with the money moved into the twelfth floor penthouse apartment in the building pictured above. Unfortunately, the money didn’t keep coming in.

After the money ran out he moved into the apartment building above, on Hillcrest, just south of the Hollywood Bowl. According to his daughter, who helped him make the move, “the place was a dump.” By now his last novel, the embarrassing King Blood, was behind him. He died in ’77, completely out of print in the United States.

Review: Hardboiled America by Geoffrey O’Brien.

O’Brien originally published Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir in 1981. He updated it in 1997, and De Capo press reissued it — with the unforgivable cover to the left. It boggles the mind that a publisher could release a book whose focus is the paperbacks of the forties and fifties, a book with fifty pages of cover reproductions, sometimes four to a page, with such a boring, emotionless cover. It evokes nothing.

And while I’m bitching about the book’s design, I might as well make one more complaint. This book references many a book cover in its discussion of the history of noir paperbacks, and most of the covers referenced are reproduced in the book itself … but never is the reproduction on the same page, the page opposite, or even within three or four pages. You’re constantly forced to flip through half a dozen pages, backwards, forwards, ah, there it is, finally, in order to find the cover being discussed, so that you know what O’Brien is talking about. This is dumb. The illustrations should at least have reference numbers so that they can be easily found.

Okay, that’s off my chest. Now, to the content: the book is good. It briefly touches on Cain and Hammett, but they both came before the book’s subject was unleashed on the world. Hardboiled America really begins with the launch of Pocket Books in 1939. From this beginning, the birth of the pocket-sized paperback original as a force, it covers publishers such as Ace and Dell and Gold Medal and Perma; cover artists such as Leo Manso and Stanley Meltzoff; writers such as David Goodis, Charles Williams, John D. MacDonald, and the inevitably overrated Ross Macdonald. And so on.

If you have a broad and deep knowledge of the genre, Hardboiled America might not offer much in the way of new information. It’s a short book, 45,000 words, so it doesn’t offer much more than a survey course. This isn’t a criticism. I don’t think it tries to offer anything more. And it’s a very good overview of the history of the paperback originals of the forties and fifties and sixties, as well as a neat little history of American culture as revealed through them.

Sometimes it’s nice to stand on a hill and get a good view of the landscape. That’s what Hardboiled America offers.