1Lit.com - The Literary Ezine Article
British Book Publishing:
A 19th Century Cottage Industry in the 21st Century
Part II
For Part I go here
by Nadeem Azam
The Sunday Times bestseller charts are telling. The lists are replete with authors and books who have become well-known through other media, be it television, newspapers, radio, or the cinema. Take the non-Fiction hardback charts for 24 June, 2001. Number one is the cricketer Darren Gough’s autobiography (having sold a jaw-dropping 3000 copies). Other titles in the chart include Nick Faldo and Madonna’s biographies. The paperback charts are similarly dominated with books by and about film, TV and sports personalities: a woman best known for taking every opportunity to bear her breasts in the 1960s and early 70s (Barbara Windsor), an 80s chat show host and current DJ (Terry Wogan), and a footballing maestro from the first half of the last century (Stanley Matthews).
The embarrasing reality is that book publishing is now little more than an adjunct of more heavyweight media, such as film and television. Instead of having the creativity and wherewithall to promote writers with talent, publishers and their publicity departments have their noses glued to the movie pages of Empire magazine or are fixated with happenings on Sky Sports. “Oh, Jack Lemmon has died, let’s bring out a biography of him”, “Oh, Manchester United have won the Premier League again, time to release another book for their fans”.
This obsession with freeloading off demand created by other media has reached ridiculous proportions. The most popular section of the industry’s trade paper, Publishing News, is the bit in which there is a detailed day-by-day breakdown of forthcoming television programmes, films etc. Booksellers use this section to push books on subjects related to them. So if there is to be a BBC documentary series on Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, bookshops will bring biographies of him to the front of their stores. Nothing wrong with it, but the degree to which this section relies on other media should be embarrassing for those in the book industry.
Not that it is. It’s a quick and easy way of generating sales without having to think up ones own promotional techniques for flogging books. Raise the topic with a book publisher or seller at a ‘do’ and trends like these will not register the slightest discomfort. ‘My good boy, it is creative to hang on the coat-tales of Hollywood blockbusters,’ will be the rebuttal from Sir Double-Barreled Name as he returns to snorting coke and downing another chardonnay.
An example of how all-too-many UK book publishers operate, or rather do not operate, can be seen with the example of Allison and Busby, a well-known publisher of crime fiction and writers’ guides. Despite several attempts over the period of a week to access their website, allisonandbusby.ltd.uk it was “unavailable”. The URL merely forwards to their website at The Book Place, so that is another way of enjoying the fruits of their online endeavours.
The What’s New page leaves you banging your head against the wall. Not having been updated in two years, the author events relate to bookstore appearances for December 1999!
Emails written to the address provided at the bottom of every page of the site, all@allisonandbusby.co.uk, have been hurtled back from whence they came with unfathomable error messages. If you try adding a book to your shopping basket, it simply displays more error messages. You get the picture…
Allison and Busby’s web offering is not exceptional. Some British publishers still do not even have websites and a significant proportion of those that do seem to have been created by the publisher’s 16 year old son and leave one cringing with embarrassment.
One could put a benevolant twist on the situation by saying it is rather charming that publishers refuse to be carried away with commercial nonsensicalities such as setting up websites and prefer to concentrate on doing what matters: producing good books. Certainly, the core product, the book, should be the focus of a book publisher’s outfit and that is what he/she should concentrate most on.
But, in the 21st century, it is suicidal to dig one’s head in the sand and refuse to fight on the commercial battlefield. It doesn’t seem to ruffle any feathers in a rather blazé industry, but their beloved books are becoming sidelined by the day.
Channel Four, for instance, recently announced that they were no longer going to cover the Booker Prize. Sky News has given the axe to the only book programme on a major television channel. The BBC has damped hopes that the Bookworm programme would return to BBC One.
When these major losses for the book industry were mentioned to a staff member at Publishing News, she exclaimed: “They’re insignificant”. (Attempts to ring others in the industry for their opinions were futile. It was after 4:30pm and so there was no one around.)
Insignificant? Is it inconsequential that the UK’s major book award will no longer be shown on Channel Four, or that there is not a single program about books on any major television channel? The most obscure music and movie awards ceremonies are aired on British television. Channel Four gave staggering amounts of coverage to the Empire Film Awards at the start of the year, a third-rate event with B-list celebrities which didn’t deserve five minutes of television exposure.
It might not have been disasterous for books to be sidelined from mainstream media if book publishers had the gusto and niftiness to promote books effectively in a world where there are so many competing leisure activities. But when so many publicists in the industry specialised in Latin or Art History at university and can’t tell the difference between a billboard and blackboard, when many of them have got a job because of who they know in the field rather than what they know, then the industry is on its deathbed.
Maybe the publicists in British book publishing could learn a thing or two from Goebbels, and publishers generally from the Nazi's slick operations, as sick as they were.
The above article is taken from the 1Lit ezine
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