October 29, 2010
A Busy Weekend in Books
If you aren’t busy enough already shmoozing at the International Festival of Authors, rooting around at the St. Michael’s College Book Sale, or trying to read 40 Canadian novels before November 7th; there’s an extremely exciting alternative available to Torontonians (and her visitors) this weekend: The Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair.
After a month-long marathon of the University of Toronto’s excellent book sales, book-hunters might be inclined to give this one a miss, but step back for a minute and reconsider. This is not just another book sale. For the first time in fifteen years, Toronto will be hosting some of the biggest and best rare and antiquarian book dealers in the English-speaking world in one spot, and attempting to pull off a show that compares with the excellent New York and Boston International fairs. This is a significant step above the lack-luster local Toronto Book Fair & Paper Shows.
Pre-register: this will get you a coupon for $5 the entrance fee, bringing it down to a very reasonable $10 for unlimited access for the whole three days of the show (October 29th, 30th & 31st). Roughly 50 dealers are scheduled to be showing there wares at the cozy Metro Toronto Convention Centre site. Among these will be the excellent and approachable local dealers like London, Ontario’s Attic Books and Toronto’s own (organizing force) Contact Editions; as well as big International names like Baltimore’s Kelmscott Bookshop and Maggs Brothers of London.
While firms like Maggs and Adrian Harrington can be reasonably counted on to bring some high-visibility (and high-priced) rarities, don’t think this is just a show for established collectors with deep pockets. The promises of “something for everyone” are likely to be well-founded. I’ve always loved looking through Attic Books’ reasonably-priced early-20th century children’s books, or David Mason‘s specialty, the “1st Canadian editions” of important works. While a show like this isn’t for bargain-hunting cheap used copies of paperbacks, you can still find some under-appreciated treasures in the $10-$50 range. Furthermore who wouldn’t want to go see some of the higher-profile books or documents? I might not be able to afford a $275,000 map, but if I should be so lucky, I’d love to glimpse one.
For the amateur collector, this is also an excellent opportunity to approach dealers who don’t keep open shops and sign up to receive their catalogues. I don’t think I’m the only person who reads catalogues for fun: they’re a treasure trove of bibliographical information, a good way to make wish-lists and the best way to get an idea of what books cost on the market. The catalogues themselves are also frequently beautiful things. See the wonderful offerings from Oak Knoll or Roger Gaskell as examples. You’ll never wonder why so many people collect 18th century scientific treatises ever again.
For full details, visit the Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair’s website.
October 22, 2010
Dear Publishers: It’s called a “slipcase”.
I’m thrilled to death that publishers are getting behind fancy private library editions; big, beautiful hardcover tomes for display or general celebration of bookness. We’ve had a particularly meaty month at my bookstores – doorstoppers are coming fast and furious. Northwestern University Press has published an all-in-one edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, translated by the ubiquitous Burton Raffel. Yale’s Autobiography of Mark Twain – volume ONE of THREE – weighs in at about 700 pages. We continue to sell out of copies of Joseph Frank’s 1000-page abridged (from 2500 pages) edition of Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time.
I love big books, I do. I have a probably unhealthy attraction to works that exceed 500 pages; the more the merrier. But if I may – as a bookseller and a collector – make a suggestion? These books look lovely sitting flat on a table, but as time passes they inevitably make their way to shelves where they must stand upright, or into paperback editions where they are nearly as thick as they are tall. They puff-up, tilt and sag. The Pevear and Volokhonsky War and Peace published by Knopf published in 2007 is probably a case in point – in paperback, the book inevitably looks old and used after a mere two weeks on the shelf. It is too big. The binding – especially in paperback – can’t hold shape with so many pages.
This is an easily remedied problem. It’s called a slipcase. You’ve seen them before, a nice cardboard sleeve that hugs two or more volumes together in one tight box. Penguin released a beautiful trade version of The Arabian Nights translated by Lyons & Irwin in 2008 which housed three hardcovers in one slipcase. See how manageable each volume is? No slipping, sliding or flip-flopping around. No puffy, humidity-soaked pages or disintegrating “perfect” binding. And one wide canvas for all your design needs!
You can have your cake and eat it too: all-in-one editions without asking one binding to hold all those pages in one. And wouldn’t it be nice? A 3-volume slipcased edition of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy? Davies’ Deptford Trilogy? Penguin, please, bloody Clarissa? We will all thank you for it.
October 14, 2010
Characters vs People
Somehow I grew up biased against non-fiction. I suspect it has to do with the libraries of my parents, stacked wall-to-wall with excellent literary and Canadian novels, interrupted only by old university textbooks. At first non-fiction seemed boring and later, when I came to know a thing or two about the Public’s reading habits, I associated non-fiction with reading celebrity memoirs or true crime accounts. Non-fiction was either academic or low-brow. I forced myself to read non-fiction about 1/3 of the time: I considered this a sort of penance paid for self-education. Mostly these books were about science, politics, environmentalism or food. Things about which I felt I ought to be Educated.
So it surprises me to some extent to find that, over the last few years, some of my favourite books have been non-fiction: Eleanor Wachtel’s collections, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading and Deep Economy by Dave McKibbon. The extent to which I am beginning to prefer a good collection of essays, or a memoir, was made obvious this week as I read Michael Moorcock’s contribution to the Neil Gaiman-edited short story collection, Stories. Moorcock’s contribution, also called Stories, starts out “This is the story of my friend Rex Fisch…” and launches into the history of a group of writers. It took me three or four pages to realize that what I was reading wasn’t fiction, but autobiographical. The shift in my perspective, the sudden sharpening of my interest was a physical sensation, like putting on a new pair of glasses. Suddenly, this was the best story I’d read yet. A dozen pages in I hesitated and wondered, maybe this is fiction after all? Can anyone write fiction that true, that compelling? All those characters, dates, events, histories, relationships! The depth and complexity of the story Moorcock is telling seems impossible to replicate in fiction. Maybe it’s the lack of descriptive landscape, and of poetic language. Maybe just knowing it’s true makes me more curious. But something is different.
The best book I’ve read in a long time is Elif Batuman’s The Possessed. No, maybe not the best. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum was amazing. So was Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators. But I haven’t been as engaged by any book this year the way The Possessed engaged me. The books is a series of vignettes of Batuman’s time spent In Academia, from life as an undergrad, to post-graduate assignments in Russia in the dead of February. She sets out explaining that she wanted to be a writer, but that the right path, for her, was to study literature, rather than to study writer’s craft. The experiences she subsequently racks up, from a summer in Samarkand studying “Ancient Uzbek” to helping to coordinate a conference on Isaac Babel certainly made for meaty retelling. Somehow I can’t imagine workshopping stories in New Jersey can provide quite the same anecdotal kick (but I could be wrong). The Possessed was side-splittingly hilarious, insightful and inspiring. These were good stories. The complex connections she can draw between her life, the lives of her beloved Russian masters, and the universal experience of life did justice to her ambitions. I’d read anything Batuman writes now, right down to a laundry list. She has authority, experience, insight and style. What more can a novelist boast?
Now, as a life-long devotee of The Novel, I feel I need to engage with something longer and deeper, with characters I can root for and despise, and longer plots I can follow. I need something that can reaffirm my faith in the novelist’s ability to write as true and as deep as an essayist or memoirist. Batuman makes me crave Tolstoy – Anna Karenina? – , Moorcock tempts me to explore Dashiell Hammett – I think I have The Thin Man on my shelf – and Michael Chabon now has me re-eyeing Sherlock Holmes.
What would you recommend? Who are the best story-tellers, the best crafters of narrative truth and story? I’m in the market for a new book…
October 1, 2010
It’s Raining Deluxe Editions!
I (and others) have observed over the last few years that the rise of the eBook might be a Good Thing ™ for those of us who love and value the art of the book. Relegating most of the drivel published to an appropriately temporary medium might free up print resources for those things which benefit from a tactile existence – that is to say, it might widen and clarify the difference between works read unthinkingly to pass the time, and works owned to preserve and venerate the quality contents. The books one wants to own and the books one wants to read are not always the same. Perhaps the Reader would spend more on the former if they could spend less on the latter (insert snarky comment about the long-standing existence of libraries here).
I have absolutely no data to back up this claim, but I am starting to detect actual evidence of this trend. Not that the flow of cheaply printed works of drivel has lessened any (maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t – I like to think we don’t stock or sell these things, so as a bookseller I’m pretty oblivious to them), but the availability of premium editions from mainstream publishers – that is, not from small and private presses who’ve been producing these all along – has really increased. These books might not be exactly to the standard of an artisan private press work, but they certainly are striving to appeal to the sensibilities of collectors.
Harvard University Press’s new release Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition (annotated by Patricia Meyer Spacks) is a beautiful example. The book is bound in ochre cloth with the most lovely wood-grained endpapers, and is lavishly illustrated throughout with historical references, diagrams and portraits. It’s a non-standard 9 x 9 1/2″, and weighs a tonne because of the excellent paper stock. Best of all, it’s fantastically affordable at $35US.
“Dover Publications” doesn’t bring to mind “quality editions”, so they wisely launched their latest enveavor under the imprint Calla Editions. These hardcover editions are mainly reprints (as is most of Dover’s catalogue) of classic illustrated editions from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. But oh my goodness, who cares? These are stunning reproductions of iconic editions illustrated by Golden Age artists like Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen and Harry Clarke. The list keeps expanding, too – I’m giddy at the possibility that I might someday get a big, beautiful edition of one of my favourites from Dover – E.R. Eddison’s Worm Ouroboros, illustrated by Keith Henderson. Once again, the price is right – the backlist thus far has come in at $50-$54 CDN per volume.
In honour of Puffin’s 70th anniversary, they have released these Puffin Designer Classics. These limited-edition runs of classic children’s books are drop-dead gorgeous in jpg form – I’ve yet to see one in person, though! I’ve pictured their edition of The Secret Garden because it is probably the most stunning – but unsurprisingly, I’d line up for their Treasure Island in glass-bottle slipcase!
Both Barnes & Noble and Penguin Classics are onboard, of course. I saw my first Penguin Hardcover Classic (left) in the wild at Type on Queen St. the other day, and it exceeded my expectations. Generally I’ve found Penguin Classics to be cheaply made, overpriced- and subjected to Pearson’s insane book packaging and shipping methods, which frequently end in bent and damaged books. But they weren’t messing about with these editions- the paper is more forgiving, the bindings are tight and of course, they look wonderful. Barnes and Nobles’ Leatherbound Classics (right) I can’t attest to – but they give a mean photograph.
In administrative news, I’m back! Apologies for the extended summer vacation – the bookstore has been a zoo busy lately, only now settling down to our usual, sit-and-read pace. I have a backlog of reviews, interviews and reports to kick out, so I hope you’ll be back. Happy autumn!
July 20, 2010
Canada’s Second National Book Collecting Contest 2010-11
I was very pleased to discover this morning that, after a year’s hiatus during which I thought perhaps they’d given up, the Bibliographical Society of Canada, the Alcuin Society and the newly-founded W.A. Deacon Literary Foundation are running Canada’s Second National Book Collecting Contest.
This is fabulous on a couple of levels. There’s the obvious goal of the contest, to foster and encourage interest in book collecting (and book-as-object in general) in younger people. It’s also nice to see Canadian book history organizations collaborate on a project like this: a healthy book collecting culture (including not just collectors, but dealers, publishers, academics and librarians) needs institutional support to thrive. The contest is also shaping up to be a really excellent source of beautiful posters for bibliophiles and typography geeks. This year’s design by Jennifer Griffiths is every bit as lovely as last year’s, even if it doesn’t contain quite so many different display types.
If you’re under 30 and collect books even as, you might think, a green amateur, I really encourage you to enter. Everything about the contest, from the educational value of researching your books to the people you’ll meet from the sponsoring organizations, is worthwhile to a book-lover. And who knows, right? $1000 can buy a lot of books.
I have listed the contest under the Events tab for your future convenience. You have until March of 2011 – good luck!
July 12, 2010
Oh, the movie/tv tie-in…
I sympathize with publishers on this one, I do. One of your literary titles has been optioned for a movie or TV mini/series – what luck! Now the poor, overlooked book can reach thousands of new readers, brought in by the millions of film publicity dollars. You rush the book into a new edition ready and waiting for its new audience. Of course, the new edition had better be obvious to the movie-going public – you wouldn’t want to miss a sale to a customer who might not remember just exactly what the name of the book was, or the author. You might need to tweak the title a little bit – better Away from Her than The Bear Came Over the Mountain, say. You might provide some visual cues – a new cover design inspired by the film, perhaps. You do what you need to do. You publish a movie tie-in.
The movie tie-in works very well strictly to advertise itself. But it works so much worse as an addition to one’s library. This is plainly a fact in my mind as I spent much of last month trying to stealthily smuggle my book face-in wherever I go, for fear that someone might see the very embarrassing cover. Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart’s airbrushed mugs make me feel as if I’m reading the latest issue of People, not a book. This is bad luck on my part. Unlike many movie-goers, I am perfectly aware of the title and author of the book a movie may be based on, and I have a privileged ability to special-order whatever edition I want through my bookstore. But the sad reality is that once a movie tie-in has been published, it replaces the previous edition. Too bad for you if you wanted something a little more subtle.
My issue with an edition like this Possession is unquestionably the celebrity faces which feature so prominently in the design. This seems to be the Style for films based on literary fiction – I have unfortunate editions of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours on the shelf as well:
This is not, however, a universal design. It seems to be the case only when we’re unfortunate enough to get a film version where the stars are supposed to be a bigger draw than the source material. Case in point? Harry Potter books have always looked like… Harry Potter books. Meanwhile, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books, despite their massive following and iconic cover design (iconic enough that older literary classics have been redesigned to attract the Twi-trained eye), got the film treatment, presumably to sell to those of us who only considered watching the films for the eye candy. The lesson here is that if you hear an interesting book has been optioned by Brad Pitt and will be released staring Robert Pattinson in 2012, BUY IT NOW WHILE YOU STILL CAN.
I am sympathetic to the need for a movie tie-in, I am. But publishers, please, try to spare us when you can! Here are a few examples of tolerable tie-in covers:
Okay. Here we have the tie-in for Ruby Weibe’s Temptations of Big Bear. So here’s a step up from the airbrushed faces: we still have the movie’s star (Gordon Tootoosis) but he’s not staring us down. The picture they’ve chosen is fairly well-framed. Some thought to book design appears to have been made, rather than just importing the movie poster. Not too shabby.
Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of Murder could pass for a “regular” book if not for the “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE” banner across the top which, frankly, is pretty subtle. No celebrities, and nobody gets higher billing than the author. This works.
I think these are hilarious. Okay, maybe not the best way to help market the movie or TV show. As seen… where? Starring who? But if your goal is to sell books and not to market the movie, then why not a generic sticker? Anyone who saw the show is going to come looking for the book and an “AS SEEN ON TV” sticker is a quick memory aid. It’s also removable, which is a plus.
On that note, it occurs to me that a collection based on movie tie-in covers might actually be kinda fun. Private Library – any thoughts? As some parting food for thought, here’s one place I think the movie tie-in was an improved design:
June 30, 2010
Too Busy to Blog
“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”
Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting (1931)
June 24, 2010
The University Press
The very best job in all of bookselling is looking at new catalogues. Remember that feeling, months before Christmas when you were seven or eight years old, browsing through the Sears Christmas catalogue and picking all the toys you wanted Santa to bring you? Going through publisher’s catalogues is exactly like that, except you actually get to order every last book you want.
We have a pretty carefully curated collection at my bookstore. We don’t sell a lot of “bestsellers”, period. From the mainstream trade catalogues we buy the very best of the literary fiction, poetry, and a lot of non-fiction, but compared to our purchases on the whole, these amount to a middling percentage. The catalogues we get most excited about, invariably, are those most other bookstores don’t look at: the University Presses.
It isn’t that University Press books are only of interest if you are a specialty bookstore. They contain lots of exciting, widely appealing titles. But ordering from them isn’t the easiest thing if you aren’t used to it, and so most conventional bookstores don’t bother.
For starters, many University Press books are what we call “short discount” books, meaning the bookstore gets much less of a discount than the norm for a frontlist trade title. This has led to a policy at Chapters/Indigo of not ordering short discount books for stock – they will, I believe, special order them if you beg really hard. A short discount on an expensive book can be hard for many bookstores to swallow, which leads me to the second issue, which is that University Press books can often be quite expensive. Not unreasonably so, but you’re not likely going to ever see a “mass market” edition from a University Press. Hardcovers range from $29.95-$60+, with paperbacks in the $19.95-$34.95 range. Sometimes more.
Many University Press books are print-on-demand. That means they don’t have a warehouse full of stock (though wholesalers might), they simply print to order. The backlists of presses like the Fordham University Press, Cornell University Press, and the State University of New York Press have gone largely to a print-on-demand model. Print-on-demand is a useful technology that allows thousands of titles to remain in print over a long period of time, but is troubling for some bookstores. It complicates returns as many POD titles aren’t returnable, and the books often aren’t very attractive. Chapters/Indigo has a chain-wide policy of never ordering print-on-demand titles, to simplify things for them.
Lastly, many of the best University Presses are American, without Canadian distribution. Not only does this mean they need to be imported, but they will have to be exported too, when returns time comes. Importation is not without its costs. Customs brokerage can be 15-20% of the cost of a shipment – or more. This is not always the case, of course – the University of Toronto Press distributes many excellent presses, as does Unipresses (McGill-Queens, University of Alberta, etc.)
But this isn’t meant to be a litany of reasons not to get University Press books – what I have instead are five reasons why all the trouble is absolutely worthwhile to me.
A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel – Yale University Press
I’d argue that Alberto Manguel is one of Canada’s very best literary critics. His books on reading and readership should be required for anyone who thinks or comments on book culture from any angle – his classic A History of Reading has become a one of my most frequently consulted reference books. And speaking of well read individuals – this guy. He has lived on four continents and counts having once been a reader to a blind Jorge Luis Borges among his qualifications. Most of Manguel’s best-known works are published in Canada by Random House, but this collection of essays drawn from a variety of publications has just been published by Yale University Press.
Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain – University of California Press
You have to have been living in a hole to have missed the announcement of this one: Mark Twain left instructions that his final œvre – the autobiography he spent the final four years of his life writing – would not be published until 100 years after his death. And guess what? The time has come, the vaults have been unsealed, the manuscript has presumably been thawed and released from stasis or whatever else they did to it, and here it is, the first volume from the University of California Press. Or, here it will be, come November.
Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs, and the Rise of Modern Mathematics by Amir Alexander – Harvard University Press
I have a secret love of books with elaborate and unlikely titles. Especially ones which involve duels at dawn. From the blurb: “In the fog of a Paris dawn in 1832, Évariste Galois, the twenty-year-old founder of modern algebra, was shot and killed in a duel… in the nineteenth century, brilliant mathematicians like Galois became Romantic heroes like poets, artists, and musicians. The ideal mathematician was now an alienated loner, driven to despondency by an uncomprehending world.” There’s a novel in there, somewhere. In the meantime, Alexander’s book is supposed to be excellent. It’s also beautiful: Harvard produces some of the nicest, most pleasant to hold books on the market.
Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing by Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman – University of Toronto Press
This isn’t just token Canadian Content. I think this is a really important book, even if you aren’t a student of Canadian Book History. Canada has come to be a world leader in children’s publishing, and that is in no small part due to the very hard work on the part of certain pioneers in the field including Janet Lunn and Oxford Canada’s Bill Toye. The book is thorough – for an academic, utterly complete – and beautiful, and I dare say -for the non-academic – readable.
Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins – Duke University Press
Indeed! I haven’t looked too closely at this one because it only arrived the day before yesterday. But I’m intrigued! Collins talks extensively about the rise of literary adaptations in film and television, and of literary adaptations of film and television; of fandom and increasingly hands-on readers. He discusses past and current responses to bestsellers and the bestseller phenomenon itself. Okay, it might sound a little egg-headed, but we’re all smart folks here. This might be the reflective survey of your life’s passion that you were looking for.
June 21, 2010
Who Goes to the Small Press Book Fair?
I love the Toronto Small Press Book Fair. I love how well run it is, I love how the participants are, to a person, super excited to be there; I love the deals offered and I love seeing stuff you will never, ever see in a regular bookstore. I always have to set myself a very strict budget before going ($100 ON PAIN OF DEATH) or else I will bankrupt myself. This year I hit it within $5 and I tell you, I was looking for something to buy with that $5.
My haul was impressive. I bought A Is For Alice by George A. Walker (Porcupine’s Quill), Mother Goose Eggs by Jim Westergard (Porcupine’s Quill), DA * 53 (Porcupine’s Quill), Urban Legends by K. Riedel (Iron Rabbit Bindery), The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema (ChiZine Publications), Sword of My Mouth by Jim Munroe and Shannon Gerard (No Media Kings), Room issues 32.2 & 31.4 (Room Magazine), Descant issues 145 & 147 (Descant), and Carousel v22 (Carousel).
I was THRILLED that the lit magazines were selling back issues at various 2-for-1-like discounts. This let me load up on a number that I’d never read before to decide if I should invest further. This is a great way to “sample” from Canada’s very busy literary journal landscape. Smart, smart publishers.
Nevertheless, I felt like an oddity there: a simple reader looking to buy books to read. Upon approaching a table, the publisher would immediately launch into their spiel about content submissions, letting me know what kind of fiction/poetry/art they were accepting. I’d hastily interrupt that no, I was just there to read and spend money. I felt like I’d stumbled into the wrong party – that this was a trade show where publishers and writers meet up and network. I suppose it is, too.
But that’s a real shame. Many of the publishers and vendors who attend the show haven’t got mainstream distribution and are hard or impossible to find in a book store. Newsstands often only carry the latest issue of a literary journal, so back issues have no visibility. Readers should be attending this show; we should be attending it in droves. It beats the living pants off a show like Word on the Street which, frankly, is usually just an orgy of discounted publisher’s overstock books; shiny, gaudy, mass-produced cookbooks, Thomas the Train sets and Spiritual Exercises. The Small Press Fair has that perfect balance of quality, affordability and discovery.
It made me wonder (not for the first time) what percent of Canadian’s literary journal subscribers are writers looking to be published. Is this our economic model: 100 aspirant writers buy the magazine and 1 is published? Struggling wordsmiths pick them up as research or business expenses (bonus: also fun to read) only because they hope some day to appear within the pages? I’ve always wondered if the hurdle over which to leap for literary journals is simply how to reach the Common Reader. Duh, says you. But honestly, I’ve never seen any advertising directed at Just Plain Readers.
Not long ago a poll in the UK claimed that “writer” was the top dream-job amongst those polled. Is that the mentality that fuels the small presses and literary journals? Now I find myself wondering. If we were all happily employed as carpenters and legal clerks and rights managers, would we still have our subscriptions to Canadian literary journals? Hum!
May 19, 2010
BookCamp T.O. Wrap-Up Pt. II: “Online Communities”
BookCamp T.O. seemed to me to be peopled by three types of people: 1) representatives from publishing houses (often, publicists) 2) technology/new media geeks and 3) commenters and critics – i.e. bloggers. I certainly felt I was there in my capacity as the latter, and so the sessions I chose were those I thought would speak to me and my vocation best.
So I was disappointed, to say the least, in the final session of the day, “Building and Sustaining a Community of Readers Online”. Far from being concerned with community-building or readership, this session wound up being about leveraging existing community in order to generate sales. Tan Light of Random House pointed out to us that social media, while “free”, is extremely time consuming and thus requires a lot of man hours. So, by building (or finding) self-sustaining communities, you basically have an engine that will generate that labour for you.
Needless to say, from this “community as marketing tool” standpoint, most of the discussion focused around what to do when the community is saying bad things about your company or product; how to manage or minimize the things you don’t want the “community” to be saying. Customer service! Transparency! Smiley emoticons! Okay, that last bit is mine.
I’m sure the publicists in the room were thrilled.
But for my part, the session left a bad taste in my mouth. Is that what I am? An unpaid publicist? Is that what we’re building all these “communities” for? To sell books?
This has been an issue with “free knowledge” rhetoric all along. The “knowledge economy” is supposed to save us from economic collapse, but who along the knowledge production chain gets paid? If I am participating in a critical community which is hashing out important issues in, say, bookselling and then a media giant comes along, scoops up the buzz and the discourse and the leads we’ve worked up and prints it in their for-profit newspaper, we (the critical community) have produced the bulk of the knowledge to be sold by a third party. This is part of the problem with copyright in general: What right has anyone other than the content producer have to make money off of an intellectual property?
But someone should make money – I don’t advocate reducing people whose talent is for knowledge production to slaves or hobbyists. If what you do is write or make music or draw or think, you should have the right to make your living off of it. You don’t owe it to “society” to give away your product for free. And you certainly should be annoyed if you do give something away for free and someone else capitalizes off of it.
So I wonder how the blogger model fits into the new economy. Blogging is almost always done for free. The Quill & Quire profiles a number of “big” book bloggers in their latest issue and we learn that among them are only two who actually make money from it – BookNinja and GalleyCat. So what’s in it for the rest them? I hate to be so crass, but let’s be honest: sure, there’s an element of fun and community to it, but most bloggers have some back-of-the-brain idea that blogging will net them something in the long run. Money? Legitimacy? Popularity? A job?
“Hits” are a big deal. We let our stuff be quoted, linked and promoted elsewhere, often by companies who use our influence to promote a product of theirs that we’re lauding, because there’s an expectation we’ll get traffic in return. The Quill’s article suggests the legitimacy of blogs like BookNinja and Maud Newton comes from being cited by “real” news sources like the Washington Post or the New York Times. Great publicity for the bloggers, right? But Maud Newton isn’t underwritten by a media conglomerate and she doesn’t run ads. Major media sources use her work, and in return she gets…
On the one hand, it’s nice to imagine that most of us are blogging for the altruistic purpose of “contributing to public dialogue” or “making a difference”. Maybe we really love Canadian Literature and want to see it succeed, or we feel strongly that new transmedia projects will make the world a more equitable place. But fact is, this is a time-consuming practice. Blogging as a form of philanthropy is, like all philanthropy, the privilege of the already-underwritten-by-someone-else. As we move into a future where blogging is an increasingly legitimized form on journalism, and “real” newspapers are dropping like flies, there’s really nothing just about a blogging model that expects the new journalism to come from generously employed hobbyists with a bit of an obsessive compulsive streak. If we as a society value the knowledge production they’re engaged in, we’ll find a way to make this their full-time job.
I sort of wish I’d gone to mesh ’10 because I think there might have been more opportunity for me to learn about these issues. But then, I have a job I had to attend, and a toddler to take care of. My exploration of media issues isn’t being underwritten by anyone, so I’m left musing to myself in my “spare” time. Hopefully I haven’t fired way off the mark this time – what do y’all think? How do you reconcile your status as unpaid publicist; dharma bum?